I scrambled to the stage and crawled up. “We have to leave,” I told him. “We have to go right now.” I reached for Adam’s hand. He grasped my fingers. I was blind with panic. Our shoes squashed petals as we rushed off stage left.
I spotted a red exit sign glowing in a corner behind the stage. “This way,” I said. I didn’t look back. I pulled Adam as fast as I could out the door and slammed it behind us. We cut back to the front of the building. I spotted headlights swooping sharply around a turn, and then Owen’s Jeep was parked in front of us. He rolled down the window. “Get in.”
I didn’t ask questions. We piled into the backseat, and Owen slammed on the accelerator. I heaved for air, sticking my head between my knees and trying to breathe. “What … the hell … was that?” I said.
“That, Tor, was a very dead Knox Hoyle.”
I pushed myself into a sitting position. Owen drove faster than I’d ever seen him drive before. It was good. We needed to be as far away from there as possible. I wrung my hands. Adam’s eyes were bottomless in the dark backseat with the evening landscape whipping past. My Adam. My perfect Adam. What had I done?
“I’m sorry, Victoria,” he said, and I wished that his voice held more emotion. Just this once.
But it didn’t matter. Sometimes, the results of the very best experiments were different from what you’d expected. Sometimes you failed. I’d been wrong all along. I couldn’t fix Adam. His time was up. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the last flyer, the one that the girl had handed to me.
I spread the page out on my lap and punched the number into my keypad. The tone rang three times before an answer.
“This is Meg.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The subject will not be progressing to Stage 3 of the experiment. The regression of Stage 2 has been complete. Subject has failed to integrate into society and is no longer a productive member. Impulse control has devolved considerably. Subject is a menace to himself and to others. I can’t help but think that this inability to control is caused by his lack of memory, which would serve as an anchor to his behavior. In any event, the experiment has failed.
*
What started off as a car crash on a rain-slicked road had splintered. We had collateral damage. First the mirror, then the wall, followed by Knox’s arm, and now someone was dead. I paced the short distance from wall to wall of the cellar. My laboratory, since yanked free of my mother’s wood boards, felt more like a storm bunker than ever, only it wasn’t a tornado we were trying to keep out. Adam raked his fingernails down the sides of his face and neck. Owen’s head bent low as he tinkered with the back of a broken pocket watch.
“Adam, where were you today?” I asked, trying to keep the rage from my voice. It was there, it had been quietly boiling for some time, I realized. I checked my phone again. Precious minutes were melting away. They would be looking for him. Where was she?
Adam rocked back and forth in place. “I was searching for the house. 4-0-8. You told me that you would help me find it,” he said.
My teeth clenched. I squeezed my eyes shut. “And I would have, Adam. If you gave me the chance.” I idly closed an anatomy book with pencil scribbles in the margins. “Now everything is ruined.”
“Tor…” Owen looked up from the pocket watch. “Come on…”
I couldn’t believe that Owen was the one standing up for Adam. Especially after tonight. None of us spoke for a long moment until we heard the sound of three knocks on the hatch door.
“Who is that?” Adam hardened. The muscles in his forearm twitched.
Owen’s screwdriver went still. He looked to me, then the stairs, then to me again. He seemed to make a decision. It took him three steps to reach me. He positioned his back to Adam. His fingertips were stronger than I expected as they applied pressure around my arm. His mouth was close to my ear. “You have to tell him, Tor. Tell him how it happened. He deserves to know at least that much about why he is the way he is. This isn’t all his fault and you know it.”
Our cheeks touched when I shook my head.
“He might … remember.” His voice was low. “When…”
I swallowed. Before any of this, there was me. I killed John Wheeler. But I was too afraid to say it. Three more knocks came from above. Held breath burst in my lungs. I pulled away from Owen. My heart slammed against my chest.
“It’s a surprise, Adam,” I said, trying to keep my voice light, a noticeable shift from moments earlier. This was the end, though. There was no point in acting mad. There was no point in acting anything. “You’ll like it, I think.”
“A surprise?”
“Tor…,” Owen insisted.