“I tried,” he said.
I blinked and turned my head away, heat building behind my eyes.
“Your father contacted C over the mainframe system,” Jack said. “He wants me to bring you to him. Your dad is smarter than mine. There might be a way for your father to save Finn.”
I bit my lip and glanced down at my brother lying unconscious on the floor. My mind struggled to sort truth from lie, to weigh my options, knowing that Jack was trying to sway me, and also knowing he might be the only one who could help me.
I narrowed my eyes at Jack. “I won’t leave without Finn. No matter what.”
“I know. We’ll figure all that out. But you have to trust me. From here on out.”
“Fine,” I said. I lowered Finn’s head from my hands to the floor and stood to help Jack.
Jack nodded and wiped at the blood trickling down his calf. “C, can you send us up some help?”
23
BECKETT
They left the pastry on the table for me. I wasn’t sure how they intended for me to eat it with my hands tied behind my back. I was getting hungry, and I stared at that pastry when Smalls wasn’t in the room. Hours passed. To his credit, Smalls moved my chair against the wall so I could lean my head back and sleep periodically. It also meant I couldn’t duck away from the punches.
My face and chest were raw, my nose might be broken. A cut continued to bleed just above my right eyebrow where the skin split. That was more annoying than anything else. To be honest, I thought it would all be worse.
Smalls had just disappeared after a particularly long bout of questioning, which had led to more of me refusing to talk, which led to more punches. I wondered if they’d actually let me die, slowly cutting my water supply or something similarly slow and tedious.
I’d dealt with a taste of death before, not my own, but Mom’s death when we were three years old. I didn’t remember it, but Jack had told me about the memorial service. Jack was only two minutes and forty-five seconds older than me, but he remembered all the things about Mom that I could not. Because Jack was modified. In the beginning, they hadn’t known if he would make it, so they implanted me, too. The backup baby. So Mom would still have someone to love, just in case. And then, we’d both survived.
Once upon a time, Jack had shared all his memories. Especially about Mom. How she would read us books, take us to the park, play catch with this blue-and-green ball we’d got on the street corner in the city. I made Jack describe her over and over—her face, her hands, the special way she cut our apples—because my only memories of her came from him.
But one night, when we were thirteen years old, the memory-telling stopped.
We were lying awake in our New York apartment, and I asked Jack a question about Mom. What was her favorite thing to bake, did Jack remember?
Jack rolled over in bed, facing away from me, and replied that it was his fault. That it was because of him, in her womb. He said that’s what eventually killed our mom. That’s it. That’s all he said. After that, he never talked about her again. If I asked, he didn’t respond. When we were younger—six, seven, eight years old—he always told me it wasn’t true what our dad said. That Mom had wanted both of us.
But eventually Jack stopped defending the fact, and I watched him start to believe Dad. Jack finally fell for it. He thought he shouldn’t have been born.
I tried to talk to him about it. I knew full well that Dad blamed Jack’s DNA for making Mom sick—we’d heard Dad say it plenty of times. I wanted to make sure Jack understood I never believed that crap. It’s not what Mom would have wanted.
But after that night, Jack never acted like he agreed.
Across the room, the door opened, and I raised my head away from the wall and took a deep breath, pulled away from thoughts of my brother and our past.
It was Dallamore, with Smalls behind him. I hadn’t seen Dallamore since sometime earlier today, if it was still today. Dallamore made his way to the seat at the conference table, no verbal greeting offered. His suit looked wrinkled, and bags hung under his eyes. Smalls remained by the door.
Dallamore wheeled a chair up in front of me.
“This isn’t working,” Dallamore said. “I’m tired. I’m bored. I want to go home. And I’m thinking that you might actually be willing to die.” Dallamore clasped his hands together, leaning forward over his distended belly to rest his elbows on his knees.
“So I’ve talked to your father. He’s agreed to let you come to the island and see the girl. With the agreement, of course, that you’ll share with him the information you have.”
“Excuse me?”
“The island. It’s where your father and brother have been for the last three years. Surely you knew that?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t feel like going into the details of how Dad threatened us with Jack’s life if we ever tried to contact them.
Say hi to Alaska for me. Those were Jack’s last words to me three years ago, right after he helped dad shove me into Peg and Jeff’s car, with me fighting back the entire time.
Dallamore stood up. “You’ll leave in the morning for headquarters in the city, and you’ll fly out from there.”
As Dallamore left, relief flooded my entire body at the newfound reality. They were taking me to Sage and Finn. With the relief came questions. Why were Dad and Jack on this island? What had they been doing there for three whole years, and why had plans changed from Europe?
But Jack was there. My brother had been with Sage and Finn all along.
Which meant Sage and Finn were safe. I knew my brother well enough. Jack wouldn’t let anything happen to them. They’d be okay until I got there. Jack would help me get them off the island before Vasterias did anything.
“I’m coming,” I whispered.
I willed the words to float out into the ether for Sage to hear.
24
JACK
“You really don’t know the rules of women, do you?”
It was the middle of the night—five hours since my leg had broken—and C stood over my cot, inside my bedroom located just off the foyer in the west wing. “The girl’s about to cry her eyes out because her brother is a mutant, and you bring up her long-lost father? Dude, she already knows you can’t wait to destroy the code. And seriously, you bring that up? What were you thinking?”
I took a swig from the bottle of whiskey C had brought me. “I was thinking that I was about to lose her for good, C. You couldn’t see her eyes like I could. I might as well have done the injection on her brother myself. I wasn’t thinking, I was just talking until something worked, okay? And it did work, so give me a break.”
“Did you lie to her, you a-hole? Can her dad really help her brother? Or was that just some sick way to get her to agree to go with us?” Caesar said as he picked up my arm and examined my bruise.
“You really can use the cuss word you know,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong, you a-hole. It’s a brilliant plan,” C replied. “Just really deceitful and messed up if it’s not true.” C dropped my arm. “That’s nasty-looking, by the way.” He nodded to my arm.
“It’s true, alright?” I said. “Her dad is smarter than mine. And there is a good chance he could have some idea how to help Finn.”
“Are you positively sure on that?”
“When am I ever sure about anything?”
“Usually, never.”
“Exactly.” I rubbed my forehead. “We’re rolling with this, C, okay? It’s the best option we’ve got at this point.”
Caesar sat down on the cot, moving my broken leg over to make room for himself on the mattress. “Did they seriously have to re-break your bone by the time you got down to the lab? I don’t understand how your body can start to heal so fast.”
I shrugged and rested the whiskey bottle on my thigh and leaned my head back against the wall, trying to forget about how painful that had been. My dad enjoyed doing it without pain killers. “What’s the word from Cunni
ngham?”
“He’s sending a helicopter in three days to the opposite end of the island,” Caesar said.
“We need longer than three days now.”
“Why? You’re leg’s going to be fine by then.”
“She’s not leaving without her brother, C.”
Caesar sighed. “So … what? We need time to tame the mutant?”
“His name is Finn.”
“Yeah, and he’s mutated.”
I took another drink of the whiskey. “Any word on Beckett’s whereabouts?”
“Not yet, but we’re tracking. I’ve sent word out to headquarters. She said she’d try and trace the possible Alaskan towns they were in.”
“We’ve got to find him before we can leave. I don’t trust my dad not to go through with his threats.”
“He would, wouldn’t he? Kill his own son? That’s just sick. So is making Sage do your job of cleaning out modwrog cages while your leg is broken. Like she wants to stare at her brother every day.”
“I expected worse when he came upstairs,” Jack said. “Besides, Sage seemed glad about it. I think she wants to see Finn. It’s not punishment like my dad intended. And she’s probably used to hard work. She grew up on a farm.”
C smiled. “I knew this would happen at some point, with some girl.” He took the bottle from me for a swig of his own. “You actually like her.”
I turned my eyes to C, wondering if I should mention the pull I felt when she was anywhere nearby. “I don’t like her. But she is different than other girls. I can’t explain it, but there’s this weird feeling, like a magnet or something when she’s around.”
“Magnet? Really, dude? Come on, seriously there are better ways to say it. You like her.”
I smiled and grabbed the bottle back from Caesar, tipping my head back for another drink.
Caesar stood and slung his pack over his back. “Get some sleep, dude. And drink some of this water with your whiskey, all right?” C kicked the water bottle he’d set next to my bed.
I grunted.
“Hey, I crawled through the vents for you tonight just to bring you that alcohol. Don’t get all righteous on me.” C opened the door. A modwrog squealed down the hall. “Geez, how do you sleep here?”
“Goodnight, C,” I said.
Caesar slipped out and shut the door. “See you on the cameras,” he whispered through the door. I didn’t bother replying.
The pulsing pain in my leg had started to ebb. I listened while my friend climbed through the vent in the foyer so he could get back to his dorm room unnoticed. We weren’t supposed to be friends, and we needed to maintain our feigned distance now more than ever. When C was eight or nine halls away—halfway to his room—his crawling faded enough that I couldn’t hear him anymore. Slowly, I drifted to sleep.
25
SAGE
I slept without dreams, without feeling anything.
It felt like I’d just laid my head down on my pillow when the knock came on my door.
“5am,” a voice said. “Time for you to report to the west wing.”
I sat up, heart beating hard. My mind struggled to orient itself as I glanced around at the walls, the desk, the chair.
Concrete room. Island. Building. West wing. Finn. Finn was a modwrog. It was really true.
I changed into a fresh set of clothes and stumbled out of my room, exhausted and yet on high alert. A young boy in fatigues, who couldn’t be any older than twenty, stood in the hall. He appraised me, as if to make sure he had the right room, the right girl, and then we turned and followed the same route Jack had taken me last night. About halfway to the west wing, a metal door swung open mid-hall, right in front of me. I jumped back, about to scream, when a head popped out.
“Hi.”
The guy’s teeth were perfectly white and straight but his nose was slightly crooked, like it had been broken at some point in time. He looked friendly—an anomaly on this island. His lips were covered in white-colored lip balm, and he had light brown hair long enough to tuck behind his ears.
The guy eyed the guard. “I’m supposed to instruct her on her duties for the west wing. This will take a minute.”
The guard’s eyes flickered between me and white lip balm guy.
Lip balm guy widened his eyes at me and motioned to the door, as if we shared some secret we couldn’t let the guard know about. His look was so emphatic, I moved forward and peered into the room, empty except for three dozen computer monitors showing camera footage of the entire building. A hunter green mug of coffee steamed next to his keyboard. So, this was Caesar?
“We’ll be one moment, just wait here in the hall,” he said to the guard, then did the wide eye thing at me again, so I stepped inside the room.
The door clicked shut. “That guard is new. Doesn’t really know I’m not someone who should be giving him orders.” He gave me a smile before holding out his hand. “We haven’t officially met. I’m Caesar.”
I glanced around, unsure. “Um, hi.”
Caesar withdrew his hand and rotated his swivel chair back to the screens. “We don’t have much time, so I’ll get straight to the point.” Caesar clicked a button and the only blank screen in the lineup came to life. “First, you need to watch this video.”
For a minute the screen stayed fuzzy gray, then a picture popped up. I gasped. In the top left corner, Finn lay strapped down to a table inside a lab room. He was normal. He had on the same brown pants and top from last night. Dr. Adamson and two other men surrounded the table. The first, a shorter man with big glasses and a head full of white hair, flicked a syringe filled with yellow liquid with his finger.
My hand rose to my mouth to stifle a cry. I couldn’t watch this.
As if Caesar could read my mind, he glanced over his shoulder at me and then nodded to the screen. “Look.”
Movement popped in the bottom right corner.
Jack.
He slammed himself against the door of the examining room door, pounding on the glass, shaking the handle violently. There was no sound with the recording, but I could tell he was shouting. He shook the handle again, then he started punching the window.
Dr. Adamson moved swiftly, taking the syringe from the first doctor. The glass in the window shattered. Jack’s hand groped inside, searching for the handle. The door opened just as Dr. Adamson shoved the syringe into Finn’s arm. Jack shot across the room at his dad, and his dad stabbed him in the forearm with the needle.
The rest was just as bad, and the screen blurred slightly from the water in my eyes. His dad used the Taser on him, over and over. Jack lay lifeless. The screen cut to fuzzy specks.
I stared at the blank screen, unmoving. If I hadn’t seen Jack last night, based on that video, I would have believed him dead.
Caesar flicked a button and the screen went dark. “I wanted you to see that, because I’m sure it wasn’t easy when you went to the west wing and saw your brother. It probably felt like no one cared. Jack cares,” Caesar said. “He just doesn’t say it out loud.”
Guilt poured over me, thinking about what I’d said to Jack last night. “Thank you for showing me this.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied. I felt Caesar analyzing my face. “I knew that wouldn’t be easy to watch. I just wanted you to see it because …” He scratched at the hair on the back of his head. “Well, just give Jack a chance. He’s got a hard shell, but inside, he’s different.”
Caesar lifted his mug and took a sip of coffee. “And if you tell him I said any of this to you, or showed you this video, I’ll be very perturbed. Not to mention dead, because Jack would kill me.”
I smiled slightly.
“Okay then,” Caesar said. “Oh, and just a heads up for the west wing—Jack’s room is just off the foyer, and he may be a little drunk. He had a bit of a hard night. They had to re-break his bone. They gave him some painkillers afterward, but he burns them off so fast. So I brought him some whiskey.”
“His bones start to heal in ju
st a few hours?”
“Yeah, would be nice to have superpowers, wouldn’t it?” Caesar swung open the door for me. “Happy cleaning.”
My feet moved slowly behind the young guard the rest of the way to the west wing. For the first time, I thought about life from Jack’s perspective. He’d taken a risk, giving up his cover to try to get to Finn. I’m sure I didn’t know all the intricacies of what that meant for him.
For a moment, I allowed myself to think about everything from a completely different angle: What if everything Jack had said since I arrived was true? What if he really did want to help us get out of here? What if I could actually trust him?
My brain couldn’t sort it all out just yet, but either way, I owed Jack an apology, for how I’d acted last night.
I thought of Jack, with his hard face and short, rigid responses, and I had to wonder if he’d forgive me, or if he even cared.
26
SAGE
The guard stayed only long enough to see that I moved through the lobby and into the hall. The west wing sounded quieter than last night. A few hisses greeted the sound of the door closing behind me, but no screams or shrieks. Perhaps the modwrogs still slept. It was only early morning, after all. In the foyer, to the far left, a door sat cracked open, and a small amount of light streamed out. This must be Jack’s room. I stepped forward and pressed the door wide enough to stick my head inside. The smell of alcohol wafted out.
Jack leaned against the wall, one leg bent up to his chest, the other leg—the broken one—extended out along the mattress, wrapped in gauze, supported by some sort of plastic splint. He wore a white undershirt and his fatigue pants, one pant leg cut off above his injury. His abdominals and arm muscles were more visible now than before—a physique to marvel at, but I was distracted by his forearm, which revealed that nasty, greenish bruise, looking more raised than it had last night. A bottle of liquor leaned up against him on the bed.
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