Wake Up Missing (11 page)

I tapped on the glass, but he didn't look up. He was lost in the connections in his hands, lost in that other world.

“Dr. Ames lied,” I said, still staring. “Trent is
here.
”

Sarah put her hand on the doorknob, jiggled it, and shook her head. “Trent!” She hollered and rapped her fist on the glass. Trent didn't even look up. “How could he not hear me?”

I shivered, watching him reach for another mess of wires. “He's turned into some kind of . . .” It still sounded impossible, so I didn't say it out loud. But when I saw the cot in the corner of the room, I knew.

“It looks like Edison's lab in there,” Sarah whispered.

I nodded slowly. It was Edison's lab. And right in the middle of it, a boy who used to love playing basketball and goofing around, acting exactly like Thomas Edison.

“They
did
give him someone else's DNA,” I said quietly. “They must have. What else could this
be
?” I still couldn't believe it.

Ben never said a word. He stared through the glass, mouth open, eyes confused.

“This is incredible.” Quentin squinted through the glass, and I followed his eyes, taking in every corner of the lab. “Someone set up this workshop for Trent, set it up with everything an inventor could possibly want, filled it with a personal library.”

His words bounced around my brain and mixed with other words, in another voice.

Phase Three . . . Piece of cake . . . Ask my buddy Trent.

Suddenly, I was afraid of even being here, seeing this. “You guys, we have to go. We can wait for Molly at her boat.”

It felt wrong to leave Trent, but we did. He looked happy enough. Did he even know how much he'd changed? If he did, he didn't seem to care.

“I don't understand
how
it could work,” Quentin said as we
crossed the lawn, heading down to the docks. “When we studied genetics for Science Olympiad, we learned all about cloning and genetic engineering, and what happened here . . . it shouldn't even be
possible.
”

“You saw him, Quentin.” Sarah ran ahead of him and turned to face him, walking backward. “This is
real.
”

“No. This is
stupid
,” Ben said. He'd been lagging behind us but caught up. “There's got to be another explanation. Dr. Ames wouldn't
do
something like this.”

“Seriously?” Sarah got right in his face, and even though she was a head shorter than he was, Ben took a step back. “You've known Dr. Ames, what, a week? And you're happy to ignore all this because, ‘Oh, well,
Dr. Ames
told me everything's great.' Wake up, will you?”

Ben looked as if he might reach out and shove her, but then he actually laughed a little. “You know what? Go have your investigation.” He whirled around and stalked off toward the pool.

“This is totally messed up,” Quentin said as the rest of us headed for the dock. “I can't imagine how—”

“They
have
Edison's DNA letters . . . or . . . whatever they're called,” I said. “We saw the file on Dr. Gunther's computer.”

Quentin swatted at a deerfly buzzing around his head. “What else was on that computer?”

“A bunch of random stuff.” I tried to remember. “E-mails about a trip Dr. Gunther's taking, one about a team in Phoenix from somebody named Wiley, news alerts about a terrorist group, butterflies he bought on eBay, something from a reporter asking about poachers. Random stuff. But those files . . . the files had DNA sequences.”

“But even if you
could
get Edison's DNA to grow inside a living person's cells with retroviruses or whatever, that doesn't mean you'd have a new Edison. Your DNA is only part of what makes you the person you are. People are more than genes. We're this crazy mix of our DNA plus all the experiences we've ever had. All the education, all the people who have been part of our lives, and—”

“They have that, too,” I interrupted, remembering the pages and pages of Edison's history, his journals and lab notebooks. “On the computer. They have files full of Edison's past. What if they . . . I don't know . . . gave all that to Trent?”

“How?” Quentin frowned and thought for a minute. “I mean, it sounds totally science fiction, but I guess it would be possible to implant a microchip in his brain so that—”

“That must be it!” Sarah's face was a twisted mix of triumph and fear.

“So they're programming him like a robot?” I shook my head and almost laughed. These were doctors. Hundreds of patients had been treated at this clinic; we'd seen their names on the computer. My mom brought me because it offered the best care in the world for my injury. “That's so crazy. There
has
to be some other explanation.” But even as I said it, I remembered Dr. Ames using the word
implant
on the roof. I remembered Trent's bandaged head at breakfast. I tried to push the memories down; I didn't want to think about it, but Sarah grabbed my arm.

“If they did that, Trent would have all those memories
and
Edison's DNA,” she said. “He'd have Edison's voice in his head from all those lab notebooks and journals. And then what if they built him that lab and did everything else they could to make him think and work like Edison?”

Quentin paused at the edge of the dock.
“Why?”

The air cooled as a cloud moved in front of the sun. Sarah didn't have an answer. We stepped onto the dock and walked down to the airboat. Molly still wasn't back, and everything that had been coming together in my head fell apart again. None of this made sense.

“Why would somebody want a dead scientist?” Quentin sat down on the dock and leaned back, looking at the clouds. “Who were the scientists in that file?”

I walked back and forth on the wooden planks. “There was Edison, obviously. And Isaac Newton . . . he discovered gravity, right?”

“More than that,” Quentin said. “He made breakthroughs in chemistry and optics and
invented
calculus. My Science Olympiad coach says Newton may have contributed more to science than anybody else in history. Who else?”

I tried to remember the whole list of names from Gunther's computer. “Let's see. There was that Renaissance painter Da Vinci. They had a show on him at the San Francisco Art Museum. There were some women . . . Lise Mitner or Meitner . . . Somebody Shilling . . . Mary Curie . . .”

“
Marie
Curie,” Quentin corrected, and let out a low whistle. “Nobel Prize winner in Physics and Chemistry. She basically figured out radioactivity and discovered radium and polonium. She ended up dying of radiation poisoning but not before she accomplished a ton of stuff.”

“There might have been one more,” I said.

“There was Gunther—but he doesn't count,” Sarah called
over from where she was dangling her feet in the water. “And somebody else . . . Redenbacher?”

Quentin tipped his head, confused. “Orville Redenbacher ran a popcorn company.”

“No, that's not it,” I said. “It was Open-something. Open-hammer?”

“Oppenheimer?” Quentin sat up. “Robert Oppenheimer?”

“Yeah. That's it! Who's he?” Sarah asked.

Quentin ignored her question. “Oppenheimer
and
Curie . . .” He looked up and squinted into the sky for a long time. “You said there was stuff in Gunther's e-mail about a terrorist group?”

“Yeah . . . news alerts.”

He stared at the clouds some more. Finally, he shook his head and took a deep breath. “It's kind of nuts . . . but I think I know why someone might want a bunch of dead scientists.”

I waited. I wanted everything to make sense before it all fell apart again in my mind, before my headache came back, and I could already feel it pushing behind my eyes.

“What if . . .” Quentin paused. “What if they wanted to bring back all the smartest people from history to . . . work on a project together?”

Sarah tipped her head. “A project?”

I didn't get it either. It sounded like they were going to be some superteam for a school science fair. “Like what kind of project?”

“It could be anything. The right group of scientists might be able to cure cancer or fix global warming or find new energy sources.” Quentin thought longer, then let out a sigh. “Or what if they wanted a team to create some . . . super weapon?”

“A super weapon?” I repeated. Hanging in the muggy air, the words sounded silly. For a second, I thought he was kidding.

Sarah did, too. “Are you making fun of me like Ben? Because I don't need this.” She got to her feet and started to walk away.

“No. I'm
serious
,” Quentin said. “I swear . . . Think about it. If you could bring together all the greatest minds from history, all the greatest thinkers, to work together with modern technology, stuff like Trent's got in there and more,” Quentin said. “Imagine what they could create.”

“Yeah . . . but . . .” Sarah shook her head, and I understood why.

“But listen,” Quentin said. “You said there was something about a terrorist group in Gunther's e-mail. Imagine if you were were part of that group. If you were going after the most powerful nations on earth, you'd need powerful weapons. And you'd need people who could create something bigger, better than ever before.”

“But that would mean . . .” I wanted to argue. If he was right, it meant our parents had dropped us off in the middle of nowhere and entrusted us to . . . terrorists? Or at the very least, someone working for terrorists. It sounded like it should be part of a spy movie . . . not my
life
.

It was too much to believe, and thinking about it fueled the headache growing behind my eyes, the headache that was supposed to be gone because I was getting better. “I'm leaving.” I stood up and started toward the clinic.

“Cat, wait. Listen . . .”

“No!” I whirled around and shouted back at the dock. “These are
doctors
, Quentin, and they're supposed to be helping us, and
this is just . . . no! The idea that somebody's going to mess with a bunch of kids' DNA and turn them into geniuses and then throw them together and say, ‘Build me a big new weapon' . . . it's crazy.”

Quentin met my yelling with scary quiet. “It's been done before,” he said.

“What?”
Sarah stared at him.

“Not the genetic engineering part. But the idea of bringing geniuses together to build a weapon.” Quentin's voice shook. “The Manhattan Project. In the 1940s . . . the United States government assembled a team of scientists in the middle of nowhere to work on a top secret project to defeat Japan during World War Two.”

My stomach twisted, and I almost choked on the words, but I blurted them out. “Robert Oppenheimer was one of them, wasn't he?”

Quentin nodded. “They call him the Father of the Atomic Bomb.”

“You kids trying to sneak off with my airboat?”

We hadn't heard Molly coming down from the clinic, and her booming voice scared me half to death.

“Relax, Cat. I'm just having fun with you. Want to go for a ride and spot some birds?”

“No.” My voice quivered. Not because of Molly. But because everything Quentin had said made sense. Frightening, terrifying sense.

“No,” I said again. The pieces were coming together in my brain faster and faster, and there was nothing I wanted more than to shake them all back up, unpiece the puzzle, and believe that we were safe here.

But headache or no headache, I couldn't ignore the picture that had formed.

Molly put a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?”

I didn't know where to start.

But Quentin did. He turned and headed for the hangar. “We need to show you something.”

Molly stared through the tiny pane of glass, cursing under her breath. She hadn't said a word as we walked, as we told her the whole story, from the conversation on the roof, to the scientist files and DNA sequences, to Dr. Ames, lying about Trent leaving the clinic.

She asked lots of questions:

“Tell me again exactly what Dr. Ames said about Trent going home.”

“What else was on that computer?”

“Who was Dr. Gunther e-mailing?”

“Wiley? Do you remember more names?”

And to Sarah: “Trent never expressed an interest in this stuff before?”

We answered all her questions, and she listened, her eyes growing sharper, more concerned with every response. Molly didn't say we were dumb kids or scared about being away from home or anything else. She finished asking questions, and then she looked through that window for a long time, shaking her head, and finally turned to face us.

“We need to get you out of here.”

“Can you call for help?” Sarah asked her. “Our cell phones don't work here, so . . .” But Molly was already shaking her head.