“I don’t know,” he answers. “Maybe they just took her in for questioning about the break-in last night. They’ll grill her for a while and then let her go when she tells them the truth. She has nothing to lie about.”
I want to believe him. I want to believe that Mom’s disappearance is routine and that she’ll be home in no time. But one look at the destruction around me and I know that’s a fantasy. Whoever took her was looking for something and tossed our entire house to find it. And if they took Mom with them, they must not have found it.
Besides, if it means keeping my immunity a secret, she absolutely would lie to them. In a heartbeat.
If they’d do this to the house, what would they do to her?
“We need to get her back as soon as possible,” I say. “We need to get both her and Deacon back. Tonight.”
We head back downstairs through the chaos. I don’t need to see any more. Not when my mind is too full with my new mission: get Deacon and Mom away from the bad heroes—and pray that Rebel and the villains are wrong about the pervasive corruption.
I mentally cross my fingers, toes, and eyes hoping that whoever tossed the place didn’t bother with Mom’s makeshift home lab in the garage.
But that was a futile hope. Unlike the rest of the house, the garage hasn’t been trashed. There are no beakers smashed to pieces on the concrete, no chemical slime oozing across the floor, no cabinets yanked off the walls. No, everything in the garage is just gone.
It’s like they backed up a moving truck to the door and loaded it with every last piece of equipment, every last ounce of chemicals. Every last hope of using Mom’s secret stash of knockout serum to rescue her and Deacon.
Sick to my stomach and more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life, I turn to Draven. “We’re going to need a new plan.”
Chapter 10
Draven looks at me, his jaw clenched. “We don’t have time for a new plan.”
“Time or not, we have no choice.” I gesture to the empty garage. “Without the knockout serum, I’ve got nothing.”
He swears under his breath, words so vile and vicious that only a villain would use them. Then he yanks out his phone, hitting speed dial. “We’ve got a problem, Dante,” he barks when his cousin answers the phone, no preliminaries. “Get here, now.”
He doesn’t say any more than that, doesn’t warn Dante or Rebel about what to expect when they get here. Instead, he just disconnects the call, shoves the phone back in his pocket, and starts to pace like a caged tiger.
I try to think what our next steps should be, but it’s hard with panic ripping through me. Mom. Mom. Mom. She’s all I can think about. All I can see when I close my eyes. All I can focus on, even though I know that if I want to save her, I have to concentrate on being smarter, sneakier, better than the bad guys—whichever side they’re on.
She’s gone. My mother is gone.
There’s no way this is anything but a kidnapping—and it has to have been someone on the inside.
The question is, why? Did they find out about one of her secret experiments? The knockout serum? The night-vision pill? Or the projects she was working on that were so dangerous she wouldn’t even tell me about them? My immunity shot?
Just the thought swamps me with guilt. I almost blew my immunity secret with Draven tonight. Maybe it wasn’t the first time. Maybe I let it slip somehow when I was in Rebel’s dad’s office or on sub-level two.
Shit. I used my mother’s pass last night—to get to her lab, up to Mr. Malone’s office, and down to sub-level two. Her access card. Her RFID chip. Her digital trail. What if that’s why they came to get her? Not because of her side experiments, but because of me? Because of what I did?
And then when they got here to question her, they searched the house and found her unsanctioned experiments. Experiments Mr. Malone might very well consider treasonous. Experiments she was keeping secret because she wanted to protect us. To protect me.
Me. It all comes back to me. My mother is in trouble because of me. The thought makes me sick, makes my knees feel like gelatin and my stomach feel like I swallowed a bowling ball.
My mother was taken because of me.
My mother is being held captive somewhere because of me.
My mother might very well be tortured because of me.
Tortured.
They might be torturing my mother right now.
I try to force myself to be rational. Just because they took her, just because they want to question her, doesn’t mean they’ll hurt her. But the old argument about the heroes being the good guys is gone.
For a second, all I can see or hear is Deacon. Face pale, body tense, his screams echoing through my brain as they tortured him.
For the first time I understand, really understand the helpless rage that is written all over Draven’s face. The fury and terror and hate that have him wearing a path into the industrial-grade carpet my mother put in the garage when she turned it into her secret lab.
It is the same fury and terror and hate—yes, hate—that is suddenly burning inside me.