Bali was lying down again when Milo came into the room. She had a fever—a high one—and it was reaching the point of delirium, making her see things that weren't there and have fever dreams that made her sweat through the hoodie and the thick blanket.
"You're burning up," Milo said, putting his hand on her forehead with concern.
"Maybe I'll die before they can take my shadow," Bali mumbled with a weak chuckle.
"That's not funny," Milo said quietly. He sat down on the floor next to her, and she felt something cool touch her forehead.
"How could you have survived this long with the witches?" she asked him, looking at him through the fog of her illness.
"Evil starts to feel normal when you're around it long enough. You either fight it till you die, or you adapt and become like it," he said honestly.
"Is that why I am dying? Because I'm fighting it?" Bali asked, closing her eyes.
"Yes," he replied, "so stop fighting it."
"Or you could start," she replied without opening her eyes.
Milo was silent for a while, carefully wringing out a wet cloth he had brought with a bowl of cool water and laying it across Bali's hot forehead until all the cold in it was gone. Bali faded in and out of consciousness, occasionally moaning to herself, as Milo just sat over her trying to cool her fever.
The door opened quietly behind him, and Milo did not turn around. He didn't care what the witch would think or what he would say. Milo was waging a war within himself, and every time he looked at Bali, he knew which side of that war was winning.
"Are you growing attached, my sssson?" the witch asked in his most father-like and condescending tone.
"No, father," Milo replied without emotion.
"Good. Our plans have changed. We are not taking her to the old brewery as we had planned."
Milo turned around suddenly in surprise. "You're not?" he said, which made the witch cackle derisively and say, "alwayssss revealing your emotions, you foolisssh boy! I knew you were growing attached."
Milo turned away from the witch and said nothing. He hated the way the man who wasn't a man always knew what he was feeling. He must know that Milo didn't love him like a father, had never loved him; in fact, he had despised him from the beginning. But what choices did he have? He never saw any other volunteers for the job of father, and the witch had helped him when he had needed it. At most, he felt a twisted kind of loyalty for the witch, without whom Milo would have been wandering the streets and homeless when he was eight years old. Or at least he had felt a kind of loyalty; now he stayed because they had his shadow, and that was the only reason.
"Unchain her," the witch said, "and bring her to the hall of shadows."
"The hall of shadows? Are we not waiting for the shadow eater?" Milo asked in surprise.
"And we ssshall have the ssshadow eater before too long. I have sssomone on their way to get her assss we sssspeak! Now come!"
...…..
Lucy was still sitting in the computer chair, watching the motionless cameras and twisting her swivel seat back and forth, listening to its irritating squeak. The bunker was too quiet, and she wasn't sure if she liked it or hated it; the chair's squeak as she swiveled it back and forth somehow made her feel less alone.
"I wonder if there are any cookies left?" she said out loud, feeling the freedom of talking into an empty room, knowing there was no one to judge her.
"Aha!" she said, spotting one cookie left on the plate. "All mine!" She found a fresh mug and poured herself another cup of coffee, wondering if there was a limit to how much coffee people usually drank in one day. But then again, she didn't really care; it was just so delicious, especially when she dipped the cookie in it.
A beeping noise erupted from the wall of computers, and Lucy jumped, spilling coffee onto the floor. She grabbed a towel from the counter, tossed it over the spill, then walked over to the squeaky chair and sat down again. The monitor directly in front of her had a red word flashing in the top right corner, and Lucy read it out loud.
"Intruder," she said. A wave of panic washed over her. She looked frantically at all the cameras, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. There were no signs of movement on any of them, and Lucy looked intently at them all, afraid to blink in case she missed something.
The computer beeped a few more times, the same red word blinking across the screen, and then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Lucy took a deep breath after a few moments and leaned back in her chair.
"It must have been a glitch or something," she said to herself. But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than something black was slipped over her head, and the world went dark.