Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (4 page)

“Don’t know, Girl Genius. I run
from
trouble, not toward it. You up to fly, Cap?”

Still weakened from the mind control, I put on a brave face. “I can do it, as long as we land someplace not too far away that has food.”

“Dinner’s on me,” Sasha said. “It’s the least I can do.”

We stayed close and decided to eat at Lampinelli’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant that had great pizza and served endless garlic knots as an appetizer. All three of us were ravenous. Sasha sat across from me, and Rhapsody was at my right in the lacquered wooden booth so I could see the television – the Giants were just finishing up an extra-innings overtime baseball game.

Our waitress, a light-skinned girl with mini-braids, approached us. “Welcome to Lampinelli’s.” She gave us her name and handed us menus. “Can I start you off with something to drink?”

“Water,” Rhapsody croaked. Using our powers made us thirsty, too. “Please.”

Soon we were brought three waters and a basket with four garlic knots in it. Sasha and I said grace and Rhapsody did the Catholic cross thing. We dug in, taking a knot each and splitting the fourth one into thirds. In less than a minute all three of us had drank full glasses of water and polished off a basket of bread. It surprised me, because Sasha hadn’t been able to use her cloning abilities, so she shouldn’t have been as hungry as Rhapsody and I were.

Rhapsody put a fist at her lips and let out a tiny burp. “That was embarrassing.”

We opened the plastic menus with red fabric on the outside and at the folds. Instantly I knew what I wanted. The girls, of course, flipped through pages and took longer to choose.

Our waitress returned, dumbfounded we had eaten so fast. “More bread?”

Sasha opened her wallet and palmed a twenty dollar bill. “Say, you get what, like two dollars an hour plus tips?”

She couldn’t have been much older than we were. “Yeah, something like that.”

Sasha extended her hand with the bill sticking from between her fingers. “Here. My friends and I are going to eat a lot and we’re going to run up a good bill. Don’t ask us questions, just bring us what we ask for quickly, and I’ll make it worth your while at the end.”

Hand on her hip, the waitress took the money and stuffed it into her apron pocket. “Girl, I’ve got student loans. Let me know what you need and I’ll hook you right on up.”

Not one to be shy, I started off. “Can I get an extra-large pizza with pepperoni, meatballs, steak, and ground beef? And a Sprite. Lots of Sprite.”

The waitress looked at me as she scribbled down my order. I hadn’t ordered two cows with a side of fries, so what was the big deal? Regular dudes eat whole pizzas by themselves, too.

“I’ll take a pepperoni and sausage calzone,” Rhapsody said. “Coke for me.”

Sasha closed her menu. “Meatball sub with extra parm. And lemonade to drink.”

The waitress took our menus. Soon she returned with three baskets overflowing with steaming hot bread. She refilled our water and hurried off to get our drinks.

Being invulnerable has its advantages. I popped a whole one in my mouth and happily chewed. “I like this girl,” I mumbled.

Talking around a mouth full of garlic knot, Rhapsody said, “So, this is how the other side lives, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

Rhapsody gained a sudden interest in what was left of her roll. “Nothing.”

Scowling at her reluctance to answer, Sasha covered Rhapsody’s hand with hers. “No, really. What is it?”

Rhapsody grew silent, still chewing. She took a long drink from her water glass. “When Pápa took us out we split a meal three ways. Or I was told to order the cheapest thing on the menu. One time his rich brother Harper took us out and laughed at me for eating an appetizer like a meal.”

Her voice broke in and out talking about her childhood. She didn’t ask to be poor, like I didn’t ask to have rage blackouts and Sasha didn’t ask to have an alcoholic mother. They were things we had to deal with, and they sucked.

“Other side,” Rhapsody repeated. “It’s nice to feel…respected.”

“Even if it’s because you have money and nothing else?” Sasha asked.

Rhapsody chewed on a garlic knot, probably to hide her true feelings. “Respect is respect.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Ray made me feel the same way when he threw money around. He had debts, too, but his were nuisances and ours were anchors around our necks.

I buried myself in the game on the television as a distraction. They noticed I had zoned out and continued talking to each other. At the bottom of the thirteenth inning, our food arrived and the game was interrupted for a special news bulletin.

“C’mon,” I said, my mouth stuffed with smoking hot pizza. I hated news bulletins during games, and most of the time they were for stupid things like minor highway accidents.

Rather than wait for our server, I went over to Sasha’s side, stood up on the booth’s red padding, changed the channel to an all-day sports station, and sat back down. Both Sasha and Rhapsody stared. I ignored them and continued eating my pizza as fast as I could chew and swallow it. Rhapsody had gotten through half of her calzone before slowing down and Sasha picked at the remainder of her sub.

“I don’t know what I was thinking, eating all these carbs.” Rhapsody wiped her hands on a cloth napkin. “I think I feel the fat creeping straight into my thighs and butt cheeks.”

Sasha snorted so hard lemonade came out of her nose. We all had a laugh. We needed one.

CHAPTER FOUR

another hospital visit goes wrong

The jokes continued through two rounds of tiramisu and coffee, which we drank to keep our energy up after eating so much. With a hand wave, Sasha signaled our server that after sixty-five minutes of nonstop eating we were ready to settle up.

While stacking our greasy plates and silverware on her bar tray, she laid the paper bill next to Sasha and asked us, “Did you hear about the hospital fire? Terrible thing.”

I hesitated, not wanting to ask. That’s what exploded and caused the smoke.

Sipping my Sprite down to the ice, I finally gathered up the courage to ask, “North…was it…North Hospital?”

“Yeah.” She glanced at the television facing me. On it, a trio of talking heads debated tomorrow’s preseason football game between the Raiders and the Eagles. “You didn’t know?”

Rhapsody grabbed my right hand and squeezed it underneath the wooden table. From everything that had happened to us over the past few months, we knew this must have something to do with Debra. Hospitals just don’t explode for no reason, and for months, nothing that’s happened to me was an accident. Not even discovering the emerald.

The person who detonated the explosive had to know me. I suspected Selby. Killing a large group of innocent people just to get to me and Debra had his sociopathic mark all over it.

I let go of Rhapsody’s shaking fingers, for fear I’d squeeze them accidentally and shatter her bones. After the provenance crystals exploded, finding out my stepmom was alive filled me with indescribable hope. I couldn’t lose her again. Not now, when I thought I already had, when I tried preparing myself to be without her. So much – I’d already lost so much.

Fearing for the worst, the three of us slid out of the booth and approached the next television airing coverage of the disaster. The blast had torn through three levels of the hospital’s west wing. Thick clouds of black smoke and orange flames continued billowing from it towards the sky while fire hoses cascaded streams of water onto them.

They’d think it was a terrorist attack, which was just as bad as the truth. “Firefighting crews have been on the scene for the past hour battling the multiple-alarm inferno,” said the five o’ clock news anchorwoman. “Thus far the flames have been nearly impossible to contain. We will continue to update this situation as it develops.”

I needed to help with the recovery efforts. It was my fault, after all. The more I thought about it, the bigger my guilt grew.
Shouldn’t I help?
I can make a difference
. Debra could be in there fighting for her life because of me. Again.

She could be dead, a charred skeleton by now. Without a suit or a mask to hide my identity, if I did do something, good or bad, I’d be exposed. Everyone would know about me. Then they’d figure out there were others. The uncertainty was killing me. I had to know for sure. I had already decided what to do, but I said it out loud for my friends to hear it.

“I’m going.” I headed for the door.

Rhapsody rushed out after me. “Wait for me,” she shouted at my back. “I’m going, too.”

In the distance the hospital’s levels continued to burn. The powerful scent tickled the inside of my nostrils. Rhapsody stood beside me and coughed so much I patted her on the back. She pulled her shirt up to shield her nose from the fumes and squinted her eyes. Gray embers drifted like flower petals whatever way the slight breeze blew them. And we were miles away from the site. God only knew what kind of destruction was waiting for us at ground zero.

Once Sasha settled the bill, she emerged from inside Lampinelli’s with a water-soaked white cloth napkin at her face. Noticing that Rhapsody was choking, she handed it to her and went back into the restaurant for another. I’d never seen either of them be so nice to the other before. It was way stranger than when they were fighting all of the time.

As we waited for Sasha to return a late model black van swerved around the corner to our immediate left and made a beeline for us.

The Collective’s van. Since Courtney had let us go they were coming for us.

I tried to fly off, but my sneakers were glued to the ground. My muscles had frozen. I glanced over at Rhapsody, who was almost invisible. When Sasha came forward, neither of us could warn her to stay out of sight. She, too, became a statue.

The van careened, speeding around traffic to get to us. I expected it to suddenly stop. Then the side door would open, and Hughes would jump out and grab us. Camuto, an Asian woman who had all the humor of a knock-knock joke, wouldn’t dirty her hands doing it. They were all scientists, but she seemed to be more natural at it.

Instead, the air around us turned golden yellow, like a swirling cloud of magic pollen. I blinked, and the next thing I knew we had been teleported into the back of the van. Hughes had done it. He sat, strapped into a chair on the wall nearest us. Camuto drove.

Experiencing the nausea I typically get when someone teleports me I felt the pain from my surgeries. Keeling over, I used a piece of equipment bolted to the floor for support. Hughes had used goshenite isotopes to suppress our powers, which had made me vulnerable.

The facts about what they had done to my mom, Rhapsody’s dad, and so many other people were not lost on me. Hughes must HAVE seen the disgust in my face because he moved his feet back like I might puke on them. A salt and pepper goatee covered his chin. Like Courtney, he had advanced in years. It must have been the time he spent without a piece of heliodor that did it. Camuto must be older, too. Of course, aging is relative to them, because they’re almost two hundred years old. The last time I saw him before the source crystals exploded, he looked to be about forty or forty-five. Now he looked more like he was a fifty, fifty-five, or maybe sixty-year-old.

“How did you find us?” I groaned. The pizza and garlic knots in my stomach were only a belch away from making a reappearance.

He leaned his head forward. “We never
lost
you. It's not like you were exactly stealthy.”

I wanted to crack his teeth for watching us for as long as they had at Reject High. They hadn’t come forward until after my first leap into the air, when I broke the sound barrier.

Rhapsody looked around. “Where’s Courtney?”

“At the explosion site, looking for you, I’d imagine,” Camuto said from the driver’s seat.

Of course they knew about the hospital and why I wanted to go there. That meant, like all the other times, they were withholding information from us. “What do you know about it?”

Hughes handed us each a new bodysuit wrapped in plastic. “Don’t be shy. Suit up.”

The new armored suits were snug with our clothes on. and we could barely move in them. Sitting on the floor, Sasha and Rhapsody shimmied out of theirs first. I pretended to busy myself with mine so that I didn’t look at their bodies. I kept my eyes on Rhapsody’s face, just in case I was tempted.

When Camuto stopped on a dime at a traffic light we slid forward a few inches. When we passed the Arts Association Building and the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee shop on the corner, I could tell we were closing in on the hospital. Soon we’d come to a roadblock and would have to get out.

The bodysuits were sleek, smoother than the ones we had worn before on previous missions. The same metal armor shell texture, they had a purplish shine to them. The masks still hung from the back, like a hood, with the breathing apparatus for when we were in the air. Something new had been connected to the area around the ears in the mask – a transmission system?

Satisfied, probably because we hadn’t asked questions, Hughes explained. “According to our surveillance, twenty-five total patients are missing. The police aren’t releasing names to the press until their next-of-kin is notified. Debra Desiree Brown might be on that list.”

I’d never known Debra’s middle name before, except that it started with a “D.”

Rhapsody rolled her eyes. “Really, the ‘kidnap-or-kill-a-person-you’re-close-to’ scheme? Couldn’t King or whoever cook up something different to try?”

Hughes jerked his head back. “Why? Didn’t Jason give up the provenance emerald in trade for your life? Didn’t he almost ditch a mission to go after Sasha and Selby? Wouldn’t he do it for Debra? It’s effective. It’s exactly what we would’ve done.”

Right. Because they’re all from the same school of how to blackmail and murder people.

“Then why didn’t you all protect her while Jason was in a coma?” Sasha asked. “He did save the three of you and prevent a nuclear explosion from destroying the world.”

Camuto accelerated and turned at the next two-way street. We must have hit a roadblock. The hospital was straight ahead. “It’s nowhere near that simple,” she said. “King has more people at his disposal. We can only do so much, the three of us.”

“But you have all the source crystals,” Rhapsody argued back. “One of you could’ve been there and stopped him from nearly killing her. Unless it’s what you wanted…”

“Of course not.” Camuto sucked her teeth. “Her death would serve us no purpose.”

I clenched my fist.
Dying is okay as long as it serves a purpose for them?
I should have killed King when I had the chance, yanked his heart out and stopped it from beating myself. Then, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. “He’s not dead.”

Hughes said, “You don’t get to survive as long as we have by being easy to kill.”

The van halted on an empty side street. Above us were towering brick apartment complexes – the perfect camouflage for a takeoff attempt. The vehicle’s side door opened automatically and we filed out from the back, Hughes included. In the afternoon light we looked like we were wearing purple wetsuits for surfing. This was hardly stealth.

I nodded toward Sasha and then Rhapsody. “They need emeralds,” I informed him.

He pulled two green emerald necklaces from his pocket. “Reinforced tungsten, like Jason’s. Custom lock. Once it’s on, it’s not coming off.”

Both girls hesitated before snapping them together around their necks. The necklaces fit more like chokers. There wasn’t enough slack between the chokers and the girls’ skin to become a ligature if someone tried to strangle them with it.

Hughes pointed at me. “Find Stafford up there. The rest will play itself out.”

I didn’t like the way that sounded.

Sasha tugged at my elbow. “Wait,” she said. “How are we supposed to contact you without cell phones?”

“We’ll be circling the perimeter,” Camuto said from inside the vehicle. “Use the

Bluetooth inside your masks to keep in touch.”

Down in my gut, which Debra insisted was my “spirit,” I felt uneasy. A quick glance at Rhapsody’s and Sasha’s faces revealed they had the same kind of qualms about this. The Collective didn’t give anything without wanting something in return. What was their plan? We’d have to find out after freeing Debra.

With Sasha holding my left arm and Rhapsody on my right, I flew straight for the hospital. The outside of what looked like the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors was gutted and still ablaze. The towering flames blasted us from a considerable distance away. We slowed down and circled the building. I had to remember the heat affected the girls but not me because of my invulnerability.

Rhapsody ghosted us into the intact part of the fourth level. Doctors and nurses rushed through us, transporting patients with serious injuries. Some of them had pink blistering burns covering their bodies. I gagged at the sight of a woman whose forearm had been completely burned through to the bone.

In the midst of the ruckus we found a supply closet. The space should have smelled like alcohol and freshly-washed clothing but didn’t. I stood guard as the girls slid into sets of green scrubs and booties. When they finished, I hurried to do the same. None of us looked like doctors, especially Rhapsody with her Goth makeup and spiked hairstyle.

She caught sight of herself in a mirror on the back of the door and chuckled. “Maybe I should stay invisible,” she said with a slight frown. “I look like a meth head.”

Sasha handed her some alcohol wipes and a rubber band from a shelf. “Wipe off your makeup and tie back your hair. You’ll look fine.”

While Rhapsody fixed herself up, I itched to get out there. There was no guarantee, with or without Courtney’s help, that we’d find Debra. Still, we had to make an attempt. “We should separate,” Sasha suggested. “My clones can cover multiple floors.”

Nothing about that sounded like a good idea. “No way. You’ll spread yourself too thin and won’t be able to bring them in from a distance if there’s trouble. We don’t split up. Period.”

Sasha countered my argument with a better point. “Debra could be on one of the eleven floors left. There are more than nine hundred patients. We have to split up, Jason.”

“On this one,” Rhapsody put a finger at her naked lip. “I have to agree with Girl Genius. You can’t have us both, Cap.”

Scratching the back of my head, I opted for honesty. “Fine. I’ll take the damaged levels. Sasha and her clones take eight through eleven and four. Rhapsody, you handle three to the ground floor and the ambulances headed out. If you find Debra, grab her and ghost out of here. Sasha can call one of us if she needs to. We’ll meet back at the van in twenty minutes.”