He leaps toward the sky, to the top of the school, and I erupt after him, so high an aerial view of the building appears beneath—unfinished walls, floors in jagged edges, structure beams peeking through the roof. I pull myself down and hit the platform of tarmac, my weight sending a tremor across the roof, my feet sinking slightly through it.

Sawyer’s waiting for me at the end of a gap into the hallway. His eye burns red, like a smashed cherry. Acne appears and then pops around his cheeks. His lips fade from white to blue to pink.

His eyes blacken, and he tears at his neck, ripping open the skin so that tendrils of red energy can crawl their way out. They tether red hands onto silky strings. Wraiths, coming toward me.

They seize my throat and lift me up, shrinking the school as a black curtain falls over my eyes. Sawyer’s aura calms. My legs kick for dear life, desperate to hold on to some semblance of my surroundings. But everything is blackening the farther up I go, like I’m drowning in the wrong direction.

NO. A voice erupts from the darkness. “NO.”

Mist burns down the lengths of my arms, up my neck so it blinds me.

Kill him, it whispers. Kill him.

It’s an order, not a suggestion. Not from River, or me, or any one voice. It’s a chorus of them, in one rhythm, all saying the same thing. Kill him, sssssssssissssss.

I fall to the roof, landing like a dancer, a network of power coursing through my hands. I shoot him once in the chest, knocking him off balance. He runs forward, legs flying off the ground like a racehorse, and charges through me. I collapse in a fragile heap as River and Sawyer roll from my body, a tangle of grabbing hands and legs, barely there through the static of them.

Their momentum stops in the middle of the roof. River’s on her butt, backing away, and he’s rising above her, the gun trained on her forehead.

I shoot another ecto-blast, which hits his gun and sends it twirling from his hands. He turns to face me, and River finds her feet, connects her arms to his, then rips them out, stealing back her hands.

They fasten at the ends of her forearms, already balled into glowing fists. She throws a punch, and her hand knocks him off-kilter, disappearing through his face and returning to her wrist a moment later. She tackles him and lays into his face.

“AHHHHHHH!” she screams, anger roaring from her throat with her punches—punches hard enough to hear cracks forming in the matter of his being. Pieces of his face break off in red bouts of dust, disfiguring it.

Then he’s a vanishing fume, tearing at the sleeves and legs and neck, an unconscious being melting like sugar in water through the roof.