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“How clever. Bring it here, Emerson.” Like a good little girl. He raised his hand, palm out.
My pulse jumped as I moved toward him, fully aware that the disk might not be the only thing he had plans for. I held the plastic jewel case so tightly it bit into my flesh.
Jack’s eyes were a gray-blue now. Colder than they’d been before. Staring straight into my soul.
He took my hand in his and slid the computer disk case from my grip.
“I’ll be seeing you soon.” Now that I was close to him I saw that his hair had gone almost completely white. He took a step forward and faltered. Cat rushed to his side, pulled his arm over her shoulder, and helped him toward the door.
Without another word, they were gone.
The second the front door closed, Michael rushed toward me and wrapped me in his arms.
“I thought he was going to take you with him.” He covered my face with kisses. “I was more terrified of that than I was when Cat pushed that gun against my throat. Are you okay?”
I couldn’t remember what Jack had shown me.
I buried my head in Michael’s chest and nodded. Holding on. Just holding on.
“Michael, you’ve got to get to a hospital. Those cuts—”
“They’re fine.” He held me tighter. “They’re small, already stopped bleeding. But we do need to get out of here. We need to tell Liam that Jack’s out of the bridge—that he’s got the computer disk with the formula.”
“He doesn’t.”
“What?”
I pulled away to look up at him, shaking with triumph.
“If I did it right, they don’t have the formula for exotic matter. They have the formula for Kaleb’s emotion control meds.”
Chapter 55
The second Thomas laid eyes on me, he grounded me indefinitely.
That’s not true, exactly. He hugged me first. But the grounding occurred shortly thereafter.
The couch became my new base of operations. I still wore Grace’s duronium ring, and I could see the veil to the bridge too clearly to be comfortable in my room. Forget sleeping in it. I’d also shoved a bookcase in front of the door and forbidden anyone else to go in. Thomas didn’t say a word.
But he did start perusing local real estate listings.
The nightmares started on the sixth day of my sentence.
Flames. Bright and hot, licking around me, as I lay powerless, forced to watch. My parents with their eyes open. Unblinking, cold and dead.
That night I woke up screaming. Thomas came to my bedside and sat with me, holding my hand until I calmed down. But I didn’t go back to sleep.
The next day I watched a marathon of animated movies, craving a fix of fairy-tale endings. Characters in Disney films mostly started out just like me—orphaned, defeated, alone—and they all triumphed in the end.
Unfortunately, I dozed off sometime shortly after Ariel’s misidentification of a fork.
This time I dreamed more than images. I smelled burning flesh, the sickly sweetness of a mass of flowers covering two caskets, the sharpness of hospital disinfectants. I felt shock treatments traveling through my nervous system to my brain, a jolt as a hotel shuttle bus wrapped around a tree. I heard the whine of metal as it broke away and slid down the side of the snow-covered mountain.
I didn’t remember any of these things actually happening to me, but I knew in my gut that they did.
I drank two pots of coffee that night.
When Dru woke up the next morning and caught me trying to stay awake by rocking back and forth in a chair and reciting “Casey at the Bat” from memory—backward—she put her foot down. I could hear her arguing with Thomas in their bedroom.
