by Laura Burns
When they banged up against the bigger boat, somebody tossed down two life jackets. Sarah put one on, her fingers shaking with the cold. There was a rope ladder, and Ethan gestured for her to climb it first. She forced her hands to hold on, forced her legs to bend and climb. Her entire body felt like it was going to shut down, and her mind wanted it to. What were these people going to do to her?
At the top, a pair of strong hands grabbed hers and pulled her over the side. Sarah looked up, trembling, into the eyes of the guy in the uniform.
“What in god’s name are you kids doing out here in this storm?” the guy bellowed. “You’re lucky we found you!”
Sarah stared at him, weak-kneed with relief. “You’re … you’re the Coast Guard.”
“Who were you expecting, the Tooth Fairy?” he asked.
Sarah laughed, turning to see Ethan as he was hauled on board. “It’s the Coast Guard!” she cried, hurling herself into his arms. “We’re saved.”
“And we didn’t even have to make it to the wind farm,” he laughed, hugging her back.
* * *
Ten minutes later they were wrapped in blankets, huddled inside the cabin of the rescue boat. Their rescuers had given them hot coffee, and Sarah finally felt her body stop shaking. Her mind was whirling, but she wasn’t sure they could talk about the island in front of the crew.
“Should we tell them?” she murmured, moving closer to Ethan. He lifted his blanket to put his arm around her so they’d be closer. “We don’t have any proof.”
“Which is why we need to think very carefully about how to report them,” Ethan said. “We can go to my house and figure things out from there. My parents know a million lawyers.”
His house, Sarah thought, shocked at the sudden return to real life. He has a house, and parents, and buckets of money. I have my muddy pajamas—and nothing else. She pushed the thought away.
“Will they help us, though? They never told you they went to Sanctuary Bay,” Sarah said.
“But there’s no way they’d be okay with all this Fortitude stuff,” he replied.
“Okay, kids, we’re here,” the captain said, sticking his head into the cabin. “All ashore.”
Ethan got up and smiled down at Sarah. “I’ve been trying to get home for years. I can’t believe we really did it.”
“I’m happy for you,” she said, covering her own worries with a smile.
The captain climbed down first, then Ethan, and Sarah followed slowly after them. Her clothes were still wet, and Ethan’s too-big shoes made it hard to find her footing on the ladder. When her feet hit the ground, she realized it was made of familiar smooth stones.
A chill of terror ran up her spine.
She was standing on the same jetty as when she’d first arrived at Sanctuary Bay. Sarah turned around to find herself staring at Dean Farrell.
“Welcome back, Ms. Merson,” the dean said.
19
Sarah whirled back to the Coast Guard captain, who was already halfway back up the ladder after escorting them down. “What are we doing here? You were supposed to take us to the mainland.”
“Your school called us and told us to search for you,” he replied. “If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have been out in this storm. You should be grateful.”
“You can’t leave us here,” Ethan said. “The school is experimenting on students.”
The captain laughed. “That’s a new one.” He disappeared onboard without another glance.
The two security guards behind Dean Farrell stepped forward, and Sarah felt as if she’d fallen back into a nightmare. “Take them to my office,” the dean said. She turned her back on them and clacked away down the dock in her completely inappropriate low-heeled leather boots. Karina would be appalled, Sarah thought, feeling sick at the thought of her roommate. Was she going to end up like Karina? Or Izzy? Or even Nate?
One guard took Ethan roughly by the arm and the other one took Sarah. She didn’t have a chance to speak to Ethan again until they were deposited at the door of Dean Farrell’s office.
“Maybe she doesn’t know how bad it is,” Sarah said to him in a rush. “She thinks Fortitude is running a medical trial, she probably doesn’t know about the rest.”
“Then she’s about to find out,” Ethan replied, as one of the security guards opened the door.
Dean Farrell wasn’t there.
Instead, there was a man sitting behind her desk, grinning from ear to ear. Midforties. White, dark hair, brown eyes, two-thousand-dollar suit.
“Well, well, look at this!” the guy crowed. “You’re alive, even after braving the Atlantic in a nor’easter!”
Sarah and Ethan just stared at him, baffled.
“Sorry, where are my manners? Have a seat,” the man said. “I’m Mr. Carothers, senior vice president of the Fortitude Corporation, but you can call me Dave. We’re going to be friends.”
“What are you doing in the dean’s office, Dave?” Sarah asked. “Where’s Dean Farrell?”
“Oh, she’s really more of a figurehead, Sarah,” Dave replied. “I’m the actual dean. Hmm. Maybe I should add that to my title, what do you think? SVP of the Fortitude Corporation, Dean of Sanctuary Bay Academy. Sounds great.”
“What are you talking about?” Ethan asked. “Fortitude is a contractor.”
“Well, not so much.” Dave gave him a wink. “It’s more like Sanctuary Bay is a front.”
Sarah sat down heavily in one of the guest chairs, a strange buzzing feeling seeping through her. She wasn’t sure she could take any more surprises today. “A front for what?”
“‘Front’ might not be the right word,” Dave said thoughtfully. “Technically, the word would be ‘subsidiary,’ but we do use the school as a front. So I guess it’s an okay term. Though we also use it for recruitment and training and placement … I have to say, kids, after consideration I’m not comfortable calling Sanctuary Bay a front. It’s much more than that.”
Ethan sat down next to Sarah looking grim.
“I guess the best way to put it is this: Sanctuary Bay Academy is the public face of the Fortitude Corporation,” Dave went on cheerfully. “See, we own the school. The school is us. It exists for no reason other than to complete our mission.”
“Your mission is to give kids illegal drugs and do mind-control experiments on them and then strap them down to metal beds and torture them?” Sarah asked edgily.
Dave looked offended. “There’s nothing illegal going on here, Sarah. Why would you say that?”
Did Call-Me-Dave not hear the word “torture”? Sarah thought wildly.
“Bromcyan was banned, but you’re using it on students,” Ethan said.
“Ahhh, I see the confusion,” Dave replied. “You’re right, Ethan, Bromcyan was banned … but not for us. You could say that the government placed a ban on anyone else exploiting the drug called Bromcyan.”
“It was banned before the school even existed,” Sarah argued. “Before the asylum even closed!”
“Riiight…” Dave said. “About that: The closing of the asylum wasn’t entirely a closing. It was more like a retreat from public view. The 1930s were all about research for us, and the 1940s brought a really wonderful new supply of test subjects. You see, we’d been testing the uses of Bromcyan on the nutbars at the asylum. Oh, I’m sorry, Sarah. You don’t like those kinds of terms.” He smiled warmly at her. “You’re very compassionate that way.”
He’d been watching her? Listening to her? Of course he had, she realized. Lab rats were always observed.
“Instead, let’s say that we were testing Bromcyan on the mentally ill patients. We were able to retain many of them after the official closing of the asylum. On the down-low, you understand,” Dave continued.
Sarah found herself staring at his teeth. They were blindingly white, and there was something mesmerizing about the way they moved when he spoke. She couldn’t bring herself to look at anything else as his words washed over her.
“But the fact is, we didn’t so much care how Bromcyan affected the loonies. We wanted to know how regular people would tolerate it. And in the 1940s, there was a war—that’s World War Two for you kiddies.”
“Yeah, we know about World War Two,” Ethan snapped. “We know there was a POW camp here.”
“You experimented on the prisoners,” Sarah said. “That’s why that German soldier went crazy. Why someone carved the word ‘Bromcyan’ into the cell wall.”
“Exactly! It was a real stroke of luck, let me tell you. We found out that Bromcyan’s effects on those of normal intelligence were everything we could have wanted,” Dave said. “You see, it works like a charm on the mentally ill—it orders their minds, if you will. It calms the mania and makes them open to suggestion. Give them talk therapy, suggest a new pattern of thinking, and they do it! It’s really a shame it will never be available to them.”
“You are such a bastard,” Sarah muttered.
Dave went on as if he hadn’t heard. “But on regular people, well, it renders them extremely suggestible, as well. The trick is, you have to use a much lower dose. In high doses, it helps the mentally ill but destroys the mind of a healthy person. In low doses, though, the healthy mind becomes putty in our hands.”
“What you’re saying is that you destroyed the minds of a bunch of German prisoners to find this out,” Ethan said, a low growl in his voice.
“Well, sure. But they were Nazis,” Dave said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“I don’t understand. Bromcyan was discovered by Herman Wissen at the asylum. You keep saying that Fortitude did all this, but Fortitude wasn’t there. It was an asylum and then a government POW camp,” Sarah said.
“Technically you’re correct, of course. It wasn’t until after the war that the Fortitude Corporation officially came into being,” Dave replied. “When the POW camp closed, the government decided to create some distance between themselves and our work with Bromcyan. Plausible deniability, I believe it’s called.”
Sarah closed her eyes, not wanting to hear more, but unable to stop herself from asking, “Fortitude is the government?”
“No, no,” Dave said. “Fortitude is a government contractor. Did you miss the part about plausible deniability?”
“Who founded Fortitude?” Ethan asked.
“Why, Dr. Wissen, of course,” Dave said. “Though he was pretty old by then. He died a few years later. But it was his brilliant idea to create Sanctuary Bay Academy. The school was founded nearly as soon as Fortitude was. Think about it: What better setting for controlled psychological testing?”
“It’s never been a school?” Sarah asked. “Not even at the beginning?”
“Nope.” Dave grinned. “What we like about Bromcyan, as I’m sure you’ve realized, is that it lets us explore the idea of mind control. The drug itself tills the soil, so to speak. It renders the mind open to suggestion, to influence. And teenagers are all about influence. I mean, everything in high school is based on peer pressure, am I right?”
“You’re talking about the Wolfpack,” Sarah cried. “All those missions! They were psychological tests.”
“Yup.” Dave beamed. “The Wolfpack, the lacrosse teams, the student government, even the debate team and math club! Everything can be a test. It’s fantastic. See, the Wolfpack drinks the Blutgrog, that’s Bromcyan. The lacrosse players have their special protein drinks, that’s Bromcyan. The cheerleaders suck down homemade alcohol and diet Sprite, that’s Bromcyan. Hell, we even put it in the food sometimes.”
“The entire school is a giant petri dish? It’s not just some students,” Ethan said. “It’s all of us?”
“Well, of course,” Dave replied. “We’re not just testing Bromcyan anymore—we know how that works. I mean, we’ve had eighty years to research it!” He laughed loudly. “No, at this point we’re mostly testing the people, the candidates. We try out various types of stimuli, gauge reactions to psychological stress, anything the scientists want.”
“Candidates,” Sarah repeated.
“We’re talking about brain chemistry here, Sarah. You’re good at chemistry, so you understand how tricky a subject this is—everybody reacts differently to a drug. We need to make sure a candidate is able to handle the Bromcyan both mentally and physically before we proceed.”
“Proceed with what?” Ethan asked. “Candidates for what? Why don’t you just skip the history lesson and tell us what you’re talking about, Dave?”
“Okay, if you want. Proceed with implanting the tech. Candidates for usage in the field. Happy?” Dave asked.
“No,” Sarah said. “What tech?”
“Ooh, I’m glad you asked. Right now, we’re running a pilot program for our new nanotechnology,” Dave said. “Back in the day, we injected operatives with Bromcyan and used hypnosis to give them their orders. Then we graduated to implanting a device to pump out the Bromcyan, which still required hypnosis, of course, but made it easier to maintain the proper dosage levels. That lasted for a long time—I mean, we’d upgrade the implants from time to time. Originally they were very crude, but then we learned to equip them with sensors that could send back readouts, and eventually the sensors were able to analyze the results themselves, and adjust dosage accordingly. Technology is something, huh?”
“All the biotech equipment in the underground lab,” Ethan said, turning to Sarah. “It was producing this.”
“Not anymore. Now it’s producing nanites,” Dave corrected him. “See, we first developed the smart chip—that was an implant that monitored enzyme levels, controlled the Bromcyan dosage, and produced Bromcyan right there in the body. Basically, it was a tiny factory that used the body’s own chemicals to create Bromcyan. But the problem was that we still needed hypnosis to give orders.”
“Now you just do it wirelessly,” Sarah said. “We saw that with Izzy. You figured out a way to have your smart chip send electrical impulses to the brain to create the behavior you desired.”
“I knew you were a keeper, Sarah,” Dave said. “That’s exactly right. Only now it’s not one smart chip anymore. Now we’re using a bunch of nanites that move through the bloodstream and operate in unison. The idea is that this will give us a more precise control of hormone and Bromcyan levels, and a more sophisticated interface with the brain commands.”
“What kind of commands?” Ethan asked.
“That all depends on what we’re using them for,” Dave replied. “If the operative is a soldier, we’re giving them military commands. If it’s a diplomat, we’ll be giving them commands to act in whatever way advances our political agenda. If it’s a business executive, the commands will be to help us further our financial goals. If it’s an assassin, well, that one’s pretty obvious.”
Sarah just stared at him.
“You know what a sterling reputation Sanctuary Bay has,” Dave said teasingly. “Our students go on to become leaders in almost every walk of life. Presidents, ambassadors, tech gurus, rock stars, you name it.”
“And you’re controlling them,” Sarah whispered.
“Have been for years!” Dave crowed. “I told you, this school was a stroke of genius. It gives us the perfect setting for testing, and the perfect vehicle for placing our operatives.” Dave frowned. “There are bumps in the road, of course. Right now the nanotech is in the initial testing stage, and unfortunately that always means a higher incidence of mistakes. We run a lot of tests before we move on to implanting the nanotech—we like to be sure how a candidate will react before we make the investment. But sometimes it still goes wrong. You can never tell how a host body will act.”
“Like Nate. Nate was a mistake,” Sarah guessed. “Something went wrong with him.”
“Yes, unfortunately that was a mess,” Dave agreed. “You know, that was a little bit your bad, Sarah. No guilt, but if you hadn’t pushed him so hard about the Karina situation, he would’ve been fine.”
Sarah was stunned.
“It was basically a domino effect,”
Dave went on. “We told Nate that he spent Halloween getting down and dirty with you, so that’s what he believed. When you kept needling him about it, he got stressed. His hormone levels went nuts, pumping out a cocktail of glucocorticoids, catecholamines, prolactin … It got out of control. The nanotech tried to keep his Bromcyan production regulated, but eventually it was overwhelmed. Still, though, Nate’s experience gave us a lot of information to work with. Sometimes you have to get it wrong before you know how to get it right.”
“I hate you,” Sarah snarled. “You sit there smiling like it’s funny but you’re playing with people’s lives. I’m not the one who killed Nate, you are.”
“But I’m not!” Dave cried, insulted. “Nate had had the tech for more than a year. We were finishing up his post-implant testing. Everything had been stellar until you came along. Now Izzy, that’s another story. She just flat-out rejected the nanotech. Well, you know, Sarah. You saw her getting the little guys pumped into her head.”
“That treatment? When she was screaming,” Sarah said.
“Yeah. We hoped it was just a short-term reaction, but nope. The nanites have trouble regulating her adrenaline levels. Whenever we increase her Bromcyan, she becomes unpredictable and violent. When we decrease the levels, she doesn’t follow commands. It’s really too bad. I was convinced she’d be a perfect candidate for an assassin. I mean, did you see the way she shot Karina? Stone cold.”
“Screw you,” Ethan growled, jumping from his seat. “You let Karina get killed as part of some experiment?”
“Whoa, whoa! Calm down, tiger.” Dave threw up his hands. “Don’t you remember the wax bullet? You weren’t supposed to find that, by the way. But Karina’s fine. Look.”
He grabbed Dean Farrell’s cell off her desk and typed in a command. Two seconds later, the door opened and Karina walked in. Her long black hair was as lustrous as ever, her dark eyes bright, and her smile happy.
“What’s up?” she said. She beamed at Sarah and Ethan. “Hi! I’m Karina.”
A rock seemed to settle in the pit of Sarah’s stomach. There wasn’t a trace of recognition in Karina’s eyes. Sarah had no idea who they were. She glanced at Ethan worriedly.