“I texted Milo to meet us here,” Dana explained. She was sitting in the back with Calvin and Morgan. Cal was looking even worse, but Dana appeared to have plateaued. She still looked, though, as if she could use a long nap. “Precautionary stuff.”
Garrett had offered to drive Cal’s car so that Dana could focus on Cal, and it had been a bumpy ride. Garrett was, after all, a far cry from a Greater-Than, and he’d had a hard time figuring out Cal’s wheelchair-friendly hand controls. By the time we turned into the twenty-plex parking lot, I’d grabbed the
holy shit
bar above my head more times than I could count.
But I’d also taken the drive time to tell Dana and Cal about my depressing phone conversation with Jilly’s mother. Garrett was in the
Let’s just go into Rochelle’s house and drag Jilly out of the closet whether she likes it or not
camp. But Dana was quick to point out that the girl was a G-T, and the last time we’d tried that, it hadn’t gone well.
So some of Garrett’s driving may have been a passive-aggressive response to being completely shut down.
Now, he cut the engine with one final jolt. “If we wait too long to save Jilly, then she’ll be dead. Of course, if she’s dead, then she won’t have to go back to her owners, on account of being dead, but then again, she’ll be
dead
, so…”
“First things first,” Dana said. “And first is Calvin. We’ll get to Jilly, I promise.”
“But if we wait too long—” Garrett said again.
“We get it,” I interrupted him, not wanting to hear him say the word
dead
another twenty times.
“Here,” he said, turning around to hand the car keys to Calvin in the backseat.
“I’ll take those.” Dana grabbed the keys out of Garrett’s hand before Calvin could get to them.
Calvin frowned.
“Precautionary stuff,” Dana repeated as we all got out of the car. She tossed Cal’s keys over to Milo, then opened the trunk, pulling out both the bag she’d brought into Garrett’s dad’s office and a larger duffel. I assumed it contained the cooking batch of Destiny and all of the paraphernalia needed for Calvin to get the drug into his bloodstream.
The reality of the situation was setting in big-time, and Dana’s mention of
precautionary stuff
over and over was making it all the more real. She truly thought there was a chance that Calvin might joker.
Which was why, I realized with a sinking feeling in my chest, Dana had made sure that Milo was here. He was Dana’s
Whoops, Cal Jokered and I’m Suddenly Dead
Plan B.
Meanwhile, Cal was arguing with Dana over the absconded car keys. “I mean, for real. It’s not like I’m gonna just fly off the deep end here.”
Dana’s eyes were intense. “Babe. No offense. But, worst-case scenario, that is
exactly
what you’ll end up doing.”
“First things first. There is nothing more awesome than when you call me
babe
instead of
Scoot
. You should never not do that. Also? I feel fine—” Cal suddenly jerked and spun and then doubled over and puked just back beyond his car.
Dana set down her bags and went to help him as the rest of us tried to give them privacy. Which, frankly, is very hard to do when someone is violently dry-heaving a few feet away from you.
Garrett checked his email on his phone, while Morgan leaned against the front of the car and simply closed his eyes.
Milo came to greet me. Still no kiss hello though. But maybe that was because he was chewing his nicotine gum. Of course maybe he was chewing gum as an excuse not to kiss me. Or…
He broke into my current swirl of crazy overthinking by saying, “I got the GPS marker on our John Doe’s car. When Dana called, it was kinda now or never, so I did it en route. A fifty-mph marking can be ugly, so I’ll have to go back. Make sure it’s secure. Kinda driving me crazy—the idea that we might lose him. But this is important, too.”
It was an unusually long speech for Milo, and I could smell that he was nervous. Of me? That didn’t make sense. I tried to focus on his words, which didn’t quite make sense either.
En route?
“Wait. Fifty
miles per hour?
You seriously put the GPS thing onto his car while you were going
fifty miles per hour on the bike?
” I had to work really hard to keep my voice from sliding up to octaves that only dogs could hear.
Milo nodded. “I had to. It’s stupid and dangerous, I know, but letting him just vanish would’ve been even more stupid and dangerous, so…”
“Seriously, Miles,” I said.
“He’s coming for you, Sky,” Milo told me, “and I’m not going to let that happen.”
Now my heart was in my throat. “But first you had to come here to make sure I wasn’t the one who had to kill Calvin, if Calvin jokers and needs, you know, killing.” I looked at him hard. “That wasn’t Dana’s idea—that was yours, wasn’t it?”
Milo nodded.
“You’re always trying to protect me,” I said. “But you don’t have to. I’m strong—”
“And tough, and capable,” he said. “I agree completely. Could you handle this—if Cal jokers? Yes, I know you could. Absolutely. But you shouldn’t have to. Nobody should ever have to kill their best friend, Sky.”
“Great,” I said. “Thanks. Except he’s
your
friend, too.”
“But I’ve seen enough addicts joker,” Milo told me quietly. “Yeah, he’ll have Calvin’s face, but I won’t have any doubts at all that he’s not Calvin anymore. I’ll be okay.” He corrected himself. “More okay.”
We were talking as if it was a given—that Cal was going to joker, kill Dana, and then die at Milo’s hand. My face twisted as the shock of that hit me, and I almost burst into tears, but Milo grabbed me and hugged me hard.
And yes, our connection clicked on.
God, Sky, I love you so much and I wish to hell I could fix this!
He wasn’t so much thinking it in words as he was feeling it with every cell in his body.
Still thoughts
, I sent back for both of us.
Still
…
Just then, the alarm for Calvin’s car went off—the horn blared and the lights flashed, and Milo and I sprang apart.
“Ow!
Merde!
” Morgan jumped up from where he was leaning on the front hood. “Hello! I just got a shock!”
“Sorry! Sorry!” We all turned to see Calvin backing away from the car, his hands out. Dana gestured to Milo to give back the car keys, but Cal beat her to it, silencing the car by pointing at it and sending it an electrical current direct from his hand. It would’ve been cool, except it wasn’t. It was scary and weird and awful.
“Sorry, that was me,” he apologized. “I was leaning against the car and I must’ve… Sorry.” He looked at Dana and added, “I’m okay. Sorry about reprising my role as the Vomit King, but I’m done. And yes, I know I’ve felt
better
, but—” He shook his head feebly. “I’m not great. I’ll admit that much. But I do know that I’m in complete control.”
Dana’s expression was grim as she looked at him, especially considering he’d just sent an accidental electrical current through the car that he’d been leaning against. “You think that now. But if something goes wrong and you joker—you could do things. Terrible things. And it won’t be
you
anymore, Cal. It’ll be the drug, making decisions
for
you.”
Calvin’s jaw clenched. I had never seen him look so solemn. “I would never hurt you, Dana. I swear it.”
Dana nodded as she gazed into his eyes. “I know you
believe
that, babe. But Destiny is stronger than you. It’s stronger than love. It’s stronger than anything.”
She picked up both bags again, slinging them over her shoulder as she used her other arm to help support Cal.
Milo took a step toward them, his brow furrowed in concern.
“I got this,” Dana said, looking at him—her longtime friend who I knew she loved as much as I loved Calvin. She pointed to the collar of her bomber jacket, and I saw she’d clipped one of those Minicams there.
Milo nodded and held up the tablet we’d been using to scope out the inside of Rochelle’s house. He must’ve had it in his jacket pocket. “Turn it on,” he said, and she did even as she started to lead Cal through the fence and toward the abandoned mall.
I leaned in to look, and the picture had already come on line. I was both relieved and horrified that, even from a safe distance, thanks to that camera, I’d have a front-row view of my best friend getting injected with Destiny.
And then maybe killing Dana.
I loved them both so much. This whole thing was like one big nightmare that I couldn’t wake myself up from.
I couldn’t stand it. I bounded after them. “Wait!” I exclaimed.
Calvin and Dana both turned around, their frowns identically quizzical.
“Just let me give you both a hug before you go inside,” I said.
Dana didn’t hide her eye roll. But Calvin grinned. “Lend me some sugar. I
am
your neighbor!” he exclaimed, stealing a quote from an old-school song he liked to sing when he was in one of his goofy moods.
I felt way more like crying than laughing. But I managed to smile before wrapping my arms around him. “Be careful,” I said.
“Always,” he whispered.
I let go of Cal and turned to Dana. “I know you think I’m cheesy, but I really need to—”
“Just get it over with, Bubble Gum,” she interrupted me impatiently, spreading her arms wide as I rushed to hug her. “Christ,” she added in a gruff voice. But she hugged me back, hard.
————
“When we’re done here”—Dana’s voice came through the Minicam’s microphone, loud and clear, as Garrett, Morgan, Milo, and I got back into Cal’s car to avoid the mosquitoes—“let’s take a road trip to Orlando and scope out that address you were screaming about. The one near the Doggy Do Good warehouse. Okay?”
Milo took the driver’s seat—he had the car keys. And Garrett and Morgan climbed in the back, leaving me the seat beside Milo. He propped the tablet on the dashboard so everyone could see. He also put his cell phone in the cup holder between us. Except it wasn’t his cell phone. It was different. That was weird. I shot him a
What’s that?
look, but his full focus was on adjusting the screen of the tablet.
“Yeah,” Calvin said from inside the mall, his voice clear, too. “That’s a good idea.”
“She’s good,” Morgan commented from the backseat. “Dana. She’s setting up a reality where Calvin survives the injection without jokering. It’s good he goes in believing that.”
“Wouldn’t it be great if your sister was just…
there
,” Cal said as Dana helped him through the door to our familiar theater six. She was holding a flashlight and the light bounced around the big room. “Like, we kick down the door, and she’s the first girl we see? I mean, everything’s always so hard. It’d be nice if
something
was easy.”
“I hear you,” Dana said. “That
would
be nice.”
“Then we could all go to Hawaii and live happily ever after,” Cal said.
“Hawaii?” We heard the sound of her putting her bags on the floor, heard a zipper unzipping as she briskly opened the larger one.
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go. Take a hike through the jungle to see a volcano. Maybe make out beneath a waterfall…”
“You have a thing for waterfalls, huh?” Dana teased.
“I have a thing for
you
,” Cal told her.
Dana must’ve turned to look at him, because Calvin’s face appeared on-screen, his eyes shiny as nickels against the glaring beam of the flashlight. He looked like a cat gazing into the dark, and I shuddered. But then he smiled and he was back to being Cal again.
Dana said, “Wait a sec, let me…” And the image was dizzying for a moment as she plucked the camera off her jacket. She somehow stuck it against the wall, giving us a clear view of the whole room.
Calvin was sitting against the far wall of the theater. He deliberately focused his gaze onto the camera and waved.
Garrett, genius that he was, waved back.
“Here hold this for me,” Dana ordered, crossing to Cal and handing him the flashlight.
He obediently aimed the beam down onto her two bags as she took out what looked like a syringe. Yup, it definitely was.
“I wish I could turn on the lights for you,” Cal said pointing up at the theater’s overheads. Last time we were there, he’d used his Destiny-induced power to make them explode. But now, little more than tiny sparks jumped feebly from his fingertips.
Look what I can do, look what I can do…
I shivered again. And I wanted to reach for Milo, hold his hand, but
not
reaching for him had become our new normal, so I didn’t. Instead I gestured to the phone in the cup holder, mostly to distract myself while Dana prepped that syringe. “Don’t tell me your phone died again and you’re already using the backup.”
“No,” he said. “That’s…not…” He cleared his throat. “No.”
“It’s a trigger phone,” Morgan said from the backseat. “Isn’t it?”
Milo glanced at me as he nodded.
“A what?” I asked.
Milo sighed and then answered by taking my hand. Our connection snapped on, and I felt the sudden rush of being shown one of Milo’s memories. He was with Dana. They were both out of breath—they’d been fighting…someone…?
A Destiny addict who jokered. It was before we met you, and it was ugly
, Milo told me, as in his memory, he opened the trunk of the now-dead joker’s car. “Whoa,” he’d said aloud, and Dana came to look, too. “Whoa,” she’d echoed.
The trunk contained four homemade bombs, all wired to be triggered by a cell phone. I watched Dana reach into the trunk to pick up the phone—it was the same one that was now in the cup holder.
Dana didn’t want to sell them
, Milo said.
She was afraid they’d end up in the wrong hands. We blew one up
—he shot me another memory, this time of a deserted and overgrown orange grove, similar to the ones out to the east of the interstate, where an explosion ripped through the overcast morning sky—
just to see how it worked—if it worked
.