Crash (20 page)

I bump his shoulder with mine. “You don't need an
excuse to visit her,” I say, then wish I hadn't because if anything, he looks even more ill at ease.

He nods, not meeting my eyes. “Looks like it's starting to snow,” he says with a glance at the tall windows. “I should head out.”

Kathy looks up as he looks down and they stare at each other for a second before she says, “See you.”

And with a casual wave at all of us, he's gone.

“What the hell?” I whisper once Jackson and I are in the elevator.

He rests his index finger against my lips and shakes his head. “Later.” As he drops his hand, he pauses for a split second, just long enough for me to get that he's pointing to the elevator surveillance. I remember the day Jackson and I first ran together, the day I found out Richelle wasn't coming back, the day he first told me the Drau could piggyback on human technology and watch us anywhere. And I remember the night we waited for news on Dad and Carly, the creepy feeling I had of being watched, my suspicion that maybe the TV in the waiting room was being used for surveillance.

But I have the feeling that maybe he isn't worrying about the Drau right now, that maybe he's thinking about all the suspicions of the Committee I shared with him in the courtyard.

The door to Dad's room is partially closed, the privacy curtain drawn, a woman's feet visible beneath.

“Can I come in, or should I wait outside?” I ask.

“I'll just be a second,” the woman replies and a minute later jerks back the curtain. The nurse who sent me home that first night, Laila, stands in front of Dad's bed.

Over her shoulder, I catch a glimpse of Dad. He's lying on his back, hooked up to a bunch of stuff that definitely was not there when I went downstairs. He looks a lot like Carly looks: pale, soft, fragile. The ventilator's back. So are all the monitors. My stomach drops; my heart thuds uncomfortably against my breastbone as I clutch my folded jacket to my chest.

Jackson steps up beside me. “What's going on?”

Laila glances at him. “Are you family?”

“My brother.”

She frowns, but before she can protest, I say, “He dyes his hair. What's wrong with my dad?”

“His temperature went up about an hour ago. He started having some trouble breathing. It escalated and the doctor had to intubate.”

“Is it pneumonia?” They told me that people are at risk of that after a splenectomy. Double jeopardy for Dad, thanks to the broken ribs. The possibility terrifies me.

She gestures at the IV bags. “We have him on antibiotics.”

Which doesn't exactly answer the question I asked. “So he's going to be okay?”

“He's in a coma, Miki.”

My throat closes, locking the air from my lungs. It takes
me a second before I can manage, “Like Carly? A medically induced coma? To help minimize damage?”

“No, this isn't medically induced. Your father's slipped into an unexplained coma. We don't know exactly why—”

“You don't know?” I cut her off. “Who
does
know?” Even as I ask the question, an image of the Committee flashes through my thoughts.

“We're doing everything possible to figure things out. Dr. Lee's ordered some tests. Someone will be by soon to take your father down for X-rays.” The intercom buzzes and a disembodied voice says a few words. Laila cocks her head and listens, then she touches my shoulder. “I'll ask the doctor to come speak with you. He's in surgery right now, but I'll ask him to come as soon as he can.” And then she heads out of the room, leaving me standing there, bewildered and afraid.

“He was fine,” I say. Then I say it again. Actually, I'm not sure how many times I say it. I just know that after a few minutes I'm sitting on the edge of Dad's bed and Jackson's sitting on the pleather chair. We don't talk. We just sit there holding hands, watching Dad's chest go up and down while the suction makes its ugly slurping sound and the monitors beep and the sounds of people in other rooms carry to us.

Voices. Sobs.

I feel their pain while at the same time feeling disconnected from it because I don't believe Dad's relapse is unexplained. The fine hairs on my arms prickle and rise
and chills chase across my skin.

“They did this,” I say. “To teach me a lesson.”

When he doesn't say anything, I turn my head to look at Jackson. His head's cocked, frown lines between his brows, like he's listening for something. Or maybe feeling the same weird chill that I am.

Over his shoulder I see a shadow stretching across the doorway, as if someone's standing there, just out of sight, listening. I jump off Dad's bed and tear to the door, looking right then left and seeing nothing but the open doors of the other rooms.

Breathing too fast, I spin as Jackson comes up behind me.

“Someone was here,” I whisper. “Right here. Watching us.”

“Kathy?” he asks.

“I don't know. I didn't see. The shadow was long, but that doesn't mean it was someone tall . . . it could have just been the angle of the light.” I mouth the words
Drau
then
shell
.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe not,” I finish for him. “I'll be back.” I stalk from the room and out the doors of the ICU. I check the hall and the waiting room. No one's there. I spin to find Jackson right behind me.

“Bathrooms,” he says and heads into the guys' while I check the girls'.

“Nothing,” I say when I'm back in the hall and he
shakes his head, telling me he didn't have any better luck.

Back in Dad's room, I pull the privacy curtain around his bed, as if that really gives us any privacy. But there's something to be said for the power of illusion. I pause just before I pull it the last couple of inches, still feeling creeped out, still feeling like I'm being watched.

“This is payback. They know what we did, how we communicated. They know we're keeping things from them.” When Jackson doesn't shoot down my words, I pace the length of the small room, then pace back to him and continue in a whisper. “This is too much of a coincidence. Dad was fine, he was getting better, then all of a sudden he isn't? It's a direct threat.”

I pace three steps, turn, and pace three steps back.

Jackson grabs my arm. “You're making me dizzy, and you're just amping up your anxiety.”

He's right. The room's too small and pacing like this is making me feel like a claustrophobic tiger in a cage.

“Maybe they didn't just make Dad fall into a coma now. Maybe they engineered all of this . . . the accident . . . the drunk driver . . . Dad . . . Carly . . . everything. They're capable of so much. What's to say they aren't capable of that?”

I think of the way I was pulled into the game, throwing myself in front of a truck to save Janice's little sister. Jackson was pulled in after a car accident. Richelle fell off a roof trying to coax her neighbor's son down. Did they set up every one of those events? Or did they only pull kids
who would have died anyway?

“How did Tyrone end up in the game?”

If Jackson's thrown by my off-topic question, he doesn't show it. “Drowned after he got his kid brother out of the lake.”

“The boy I replaced . . . what about him?”

“Don't know. Never asked,” Jackson says. “Why?”

“All of us got pulled trying to help someone else. Except you.”

“I got pulled because Lizzie didn't want me to die. So I guess you could say I got pulled because Lizzie was helping me.”

“Right. Exactly. All of us were up against big stakes. Life-or-death choices. What if none of those events were actually accidents? What if they were orchestrated? Every single one of them?”

“You're crediting them with a huge amount of power. The ability to alter fate.”

“Fate? Is that what this is?” I clench and unclench my fists. “They are powerful enough to bend time, to transport us in and out of missions . . . and you think it's too much of a stretch that they can cause a car accident?”

Jackson weighs my words. “There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.”

“Did you make that up?”

He shakes his head. “Napoleon.”

“Napoleon?” I stifle a laugh because I have a feeling that if I start, I won't be able to stop. I'll just cackle like a
hyena, the way I did when I lost it that day with Luka in my driveway, the day I figured out Richelle wasn't coming back. “You're quoting a man who conquered most of Europe in a quest for personal power. Which is actually kind of appropriate, given what I'm thinking.”

“Miki,” he says, his tone carrying a warning, one I choose to ignore.

“I think everything that's happened was orchestrated. Not by fate. By the Committee,” I whisper. “Everything. Not just what's going on now. Everything that happened before. The accident that pulled you in. The one that pulled me in. Your family vacation to Atlantic Beach. Your family's move here to Rochester.”

I pause long enough to catch a breath, then continue in a rush. “Look what they've done to my dad. He was fine and now he isn't. This is a clear threat, directed at me.” Because I managed to keep them out of my brain and figure out how to talk to Jackson in a way they couldn't hear.

“They aren't happy with me right now,” I say. “They're reminding me what they can do to the people I love. They're telling me they can step in any time they want, do anything they want. This is like them pulling Carly into the game. Making a statement by nearly getting her killed there. They don't want me poking around, finding things out. They don't want us talking behind their backs.”

I'm talking too fast, the words running together, my voice rising with each syllable. I get myself under control and say, “We're close to something important, Jackson.
Something they don't want us to find out.”

I wait for him to tell me I'm talking crazy, but he doesn't.

Instead he says, “What makes you certain they were the ones who pulled Carly? There were other players involved at that point. Those players are adept at influencing the game. And they are capable of pulling us. Which makes them equally suspect.”

He means Lizzie and her team, and I pause long enough to consider it. Lizzie moved me through time and space. She's part of the game but not, able to go in and out at will and not at the whim of the Committee. She admitted that her team saved Carly. Could they have been the ones who caused the damage in the first place? “What would they gain?”

“Your sympathy.”

I stare at him. He's right. What better way to get me to believe them than to trick me into thinking the Committee's responsible when it was them all along.

I don't know who to trust. I can't tell the villains from the victims. I press the side of my fist against my forehead, feeling like my head's going to explode. “What if there are no good guys?” I whisper.

Jackson brushes my hair off my face and says, “You're the good guy, Miki.”

Which makes me choke out a watery laugh.

“No more talk about this. Not now. Not here,” he says. “We just went through that whole exercise in the courtyard
to maintain a little privacy. Best we keep that in mind.”

He's right, and now here I am blurting a bunch of stuff out loud. Nice one, Miki.

“Besides, from what I understand about comas”—he dips his chin toward Dad—“he can hear you.”

I turn to Dad, horrified. What if my little rant has put him in even more danger by letting him overhear all of this, even if he
is
unconscious? What if the Committee can get access to his thoughts?

Jackson pulls me in for a one-armed hug and says against my ear, “Talk to him about normal stuff. Just let him hear your voice, like you did with Carly. It matters. Maybe it will help him find the way back. The rest of this will have to wait for later. Don't think about any of it. Just think about your dad.”

I tip my head back and stare at him. “How? How am I supposed to do that?”

“Compartments. Right now, you only open the one where your dad matters. Lock the others up tight. Later we'll open those, okay?” When I don't answer, he leans back and studies my face. “Okay?”

I nod, edge my hip onto the side of Dad's bed, and take his hand. Jackson flops down on the familiar pleather chair. I'm hesitant at first, not really knowing what to say, my brain crowded with too many things. I talk about fishing and tying flies, and it gets easier the more I talk. I remind him of funny stories from Atlantic Beach, and about the year he thought it was December when it was actually
November and he stayed up all night getting the Christmas lights done because he thought he was late. I talk about how I think we should ask Aunt Gale to come home for the holidays this year.

I tell him how empty home feels without him. I tell him what I ate for breakfast and what I had for lunch.

When I falter, topics exhausted, Jackson asks me questions, drawing out stories of when I was a kid, keeping me going until my voice grows rough and hoarse, and when I can't talk anymore, I just sit there.

Every once in a while I look over at Jackson, kind of amazed that he's still here, that he still hasn't left.

The doctor doesn't come by, but eventually an orderly does. He tells me he's taking Dad for tests and I stand and watch him wheel the bed away down the hall, trying to hold in the anguish, my arms crossed tight over my belly, Jackson at my back, his arms around me, crossed over mine.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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