“Maybe she went to the police,” I say, mostly to myself. “Maybe she wasn’t here when it happened.”
Draven gives me a skeptical look—like I’m living in a fairy tale—but I ignore it. Instead, I pull out my phone and dial Mom’s cell number. A moment later, I hear the muffled sound of “She Blinded Me with Science” coming from back in the bedroom. I follow the music to a pile of bedding in the corner. Tossing sheets and pillows aside, I find the phone at the bottom of the pile.
I hold it up, staring blankly as it continues to ring. And ring. And ring. Then the noise stops as abruptly as it started and my call goes to voice mail.
“That’s her phone?” Draven asks.
I nod dumbly.
The house is trashed. Mom’s not here. And she doesn’t have her phone, the one thing she never goes anywhere without. I punch a button, hoping to find some clue to what happened here. The screen stays black. The battery must be dead.
Where is she?
I slide her phone in my pocket and then use my phone to try her office number. She doesn’t pick up there either.
Next, I try the lab itself. Nothing.
I decide to try another lab on our floor. After three rings, someone picks up.
“Neurotoxins,” the gentle male voice says, “Dr. Harwood speaking.”
“Dr. Harwood, it’s Kenna.” I turn away from Draven. “Is my mom around?”
“Haven’t seen her,” he replies. “Did you try her office?”
“No answer.”
“Be careful with that bottle,” Dr. Harwood says, muffled like he’s turned away from the phone. “Do you want to paralyze us all?”
I rub the spot between my eyes.
“If I see Jeanine, I’ll tell her to give you a call.”
“Thanks,” I tell him.
I stare at my phone for several long seconds. Mom lives at the lab. She mostly comes home to sleep and eat—and those only when I remind her. If she’s not there…
I keep myself from imagining a worst-case scenario.
Before I give up on reaching her, I try her office one more time. I’m about to hang up when it goes to voice mail again, but then I freeze. Instead of Mom’s distracted instruction to leave a message, a male voice says, “You have reached the voice mail of Dr. Jeanine Swift. Dr. Swift is out of the country and unable to check messages. If this is an emergency, please contact the main office at ESH Lab.”
I hang up before the beep. Then I dial again and play the message on speakerphone.
My thoughts accelerate from worry to terror.
“They took her,” I whisper.
Draven steps into my line of sight. “You don’t know that. Maybe she—”
“Someone took her,” I repeat. “She wouldn’t just take off without saying a word to me. She especially wouldn’t leave the country.”
“But why would the superheroes take her?” he asks. “She’s their poster child.”
“I-I don’t know.” I shake my head. This makes no sense. None of this makes any sense.
Everything in my world is tumbling too fast. My mind can’t keep up. Get a grip, Kenna.
I’d only let my guard down for a second, allowed myself to think about trusting villains because a few heroes are doing bad things, and suddenly my first thought is to blame the good guys? The world doesn’t change that fast.
“You’re right,” I say, “it couldn’t have been heroes. It had to be villains.”
Draven scowls. “No way.”
“Yes way.” I advance on him. “Who took her? Where are they keeping her?”
He holds up his hands. “Whoa. Villains did not take your mom. We aren’t the ones with a proven record of kidnapping here.”
“You’re the bad guys!” I punch him in the chest.
He doesn’t flinch, but it feels good anyway. I hit him again and again. Harder and harder.
He grabs my wrists and holds me back. “Kenna, listen.” His voice is steady and, for once, not full of anger and snark. “You asked me to trust you and here I am, trusting you. Now it’s your turn. Trust me when I say that villains did not do this. We try to keep a low profile.”
My fury deflates a little—even if villains took my mom, that doesn’t mean this villain had anything to do with it—and I fight the urge to snort at the idea of villains keeping a low profile.
“Besides,” he says, “who could have changed her voice mail message? We don’t have that kind of access.”
All of the tension leaves my body. Everything inside me goes still. He’s right. Only someone with the highest security clearance could have overridden Mom’s voice recognition access to her voice mail. Not even a gifted technopath could bypass that without authorization. It had to have been the heroes.
Worse, it had to be someone with status. Someone in the Collective.
“But why?”