Page 207 of Victorious

“I want to wake up.”

Sydney.

June pointed herself in the right direction, then slipped back into the stranger’s body, and began to walk.

Mitch’s hand went to his chest.

His fingers came away red.

At first, his only thought was Oh.

He tried to breathe, but his lungs weren’t working right. His mouth was full of copper. And then his body was buckling beneath him, and when he hit the ice, it didn’t break because it wasn’t there. Pain had shattered the illusion—amazing, how something so small could hurt so much—and the frozen lake was gone, replaced by a large white room, somewhere inside EON.

But the gun in Serena’s hand was real.

The bullet in his chest was real.

The blood pouring out of him was real.

He needed to get up.

He needed to get up.

He needed to—

But his body, which had always been too big for him, was now too heavy, too.

And even though there was no lake, no ice, all he felt was cold.

Sydney gasped, inhaling icy water as she struggled to keep from going under.

It’s not real, it’s not real, she tried to tell her racing heart, her burning skin, her screaming lungs as she fought to grab the jagged edge, and slipped, tried again. After several frantic moments, she finally managed to haul herself up, out of the water, and onto the ice.

Mitch was on his back, chest hitching as the stain beneath him spread, too much, too fast.

She scrambled toward him.

I’ll fix it, she thought, I’ll fix it.

But she couldn’t, because Mitchell Turner wasn’t dead—he was still dying—so all she could do was press her hands against his chest, to try to staunch the blood, or maybe just to let him know that she was there. That she would make everything okay again.

“Leave him,” said Serena. “We don’t need him.”

“I do!” Syd snapped, tears sliding down her cheeks. “He was there when you weren’t. He saved me when you didn’t.”

She could feel the world around them darken with her sister’s mood. The fog thickened. The ice beneath her cracked. She didn’t care. It wasn’t real.

Mitch was.

“Hey, kid,” he whispered, blood bubbling behind the words. “… it’s okay…” He looked up at her, his eyes losing focus. His lips moved again, but this time, Sydney couldn’t hear him.

She put her ear against his mouth, and just managed to catch the words.

“… not alone.”

And for a second, Sydney thought he meant, she wasn’t alone. That he was with her. Would be, till the end. But then his fingers twitched along the ice, trying to point, and she turned in time to see a figure walking toward them, across the lake, parting the fog as they marched up behind Serena.

June.