Theo grunts, his finger jerks on the trigger, and Kim stumbles back, blood blooming on the front of her blouse like the zinnias Mommy planted in our backyard.

I don’t have time to say anything, to process anything; I hear steps running down the hall toward us and Theo is staring blank-eyed at the spot where Kim was standing. I reach for his back pocket, grab something that looks like a gun, and come away with the Taser I stripped from the cop instead.

A bullet whizzes past my head and I turn, flip what I hope is the safety, and when a laser sight appears on the chest of the man shooting at us, I fire. Two metal wires shoot out and hit him, and he drops to the ground writhing. I don’t let up, watching the gun slip from his splayed fingers and the Red Sox cap slide back and be crushed as he rolls onto it.

“Fucking Drew,” I say in a voice so low it rasps my throat. I finally release my finger, which is starting to cramp from willing my anger through the Taser.

I walk over to Drew and pick up his gun. I can’t bring myself to shoot him, unconscious and with a piss stain on his jeans. I should kill him, but instead I slip to the floor as my legs give out without so much as a warning tremble.

Theo walks up to me. “I’m sorry I froze. I should have—I should have—”

“It’s okay not to be that cold-blooded,” I say, my teeth starting to chatter. “I’m sure as hell not. Fuck.”

Theo drops down beside me and pulls me against him, and we stay like that for a minute. Holding each other in a room full of bodies and gore because if we didn’t need a hug after all that, it would mean this night had broken something in us that couldn’t be fixed.

“We need to get the people out of those rooms down there,” I say. I don’t want to give up the sensation, but there might be more Drews and there are definitely people in need of immediate medical attention. I don’t know how we’ll get it to them, but we have to finish this.

“Let’s go,” he says.

We shuffle back down the stairs—my adrenaline surge has faded and I’m fucking exhausted, and the night isn’t even close to over. We each grab a wheelchair from the lobby as we head back toward that awful wing of horrors we first encountered.

When we pass through the double doors my heart stops. The blood on the floor is gone. All the doors to the rooms for the “test subjects” are locked tight, their pain locked behind the soundproof doors once again.

Two men who look barely out of college, one white with greasy black hair, wearing a T-shirt with various sexual positions on it, the other one with curly brown hair and features people call racially ambiguous, stand talking with an older white man in a blood-spattered business suit a few feet away.

“Oh, there they are,” the man says, exasperation in his voice as he looks at me and Theo, completely ignoring our guns. “Perfect. Prime them, and then you can try the Feelbutrol on them. How does that sound? Feelbutrol. Mikel thought it sounded too much like an antidepressant, but he’s gone now and I like it. Has a sci-fi element but it’s still hip.”

“Sounds good, Mr. Voorhies. You were always cooler than Mr. DeVries,” Curly Hair says.

“Yeah, and Kim was a real bitch. Glad she’s gone,” Greasy Hair says, then looks at us, annoyed. “We’re giving it to this guy, too?”

“Yes,” Voorhies says. “I hate to say it, but Mikel was a bit racist. I mean yes, yes, superior race, whatever. He also wasted a lot of money on his whims. I’m not going to let a good strong volunteer go to waste. Use them both.”

He looks past us, snaps, and makes a wrap-it-up motion with one hand.

There’s a sharp prick in my shoulder and everything goes black.

Chapter 25

Sydney

IN MOVIES, WHEN PEOPLE GET STRAPPED DOWN TO HOSPITAL beds by the bad guys, they either develop superhuman strength or they manage to find some way to slip out. I’ve been strapped down against my will before. I know that no amount of wriggling, no amount of screaming, no amount of praying to God or Satan or one of their little friends will get you out.

I’m not calm as I lie on the gurney next to Theo—my heart is pounding, my jaw is locked, and I feel like if I blink too hard I might set off a full-on panic attack. I look calm compared to Theo, who, in typical white dude manner, is not pleased about being denied autonomy.

“Let us go!” he screams, writhing so that the bed he’s strapped to shakes and the metal buckles of the straps clang against the rails.

The two young doctors, scientists, whatever, are in this room with us and bustle around us like they’re just at a regular office job. Like Julia and her coworker, they wear normal clothes and white jackets, and both of them are sipping tea from winter holiday Starbucks thermoses even though it’s summer.

The curly-haired one is power walking back and forth around the room, opening small fridges and gathering glass bottles of chemicals. The white guy is sitting in a rolling office chair, and his hair hangs in his face as he looks over some papers and eats wings from a Crown Fried Chicken box.

We’re about to get killed by some dude who probably hasn’t changed his underwear in the last five days and doesn’t care about getting strangers’ bodily fluids in his food.

Great.

“You know what would be cool?” Greasy Hair asks.

“Letting us go,” Theo answers.

“Me not having to do all the setup for once,” Curly Hair says irritably. “That’s what would be cool.”

“Hey, I still have ten minutes in my dinner break because I got interrupted by all those suits stampeding down here. You get to go home after this and you got to go to the shareholder dinner and eat all the good food.”

Curly Hair rolls his eyes. “It was boring as hell, I almost got killed at the dinner, and the food was worse than what we feed the test subjects.”

“Let us go!” Theo shouts again, the tendons in his neck cording.

They’re mostly ignoring him, but the curly-haired one’s gaze keeps flicking over. He seems disturbed, having to do this to a white guy, even though he looks more like the previous test subjects.

Greasy Hair sucks his index finger and thumb, and then drops a chicken bone into his paper box. “I was gonna say it would be cool if there was a Whole Foods here already, so I could go to the buffet instead of eating this ghetto shit. There was one by my old job, and it was fucking—”

“Let us go!” Theo yells, and Greasy Hair grabs a syringe, stretches a lanky arm over, and squirts a liquid into Theo’s face.

“Shut. Up.” His voice is deadpan, like someone mildly annoyed by a cat scratching furniture that’s already been shredded by three cats before it.

Theo sputters and blinks liquid that I hope is water out of his eyes, then glares at the guy. “Don’t you know that you’re killing people? That—”

His words are cut off because Greasy Hair picks up the used latex gloves beside his food and shoves them deep into Theo’s mouth.

I gag along with him.

“Shut. Up. My rent just got jacked up. This job pays well. End of story,” Greasy Hair says, then leans back in his seat. He shakes his head. “And you two just killed a bunch of people? You’ve got a lot of nerve judging me. At least I don’t kill my own kind.”

Curly Hair knocks over a beaker, swears, then heads to the medical-grade fridge humming in a corner.

“What are you doing now, then?” I ask.

“He’s not one of us.” He shrugs. “If he was, he wouldn’t be here, would he?”

Funny how much race matters until it doesn’t.

“Besides, there’s no guarantee he’ll die. In fact, he’s gonna feel really good for a little while. Unless I overdose him on this oxy since he ruined my dinner.”

“Let’s do this already. He’s giving me a headache and I don’t want a migraine at the beach tomorrow,” Curly Hair says as he walks over to me. He places his little tray of meds on the table next to me and I see the familiar setup for a medicine port from when Mommy was in the hospital.

He tightens the band around my arm, and I take a deep breath against the panic and the anger at the unfairness of this all.

It strikes me that it’s pretty typical that I’d discover a goddamn conspiracy theory, infiltrate a secret research center, kill a bunch of bad guys, and still end up not saving the day.

I snort a laugh and Curly Hair looks at me quizzically, which makes me laugh more.

Shit, what a stupid fucking way to die. And if there is a hell, I certainly just earned my way in with all the blood now on my hands from this dummy mission.

What a week.

“What’s so funny?” Greasy Hair asks, throwing his wings box into a garbage can with a biohazard label on it and wiping his fingers on his jeans. He takes a sip from his thermos. “Are you already high or what?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Then shut the fu—ack!” I glance over at him and he drops his cup, his hands going to his throat. His mouth is stuck in an exaggerated O shape and his eyes bug out of his head as his face turns a violent shade of purple.

Curly Hair’s brow creases in concern and he puts down the port he was about to insert into my arm so he can go check on his buddy. His hand slams into the tray clumsily.