I was safe, standing behind Cal. So were Morgan and the girl atop his muscular equine back. He’d galloped a good distance away from the madness, and looked poised and ready to move even farther away.
But Dana? She was receiving some residual shocks simply from standing in a puddle. And, despite her efforts to nullify them with her own G-T abilities, I could tell that she was hurting.
“
Cal! Stop it!
You need to stop!” I barked even as Dana breathlessly exclaimed, “They’re good! Cal! They’re good! Our side! They’re on our side!”
But it was like Calvin was under a spell—a terrible one that he was actually
enjoying
. Dana tried to step toward him, but she jumped back as soon as she realized that she’d be stepping into a world of pain. The blue current surrounding the mailbox was worse than anywhere else, thin blue lines snaking their way around the metal like fluorescent tapeworms, slithery and awful.
I focused my attention on the water that was still swirling out from the warehouse and TK’d the crap out of it, sending it up into the air with the force of a fire hose—directly into my best friend’s face.
The water alone didn’t stop him. But it caught Cal’s blue current and he ended up zapping himself. It didn’t knock him off the postal box, but it jolted him badly enough to make him stop.
In the sudden silence, Cal glared down at me from his perch on the mailbox. The expression on his face was terrifying.
His pupils filled up his brown eyes almost entirely as he bared his teeth at me. He looked like a monster—in the shape of my best friend. The thing that made him Calvin—the lightness and life in his eyes—was all but completely gone.
Something else had replaced him. Something terribly evil.
“Cal!” Dana said sharply, and just like that, he changed back into Calvin. Or almost-Calvin. There was still something…off in the way he was looking at me. And he made it worse by making that same
watching you
gesture with his hand that he’d made in jest, just a few hours earlier. This time, though, I didn’t think he was kidding.
But now Dana had already turned and given a hand up first to Miss Aurora and then April, hauling them both to their feet.
“We’re all on the same side,” Dana said again. And the fact that she gave that handgun back to the older woman, butt first, made her words ring even more true. It also made the gang of twelve from the front of the warehouse breathe a little bit easier. Sure enough Miss Aurora made a
stay put
motion toward them, but they definitely made sure we knew they were armed as well.
Of course, we were armed, too, with Calvin still perched on the postal box.
Dana turned to April. “We thought you were being held prisoner. Cal and Skylar recognized you from their school in Coconut Key.”
April gazed at me from underneath her wet mop of hair. I knew she remembered me. She nodded but then looked at Cal and shuddered. “You should kill him before he kills you.”
Cal, of course, bristled, and Dana was back to calming him down as April turned toward me and asked, “Why would you come all this way to save
me
? And how’d you even know I’d be here? And why now, after all that time?”
“Well, we didn’t. Know,” I tried to explain. “Cal’s got a little weird prescience thing happening with his…condition—”
“He’s a freaking addict,” April said flatly. “It’s not a condition.”
“Yes, I know, but—”
This time Dana cut me off. “We’ve been looking for my sister. I thought she was dead. She was taken years ago when she was small, but we just found out that she might still be alive. Another girl saw her here, and…her name’s Lacey. Lacey Zannino?”
Miss Aurora stepped forward and reached out to tip Dana’s face more fully into the wan light from the still-open doorway. She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “It’s remarkable. The resemblance.”
Hope flared in Dana’s eyes.
It was then that Morgan came clip-clopping back toward us. He was still carrying that blanketed figure, who was now sitting up straighter atop him. I could see a shock of blond hair as Miss Aurora said, “We call her Ell. And yes, it’s short for Lacey. She doesn’t remember her last name, but she’s been with us for about six months now. The transition back to freedom’s been particularly hard for her.”
Next to me, Dana let out a sound that was three parts gasp and one part sob. She brought her hand to her mouth as she turned to look up at the girl.
“It’s definitely her.” Morgan the horse spoke aloud to the group. And, as weird as it should have been, he somehow made the whole talking-horse thing much more elegant than Mister Ed. Maybe it had to do with the words he was uttering.
It’s definitely her.
“Lacey?” Dana breathed.
Miss Aurora went to help the girl dismount from Morgan. And as she slid off the big horse, the blanket slid off her shoulders.
The girl who stood there was Jilly’s age—fifteen years old. Her eyes were crystalline blue and heavily hooded with a curtain of dark lashes in a face that could’ve been Dana’s. Her hair was longer than her sister’s—just touching the tops of her shoulders—and she was a few inches taller, but the resemblance
was
uncanny.
Except for the fact that little Lacey was hugely pregnant.
“Lace. It’s me,” Dana said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Dana.”
“Dana?” the girl repeated. She placed a protective hand around her round belly before stepping forward and squinting disbelievingly. “You can’t be. You’re lying! Dana’s dead!”
Then, Lacey—Dana’s long-lost sister—fainted at our feet.
————
When Lacey came to, she started to scream. Morgan quickly morphed from horse to dog, and when he leaned up against her leg, she immediately clung to him and calmed down.
Dana backed way off, but I knew that she was horribly freaked out. She’d clearly upset her sister—badly.
It wasn’t the worst thing in the world that both April and Miss Aurora—it was hard to tell which of them was actually in charge of this crew—wanted to do something called “bug out.” Immediately. They were rightfully worried that with all of the noise and weird blue lights and exploding windows and water, that the gang over at the Doggy Doo Good would send someone over to see what was causing the ruckus.
So instead of standing around and making Lacey even more upset, we bugged out. Which basically meant we got into our cars and drove away.
The gang of G-Ts had a couple of ancient cargo vans hidden in the burned-out warehouse next door. They all piled into those vehicles, and we got back into Calvin’s car. Morgan-the-Dog went in the van with Lacey, and April went with us in a kind of impromptu “hostage” exchange.
It was then, as we drove to a safe location on the other side of Orlando—it took us about a half hour to get there—that April answered most of our questions.
Who the hell
were
they?
April’s first response to that question was to pull a marker pen out of her pocket and draw <=>, surrounded by an eye-shaped oval, on the inside of her left arm. I recognized the mark—it was the one Morgan had showed us, back in the twenty-plex.
It turns out that Morgan was right, and we’d stumbled upon a local rescue cell from GTFU. This group of G-Ts and allies had set up camp right in the proximity of the Orlando Doggy Doo Good complex in order to intercept shipments of kidnapped little girls.
April had become part of the group after they’d saved her life.
Apparently, last year, after her breakdown at school, she’d been snatched from the hospital by some very bad people who sold her to a Destiny farmer. But the truck she’d been in, heading north to God knows where, had been stopped by this rescue cell, and she’d been saved.
Turns out she’d found not just a home but a calling.
Some months later, she’d been part of a daring raid of a Destiny prison near Gainesville. This little group of G-T freedom fighters saved three dozen girls in that op—and one of them was Lacey.
Unlike in most Destiny production rings, those girls had been cared for. Periods of torture and imprisonment were juxtaposed with weeks of food and shelter and health care—all of which must’ve felt like sheer luxury—before they were sent back out “on the line” again. That’s what they called it when they were chained to a bed or sometimes just to an anchor in the floor, and forced to bleed into bags while being threatened with beating and death.
But the girls got harder to control when they reached puberty because their powers increased. When the girls in this particular farm turned thirteen or so, they got taken off the line, April told us, and put into a breeding program.
Yeah. That’s as awful as it sounds.
Dana’s little sister, Lacey, was pregnant because the people who’d owned her had decided it was time for her to make them more G-Ts. But not just regular Greater-Thans—
super
G-Ts.
That was pretty horrible, but the thing that made Dana start to cry was finding out that this was not her sister’s first pregnancy. According to April, Lacey’s first baby had been born about a year ago—and immediately ripped from her arms. She had no idea where the girl was or even if she’d survived. And yes, Lacey had had a daughter.
Apparently there was a way to ensure that “Breeder Girls” had female babies, since most of the time males wouldn’t do their owners any good.
I wanted to throw up. I knew that the people who produced Destiny were evil, but this was… Lord, I couldn’t even.
As we all absorbed that info, we arrived at a crumbling hotel in a part of Orlando that looked like it had been abandoned thirty years ago. This place was dark and boarded up—except for one window that we crawled through to get inside.
Morgan was waiting for us—back in human form and fully clothed, thank goodness.
“How is she?” Dana asked him.
He nodded. “She’s, um…in really shitty shape. I don’t want to lie to you.”
“No,” Dana said. “Don’t. I don’t want you to. I wanna know.”
“She believes with a deep conviction,” Morgan said, “that both you and your father were killed in a car accident. She, well, she saw it happen.”
“But it didn’t! How could she…?” Dana asked.
“Someone planted a false memory of your death in her mind,” Morgan said. “I’ve seen that done before—nothing like this, though. Whoever did this is…brilliant in a really evil way. The memory is anchored in there in a way that’ll be hard to fix. Even for me. It was implanted years ago—my guess would be that she kept trying to escape when she was first kidnapped.
“Whoever owned her recognized the potency of her blood,” he continued. “They used the implanted false memory to instill a feeling of hopelessness in her—which seemed to work. With you and her dad gone—dead, in
her
mind—she had nowhere to go. About the same time they did that, they wiped her memory of her last name. She really has no clue what it is.”
Dana nodded. “That explains why she didn’t come looking for me when she was rescued.”
“Yeah,” Morgan said. “Look, you should go in and see her. Let her get used to the idea that you’re not dead. But I wouldn’t try to move her. Not right now. She feels safe with Aurora and April. I’d let her stay with them, for a while at least.” He lowered his voice. “Also, Calvin really freaks her out, so—”
“I heard that!” Cal said.
I spoke up. “We’ll stay out here while you go see Lacey,” I told Dana. “Take as long as you need.”
Dana nodded. “Thanks.” She looked to Calvin for support, but his head was down as he was looking at his phone. So she asked me, “What do I say to her?”
I hugged her. “I’d start with
Hi, I’m your sister, and I’m definitely not dead.
”
“Thanks a billion, Einstein.”
“Sometimes it’s good to go with the obvious,” I said as she went down the hall with April, leaving Morgan, Cal, Garrett, and me to entertain ourselves.
I quickly shot a text off to Milo:
We found her! But it’s weird.
“Hey!” Calvin said. “Holy shit! Holy
shit
! You guys! You remember those numbers that I kinda burped out at the twenty-plex? Seven, nineteen, twenty-one, thirty, fifty-four? If we’d used them to play the lottery, we’d’ve won seventeen million dollars! Am I the bomb, or am I the bomb?”
He started singing and dancing, right there in that mildewy hallway in Orlando, completely unconcerned that the girl that he loved really could’ve used his support.
We were losing Cal. It was happening right before our eyes. And as I remembered the way he’d looked at me, teeth monstrously bared, from his perch on top of that postal box, I heard an echo of April’s voice.
You should kill him before he kills you
.
Chapter
Twenty-One
We left Morgan in Orlando with Lacey, with an unspoken plan for him to return to Coconut Key in the morning to do Cal’s detox procedure then.
It was easier for me to think about it that way—as our attempt to save Cal. But in truth, my best friend was going to die tomorrow.
I wasn’t sure how we were going to do it—how we were going to kill him. And I don’t mean the stop-his-heart part.
That
I knew. What I didn’t know was how we’d get him strapped down on the operating table so that we
could
kill him.
It seemed extremely unlikely we’d be able to talk him into willingly participating. That left two options. Either we’d trick Calvin, or we’d have to overpower him.
Oh, wait, there
was
a third way. We could sedate him, which was kind of a combination of tricking and overpowering him. We could slip drugs into his drink or zap him with a hypodermic needle—and watch his shock and his sense of betrayal flare in his eyes before he slipped into unconsciousness.
The shock-and-sense-of-betrayal-in-his-eyes part was guaranteed, whatever method we chose.
I was aching to talk to Milo, but he’d briefly texted me back after I’d let him know we’d found Lacey. He was psyched, but his phone battery was running low. He’d let me know that he’d found our John Doe, who’d checked into a hotel, so that was good. But Milo didn’t have access to a charger, so I couldn’t take advantage of the long drive to have a longer conversation, which really sucked.