Wedon't have a choice.
I pull.
Click click?—
The mask doesn’t release clean. Something catches and the resistance is wrong. This is aripand the mask comes away in my hand.
Two masks.
Both of them.
The performance mask and the skull prosthetic, fused together, torn free in one horrible motion.
Rex’s actual face stares back at me.
For one frozen heartbeat, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. It looks enough like the prosthetic skull that my brain tries to make it fit.
Then it doesn’t.
Because the skull prosthetic was smooth and painted and theatrical.
This is what I saw in the leak, only it’s in real life. Not a picture taken from afar where I can scroll and put it out of my head so I'm not betraying him.
Melted skin pulled tight like candle wax, pink and white where the grafts took. Muscle and bone where they didn’t. The right side of his mouth is completely destroyed. His cheek is torn away, exposing the architecture of his jaw, the sinew, all the teeth on that side.
And his right eye, lids so damaged it can’t blink, glows in the light from the flames shooting up around us, the pupil huge and black and damaged and drowning out almost all the blue.
The other, all I can see of the unmarred side of his face in the shadows of the stage lights, is a terrified pinprick.
The sound changes.
Three thousand voices that were screaming for us thirty seconds ago turn into something else. A roar. Shock and horror and the sick thrill of seeing something they were never supposed to see.
I don’t look at them.
I can’t look at anything but Rex.
Rex doesn’t move.
Doesn’t breathe.
His hands—still gripping my upper arms—go slack. His fingers open one by one, mechanical and slow, like the signal between his brain and his body just severed even though he knew this was going to happen. That something was going to go horribly wrong.
We were fucking sabotaged.
He’s not here anymore. He’s gone somewhere deep inside himself, somewhere beyond the lights and the screaming and the cameras, somewhere the boy who burned alive is still waiting for the fire to stop.
My hands find his face.
Both sides. The unmarred side and the side where there are exposed teeth against my palm where his cheek should be. Theedge of his lidless eye socket is smooth and cold against my thumb, a sliver of bone barely covered by skin.
The crowd noise is a wall of sound and none of it is kind.
Fuck them.
Fuck every single one of them.
I pull his face down to mine.