Mania

by J. R. Johansson

  Joey flinched back like she’d struck him. “I came to bring you back where you belong. You shouldn’t desert your family, no matter what.” He spoke forcefully, but there was a whine beneath his tone that made him sound surprisingly vulnerable.

  I kept my hands up, waiting to see what he’d do, preparing in case he tried to grab Chloe and run. My jaw clenched tight enough to make my sore cheek ache. If she didn’t want to go back, then he would have to go through me before he could take her away.

  “Cooper doesn’t want me there.” Chloe stood up straighter and a spark of anger fueled her words. “Besides, I think I’m doing more to help everyone from here.”

  “But how can you want to help them?” Joey howled, pointing at me. “How can you want to help him?”

  “So many things Dad told us weren’t true, Joey. He was wrong in so many things he said, so many things he did. Think of the way he treated you.” Chloe’s voice softened a bit and she walked over to stand beside me. “I’m helping Jack because I think it’s the best way to help everyone else I care about—including you.”

  Joey looked completely confused. I almost felt sorry for him … almost.

  “You need to trust me,” Chloe pleaded, and her eyes were a storm of emotion.

  I could see Joey’s conviction wavering. He lowered his hands to his sides and looked at me again. Then, abruptly, his anger flared. His hands clenched into fists and he spoke from between gritted teeth. “I trust Cooper.”

  He was about to run at me when I heard a solid thunk. Joey fell to his knees, grabbing the back of his head. Libby stood behind him, with a dark smile and a piece of wood she must’ve grabbed off the ground. I saw a trickle of blood dripping down Joey’s neck, and he shook his head like he was trying to clear his vision.

  Chloe ran to his side. But he staggered to his feet and backed away, eyeing all of us warily. Seeing that he was very outnumbered, he turned and ran.

  “Joey!” Chloe yelled after him, but he got in a car at the other end of the lot and drove away.

  Chloe turned on Libby, and I recognized the fire in her eyes. Before she could say a word, I grabbed her around the waist and guided her toward the van. “Thank you,” I mouthed over my shoulder at Libby.

  Once we were several feet away, I spoke low into Chloe’s ear. “Your brother is fine, and Libby didn’t have a choice. Don’t pick a fight with her for trying to protect the rest of us.”

  She glared at me as we reached the passenger door of the van, but she seemed to be fighting to keep from saying anything she might regret. Her expression softened as she reached out to gently touch the puffy skin that was beginning to swell around my eye. “Does it hurt?”

  I blew out a big puff of air and pulled her hand down, squeezing it inside both of mine before releasing it. I opened the passenger door for her and waited for her to climb inside. “No. Let’s just go finish this. It isn’t going to be easy … but you’re starting to make me believe it may actually be possible to convince some of the Takers to think about a new formula. We can worry about getting everyone to play nice after we all survive the next month. Okay?”

  She took a slow breath and then nodded. “Okay.”

  I walked to the driver’s door, but before I could open it Libby walked up and grabbed my shoulder. She looked in my eyes.

  “You really think she didn’t know her brother could find us at any time? She found that tracker awfully quick, don’t you think?” Libby shook her head with a sigh. “I know there’s something going on between you two … ” She trailed off, like she was waiting for me to argue with her.

  But I couldn’t. Mistake or not, mutual or not—I was definitely developing feelings for Chloe. And I wasn’t going to lie to my best friend about it. I’d seen with Parker how many more problems that could cause.

  When she realized I wasn’t going to correct her, Libby’s shoulders drooped forward. I almost regretted my decision to stick with the truth.

  “Just don’t let her make you a fool, Jack. You’re smarter than that. You’re better than that.” Libby’s hand fell away from my shoulder and hung by her side. “Takers have done nothing but hurt us all our lives. Don’t give this one a new way to do it.”

  Then she left me and walked around to climb into the back of the van without giving me a chance to say anything in return.

  Twenty-Six

  Parker

  My body suffered through tremor after tremor on the white tile floor. My eyes burned. Every muscle ached. In addition to trying to turn me into a Taker—which thankfully still didn’t appear to be working—they’d also found ways to speed up the effects of sleep deprivation on Watchers. Our bodies and brains had been built to withstand being sleep-deprived longer than regular people, but eventually it would catch up with us. That’s what was happening to me when I met Mia. And now, in significantly less time, they’d taken me from slightly tired to the worst I’d ever felt.

  How long until I started to lose my mind? How long until sanity alone became something I couldn’t reach anymore?

  How long until I begged for them to just kill me?

  The door to the white room opened and I recoiled against the wall until I saw it was Thor, carrying in an actual working cot and a blanket without any holes in it. When his back was to me, I noticed a lump and small cut on the back of his head. And he looked slightly off balance when he walked, like his ribs or back were hurting him. I wondered what had happened.

  I knew better than to say thank you or look grateful, because those things would only make him angry. So I just rolled slowly out of the way and waited for him to finish setting it up.

  Then Cooper appeared in the doorway. He was swaying from side to side with exhaustion, barely managing to focus on what Thor was doing. Once he did, he looked livid.

  “What the hell is this, Joey?”

  Thor—maybe, because he was my only ally, I should stop calling him that—Joey looked even angrier than Cooper. Instead of turning to answer his brother, he reached up and ripped one of the work lights in the room down from the ceiling. It went out immediately, the plug falling out of the hole. One corner of the room went a little darker than the rest and I did my best to slide into it.

  “This would be me making sure we have something to trade when the ten days are up.” Joey gestured angrily back at Cooper and said, “What about you? What the hell is this, Cooper?”

  Cooper frowned in confusion and his nose started bleeding. He wiped it on his sleeve as though nothing had happened. “What are you talking about?”

  “What you’re doing here isn’t going to accomplish anything. You’re going to kill both yourself and him before we even get a chance to make the trade for Eclipse!” Joey glanced over at me and then pulled his brother out the door, closing it behind him. I breathed as quietly as possible and listened to his voice, which still carried through the closed door. “You have to know you aren’t thinking straight right now.”

  And here was my main consolation in all of this. Cooper was in bad shape when they’d first brought me here, and he wasn’t getting better. Overseeing the experiments, and all the battles we had in our minds every night, were having much the same effect on him as on me. Breaking me down like this was a lot of work, and he’d already been nearing the end of his path. Every time I saw him he looked worse and worse …

  Just like me.

  The only new plan for escape that I’d been able to come up with actually hinged on that fact. If I could just find a way to hold out longer than Cooper, then maybe Joey would be put in charge and I might have a better chance of surviving.

  Cooper’s tone when he answered was cold, stubborn, and tired. “I’m doing what Dad would’ve done.”

  “I know you are!” Joey’s voice rose, loud and clear with desperation. “Don’t you see? This is exactly what Dad would’ve done. That is the whole problem with this situation!”

/>   Cooper’s words became positively acidic. “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood because you aren’t one of us and you hate that.”

  I heard one set of footsteps walk away, and I wasn’t sure who’d left until I heard a groan and then Joey mutter, “Well, at least my weak human genes aren’t going to kill me.”

  I had to stop myself from physically reacting to his statement. From the moment I’d found out about Cooper and Chloe, I’d assumed Joey was a Taker too. We all had. And apparently we’d been wrong.

  Jack had told me that having a Night Walker parent didn’t guarantee a Night Walker child; it just increased the odds a lot. It looked like their family was two for three—which actually explained quite a bit. Joey wasn’t that much younger than Cooper, but he had none of the telltale signs of exhaustion that Cooper did. Those symptoms should’ve been showing up by now if Thor—Joey—was a Taker.

  It took a lot of effort, but I managed to pull myself over onto the cot. I sighed as the material eased the ache in my muscles after so many hours on the hard floor.

  The door opened again suddenly, and when Joey looked my way, I thought about saying something to him. Something to let him know that not all Night Walkers thought humans were weak or inferior to us. But it was like he could see that I was thinking about talking to him and wanted to make sure I didn’t get a chance. Careful not to actually make direct eye contact with me, he tossed a new paper bag with food at my chest, hard enough that it definitely squished my sandwich. Then he dropped the water bottle on the cot beside me and hurried back out of the cell, closing the door behind him.

  I opened my bag and brought out the slightly decimated sandwich. Even if I couldn’t thank him, I hoped he knew how much I owed him. My vision shook as my eyes had one of their mini seizures, so I closed them tight in an effort to make it stop.

  Taking another bite, I chewed slowly for a full minute before opening my eyes again. Relieved to see that the shaking had stopped, I watched the newly dim corner of the room where Joey had torn the work light down. It started to darken, shadows gathering together.

  I focused my gaze on that spot, my head pounding, but it was already gone. Nothing.

  I released a shaky sigh.

  I’d lived through this before. It was only a matter of time before it all happened again. No one else had ever put themselves back together after being Divided the way I had. It was pretty safe to assume that no one knew what would happen if a person became Divided twice in one lifetime. Given how awful and terrifying it had been living with Darkness the first time around, I didn’t want to face that again. Not now, when I was already this weak.

  Lying back on the cot, I closed my eyes and rested one arm across them, trying to soothe the pounding ache I’d had behind my eyeballs for hours—or days now. The pain never stopped anymore. It just moved from one location to another and changed intensity. I was so tired … and every movement was becoming so hard.

  I didn’t move when I heard Joey come in later and collect the garbage from my lunch. As he left, he reached into the hallway and hit switches to turn out every light, one by one. The relief from the heat and the cool darkness on my aching head was too much. A grateful sob escaped my chest. I decided I didn’t care if it made him mad. This one time I had to say it.

  “Thank you, Joey,” I whispered into the quiet.

  “Get some rest.” His tone wasn’t angry. He just sounded surprised and confused, and then the door closed behind him.

  With Joey helping me like this, the Takers might even be less of a threat to me than what I had lurking within my own mind. After everything Cooper had done to me, I’d lost so much of my strength.

  If Darkness came back again now … I doubted I’d have anything left in me to keep him from taking over completely.

  Twenty-Seven

  Jack

  Mason had a cabin so far outside of Fairview that it wasn’t technically considered part of the town. The area was filled with dense natural forests and roads that were barely usable. We bounced along the roads in tense silence. I’d tried to call Mason a few more times from the van, but he still wasn’t answering. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I couldn’t imagine it was a good thing.

  Finn pulled his phone out. “I’m going to tell Addie and Mia we got the second ingredient and are on our way to the third. That okay?”

  “Sure.” I turned on my blinker, relieved that Finn had taken on the task of keeping the girls in the loop this time. If I had to name things I was terrible at, first on the list was probably communication—as I’m sure Parker would attest to—and second would be reassuring others.

  Finn was obviously the clear choice for this job.

  We’d been driving for a couple of hours and were getting close now, but I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to say to Mason. Since he’d been kept in the Takers’ prison, it seemed a safe assumption that he at least knew about the Night Walkers. But other than that, the man was kind of a mystery.

  Libby had a book open. She was stretched out across the very rear seat, reading and trying to ignore the rest of us. Finn, finished with his phone call and looking bored, leaned up from the middle seat to talk to Chloe and me. His shirt of the day read, What I really need are minions. The shirt had a point. Minions could really come in handy with the way things were going lately.

  “So, this Mason guy—he can’t be a Taker?” he asked.

  I glanced over at Chloe, but we both were shaking our heads no even before I responded. “He’s gotta be at least fifty. No Taker has ever—” I cut myself off, realizing what I was about to say and how much I didn’t want to say it, especially not in front of Chloe.

  “No Taker has ever lived that long,” Chloe finished for me, then shrugged it off as though it didn’t matter at all. “It’s okay to say it. It isn’t new information.”

  “Okay. But he could be a Builder, though?” Finn looked eager to move on to a different possibility.

  “Probably,” I said, and Chloe nodded in agreement.

  “And you don’t know anything about why he might have been thrown into the Takers’ prison?” I asked Chloe, not for the first time. It really wasn’t about trust—I just hoped she might finally remember something about the base.

  “No. I didn’t have anything to do with all that.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I told you, they didn’t trust me enough. They didn’t even tell me where they moved to when they left it.”

  “So you say … ” I heard Libby mutter not too quietly from the backseat.

  “Why couldn’t Mason be a Watcher?” Finn asked.

  “Because he’s usually alone.” Libby dropped her book and spoke up. “And Watchers don’t live that long either unless they can use someone like me.”

  I looked up sharply into the rearview mirror and met her eyes, but she quickly looked away. The word use felt specifically selected to hurt me. The Libby I knew would never want to do that. She’d been broken by all of this … and I didn’t know how to fix it.

  By the time I finally pulled to a stop in front of Mason’s cabin, it was late afternoon and the sun was rapidly moving across the sky. The house looked quiet, but there was an old car parked next to it and I hoped Mason would be home.

  We jogged up the front steps and I knocked loudly on the door. We listened as some robins took flight from a large oak tree by one end of the house. They flapped around the tree a few times before deciding that everything was probably okay and settling back down on whatever branch I’d disturbed them from. A full minute passed before I raised my hand to knock again … and then I heard a creak from inside.

  “Mason? Are you in there?” I called, hoping he was being overly cautious and didn’t know who was outside. In response, I heard a few louder creaks and then locks being thrown back on the opposite side of the door.

  A few seconds later, the door opened a crack—t
hen an inch—and then all the way, to reveal Mason squinting out into the sunlight at us.

  “Well, this is quite the surprise … ” Then he pulled out a rifle and pointed it straight at Chloe’s head. “You’re picking some strange traveling companions these days, Jack.”

  “Whoa, whoa, Mason.” Every instinct in me told me to tackle him, to take him down and get him away from Chloe. Instead, I shifted slowly in front of her until the gun was pointed at me instead. “She’s helping us. You can trust her.”

  Mason looked at me with watery eyes, and then peered at Chloe over my shoulder before lowering his gun back to his side. “I just hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “I do,” I said as I heard Chloe release a shaky breath. I felt her place one trembling hand against my back.

  “Well, come on in, then.” Mason opened the door wide and gestured for us to enter the shadowy interior. “I imagine you wouldn’t have come all the way out here if you didn’t have something important to discuss.”

  “I might not have had to come out here if you answered your phone ever.” I gave him a rueful smile as we walked past him. Chloe stuck so close behind me she was nearly a shadow. I couldn’t blame her. Plus, feeling her presence this close felt kind of great.

  After we were all inside and settled, I started from the beginning and gave Mason the abbreviated version of what we’d been doing. Since it was clear from his reaction to Chloe that he knew plenty about Night Walkers, I didn’t hold anything back. I told him about Cooper and Parker and my dad’s new formula and the ingredients we’d been tracking down. He appeared surprised and eager to help at first, but the more I explained the details, the quieter Mason became.

  “Yours is the last name I was given, Mason.” I watched for any sign of surprise, but his face was like a brick wall at this point, so I just continued. “We know that somehow my dad left the last ingredient with you. You’re a Builder, right?”

  Mason leaned forward with a loud sigh and rubbed his hand through his beard. “I wish I’d answered my phone. I’m afraid you’ve come all the way out here for nothing.” He somehow looked visibly older than he had when we’d gotten here. “Your dad didn’t leave me with any secrets, kid. I think you must’ve gotten your information mixed up somewhere.”