Fear My Mortality (28 page)

Cheyne didn’t seem to know where he should shoot. The gun traveled a wild arc from one spot to the next, and there was no way I was letting him hit Michael. Not when
this
gun could kill him.

“Hey!” I snatched up a scalpel and threw it at the officer’s round face. It sliced through his muscled forearm as he flung it up to protect himself.

The wound kept bleeding. It took forever for his skin to seal itself.

My eyes widened. He was a slow healer …

I didn’t waste any more time. I picked up a pair of scissors and threw those too, followed by a pair of heavy tongs that hit Cheyne across his head and made him yelp.

He trained the gun on me, moving in my direction, but the indecision on his face didn’t escape me. He wasn’t supposed to kill me.

I waited until he was close enough and then I raced toward him. Surprise broke across his face. At the last moment, I skipped to the side. I thrust my hand out, snatching for the gun. My fingers closed over it.

Cheyne yanked it upward, jerking my arm toward him, so I lost my balance, collided with him, and we crashed at the foot of the kid’s bed. The sharp scent of oily tar filled my lungs. I wondered if it would only take one shot to light us both up. The gun jammed between his throat and the crook of my arm.

A
crack
jolted through me.

The sound blanketed everything else. A blur raced past as I tried to raise my head. Somebody running. Toward me or away, I couldn’t tell. Cheyne lay partly under and partly over me, a horrifying tangle of heavy limbs, his big body suffocating me. Someone pulled me upward and Michael shouted my name. He hauled me in the direction of the door.

I strained toward the room. “We have to help the others.”

“Ava, no. Dad will be back any minute with backup.”

I couldn’t leave them. I raced to Thomas’s bed, assessing the bullet wound in his leg. I figured that the mortality bullet was still stuck in there and it had to come out or else he’d die anyway, or go funny in the head. I snatched up the pair of pliers I’d thrown at Cheyne, wondering how deep the bullet had gone.

The tension in Michael’s body was palpable, but he raced over and pressed on the wound. I jabbed the pliers inside it, grabbed something and pulled. The mortality bullet appeared, and I dropped it onto the floor next to Cheyne. It lay next to his face, an empty metal teardrop against his cheek. He remained prone, unmoving, not even blinking, only his chest rising and falling. I wondered if that was what a coma looked like, but right now I didn’t care.

“How do we wake Thomas up?”

Michael ran to the head of the bed, pressing buttons. “It’s this one.” He stabbed at a button on the machine.

Thomas’s eyes flashed open, and Michael turned left to free Jeremiah. A shout filled the room as the other guy sat up, punching out, hitting air as Michael ran to the older man.

I waited long enough to see Thomas’s bullet wound heal and place my hand on his forehead with a reassuring smile. As he sat up, the syringe that Michael’s dad had held rolled off the bed and stopped at my foot. Black liquid like luminescent pearls filled my vision.

It was a syringe full of nectar.

I stared at it. If Michael’s dad had nectar ready, then that meant … he was going to give Thomas the nectar after they shot him. He was going to heal him.

I searched around for the cap to place over the sharp tip, and found it in the folds of the bed, then I shoved the syringe into my pocket. This nectar didn’t have a tracking device in it.

Then I raced to the next bed—Mrs. Hubert’s—punching buttons and pulling out lines.

Jeremiah reached Thomas, picking him up and casting a wild look at us. Michael was busy freeing the older man, leaping out of the way when he woke up in the same way Jeremiah did—with a flying fist.

Jeremiah’s eyes widened. “Granddad!” He raced to the bed on the far left, with Thomas clutched tight, reaching the older man in a few strides. “It’s really you.”

I saw the resemblance immediately—blond hair, broad chest. The older man grabbed Jeremiah and Thomas in a bear hug, his arms going around both of them. Then he shoved his grandsons back with tears in his eyes. “What’s happening? Where are we?”

I didn’t see how Jeremiah responded because a tug on my arm told me that Mrs. Hubert was free. She wobbled as she sat up, but the weakness seemed momentary. The color flushed back to her cheeks and the strength in her hand was unmistakable as she grabbed my shoulder. “What are you doing here, dear?”

I dropped a quick kiss on her cheek, remembering her old lady scent from another life. There was no way I could even begin to answer that question, so I said, “Be safe.”

That was all I had time for before Michael grabbed my hand and pulled me to the door. Behind us, Cheyne was a mound on the floor, and Jeremiah and his granddad were already on the move. They hovered over him and Jeremiah picked up the mortality weapon. He was going to use it, but his grandfather grabbed his hand and took it away, giving his grandson what looked like silent instructions. They strode toward us, Jeremiah with his brother in tow and their grandfather with the gun.

Michael said, “My dad will come back with reinforcements. They won’t let you out of here easily. You have to move fast. Can you get the old lady out?”

“Who’s an old lady?” Mrs. Hubert demanded. She had a wicked-looking wrench in one hand, tapping it on the other.

Michael shot a look at me, and I shrugged.

“Whatever you are, you should stay away from us. We’re … ” Michael seemed to search for the right word. “We’re targets.”

“They won’t get us again. Don’t you worry about that,” Jeremiah said. “I wasn’t unconscious for the whole trip here like they thought I was. I know how to get us out. And I will.”

“Good.” Michael was already pulling me to the right along the corridor and the grip he had on my arm didn’t budge. The others disappeared in the opposite direction until I couldn’t see them anymore. I was glad we weren’t going that way. I never wanted to see that room again, the room where Reid still lay.

Michael didn’t look back as he hurried me along, urging me into a jog. His hand was warm in mine, made more so by the constant small tingles of energy rafting from his skin to mine.

“We have to find the right door,” he said. “I was blindfolded when they brought me in, but they took it off right at the end. We went through these circular corridors. Kind of like circles within circles, connected by doorways. One of these doors has to lead to a new corridor. Do you still have that key? It’ll be a skeleton key.”

I touched my neck where the chain rested, trying not to remember the person we’d taken it from, trying not to think of the years he would have lived if not for me. But what would he have done with those years?

Michael ran his left hand along the wall as we walked, feeling with his fingers and peering at every lump and bump. I slowed down with him, watching to see what he was doing. “What are we looking for?”

“A keyhole without a door.”

There were bumps in the wall of the room I’d slept in the night before. Objects had slid out of hidden, seamless openings. I hadn’t noticed they were there despite spending the whole night in that room, so I didn’t know how we would spot such concealed indentations while running. We didn’t have time to look carefully. “We could have missed it already.”

“Yep, but if we miss one, we won’t miss the next. There has to be a signal of some sort. Otherwise, they’d never find it themselves.”

I glanced to the left, to a door with a clear glass panel. My eyes glazed over it. “Nothing here.”

“Keep looking.”

A crash far behind us made me jump. I wondered if Jeremiah and the others really would be okay. Michael’s dad had raised the alarm by now. The determined way Jeremiah had pointed the gun at Cheyne, though, I knew anything was possible. “When we find the right door, we’re leaving it open, okay?”

“That’s a really bad idea, Ava. The officers will know where we’ve gone.”

“What if this is the only way out? We have to give the others a chance.”

He gritted his teeth. Something lit behind his eyes. Worry, frustration, and maybe just a little bit of admiration. “You really care about them.”

We passed another door with a glass panel and I glanced inside it. It contained a bunch of computers. “Why don’t you?”

“Because I care more about you.” He stopped suddenly, looking carefully at a crack in the wall. It must have been nothing because he shook his head. “This is impossible. We’re wasting time.”

I was still thinking about what he’d just said, that he cared about me. I allowed myself a small moment, a quiet pause where my heart warmed with the thought that this boy standing next to me was my friend. Perhaps the only friend I had.

I tugged on his arm, not wanting to break the moment, but needing to speak. “Michael. Your dad back there. I don’t think he was going to kill Thomas. He had a syringe full of nectar in his hand.”

Michael stopped, a frown forming on his face.

I said, “I think he was going to bring Thomas back.”

Michael was quiet, but he shook his head. “It still doesn’t make it right. I saw what that stuff did for you, healing you, but we don’t know for sure that it could help someone once they’ve died. If he was testing it, then he didn’t know either, and he was willing to take that risk.”

I reached for his hand again. “You said your dad was looking for a cure for your brother. Maybe he thinks this is it.”

He shook his head. “I know he’s trying. He’s been trying ever since my brother was born and when Mom left, it broke him. I don’t hate him for that. It’s the way he’s doing it that makes me sick. Forcing you to come here, using that stuff to try to control you. And then there’s all the things he didn’t tell me, that he still isn’t telling me.” He took both my hands in his. “Ava, if he’d told me about Josh … your brother would still be alive. I’ll never forgive Dad for that.”

I fought the tears burning behind my eyes as I thought of Josh and how hard he’d tried to save me from all of this. “I know.”

After that, we walked in silence until another door loomed on our left. This one was glazed and patterned so I couldn’t see in.

“There has to be a way that they tell where things are … Wait. Stop.” I pulled Michael back to the door with the colored glass and edged closer to it. “Look.”

“What?”

“Did you ever see one of those optical illusion images? You know, there’s one with a black and white picture and one minute it’s an hourglass, and then it’s two people looking at each other?” I tapped the glass panel. “This is a map.”

“It’s a bunch of swirls.”

I jabbed my finger at a particular spot. “It’s the curve of the corridor. See this splash. That’s where we are. See this other line, stretching perpendicular. It’s opposite us.” I pushed past him as he peered into the glass with a puzzled look on his face.

There it was, on the opposite wall—a bump. I pressed it and a small, round panel slid open. A lock glided out. I turned to Michael with my best game show host impersonation. “Ta-da.”

“Huh. What do you know?”

I turned the key in the lock and pushed. Michael stepped inside and I glanced back at the glass panel. It looked like only part of the map, the beginning of one, but I knew what I was looking for now. We left the door open behind us as we ran down the new corridor, looking for a glass panel with an exit marked on it.

We ran for what seemed like half a mile, the corridor always pulling slightly to the left in the circle that Michael had talked about. We found another exit to a new corridor, and then another, and with each one, the curve in the walls became less distinct, larger as we moved closer to the outside of the building.

Michael pulled me on. “We must be close to the outer corridor.”

This time we ran for close to an hour, stopping to assess the glazed panels, which showed the way out always in the same direction, but as we followed the curve of the hallway, I realized that something was wrong. I stopped, puffing, standing outside the latest in a string of panels. “I’m sure we’ve been here before.”

“I’d believe that.” Michael had barely broken a sweat.

I frowned at the colors on the glass panel. “I’m not reading this right. All the maps say the way out is this way, but we never get any closer to it. We’ve been going around and around. Hang on … ” I peered at the panel again, following the curves with my finger. “It looks like this is pointing inward again, unless … Oh!”

“What is it?”

I looked up at the ceiling. I pointed.

Michael ran his hand through his hair. “They really don’t want anyone getting out of here easy. C’mon. Up on my shoulders.”

I bit my lip. “Um … ”

“It’ll be fine, star girl. Time to fly again.” He knelt down and I clambered onto his shoulders, clinging for dear life to his head. I reached upward, touching the ceiling with my palm, balancing there. Little shocks traveled up my legs through the rips in my jeans where his bare shoulders touched my skin, making me shiver. I stretched for the protrusion in the ceiling. “Do you seriously think this is how these guys come to work every day?”