Oh God—what was she going to do?

The silver bullet in her arm felt like it was alive. Like it was some horrid kind of beetle that had burrowed into her muscle tissue and now it was gnawing at her from the inside out. It felt sharp, spiky, as if it were growing in size. It felt like it was going to be bigger than she was, soon.

Chey slumped to the ground and shook for a while. Not trembling with sobs but shivering. Chills racked her spine while her head burned with fever. Her arm itched and she scratched it unthinkingly, her nails dragging long strips of skin off her arm.

The wound turned an angry purple while she watched. How long before the poison spread to her heart? How long before the poison finally killed her? She had no way of knowing. Powell hadn’t given her so much as a hint. Was he trying to torture her with fear as well as kill her with silver?

She rolled back onto her knees. Pushed herself to stand up. Her body didn’t want to. She shouted, screamed inside her head at her legs, at the muscles in her back, to stop shaking and start working again.

It didn’t work. She fell backwards and her back scraped on the rough ground.

She had to try again. No one would help her, she knew. There was no one anywhere nearby who wasn’t already trying to kill her. Dzo couldn’t come to Port Radium—it was too toxic. Bobby had given orders to shoot her on sight.

She had to save herself this time and she just didn’t know exactly how she would do it, but she was certain she did need to get up and get moving.

Now, she thought, stand the goddamned fuck up. Just stand up. Stand up.

One complaining foot got underneath her. The other. She cursed and snarled and wept and then she was standing up. She could walk, she thought. The poison wasn’t in her legs and though her whole body felt like it was breaking down, giving up, she was pretty sure she could still walk.

She knew what she was going to have to do in a general way. She needed to find a knife or at least something sharp and she needed to cut the bullet out of her arm. Maybe even that wouldn’t be enough—maybe she was already too full of poison—but the only way to find out was to try. The very thought horrified her but she couldn’t just die, couldn’t just give up—

Well, she thought. Well. Well, she could, actually.

Why had she come to the Arctic, after all, except to resolve things with Powell. And her death at his hand would be a kind of resolution. It was one of the possibilities she’d been living with for years, wasn’t it? That she was supposed to have died on the Yellowhead Highway. Lycanthrope kills two in bloody road rampage, no survivors—that was one way it was supposed to have played out. It was something that she had thought many times that she might have, well, actually, preferred. The guilt of surviving her father’s death, the blankness and trauma and fear and depression and unhappiness that followed, the sleeplessness that had defined her life—none of those things would have had to happen. If she died now, if Powell killed her twelve years after the fact, things would still balance out. In their own bad way. Chey knew she understood very little about the universe but she knew that things coming to a bad end was not unheard of. That sometimes happy endings were too much to ask for.

Lycanthrope kills two.

No.

She didn’t like that ending. She had worked so hard. Sometimes without focus, sometimes to no point, but she had worked hard. She had jumped out of a fire tower and survived the fall, for instance. She had convinced her uncle to do something he hated. She had tattooed a wolf’s paw on her breast to steal some of Powell’s strength.

No, she wouldn’t stop now. She wouldn’t die.

In the hangar building, back in the offices, she searched for a knife, for a broken edge of a metal girder, for anything sharp. The offices were nearly bare except for some green enameled metal desks, their surfaces covered in rusted scratches. She tried pulling the leg off one of the desks but her strength was broken in half by the pain and the poison. She sweated and strained and pulled but nothing happened. With the handcuffs still on her wrists and only one good arm to work with she couldn’t get any leverage, anyway.

She ran out to where Pickersgill still lay dead in the parking lot. She searched his pockets, figuring he had to have a penknife, a folding knife, anything of the kind. He didn’t. She did find the handcuff key and spent a long frustrating while figuring out how to unlock the cuffs. With them off she felt minutely better. More free, at least. She dropped them to the ground and moved on.

She needed a jagged piece of metal. An especially sharp rock would do. She looked down at Port Radium and saw the pond down there full of cast-off machines corroding away in their polluted bath. Down there, certainly, there would be something.

Chey raced down the hill as quickly as she could manage. At one point her feet went out from under her and she rolled part of the way, dust and mud flecking her face, getting in her mouth, gravel pattering through her hair, stinging her eyes but then she was up again, moving again. She splashed out into water that felt all wrong, thicker, stranger than water. Muck bloomed in great rolling clouds wherever she disturbed the surface and a bad saline stink came up to make her choke, a disused, decayed smell, wholly inorganic and asphyxiating. She coughed up bloody phlegm and spat it into the ripples around her legs. She pressed on.