The Final Showdown - The Moon Trilogy - Book 3

Chapter twenty:

   After such a blur of events, one thing happening after the other, the next few days seemed dull, slow. Rachel always did the cooking. Though she sometimes saw the others going out to stop something or other they'd found on the news, Rachel never went with them.

   She didn't know how much help she would have been, either. She could hardly cook—the one thing she was good at—without messing up or zoning out or focusing so entirely on Clarity and her situation that she cracked eggs into the trash instead of into the bowl.

   The rhythm was almost too much. She was used to things going wrong, things happening that weren't supposed to happen.

   But now she was stuck in between. There was a single, ongoing thing happening all around and in her head. Clarity was a void, undeniably and noticeably missing from everything they did.

   Rachel wasn't sure if everyone else felt the absence as sharply as she did, but she knew that they noticed. It wasn't a rare occurrence to find one or more of them, staying up late into the night, pouring over what little information they had on the matter.

   She could guess just by looking around the table that Alex had been staying up late, at least the night before, if not more before that. She looked at their eyes, blearier and more worn out than ever, despite the fact that what they were doing now was a break compared to what they'd done in the past.

   She scanned the table again. Something was missing.

   And this time, it wasn't just Clarity. How could she not realize right away?

   "Johnathan?" she stood up, projecting her voice into the living room to make sure he wasn't there, his late-night studying going a little later. No answer.

   She walked slowly, forcing herself to keep calm. No one missed the meals—it was simply part of the rhythm. Alex did the laundry, Scarlett swept and vacuumed each night, and no one ever skipped breakfast.

   He wasn't in the living room, the bathroom door was open and the bathroom itself was empty. The storage room was empty. The roof was empty. Well, not entirely.

   His room. Maybe even Clarity's room.

   She heard the beeping before she even got halfway to the door. It was a rapid beeping, and worst of all, it came from two directions at once.

    One beep came from August's room, and the other from Clarity's. The two sets were perfectly in-sync but clearly two-toned. Something was happening.

   Nothing had happened for days.

   She ran into Clarity's room without further delay, the spell of the rhythm finally broken, and she saw that Johnathan was there. That was one problem solved.

   He was messing around with the holo-screen that displayed Clarity's vital signs. His brows were knitted tightly together.

   "What is it?" Rachel asked, breathless.

   The commotion, the breaking of the spell they'd all been under, drew the rest of the team to the room. Alex repeated the question she'd only just asked.

    It took a second for Johnathan to respond. "Something's wrong. Her temperature is rising, and her heart rate is way too high."

   They all knew that Clarity's heart rate and temperature had been holding steady, and holding very low for a long while.

   Scarlett took over at the screen displaying Clarity's vitals. Johnathan stepped back. They all understood that this was important: something was finally happening, and if they played their cards right, they might just fix their problem for once and for all.

   The room felt too full, even though it was more than big enough for everyone. The air was thick.

   The beeping persisted through it all, and just when Rachel was going to go crazy from the trill of the monitor going off every other second, it suddenly stopped. The silence was much, much worse.

   The pulsing tone was replaced by a single one, long and low.

   Clarity's heart had stopped, which, by association, meant August's heart had stopped as well. And Rachel left. She didn't want to watch it. She didn't want to hear. She would come back when the ordeal was over, and she would see the outcome.

   She walked into the living room, but she could still hear the beep, so she walked farther. She walked and walked, but she couldn't get the sound out of her ears. Pretty soon, she was in the parking lot outside of the building. Her head ached from the constant ringing in her ears that had evolved from the beep of the heart monitor.

   The single, flat tone. Clarity's heart had stopped after over a week of being in a coma. Were they dying? Was it finally happening?

   Beep. Beep. Beep.

   Beeeeeeeeep.

   She didn't stop walking. Even when she reached the street, she kept walking. She thought that she could hear something else over the sound of ringing ears, but she wasn't sure. She didn't care, though. She just had to get far enough away that her ears would stop registering the sound of the flat-lining heart monitor.

   It almost felt like her heart was stopping instead of Clarity's. She was just as connected to her as August, and she was dying along with them.

   Something flashed in the corner of her eye. Something dark, something big.

   Something fast enough to break her out of the trance. She fell to the pavement, and a moment later, she felt the rush of air flashing over her.

   A car.

   The almost-accident was enough to pull her out of her stupor. She rolled, scrambling breathlessly to get back onto the sidewalk before another car came along to flatten her for real.

   What was she doing? She was running away when Clarity was dying.

   She was being a coward. 

   She had to face this. No matter what happened. She couldn't just take the easy way out as soon as something happened that she didn't like.

   They had all had to face Clara's death in the same way, and just because Rachel cared more for one of them than she did the other, it didn't give her any more of a right to hide from it.

   She started walking again, this time back towards the towering monolith of a building that she'd been living in. The roof seemed so far away, almost farther than the ground seemed when she had been standing up there, instead.

   Her breath caught in her throat, then came too fast. She was hyperventilating. She wasn't sure if the water on her face was rain or tears.

   She really, really hoped that Clarity wasn't dead, and she'd long since learned that hoping for things was never a smart move.

   She tried to tell herself as she walked to the elevator that Clarity would be dead when she got there, that she had to prepare for the worst, but she couldn't force her heart back into its proper place.

   Clarity had to be alive.