Voices and heavy feet sounded behind us. “This way,” a man said.
“Come on.” Jonas grabbed my hand again. A low growl of frustration erupted from somewhere deep within my throat.
Despite my irritation, we ran. I would give him one more chance, though I was exhausted from allowing him inside my mind. I might not be able to block him out every time, but I sure would try harder. I might use my ring on him just to prove a point. And I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t enjoy it.
I wanted Jack. I missed him. His touch. The promise of a future. I wouldn’t hesitate to escape to a new life far away from here—if I ever got another chance.
The next time Jack gave me the opportunity to run, I was one hundred percent in.
Jonas darted around one more corner, then to a door on the right. He stuck a key in the lock, opened it, and we both slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind us. I leaned my forehead against the steel door. The coolness helped the fire that had spread across my face.
Jonas placed both hands on my shoulders and rubbed. I couldn’t help but replay his confession of feelings for me from earlier. I think I knew he felt something for me, but with his and Ty’s mind invasion, I never knew what was real. I couldn’t help but like Jonas at times, but it was never anything more than friendship. And other times, like now, Jonas infuriated me.
I drew my head back, then pretended to beat it against the door several times before he stopped me. “Hey. Remember I said I had a surprise for you?”
“I don’t want any more surprises,” I said. I jerked my shoulder from his grasp. “I’m done with surprises. Especially from you.” I swallowed hard. “I just want to paralyze that evil woman that gave us life, destroy the server, and run far, far away from here where the IIA can’t find me.”
A tear ran down my cheek. I was definitely losing it. Jonas had stopped touching me. I didn’t know if he had backed away to let me have my moment of pity, or was he standing right behind me?
I didn’t care. I no longer cared about Jonas. I only cared about finding my way back to Jack. And saving my best friend from a fate that she never should have been a part of.
“Does your plan to run from the IIA include me?”
I whipped around at the sound of his voice. “Jack!” My knees buckled a little. He caught me. “You’re here.” I slipped my arms around his neck. He wrapped his strong arms around my waist in a hug, lifted my body, and carried it farther into the room.
“I’m here,” he whispered into my hair, his breath warm on my neck. “I’m sorry it took me so long. We had complications.” He kissed me lightly behind my ear.
I pulled back. “Why are you here? You shouldn’t be. She’s awful, Jack. She’ll kill you. She’ll kill me when she figures out I’d rather die than give her what she wants.”
“Shh.” He smoothed my hair. “I’m here. And we have a plan.”
“Thank goodness.” I noticed the room we were in for the first time. “Where are we?”
“Sandra’s apartment,” Jonas said, his voice quiet.
A growl rumbled in my chest. I glanced at him. “Isn’t that a little risky?”
“It was my idea.” Addison popped into view out of nowhere. “You know. Hide in plain sight.”
I jumped backwards. My hand flew to my chest. “Where did you come from?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Jonas said. “Addison is our little gen mod version of the invisible girl. She can vanish in the blink of an eye, and reappear whenever she wishes.”
My eyebrows jumped up. “Gen mod?”
“Genetically modified,” Jonas answered.
“And she’s discovered how to make herself invisible?” This was too much.
“Well…” Jonas tilted his head side to side. “It’s really about mind trickery. Similar to Dia and Bree. Where Dia and Bree can make people believe they’re seeing something or someone else, Addison can make a person see nothing at all. Her own invisibility cloak. It’s quite useful.” Jonas smiled.
I could feel my own eyes widen. “If she can do that, why didn’t she use that trick while at Wellington when Dia and Sandra kidnapped her?”
“Dia,” Jonas said.
I raised a brow, “Meaning?”
“Dia is very well aware of her surroundings, including the people around her,” Addison explained. “She has to be, in order to manipulate what a person sees or doesn’t see. And she can be sure to see things, including me, even when I try to disappear. She had no trouble finding me in my weakened state—so soon after I’d recovered from my brain injury.”
Jack brushed up against my back and circled his arms around me. His hands interlocked against my stomach. I laid mine on top of his. “Briana will most likely have the same powers as Dia,” he said. “She just hasn’t tapped into them completely yet.”
Addison went on. “The day you visited me for the first time, Dia was already manipulating what I was seeing. I told you I found Briana in the parking lot, only it wasn’t Briana. It was Dia. She was already throwing me off. I didn’t even see her coming. She was how Sandra escaped unnoticed.”
I squeezed Jack’s arms with my fingers, drawing his arms tighter around me. I had craved his touch, and now he was here.
Jonas eyed us from across the room. “I hate to break up this little reunion, but we have work to do if we want to get out of here. And I don’t want Sandra to find Lexi and me here. Together. She needs to trust me a little longer. If she turns on me, she’ll reprogram my tracker, and I won’t be able to control what they force me to make you do. I don’t ever want to be her puppet again.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Wait a minute,” Jack removed his arms from me, and moved to stand between me and Jonas. “What kinds of things would you be able to force her to do?”
Jonas stood up straighter. Shoulders back. “Anything. Unless—”
“Unless what?” Jack squeezed his hands at his side.
“Unless Lexi figures out how to block me. She was able to block Ty in the end.”
“Which is why Sandra terminated him,” I said with great sadness. Jack relaxed his protective stance and moved so that he wasn’t blocking me. “Which is also why I need to destroy the server, or remove every tracker.” I was convinced that if I could remove the trackers, that even Dia and Lin would be safe from Sandra’s wrath. That they wouldn’t follow her orders. They could come with us. “Where’s Georgia?”
“I don’t know.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “We’re in touch, but she’s in hiding. She says she’ll help remove the tracker from Jonas, but that’s all she’s agreed to for now. She had quite a reaction after Addison.”
Addison nodded. “We have to shut down their system and get the trackers out of everyone we can. When they brought me here and put that stupid thing in me, it was like I was unplugged. One second, I was fighting with Dia, the next, I felt a sharp sting to the back of my neck. Then, nothing… until I woke up and saw Lexi.” She lunged at me, throwing her arms around me and practically knocking me over. “Thank you for coming to save me.”
Addison was such a little girl at times, but her disappearing act was pretty cool. And would come in handy.
Addison backed away. I looked from her to Jonas to Jack. Worry swam in Jack’s eyes.
“So, it’s the four of us?”
“Actually, five of us,” Jonas said. “Briana’s here.”
“When Briana and Kyle came to the door last night, Kyle took Georgia to The Program to get help from Seth.” Jack glanced sideways at Jonas. “Briana stayed with Jonas.”
“But they got zero sleep last night while they studied the complete layout of this building.” Addison snickered. “She’s sleeping in Jonas’s closet.”
“His closet?” I wanted to laugh, but the situation was far from funny.
Jonas shrugged. “Thought the agents might stay out of my closet.”
“What’s the plan?”
Jonas pulled a packet of pape
rs folded lengthwise from his back pocket. “I have a copy of a map of The Farm for each of you.” Unfolding the packet, he laid one across a table. We all gathered around. “We are here.” He pointed as he explained the layout. “From what I can tell, the tracker server is somewhere in this control room, which is connected to this lab. Lexi, your job is to get to the control room, which can only be accessed through the lab. I won’t be with you, but I can see everything you see.”
“What do they do in that lab?” I asked.
“That’s where DNA is studied, I think.”
I remembered the lab I saw when I first entered The Farm last week, but this lab was at least one floor lower.
“You’ll know the control room by the equipment around it. I saw it at one of the previous facilities. There’ll be at least three computers around the server. There will probably be some biometric security required to gain entrance to the lab, but the door to the control room will have even heavier security.”
“Like the blood kind?” I asked. I hated having my finger pricked. I much preferred when no one had to get hurt to open a door.
“Yes, like the blood kind. Or the eye-scanning kind. Or a thumbprint and blood kind. A key might be required. I just don’t know. Whoever discovers this room first will need to mindspeak to the rest of us. I’m pretty sure Briana is the only one who can’t actually speak to us, but she can hear the chatter when you direct it at her. I should be with her and will make sure she’s informed.”
Jack slipped his hand in mine again. The constant touch gave me hope that we would be together outside this facility eventually. He pulled me closer, urging me to turn to him. “I’m worried about you.”
I want you to come with me, but you can’t. I squeezed my fingers more tightly around his. If Sandra were to discover you here with me, I’m afraid she would stop at nothing to ensure we remained here. And I have no idea what it means that your father is here with her.
It means he’s a part of some plan of hers and probably has been for a very long time. Jack’s furrowed brows cast a certain darkness over his already stormy eyes.
“You don’t have to worry about Lexi,” Jonas said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to her.”
Jonas has become very protective of you.
I glanced down at our joined hands. Jonas had helped me understand a lot about who I was the past week. I’ve had to really work through a lot of trust issues where Jonas is concerned. I met Jack’s eyes again. A lot of my well-being is based on blind faith right now.
We wouldn’t be standing in this very spot if I didn’t feel it was necessary for our future, Jack said. And I would not have left you in Jonas’s hands if I didn’t trust that he had control over his own mind. However, if something seems even a little off, I want to know immediately.
I nodded. I think Jonas’s protectiveness of me is real. I’m lucky to have two strong people looking after me.
Jack dropped my hand and reached behind him. He pulled a small handgun around. “I want you to carry a gun.”
I backed away. “Absolutely not.”
“Listen to me.” He grabbed my forearm, stopping me from getting too far. “It’s loaded with rubber bullets. Unless you hit someone in the eye or in another weak spot, it won’t seriously harm them. But it could save your life and give you the chance to escape.”
I looked at Jonas. “What if they search me again and find it? They’ll know someone gave it to me.”
“You need to carry it. We’ll deal with that if it happens.”
I wrapped my fingers around the handle and lifted the gun in front of my face. I had such a horrible feeling about this.
“Take it,” Addison said. I turned and faced her. She was so young, but I had no idea what her childhood had been like. “Sandra is crazy. She came to Kentucky for one reason—you.”
Jonas stepped forward. “Well… and to get Addison back.” He stuffed his hands inside the front pockets of his pants. “The biggest thing we have going for us right now is that they think they have you, Lexi, even if only physically. Sandra is just arrogant enough to think you’ll join her team simply because you were created from her DNA.”
“Well, they don’t have me,” I declared. The gun slipped perfectly into the waistband of my jeans. It was small enough not to cause much discomfort against my skin. I made sure my shirt came low enough to cover it.
“Where will you and Addison go?” I asked Jack.
“Our job is to find the other trackers—the ones not implanted. And to stay out of sight. We can’t risk Addison being caught again.”
Or you. Please be careful.
Jack nodded.
“We have one last thing to talk about,” I said. “What will happen if they begin evacuating?”
Addison’s head snapped in Jonas’s direction. Jonas rubbed his face. “I haven’t seen any signs of packing up, but this place is like a circus.”
I cocked my head. “What does that mean?”
“If you’d ever seen a circus come to town, you’d know. They arrive in slow motion—one truckload at a time over several days. When the circus is over, they’re gone before the last juggling clown unicycles out of the main tent. Not a trace of this place will be left within an hour of being told to evacuate.”
“How will we know?”
“Oh, you’ll know.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The announcement, along with a piercing alarm and an intermittent strobe light, came over an intercom speaker less than an hour after I left Jack and Addison. “LAB WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN ONE HOUR.”
A sharp pain had erupted in my chest when I’d first left Jack back in Sandra’s apartment. We should be doing this together, but risking the two of us being caught together wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. Not to mention, we had little time to find both the trackers and the server controlling them—as the computerized female voice made clear.
Jack and Addison were by now roaming the facility in search of additional trackers; we all agreed the trackers wouldn’t be stored in the same lab as the server. And Jonas had left to check on Briana.
According to the map Jonas gave me, I was in the hallway near the main lab. People rushed about. Most didn’t even glance my way as they passed, which was strange. Either this entire place was built on the arrogant assumption that I would decide I wanted to be a part of this, or they already knew for a fact the one thing I refused to accept—that I was trapped inside The Farm with no way out. Every once in a while I’d get a strange look or a double-take. Probably because I looked scarily like the barracuda heading up this strange underground laboratory.
Similar to the lab I saw the first time I came here, the room I’d been looking for was behind a wall of glass windows. Inside, men and women in white lab coats typed away on computers, lifted equipment onto rolling carts, and boxed up supplies.
The IIA was moving their operations.
But why?
Maybe they knew that the FBI and police were getting close to something like Marci’s murderer. Maybe the university discovered the illegal experiments that were occurring inside this secret laboratory.
I stood in front of the glass, scanning the sea of doctors and scientists. Behind rows of microscopes, medical equipment, and computers was a door tucked away in the back right-hand corner of the room. If Jonas was right, that was the room I was looking for.
I ran my fingers along the ledge of the interior window as I walked toward the entrance to the lab. The double set of sliding doors only required an ID badge.
A woman in a lab coat and scrubs exited the lab in a hurry. She was alone. The doors closed behind her too fast for me to slip through, though.
I followed her around the corner and watched her enter the women’s restroom.
Looking both ways down the hallway, I snuck in after her.
The bathroom was quiet. It was only the two of us.
I waited for her to finish inside the stall. My hands shook at my side as I waited in the ne
ighboring stall, the door open. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. That wasn’t what I was about.
The toilet flushed, and I knew what I had to do. I spun my ring halfway around so the pearl was on the palm side of my hand. I twisted the pearl, and the small needle appeared. I would have simply mindspoken to get her badge and clothing items, but this way, she would be unable to run after me and get help.
She walked slowly past, oblivious to my presence as she adjusted the lanyard around her neck.
I stepped out, made three quick steps, and caught her by surprise with a bear hug with one arm. My other hand went straight to her neck and made contact, but not before I took an elbow to the stomach.
I grunted loud, the breath knocked out of me. She made an “oww” sound. I had definitely grazed her with the tiny needle. But was it enough?
I held my breath as she started to turn, but her body went limp. Thankfully, she was a small woman. I caught her as she slid to the ground and softened the landing of her head on the concrete floor.
I righted the ring so as not to paralyze myself. Leaning down, I whispered, “I’m sorry.” I then took her lab coat, her ID, and her glasses. Maybe the glasses would help disguise me a little.
A minute later, I was at the door of the lab. No one noticed me; everyone was completely focused on packing up the lab.
Jonas, I’m inside the lab.
How did you manage that? he asked.
Don’t worry about it. Point is, I’m here, and I’m making my way over to the control room. Everyone is too busy packing up to even notice me. Where are you?
I’m calming Dia and Lin down. Trying to talk them into coming with us when we leave here. Trying to convince them that we can remove the trackers.
Have you mentioned this to Georgia? I don’t know how to remove the trackers without her.
We’ll figure it out.
I stayed to the outer perimeter of the room, not making eye contact with anyone. I wished we could remove every clone within this facility tonight, but there wasn’t time.
When I reached the door to what I believed to be the room housing the tracker server, I studied the panel just outside the door. It was a square panel with a keypad next to it. I held up my palm to test the size. It definitely would measure my entire hand. Maybe it scans each fingerprint. Right about the spot where my middle finger would go was a tiny hole in the otherwise flat surface.
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