The Sleepless Stars (16 page)

The sound of metal being shaken combined with the motion of the cage to let him know Grey had heard and was testing his theory. “I think it will work, if you don’t mind me using you as a step stool—I want as much height as I can get before I have to trust a blind climb.”

“No problem. It’s a long way down if we don’t get this right the first time.”

“The chains are anchored to each corner, so I’ll go up the front right corner.”

“You can brace yourself against the wall.” Keeping his balance in the disorienting pitch black would be the trickiest part.

The cage swayed as Grey returned and crouched beside Ryder. “Do you know where Rossi is? I really should send some guys for her, get her into protective custody.”

“I don’t know exactly where she is, but Devon Price will.” Ryder debated whether to tell Grey everything, but he couldn’t risk it. If the Fed escaped, a call to Price wouldn’t compromise Rossi’s safety or the children’s. And Price could take care of himself. Funny how he’d come to trust the former criminal more than fellow law enforcement officers. Proof of just how crazy his world had become.

“Price? Why do I know that name? Wait, he was there when you were shot and Leo Kingston was killed. What’s Price got to do with Rossi?”

“Call him. He’ll know how to get word to Rossi.”

“Interesting group you hang out with.”

“So says the man following the trail of a madman.” Ryder accepted Grey’s help up. “I wouldn’t wait for the FBI, the Staties can get here quicker with their Special Response Team.”

“You think I’d risk your life to get some credit from my bosses?” Grey’s tone was wry. “Seriously, Ryder, I’m not obsessed or crazy. Just decided to follow a lead on my own time, see if it led to any solid evidence before I risked taking it up the chain of command. Don’t tell me you’ve never done the same.”

Ryder never broke the law doing it—like planting an illegal tracking device on a suspect. And he certainly never endangered anyone else’s life. But he said nothing; he needed Grey focused on bringing back help, not playing the hero.

They moved to the front corner of the car, the floor swaying beneath them with each step. Between the total darkness and the unreliable spatial cues from the cage’s constant swinging, Ryder counted himself lucky he didn’t suffer from motion sickness. Although his hands were now almost totally numb, and sooner or later, hypothermia would do him in—if Tyrone’s goons didn’t take care of matters before that.

“Good luck,” Ryder whispered to Grey. He knelt down, head pressed to his knees, while Grey climbed onto his back. The cage shook, then Grey’s weight vanished. Ryder scooted back in case the other man fell, but a thud sounded from the metal ceiling, telling him Grey had made it that far.

Ryder visualized Grey’s progress in his imagination, translating each shudder of the cage. That quaking was Grey clinging to the chain, reaching for the barrier gate at the top of the shaft. The sudden push back was Grey jumping onto the gate. The rattle of metal was his climbing over.

Then there was nothing. The cage slowly came to a stop—other than the occasional shiver from the air currents in the shaft. The darkness remained, but that was no surprise—Tyrone’s men would have taken the lantern with them back to the mine’s entrance and their main work area.

The absolute silence was the most difficult part for Ryder as he sat shivering. He could project anything onto that silence, from miraculous success to catastrophic failure.

Neither helped. Nothing he could do now except wait. He focused on contracting his core muscles, performing awkward squats and lunges in the confined space, trying to keep warm and alert for what came next.

The sudden sound of gunfire made him jump. He strained to listen as men shouted, their words obscured by the way noise ricocheted from the stone walls surrounding him. Grey, had they caught him? Had he been able to call for backup first?

Silence reigned once more. Ryder stared up at the exit Grey had escaped through, despite the fact that he knew he’d never be able to see anything.

He strained to listen as the sound of men’s voices and a shuffling noise came closer. Was that the faintest sliver of light forming along the edge of the ceiling?

Before he could decide if he was imagining things, the anguished cry of a wounded animal shrieked through the air.

Not an animal, Ryder realized with a sinking feeling. Grey. Being tortured.

I WAS DROWNING
in black, a silence that swallowed all light, stole all thought and sound. Floating, no up or down, no arms or legs, no me...

A bright light skewered one eye and then the other. I blinked. The light pulled back to reveal Louise, holding an ophthalmoscope.

“Angie, are you okay?” Louise asked, her voice filled with concern. Her features were cloudy from the artificial tear gel she’d put into my eyes to keep them from drying out during my fugue, but a few more blinks and my vision cleared.

Wish I could say the same for my brain. I nodded in answer to her question—didn’t have the strength for words yet. She checked my pulse, nodded, patted my hand, and then moved away from me. I closed my eyes—it was too much work to keep them open.

Usually after a fugue, I was exhausted, but there was also a weird energy. And my other fugues had ended with cascades of music and light and sensory experiences that, while frightening, were also stimulating. This one hadn’t been like any of the others—I felt drained, as if I was the one who’d been sucked dry of every memory.

Maybe it was because with the other fugues the people had had a final thought, one last wish, if you will, that they wanted passed on? Patrice had wanted me to save Esme. All of her focus had been directing me there. Alamea had wanted forgiveness from her family—not that she needed it. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but she’d felt guilty for the pain her family had gone through because of her. Leo, the man who kidnapped and tortured her, hadn’t wanted forgiveness. He’d wanted to be remembered for his crimes. In a warped way, he’d been proud of them, wanted his fame to continue beyond his death.

And Jacob? Other than the message Tommaso had forced him to give me, all Jacob had wanted was to tell me he loved me...and that he forgave me. Even in death, he was a better person than I’d ever be.

Feeling slowly returned to the rest of my body. I raised my hand and sought out Ryder’s pendant. Still there—somehow I knew that meant I really was back.

A tear escaped my closed eyes. I was back. And without the cure. Without anything that might help save the children. Except Daniel’s accusation that I was the reason why they were dying.

Opening my eyes, I looked around. Definitely Daniel’s room and Daniel’s bed, but I was no longer touching him. Even so, I squirmed as far away as I could from where he lay beside me. I couldn’t see the monitors, but his chest was still rising, although his breathing was slower than normal.

“Drink this,” Flynn said, approaching me with a glass and a straw. “Did you get anything out of him?” she asked without waiting for me to finish.

My throat was too parched for me to talk yet. Definitely my Flynn, the real Flynn, with her abrupt, to-the-point manners. As I sipped the electrolyte cocktail, I raised my free hand to my head, felt the EEG monitor pinching my scalp like a tight-fitting swim cap. Louise should have gotten some great readings, given what Daniel had put me through. I blinked the rest of the eye gel clear and scanned the room for a clock—I’d been gone for almost three hours.

I’d had longer fugues—almost died from one a few days ago that lasted over a day—but had never been inside someone for that long. No wonder my brain felt as if it’d gone through an industrial-sized shredder.

Flynn steadied the glass for me as tremors shook my body. “You okay, doc?”

I nodded, let her take the glass away before I dropped it. “C-cold.”

She felt my forehead in a most uncharacteristic maternal fashion. “You’re burning up. Louise, she’s burning up.”

Louise was already coming around the bed, leaving Daniel’s side where she’d been monitoring him. “Does this usually happen?” she asked.

My teeth were chattering too hard for me to form words, so I nodded. It usually wasn’t this bad, but we could argue semantics later. She checked my vitals, popped a few pills into my mouth, held the glass as I drank and swallowed. Flynn hovered, watching closely. Sometimes I had the feeling that if Flynn was a normal girl who’d lived a normal life, she could have been anything she wanted—her powers of observation were so finely honed that she quickly learned almost any task.

Like now, handing Louise a small handheld testing unit without Louise asking. “Checking your electrolytes, see if I need to start an IV to rehydrate you faster.”

As if I didn’t know that already. See how quickly you can go from being in charge of an entire emergency department to being a helpless patient? Already feeling better, I rolled my eyes. “I’m fine.”

She ignored me, poking my finger and letting the blood drip onto the testing strip. I yanked my hand away, a drop of blood staining Daniel’s silk coverlet. Flynn was right there with a bandage and another glass of electrolytes.

I drained it even faster than the first, my hands steadying, the chills fading. The fog clouding my brain also receded. I tried to sit up, wanting to get off the bed and farther away from Daniel. I didn’t make it very far, the room swimming around me. But Flynn anticipated my needs and helped me move from the bed to a chair near the fire. A fireplace in a bedroom—such extravagance only punctuated just how out of place I was here in Daniel’s house, fighting a family who, according to him, had even more money and power than the Kingstons.

“I need a pad and pen.”

Flynn rummaged in the bedside table and handed both to me. The paper wasn’t the recycled hospital scratch pad I was used to. Instead, it was heavy, with a cloth-like texture. And the pen was an old-fashioned fountain pen. As I sketched the formula for the PXA reversal agent, I imagined Daniel sitting here, jotting down late-night notes to sack the economy or pillage a competitor. My eyes barely open, I dumped everything I could remember onto the paper, then handed it to Louise.

“What’s this?”

“Daniel gave me the PXA reversal agent.”

Her eyebrows raised as she scrutinized my notes. “This is...astounding. Your EEG while you were writing it just now—it wasn’t what I would expect from someone copying from rote memory. More like the pattern of someone reliving an experience.”

“You said the fatal insomnia affects my thalamus. That’s the area where sensory and somatic nerve tracts are concentrated. Muscle memory,” I explained to Flynn. “Why did you pull me out?” I asked them both. “I didn’t get much more than this formula.”

They exchanged a look. “The readings—” Louise started, then stopped. I didn’t blame her. Fatal insomnia required a whole new vocabulary beyond typical medical jargon.

“Was Daniel starting to die?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“It was you,” Flynn said in her usual blunt way. “You died.”

“Not really,” Louise rushed to explain before I could register the shock. “But for a minute—less than a minute, a few seconds at most—your EEG went flat. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was certain it was equipment failure, except at the same time Daniel’s EEG suddenly lit up. As if he were somehow waking up from his coma.”

My mouth went dry as I processed that. It must have been when Daniel had tried to imprison me in his false reality.

Could he really somehow have used my own memories to jump-start his brain? No. I could explain a lot of what was happening to me—hell, medical science had already demonstrated the ability to transfer memories from one rat to another, so why not a human under the right circumstances?—but I could not fathom a reality where one person could take over another’s consciousness.

“It was only for a few seconds,” Louise repeated, trying to be reassuring despite the puzzled expression on her face. “Then Daniel’s EEG went almost totally flat, while yours went back to normal. But your blood pressure and pulse were increasing, so I pulled you out.”

“It was too soon. He was getting ready to show me—” I stared at Louise, not sure what to do with the anger that suddenly swamped me as I remembered what Daniel had shown me there at the end. “You knew, didn’t you?”

She jerked at my tone of accusation, while Flynn braced herself as if facing an unexpected danger.

“When you confirmed that I had the fatal insomnia gene, you tested my DNA along with Patsy’s. You knew she wasn’t my biological mother. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Louise’s features tightened into a frown, then her gaze shifted to Daniel’s still form, then back to me again, morphing into curiosity. “He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“How could he know Patsy wasn’t your real mother?” Louise asked, still hovering between me and Daniel.

“He knew my real mother. Was in love with her, asked her to marry him. But she said no, because she had a grand plan to save her family.” It was all coming back in a confused rush. From the looks on their faces, I wasn’t making much sense. I kept talking in the hopes of untangling the threads Daniel had woven through his memories. Memories that I now carried like a remnant of frayed cloth. “Her name was Francesca. Francesca Lazaretto.”

“Wait,” Louise said. “Lazaretto? She was related to Tommaso?”

I nodded slowly. “She was his mother. And mine.”

TYRONE AND HIS
men must have dragged Grey back to the top of the elevator shaft. Of course they did—they didn’t want Ryder to miss a single second of Grey’s torture. Muffled thuds followed by cries of pain echoed from the rock walls surrounding Ryder’s cage.

Anguish sliced through him, but there was nothing he could do, not trapped down here. He couldn’t shut his hearing off, but he could focus on escaping, anything that might help him save Grey. Contorting his arms as best he could, Ryder felt along the surface of the handcuffs to where the key was broken off in the lock. Grey was right, the flimsy plastic key had snapped flush with the metal—except for a tiny shard that poked into Ryder’s numb fingers.