Page 150 of White Lights
She came to Acheron, without a clue, aboard an obsidian jet. She’ll leave on one, too, wiser and stronger than she ever could have guessed she’d become.
From outside her room, there’s a heavy pounding on the suite’s main door.
“Desdemona!”
It’s Rafe. He sounds furious.
“I know you’re in there,” he calls. “Open up.”
“Shit,” Dez mutters.
She’s lost too much time hatching her plan. Now Rafe’s here with every means to stop her. For a moment, she has no idea what to do.
If it comes down to it,the bartender once told her,take this … It’ll buy you time to get free.
Dez pulls out Eri’s Soma pill and swallows it without thinking. The heady feeling tingles in her mind and the back of her neck. She steadies herself against the intoxication, remembering it’s brief.
She listens, hears no more sound of Rafe outside the door.
Did it work?
She tries to recall everything he told her the first time she drank the Soma. She thinks of the espresso, which he insisted would stay hot—up until the moment she seized it and brought herself back into time.
She is already holding Jet’s eye, but when she gets to Point Mugu, she’ll need to seize something else, to come back into real time. Until then she can’t touch anything that isn’t already in her hands.
Using her hips to edge past her door, stepping outside her room into the common room, she sneaks toward Simon’s open door to confirm what she needs to be true.
Jet lies on his back with his eyes closed, his right hand on top of Simon’s head, which isn’t moving. It worked. They’re frozen in time. Dez has bought herself twelve hours to get to Asher, to save his life.
Carefully, with her sweater-covered elbow, Dez opens to the suite’s front door. Where she jumps backward, throwing her hands up protectively at the sight of Rafe blocking her exit.
It takes her a long, panicked moment to confirm that Rafe is frozen in time, too.
She backs away and takes him in. His dark hair is windswept, caught mid-motion the instant Dez swallowed the Soma. His fist israised to pound on her door. His face is perfect in its stillness. But the look in his eyes is alive, ferocious.
He knows she ran from the Vault. Does he know what she’s planning on doing?
He came close, but he can’t stop her now. All she has to do is get by him, down these stairs, and the hell out of this place.
Except—
Something’s missing.
Jet’s eye. Dez’s hand is empty.
No.
She searches the floor beneath her feet, beneath Rafe’s. She gets on her knees, her palms about to sweep the hardwood when she remembers she can’t touch it. Her eyes scour the floor for her only ticket out of here, her only chance to save Asher’s life.
It’s gone.
Her chest heaves, and she feels like she might be sick. To have kept the eye safe all these months only to lose it now, when it finally matters. She looks up from the ground at Rafe, frozen, lording over her.
And she sees the eye, where it got caught in his closing fist, about to knock on her door.
She rises slowly, terrified, holding her breath. Is it over? Has Rafe finally won? If she takes the eye again, will she be seizing time, releasing Rafe back into the moment?
She doesn’t have a choice. She slowly reaches inside Rafe’s partly closed hand, taking extreme caution not to touch him.
