The password Becky had given me sat behind my teeth with the last of the air I had.
I forced it up through a throat that wasn't opening.
"It… is raining… in Goth."
The pressure tightened. My hands went to something with no surface to it, nothing to grip, nothing to pull at, and after a second my arms stopped believing there was anything there and gave up on their own. Vision narrowed to a hard white point.
"What did you say?"
Something came apart in his voice on the second word. The control that had held every sentence since we set foot on the roof cracked along one edge. The pressure on my throat didn't ease. It only paused, as if the hand that wasn't there had forgotten what it was doing mid-act.
"Say it again."
I couldn't. He hadn't left me the air to. The words sat behind the closed architecture of my neck with nowhere to go.
Then all of it released at once and I dropped and hit the concrete on my side.
