“Gemma, no.” Pete grabbed her by her shoulders so she had no choice but to look at him. She wiped her face with a hand and left a slick trail of wet and maybe snot. Great. “Listen to me, okay? Those men at Haven—the ones who stole children so they could get their funding, the ones who made people, living people, just to use them and poison them—those are the monsters, okay? Not you. You’re amazing, do you hear me? You’re perfect.”
Somehow through the suffocating mud of her misery, this penetrated. No one had ever told her she was perfect. She was about as far from perfect as you could get. And yet looking up at him, at his freckles and his eyes all warm with kindness, she believed that he thought so.
Of all the things that she’d seen and learned in the past week, this seemed like the most miraculous.
“So you don’t hate me?” She swallowed a hiccup. She could only imagine what she looked like, but he didn’t make her feel ugly. He still had his hands on her shoulders and she realized how close they were. No one had ever looked at her the way he was looking at her, or touched her like this, like she was something beautiful that needed preservation.
He smiled, and behind his eyes were doors that opened and said come in. “God, Gemma. You really are dumb sometimes. You know that?”
He had to lean down a little to kiss her. Gemma had never felt small before in her life, but she did then: small and protected, held inside of the space made by his chest, by his hands on her cheeks. His lips were soft. He didn’t try and put his tongue in her mouth and she was glad. It was her very first kiss and she was nervous, too nervous to have to sort out whether she was doing it right or worry about opening her mouth and whether she was using too much tongue or too little. She just wanted to stand there, in the sun, with the softness of his lips on hers and his fingers light on her cheeks. She moved her hands to his waist and felt the thrill of his body beneath the T-shirt, the narrowness of his waist, so delicious and foreign and other.
He pulled away and she took a step backward, bringing a hand to her lips, which were tingling. Her first kiss. With Pervy Pete. But she was happier than she could ever remember being. It felt like someone had cracked open a jar of honey in her chest. She was filled with a slow warmth.
“Wow,” he said. “That was pretty good, huh?” His smile was so big she couldn’t see beyond it.
She nodded, afraid to speak, afraid she would giggle.
“I mean, I’m not going to lie, I think I kind of killed it, actually. Like if there was a town for knowing when to kiss a girl, I’d probably be mayor.”
“Pete? Don’t ruin it, okay?” But she was smiling, too. In the parking lot, a man in mirrored sunglasses was obviously watching them. She started to turn away, suddenly self-conscious—had he been staring at them the whole time, like some creep?—when she noticed the cut of his suit and the man, identically dressed and nearly invisible behind the glare of the windshield, sitting behind the driver’s seat in the car next to him.
The car next to him was a maroon Volvo.
The maroon Volvo.
They’d been followed. They’d been found.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 14 of Lyra’s story.
FIFTEEN
ALL THE GOOD FEELING VANISHED. She was suddenly freezing.
“Two men,” she said.
As soon as he realized she’d spotted him, the man had turned away, pretending to be talking on his cell phone. “In the parking lot, watching us. They look military to me. Don’t look,” she said, grabbing Pete’s wrist when he started to turn.
“Military. Christ.” Pete had gone white again. Even his freckles seemed to disappear. “You sure?”
Gemma hated looking at the men. It felt like getting slapped. But she did now, in time to see the guy in sunglasses once again pivot away from her the second her eyes landed on him. He climbed into the car and for a second she imagined—she prayed—they would simply drive away. But both men just sat there. She nodded.
“How the hell did they find us?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t know what they were waiting for. Maybe they didn’t want to cause a scene. But she was positive the men, whoever they were, wouldn’t let Pete and Gemma leave. Only an hour ago she’d been hoping for someone, anyone, to interfere with Harliss, to save them from him. But now she wished herself back inside that close-smelling room, back inside the dark with the gun.
“Look, what can they really do? I mean, think about it. We didn’t do anything, right? They can’t arrest us just for talking to Jake Witz. They’re not going to throw us in jail. Sure, we broke a few traffic laws. Maybe they’re here to give us a speeding ticket, no right turn signal, points off my license. . . .” He trailed off. She knew he didn’t really believe that the men had followed them across Florida because they’d failed to signal.
Gemma saw movement in the parking lot. A hard slant of reflected sun. The car doors opened. Both men climbed out of the car. She heard a tinny ringing, and it took her a second to recognize her own ringtone. She fumbled her phone from her pocket. Jake.
“This is America,” Pete finished, in a whisper. As if that would help. As if that would protect them. “I mean, they’re not going to hurt us. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. Right?”
Gemma felt a surge of relief, of joy. Jake would help them. He would know what to do. He was back on her side.
“Jake?” She nearly choked on the word. She was close to tears again. “Is that you?”
It wasn’t.
The girl’s voice sounded distant, as if she was holding the phone away from her mouth.
“It’s not Jake,” Lyra, who was really Brandy-Nicole, said. “Jake is dead. And we need your help.”
Jake is dead.
Gemma’s mind crystallized around this fact, even as she revolted against the truth of it. Jake Witz was dead. Jake: his dark eyes, the strange stillness of him, his sudden dazzling smiles that made you lose your breath.
Dead, dead, dead. Even the word was ugly.
Those men were responsible. If they hadn’t done it themselves, they’d given the order. She knew it.
“Where are you?” she asked, and Lyra told her: the Blue Gator in Little Waller. Easy enough to remember.
“There’s Suits after us,” Lyra said. “Two of them.”
Her meaning was clear enough. They were being followed, too. “Just stay where you are,” Gemma said. “We’re coming for you.” She hung up and slipped the phone back in her pocket.
Both of the men were pretending they weren’t staring up at room 33—pretending there was something wrong with one of their tires, now, which required both of them to puzzle over it. Maybe they didn’t know that Gemma had recognized them. Maybe that was why they weren’t in a hurry. And of course they wouldn’t want to make a scene, wouldn’t want Gemma and Pete to start screaming and calling for help.
A scene. That’s what they needed.
The phone call, both the news about Jake and the fact that Lyra and 72 weren’t lost forever, had focused her. She knocked on the door of room 33, and Harliss opened up right away. He might have been standing at the door, listening, making sure they hadn’t slipped away.
“Listen to me,” she said as soon as they were inside and the door was locked again behind them. “I was wrong. Your daughter is still alive, and I know where to find her.”
Harliss took a step backward, as if she’d punched him. His hand worked its way to his chest. “How—?”
“There’s no time to explain. We’ve been followed.” Gemma’s mouth was chalk-dry. “We need a distraction. The people who came for us won’t like attention. They’ll want us to come quietly. If we can get out of here, I can bring you to your daughter. I can protect her.”
“Fuck.” Pete turned a circle. But of course there was nowhere to go.
Harliss was staring at Gemma as if he’d never seen her before. She knew he hadn’t heard a single thing she’d said. “Brandy . . .” His voice was hush
ed with awe, like he was speaking inside a church. “Where is she? Is she okay?”
Gemma fought down a hard swell of impatience. “She’s okay now,” she said. “She won’t be okay if those men out there get to her first.” He made a noise like a soccer ball punctured with a knife. “Look, you were right. She’s been living at Haven. They made up stories, told her she’d been made there.”
“All this time . . .” He shook his head. Although he must have expected it, he still looked as if someone had taken out his guts with a spoon. “So she doesn’t remember me? She doesn’t remember anything about me at all?”
“She remembers a few things,” Gemma lied. How long would it be before the men got tired of waiting, and came up to finish the three of them off? She knew they’d killed Jake. She felt it. And she was sure they wouldn’t have trouble killing again. “Now listen to me. We need to get away from those men. We need your help. Your daughter needs your help.”
Harliss blinked. “Okay.” He rubbed his face, as if trying to wake up from a dream. “Where are they?”
“Down in the parking lot. Two of them. Maroon Volvo.”
His eyes were still raw-red, as though they’d been scoured. “You’re not messing with me? You know where my girl is?”
“I swear,” Gemma said.
“And if I help you, you’ll help me?”
Gemma nodded. Harliss turned to look at Pete. Pete held up both hands.
“Yes, yes,” he said quickly. “Just . . . Christ. Let’s get out of here, okay?”
Harliss ignored that. He turned back to Gemma. “Now you listen to me.” He took a step forward and Gemma flinched, expecting him to grab her. But he only brought his finger up to point. “You get my girl. You bring her back to me safe, okay? You take her home to North Carolina until I get out.”
“Get out?” she said. Her chest was tight with fear. “Get out of what? Aren’t you coming with us?”
But Harliss didn’t answer. He gave Gemma one final look and then moved past her to retrieve the gun from the bedside table. Before she could ask him what he intended to do, he’d slipped out the door. She could tell he was moving away from room 33 by the sound of his voice, which came back to them through the thin walls. He was shouting, letting off a volley of slurred obscenities and even snatches of song.
Pete went to the window and parted the curtains to look out. “He’s pretending to be drunk or something,” he said. “He’s stumbling all over the place.”
“Smart,” Gemma said. That would get at least the desk clerk to pay attention. Maybe the other guests, if there were any.
“Should we call the police?” Pete asked.
“And say what? Some military guys are trying to kill us because they’ve been cloning people to use as petri dishes?” Gemma shook her head. They needed to get to Little Waller, fast. They didn’t have time to tangle with cops and questions like Where are your parents?
“I don’t know.” Pete was pacing the room. “Even if those guys are military, they can’t do anything with cops around, right?”
He was right. They needed cops, firemen, a whole shitshow drama. But they couldn’t call. Something hinged open in her chest—an idea, a hope. She grabbed Pete’s hand and dragged him into the bathroom.
“Seems like the wrong time for a shower,” he said. But his voice was unsteady, breaking on the joke. “Aren’t we supposed to be getting out of here?”
There was no escape this way. Nothing but a single slit of a window barely the width of a pizza box. She registered the sad shower, the sink with a nest of hair clinging like a waterlogged insect to the basin, the fire alarm. She grabbed the roll of toilet paper from next to the toilet and threw it in the sink.
Pete stood there, staring. “What are you . . . ?”
“Quick,” she said. “I need a lighter or matches or something.” She bent to search the cabinet beneath the sink. Several sheets of old newspaper lined the plywood. She balled them up and threw that in the basin, too.
Then he got it. He disappeared again into the bedroom, returning with a sheet from one of the beds and a book of matches from a place called Skins. There were only three matches left.
“Dresser drawer,” he said, tossing them to Gemma. “Someone always leaves them behind.”
She was so nervous she took off the first match head when she tried to strike it. But she got the second one lit. The newspaper flared and curled. The toilet paper began to smoke.
“Shut the door,” she said, as the smoke began to drift out toward the bedroom, sniffing for oxygen. Pete stepped inside, closing the door behind him, and together they blew softly on the fire, so flames leapt up toward the mirror from the sink. Gemma’s eyes watered. The chemicals in the paper let off an acrid smell.
The fire alarm was much louder than Gemma had expected. She plugged her fingers in her ears. The bathroom was now so full of smoke, her eyes began to water. Finally they couldn’t stand it anymore and opened the door to the bedroom, stumbling out, coughing and sucking in clean air. There must have been a sprinkler system fitted at one point, but it hadn’t been maintained. A dribble of water came from a thin pipe in the ceiling, and did nothing but wet the carpet. Already Gemma heard the wail of sirens in the distance. She hadn’t thought there’d be so much smoke. . . .
“Shit.” Pete had his shirt to his mouth. He had to cough out the word. “The walls.”
The wallpaper in the bathroom had caught fire. Gemma had never seen anything like it. She’d never been so close to a fire at home, sitting in front of the fireplace, and those were the gas kind that ran on a neat little grate tucked away behind fake logs. Click on, click off. But now through the open door of the bathroom she saw the fire climbing the walls, leaping onto the plastic shower curtain and simply devouring it. She had the strangest urge to run back and try to smother it—as if she could do anything—and then fear hooked her hard in the stomach. Out. They needed to get out. The sirens outside were louder now. A bit of the carpet caught fire and the flame made a hand, waggled its fingers at her, crawled a little farther into the bedroom.
They couldn’t get the door open. For a horrible second, she thought the men had somehow trapped them, locked Gemma and Pete inside so that their job would be easy. Then she realized that in his panic Pete had locked the bolt instead of unlocking it, and she reached up and slammed the bolt free and wrenched the door open. The fire made a sound—like a roar, like an animal, like it was alive and hungry—and smoke came out with them, clouds of it. But they were now in the sunshine, on the balcony, and she saw a cop car below them in the parking lot, newly arrived, and a fire truck just pulling in, and a dozen people slowly drifting into the street to watch. A crowd.
She saw things in images, pictures and flashes. In the parking lot: a teenage girl holding a kid—her son?—by the hand, her son trying to fit an enormous lollipop in his mouth. The desk clerk talking on his phone, an old woman pointing, athletic socks bunched around her ankles. A boy was standing next to the maroon Volvo, angling his phone toward the balcony, filming. Time was moving very quickly for Gemma, so everything else seemed almost to be frozen. The agony of the fire truck angling into the parking lot. The sludge of a cop getting out of his car.
“Don’t you try and tell me what to do. I know your type. You keep your hands off me.”
The mouth of the stairwell: fifty feet away, Harliss, stumbling and still pretending to be drunk, so the two men in suits were forced to dance around him. Gemma sliced the scene into segments, into instinct. They did not want to use violence, had been trying to get him to go quietly. He was shouting, shaking off one of the men, who had a hand on his elbow.
“I know my rights. This is America. I know all about the Constitution. . . .”
There was no way down to the parking lot but past them. And as Gemma and Pete stood there, maybe for half a second, maybe less, one of the men turned and saw them. He still hadn’t taken off his sunglasses, and that was the scariest thing, worse even than a fire that obeyed its
natural impulse to burn—the unnaturalness of a man doing what he had come to do and yet not bothering to take off his sunglasses, no reason to sweat, no reason to get upset.
And in that second she knew, she truly understood, what Pete had said to her outside. Monsters weren’t made, at least not by birth or fate or circumstance. Monsters chose to be monsters. That was the only terrible birth, the kind that happened again and again, every day.
He was coming toward them. And still the endless sludge of firefighters half suited up, the radio static, the cop dull and useless standing there. The man couldn’t take them, not if she screamed, not if she fought. There would be too much attention, too many questions, a cop coming to pull them aside and ask awkward questions. But they might lose Lyra and 72. Every minute, she was in danger of losing them.
He was close enough to speak, above the roar and Harliss’s shouting and the way that things hum into sound as they’re collapsing. “It will be easier, and much better, if you come with me,” he was saying. “You’re in a lot of danger. I’m here to help.” Not the words Gemma had been expecting, but she still picked up on the lie, the worst kind—the kind that pretends to be a favor. She’d been hearing them her whole life.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Pete said, stepping in front of Gemma as if he could protect her, a gesture so sweetly useless she wanted to cry.
They were mirrored in his sunglasses, the two of them. She thought of shattering those glasses and the eyes beneath them, too. His face dissolving. Her fists like superhero hands, extending into trunks, pummeling him.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m on your side.” He took a step forward. He reached for Pete. “I’m going to have to insist—”
The gunshot was a clean, sharp crack that cleaved the air in two. Gemma had heard people describe gunshots as cars backfiring, as firecrackers, but she had no doubt what this was, even before she saw Harliss, still in that strange snapshot way, holding the gun, the barrel pointed to the sky. There seemed to be a pause before people were screaming, although she knew there was no pause, really: there was a gun and a shot and the man holding Harliss had dropped to the ground, and the man standing in front of Pete, telling them he was only trying to help, had dropped, too, because of course they couldn’t do anything else.