The Doctor felt a sudden and unanticipated appreciation for Spider-Man after he shimmied up the storm pipe and eased himself back inside through an open window.
He landed inside a dark and empty office area, dotted with empty cubicles robbed of their inhabitants. He located a computer with an unlocked screen and, for once, blessed the absentmindedness of the human brain—he didn't have the time to try to break into a locked computer, not without the sonic, anyway.
The Doctor sighed. He really missed the sonic right about now.
He sat down at the computer desk, his fingers flying over the keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the owner of this desk had a Yoda bobble-head figurine, of all things. He rather liked it.
"You and me, then, eh?" he said to the Yoda bobblehead. "Yoda and the Doctor. That seems fitting somehow."
He accessed Torchwood's secure server with relative ease, scanning their interdepartmental correspondence to see if he could glean anything helpful on this virus, or contagion, or whatever it was. Of course, Torchwood had not gathered very much information, and their tests had not yielded any definitive results, but he had expected that. Very little time had passed since the beginning of the outbreak and it was unlikely anyone here had ever dealt with something like this before.
Still, something seemed off about this whole thing.
"I have to admit this has me stymied," the Doctor told Bobble-head Yoda, but of course the figurine didn't respond, save to bobble his head unhelpfully when the Doctor poked it. "There's absolutely nothing useful in any of these health and safety reports. All I can find in here that's halfway interesting is a report on the new paint job and some complaints of mold. That's not terribly relevant, is it?"
Yoda nodded sympathetically.
"That's about what I thought," the Doctor agreed.
He squinted at the computer screen, a little disgruntled to find that in this human body, he may actually need reading glasses. Well, that was just wonderful. He blamed Donna's faulty human DNA. Probably she wore contact lenses all the time and just never told him.
He clicked through several more files, scanning through boring reports and useless department communications until his eyes fell on one particularly intriguing bit of text. His eyebrows shot upward in surprise.
"Now here's something interesting," the Doctor said. "According to these files, the blood samples sent to the lab indicate no trace of antibodies in Miranda's system. That means it can't be a disease or virus, her body would have started fighting back pretty much instantly," he explained to Bobblehead Yoda. "Bodies are sort of handy that way. Get it? Handy?"
He wriggled his new-old right hand at Bobblehead Yoda, but received no response.
"You're right," the Doctor said, "This is no time for puns. Although personally I feel that most times are good times for puns."
He glanced over the sickbay's records.
"Well, now." He peered more closely at the screen. "We've got one more sick patient on file. Says here he started presenting symptoms after arriving in sickbay for the quarantine. Miranda fell sick in the cafeteria, the second patient fell ill almost immediately after stepping foot in the building, and another took ill in the lift, the gent in the HAZMAT suit. That last one was dead within seconds."
He tried not to think about what that meant for Rose.
The Doctor leaned back in his chair. "So whatever it is, it's fast-acting, clearly spread throughout the entire building, but it's only affecting a handful of people."
He clicked impatiently through a few more files. "How am I supposed to cure something if I can't figure out what it is?" the Doctor asked Bobblehead Yoda. But Bobblehead Yoda was, as usual, silent and withholding.
The Doctor frowned. He just couldn't put his finger on it, whatever it was. Clearly it wasn't a virus, it wasn't a disease, it didn't appear to be bacteria, and it didn't have the hallmarks of an infection. But that didn't make any sense. There was nothing else it could be. Torchwood's team was just overlooking something, that was all.
He'd have to make his way into their lab and see the test results for himself, inspect the blood and tissue samples and hopefully the HAZMAT-suited body to find out what exactly this thing was. That was the only way to stop the contagion, to save Rose and anyone else who might be affected.
He still wondered how Rose and the others had contracted the contagion in the first place. He had initially thought perhaps Rose was exposed via her mangled toe, but none of the other patients had shown any wounds or telltale marks, according to the autopsy reports.
Curiouser and curiouser. Hopefully the lab would have something useful for him.
"So long, then," the Doctor said to Bobblehead Yoda before he left. "Although I can say from experience, 900 years old is no excuse to let yourself go."
The Doctor quietly loped from one end of the room to the other, stuck his head out into the dark hallway, looked both ways. Of course the coast was clear, even if the faulty fluorescent light flickering above gave him an uneasy feeling. He quickly located the Torchwood directory on the wall, scanning it for the location of the laboratory.
Something clicked at the end of the hallway. He snapped around, scanning for any Torchwood security agents that might have found him, but nobody was there. He took a few steps forward in the flickering lights and gave a good long look anyway just to be safe.
Nothing. Just a quiet buzz-hum in the air, could easily be the cheap overhead lighting. He turned back to the directory.
Miranda was standing there.
Rose pushed through the small throng of Torchwood employees crowded around the sickbay entrance. It was all she could do to keep herself standing. She wasn't sure if this was the contagion or just nerves, but she was slowly starting to feel more and more feverish, like her veins were on fire.
Rose heard the stairwell doors fling open behind her. The agents chasing her had finally caught up. She ducked into the crowd before they could see her.
When nothing happened for a few moments, she chanced a look back—they were scanning the crowd for her. She crouched as low as she could without drawing attention to herself (one of the perks of being short, she noted). She slowly limped over to the first nurse she saw, a young man in full surgeon's garb with a mask and everything. The nurse was busy taking an agent's blood pressure.
"Be with you in a moment, Agent Tyler," the nurse said without taking his eyes off his patient.
"I've been exposed," Rose said breathlessly, scanning the back of the room to make sure she was still safe from her pursuers.
"We've probably all been exposed, it was a dinner lady what had it," the nurse's patient snapped. "Probably gave us all Typhoid disease or something."
"No," Rose shook her head, struggling to breathe normally, "You don't understand, it's not spread by air or anything like that, it's something else, and I've been exposed."
She looked down at her hands. The small veins in the soft underside of her wrist had started going dark. The sight sent her blood pressure plummeting, leaving her light-headed. She showed her wrist to the nurse.
"Look, it's already begun," she said.
To his credit, the nurse didn't ask any questions, but immediately dropped what he was doing and took her by the arm, leading her to the back of sickbay.
"We've got another live one," he said into his walkie-talkie.
"Live one?" Rose asked, a little dizzy from her fever. "There's more?"
"There's you and another fellow that are still alive," the nurse informed her.
Still alive, Rose noted with a sinking feeling.
The nurse brought her to a hospital-style room with several cots and one other inhabitant. It took a moment for Rose to recognize him—it was Jared.
Rose was shocked at his condition. Jared was a swimmer, or a sprinter, or something else that gave him a lean, but tightly-muscled physique. Passing by him in the hallway, she'd silently appreciated his pretty arms and pleasant bum on more than one occasion. But now, his cheeks were hollow, his skin nearly translucent, and his once-strong body seemed small, slowly seizing in on itself. Rose couldn't believe how rapidly he'd changed in just the short amount of time that had passed since their greeting earlier.
Rose wondered how long she had before she became like that.
Jared did not respond to any of the commotion around him. He just stared ahead with glassy eyes. Rose watched him as several nurses attended to her, situating her on a cot, peeling off her jacket and taking her vitals. One nurse handed her some paracetamol for her fever and another draped a cold compress over the back of her neck. Through her increasing head-fog, Rose managed to feel very sorry for Jared; he'd seemed nice enough.
She couldn't help but notice that Jared already had some black at the corners of his mouth.
"What are you?" the Doctor posited to the dead body standing in front of him, the one that used to be a dinner lady named Miranda.
"You know what this body is," Miranda's body responded, slow and thick, her tongue weighing heavy in its mouth.
The Doctor winced at what she had become. The formerly sweet voice was now rasping and rough, as if it had been torn apart and stitched back together poorly. Behind a ragged curtain of matted hair, her eyes blinked just a fraction of a second too slowly, sliding open and closed over dull, solid-black eyes. Her dark veins had become more pronounced now; the Doctor could see them all over her body—in her face, in her hands, in the tissue-thin flesh stretching over her sternum.
Poor, poor lovely dinner lady, the Doctor thought. You didn't deserve this.
"This is the Miranda," the body told him finally.
"Yes, well, general rule of thumb: most English-speaking peoples don't refer to themselves in the third person," the Doctor replied. "Also, they're usually not dead and covered in black stuff. I don't know, I guess I'm just a stickler for details."
Miranda's body did not reply, but continued to drool a bit of the black stuff, thick and wet and foul, filling the air with the smells of mildew and rotting things.
"You've got a bit of—" the Doctor gestured toward his mouth, mirroring the black drool on Miranda's face. Miranda did not respond. "No? All right then," the Doctor finished.
"The Letrion need your help," Miranda eked out.
"And what are the Letrion?"
"Not what. Who. And impolite to ask."
"Well it's a bit late for that now; you want my help, you're going to answer a few questions," the Doctor said, and he wondered if that pesky quiet buzzing noise would ever stop. "So! First things first. What are you?"
Miranda paused. "We are the Letrion," she said after a moment. "We can tell you no more than that."
"Ah," the Doctor said, shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking on the balls of his feet. "But you see, you've already told me so much. See, your use of the word 'we' indicates the plural, indicates lack of sense of individual self, and that combined with the low-level telepathic field you're projecting hints at a hive mind of some sort—which, by the way, if you could dampen it down a bit, I'd really appreciate it, it sort of creates a very unpleasant buzzing noise for us touch telepaths, sort of vibrates in our teeth—so I already know there's more than one of you in there and out here and you're all mentally linked by said telepathic field. How am I doing so far?" he asked, turning his head sideways and grinning.
"The Letrion needs your help," Miranda repeated.
"Nope, if you want me to help you, first you've got to help me," the Doctor said cheerfully. "I want to know what you're doing to these people, and why."
Miranda's body eyed him distrustfully, or as distrustfully as it could given its glazed-over eyes. "We need a place to live," she told him. "A place to grow."
"You need to…do a metabolism thing," Rose managed to tell her nurse as he took care of her damaged toe. She'd splintered the toenail, torn it almost completely off. It was quite bloody, and though that was hardly anything new for Rose, the black stuff seeping from the wound made her feel sick to look at. Rose kept her eyes trained on the nurse's face instead. "Reduce my metabolism…to slow down the…infection thing…" she said weakly.
The nurse looked surprised. "You study Medical Theory, Agent Tyler?" he asked.
"No. Just got some smart friends."
"Don't worry, we've got some serum on the way for you now. It's a basic slow-acting agent to help deal with unknown contagions."
"Did you use that on the others?" Rose asked.
The nurse hesitated. "We've got Jared on it right now," he said, attempting a pleasant attitude for her sake. "Jared's on it, and we're getting promising results."
Rose's eyes flickered over to Jared, took in his darkening eyes, his slack face, his dark veins. Those results certainly did not look promising.
The nurse finished dressing her wound, replaced his gloves, and plugged the ends of his stethoscope into his ears. "While we're waiting for the serum, I'm going to need you to take some deep breaths for me," he instructed Rose. She nodded in understanding. He pressed the stethoscope pad against her chest and back.
"So tell me a bit about—"
"You don't need to do that," Rose said. "I know it's bad. You don't have to comfort me or distract me. Just tell me how bad it is."
Another nurse arrived with the serum, pushed up Rose's sleeve and started swabbing her arm in preparation for a shot. "This will help slow down the progress of the contagion," she explained.
"Please just tell me how bad it is," Rose asked the first nurse, ignoring the unpleasantness of her serum-shot as the needle pierced into the soft flesh of her inner arm. "I have a right to know."
"You don't want to know," he told her firmly.
Rose fought back the urge to be nasty. She tried to remember the nurse's name. She'd been here enough times, seemed like she'd have all of the medical staff memorized by now.
Ugh, people skills. She hadn't needed them in a long time. This sort of thing used to come to her so easily.
All right, she thought to herself. You can do this. 30-ish, stocky, Japanese, buzzed hair, thick-rimmed glasses, perpetual 5 o'clock shadow under the mask, one of four male nurses in the building. You can remember his name. Something with a hard "G" sound at the beginning. Garrett? No, too nerdy. Greg? Too typical. Gary? Too old.
Oh, bugger it, just throw something out there.
"It's Greg, isn't it?" she ventured.
The nurse nodded with a quick "Yep". Rose congratulated herself silently.
"Okay Greg, if this was happening to you, wouldn't you want to know what it was?" Rose prompted.
Greg finished writing the notes on his sheet. "There. We'll keep an eye on your progress and give you a dose of the serum about once every half hour," he said. "Hopefully that will buy us some time until we can find a cure. In the meantime, let's see if we can get you comfortable."
"Greg. Tell me."
Greg looked up from his clipboard. "I have every confidence that we will discover a cure for this, Agent Tyler," he told her.
"I've been here long enough to know what that means," Rose said. "I know you're doing your best, and I'm grateful, really, but...I have a right to know what's happening to me. I need to know the worst case scenario."
She paused for a moment. "Please," she added.
Greg hesitated. He glanced over at Jared, perhaps thinking he didn't want to hear this, but Jared just stared into space. Greg looked like he may keep his silence, but eventually, he spoke.
"All right then," he said. "The fact is...we don't know what this is, or how it's doing what it's doing. It doesn't match anything we have in our databanks. It acts like a virus, but it certainly isn't. Whatever it is…"
Greg looked like he might be searching for the right words to make the situation sound less awful, but he came up with nothing, shaking his head a little.
"It's contaminating your fluids, causing radical changes at the molecular level," he explained. "That's why you've been feeling feverish—it's a side effect of the chemical changes. But we're not sure how or why the change is happening, or what's causing it."
"You're parasites," the Doctor concluded. "You're altering your hosts' body chemistry so you can survive comfortably. And of course those changes kill the host."
Miranda didn't respond, didn't confirm or correct him, just watched through dead eyes.
"So here's my next question," the Doctor continued. "Why do you choose the people you choose? This building's full of people, any one of them as good a host as the next, yet most of them are unaffected. And even among the infected, the incubation periods vary wildly. What is your pattern?"
Miranda shook its head. "No more talk. Help us," it rasped.
"Now hang on," the Doctor said, thoughtful. "I'm not finished asking questions. I want to know why you've targeted only certain people. Specifically, my friend. Tell me why you chose her. And tell me how long she's got."
"Promise to help us and we will answer all of your questions," Miranda told him.
The Doctor paused. "I can't make any promises," he said truthfully, "Not until I know everything."
"Promise to help us, or the Letrion will kill the Rose."
The Doctor's face contorted into a dangerous grimace. "I don't take well to threats," he said in a low growl. "Tell me why you chose to infect her and the others, or you'll never get anything from me."
"Help the Letrion or we will kill the Rose now."
"As the contagion matures, it will…well, it won't just affect your blood, though that's bad enough. It will eventually start targeting your organs as well," Greg finished.
Rose did not reply. She did not know what to say.
Greg watched her for a reaction, his own expression worried, apologetic. "It's awful, I know," he said quietly. "I'm sorry there isn't a better way to tell you that."
Rose felt like she should be more upset about this, but she mostly felt tired. "Is there anything else I should know?" she asked.
Greg shook his head. "That's about all there is, I'm afraid."
Rose nodded.
"I'm sorry I don't have better news for you. But we're doing everything we can, Agent Tyler."
Rose looked down at her hands. The blackness around her nail beds had darkened and spread. "It's all right," she murmured. "It's not your fault."
"We'll do our best to make you comfortable," Greg assured her. "We caught it early enough that the serum may afford you some additional time. You've already made it longer than any of the others, and that gives us some hope."
Rose chuckled a bit at that. She'd quickly discovered a surprising resiliency to disease in this new universe—flus and colds and viruses were rarely a concern, and when she did contract them, they were gone in the blink of an eye—and she suspected it was a residual effect of traveling in the TARDIS. The thought had comforted her in the past. But she doubted the TARDIS had ever encountered anything like this before.
She knew it wasn't fair to compare the new Doctor to the old, but she couldn't help but feel that the real Doctor may have fixed everything by now.
"In the meantime..." Greg started to say. He hesitated. "In the meantime, just to be safe, if there's anyone you'd like to say goodbye to, now would probably be the time to give them a call."
He grasped her shoulder. "I'll give you a bit of privacy," he said before leaving.
Rose sat in silence. The serum shot had dulled the fiery pain somewhat, but it was still there, lurking beneath the surface. She could feel it warming her veins, pulsing in her temples, waiting to strike.
She looked over at Jared again, who already looked even worse than he did just a few moments before. He lay flat on his back on the cot, a few greyish tearstains on his face, irritating his cheeks with their caustic content. She wondered if he'd already said his goodbyes to anyone, or if he had anyone to say goodbyes to.
Rose reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her mobile, started to dial her mum, stopped. She looked over at Jared again.
He looked so miserable. It was pretty clear that he was too far gone to save.
Rose glanced down at her phone, "Mum" flashing on the screen. She thought about hitting the call button, but couldn't stop thinking about the man that was about to die in front of her.
Who did he have to say goodbye to? Anybody?
"So, Jared," she said, extending her mobile out to him. "Who do you want to talk to?"
"If I promise to help you, will you let her go?" the Doctor asked sharply. "And will she be all right?"
"Yes, if the Traveler helps us, we will set the Rose free, and all effects will reverse," Miranda told him.
"I take it that the Traveler is me, then?" the Doctor asked.
Miranda nodded.
"All right," the Doctor said. "I promise I will help you. I give you my word." He pursed his lips and took a deep breath in through his nostrils. "Now why did you choose your hosts over everyone else in the building?"
Miranda licked its lips, distributing the black stuff all around. It was disgusting. "We are drawn to them," Miranda responded. "They call to the Letrion."
"Well I doubt that, very few people typically volunteer to host a parasite." The Doctor thought for a second. "Well actually, there is that Knavrosian cult that would be all over that, but that's neither here nor there."
"They reach out with their thoughts. Their feelings," Miranda told him. "They cry out in the darkness. We hear them when they cry."
"So your telepathy field extends outside your species," the Doctor asked. "And you seek out hosts with a certain telepathic signature?"
"The Letrion must maintain the hive at all costs," Miranda responded. "We are drawn to those who do not belong. We feel them. Feel their loneliness and pain. In our world, we must save those who stray from the hive. Save them to end their pain. But here, we feel it everywhere. People who do not belong. People who are…alone."
She shuddered at the word, like it was a curse, like it was the worst thing in the world. The Doctor did not necessarily disagree.
"We smelled it on the Rose," Miranda's body whispered. "So very strong. A siren song of longing and despair."
"Right," the Doctor said, caught between sympathy and disgust. He was very glad that he could not properly use his own telepathy without the power of touch, could not sense anything of the Letrion beyond their low-level hum—he could not imagine the burden of feeling everyone else's unhappiness. He could barely cope with his own.
"You're lonely. I get it. So is everyone else in the world, you don't see them going on a rampage. Most of them, anyway." The Doctor crossed his arms. "So what do you want from me?"
"We need the Traveler to take us home."
That gave the Doctor some pause. "Home? Why can't you get there yourself? How did you get here if you can't get back?"
"We fell victim to the nothing," Miranda whispered, and her eyelids fluttered as her possessors remembered. "The stars went out, and the nothing came. We fled to the Void. But then we heard the song of the Vortex, and followed the song to safety."
"You're hitchhikers," the Doctor realized. "The reality bomb destroyed your world and you escaped to the Void, somehow survived long enough to hitch a ride here with the TARDIS."
"But now we feel that the universe is mended," Miranda told him. "The nothingness is gone. The blackness has faded. The stars have returned home, and so must we. And the Traveler will help us."
Despite his disgust for the parasites, the Doctor found himself almost pitying them.
"No," he said quietly, shaking his head. "I'm sorry. I can't. There are no more rifts between the universes. You're stuck here, just like me."
"Then the Traveler will find another way," Miranda hissed.
The Doctor shook his head again. "It's not possible," he said. "I'm sorry. You can't go home. You're going to have to adapt and learn to live here, I'm afraid. We'll figure something out. But only after you let my friend go."
Miranda raised her chin in defiance. "If you do not help us, we will consume the companion Rose, and any others we see fit," she threatened.
"No," the Doctor argued. "There's another way, I know there is, if we can just…"
He trailed off. A thought had suddenly occurred to him. A very unpleasant thought indeed.
"Hang on," he said. "I never told you my friend's name was Rose. So how do you know who she is?" he asked.
Miranda did not respond. The Doctor took a menacing step forward.
"How do you know?" he said loudly.
"I had just got my certification for field agent," Jared said. Every word was a strain, a struggle through coughs full of thick black fluid. Rose sat next to him on his cot, holding a paper cup full of water, giving him a drink when he looked like he needed it. He was obviously in a lot of pain. "Just needed to fill out my paperwork, and then the job was mine," Jared wheezed.
"You're still going to be a field agent, you know that, right?" Rose asked.
Jared scoffed. "Not bloody likely," he mumbled. "I'm going to rot down here, and I dropped my stupid mobile upstairs, and it has all my numbers on it. Never thought I'd need to have them all memorized, you know? Stupid bloody smartphone. Now I won't even get to tell my girlfriend goodbye." He sighed. "She doesn't even know I'm in here."
"You've got a girlfriend, then? What's she like?"
Jared cracked a sad smile then. "I guess I should say my ex."
Rose clucked in sympathy. "That's too bad. Sorry about that, mate."
"Yeah. Things weren't going so well. Long-distance relationships, you know how they are."
"You have no idea," Rose said drily.
"But I dunno, I always thought maybe there was still hope. I thought, maybe I'll fly over there sometime and surprise her. She lives in the States now. I'd go over there and bring her flowers and take her to Disneyland or something."
A few greyish tears welled up in his eyes. "And now I'll never get a chance to do it, because I'm going to die because from some kind of…god, I don't even know what this is. Did it take anyone else this long to die?"
"I don't know. Maybe we got a dose of that serum early enough to slow down the damage. And you're not going to die," Rose said firmly, squeezing Jared's hand. "There's…"
She hesitated. She felt odd about what she was going to say next.
"There's a man out there who's going to save us," she told Jared. "He's, well, he's different. Not your usual bloke. But he's done stuff like this loads of times. Both of us have. We save people, that's what we do. What we did. I guess he still does."
Rose had this nagging little feeling in the back of her head like she was somehow betraying the real Doctor in comparing the new Doctor to him. She didn't even know if the new Doctor was capable of the same stuff as his older counterpart. She may very well be talking out of her ass, Rose realized.
Then she noticed she was fidgeting with the TARDIS key around her neck. She dropped it and clasped her hands together instead.
"Tell me about him," Jared said. His voice was very weak.
"Well," Rose said. "He's sort of tall and skinny. Always wears a pinstripe suit with trainers. Has fantastic hair."
Jared gave a laugh, which lapsed into a cough. Rose helped him drink some water from the paper cup. His mouth left a smudged black ring behind.
"Of course he thinks he knows everything," Rose thought out loud, smiling just a little bit. "I dunno, maybe he does. Bit of a show-off. But he's brilliant, really. Just…"
She let out a slow breath. "…Brilliant."
"Are you and him a thing, then?" Jared asked.
Rose smiled embarrassedly. "I dunno," she repeated, tucking her hair behind her ear like a shy schoolgirl. She remembered how the new Doctor had grabbed that same hand earlier, the urgency of his grasp on her arm, the look on his face when he realized she was sick. "It's complicated," she told Jared.
"How complicated can it be?"
"You'd be surprised."
"Try me."
"Honestly?"
"Yeah. It can't be any weirder than this."
Rose set the paper cup down before speaking. "He's a newborn copy of someone else from another universe and I'm having a hard time dealing with the fact that that someone else apparently doesn't want me anymore, so the last few years of my life have pretty much been for nothing, and now I'm stuck here in an alternate universe with the clone of the person I love, or thought I loved, or I don't know, and now I don't know what I'm going to do with myself, or him."
Jared blinked. "And…the clone is going to save us?"
Rose nodded. "Probably, yeah."
"You're bonkers."
"Probably, yeah."
They both laughed. Rose could tell it was very painful for Jared. He was choking up a lot of the black stuff now, his shoulders shaking with the force of his coughs. Rose wiped it off his face with her suit jacket sleeve. The black blood congealed on the jacket, and the air reeked of wet wool.
"Wish he'd hurry up," Jared murmured. A few tears dripped out of his eyes, big viscous dark grey tears. "The end is coming soon. We can feel it."
"Nope, you're going to be fine, I promise," Rose assured him. Greg came over to take Jared's vitals one more time, pressing his stethoscope to Jared's chest, and Rose gently patted Jared's hand, hoping to comfort him.
Then, Rose stopped.
"What do you mean, 'we'?" Rose asked.
"Well that can't be right," Greg said, looking up from his watch. He felt at Jared's neck, too. "That really can't be right."
He brought out his stethoscope again, pressed it against Jared's chest in various places. "I need an adrenaline shot over here!" Greg called out to one of the other nurses.
"What is it?" Rose asked.
Greg didn't turn to look at her, just frowned at Jared. "You've completely flatlined. How are you even conscious?"
Jared's eyes turned and fixed on Rose. She stared back, a heavy feeling of horror mounting in her chest.
She knew now that Jared was dead. And he knew that she knew.
"Oops," he said softly.