My breath felt out of control. A giant weight pressed down on my chest, suffocating me. Seconds dragged out like an eternity. I’d loved numbers all my life. How fitting that in my last moments, I should hate them.
Tick. Your father doesn’t love you.
Tick. He doesn’t care.
Tick. He won’t call.
Tick. Jack where are you?
Tick… Tick… Tick.
“One minute,” Dr. Adamson announced to the camera, satisfaction in his voice.
Dr. Tappit leaned in, steadying my arm with one hand and positioning the needle directly above the bend in my arm with the other.
This was how it ended. Right here on this table, with some of the people I’d come to hate most in the world.
Time stood still.
People speak of life flashing before their eyes right before death. I only felt ashamed. Ashamed for the lack of trust I’d put in those I loved. My whole life I questioned the people who cared about me the most. I wouldn’t do it anymore. If I somehow made it out alive, I wouldn’t be that way anymore.
And, if I somehow pulled through this, if any piece of my mind still remembered who I was, I would stop the Corporation. I would stop this madness. I would spend the rest of my life making sure this happened to no one else.
But surviving this injection would be a miracle. And I couldn’t do it alone.
“Thirty seconds,” Dr. Adamson called out.
God help me. God help me. God help me.
I pictured my mother. Maybe my body wouldn’t be able to handle the injection. Maybe I would die quickly. Would I see her right away? Waiting for me on the other side? I saw her face, smiling. Somehow, she felt closer than ever. I wondered if she was right here, near me, ready to reach out and guide me home.
Dr. Tappit lowered the tip of the needle to touch me, slightly depressing the skin. I felt the tiny prick of the metal as it dropped just below the surface, not going any further, just sitting there, waiting. Dr. Tappit’s thumb poised at the end of the syringe, ready to press. His hand trembled slightly.
“Twenty seconds.”
I thought I heard ragged breathing on the other end of the line now. Beckett’s, maybe.
My heart pounded in my chest. I saw the vein, right beneath the needle tip, thumping with the beat of my heart. I would call out goodbye, for Caesar and Beckett, right before the time ran out. The doctors wouldn’t know who it was meant for, but the boys would.
“Ten seconds.”
Dr. Tappit tried to steady himself, and I thought I felt the needle sink further into my arm. The yellow liquid rocked menacingly in the tube, waiting to slip into my blood stream and move through my body. Dr. Tappit’s hand shook badly now, his thumb on the tip of the syringe. Was it my imagination, or did I feel a drop of serum seep into my arm? I blinked, not breathing, my gaze riveted to the needle.
“Five seconds,” Dr. Adamson called out.
A bead of sweat fell from Dr. Tappit’s forehead. I heard the droplet landing on the paper table cover, the sound magnified, yet barely audible, all at the same time. I licked my lips, ready to call out my farewell.
Then came a noise opposite in scale. The sound pierced my ears and echoed off the walls of the lab room.
The phone was ringing.
51
SAGE
Dr. Tappit jumped and then brought the needle away from my arm. He sighed—in relief or annoyance, I couldn’t tell.
Dr. Adamson immediately stepped to the phone hanging on the wall and jerked up the handle. “Cutting it close, aren’t we Robert?”
Was it really my father on the other end of the line? I could almost make out the sound of a voice talking. Dr. Adamson listened for a few moments.
“I understand your terms,” he replied. “We get the code. She goes free.” Dr. Adamson rolled his eyes. “And you understand ours? It will only take a few hours to discover if you’re telling the truth. No longer than that,” Dr. Adamson said. “If you’re lying, she gets the injection.”
Dr. Adamson hung up the phone and turned off the camera. He lifted a walkie-talkie from the countertop. “Find him. Track the phone number and find him.” Dr. Adamson scrawled on a piece of paper pulled from his breast pocket and then went to the guards in the hall. “Send this address to headquarters and have them send someone out.”
Dr. Adamson turned to Dr. Tappit. “She can wait there until we hear more.” Dr. Adamson disappeared down the hall. Too stunned for words, I lay still.
Dr. Tappit stepped away from the table and moved to the corner, blotting his forehead with a tissue.
My dad had called. He had actually called.
But what had he said? And what was the real bargain? How could he assure that the Corporation wouldn’t just get the code and kill me afterward—which I’m sure they’d do if Dr. Adamson had any say about it. And the biggest question of all—why did my dad even care? After all these years, working to hide the code, not contacting me and Finn and Mom at all? Surely there was some motivation for him reaching out now, calling now, or else why wouldn’t he have done it before with Finn? Why me?
Dr. Tappit silently left the room, and I was alone with my thoughts. Questions swirled around and around in my head. Beckett and Caesar must have been just as shocked, because no one attempted to talk to me.
I wondered what the Corporation would find. If my dad was telling the truth, would they really release us? The rational part of my brain told me no, but my heart couldn’t help but hope. It meant Finn would make it out and get the help he really needed.
As I lay there on the bed, my stomach began to hurt.
At first, it felt like anxiousness, an exacerbation of the way my stomach had felt since the moment we were taken. But as the minutes went by, the pain increased, like someone twisted a knife in the muscles at my torso. I shifted, trying to move into a position that made it better.
Half an hour later, my clothes were soaked with sweat. I felt hot, yet chilled at the same time. A stitch of pain moved up my spine, starting at my tailbone and pulsing upward to the base of my head. I heard myself moaning, but it sounded like it came from another body altogether. What was happening? Had a drop of the serum gotten into my body after all?
My brain couldn’t focus long enough to wonder. I drifted into sleep.
*
I stood on a stairway landing in a familiar house. Hardwood floors. Clean, fresh, historic-looking. I remembered it and yet didn’t. My body felt short in relation to the stairs. I knew I was young. Just barely walking.
A man kneeled in front of me, his hands on my shoulders. He looked me in the eyes. He had brown eyes, like mine.
“You’re a special girl, Hope. You’ve got something special inside of you. Never forget that.”
My body jerked and shifted, a stab of pain in my stomach. The scene shifted, too.
Two little boys waved at me from the sidewalk. Mom locked me into my car seat. She wore a simple black dress. Her hair fell down her back in shiny waves.
From my car seat, I craned my neck to get a better look at the boys’ faces through the back window. One of them—the one with lighter hair—stepped forward to the edge of the curb and grabbed my door’s window ledge. He jumped, clinging to the door for a second, entertained with the activity. His father, dark-haired, with a serious face, called out to him. “Beckett, get down from there.” The boy dropped to the concrete, laughing.
The other boy stood back, near his father, underneath a small tree planted in the middle of the city sidewalk. He watched me. His eyes reminded me of the sky.
I stared back at the blue-eyed boy until my toddler eyes got distracted by a white curtain shifting in the second story of the brownstone behind the boys. A man peered out, the same man who’d rested his hands on my shoulders. I couldn’t read the emotion on his face.
“Daddy,” I called, and pushed my legs desperately against the seat in front of me. “Daddy!”
He turned away from the window and disappeared.
Mom
’s car door slammed ….
My seventeen-year-old head jolted upward, heart thudding, my mind reorienting to the walls of the lab room. The clock on the wall to my right was colored a fuzzy neon. How long had I been lying here? The neon clock read 7:45. All day, then? Or all night, too? Was this real?
At some point, Dr. Adamson stood over me, staring with a puzzled expression. But his face looked distorted—long, cartoonish, shaped like a lemon. I couldn’t distinguish dream from reality. His brow furrowed. He left the room, or left my mind. I wasn’t sure which.
My spine throbbed. My sweat-drenched clothes clung to me, dampness seeped into the sheets. I shivered. The dreams—they were too real. It felt like I was there. They were me. Those other people, they were my mom, my dad, Beckett, Jack, Dr. Adamson.
Before I could process more, a spasm shot through my spine, and the pain pulled me back under.
52
JACK
I pressed my thumb and index finger to my temples. Sage couldn’t hear me. We’d been trying to talk to her for the last few hours through the ear bud. She was completely unresponsive.
From where I hid in the vent above the lab room, I had a clear view of her below, and I could see what Caesar was talking about. She looked bad: pale, sweaty, continual groaning, talking to herself, twitching on the bed. Some of the serum had to have gotten into her system.
Is this how I’d looked when she’d come to my room?
Would she feel stronger once this wore off? In the way my body had responded to the injection? Since my dad stabbed me, I’d never felt stronger in my life. Perhaps her abilities would heighten afterward? Then I would know her dad had done something to her, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what.
At this point, it didn’t matter. She looked awful. Why had I gone to the woods after what Beckett had said? I should have taken him more seriously. I knew Dr. Cunningham’s phone call was only buying us time, nothing else. And time was almost up.
I was disturbed by how many times my father had come inside the room and simply stared at Sage, listening to her words. Sometimes he even smiled at the things she muttered in her state of unconsciousness.
What had he found? The code? It made sense, then, why Cunningham would want Sage, if the code was in her. I supposed it was possible, but then, where were her powers? It couldn’t be that. There must be something else I’m missing ….
And none of it explained why the pull to her had grown. Sage may be sick, but whatever magnetic draw radiated from her body, it was only getting stronger. When I’d first kneeled over the vent, watching my father watch her, I’d almost jumped through the hole in the ceiling and tackled him right then.
Caesar interrupted my thoughts. “Your dad just ordered the search for you to extend out to the perimeter of the property. They may find the hole in the fence … and our false trail.”
I dropped my hand from my face. “We’re out of time,” I responded to Caesar, but knew Beckett and Imogen could hear me, too. “I’m going in. Initiate plan. Beckett, Imogen, give me three minutes. We’ll meet you in the vent in eight. Time starts when I drop. I’m going for guards first, then I’ll try to wake her up.”
“What about Finn?” Beckett said. “She won’t leave without him.”
“She’s going to have to,” I said. “There is no time to sedate him.”
“She won’t,” Beckett said.
“If she refuses, we split up. I take her to see him, see if he’ll cooperate. Beckett, if she knows you’re waiting in the woods, then maybe it will motivate her to come when she realizes it’s impossible with her brother?”
I knew I’d made Sage a promise. I didn’t want to leave Finn behind. But I’d watched my dad’s face over the last hour, staring at her, and I didn’t like what I saw. It was the face Dad had when he got edgy, consumed with science-brain. I’d seen it too many times from Sage’s position—lying on a table at Corporate headquarters.
Beckett swallowed, his voice tense. “I think you’re putting too much faith in the idea that she still likes me.”
“She does,” I pressed. “She has history with you. It could help.”
Sage had to get out of here. No matter what, my dad could not get to her. Even if it meant leaving Finn behind—as much as it pained me to think about.
No one replied, and I decided to proceed. Caesar would unlock their dorm rooms. Imogen and Beckett would meet in the bathroom and crawl from there. I’d deal with Sage—and the Finn discussion—when the moment presented itself.
I reached my hand through the slits in the vent, my fingers unscrewing the first of two screws that held the vent cover in place. After the first, the second dropped to the ground.
“I’m going in,” I said.
53
SAGE
I stood in a dark cave, alone. But somewhere far away, there was shouting. The yelling echoed, moving down the cave all the way to my ears.
Then, I could see the mouth of the cave. A small bit of light. Someone was there, calling my name from the opening. But it was too far away. I could barely make out the outline of the person through the darkness.
“Sage!” The voice drew suddenly closer, my body now at the mouth of the cave. But the light was too bright.
“Sage, wake up!” Jack’s voice rang solid in my ears, and when my eyes blinked open again, his face came into focus.
My wrists and ankles had been released from their straps. Beyond that, my mind only registered two things: The pain in my spine, and Jack’s aura—which felt stronger than it ever had before. The desire to get closer, like he pulled me in with some unseen force, felt completely out of my control. What had happened to me? I pushed past the headache and tried to move beyond the pull.
“Your dad’s phone call is only buying us time.” Jack’s face was serious. He wore a gun belt at his waist. If he felt any bit of a matching desire, he masked it well. “C got confirmation. Your dad’s helicopter will be at the other end of the island at 9am.”
Jack helped me sit up. The warmth of his hand on my arm burned my skin, electricity shot through my body.
“We don’t have much time.”
“Beckett?” I said.
“Meeting in the vent in five minutes. You okay?”
I nodded, but the pulse in my head and spine sent me back to the gurney.
Jack wrapped his hand around my arm and looked me in the eyes. “You can do this.”
He gently pulled me to standing, and then stepped away from the bed, revealing unconscious guards lying on the floor near the door.
With only a few strides as a running start, Jack jumped, and then launched his feet off the side wall, sending his body into the air with enough height to grab for the vent opening. Soundlessly, he pulled himself up and into the vent.
Jack’s arm came down in the space of the room. “Wheel the gurney over and climb on.”
I obeyed. Once I stood on the mattress, Jack grabbed for my extended arm just before I felt myself losing my balance. He wrapped my forearm with his hand and pulled me inside. I leaned against the vent tunnel, the world spinning around me.
Jack pressed his hand to his earbud. “We’re in.”
“10-4,” Caesar said.
Jack nodded down the vent. “Four minutes to our drop,” he said to me. “Let’s move.”
We started to crawl.
54
SAGE
Jack led the way at a fast crawl, despite how his body seemed to barely fit within the parameters of the vent. Adrenaline pumped through the pain in my spine, through the pounding in my head and through my every vein.
With each second that passed, my brain cleared up a little more, and the dreams I’d had on the gurney started to seep into my consciousness.
But they weren’t dreams at all. They were memories.
Usually a person had to be awake for memories though, right? So had I been awake? Or sleeping? Half-conscious? Maybe the memories were rooted deep, and a half-sleep was needed to pull them out?
&
nbsp; I had no clue, but I did know this. They were real. Which meant Mom hadn’t been running from my dad, because he’d watched her leave. Maybe he let her go? To protect us?
And he thought I was special. He said I had something special inside of me. What did that mean? Was there something scientific about me my father could want? Why didn’t I see it before?
The idea was viable. Perhaps, subconsciously, I hadn’t wanted to explore the possibility because I’d been hoping my dad just wanted me, as his daughter. Because he cared about me. Not because he wanted to save something else entirely. My mind spun. I pressed my hand to my forehead, trying to clear away the pain and the fog, unable to fully form my thoughts.
“Almost to you,” Imogen said, breaking my disjointed train of thought.
Jack slowed at an intersection in the vents. We stopped for a few seconds until I saw Imogen and Beckett coming from another direction, Imogen’s bright hair leading the way. They filed in behind us. No one spoke, but I saw a look of relief on Beckett’s face when we made eye contact.
After a few more minutes, Jack froze suddenly and turned to us with his finger to his lips. We stayed that way for a long time, listening, and then he motioned us forward again. His pace seemed faster after that, and I wondered what he’d heard. Caesar remained silent on the other end of the line.
We crawled on. How much time did we have before someone noticed Imogen and Beckett weren’t in their rooms? Or that I wasn’t on the gurney? And why didn’t I feel a sense of urgency about it? Like none of it really mattered? I still struggled to clear away the fuzz. The headache and pain in my spine weren’t helping.
By the time we came to a stop, my knees and palms burned, pulsing in rhythm with the blood pounding through my head. Just in front of Jack, a hole had been crudely cut into the side of the vent. I could see a wall, only a little more than a foot away from the hole.
Jack slid out and dropped. When I stuck my head out and peered down, I saw he stood on a narrow, metal catwalk. Red and green lights blinked everywhere; large wires ran along the walls in a covering so thick that I could hardly see the concrete behind them.
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