Unknown faces leaned over me before my eyelids drooped closed again. Moments later, an awful vinegar smell assaulted my nose. I squinted under the bright lights. My body ached like I’d been used as a soccer ball. I lifted my heavy arm, but it stopped partway up with a snapping sound. A glistening chain connected a band around my wrist to the chair I was lying in.
“Ah, she’s awake.”
I flipped my head in the direction of the male voice, the room slowly spinning as I went. The small room had white walls devoid of any decorations. Scalpels, needles, and clamps filled the silver tray next my chair. The harsh light gleamed off the tools as if they were mocking me.
My feet were bare, and my jeans had been replaced by cream-colored scrubs complete with a matching top.
“Where am I?” I choked out, my mouth dry. “Let me go.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” A second, deeper voice laughed.
I gasped, immediately recognizing the man from pictures in my history briefs and on the news. Even though his khakis pants were wrinkled, his red sweater was faded, and his normal slicked back hair wildly stuck up in places, there was no mistaking who this man was, tired bags under his eyes and all. In the corner of the room stood Rufus Scurry, the inventor of Tracker220.
I swallowed hard. Trouble didn’t even begin to describe my current situation. I was no longer walking the edge of the cliff. Things had spiraled so far out of control that I’d tumbled off, headed for a pit full of flaming, jagged rocks.
“You and your tracker have caused a lot of problems, young lady.” He stared at me like he was trying to understand a calculus equation with no solution. “What do you say we run some tests?”
My mind raced. He was clearly smarter than his goonish agents. His mere presence meant he must not have trusted anyone else to fix my malfunctioning tracker. Lying was my only option, and I’d have to make it convincing.
The tracker network relied on unquestioning people who complied with the system and obeyed the rules. I hadn’t done that.
Staring at my shackled hands, I thought of Jake, the one thing that would make me cry on the spot. I gave into the tears, knowing it might be the only thing that would save me. “I wanted to come home, but”—my bottom lip quivered—“the Ghosts—they held me prisoner. They killed my brother and told me if I didn’t help them, they’d kill my parents too. I didn’t have a choice.” I let the tears well and my body shook, hoping he wouldn’t see through the lie.
Mr. Scurry’s face showed no emotion, but his eyes glimmered with a glint of something I couldn’t quite place. Maybe it was triumph. He tilted his head to the side as if weighing the truthfulness of my words.
“I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.” I added hoping to tip the balance. At least that part was true. I was scared then and now.
His lips curled upward into an evil half grin as if to say, “I’m onto your little secret. The ruse is up.” “Your parents are here. They’re in no real danger.”
My insides coursed with dread. They might be alive, but in the hands of Rufus Scurry was way worse than anything I could imagine. With one expression, he’d taken me out of the fire and burned me from the inside out.
“Can I see my parents?” I put on my best hopeful, pleading face. “You can do whatever you need to with my tracker. Just let me see them first.”
“You’re right. We will adjust your tracker. But we don’t need your permission.” He nodded to the agents on either side of me, then strode from the room.
They wheeled over large machinery holding trays of needles and sharp objects that made the instruments to my left look like toys. Before I had time to struggle, they pressed my arms down and shoved needle after needle into them. The stab of each one made me scream louder and louder inside my head, but I bit down on the insides of my cheeks to keep the screams from becoming audible. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
Some of the liquids burned like a volcano while others cooled like an arctic blast. I broke into a sweat as I rapidly cycled between hot and cold. My body grew heavy. My eyelids drooped. The machines buzzed and whirled around me with increasing intensity. The crunching and grinding sounds were sickening. I fought to stay conscious, but with each substance they injected, more energy leaked from my body. My vision went white, like my tracker was hard-resetting.
After an eternity, my feet blurred into focus, followed by two men in green scrubs. They loosened the bands around my arms and hauled me from the chair. A blue light blinked in the corner of my sight, indicating some kind of health issue, but I didn’t dare access the message. They dragged me out the door and down a hall, my dirty feet scraping across the pristine, white floors. I had trouble keeping track of the directions we went as we twisted through the nondescript hallways.
With a metallic whine, a door swung open, and they threw me to the floor by the far wall. The door slammed behind me with a second screech.
I groaned and struggled to sit upright. Shooting pains raged through my head, causing the room to spin.
“Easy. You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”
The voice sounded familiar, but my head pounded too much to think clearly. I strained to focus on the figure helping me to a sitting position. Brown, shaggy hair, green eyes. “I’ve seen you before,” I choked out in a hoarse whisper.
“Yes, we’ve met. I’m Myles, Bailen and Peyton’s father.”
I shook my head but instantly regretted it. Pain shot through every nerve in my brain. With it, came a sudden clarity. I knew where I’d seen him before, and it hadn’t just been at the Hive. “No, you were on the news.”
“Oh, they did a number on you, dear.”
“No,” I protested. “The crime, the murder, that was you.” I knew his eyes were familiar when I met him, but I couldn’t place it beyond that he, Bailen, and Peyton all had a striking resemblance. I struggled to process it then, with the emotions of Jake’s death as fresh as a cut. But after everything I’d been through, things were clearer than ever.
“It’s not something I’m proud of, but we needed supplies. You’ve seen the equipment we’ve been working with. It wasn’t cutting it.”
“But stealing? Killing.” Everything was a blur. This didn’t align with the Ghosts I knew.
“I tried to pay for the items, but he wouldn’t sell the quantity we needed. That poor man came at me with a gun. I tried to stop him…” His gaze drifted to the floor, as if he were ashamed to face the truth. “But it went off. It was an accident. I never meant to hurt anyone. I grabbed the supplies and ran. I seem to be making a mess of things lately. Our current situation is no different.”
With his resignation, the room slowly came into focus. We were in a cement cell with no windows, surrounded by hay on the floor. Light entered through a slit in the metal door, the only exit. The red message indicator on my tracker blinked.
“My tracker is active. I’m getting a message.”
“It’s a trap. Don’t open it.”
As much as I ached to see if the message was from my parents, I knew Myles was right. It would have to remain unread along with the two hundred unread messages Lydia had sent me since my tracker had reactivated. “How did you get here?”
He shook his head as if he was trying to clear away a fog. “I’m not sure. I was loading the semicopter with supplies and the next thing I knew I woke up here, in this cell.”
“That’s better than where I woke up,” I muttered. I shut my eyes in an attempt to calm my pounding head, but when I opened them again, it wasn’t any better.
“What about Bailen? Peyton?” Myles rubbed his temples. His head didn’t seem to be in any better shape than mine.
“I don’t know. The last thing I saw was Bailen speeding away from me on his bike.”
Barry smiled as if he knew his son had escaped.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“We wait.”
“We wait? There has to be a way out of here. We can’t be trapped.”
“I’ve spent years memorizing the maps of this facility. These cells are ironclad. No one is getting in or out unless they want us to.”
“So we’re stuck?”
“Even if we could break out of the cell—and that’s a big if—there’s no way we’d make it out of the facility alive. It’s heavily monitored.” He leaned against the wall as if he had given up.
“How do you know?”
“In all the map studying, if there was a way out, the Ghosts would have found it by now. They’ve excelled at cobbling together bits of intel and research over the years.”
“The others know where we are? There’s a chance of rescue?”
“We’ve only been able to steal schematics, but nothing indicates its location. It’s well hidden. They make people disappear,” he said. “But we’ve narrowed down the options considerably. It’s only a matter of time before they find it.”
“I’m guessing the authorities didn’t leave much of a trail to follow.”
“Probably not.”
“We’re on our own then.”
“Like I said, we wait.” He swallowed and lowered his voice. “They’ll come for you, eventually.”
“What about you?”
“Perhaps, but I have less time.” He lowered his head as if he’d accepted a death sentence.
“Why me?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. My head swarmed with painful thoughts, trying to keep up. I didn’t know if I could withstand torture for days on end. I was already at my breaking point.
He leaned in and whispered into my ear. “They’re listening,” he said. “Besides, your father wouldn’t want me to tell you.”
I froze. Every part of me wanted to be angry at him for his vagueness, but the shock left me without words. After a while, I forced out the first ones that formed. “You know my father?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“How? He’s not a traitor.” I stopped. That was harsh. “I mean a Ghost.”
Myles froze, as if his thoughts had taken him to a distant place. Somewhere long forgotten. Maybe he hadn’t heard me slip up. I’d spent how much time with the Ghosts, and I still sometimes thought of them as the enemy? Maybe it was the current circumstances. The cell, the agents, Rufus Scurry, my parents; my brain was on overload. Despite what I’d said, I knew in my core I could trust the Ghosts, even if Myles had made a mistake. If it weren’t for them, I’d have been locked up a lot sooner, or worse.
“Myles?” I touched his shoulder. He didn’t jump, but he focused on me like he had finally woken up.
“You can’t ever forget how important you are,” he said in a quiet but solemn tone that inherently told me he knew it to be true within his very soul. “You are the one thing that will allow us to overcome them.”
The room started to spin again. I lowered to the ground and pressed my cheek to the cement. “I’m not sure anymore. They did something to my tracker. They may have even replaced it.” I touched the back of my head, wincing when my fingers ran over a sore spot.
“They haven’t replaced it. They tried to reset it, though.” He lifted my head and twisted me so I could lean against his shoulder. I was grateful for the reprieve from the hard surface.
“How do you know?”
“Because they’ll want to study you. They can’t if they remove it. Besides, they would have to shave your head and perform surgery to remove it.”
I shuddered at the thought. Brain surgery was not on my to-do list. “They wouldn’t cut into my head just for the satisfaction of retrieving a faulty tracker chip?”
“Only as a last resort. It’s a huge risk to remove the chip from its current environment. It may not function the same.”
For the first time since I’d arrived, the tension inside me uncoiled a little.
Myles whispered into my ear again. “But if they knew what you were carrying on your tracker, they wouldn’t hesitate to remove it.”
I shot up, ignoring the shooting pain in my head. I inspected his serious expression, searching for meaning I couldn’t find. A question formed on my lips, but the metal clang of the door opening prevented it from escaping.