Deadly

34 SOMEWHERE OUT THERE

Aria was swimming in a beautiful blue ocean. Colorful fish flanked her sides. Coral waved in the ocean current. A figure treaded water in the distance, and she kicked toward him. When she surfaced, she saw Noel. The sun danced across his cheekbones. His eyes sparkled. But his smile was sad and lonely. There were tears in his eyes.

“Aria,” he said, his voice full of pain.

“Noel!” Aria paddled toward him. “I’ve missed you. I thought I’d never see you again.”

Noel blinked and pressed his lips together. “That’s the thing, Aria. You won’t. This is the last time.”

“W-what do you mean?” Aria asked. Why did he look so miserable?

And then she remembered. That basement room full of Ali. That poisonous gas. Ali and Nick and those guns. That bang.

It all flooded into her memory, twisting her into knots. She looked at Noel in horror, waves lapping around them. “Am I . . . dead?”

Noel’s chin trembled. Tears spilled down his cheeks.

“No!” Aria exclaimed, waving her arms, suddenly hyperventilating. “I-I can’t be dead. I feel so alive. And I’m not ready.” She stared at her ex-boyfriend, full of purpose. She wasn’t ready. She wanted to live; she wanted him back. She didn’t care about that Ali shit anymore. Everyone lied. Everyone made mistakes. They’d get over it, the way they’d gotten over everything.

She reached for him, but Noel ducked under the water. “Noel!” Aria cried out. He didn’t surface. “Noel!” She ducked under, too, but all she saw was darkness. No more fish. No more nothing.

“Aria? Honey?”

Aria blinked hard. When she opened her eyes again, she was lying on a bed in a bright room. A sheet covered her body, and a monitor beeped at her side. A blurry face loomed over her. When her eyes adjusted, she saw it was Agent Fuji.

Aria licked her dry lips. Was this another hallucination? Was she in some sort of post-death limbo? “W-what’s going on?” she heard herself say.

Agent Fuji glanced over her shoulder. Two more blurry figures shot forward. One of them was Byron, the other Ella. “Oh my God,” they both cried, clasping Aria’s hands. “Oh, honey, we were so worried.”

Mike appeared, too. “Hey,” he said sheepishly. “Good to have you back.”

Aria swallowed hard. When she shifted, her head pounded. Did dead people get headaches?

“I’m . . . alive?” she asked tentatively.

“Of course you’re alive,” came a voice next to her. Aria looked over. Emily was propped against a pillow, her eyes open and a wan smile on her face. Her sister Carolyn was next to her, tears in her eyes. Hanna was lying on her side, her mom holding one hand, Kate holding the other. Spencer had a bandage on her forehead and looked pretty out of it, but when she saw Aria’s gaze land on her, she weakly waved.

They were all alive. They’d all made it out, somehow. “How long was I out?” Aria said shakily.

“Two days,” Mike said. “But it felt like two years.”

Fuji materialized at the foot of Aria’s bed. “We pulled you girls out of that room just in time. The amount of cyanide in the air was staggering. If we would have arrived a few minutes later, you wouldn’t have lived. It’s a good thing we were keeping tabs on you that night. Someone followed you to that house. When you didn’t come out, our agent called for backup.” She patted Aria’s leg. “But we got him, honey. He’s in custody. It’s all over.”

“Him,” Aria said thickly. Nick. She thought of his eerie, wolflike smile. The gun trained in his hands. His body falling to the ground, a dim recollection of Emily knocking him out.

“He nearly killed you girls,” Fuji said. “I guess he figured out you were getting too close. Some members of my team figured out the Nick link just about the same time he captured you girls. They brought it to our attention just as he trapped you in that house.”

“How did you figure out it was Nick?” Aria asked.

Fuji rubbed the fine lines around her eyes. “One group of forensic experts was doing the computer piece, and they were able to trace everything back to Nick’s phone—all those A notes, and also the rerouting of the A notes to your phones.” She glanced at Spencer. “We did listen to you—we cross-referenced Preserve patients to see if someone from inside the hospital might be a suspect. Nick was on our list. We had other experts looking at DNA, and Nick came up a match there, too—his DNA was on record from a prior offense before he was at The Preserve. We finally ID’d the third face in the cruise basement where that bomb went off. And last night, we found Iris Taylor tied up in the woods, half-dead. She confessed that he hurt her. It was Nick. It was all Nick.”

“Iris?” Emily cried out. “So she’s . . . okay?”

“She will be,” Fuji said. “But it was a close call.”

“Wait.” There was a gap in Aria’s brain. “What about . . . Ali? Did you find her?”

Byron and Ella glanced at each other. Fuji set her mouth in a line. “Ali wasn’t there, Aria.”

Aria struggled to prop herself up on the pillows. Her head throbbed. “Yes, she was. We all saw her. You said there were people watching us at the house. They must have heard her voice.”

“Honey,” Ella said gently. “You’re just confused.”

“No, it’s true,” Spencer croaked. “She tried to kill us alongside Nick. They did this together.”

“She shot me,” Emily said. Aria watched as she touched her head. There was no wound. “At least I thought she did,” Emily said, after a moment.

Fuji sighed. “Girls, Nick drugged you with a dangerous mixture of toxins. You saw Alison because that was who you feared you’d see—and because her picture was all over those walls. Nick built a shrine to her. He was obsessed over her death, and he was trying to get revenge.”

“Nick and Alison were boyfriend and girlfriend,” Melissa Hastings, who was sitting by Spencer’s side, piped up. “He came after you because his girlfriend was killed. He knew Tabitha Clark—they were friends from the hospital as well—and clearly got her to impersonate Alison to scare you girls. And that’s where it all started.”

“But Iris said she hadn’t seen Tripp—Nick—in years,” Emily protested. “She just led me on a wild-goose chase to find his house.”

“People lie,” Fuji said. “And Iris isn’t exactly a healthy girl.”

Aria stared at her, blinking hard. “So what about that video from Jamaica? The one of Tabitha?”

Fuji shifted her weight. “A second video came in the same night you girls snuck out, proving your innocence. It’s more footage from the night Tabitha was murdered, and it shows one person acting alone, beating the girl to death—Nick. Our forensic and digital experts are certain it’s the real one. The other is a fake.”

A shock wave went through Aria. “Who sent that video?”

Fuji shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Aria looked at the others, and they seemed just as stunned. “What if Ali sent it?” Emily cried. “Don’t you see? She had it in her back pocket all along. She sent it to frame Nick when she knew they were caught!”

“And what about your theory of two people tying Noel up?” Aria asked. “If it wasn’t Ali helping Nick, who was it?”

“It could have been anyone,” Fuji said. “Nick had other friends. It’s possible he lied and said Noel pissed him off, or that he was doing this as a prank.”

Aria shut her eyes and thought of the night she, Noel, and the others had tried to trap Ali at the library. A blond girl had served as a decoy, clearly Nick’s helper. What if whoever was aiding in his crazy rampage wasn’t Ali at all?

But no. They’d seen her. Talked to her. Aria was sure of it.

Fuji stuck her hands in her pockets. “Let it go, girls. I know you wanted closure, but you really didn’t see Alison in there. Our experts are combing the basement, making sure, but I’m positive we’ll find no trace of her. She’s dead—and has been for a long, long time. Honestly. It’s better to just accept it and move on.” She looked around at all of them. “Just get some rest, okay? You’re going to have to answer a lot of questions from reporters soon enough.”

And then she walked out of the room and shut the door. Aria glanced at her best friends. Everyone stared at her blankly. But it wasn’t like they could talk about any of this now—not with all their family around. Of course everyone would think they’d hallucinated Ali, too. Maybe they should let it go, Aria wondered. Maybe this really was the end.

The door swung open again, and Aria turned her head, worried it might be a nosy reporter wanting to ask questions. But Noel stepped through instead. As soon as he saw Aria, his face crumpled. He ran to her bedside. Byron and Ella moved apart to let him get close.

“H-hey,” he said, trembling.

“Hey,” Aria said. All at once, the dream rushed back to her. Sinking underwater and finding Noel nowhere. Never getting to touch him again. She reached out and squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back. And then he leaned forward so that his face was close to hers. At first, Aria thought he was going to kiss her—and she wanted him to.

He moved toward her ear instead. “You saw her, didn’t you?” he whispered.

Aria’s eyes widened. She nodded, then glanced toward the door, where Fuji had disappeared. “But no one believes us.”

“I believe you. I’ll always believe you.”

He drew back, and Aria stared at him, half in shock, half grateful.

Thank you, she mouthed, her eyes full of tears.

But she wanted to tell Noel to forget about Ali. She wanted everyone to forget about her. Her mind went to a dark, terrible place. We won’t find a trace of her, Fuji had said. All at once, Aria knew they wouldn’t. No fingerprints on the gun she was holding. No blood on the floor. No long, blond hairs on the carpet. Not because Ali hadn’t been there.

Because Ali was smarter than all of them.

A nurse poked her head into the room and frowned at all of the guests. “Okay, visitors, everyone out,” she demanded in a no-nonsense voice. “These girls need their rest.”

Noel patted Aria’s hand. “I’ll be right outside,” he said. Aria nodded, then watched as everyone else trailed out, too. The nurse dimmed their lights, and for a moment, the room was silent. Then Hanna reached for her remote and turned on the TV that hung from the ceiling. Serial Killer Taken into Custody, blared a headline on CNN. Of course it was all over the news.

The camera showed the outside of the old farmhouse. A cop shoved Nick into the backseat, his hands pinned behind his back. Ambulances whirled in the background. Aria wondered if she’d been inside one of them, unconscious.

“I hate him,” Spencer said quietly, when a mug shot of Nick popped up.

Aria nodded, saying nothing. He totally deserved this. But he was only half the problem. If only the cops had caught Ali, too.

The police car rolled away on the screen, but the cameras remained on the police activity on the farmhouse for a moment. It was crawling with police officers, forensic teams, and dogs. Aria listened hard over the sounds of sirens for that telltale high-pitched giggle, anything that would prove Ali was still here. But there was nothing. Of course there wasn’t.

“What now?” she asked, when the news cut to commercial.

Spencer sighed. “It’s hard to know. We lost everything. But now maybe we can do anything.”

Anything. They stared at one another, absorbing the possibilities.

Hanna looked down at her phone, which was still tucked in her pocket. “I keep expecting this to go off any second.”

“With a text,” Spencer whispered.

Aria stared at her phone, too, but no texts came. They wouldn’t, of course. Ali wasn’t dumb enough to send one right then.

Aria looked at her friends nervously. “Do you think we’ll ever hear from her again?”

Hanna shook her head, a look of determination on her face. “No. It’s done.”

“Definitely,” Spencer agreed.

But Aria knew they didn’t quite believe it. They might not hear anything from Ali for a while—maybe a long while. But she wasn’t gone from their lives forever. She was still out there . . . and they were still alive . . . and that meant her job wasn’t done. Knowing her, she’d only stop when she got what she wanted. She’d only stop when they were dead.

It was just a question of when.