“It was,” she agreed, “crazy.”
I was glad I hadn’t been awake to see the looks on their faces, or to hear whatever they might’ve had to say about the whole thing. I didn’t need to be reminded I was the freak of the bunch.
“Do you think anyone got hurt? Like, infected, when I did it?” Maybe I’d be better off not knowing—the whole ignorance-is-bliss thing—but I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“As far as I could tell, you cleared the entire lab with just the threat of the Code Red.” Simon reached over and patted my leg.
“Yeah. Even the guy whose suit got ripped when that . . . thing, that glass, broke . . . he took off in time.” Natty’s face screwed up. “What was that all about anyway? What do you think happened?”
I flashed Simon a pleading look, but he just shrugged. “Who knows. They’re just beggin’ for trouble with all that techno-crap they have. I doubt they even know what half that stuff is. They’re lucky they haven’t blown themselves up yet,” he told Natty, ignoring me altogether. “But whatever it was, it sure had them scrambling.” And then I felt it, the slight squeeze of his fingers on my thigh.
He’d known all along it was me.
“What about Agent Truman?” I asked. The last thing I remembered was his face as he stood in front of me when I pulled the trigger. I’d probably see that face every day for the rest of my life. It was forever branded in my mind.
It was Natty who answered. “Yeah, so that was weird. He was the one person who didn’t run when the rest of ’em did. He just stood there, while you were bleeding and”—she frowned—“he just let us get away.” She turned to Thom and sighed. “For a minute there, we thought we’d lost Thom too. He was the last one out.” Tears welled in her eyes. “He stayed behind to fend off those last two guys in hazmat suits so we could get away.”
Thom just smiled at her, his hand crossing back to squeeze hers. “You could never lose me.”
My eyes widened, but I couldn’t get past what Natty had said about Agent Truman. “So Truman didn’t shoot at us?”
Thom answered, “No. It was the weirdest thing. It was like he was frozen or something.” He shrugged. “Maybe he was shocked that you really did it. Think about it: the guy just got himself exposed. He was probably freaking out a little.”
Freaking out. Hard to imagine Agent Truman would be worried about anything except whatever mission was at hand: namely, getting his hands—or hand, as the case may be—on us.
“At least we don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Natty said. “Did you see those dead eyes of his? Gave me the creeps.”
I wasn’t as convinced as Natty. “I don’t know about that,” I said, hating that I felt even the smallest twinge of guilt over what I’d done to him. I mean, seriously, the guy had pretty much backed me into a corner—he’d strapped Willow to a gurney and was probably going to dissect her—and here I was actually feeling bad that I’d gone to such extreme measures to rescue her. I’d warned him. It wasn’t my fault he hadn’t been smart enough to run.
Guilt sucked.
“I wouldn’t count him out just yet,” I said with a sigh. “I doubt getting sick is enough to stop him from coming after us. We shouldn’t stop worrying about him . . . at least not yet.”
“Can I just say I wasn’t sure you’d have the balls to go through with it?” This was from Willow now, resurrected from the dead and gripping my shoulder from behind.
I had to smile at that. I couldn’t say I blamed her for doubting me; there was a point there where I wasn’t sure I could do it either. “Is that your way of saying thank you?”
Another squeeze, just a slight tightening, and then she collapsed backward against her seat. “If that’s how you want to take it.”
I was relieved. To have Willow back, to be away from that place, and even a small part of me, a secretly terrible part of me I didn’t want to admit to, was glad knowing that Agent Truman might not be a problem for much longer. Still, there was something bugging me.
After everything we’d just been through, I should probably banish any lingering concerns to the darkest corner of my brain, but I’d never been the kind of girl who could ignore something once the question was niggling at me. Even when I was little, I’d always wanted to know why the sky was blue or birds flew south for the winter . . . to the point that I’d driven my parents crazy because “I don’t know” or “because that’s just the way things are” were never good enough answers for me.
“So that lab . . . and all that equipment . . . ,” I started on a shaky voice, because maybe, for the first time, these were the kinds of answers I really didn’t want. “What exactly are they hoping to gain? From us, I mean. What is it they expect to find . . . from whatever it is they plan to do to us?”
There was a hushed kind of silence. The heavy kind that comes when no one wants to talk and you know it’s bad. The worst kind of bad.
It didn’t surprise me that Simon spoke up first. “Look, Kyra, I planned to tell you this eventually . . .” The deliberate way he said it caused a sour taste to flood the back of my mouth.
“You’re kidding, right? There are more secrets? So what now? What is it you thought we couldn’t handle?” I turned to the others, thinking we were in this together. But as soon as I saw their faces, I knew: I was the only one out of the loop. “Awesome.” How could I possibly have thought it was nice when Simon was stroking my hair, unconscious or not? There wasn’t anything nice about him. “What was it that you all decided I was too delicate to know?”
I braced myself for what was coming.
“The experiments,” Simon finally said.
“Experiments?” I let my lack of enthusiasm hang there in that one word.