ZAIRE’S CRYPTIC and confusing explanations haunted me all night and well into the next day. Thank goodness for multitasking, because I had to hand in my assignments, attend my classes, and figure out what Zaire had meant. Add trying to keep a low profile to that. Well, as low a profile as rumors about probation permitted. I’d become the first school delinquent Braylin had in its halls.
By the time my morning classes ended, my brain had staged a strike. The pounding felt like a thousand East Germans with sledgehammers tearing down the Berlin Wall. I needed coffee. Or food. Or both.
At The Roast, I ordered chicken soup. The server winced and wiped his hand against his apron when I sneezed just as he was setting the steaming bowl in front of me. I smiled in apology. His lips twisted ever so slightly before he turned and left. I sighed. I couldn’t even enjoy the smell. My nose had stopped working. As clogged as a drainpipe. I tried to sniff, but it magnified the pain in my head.
“You look terrible,” Riya said the second she saw me.
“Thanks for the reminder.” I lifted a spoon filled with chicken-y goodness and blew on it.
Riya set her books down and slid into her usual seat. “Well, it begs repeating.”
I let the heat of the soup burn its way down my throat. “I’m fine.”
“I don’t believe you.” She observed me like a cat watching fish in a bowl. “You’re a walking infection right now. What possessed you to come to school anyway? You should’ve stayed in bed.”
I dropped the spoon into the bowl and rested my burning forehead on the coolness of the table’s surface. I groaned. “I had to hand in my assignments today. I didn’t want to attract any more attention than I already have with my probation.”
“Camron, making yourself sick from the stress won’t help.”
I gnawed the inside of my cheek before I blurted out that stress had nothing to do with my cold. Fleeing blindly through the snow with a psychotic flesh-eating chick in hot pursuit, then being drugged and left to sleep it off in a cold library was enough to make anyone sick. I just groaned again in response.
“Okay, that’s it.” Riya slapped the table. “Finish your soup and I’m taking you to the nurse.”
“I don’t need to go.” I switched from my forehead to my cheek so I could see Riya’s livid expression. “I have classes this afternoon.”
“Like hell you do.”
I grinned. “You said ‘hell.’”
“You’re skipping all your afternoon classes,” she continued.
“Look at you, making me skip class. You’re a bad influence.”
“Camron?” She blinked at me.
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
I bit my lower lip to keep from laughing. My head would explode if I did.
She sighed, then said, “We’ll get the nurse to give you something so you can sleep. Then I’ll come for you when my class is over.”
“I’ll just go home now. Why wait?”
“Because I don’t want to leave you alone in your condition.” She glared. “Now, quit whining and eat up.”
I sat up and stared at the bowl. I picked up the spoon and brought it to my lips. Riya stared at me the entire time, growling when I paused longer than ten seconds. She made sure I swallowed every bite.
In the minutes after leaving The Roast, the walk to the clinic became a harrowing experience. My stomach sloshed from the chicken soup Riya had forced down my gullet. I wanted to scream at her, but I felt too nauseated. It took all my strength not to puke my guts out.
My legs felt like rubber by the time Riya pulled me into the clinic. The nurse stood up from her desk and hurried to my other side. She put my arm over her shoulder and wrapped her arm around my waist, and then she and Riya moved me toward the beds.
“Sink,” I mumbled.
“What?” the nurse asked.
“I think he said ‘drink,’” Riya said.
“Sink!” I yelled.
They hurried me to the small washing area near the rear of the clinic just in time for the stainless-steel sink to catch the chicken soup that refused to stay eaten. I heaved and heaved until I had nothing left to heave, and then some. Riya rubbed circles on my back. My entire body convulsed. After the trembling stopped, I lifted the tap and washed out my mouth.
“When did I eat carrots?” I faced Riya, and she shrugged.
“Come on, Camron,” the nurse said. “You should lie down.”
I refused their offer to help me behind the privacy curtain. With one careful step after another, I made my way to the bed nearest the window. If I had to lie down for the rest of the afternoon, I at least wanted a view of the garden and the sky.
I passed out sometime after the nurse took my temperature and gave me something for my cold. When the oblivion of sleep chased away the incessant pounding in my head, I hardly cared about anything else.
Visions of Troyan hauling me around campus interspersed themselves with images of Zaire carrying my books in the library and sitting with Gaige in the solarium. The imagery sped past my line of sight so fast that my nausea returned. I saw myself running away. Overwhelming fear pushed me along a dark hallway. To stop meant death. I had to keep moving. I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing. Just endless darkness. When I faced forward again, I slammed into a marble wall.
I opened my eyes and gasped for air. Sweat slid down my temple to my cheek. The winter afternoon sun cast the room in gray light. In my periphery, I caught sight of a figure sitting beside my bed.
“Oh, jeez!” I squawked out and scrambled to the farthest corner of the bed, pulling the blanket with me. “What are you doing here?”
“Camron, you have to lie down,” Gaige urged. The grayness of the room made his pale skin look even more ashen than usual. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Easy for you to say.” I rubbed my chest. “I thought I was about to have a heart attack.”
Gaige studied me. He gripped his fingers together on his lap, as if in prayer. A hint of desperation hid behind the relative calm he portrayed. I saw it in the urgency in his eyes and the tight line of his lips. A muscle on his cheek jumped. His stillness and a dizzy spell prompted me to take his advice and lie down. I stared at the ceiling for a while to keep the room from spinning.
“I can’t seem to get rid of you,” I said.
“I resent that.” The stool Gaige sat on creaked.
My eyes traced a hairline crack in the plaster above me. “The last time I was with you, you drugged me.”
“Troyan made me do it,” he said. “I wanted to keep you around, but he insisted you be returned.”
“Why leave me in the library?” I looked at him then.
Gaige stared at his entwined fingers. “He said you needed to be taught a lesson.”
“Some lesson. The most he did was get Kiev to put me on probation. If he really wanted to teach me a lesson, he should have had me expelled.”
“That was me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You mean Troyan doesn’t know I’m still here?”
He nodded; then his fathomless black eyes pinned me down. “I requested that you remain a student here. Believe me, it took some convincing. Alek was definitely ready to expel you.”
My mouth opened, but no words came out. Even if my face felt hot from fever, my hands turned icy. The temperature in the clinic seemed to have dropped a few degrees in the last minute. I gulped away the tightness in my throat.
“The nurse,” I said. “Won’t she—”
“No,” Gaige said. “She’s currently being detained.”
“You didn’t—”
“No! Oh my, no!” He shook his hands at me. “She’s in Kiev’s office. I had a hard time locating you today.”
“Does Kiev know you’re here?”
“Yes. But he doesn’t know why, and I don’t care to explain myself to him.”
“Friends in high places,” I joked.
“I beg your pardon?”
Fatigue sat like an elephant on my body. I needed rest. I needed to hurry Gaige along. He wouldn’t risk discovery for nothing. I smiled to myself; he wasn’t Zaire.
“What are you doing here, Gaige? Why don’t you want me expelled?”
“Maybe this isn’t a very good idea after all,” he whispered.
I threw an arm across my eyes. It eased some of the sting brought on by the gray light.
“Don’t back out now,” I said. “You seemed to have gone through all this trouble to keep me here at Braylin. What do you want from me?”
“I need your help.” A palpable pause. “We need your help.”
“Who are we?”
“My people.”
The desperation in his manner finally entered his voice. I lowered my arm and searched Gaige’s face. He betrayed nothing, returning my stare with a blank one. I felt sorry for him a little. I didn’t know why. I just did.
“I know this is going to sound cliché, but I have to ask it anyway: why me?”
A crack in his expression revealed sadness. It had fear and uncertainly mixed with it. I sighed, long and hard, prepared to listen to what he had to say. He’d come all this way. Plus, I felt too sick to leave.
“You already know about us. And it seems like you’re curious enough to want to know more. Don’t you want to find out what goes on at Braylin when the sun sets?”
“What about the headmaster?”
“Kiev doesn’t act without confirmation from any of us.”
“And Troyan? When he finds out, who knows what he’ll do.”
“After what I’m about to do to you?” Gaige’s brows inched up a notch. “He won’t have a choice but to keep you with us.”
My eyes narrowed. I sat up and a suspicious tingle climbed my spine. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Are you going to help us or not?”
“With that attitude, I don’t think so.”
“Stop this, Camron.” Gaige rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m being serious.”
The coming together of his dark eyebrows said as much. I was being serious as well.
“What’s in it for me? What do I get out of helping you?” I countered. I sounded selfish, but I needed to have an idea of what I was getting myself into before I agreed to anything.
“You’ll become one of a chosen few who knows what we really are,” he said.
Zaire’s words in the library pinged inside me. The hairs on my arms rose.
“You’re going to tell me what you are?” I asked.
A ray of hope shone in Gaige’s eyes when he said, “Better yet, you get to live with us for a while.”
“But wouldn’t that be dangerous for me?”
Color drained from his face. “Never mind that for now. You wouldn’t believe me anyway if I explained everything right at this moment.” Gaige shook his head. “Are you going to help or not?”
“Why is it I don’t seem to have a choice in this matter?”
“I read your file.”
Anger sparked in me. “You what?”
“It says there that your mother died of an unknown disease, that the doctors couldn’t do anything for her. There are notes in your file that show how desperate you were to find a cure to save her. Camron, without your help, my people will surely die. We’re sick—like your mother, we need a cure. And I’m on the verge of discovering one, but I need a human to help.”
Memories of my mother surfaced from the depths of my subconscious. Her frail body bogged down by so many life-support tubes. Her translucent skin. Her perpetual state of slumber. She wasted away, until nothing of her remained. Emptiness ate at the edges of my consciousness every time I remembered her.
If I could have done anything to save my mother, I would have. Now here was Gaige, desperate to save his people—a race so secretive no one but a select few knew of their existence. He was giving me an opportunity to make a difference.
I didn’t know him well, but I felt a strong urge to say yes to his request. My father, when he still loved me, taught me to be selfless. Would he respect me if I agreed to Gaige’s request? I shook my head. That was the wrong question to ask. Help should be given freely and unconditionally, my father told me once.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
Gaige’s face relaxed into a smile. He pulled out a hypodermic needle from the pocket of his lab coat and pulled off the safety cap. He grabbed my wrist so fast I didn’t have time to struggle before he plunged the needle into my arm. The pain came in an instant. First the prick, then the needle’s contents emptying into my arm. It felt like oil going in, thick and dreadfully torturous. Gaige pulled the needle out and let go of my arm. I curled into a fetal position.
The pain pulsed. It traversed my entire body.
I screamed.
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“It hurts!” I howled at him. “What did you inject me with?”
“Here, Camron.” Gaige shoved a rolled-up face towel into my mouth.
I groaned, attempting to spit out the thick cloth.
“It’s so you don’t bite off your….”
The rest of his words were lost to me as my eyes rolled into the back of my head.