I tried mine anyway. Then I waved Ariel’s badge in front of it, and when that didn’t work, I lunged into the stairwell. I had a hazy memory of a disembodied voice saying something about “zero.” It was a crap shoot, but heading down was the only thing I knew to do. I ran down so many stairs that I started falling down them. And then they ended.
I shoved through a door, expecting a hallway, but I found myself trapped in a boxy room the size of a bathroom stall. In front of me was an elevator. Behind me, a camera.
Double baktag!
For some reason, the little room energized me. I had gone the right way; the lower floors were just like in the movies: the big stuff happened there. Nick was down here, I just knew it!
I flipped off the camera, then zapped it with my Taser and rammed into the big, cold elevator door. Naturally, it didn’t budge. I kicked it with my bare foot, waved Ariel’s badge over the fingerprint pad. I jabbed my finger at it, and it responded with a series of shrill beeps. I pulled my gown shut in the back and turned a circle, starting to panic.
The door opened so fast I didn’t see it happen even though I was looking right at it. One second I was looking at my smeared reflection in the steel, the next I was staring down two women—a tall African-American with a sharp, straight nose, pretty eyes, and a dark green “guard” getup and…Ursula?
I opened my mouth, starting to say something; then I realized I should turn around and RUN. I got about half a step before the tall guard grabbed me. She was so adept she didn’t even really hurt me, just captured my biceps and whirled me around, setting me down almost gently in the doorway of the elevator, where Ursula snatched the Taser from my hand and fired in my direction.
She must have been a lousy shot, because it didn’t seem to work.
The super-stealthy woman tapped me on the back, but her tap was something special: it sent me flying into the back wall of the elevator. My forehead hit it, I fell down to my knees, and when I touched my head, my palm came away bloody.
Ursula delivered a shockingly vicious kick to my hip; it hurt so bad I doubled over, literally seeing stars. The next thing I knew, super-stealth had me on my feet, pinned in front of her. I could smell strawberry lip gloss, which made the scene seem doubly surreal.
“You’re such a fucking moron,” Ursula said, and all I could think was that she had read my mind; I’d called her a moron in my room. Then I went cold; what if she was an alien, too? What if she was Nick’s partner?
I must have given her a look, because she laughed and said, “Jesus, I won’t bite you.”
“I may.” That was super-stealth, who gave a little laugh; her voice was surprisingly pleasant.
“You can’t keep me here! I didn’t do anything,” I shouted, and Ursula laughed. Then the door opened and they marched me out.
We were in another hall—and this one was really cold. I stumbled out, still in super-stealth’s grasp, and surprised to find how little I cared about my bare butt. I turned to Ursula, desperately hoping to appeal to her human side—if there was one.
“Ursula, please! I just want to go home! I’m sorry! I panicked!”
We were moving now—super-stealth was pushing me along; Ursula strode in front of me, walking backward as she leered my way. “Why’d you go down instead of up?”
Super-stealth had been tightening her hold on me, and by now my wrists were aching. Blood from my forehead dripped into my eyes. I could feel my pulse drum in the wound. I jerked forward. “Let me go!”
“Okay.”
She let me go, and I ran like a kid in a carnival funhouse; Ursula caught me easily, throwing me over her shoulder like I wasn’t almost her size. I thought how weird it was, that Ursula actually had turned out to be a badass. I even felt a shot of embarrassment: my ego, rearing its head even over pain and terror.
I couldn’t see much—my face was smashed against Ariel’s mid-back—so when I heard Sid’s voice, I thought I was hallucinating. Then Ariel stopped. She put me down, and I turned.
Sid was standing in the hallway, arms crossed, wearing a slick black suit and a purple tie.
“Thank you, officers,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”
Super-stealth made a little awe noise, like she was sad her fun was over, and Ursula gave me an exaggerated pageant princess wave. I looked up and down the hall, assessing my escape odds, but I knew they were nil. I had screwed up—big time.
Sid didn’t even bother to use force. He knew he didn’t need to. He closed his hand around my forearm, passed me a neatly folded napkin—“Your head is bleeding, Miss Mitchell”—and led me into a little room with two chairs and a card table.
My stomach roiled. What a fool I’d been. To even think I could do this. To jump into things without a better plan. Then I noticed the wall. It was a two-way mirror, and I could see Nick on the other side.
*
Whatever Sid said first, I didn’t hear it. My eyes were glued to the gurney, were Nick lay on his back. His body was wrapped in white sheets. Under them, his arms were crossed over his chest, like a mummy. Two thick leather restraining belts crossed his mid-section and ankles, strapped so tightly they made indentions in the sheets. A brown-haired, brown-eyed man in a long white coat stood to his left side, beside an IV pole, and as I watched he leaned over and started messing with an IV in Nick’s neck. The IV was a central line; it was used for Serious Business, and the interior end of it went all the way into the heart.
I’d seen a central line before. I’d seen another person that I loved in this position, and seeing Nick like that…it made my legs feel weak.
My gaze rolled around Nick’s small, white room, looking for an out. But there wasn’t one. We were stuck here, both of us—so I turned my eyes back to his face.
It looked so… different. For a stupid second I thought maybe he’d ditched Gabe’s body and turned into “himself” but that was totally irrational, and anyway, if I squinted I could still see some resemblance.
So strange how when something awful hits you, your brain slows down like an overloaded computer. It took me a long time to figure out what was different: small things. His lips, always nice and smooth and often moving, smiling—they were badly cracked, with a blood smear in one corner. His jaw was bruised and swollen twice its normal size, which gave him an uneven appearance. The rest of his face looked a little puffy, too, which made his nose look thinner. His closed eyes looked dark and sunken, in that way very sick people’s eyes can look. And his forehead… I clenched my jaw. He must have gotten into a fight, because he had stitches across his forehead—a long train track of them that cut into his beautiful auburn hair. Of everything, it was his hair that made me cry. It looked so clean and perfect…so soft.
I wanted to touch it.
I remember the brown-haired man’s hands—short and wide. How the rubber gloves were stretched as he depressed a syringe into the central line. How I wanted to kill him, because whatever he’d given to Nick hurt.
Through the darkened glass, I saw him moan. He tried to curl up; his shoulders pulled up, toward his ears, and his knees rose just slightly, though the strap held his legs down effectively. The brown-haired man knelt, doing something I couldn’t see, and Nick arched back again, this time splitting open some of the stitches over his eye.
I remember my head got hot—the whole thing, very hot—and after that I was sitting in a chair, and Sid was leaning over me with his hands on the chair’s armrests, and he was talking but I couldn’t hear him. I looked past him, at the window—and that’s how I saw the hand behind Sid’s back. He was holding a Taser, and as he spoke, he brought it closer and closer…until finally it was in my sight and I brought my knee up hard under his crotch, and while he paused to swear, then squeezed the trigger, I rammed into him. It had been a while since I believed in God, but that day I knew that he was with me, because Sid’s wrist bent in just such a way so that the Taser’s fire went into him. He shot himself right in the pec, and then he fell back, much harder than y
ou would expect from a typical Taser. Still, Sid was strong. He sat up and I kicked him in the face.
Still riding my own wave, I grabbed a chair and knocked him in the head, then ran out the door we’d come in and into the one I’d seen when I’d looked in on Nick. I shouldn’t have been able to open the door to his room without someone else’s fingerprint, but when I reached it, the pad lit up and I rushed in like an avenger, like someone in the movies, and that was good because another white-coat had come, and she was tightening Nick’s binds. The Department of Defense sucked, because when I Tazed her and she fell back, she had big eyes and a shocked, wide-open mouth.
Maybe they had cameras—maybe reinforcements were coming at that very moment—but I took my chances. I grabbed the felled woman and dragged her into a corner, where I stripped her of her blue surgical hair net and spent what felt like an hour wiggling the lab coat off her. The whole time, I burned for Nick. I was frantic to touch him, desperate to hold him. But my panic kept me on point. I swept my air into the hat, pulled on the coat and buttoned it, then covered her monogrammed name with my hair and ran to Nick’s bedside. His eyes had opened; they were tired, but fixed on me.
I reached for his hand and felt a burst of air. The door behind Nick’s bed flung open, and the brown-haired man walked in with Ariel, who was dressed in a similar surgical cap and coat, and wheeling some kind of machine.
Again, I took a risk. I flung my arms up, and in a high-pitched voice, said: “We’ve got to get him out now! Move him to quarantine!”
They looked confused, then angry. The man said, “Who the hell are you?” and I could see it dawn on Ariel.
She rushed forward, and I was ready with my Taser. I got her in the ear. She staggered forward, then face-planted on the floor. The man was on me, wielding his own Taser, but when he jabbed it at me, nothing came out. I got him right between the legs. He howled, and I felt vindicated on Nick’s behalf.
If it had only been the two of them, I could have handled it. But just that second, two others barreled in. I caught a brief glimpse of a man with grey hair and a woman in a white coat, and then something small and fast whizzed past my jaw and I screamed. I lunged for the bed, determined to free Nick, and the man grabbed my hair. I don’t do anything to him, but as I wheeled around, I think my elbow might have hit him in the eye. He cursed, and loosened his grip on my hair, and the woman tackled me at the knees. I hit the floor hard. Pain sang through my back, and then she was being lifted off me.
I saw the man’s face—wild eyes, twisted lips—and then it disappeared. The ceiling wobbled, I blinked, and I found myself looking up at Nick.
33
“Milo.” The word was such a sweet caress, but we didn’t have time for indulgences. Nick grabbed my hands and pulled me up. He pressed his mouth into my hair, and I could feel the warmth of his breath, and then we were running. I noticed the older man’s leg twitch as Nick pulled me through the doorway, but I wasn’t worried. Nick was here.
We dashed down the hall, toward the elevator, and alarms started peeling. It sounded like more than one, and I wondered if one of them was aimed at Nick, because he flinched suddenly and pressed on his ear. Suddenly the lights went out and the ceiling began to flash red; there were little red lights embedded between wall and ceiling, the rows of them like the lights on movie theater aisles.
Behind us, I could hear footsteps, but Nick was moving fast, pulling me with him. I saw a blur of figures up ahead; I saw a red light, like a laser, and then I felt a burst of force and the path in front of us cleared. I smelled something sulfuric, I stepped on an arm; my legs felt weak and stiff, but Nick grabbed my hand, “C’mon! It’s okay!”
A shadowed form swung out the door of one of the little rooms, and Nick bounced back, into me. Then he dropped my hand. I heard a puff of air and heard a groan, and someone fell and it wasn’t Nick because he had my hand again.
We ran.
Near the elevator—I thought we were near the elevator—we ran into a wall, a steel wall I didn’t remember seeing before, the government equivalent of spikes in a road-block. Nick reached out and it crumpled, tinkling as it scattered on the floor like a broken mirror. As we started moving again, I noticed Nick was panting.
“You okay?” I said over the sirens.
I could feel him nod.
I was guiding us to the elevator, but when we got to the area where it was, Nick grabbed my arm and stumbled back, then slapped the wall beside a fingerprint reader, and it flashed and the door clicked open. He pulled me inside just as footsteps pounded by.
“Are you okay?” I hissed.
“Just…need to…rest.”
He was on one knee, rubbing his temple with his hand. “What did they do to you?” I asked.
“Just…tests and stuff.” He forced a small smile, then stood and pulled me out into the hall. This time, we went the opposite way; in the flickering red light, Nick nodded at a stairwell. We ran into it, and we climbed a few flights hand in hand. Tired as he was, Nick was still pulling me. I was feeling almost relaxed, glad we were covering ground, lulled by the pounding of our footfall, when a door opened off one of the floors and Sid stepped out. Nick flicked his fingers at Sid, and he roared and fell onto his knees, and we ran past.
“How’d you do that?”
Nick shook his head; in the dim light, I could see the sheen of sweat on his neck. “It’s okay. You can tell me later.”
“Crap!” I turned and jogged back toward Sid, searching his pockets for Nick’s whistle. I discovered it in the first one I checked, and when I ran back to Nick, I found him crouching. He stood quickly, giving me another tight smile, and we were gone.
We climbed and climbed. My legs shook terribly. My muscles tingled and my lungs burned. I didn’t think we’d ever make it to…where? How far was high enough? I didn’t even know.
The flashing lights and shrill buzzing were making me feel dizzy. Nick didn’t seem too steady, either. I was starting to feel faint when he pulled me through a door, and we were in a long, white hall—completely silent, with gray carpet and round wall globes and neat little clusters of leather chairs; peaceful and ordinary, like any corporate office in America.
34
Nick must have had a sense of where our captors were, because he led me to a trio of chairs around a table with a potted plant, and we sat down. He leaned over, grabbed my hand; his wide eyes searched mine. “Milo…did anyone hurt you?”
Tears welled in my eyes, and I felt silly, glancing down at my stolen lab coat and raw, bare feet.
“I’m okay.” I met his eyes. “Are you?”
He nodded, then looked over at the plant and rubbed his hair—where, I noticed, there were no stitches. In fact, his whole body was completely flawless and he was wearing a fresh pair of scrubs. “They…uh, they had some stuff rigged up to throw a wrench in some of my…um, plans.”
“Like…?”
“I couldn’t feel you.” I arched my brows, and he took his hand from mine; he wiped his palms on his knees, looking almost nervous. “Usually I can…kind of sense you. I mean, since I saw you again down there… And before then, at the cabin… I knew I could do it. But they did a couple of different things, to be sure I couldn’t get to you that way. So I didn’t know…how you were.”
His little speech was wrought with awkwardness, and finally I realized why.
“So you can get away from them. Clearly. But… Are you saying you were worried about me…so that’s why you didn’t break out?”
He nodded, suddenly reaching for my hand. He traced it with his fingers. “They told me a bunch of stuff…about you. I didn’t really believe them, but…” He shrugged.
“So you just let them…” I trailed off, now feeling my own awkwardness. In fact, the awkwardness around our little table had pretty much quadrupled.
I looked at Nick. The alien. Who liked me. The alien who’d played lab rat for me, because apparently they’d used me as a threat. Which meant….the people here knew he car
ed about me.
“How’d they know to mention me?”
He was looking at the floor, his fingers still tracing circles on my palm. His eyes flicked up. “In the beginning… When that stuff they shot me with wore off. It was a big dose…really big, but I wasn’t asleep for very long. But it was long enough… They said they’d—” his throat worked— “that they killed you. And they had some stuff hooked up so they could tell…it bothered me.”
“Wow.” My cheeks burned, and I almost pulled my hand away, but Nick’s fingers captured mine.
“I freaked you out.” His gaze implored, those brown eyes oh so serious. “It was worth the risk. On the off-chance that they meant what they said. I just wanted you to be safe, that’s all.”
I nodded. There was a big knot in my throat, one that was made up of shock and fear and gladness. I didn’t know how to do this with Nick, but then again, I didn’t think I would with anyone.