*SAGE
Dr. Tappit jumped and then brought the needle away from my arm. He sighed—in relief or annoyance, I couldn’t tell.
Dr. Adamson immediately stepped to the phone hanging on the wall and jerked up the handle. “Cutting it close, aren’t we Robert?”
Was it really my father on the other end of the line? I could almost make out the sound of a voice talking. Dr. Adamson listened for a few moments.
“I understand your terms,” he replied. “We get the code. She goes free.” Dr. Adamson rolled his eyes. “And you understand ours? It will only take a few hours to discover if you’re telling the truth. No longer than that,” Dr. Adamson said. “If you’re lying, she gets the injection.”
Dr. Adamson hung up the phone and turned off the camera. He lifted a walkie-talkie from the countertop. “Find him. Track the phone number and find him.” Dr. Adamson scrawled on a piece of paper pulled from his breast pocket and then went to the guards in the hall. “Send this address to headquarters and have them send someone out.”
Dr. Adamson turned to Dr. Tappit. “She can wait there until we hear more.” Dr. Adamson disappeared down the hall. Too stunned for words, I lay still.
Dr. Tappit stepped away from the table and moved to the corner, blotting his forehead with a tissue.
My dad had called. He had actually called.
But what had he said? And what was the real bargain? How could he assure that the Corporation wouldn’t just get the code and kill me afterward—which I’m sure they’d do if Dr. Adamson had any say about it. And the biggest question of all—why did my dad even care? After all these years, working to hide the code, not contacting me and Finn and Mom at all? Surely there was some motivation for him reaching out now, calling now, or else why wouldn’t he have done it before with Finn? Why me?
Dr. Tappit silently left the room, and I was alone with my thoughts. Questions swirled around and around in my head. Beckett and Caesar must have been just as shocked, because no one attempted to talk to me.
I wondered what the Corporation would find. If my dad was telling the truth, would they really release us? The rational part of my brain told me no, but my heart couldn’t help but hope. It meant Finn would make it out and get the help he really needed.
As I lay there on the bed, my stomach began to hurt.
At first, it felt like anxiousness, an exacerbation of the way my stomach had felt since the moment we were taken. But as the minutes went by, the pain increased, like someone twisted a knife in the muscles at my torso. I shifted, trying to move into a position that made it better.
Half an hour later, my clothes were soaked with sweat. I felt hot, yet chilled at the same time. A stitch of pain moved up my spine, starting at my tailbone and pulsing upward to the base of my head. I heard myself moaning, but it sounded like it came from another body altogether. What was happening? Had a drop of the serum gotten into my body after all?
My brain couldn’t focus long enough to wonder. I drifted into sleep.
*
I stood on a stairway landing in a familiar house. Hardwood floors. Clean, fresh, historic-looking. I remembered it and yet didn’t. My body felt short in relation to the stairs. I knew I was young. Just barely walking.
A man kneeled in front of me, his hands on my shoulders. He looked me in the eyes. He had brown eyes, like mine.
“You’re a special girl, Hope. You’ve got something special inside of you. Never forget that.”
My body jerked and shifted, a stab of pain in my stomach. The scene shifted, too.
Two little boys waved at me from the sidewalk. Mom locked me into my car seat. She wore a simple black dress. Her hair fell down her back in shiny waves.
From my car seat, I craned my neck to get a better look at the boys’ faces through the back window. One of them—the one with lighter hair—stepped forward to the edge of the curb and grabbed my door’s window ledge. He jumped, clinging to the door for a second, entertained with the activity. His father, dark-haired, with a serious face, called out to him. “Beckett, get down from there.” The boy dropped to the concrete, laughing.
The other boy stood back, near his father, underneath a small tree planted in the middle of the city sidewalk. He watched me. His eyes reminded me of the sky.
I stared back at the blue-eyed boy until my toddler eyes got distracted by a white curtain shifting in the second story of the brownstone behind the boys. A man peered out, the same man who’d rested his hands on my shoulders. I couldn’t read the emotion on his face.
“Daddy,” I called, and pushed my legs desperately against the seat in front of me. “Daddy!”
He turned away from the window and disappeared.
Mom’s car door slammed ….
My seventeen-year-old head jolted upward, heart thudding, my mind reorienting to the walls of the lab room. The clock on the wall to my right was colored a fuzzy neon. How long had I been lying here? The neon clock read 7:45. All day, then? Or all night, too? Was this real?
At some point, Dr. Adamson stood over me, staring with a puzzled expression. But his face looked distorted—long, cartoonish, shaped like a lemon. I couldn’t distinguish dream from reality. His brow furrowed. He left the room, or left my mind. I wasn’t sure which.
My spine throbbed. My sweat-drenched clothes clung to me, dampness seeped into the sheets. I shivered. The dreams—they were too real. It felt like I was there. They were me. Those other people, they were my mom, my dad, Beckett, Jack, Dr. Adamson.
Before I could process more, a spasm shot through my spine, and the pain pulled me back under.