Losing Lila (17 page)

I didn’t want to hear it. Making small talk with a boy holding a gun, who would shoot me without a second thought if he knew what I was, wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities.

I squeezed past him. ‘I’m going to get a coffee,’ I said as politely as I could before starting to walk fast down the corridor.

‘Lila,’ he called out after me. I turned round, plastering a smile on my face. ‘I was just thinking, wondering really, would you like to get a coffee with me later?’

I stood there, in the middle of the corridor, trying to process his request. It seemed such a bizarre question given the circumstances. We were in the hushing lull of an intensive care unit. He was effectively guarding my brother, who was lying prisoner in a coma on the other side of the door. And I could, if I so wanted to, snatch the gun from his hands before he had time to react and turn it on him. Was he seriously asking me on a date?

I started to open my mouth, my brain formulating a weak excuse about Jack and my dad not letting me date anyone in uniform, when I realised I was staring a gift horse in the mouth. A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted gift horse. I was meant to be gathering information after all. Jonas was maybe the chink we were looking for.

‘Sure,’ I said to Jonas, smiling widely, ‘that would be nice.’

At lunchtime Sara arrived. She looked stressed. She was wearing a pale grey silk blouse and a pencil skirt with black high heels. She went straight to Jack and followed her usual routine, stroking his brow and taking his hand before kissing him. I was being so sceptical and unfair. Maybe she genuinely was the tragic girlfriend. I really hoped so because I didn’t want Jack to wake up from his coma and discover his girlfriend was an evil, two-faced psycho. It might affect his rehab.

‘Sara?’ I said, taking the chair opposite her.

She looked up at me and I saw again with a pang of guilt how tired she looked. The circles under her eyes were darkening, making her face look grey, while her eyes themselves were pink-rimmed. She looked like she’d been up crying all night. I felt my words catch in my throat. It would be so good to tell her everything. I pressed my lips together to stop myself. I was being impulsive. I’d promised Alex no reckless behaviour.

Aside from the fact Sara could be one of Richard Stirling’s evil minions, we were bugged. I had found the little metal splinter inside my jeans again. God only knew who was breaking into the house every day and rooting through my clothes – hopefully not Jonas – because despite my daily laundry missions, they kept on reappearing.

I needed to weigh my words carefully. ‘Do you think Jack will be OK?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, he’ll be fine. He has to be.’ There were tears glistening in her eyes. She suddenly let out a sob which startled me. ‘You have no idea how scared I was, Lila, when they brought him back to the base. When he disappeared, I was terrified. He didn’t tell me where he was going. I guess he didn’t trust me.’ She wiped her eyes with a tissue and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

‘And then, when we found out they’d broken out the prisoners and taken Rachel . . . I came under so much scrutiny. They thought I must have known. That I was a part of it. I told them I didn’t know anything. I’m not even sure they believe me now.’ She rested her head in her hands.

‘But you didn’t have anything to do with it,’ I said.

‘I know. But I wish,’ she paused, looking up and holding my gaze, ‘I wish that Jack had trusted me. I’d do anything for Jack,’ she said, her bottom lip trembling. ‘Anything.’

I felt my heart ratchet up a notch. ‘Do you know about my mum?’ I asked, taking a deep breath. It was innocuous enough as questions go – I wasn’t asking her straight up whether she knew my mum was being held and experimented on. I wanted to see if there’d be some kind of spark, something registering on Sara’s face that she knew about Mum being alive, but her face stayed blankly innocent and she simply asked, ‘What about her?’

‘About what happened to her?’ I said.

‘I know why she was killed,’ Sara answered guardedly, frowning at me as if she wasn’t sure she understood the question. ‘I know that Jack and Alex joined the Unit to find her killers. And that Jack would do anything to stop them. As would I.’ Again with the long stare.

I sat back in my chair and looked at Jack. If Sara did know about my mum being held by the Unit, she deserved an Oscar for this performance. It was flawless. But why, then, was my instinct fighting against my desire to tell her everything? Was it just because there was too much at stake? Or because we were bugged? Or was it simply that I didn’t believe her?

My dad was staring at me as if I’d just waltzed into the room speaking fluent Japanese and wearing a clown costume.

‘He asked you for coffee?’ he spluttered.

‘Don’t have an aneurysm, Dad, it’s just a coffee.’

‘Er, well . . .’

My dad had never had to deal with the issue of me and boys before because I’d never had a boyfriend – until now. But he didn’t know about Alex. True, we’d skipped the whole movie, popcorn, first base, prom thing, but Alex still qualified as my boyfriend. Maybe. It wasn’t as if we’d had time to discuss it. Perhaps one day we’d get to do something normal like go on a real date. And act like we were a normal couple as opposed to a mutant teenager with mind-control issues and a special forces operative trained to kill me.

‘It’s not serious,’ I whispered to my dad, aware that Jonas was stationed on the other side of the door.

‘Yes, right, well . . .’ I could see my dad was struggling to cope with the idea of me and boys in the same sentence let alone in the same room, drinking coffee. ‘I guess that’s fine. I mean, at least you’ll be safe. You’re not going off the base, are you?’

‘No, Dad, we’ll stay right here. Just the cafeteria.’

‘OK, then.’ He nodded at me and I squirmed like a worm in a Petri dish. I wondered what kind of a reaction I’d get from him if I told him where I’d been and what I’d been doing with Alex just a few days ago.

I bent to say goodbye to Jack. Still beeping. Still unresponsive. Then I opened the door. Jonas was there waiting, gun slung across his chest.

‘Hi, Lila,’ he said, beaming at me. Again I was struck by the contrast between his boyish smile and the huge black machine gun he was holding against his chest. He looked like a five-year-old wearing a GI Joe costume. Why did they need to recruit someone so young? Then it struck me that Jack and Alex had barely been older when the Unit had recruited them.

‘Hey,’ I said back.

‘I just have to wait to be relieved,’ he said, pointing at the door.

‘OK, I’ll go and order coffee. See you down there,’ I smiled. I hoped the smile was warm and flirty, but I had a feeling I looked more like I’d swallowed my own vomit.

The cafeteria was on the ground floor. Ten or so plastic tables and a coffee concession stand to one side. I saw Dr Roberts at a far table. He smiled over at me before carrying on a conversation with a couple of nurses.

I bought some coffee and then on a whim some cookies. I didn’t think I could actually find the words to flirt with Jonas so I’d just give him the cookies – like a third-grader. I didn’t know how to flirt. That much had been proved with regards to my failed attempts to seduce Alex over the last few years, not just the last few weeks. And besides, it felt wrong. So wrong. Even with the mitigating circumstances it felt like a betrayal.

A gun appeared on the table – on top of the cookies. It seemed symbolic, but I couldn’t work out how. I automatically scanned the gun for the safety catch, thinking how strange it was that a couple of weeks ago Alex had had to show me how to hold a gun and aim straight and already I felt like a pro.

‘Um, do you always bring your gun on dates?’ I said, looking up at Jonas.

‘Is that what this is? A date?’ he asked, flashing a huge white smile at me.

For a moment I felt really sorry for him. I was being so unfair using him like this. Then I remembered who he was working for and the guilt evaporated.

Jonas dropped into the seat, moving his gun off the table and resting it upright against the table leg. I pushed his coffee across the table towards him. ‘So, how’s your brother?’ he asked.

‘He’s OK, I think.’

‘I hear your dad’s starting work for the Unit. Cool.’

Yeah, it was really, really cool
.
‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘What’s he working on?’ Jonas asked.

I paused for a second. I had to assume that as Jonas was a lower rank than Alex or Jack, he probably didn’t know that much, if anything, about the real work the Unit were doing.

‘He doesn’t really tell me much. I’m not sure,’ I shrugged.

‘You know,’ Jonas said, leaning across the table, and letting his voice drop, ‘I heard the other day that they’re doing tests on them.’

I swallowed some coffee and it burnt my tongue.

‘Demos and his people – when the Unit catches them. They’re testing them to find a way of fixing them.’

‘Really?’ I asked, anger flooding through my body. I looked at the cookie and it moved a fraction of a centimetre across the table. My heart dived after it.
Damn it.
I looked up, terrified. But Jonas hadn’t noticed, his eyes were fixed on my face.

‘So, what was he like?’

‘What was who like?’ I stammered.

‘You were with him, right? Demos?’ He said his name in a hushed tone as though Demos was a celebrity he couldn’t believe I’d met. ‘What’s he like? I can’t believe you actually got to, like, meet him. The Unit’s been trying to catch him for years. He’s like the big boss. Did you get to talk to him?’

‘Well, he kidnapped me so I guess that counts as meeting him.’

‘What did he do to you? Did he use his power on you?’

‘Yes.’

His eyes widened. ‘Wow, what did it feel like?’

‘It wasn’t very nice,’ I said, remembering the feeling I’d had of being lassoed round the ankles and slammed against an invisible concrete block.

‘How did you get away?’

‘He was busy fighting off the Unit. He couldn’t hold everyone so we managed to escape.’

Jonas was listening, bug-eyed, his mouth hanging open.

‘Were you there?’ I asked. ‘At Joshua Tree?’

‘I was in the third vehicle,’ he said. ‘They turned it over. We were all inside. It was nasty.’

I flushed. ‘But you were OK?’ It had been weighing on me. Just a little. Not as much as my mum or Jack or the thought of getting caught were weighing on me, but the knowledge that I’d hurt people, that Alex had maybe killed people, was there – a monster lurking in the recess of my mind, prodding me with angry fingers, trying to make me face it. So far I’d kept my back turned on it. There was just too much else to deal with.

‘I was fine,’ he smiled at me, throwing back his shoulders. ‘A couple of the others in my team came off a bit worse. A broken leg and a broken collarbone, that sort of thing. But Alpha team got hit hard. They lost three men.’

His eyes were shining bright with tears and I looked away and started fiddling with the cookies, breaking them apart and crumbling them onto the table. Alex had tried to tell me there were always casualties in war. That this was a war. That he’d have shot every single one of them if it meant protecting me. His words had registered on some level but a remote one. All I cared about at that point were Jack and my mum. The men from the Unit didn’t figure at all in my reckoning. They hadn’t figured at all until now.

But here was the reality. People were dead. They were dead because of me and because of Alex. People who didn’t know the truth – who were just cannon fodder for Stirling Enterprises.

No, I reminded myself sternly, they weren’t dead because of me or because of Alex. They were dead because of one man and one man only – Richard Stirling.

I focused back in. Jonas appeared to have blinked away the film of tears and was now describing the carnage I’d caused.

‘. . . totally destroyed the Humvees. No idea they could do that. It’s amazing. Just imagine being able to do that. Just by looking at something.’

Yeah. Just imagine.
I sipped my coffee.

‘We only got one of theirs.’ Jonas was still talking.

A scalding splash of coffee spilled over my hand. That was Ryder he was talking about.
Ryder
. I wanted to shake him by the arms and yell Ryder’s name in his face, but I didn’t. I sat there and ground my teeth and tried not to let go of my precarious control.

‘We took a giant hit. We’re down to just fourteen men. They’re training some more at the moment, lots more, I hear another four teams, but they won’t be operational for another week or so.’

I looked down at my coffee and gave it a stir. The odds were not moving in our favour.

‘Where do they recruit them from?’

‘They take the best of the recruits from out of special ops training.’ His chest puffed out. ‘We’re the best of the best.’

I thought of Suki and Nate and Amber and the others. They might have mind powers but it wasn’t going to be enough. They weren’t soldiers.

I gave Jonas a once-over. He looked like a high school quarterback not like a soldier who’d completed special ops training and come out top of the class.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Nineteen,’ he answered, jutting out his chin, ‘nearly twenty. And like I told you, we’re the finest trained Marine force in the world. You’ve got the best protection you could want.’

Huh. Great
.
That was great
. I tried to look relieved and not utterly destroyed by the news.

‘And the guys in the lab are making a breakthrough,’ he added because he obviously thought I still looked panic-stricken.

I looked up. ‘They are?’

‘Yeah, so I hear.’

‘What kind of a breakthrough?’

‘I’m not sure, some way of being able to trace them better – so we can find them easier. That’s the biggest problem. They just stay one step ahead all the time; we can’t get close.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah, not sure what it is, but it’s gonna be big. The guys are all talking about it.’

My stomach lurched. ‘You don’t have any idea what it could be?’ I said, trying not to sound like I gave a damn when really I was this close to snatching up his gun with my mind and holding it against his head until he told me or went away and found out.