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“Until we stop,” I replied, returning my eyes to the highway.
“Seriously, dude, who hurt you?” she grated out.
“There was this guy in Tora Bora once who used a potato peeler on my di—”
“Agh!” Mattie growled, reaching her hands up through the hoodie neck and pulling the hood around her ears. “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. Gross.”
“—distal phalanx,” I finished with a smirk.
Mattie shoved her hood away from her eyes. “Your pinky toe?”
“Yep.”
“Sick,” she grimaced.
I snuffed out a laugh through my nose, glancing at her and then back to the road in amusement. “You asked.”
“One of my few regrets.” She sneezed into her sweatshirt, coughed, and then groaned again. “I have the pox.”
“You know what a distal phalanx is, but you use words like ‘pox?’ Did you get kicked out of med school or drop out? I’m starting to think it’s the latter.” Her records were, actually, strangely vague. They started out detailed, showing a sterling record in high school where she had graduated two years early and started her undergrad at just sixteen. She’d been top of her class through undergrad and med school. But that was where the records got suspiciously sparse. She had dropped out weeks before graduating, but the reason hadn’t been listed, and although she showed in the records as “complete,” as in fully graduated, she hadn’t received a diploma. As far as Tabitha and I could tell, the school hadn’t followed up with her, either.
“Yep, I peeled the dean’s dick with a potato peeler,” she rasped. “Apparently, they frown on that sort of thing.”
I laughed before I could help myself, and then I managed to sober up my expression. “Seriously. Who goes through eight years of higher education to quit at the last minute?”
She made a disgruntled sound, pulling the hood over her eyes again. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
Silence wrapped around the rush of tires on asphalt and the gentle hum of the engine. Finally, she sat up and shifted uncomfortably. “My parents made me.”
I frowned. “How can they ‘make’ a twenty-something woman drop out of med school? And why?”
“It’s complicated,” she mumbled. I glanced at her in the mirror again, and I found her wide eyes watching me closely from under the hood.
My intuition pinged like a tuning fork. Something was definitely off, here. “Tell me.”
“You know what my parents do?” she asked.
“They own SynthoCare, which is a pharmaceutical company,” I supplied easily.
“Right. And they manufacture a lot of things. Some of it is medicine, but some of it—the lucrative stuff—is used by labs around the world to simulate certain physical reactions in humans.”
She was probably talking about cathynol. I’d come in contact with it a few times, and it was nasty stuff. It was a nerve activator, and it would light up every nerve in the human body like a sick game of Operation if it was actually injected into their bloodstream. Most of the time it was used in labs for pain management simulation, but it had gotten into the wrong hands a lot lately. I’d seen it used in action—as torture to obtain information. They’d used it on a friend, no less, and it still haunted me that Azura had endured that. My stomach sank. “And?”
“And… I asked the wrong questions.” Mattie sniffled, still surveying my reaction to her story. “I saw a chemical signature on one of their drugs, and then I found the same chemical makeup on a drug they named something different. And they were sending it to labs I didn’t recognize. I didn’t do anything about my suspicions. I just asked why they had one drug with two names.”
“And they… got angry?” I clarified.
She shook her head. “They locked me down.”
That ringing in my intuition sharpened, spearing through my brain and lighting up my suspicions like cathynol to my system. “They’re worried about what you’ll reveal.”
She nodded. “They want to control me.”
“Because your med school training helped you see things they didn’t want you to see,” I added.
“Yeah. At the time, I was just trying to understand what they were doing… or why. But they saw it as an attack. The only thing I could think to do was run.”
