Wake Up Missing (9 page)

“Yeah, okay. I'm going to review the scans now.”

Go to your own office
, I thought.
Down the hall. Not this one.
A searing pain shot through my head, behind my eyes. Stress always made the headaches worse, so bad that I'd vomit sometimes. I couldn't help it. My stomach clenched and I squeezed my knees tight into the cramp.
Not now. Not now.

“Everything looks fine. He's a perfect candidate, I can already tell. We're in great shape. Hold on a sec, okay?”

His voice was right outside.

Keys jingled. Acid rose in my throat. I clenched my teeth together and swallowed it back down.

Finally, we heard the door down the hall open and slam shut.

We kept waiting. After a minute, maybe two, I unfolded my legs and started to crawl out into the light. “We need to get out of here,” I whispered. “Now.”

Sarah nodded; her eyes were huge. She didn't look excited to be playing girl detective anymore.

“We need to talk to Trent,” Sarah insisted. But he was nowhere to be found. We knocked on his room door, checked the labs, the cafeteria . . . everywhere. “He's probably holed up in that workshop or whatever, doing those engineering projects he supposedly loves so much.”

We found Quentin and Ben at the pool and told them everything. About the videos and subject folders and DNA stuff we'd found on Dr. Gunther's computer. I told them what I heard Dr. Ames say about “the change.”

“Are you suggesting”—Ben put down his magazine—“that these guys who have been running this successful clinic for—what did it say in the brochure, five years?—have actually been doing some kind of evil scientists' experiments the whole time? And nobody's ever noticed until now?” He raised his eyebrows. “You two must be geniuses.”

Quentin picked up his towel and dried his face. “I get why you're freaked out by that stuff on the computer—and it
is
freaky—but you
must
be missing something.” He shook his head at Sarah. “What you're suggesting . . . They could never get away with that. Wouldn't all the parents have noticed?”

There went the switch in my head again. Saying it out loud, telling the boys about it, made it sound far-fetched. “I don't know. I guess . . .”

“Well maybe the place
used
to be a perfectly normal clinic,” Sarah blurted out, “and all the mysterious stuff is . . . new.”

“Maybe Dr. Ames is an alien, too!” Ben snorted.

“Sarah, really . . . there has to be an explanation,” Quentin said.

“Maybe . . .” The switch in my head flickered. . . .

Everything's okay.

Something's not right.

I hesitated. “Still . . . it wouldn't hurt to try and learn a little more, would it? Maybe we could get phone numbers for some of those kids who were already released and see what they have to say.”

“We have to get more information,” Sarah agreed. “What about Kaylee? They said she had some tumor or something, and they're not even telling her parents!”

Quentin turned to me. “Are you sure that's what they said?”

“Yes.” But then I questioned myself. What were the words, exactly?
If she dies here . . . tumor . . . not yet . . .
“I . . . I think so, anyway.”

“It
was
!” Sarah was almost shouting.

“Okay . . . okay.” Quentin sighed. “We'll find out more. We can all keep our eyes open. We can talk to Trent whenever he
turns up.” He looked toward the clinic windows. “You know, we could
ask
Dr. Gunther about those files that—”

“No!” Sarah lowered her voice. “Then he'll know we were snooping and we'll never find anything else. We need to find Trent.”

But Trent wasn't at dinner that night. Or at any meals the next day.

The more time that went by, the more I forgot the details of what Sarah and I had seen in the lab. I struggled to hold on to what I knew, or thought I knew. But there was nothing we could do until we found Trent, so I rested in my room a lot. I read and made a clay shape that looked almost like a snail kite I'd seen perched on a pillar by the docks. I took my medicine and showed up for my MRIs. No matter what was going on, I still had to focus on getting better if I wanted to go home.

Finally, as I was finishing my oatmeal at breakfast, Dr. Ames bounded into the room with his clipboard. “Good morning, team! Cat, I've got some great news for you. We're moving you ahead to Phase Two of treatment today. You'll start light and oxygen treatments right after breakfast, and we'll get you on the treadmill later if you're up to it.”

“Great!” I said. I meant it, too. If Phase Two could get rid of the rest of my headaches and clear the muddled mess in my brain, I was ready to go. Plus, if Trent was spending more time in the lab during Phase Three, maybe I'd get to talk with him, too.

But when I got to the lab, only Dr. Ames and Olga were there, waiting for me with some weird hat. It looked like my grandma's shower cap, but with tiny lights attached on the inside.

“Ready for your first light treatment?” Dr. Ames said, motioning for me to lie down on the exam table. He stretched out the elastic cap so it fit over my head. It tugged at my hair when he let go. “This helps keep the LED lights in place over your scalp and forehead,” he said. “They'll be providing short-term exposure to red and near-infrared rays to facilitate more efficient cell metabolism.”

“What does that mean in English?”

“Sorry.” He flashed that sheepish grin. “You're getting a good dose of light energy to help your brain cells heal themselves.”

“Well, that sounds good.” I leaned back and closed my eyes. Ten minutes went by fast, because the next thing I knew, Olga was helping me get the cap off, and Dr. Ames was across the lab, opening up this box that looked like a big glass casket.

“Come on over, Cat, and let's get right to the oxygen treatment so you have some time to relax before lunch.”

“How long does this last?” I looked around. Sarah was walking in for her light treatment. She gave me a wave, and I saw her eyes scan the lab, probably looking for Trent.

“You'll be in the chamber for one hour a day, five days a week.” He opened the coffin-thing. “Try to relax.”

“If they want people to relax in this thing, they should have thought twice about shaping it like a coffin, don't you think?” But I climbed in, and it wasn't too bad. The bottom was padded, so it felt like a cot with a lid.

Dr. Ames put a hand on the glass cover, ready to slide it over the top of me. “You remember what this is all about?”

“Kind of.”

“It's the same treatment deep-sea divers get when they're
having decompression sickness,” Dr. Ames said. “When I close the lid, you'll be breathing one hundred percent oxygen with a little extra atmospheric pressure, which helps the oxygen dissolve in your blood more quickly so it can flow through your body and help repair those damaged brain cells. Make sense?”

“I guess so.” He closed the lid over me. I wondered if he'd still be able to hear me talking. “It feels like I'm in a giant test tube,” I said, and Dr. Ames laughed and gave me a thumbs-up. He could hear fine.

I tried to relax and breathe. At first, being in the oxygen chamber felt like taking off in an airplane, and my ears felt weird from the pressure. But then it felt normal, and Dr. Ames turned on music.

Watching through the glass, I saw Sarah leave for the exercise room and Quentin and Ben come in for their light treatments. But never Trent.

And that quiet time all alone in the glass casket gave me too much time to think. Was Trent getting treatments somewhere else? Maybe Phase Three required some different kind of lab, with different equipment. I kept telling myself that, but part of me never believed it. That part was pretty sure the doctors were hiding Trent from the rest of us.

“Where could he
be
?” Sarah asked after our morning treatments. She held open the cafeteria door, followed me inside, looked around, and sighed. “He's not even coming for meals anymore.”

She ate her chicken salad sandwich with her eyes on the door. But Trent never showed up.

After lunch, I had my first session on the treadmill. Olga got
me hooked up with stuff to monitor my heart rate and blood pressure, and then Dr. Ames arrived.

“Ready to run a marathon?” His eyes crinkled when he smiled. It was hard to imagine this was the same man who yelled at Dr. Gunther on that video. I still couldn't help wondering if there was something we hadn't seen . . . something that happened before the video started that might explain everything.

“I'll do my best.” I stepped onto the treadmill, and Dr. Ames started it moving, slowly at first.

“Okay if we try a little faster?” he asked, and when I nodded, he turned it up so it was a good, fast walk.

“Am I going to run?” I'd changed into sneakers just in case, but I was worried it would make me dizzy. I hated that feeling . . . the spinning and blurring, the stomach churning.

“Not today. But I'm going to turn up the incline to get your heart rate up a little. It'll be like walking up a hill.”

It felt like I'd been walking uphill for an hour—really it was only about ten minutes—when Dr. Ames looked at the monitors and asked, “How are you doing?”

“Not great,” I admitted, and he slowed the machine down. “I'm a little dizzy. And my head is starting to hurt.”

“Fair enough,” he said, making the incline flat again. “We can call it a day. Tomorrow, you'll push a little more.”

Dr. Ames came to get me after breakfast every day for the rest of the week.

It was always just Sarah and Quentin and Ben and me in the
dining room. Never Trent, and never Kaylee, and somehow, the whole
something's-wrong
feeling kind of faded away.

Concussions had a way of doing that . . . dulling memories that seemed big and important once, until they were so blurry you figured they couldn't matter much at all. Even Sarah stopped turning around when the cafeteria door opened. It was always Dr. Ames or Dr. Gunther or Olga anyway.

On Friday, it was Dr. Ames, and as he walked me to the lab, we talked about soccer—he'd never liked it much either, even though he was a starting goalie in high school—and what it's like being an only child. He'd never really wished for siblings, but I thought it would be cool to have a younger sister.

“Yeah, but she'd borrow your clothes and shoes all the time,” he joked, helping me with the light therapy cap.

“I doubt that.” I held up one foot and wiggled my mud-stained sneaker. “Not if she had any style.” It felt good to joke, good to laugh without my head hurting.

I had to admit Phase Two was living up to the promises on the I-CAN website. I felt more like my old self. I'd been swimming a few times. I'd even started reading that magic bread-box book for English class, and I understood now why Mrs. Rock liked it so much. The main character felt real, like she might be your friend or sit next to you in math class, and the fact that she could wish for stuff and then find it in that bread box was fun to think about.