Footsteps approached outside, and a lock on the door slid open. I scrambled back on the bed, drawing my legs up, as if they were a shield between me and them, but when the person walked in, the tension in my body immediately faded.
“Mom,” I said.
Her hair was tied back in a tight bun. She wore a white lab coat, silent lab sneakers. A stethoscope wound around her neck.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said.
Somehow, her being here didn’t surprise me, either. Even so, despite what that implied, I was relieved to see a familiar face.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Shh.” This is our little secret.
She came to the bedside and sat next to me, running a cold hand across my forehead, pushing the hair from my face. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
I shrank away from her, away from her touch. “Am I?”
The corners of her mouth turned down. “Of course.”
“This is the lab, Mom. The lab where I was held captive, where your life was threatened.”
She shook her head, and a lock of hair fell from her bun. “We are not in danger here. I promise.”
“Even if that is true, this place… everything here…” A growing lump in my throat threatened to choke me. I swallowed hard against it. Just being in this room was setting me on edge. Surely she must understand that, considering she had been as much a prisoner here six years ago as I had.
I turned to her. While I could hardly breathe, as if the walls were pressing in around me, her shoulders were loose, her mouth relaxed. Being here didn’t faze her at all. She was almost comfortable.
As if this place had never been her prison.
She reached out for my hand, but stopped when I flinched.
“You aren’t in danger here, are you?” I said.
“And neither are you.”
I looked away from her and stared at the tile floor, trying to make sense of the nagging feeling in my chest that I was missing something. Something important.
“This is a medical lab. Everything I was subjected to here was medically based and”—I flicked my gaze back to her—“you’re a doctor. And a good one at that.”
Realization dawned, and I felt like the biggest fool ever. “You’re part of their medical team. You”—I jumped from the bed—“you’ve always been a part of their medical team, haven’t you? You were never in danger here. Not now, not six years ago.”
“Elizabeth—” she started, but I surged on.
“Why was I taken? Why was I part of this whole thing? I don’t”—I swiped at my cheeks as tears escaped out the corners of my eyes—“I don’t understand why you kept me here. Why would you do that to me?”
“Honey—”
“Tell me!”
She stood up and straightened, pulling that familiar steel back into her shoulders. “I needed you. You were the most important part of this whole program.”
When she paused, I wanted to urge her on, but I couldn’t seem to find the words, so I waited several long seconds as she put her thoughts in order.
“When your father and I were trying to have kids, I miscarried several times, and then when I finally carried a baby to full term, it died within minutes of birth.”
My mouth clamped shut with surprise, my teeth clacking together. She’d never told me this. I’d always thought she and Dad had wanted only one child, because they were both so busy with work.
“I knew how to fix it. I knew.” Her eyes turned bloodshot with unshed tears. “All I had to do was modify the genetic makeup at the embryonic stage. The goal was to strengthen the embryo to the point that it was indestructible.”
She reached over, taking my hand in hers. “The first successful baby was you.”
“Me?” I whispered.
“I made you stronger, Elizabeth.”
“But—what does that even mean?”
“Think about it. Have you ever been sick?”
I tried to recall being sick. Aggie suffered from frequent sinus infections, and last winter she caught the flu and lay in bed for six days. I’d thought for sure I’d catch it, since I’d taken care of her.
But I hadn’t. In fact, now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall ever lying in bed with an illness, other than a mental illness.
Mom went on. “Remember that car accident we were in when you were nine?” I nodded weakly. “You had a broken arm and a deep gash on your forehead, and I suspected you had a cracked rib as well, but by the time the ambulance arrived—”
“I was fine,” I said, my voice so low I wondered if she’d heard me.
“The EMTs said it was a miracle you weren’t injured, considering the wreck, and considering the injuries I’d sustained. They said you were left untouched, but that wasn’t true. You just healed before they reached us.”
I tried to make sense of the questions crowding my head, and the memories of my childhood, wondering if perhaps they held more clues to my mother’s unbelievable story. Skinned knees that disappeared by the time I ran to my mother’s arms. Mosquito bites that were swollen, itchy, and then gone in seconds.
I had thought, when I left this lab six years ago, that my captors had changed me irrevocably, that they’d poked and prodded me to make me invincible. But I was wrong.
I had been invincible when I arrived.
“So why did they bring me here in the first place?” I asked.
“I published an article years ago, only theorizing the practice of genetic modification at the embryonic stage to immunize future generations against cancer and diabetes and other diseases. Someone at the Branch read the article and approached me with an offer I couldn’t turn down.
“They wanted to create a serum, something that could be administered at the adolescent stage, or even well into adulthood. But… I couldn’t replicate what I’d done with you. Every attempt failed. I didn’t understand it, and we were running out of time and money. The only other course of action was to use you as our map.”
“You had me kidnapped on purpose so you could study me?”
“I knew I would need you for an extended period of time, without you fully knowing and—”
Rage burned in my chest till my vision was tinted red with it. I reached over and slapped her across the face.
Her head snapped aside, and she brought her hand to her cheek where the skin was already an angry shade of pink.
“How dare you!”
She clenched her hands into fists at her side. “Do you have any idea what this kind of medical breakthrough could mean? We can cure diseases! We can save lives!”
“Are you working for the Branch? Is that who’s in charge of this program?”
She pursed her mouth and said nothing.
“The Branch is not the kind of organization that works to cure cancer.” I recalled the things Nick had told me about his past, and the Branch. Terrible, terrible things. “They kill people, Mom.”
“You can’t believe everything Nick has told you.”
“Well, I do. I trust him more than I trust you.”
The look she gave me was almost as if I’d slapped her again.
“Why am I here now?” I asked.
“We need to make more serum, and make it better. We need to finish what we were prevented from finishing.”
Because I escaped, she meant.
I backed up toward the door, wondering if she’d left it unlocked, if I could perform the miracle of escaping a second time. “I won’t be a part of this. You can’t seriously think I’ll cooperate.”
“No harm will come to you. No harm came to you six years ago. You were always treated with respect and the utmost care.”
I narrowed my eyes, feeling the hard edge of my teeth as I bit into my lip. She had no idea what she’d done to me, what the whole ordeal had done to me. The nightmares. The anxiety. The panic attacks.
I might have been indestructible on the outside, but inside I was broken, and it was all my mother’s fault.
“Get out,” I shouted. “Out!”
“Elizabeth.”
“Out!”
She lurched backward.
The door opened, and Riley strolled in. “Move forward?”
Mom discreetly wiped the tears from her face. “Yes.”
Without another look, she turned and left the room.
Two lab technicians swept into the room, carting a massive machine, wires spilling from several ports.
“What is that?”
Once the machine was parked near the door, two more men entered the room. They were different from the technicians in that they were larger, colder, unflinching. They strode over to me and grabbed me by the arms, tossing me onto the bed.
“Let me go!”
Straps were tugged from beneath the bed, and my wrists were pinned down at my sides, my ankles secured at the end of the bed.
“Mom!” I screamed, until my voice broke.
Riley checked his phone briefly before looking over at me. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth. When you wake up, everything will be fine again.”
“What does that mean? What are you doing to me?” I tried the straps, yanking my arms up, hoping for some slack.
Riley murmured instructions to the technicians, ignoring me. The two large men exited the room once I was secure on the bed. I flailed again as adrenaline took over. I needed to get out of here. I needed to escape. Instinct told me that if I didn’t get out of here right now, then there’d be nothing left to fight for.
“Call me when it’s finished,” Riley said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Elizabeth.” He left.
The technicians placed several electrodes on my head, then attached the wires. When they switched on the machine, it started up with a whine and a rushing of noise.
“Relax,” the male technician said. “Everything will be fine.”
“What is it? The machine?”
The female technician, a short, blond woman with wide-set eyes, attached a final probe to the center of my forehead. “It’s a memory alteration system.”
36
NICK
SOMEONE HELD MY HEAD IN THEIR LAP. Something wet kept plinking against my face.
“We have to go,” a voice said from somewhere far away, like I was underwater. “We’ll come back for him. I promise.”
“I can’t leave him.” Anna. “We never should have let him go off on his own.”
“Anna,” Trev said. “We can’t sit here any longer. Either we save the girl or we go.”
Hair fell in my face as Anna bent over to kiss my forehead.
I gulped for air, and the expanding of my lungs, pressed against my ribs, felt like a balloon about to pop.
Anna shrieked.
“Holy shit,” Cas said. “He’s a zombie!”
Trev knelt beside me and pulled my eyes open. “Nick?”
I slapped his hand away and rolled over, my insides pinwheeling. On all fours, hands splayed in the dirt, I vomited until there was nothing left to get out.
When I was done, I collapsed on my stomach, the ground cold against my face. I didn’t know where I was, or how I’d gotten outside, but if I was no longer in the lab, then Elizabeth was in danger and I had to return to save her.
I rolled over again, onto my back. With a voice on the edge of fading out, raw, my throat too dry, I croaked, “They shot me. So many times I lost count.”
When I opened my eyes, treetops shook above me as the wind picked up speed. Anna, Cas, Sam, and Trev were all staring at me. Sam nodded at my chest. I looked down. There were multiple bullet holes in my shirt, and my shirt was caked with old blood and dirt.
I patted my chest. I should have been in pain. I should have been dead.
But when I ripped my shirt open, my chest was untouched. Not a single bullet hole in sight.
“What the hell?”
“Should we kill him?” Cas said. “Before he starts lurching around and eating our brains?”
“Cas!” Anna said.
“What? Too soon?”
“What happened?” I asked, and lurched to my feet. When I stumbled back on unsteady legs, Sam jerked forward and caught me. I used a tree to keep me upright and waved Sam back.
Now that I had a better view of where I was, and what surrounded us, I noticed two Branch agents either dead or knocked out ten feet away. And beside them was a half-dug hole. The perfect size for a body. Probably mine.
“Chloe,” Trev said. “She called us about an hour after she took you. Said she had done what she had to do, but that if everything went according to plan, you’d be safe. She gave us the location of an air vent about a hundred yards away from the barn, an unmarked entrance to the lab, but on our way, we stumbled on these guys”—Trev gestured at the agents—“and then we saw you.”
Anna covered her mouth with a hand and looked away.
“I’m not dead, Anna,” I said. “See.” I patted myself down. “Don’t start crying again.”
“I’m not,” she snapped as a tear streamed down her cheek. She gave us her back as she swiped at her face.
Sam frowned at me, but I ignored it.
“That still doesn’t explain why I’m alive.”
“She must have used the serum on you,” Trev said. “It’s the only explanation.”
Chloe was the one who’d broken out of the lab six years ago, and she must have known where the serum was kept. It wasn’t too crazy to think she’d swiped some of it for herself.
She’d also had enough time on the way to the barn to stop the car and retrieve my gun. She’d had enough time to shoot me up with the serum, too.
By giving me the drug, she’d saved my ass, but still came through on her end of the bargain she’d made with Riley.
“We have to get back into the lab.” I shoved away from the tree and was relieved I didn’t fall flat on my face.
“Slow down,” Sam said. “We don’t know what sort of effect this serum will have on you. And furthermore, we don’t know what we’re running into. With you inside, it was different. Now that you’re out, and you’re safe—”
“What, you’re just going to leave Elizabeth in there?”
Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is we have some time to think about this. There’s a reason they wanted Elizabeth. They won’t kill her.”
“Yeah, I know that.” I started pacing, leaves from last fall crunching beneath my boots. “That doesn’t mean she’s safe.”
When I first heard Elizabeth’s mother speak, I’d thought her voice sounded familiar. And now that I knew she was working with Riley, it all made sense.
“The audio files,” I said to Trev. “The doctor? Dr. Turrow?”
“Yeah? What about her?”
“She’s Elizabeth’s mother.”
“Son of a bitch,” Trev muttered.
Anna sighed and scrubbed at her face. She of all people understood the complications of mixing family with the Branch. Her uncle was the guy who’d created the organization after all.
“They might not kill Elizabeth if she has family on the inside,” I said, “but if we know anything about the Branch, it’s this: if they can’t kill you—”
“Then they’ll alter your memories,” Anna said.
I nodded. “We all know what it’s like to have our memories gone, and then to suffer the pain of them when they return. I can’t let them do that to her.”
I grabbed a gun from one of the fallen agents and stuffed it beneath my shirt. “I’m going—with or without you guys.”
I started off through the woods and was relieved when they all followed.
37
ELIZABETH
DARKENED GLASSES WERE PUT OVER MY eyes. The female tech flipped a switch on the frame, and several green lines flickered on the lenses.
“This won’t hurt,” she said. “In fact, you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be over before you know it.”
They’d inserted a rubber guard into my mouth so I could no long
er talk. There was no point in trying anyway. My mother was gone. And there was no one here who would save me.
Nick had told me he suffered from partial amnesia. I could still recall the pain of the emptiness in his eyes. How not knowing, while freeing in some ways, was also damaging. And I would be just like him when I awoke.
My eyes clouded with tears.
“Ready?” the male tech said.
“Ready,” the woman confirmed.
“Here we go.” He pushed a button. The machine clicked. The glasses lit up, images flashing in quick succession. A house. An ant. A woman. A tree. A dying tree. A tree falling down. A woman again.
“Listen to my voice,” she said, but the words didn’t match the movement of her lips.
A needle pricked the back of my neck. I flinched and bit down hard on the mouth guard. My toes curled in my shoes. Whatever came out of the needle was warm at first, then turned biting hot, like melted wax running down my neck.
I flailed. Trying to wipe the burning away.
Ants. Ants again. Ants on my arms.
I arched my back.
The ants tore the flesh away from my bones, piece by piece.
The burning in my neck faded, and my body relaxed until I felt like I was floating.
The mouth guard was pulled from my mouth, and my teeth clicked together.
“Listen to my voice,” the woman said again. “Your name is Elizabeth. Your name is Bethany. Your name is Tiffany. Your name is blank. You live in Trademarr. You live in Illinois. You live nowhere.
“What is your name?”
“Eliz…” I murmured.
“What is your name?” she said again. “Your name is…” Static filled my ears. Then a sharp rapping. A clap. Clap. Clap. Beep.
My mind grew fuzzy, as if my thoughts were clouds burned off by the sun.
“You live nowhere,” she continued.
An image of a forest flashed in front of my eyes, and then the same forest shed its leaves and the branches fell to the ground and a great inferno filled my vision with a blaze of blinding orange light.
When the light faded, the forest was gone.
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