If I returned.
The thought gave me pause—but not nearly enough. I took one step away from the house, and then another. A moment later, I was walking, and a second after that, I broke into a run.
The address Skylar had given me was outside of town. Driving would have been easier and faster, but if things went well, I deeply suspected I wouldn’t want to leave even a trace of evidence behind.
Getting Zev out of there wouldn’t be enough. To end this, really end this, we’d have to make sure that there wasn’t anyone left to chase us.
We’d have to crush Chimera—and everyone who worked there—to dust.
Running toward Zev felt better than anything had in a very long time. It felt like I was doing something.
Like I was going home.
I don’t know how long it took me to get there. Time lost all meaning—a dangerous thing for someone like me—but by the time I came to a stop at a dead-end road, more desert than not, the sun was starting to set.
Prime hunting time, I thought, my body relishing the darkness as it slowly kissed the earth.
Go. Hunt. Just do it somewhere else.
The closer I got to Zev, the harder it was to brace myself against the sound of his voice—and the harder his words were to ignore.
Believe me, Kali, I’d rather be trapped here for another year—or two or three or thirty—than risk something happening to you. And if you come here, something will—
He broke off, like he couldn’t bear to finish that sentence.
You can’t ask me to just leave you there, I told him, and then, realizing that he could and had and probably was about to again, I clarified my words. Don’t.
Why does it matter where my body is? Zev asked. It’s just a body, Kali. They can’t touch anything that matters.
All I heard was the word body, and all I could think of were the things they were doing to his. It was like living through an autopsy—over and over and over again.
I don’t want you here, Zev said. I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that he was entirely aware how those words would sound to someone who’d never really felt wanted by anyone, until now.
Just go away.
That was what Zev said, but I was so close now that I could feel him thinking other things. I remembered the feel of my hand on his stomach, the feel of his on mine. Zev could tell me I wasn’t wanted until my ears rang with the words, and it still wouldn’t matter.
People like us were meant to come in pairs.
That thought fresh in my mind, I stopped running. I was close enough now that I could almost smell Zev’s blood, could see the way they’d bled him again and again. The road itself wasn’t abandoned, but the address Skylar had given me didn’t exactly look commercial, either.
The entire complex was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, rusted and rotting, like it hadn’t been replaced in decades. There was a sign out front that warned would-be trespassers that the land beyond this fence had once been used to test explosives. Like the fence, the sign had seen better days: WARNING, it read, UNDE ONATED INES.
“Undetonated mines,” I said, feeling like I’d solved the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. “Isn’t that convenient?”
I scanned the perimeter of the fence—there was only one access road. It led up to a single gate, with an abandoned guard post.
The gate was open. I took a step toward it, and Zev’s voice echoed with bone-shaking vehemence through my entire body.
You don’t have to do this.
I looked at the fence, the gate, the building in the distance. “Yeah,” I said softly. “I do.”
“Do what?”
My hand tightened over the handle of one of my knives, but as my eyes adjusted to the newborn darkness, I saw the very last person I’d expected to see gracing a deserted road with her presence.
Bethany Davis.
“This is the place, right?” Bethany said. I looked past her—she’d parked her BMW just on the other side of the gate. “This is the address Skylar gave me.”
“Skylar told you to come here?” I asked dumbly.
“No,” Bethany said. “Skylar told me not to come here. Same dif.”
“I knew you’d come if I told you not to.” Skylar rounded the bend in the road a second after I heard her voice. “Reverse psychology. Behold my genius.”
As Skylar walked fully into view, I realized she wasn’t alone.
“Elliot?” Bethany said, sounding as surprised as I felt. “What are you doing here?”
“My little sister snuck out of the house carrying a circular-saw blade and a can of Mace.” Elliot gave Skylar a look. “I couldn’t exactly let her come alone.”
A can of Mace? What did Skylar think she was going to do, pepper-spray the big, bad biomedical conglomerate into submission?
“Look,” I said. “I appreciate the gesture, but whatever Chimera is keeping in there”—I gestured to the land that lay beyond the barbed wire—“I’m betting it’s not pretty, and I can’t do what I need to do if I have to worry about the three of you.”
“You can’t do it without us,” Skylar corrected. “I’ve seen it, Kali—seen it for as long as I can remember. Most of the psychic stuff, it’s pretty new, but this place, tonight, us—I’ve been dreaming it since I was twelve.”
Elliot ground his teeth together. “For the last time, Skye, you aren’t psychic.”
She met his eyes, and I was reminded of the things she’d told me in Bethany’s dad’s lab—It’s going to get better. But first, it’s going to get worse.
“Yeah, El,” Skylar said softly, “I am psychic. And you can pretend to be a skeptic, but if you hadn’t believed me when I said we should come, you would have duct-taped me to a chair in the kitchen instead of coming with.” Skylar must have seen the question in my eyes, because she clarified for me: “I’ve been duct-taped to chairs a lot.”
Sensing that she’d gone off topic, Skylar smiled—a sad smile, the kind strangers exchange in cemeteries when they don’t know what to say.
Sometimes there aren’t any good choices, she’d told me. Sometimes making the right one is hard.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told her, unsure what it was that she thought she had to do, but feeling the weight of it in the air between us.
“Yeah,” Skylar replied, responding to my assertion the exact same way I had replied to Zev’s. “I do. If you go in there by yourself, they’ll kill you. You’ll die.”
There was something about the way she said the words that made me believe her, absolutely and without reserve.
“If we don’t go with you, you’ll die, and a hundred thousand things that are supposed to happen—things that you could do—will die, too.”
I wanted to ask her how I could do anything, how one genetic freak of a girl could be of any importance at all, but before I could, Skylar switched from psychic proclamations to good old-fashioned logic. “Evidence has a way of disappearing when it implicates powerful people, Kali. You’re evidence, and they’ve already tried to kill you once. They’re obviously going to try again.”
“As much as it pains me to admit this,” Bethany interjected, “Skylar’s right. One dead teenager in the middle of nowhere is easy enough to explain. Four dead teenagers, two of whom have a brother in the FBI? That gets tricky no matter who the CEO is bribing, blackmailing, or sleeping with.”
In Bethany-ese, I took that to mean something along the line of “there’s safety in numbers.”
And maybe that would have been true—if there was any safety to be had. Glancing out over the dirt-dry land to the building in the distance, I got the feeling that there wasn’t.
The sign in front of this complex might as well have been labeled POINT OF NO RETURN.
“I’m bulletproof.” I countered Bethany’s logic with fact. “You guys aren’t. Worst-case scenario, they catch me. Worst-case scenario, you die.”
I saw my words hit home with Elliot. Bethany pursed her lips. Sensing the chink in their armor, I turned the full force of my gaze on Skylar.