Once We Were (28 page)

I threw a glance toward the bathroom door, but the chip’s weak light wouldn’t make it all the way out there. It was scarcely visible through our pants pocket.

The chip was barely pulsing, a good three seconds between flashes.

Addie said.

Addie and I came simultaneously to the same conclusion. I knew because her rush of hope and fear only compounded mine.

Hally. Lissa.

“Eva?” Sabine called through the door. “You’ve got one minute before—”

“Before
what
?” I snapped.

Hally and Lissa were out on the street somewhere. Close by. Looking for us—because why else would they have Ryan’s chip?

In our hand, the chip pulsed faster and faster. She was getting closer. Should we scream? Would Hally and Lissa hear us?

Then, almost at the exact same moment—the pulse of the chip’s light became a steady, red beam. And there came a quiet knock.

Not on the bathroom door. Farther away.

The front door.

“HALLY!”
I screamed, then again and again.
“HALLY! HALLY!”

There was a great scuffling outside the bathroom. Sabine rattled the doorknob, trying to get inside. The knocking on the front door became a pounding—

The pounding became the shattering of glass.

T
he rattling on our doorknob ceased, but I didn’t stop screaming Hally’s name until Addie shouted

My next scream caught in our chest, a hard, aching lump beside our heart. We no longer knew what Sabine and Josie might do. Hally and Lissa were in danger.

Our fingers fumbled, but I managed to unlock the door and shove it open. I flinched, half expecting Sabine to jump us. There was no one there. Then there was, but it wasn’t Sabine or Josie. It wasn’t even Hally.

It was Jackson.

The sight of him stunned us to stillness. But only for a second. We barrelled past him, struggling in our makeshift bonds. “Hally!”

Hally ran into view, her eyes huge. She grabbed for our hands. “Where are Ryan and Devon? Are they okay? Are you okay?”

“Upstairs,” I managed to say. I tried to move in front of her, shielding her from Jackson. “Go. Run. Get—”

“It’s okay,” Hally said. “Jackson came to get me. I didn’t believe him at first, but—”

Jackson went to get her?

He looked away. His voice was low, dulled. “Sabine ran out when we came in. She knows when to cut her losses. She’ll be headed for her apartment to get the bomb, then to the institution.”

Hally grabbed a large shard of broken glass and sawed at the tape between our wrists.

“You shattered the window,” I said hoarsely. Our eyes kept returning to Jackson, but each time, I forced them away again.

A shadow of a grin touched Hally’s lips. “Yeah, well, a rescue for a rescue, right? Don’t think you get all the window-breaking fun. I didn’t even have a nightstand handy.”

Hysterical laughter winnowed through us. At Nornand, we’d smashed a window to get to Hally’s room. Then, to escape the security guards, we’d run up to the roof. Somehow, that escape seemed simpler. The bad guys were just bad guys. We hadn’t spent weeks with them. Months with them. We hadn’t eaten and laughed with them.

“I’ll go upstairs,” Jackson muttered. “Make sure Ryan’s all right.”

He never made it upstairs. He met Ryan on the way out of the storage room—Ryan, who grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. No warning. No words.

The picture frames jumped. One clattered to the ground, smashing into pieces. More glass. More fragments.

“Ryan,”
I shouted. I started for him and fell, our legs still hobbled. It was Hally who reached them first, who grabbed her brother from behind, saying
Ryan, Ryan, stop. Stop.

He must have sawed his hands free against a nail. He’d also sawed up quite a bit of his skin. His hands were covered in blood. It soaked into Jackson’s shirt, left smudges of red in the white fabric.

Jackson didn’t speak. He hadn’t even shouted out when Ryan attacked him. The two of them stared at each other now, Ryan’s hands bunched around Jackson’s collar.

Slowly, Ryan let go. Backed away. His eyes focused on me and Addie.

Then his arms were around us. He was whispering, “Are you okay?” into our hair. I nodded.

Hally demanded to know what had happened, so Ryan and I told her. Everything. All at once and stumbling over our words and interrupting each other. Jackson leaned against the wall. He didn’t contribute to our story. He didn’t speak at all.

Addie didn’t speak, either.

I didn’t know what to say to either of them.

“We have to get to Peter,” Hally said.

I shook our head. “We have to get to the institution.”

Ryan’s hands were still bleeding. He’d pressed them against his stomach, staining his shirt with blood. The cut across his temple had opened up again, too. It wasn’t bleeding much, but it looked painful.

“Whatever you guys decide, we have to get out of here,” Jackson said. “Hally’s smashed the display window. If somebody hasn’t already called the police, they’re going to do it soon.”

Ryan caught my look and moved his hands away from his bloody shirtfront. “No one will notice.”

“Ryan, go check if Peter’s home.” I cut him off before he could argue. “You’re going to attract way too much attention running around the city bloodied up like that. Tell him what’s going on and get a new shirt from him or something.”

“I’m not going to attract any less attention going to Peter’s,” Ryan said.

“It’s closer.” I turned to Hally and kept our voice hard. “I need you to go and see if Sabine’s car is still parked in its usual spot. There’s a pay phone on that corner. Call Peter’s place and let him know if the car’s there or not.”

“Are you going with her?” Ryan said.

I shook our head. “I’m going back to Emalia’s apartment. I’ll call her work number, tell her what’s going on, and get her to come back home. If we can’t get in touch with Peter, we’re going to need some other way to get to the institution. Emalia’s got a car.”

“What about him?” Ryan nodded toward Jackson, who glanced at him, then at me. “What’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care.”

Jackson looked away again. Part of me was glad he didn’t meet our eyes. Part of me was furious he wouldn’t. Addie hadn’t said a word since he arrived.

The four of us made it out onto the street, hurrying to the other side of the road just in time to see an officer round the corner. I averted our eyes. None of us spoke until there was a good two blocks between us and the store.

Then I said softly, “Meet back at Peter’s.”

“Twenty minutes,” Ryan said, looking between us and his sister. “That’s it.”

I nodded. I reached up and kissed him. No one commented—not Hally, not Jackson, not even Addie in my mind.

Ryan tasted like blood. It only made me more sure that I was doing the right thing.

“Twenty minutes,” I repeated, and, because I knew no one else would make a move until I did, I broke away from the others and headed down the street. I didn’t look back until I’d counted to a hundred. By then, Ryan and Hally were gone.

Addie said, which was her way of saying what I was telling myself: that they’d get hurt. Ryan was already hurt. Worse than he was letting on. And Hally—Hally and Lissa should never have gotten involved in the first place. This wasn’t their mess to clean up.

Slowly, Addie and I walked back in the direction we’d come. Jackson was still standing where we’d left him. He seemed, if anything, a bit lost.

But he watched as we approached, and now, finally, he met our eyes. “You never meant to go to Emalia’s apartment.”

“I need to get to the Powatt institution,” I said.

Even if we’d had the money, no taxi would take us all the way there. Any driver I asked would probably kick us out, think we were pranking him. But I needed to go, and we couldn’t exactly walk. I could have waited for Peter, but God knows what Peter would have done. Peter with his careful plans and his details. I didn’t have time for Peter.

Henri didn’t have a car. Emalia wouldn’t get home fast enough. Even if she did, she would agree to nothing before calling Peter, and that would take time we didn’t have.

I could call the cops. Would they take me seriously? Would they act quickly enough to stop Sabine?

Was it worth the risk to all the other hybrids in Anchoit who were connected to us?

Addie and I could still stop this. We could still do it on our own.

“Do you know someone we can borrow a car from?” I said.

Jackson hesitated, then nodded. “But we’re never going to make it in time.”

I shrugged.

“Keep hope,” I said.

O
ur car careened down the road, going so fast I feared each turn might send us flying into the air. Nearly half an hour had passed since we’d left Anchoit, and it had taken Jackson a while to contact someone who would lend him his car on such short notice. I tried not to think about Ryan and Hally, waiting for me to reach Peter’s apartment, getting more worried by the minute.

I tried not to think about getting to the Powatt institution too late.

“We won’t get there before Sabine does,” Jackson said. “Not with her head start.”

“Then we’ll have to make sure no one enters the building.” I stared out the window, keeping a sharp eye out for police. The last thing we needed was to get stopped for speeding. The scraggly landscape flew past, a blur of brown.

“How are we going to do that?” Jackson asked. “Stand outside the door and shout
bomb
at anyone who gets near?”

“If it keeps them away.”

“It’ll keep them away,” Jackson said. “It’ll also get us both arrested.”

I said nothing.

“Eva.” Jackson kept his eyes on the road ahead of us. “What Christoph said, about not wanting to let you know so you could argue your innocence—it’s not entirely untrue. And what he said about how we never needed you—well, that was a lie.” I still didn’t speak. “Look, what happened back there—”

“What happened back there is that your friends attacked us and tied us up.”

“They’re your friends, too.”

I laughed low. “They are?”

“
Yes
, they are. And I—” His fingers clutched the steering wheel, his knuckles bright. “Can I speak with Addie?”

Addie said.

I shook our head. “She says no. Just drive.”

For a while, he obeyed, and we sat in silence. But his eyes flickered toward us.

“I’m sorry, all right?” Jackson sounded as exhausted as I felt. “I’m sorry. You were never meant to get hurt.”

Jackson parked by the side of the road, out of sight of the institution. The land here was as hilly as it had been in Frandmill. The sun was just starting to go down. I almost wished it were already dark. It might make me feel better. It would help us hide, maybe.

“This road loops around to the institution.” Jackson turned and looked out our window with us. “But you can walk up the hill and look down, see everything.”

I opened our car door. Jackson reached to extinguish the engine, but I stopped him. “No, stay. I’ll go check if there are any other cars. If not, we’ll drive until we find Sabine.”

I slammed the door shut before he could argue, and hurried up the hill. Our feet kept slipping against the steep, rocky ground.

Addie asked. We hadn’t passed any parked cars on the road.

Addie said.

I glanced over our shoulder. Jackson was barely visible inside the car. Hopefully, he could see us more clearly than we could see him.

A rock turned under our foot, and we almost slipped. I lurched forward, regaining our balance at the last moment. I could already feel phantom hands grabbing our arms. I could see officers shoving us into a police car, forcing our head down. Would they cuff our hands behind our back?

Would our parents be told? Would they look up from dinner, food turning to ash in their mouths, at the sound of our names on the television, the sight of our familiar face?

Addie answered her own question.

She didn’t sound angry or sad or accusatory. Just calm and a little numb.

I took a deep breath. A few steps more, and we were at the top of the hill. Jackson was a speck in the distance.