Reborn (Altered) (25 page)

The short ride to the barn lab was a bumpy one, and my leg throbbed with each hit. The pain had lessened, though, so it was only a dull ache in the bone. Two gunshot wounds in less than twenty-four hours. That must have been a record.

Riley didn’t say anything to me as we made our way back. Which was fine, because I wasn’t sure what I’d say in return. Probably something smart and civil, like,
Fuck off
.

The SUV was pulled inside the barn, and the door closed behind us. A lock slammed into place.

“Carry them down,” Riley ordered, and I was lugged from the SUV and dragged down the winding stairs and through the lab.

The agents at either side of me seemed to know exactly where they
were going through the maze. I was deposited in the room from my flashback.

I still didn’t know the details from the past, though it was easy to figure it out. I’d come to kill Chloe. I’d had to chase her through the woods where I finally shot her. That’s when I’d stumbled on Elizabeth, who’d been trying to escape on her own.

That still didn’t explain Elizabeth’s role in all of this. Was she just another test subject? Or was she somehow more involved?

There were two agents stationed outside my locked cell. I could see them through the window that looked out over the maze. I sat, slumped, on the bed, cursing my injuries, though slightly dumbstruck by how much the wound didn’t hurt. The pain grew less and less with each passing minute.

If my pain had lessened, then my agitation had grown, and I cracked every joint I had as I waited.

I needed a plan. I needed to find Elizabeth. I could fight off a lot of guys, but even my abilities had limits. I couldn’t fight everyone inside, while injured, and while trying to save Elizabeth, too.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the lock clicked, and the door opened. Riley came in first.

“I’m glad it ended this way,” he said, his face blank, emotionless. Riley had always been even-keeled.

It hasn’t ended
, I thought.
Sam and the others are coming. We’re going to break out of here. We’re going to survive like we always do.

“Kill him,” Riley said.

Three agents stepped into the room, their semiautos trained on me.

My heart pounded against my skull.

I had to get out of here. This was not how this would end. No way in hell.

I charged toward them. I could fight my way out of this room. I had to.

They opened fire, and the force of the gunshots sent me staggering back.

I looked down at the bullet holes peppering my chest. Blood poured from the wounds like water from a spigot.

I dropped to my knees. My line of sight skittered sideways, then narrowed.

The room grew dark and sticky and cold.

My body went numb, and I keeled over on an exhale. My heart slowed to a
thump-thump
in my ears. I had a flash of an old memory, of a time before the Branch, when I lay on dingy carpet that smelled of stubbed-out cigarettes and spilled beer as my dad glowered over me, blood smeared across his knuckles.

Back then, I’d thought I was dying. This time I really was.

“Get in a few more for good measure,” Riley said. “Then bury him out back.”

The agents blasted me again.

35

ELIZABETH

I SQUINTED AGAINST THE GLARE OF overhead fluorescent lights. I sat up. My body protested, as if it’d been in the same position for too long, my muscles cramped from disuse.

“Chloe?” I mumbled, finding my tongue too dry, too thick.

Beneath me was a thinly padded mattress covered in stark white sheets. The bed creaked when I shifted. I tried to recall what had happened before I’d fallen asleep. I was with Chloe, that much I knew, but everything else was a haze.

Using my hand to block out the blinding light from above, I examined the room. The walls were as white as the sheets, the floor gray tile. There were two doors, both closed. No windows.

I took in a breath and caught the old scent of lemon floor cleaner.

I jerked to my feet and opened the door on my right—bathroom.

I tried the door on my left—locked.

My heart rammed against the back of my throat. Panic burned through the air in my lungs, and I staggered against the wall, gasping.

It was a mistake. I wasn’t back here.
I wasn’t here.

Maybe I was hallucinating. It wasn’t so far-fetched, was it? I was mentally unsound, officially diagnosed, even. It wasn’t such a leap to think I’d transitioned from panic attacks to full-blown delusions.

I closed my eyes and counted to four, over and over again until my breathing was regulated. I wasn’t going to fix whatever this was if I was having a panic attack on top of it.

When my heart slowed, when I could no longer hear it hammering in my ears, I opened my eyes, but the room hadn’t changed and the artificial-lemon smell was as present as it had been five minutes ago.

I tried the door again, tugging on the handle with everything I had. When it didn’t budge, I beat against it and screamed until my ears hurt.

I couldn’t go through this again. I wouldn’t survive this time.

Defeated, I sat on the bed and propped my head in my hands, tears pricking my eyes. I recalled Dr. Sedwick assuring me months ago that I was safe, that I was home now and that I was never going back to the place where I’d been held.

But here I was.
Here
again.

And somehow, in some twisted way, I wasn’t surprised. I might have been free for the past six years, but the memory of captivity had
haunted me every single day. I had never truly been free of the lab, and maybe now I never would be.

Footsteps approached outside, and a lock on the door slid open. I scrambled back on the bed, drawing my legs up, as if they were a shield between me and them, but when the person walked in, the tension in my body immediately faded.

“Mom,” I said.

Her hair was tied back in a tight bun. She wore a white lab coat, silent lab sneakers. A stethoscope wound around her neck.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said.

Somehow, her being here didn’t surprise me, either. Even so, despite what that implied, I was relieved to see a familiar face.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Shh.”
This is our little secret.

She came to the bedside and sat next to me, running a cold hand across my forehead, pushing the hair from my face. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

I shrank away from her, away from her touch. “Am I?”

The corners of her mouth turned down. “Of course.”

“This is the lab, Mom. The lab where I was held captive, where your
life
was threatened.”

She shook her head, and a lock of hair fell from her bun. “We are not in danger here. I promise.”

“Even if that is true, this place… everything here…” A growing lump in my throat threatened to choke me. I swallowed hard against
it. Just being in this room was setting me on edge. Surely she must understand that, considering she had been as much a prisoner here six years ago as I had.

I turned to her. While I could hardly breathe, as if the walls were pressing in around me, her shoulders were loose, her mouth relaxed. Being here didn’t faze her at all. She was almost comfortable.

As if this place had never been her prison.

She reached out for my hand, but stopped when I flinched.

“You aren’t in danger here, are you?” I said.

“And neither are you.”

I looked away from her and stared at the tile floor, trying to make sense of the nagging feeling in my chest that I was missing something. Something important.

“This is a medical lab. Everything I was subjected to here was medically based and”—I flicked my gaze back to her—“you’re a doctor. And a good one at that.”

Realization dawned, and I felt like the biggest fool ever. “You’re part of their medical team. You”—I jumped from the bed—“you’ve
always
been a part of their medical team, haven’t you? You were
never
in danger here. Not now, not six years ago.”

“Elizabeth—” she started, but I surged on.

“Why was I taken? Why was I part of this whole thing? I don’t”—I swiped at my cheeks as tears escaped out the corners of my eyes—“I don’t understand why you kept me here. Why would you do that to me?”

“Honey—”

“Tell me!”

She stood up and straightened, pulling that familiar steel back into her shoulders. “I needed you. You were the most important part of this whole program.”

When she paused, I wanted to urge her on, but I couldn’t seem to find the words, so I waited several long seconds as she put her thoughts in order.

“When your father and I were trying to have kids, I miscarried several times, and then when I finally carried a baby to full term, it died within minutes of birth.”

My mouth clamped shut with surprise, my teeth clacking together. She’d never told me this. I’d always thought she and Dad had wanted only one child, because they were both so busy with work.

“I knew how to fix it. I
knew
.” Her eyes turned bloodshot with unshed tears. “All I had to do was modify the genetic makeup at the embryonic stage. The goal was to strengthen the embryo to the point that it was indestructible.”

She reached over, taking my hand in hers. “The first successful baby was you.”

“Me?” I whispered.

“I made you stronger, Elizabeth.”

“But—what does that even mean?”

“Think about it. Have you ever been sick?”

I tried to recall being sick. Aggie suffered from frequent sinus
infections, and last winter she caught the flu and lay in bed for six days. I’d thought for sure I’d catch it, since I’d taken care of her.

But I hadn’t. In fact, now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall ever lying in bed with an illness, other than a mental illness.

Mom went on. “Remember that car accident we were in when you were nine?” I nodded weakly. “You had a broken arm and a deep gash on your forehead, and I suspected you had a cracked rib as well, but by the time the ambulance arrived—”

“I was fine,” I said, my voice so low I wondered if she’d heard me.

“The EMTs said it was a miracle you weren’t injured, considering the wreck, and considering the injuries I’d sustained. They said you were left untouched, but that wasn’t true. You just healed before they reached us.”

I tried to make sense of the questions crowding my head, and the memories of my childhood, wondering if perhaps they held more clues to my mother’s unbelievable story. Skinned knees that disappeared by the time I ran to my mother’s arms. Mosquito bites that were swollen, itchy, and then gone in seconds.

I had thought, when I left this lab six years ago, that my captors had changed me irrevocably, that they’d poked and prodded me to make me invincible. But I was wrong.

I had been invincible when I arrived.

“So why did they bring me here in the first place?” I asked.

“I published an article years ago, only theorizing the practice of genetic modification at the embryonic stage to immunize future
generations against cancer and diabetes and other diseases. Someone at the Branch read the article and approached me with an offer I couldn’t turn down.

“They wanted to create a serum, something that could be administered at the adolescent stage, or even well into adulthood. But… I couldn’t replicate what I’d done with you. Every attempt failed. I didn’t understand it, and we were running out of time and money. The only other course of action was to use you as our map.”

“You had me kidnapped on purpose so you could study me?”

“I knew I would need you for an extended period of time, without you fully knowing and—”

Rage burned in my chest till my vision was tinted red with it. I reached over and slapped her across the face.

Her head snapped aside, and she brought her hand to her cheek where the skin was already an angry shade of pink.

“How dare you!”

She clenched her hands into fists at her side. “Do you have any idea what this kind of medical breakthrough could mean? We can cure diseases! We can save lives!”

“Are you working for the Branch? Is that who’s in charge of this program?”

She pursed her mouth and said nothing.

“The Branch is not the kind of organization that works to cure cancer.” I recalled the things Nick had told me about his past, and the Branch. Terrible, terrible things. “They kill people, Mom.”

“You can’t believe everything Nick has told you.”

“Well, I do. I trust him more than I trust you.”

The look she gave me was almost as if I’d slapped her again.

“Why am I here now?” I asked.

“We need to make more serum, and make it better. We need to finish what we were prevented from finishing.”

Because I escaped, she meant.

I backed up toward the door, wondering if she’d left it unlocked, if I could perform the miracle of escaping a second time. “I won’t be a part of this. You can’t seriously think I’ll cooperate.”

“No harm will come to you. No harm came to you six years ago. You were always treated with respect and the utmost care.”

I narrowed my eyes, feeling the hard edge of my teeth as I bit into my lip. She had no idea what she’d done to me, what the whole ordeal had done to me. The nightmares. The anxiety. The panic attacks.

I might have been indestructible on the outside, but inside I was broken, and it was all my mother’s fault.

“Get out,” I shouted. “Out!”

“Elizabeth.”

“Out!”

She lurched backward.

The door opened, and Riley strolled in. “Move forward?”

Mom discreetly wiped the tears from her face. “Yes.”

Without another look, she turned and left the room.

Two lab technicians swept into the room, carting a massive machine, wires spilling from several ports.

“What is that?”

Once the machine was parked near the door, two more men entered the room. They were different from the technicians in that they were larger, colder, unflinching. They strode over to me and grabbed me by the arms, tossing me onto the bed.