Altered (26 page)

The thought left me nauseous.

When I heard the slow crawl of tires over gravel, I slunk away from the window and peeked through a gap in the siding. I thought to call Dad’s cell, then remembered his warning and pocketed the phone. Instead I watched. He parked on the shoulder of the road and shut the engine off. I was relieved to see that he was alone, though I still half expected Riley to jump out from behind a tree.

Dad made his way across the field sporting a limp. Inwardly, I winced, remembering that day in the lab, the horror of watching Sam shoot him.

“Anna?” Dad called.

I poked my head out the door. “In here.”

When he squeezed inside, an uncomfortable staleness surrounded us. If ever there was a time for hugs shared between family, this was it. But Dad wasn’t my dad, and we’d never been big on hugs to begin with.

I gestured at his leg. “How is it?”

“It wasn’t as bad as it looked. Are you okay?”

I lifted a shoulder in a half shrug, wanting to say all the things crammed in my head. I was sore and broken and sad and scared. But I wanted Dad to know without me telling him. I wanted him to read me, like dads are supposed to do. To dispel all the stories I’d heard so far, to make things right again.

But he didn’t.

“Where’s Nick?” he asked.

I deflated. “Over there.”

Nick had moved since I’d last checked on him. That seemed like a positive sign.

Dad set to work, because that was what he was good at—working, fixing things. He climbed in the hole and pressed his fingers to Nick’s neck. “Pulse is still good, but it’s slow. Can you climb down here, too? Get his legs so we can lift him out? I don’t know how much weight I’ll be able to carry.”

I did as Dad asked, wiggling into the hole near Nick’s legs. I grabbed him beneath the knees, Dad counted to three, and we lifted. Dad gritted his teeth in pain. We swung Nick to the side, laying him on the floor so we could climb out of the hole.

It took us a good ten minutes to navigate outside and through the field to the car, carrying Nick between us. I tried to bear as much of the weight as I could so Dad wouldn’t have to, but I was only half Nick’s size.

“I can manage him if you’ll open the door,” Dad said when we reached the car.

I lifted up on the handle, but my fingers slipped, tearing a nail in half. I cursed and tried it again, my hands all but useless. Finally we managed to get Nick onto the backseat.

“The files,” I said as Dad eased in behind the wheel. “I forgot to grab them. There’s information in there about the program, about the Branch. It’s the only leverage we have.”

“Hurry,” he said and started up the car.

I raced back to the barn, ducked into the hole, and came up with the evidence. Dad didn’t waste a second when I returned. He slammed the car into drive before I had the door closed.

The rain had gathered in puddles, hiding potholes. We hit one and Nick groaned in the back. I clambered over the seat as we hit another, and I almost fell on top of him.

Maybe Nick and I had never gotten along, but I owed him. He’d put himself in front of a bullet for me.

“Nick? Can you hear me?” His fingers tightened around mine and I let out a breath of hope.

We drove for a while before Dad stopped at a drugstore to grab the supplies he’d need to treat Nick. About thirty minutes later, we found an out-of-the-way motel and Dad rented a room, using cash so the Branch couldn’t pick up on the transaction.

By the time we got Nick inside, his eyes were fluttering. We laid him on the bed, and Dad carefully peeled away his bloody clothes.
He worked with the quick precision of a professional, as if he’d done this before. And maybe he had.

Using the rubbing alcohol and travel sewing kit he had bought, Dad managed to patch up the bullet wound, which turned out to be only a deep graze.

I sat in the chair, wringing my hands in my lap as I waited for something, some update, wondering where Sam was and whether he was all right. I was getting restless. We were wasting time. At any moment, Riley and Connor could wipe Sam’s memories, and nothing we’d accomplished would matter.

When Dad finished, he washed his hands, took a swig of the bottled water he’d bought along with the medical supplies, and scooped up a straw. “He’ll be all right, I think. I didn’t find any major damage. He just lost a lot of blood, and he’s exhausted on top of that. Dehydrated, too, I think.”

“Why are you doing this?” I’d been bouncing the question around inside my head for the last hour, wondering if calling him had been a mistake. I was still waiting for Riley to come crashing through the door.

Dad brought the straw up and jammed it into his mouth. “I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago.” He went to the window, pushed aside the thick orange curtain, and checked the parking lot. “I agreed to take on the boys’ project because I was in a bad place at the time. Your mother and I—” He cut himself off. “I mean, Sura and I… we’d been divorced for a while, but she was still a
large part of my life, and we were fighting again…. Anyway, I wanted to get as far away from everything as I could. I heard about the project at the farmhouse and agreed to take it on before I knew what it entailed.”

He ran his hand over his graying hair, smoothing it down. “And then when you came along…” He shook his head, the hair falling out of place again. “Well, I was stuck at that point. I didn’t think you’d ever find out. At least not the way you did.”

“Riley said I was altered, too. Is that true?” Dad looked at me grimly, confirming it with a nod. “When did I have treatments?”

“You had treatments twice a month, in your food.” He eyed me, waiting for the information to sink in.

“The lemonade.” He’d given me treatments in my lemonade, the only tradition we had. Sam and the others had been going through withdrawal since they’d left the lab. I’d had headaches, too; I’d thought they were from the stress.

Dad continued. “The alterations you went through were minimal. I suspect you might be stronger than the average girl of your build. But mostly you are connected to the boys on some level even I can’t understand. And they will listen to you without fail.”

“What about Trev? Was he altered the same way? Do I have sway over him?”

“Why do you ask?”

I told him about Trev turning on us. The news hit him the same way it had hit me.

“Wow. I had no idea. Trev’s treatments were different, yes. I thought they were testing a different drug on him, to see how he would interact with you and the others. I never would have guessed he was working for the Branch.”

“It explains a lot, though. I can’t ever remember him listening to me when it made more sense not to. The Branch wouldn’t have wanted him to be under my control.” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Why were they taking the boys from the lab in the first place?”

“They were going to move them to another facility and leave you at the farmhouse to test the connection across states. Connor wanted to push the program to the limit before—”

“Before selling it.”

Dad sighed. “I try not to get involved in all that. I just like the science. Or, at least I did.”

He pinned his straw between his index and middle fingers. “I knew what he was doing, you know.”

I looked up. “What?”

“Sam. I knew that he was trying to escape. The straws. I knew.” He massaged the bridge of his nose. “All those years I kept them down there, and there wasn’t a single day that went by that I didn’t imagine what it would be like to let them out and let you go.

“It took me a long time to even accept what I was doing. It helped that Sam and the others didn’t remember a whole lot. And you helped. You kept my mind off things. I’d come upstairs and you’d be
there waiting for me, and for a second I’d forget about the boys in the lab.” Dad eased into the chair in the opposite corner of the room, propping his elbows on the armrests. “I owe you all. I wish there was some way I could make it up to you. I really do.”

“We have to get them back,” I said. “Sam and Cas.”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t see how we could, Anna. I’m sorry. The Branch will try to clean out their memories again, and with Sam…” He shook his head.

“What?”

“They’ve already pushed him to his limits. His memories have been altered more than the others. He was having memory flashbacks even in the lab. I didn’t record that, though. I worried about what they’d do to him if they found out. I suspect that without the suppressant, the flashes will get worse….”

I went cold all over.

Dad must have noticed the look on my face, because he said, “They
have
gotten worse, haven’t they?”

“What will happen if they try to wipe him again?”

Dad shook his head in a way that said he wasn’t sure what the answer was, but it wasn’t a good one. “It’s best if we don’t get involved. You are free. Nick’s free. That’s more than I could have ever hoped for.”

I got to my feet. “Tell me what will happen to him, Dad. You have to tell me.”

“It’s only a theory,” he sputtered. He brought the straw back up to
his mouth, paused, then said, “It could be debilitating. It could render him useless. Uncontrollable. Volatile. I don’t know. There could be any number of consequences.”

I sucked in a breath, trying to stall the tears pushing against my eyelids. “I can’t just leave him.”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

I looked at the notebook and the files sitting on the table by the window. Sam had pushed me to grab them because he knew they were important. That information was the only bargaining chip I had. “Maybe there is something.”

Nick woke with a groan sometime after two in the morning. I’d been watching TV and dozing for the last hour, waking myself every ten minutes or so to make sure he was still breathing.

He eased up to a sitting position, grinding his teeth against the pain. “Sam?” he muttered.

“Hey,” I said, going to him. “Be careful.”

He caught sight of me in the half dark and tensed. “Anna.”

“Yeah. I’m here. And you’ve been shot. So you need to lie back down.”

He grunted. “Probably isn’t the first time.”

“Do you want some water?”

“Tylenol.”

We had that, too. I filled a plastic cup with water from the sink and
shook out two pills from the new bottle. I handed them over, watching Nick in the flicker of light from the TV, checking for any signs that he was
not
okay. He seemed all right, but that didn’t mean he was.

He popped the Tylenol and drained the cup of water. He looked around the room. “Where are we?”

“In a motel outside Traverse City.”

“Who’s that?” He nodded at the lump that was my dad in the next bed over. When I told him, he lowered his voice and snapped, “What the hell is he doing here?”

“I called him. You passed out, and I didn’t know what to do. You didn’t leave me with very many options.”

“Is he on our side now?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t really know. I think so.”

“Any word on Sam?”

I thought about telling Nick what my dad had said, about the memory flashes, the consequences of another memory wipe, but it’d only fuel Nick’s anger. “No word yet. My dad seems to think he’s gone for good.”

Nick bowed his head. The TV switched to a commercial. “We can’t leave him there.”

“I know.”

“He’s always had my back.”

More so than your own family
, I thought. Sam had taken care of all of us.

And I knew what he’d say about us coming to save him:
Don’t. Get as far away from the Branch and Connor as possible. Use the evidence against them if they ever come after you.

But I couldn’t just forget about him. I couldn’t let Connor ruin Sam with another memory wipe so they could use him to their advantage. There was an undeniable wrenching in my chest, like being away from Sam, even for a few hours, tore me apart. I wanted to go, go, go, right now. I didn’t want to sit in the motel room for another second.

As if he sensed my train of thought, Nick met my stare. The glow of the TV only amplified the brilliant blue of his eyes. “Sam would say it’s a stupid idea. Rescuing him.”

“But what other option do we have? My dad…” Dad shifted beneath his blanket, stirring at the sound of his name. I whispered, “I think I have a plan. I don’t know if it’ll work, but at least it’s something.”

Nick stood. He made his way to the bathroom, his progress slow and stilted. “Whatever the plan is,” he said, “count me in.”

33

THE CLOSEST BRANCH OFFICE WAS IN a shoreline town—Cam Marie, Michigan. That’s where Riley had taken Sam. A chill westerly wind pushed the hair from my face as we strode down the sidewalk, the crosswalk signal beeping behind us.

Next to me, Nick had gone surly. His shoulders were tight, his hands hidden inside the pockets of his jacket. That morning, over a cup of coffee and a bagel, he’d said, “This is crazy. You know that, right?”

And I’d said, “Yes. A new brand of crazy. But what do we have to lose?”

“Well…” He’d taken a bite of his onion-and-garlic bagel. “Our heads. Our freedom. Or something more creative, like our fingers—”