Mania (16 page)

She slowly nodded and then turned to look straight into my eyes, ensuring our connection. Immediately, she leaned over against the window, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. It didn't take me long to join her.

Libby sat quietly in a cloud of white when I entered her dream. There was nothing happening, but I could feel a heavy tension in the air. It was like she was holding back every emotion, thought, and feeling so I couldn't see it. It stabbed at me. I knew she'd occasionally held back a thought or memory, but she'd never held back everything from me before—not ever.

“Libby, what are you do—?”

“We need to get started. We don't have much time,” she interrupted, grabbing my hand. She pulled me down until I was lying in the cloud next to where she sat. She reached out and put her fingers on my head.

“Wait.” I sat up and her hands fell away. “Talk to me first, Lib. I'm worried about you.”

She watched me in silence, like she didn't trust herself to respond.

I sighed. “Would you be happier back at Cypress Crest? I thought bringing you with me would help you, but if not … ”

Libby pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. Her eyes sparkled with the stubborn fire I was definitely familiar with.

“You need me here,” she stated simply.

“I need you to be okay.” I grabbed her hand. She looked down at her hand in mine and ran her thumb slowly across my knuckles.

“You can't always take care of everyone around you, Jack.” She spoke so softly I could barely hear her.

“I can take care of
you
.” I bent lower until she met my eyes. “You're my best friend, Lib. Let me help you.”

She shook her head, slowly pulling her hand out of mine before replying, “I'm fine.”

“Libby … ” I gave her a pointed stare that said we both knew she was lying.

“Okay, I'm not.” Libby groaned long and low before continuing. “But, I'll be fine when I'm sure this Taker girl
isn't wrapping you so far around her finger you can't see
the truth right in front of you. Until you can see what she's doing, I'm not going anywhere.”

I shook my head in confusion. “You're staying here with me because you think I need you to protect me from Chloe?”

She didn't look at me, but she didn't reply either.

“I'm not wrapped around her finger.” By my tone, I made it clear that the idea was ridiculous.

“You need to relax or this is pointless.” Libby seemed determined to end the conversation. Her voice was clipped and angry as she patted the cloud next to her so I'd lie down again. I wanted to make her talk to me, but I knew that might only make her push me further away. I resigned myself to stop fighting her and reluctantly put my head on the place she'd indicated. I'd have to wait until she was ready … whether I liked it or not.

Her fingers pressed into my brain and I tried to release all the worries that had balled up into masses of pain inside me. I didn't want her to have to feel that … or at least I wanted to protect her from as much of it as possible. I was partly responsible for there being too much death and pain lately. Would Libby, my oldest friend, be the one who would finally start blaming me and holding me accountable for the destruction I left in my wake?

Releasing a deep breath, I tried to relax as I felt her start pulling on threads in my mind. She began to loosen the tension and fear. There was an immediate sense of relief, but the fact that Libby was the one healing me felt backward. I wished I could heal her instead. She could hate me if it would somehow help her feel better. Anything that would bring back the Libby I'd always known would be absolutely worth it.

As I eventually drifted off to a peaceful sleep, my final thought was that I just wanted Libby to be Libby again.

If I could somehow make that happen, then maybe the rest of the world could sort itself out.

Libby shook me awake a few hours later with a hint of a smile on her face. It disoriented me, like maybe I'd fallen asleep and woken up in a parallel universe where everything was better …

Actually, maybe I was
hoping
it was what had happened.

“We're at Parker's house.” She spoke softly as I sat up. “Do you feel better?”

I stretched a few kinks out of my muscles, but it was miraculous how vastly improved I felt in such a short space of time. “Much. Thank you, Libby.”

“You're welcome.” She nodded and then squeezed my hand. “And thanks for reminding me that I'm not the only one hurting right now.”

My cheeks felt hot, but I squeezed her hand back. It wasn't like I could keep secrets from a Builder … but I hadn't been trying to dump my pain on her. She had enough of her own to deal with. Somehow she looked much better, though … and if my showing her how worried I was and the pain I'd been feeling had caused that, I was happy for it.

Before we were even out of the van, Addie and Mia
were on their way out to greet us. Finn had called and asked them to meet us here—he said if they all heard the bad news together it would help them deal with it better.

I didn't understand it, but as with all things pertaining to normal families, I just nodded and went along with it.

When they saw that Parker wasn't with us, Addie's skin paled and she turned on Finn.

“Where is he?” Her pitch went up a little at the end. Parker's mom was standing on the front porch, but I saw her hand grip the railing next to her.

We managed to get everyone inside and seated before the questions—i.e., demands to know what was going on—started flying in a wild barrage. I was trying to figure out who to answer first when Libby helped take care of that problem.

“Stop!” Libby raised her voice and everyone turned to look at her. She seemed wild, with her hair still messy around her shoulders from sleep. Her eyes landed on each of us around the circle—at least, everyone but Chloe. “We believe Parker is alive right now, and we're trying to save him, but if you don't all slow down and let us explain, then Jack is going to run out of time.”

Finn shuffled his feet from side to side in the awkward silence that followed. “Mrs. Chipp, Addie, Mia—uh, this is Libby. She's a Builder and a friend of Jack's. She's trying to help us.”

They all sat in shocked silence as Finn and I filled them in on everything they'd missed: that Cooper and Thor had Parker, that they wanted Eclipse, and that we were trying everything we could think of to get him back safely.

When I finished, Parker's mom stood and walked over to me. She looked up into my eyes. Her chin quivered and her eyes were wet, but there were no tears on her cheeks yet. “Parker is your
brother
.”

Her reminding me of this, like I could've somehow forgotten it, felt like a sucker-punch.

“Yes. I'm so sorry.” I met her eyes and, without her speaking a word, her raw pain robbed me of my ability to breathe. My throat closed up and suddenly the emotion was hard to control. I was responsible for him. Whatever pain or damage they were inflicting on him right now was all on me. I gritted my teeth and looked away from her, unable to face the grief that I should've been able to prevent. My voice trembled when I spoke again. “I—if I could take his place, I would.
Please
believe me, I would.”

“You don't talk about taking his place anymore. Understand me?” Her brown eyes commanded me so strongly that I felt I had no choice but to obey.

I nodded.

A small sob escaped her and tears rolled onto her cheeks. “Can you
save him
, Jack?”

I nodded again, forcing my voice to sound confident when I said, “I think I can.”

“Then don't you talk again about taking his place. You just make sure you both get back here safe.” She reached up and wrapped both arms around my neck, bringing me down into a tight hug.

At first my arms simply hung out in midair beside me; then I closed my eyes and hugged her back, releasing some of the tension, pressure, and weight from all of this being on my shoulders. Taking an instant to share the burden with someone else. I'd worried, before, that becoming close to Parker's mom might feel like I was trying to replace my own. But instead, it just felt like she was someone I could trust and rely on, someone who cared about me and wanted to help me.

When I pulled back, she smiled at me and then wiped a tear off her cheek. “Okay then, what else can we do to help?”

Twenty-Two
Parker

Exhaustion was settling deep into me, encompassing and surrounding me like a second skin. Every blink of my eyelids took effort. Lifting my arms or legs felt like moving mountains. Soon this endless fatigue would brand itself into my DNA, becoming a part of who I was—a piece of my identity.

I had been fading in and out of the Hollow all day. It had been a struggle to move at all earlier, but now I was feeling slightly better. I'd never missed Addie so much … not the nightmarish version of her I'd seen last night, but
my Addie
. I wanted to see her smile, kiss her and hold her hand—more importantly for right now, though, I wanted to
survive
. I desperately missed her dreams and her healing touch.

To have any hope of escaping to her, though, I'd first have
to figure out what Cooper was trying to accomplish with
everything he was doing to me. Was he simply some kind of sick sadist, or did he truly have a goal in mind? What did he want from me while he had me here as his prisoner?

If I could figure that out, I might have a chance at finding the weakness in his plan. Jack would be able to figure it out, if he were in here instead of me. And once he did, I was certain he would find a way to escape. Since we were at least fifty percent similar, genetically speaking, I figured I would have about a fifty percent chance of escaping without getting myself killed.

Right now, that felt like a risk definitely worth taking. Especially if it meant avoiding any more nights spent battling Cooper in our minds … or them trying to drown me with that toxin again.

Even half-asleep, I shuddered. There were very few things they could do to me that would be worse than what they'd already done.

Coming fully awake again, I cringed against the brightness of the room around me. I couldn't see anything. It felt as blinding and hot as if they'd made me roommates with a miniature sun. At first, I couldn't make out any details of the room around me.

Raising my right hand to shade my eyes, I blinked a few times, trying to force my vision to adjust enough to see clearly. The first thing I noticed was that the blood that had been on the floor next to me, after the dream earlier, had disappeared. Then I realized it wasn't the blood that was gone, but the concrete floor I'd been lying on. No, the entire room was different. They must've moved me while I was unconscious. The floor beneath me was white tile, the walls were white, the ceiling; everything was white.

I had no idea where I was now, but hopefully it was someplace not so far underground. With all of the tile, it could've been a kitchen originally. Maybe this room was closer to an exit. Maybe being moved here was my chance to find a way out.

The light seemed to be coming from everywhere, but I realized quickly that it was more of a special effect in the room than an actual truth. Very bright fluorescents nearly covered the ceiling. Plus, several large work lights hung from short cords all around the room. The work lights were pointed toward my spot on the floor. The lighting, combined with the stark whiteness of the room, made the tile nearly glow.

Weird … but still a massive improvement from the room I'd been in before.

At least it was fairly clean in here. That was nice … although it did make me notice how much dirtier
I
had become in the last twenty-four hours.

I climbed painfully to my feet, my head pounding. My hands stayed on my knees until the room stopped spinning. Slowly making my way to the door, I tried to turn the knob, but it was locked. I pulled on the handle, then pounded on the door until my hands hurt … no one came. Putting my ear up to the door, I listened, but there was only silence on the other side.

Moving back from the door, I curled into a ball on the floor, facing it. I studied the hinges and looked around on the floor for anything I might use to pry them out.

The only thing in the room was me.

Disappointed, I put an arm over my eyes and tried to get a little more rest in the Hollow until someone came to get me. But with the light this bright, it took a few minutes for me to settle down. As I started to drift off, a loud blaring horn echoed through the room and I sat up straight against the wall, my pulse racing, my eyes searching for the source of the noise.

Nothing changed, and it was silent again. After a few minutes, my eyes started to close and I began to fall asleep again. Again, the horn blasted the instant I was almost asleep.

Perfect. This was another sleep deprivation tactic. They were trying to keep me from even entering the Hollow. If my head was pounding before, every time the horn sounded it felt like it was being split open.

Then the door opened and Cooper strolled in. My eyes scanned the hallway outside, but it didn't give me any clues about how far I'd been moved. It looked identical to the hall outside the other room … so my guess was that they hadn't moved me far.

My shoulders slumped and I watched Cooper warily. A short man had followed him in, carrying a small white case; they left the door open behind them. Before I could even look for any chance to escape, I saw the shoulders of two guards standing outside the door, and my heart sank.

Turning my attention to the stranger, I saw he wore all white and had a sickly pallor to his skin that nearly made him blend right into the room itself. It took me several seconds to recognize him as the doctor who'd been watching over Chloe's body the night we'd gone to the base to get Dad.

When I squinted in his direction, he turned to glare straight at me, and I gasped.

His neck, the right side of his face, and his right hand were covered with raw skin and still-healing burns. He must've been caught in Dad's explosion. The sheer hatred in his gaze as he glowered at me was so intense I slid closer to the wall.

“Oh, that's right. You've met Dr. Rivera, haven't you?” Cooper smiled, and when he turned toward the doctor I saw a trickle of dried blood below his ear. At least I knew for certain that I wasn't the only one who'd suffered in our battles last night.

With a wicked grin, Cooper continued. “I'm pretty sure the doc remembers you.”

Dr. Rivera opened his case. Inside there were dozens of vials, a myriad of colors and consistencies. He lifted out a syringe and a vial with some kind of sinister black liquid in it. He started to draw a large dose into the needle. His eyes kept darting over to me, like I might blow stuff up like my dad if he didn't watch me close enough.

I only wished I had those kind of skills.

But since I hadn't been near anything as dangerous as a matchbox the entire time I'd been here, it was clear they weren't taking any chances with me. I shifted myself closer to the wall, trying to get farther away from Cooper and the angry doctor.

“What is all of that?” In spite of my efforts, my voice sounded as scared as I felt, and I saw Cooper's smile widen in response.

“The black one is your medicine, Parker. The other vials do different things. It all depends on what Dr. Rivera and I are trying to accomplish.”

“Accomplish?” My voice came out a little strangled. When Cooper didn't respond, I glanced at the white tile room around me. “Why did you bring me here?'

“I put this room together because it's really very lazy of you to try to take naps all day. We just want to make sure you have a more regular sleeping schedule.” Cooper nodded. “It's always healthier, you know.”

“Right. So nice to hear you're concerned for my health,” I said, sarcasm oozing from every syllable. “Tell me that black goo is for you and I might actually believe you care.”

“Oh, that?” He chuckled to himself. “That particular drug wouldn't work at all on me.”

Then he gestured behind him, and two of the Takers who'd helped drag me in from the car entered the room. I tried to crawl away, but they were too fast. They grabbed my arms and lifted me up to my feet. The motion was too quick, and once they had me up, the room swayed as the blood rushed to my feet. My vision went dark around the edges before finally settling back into place.

Dr. Rivera finished filling the syringe and slipped the bottle back into his pocket. He walked up to me and held the needle in front of my face until I looked at it. Then he smiled, handed it to Cooper, and pulled out an alcohol wipe to clean a spot on my arm.

“It's really too bad your father isn't here to see this.” Dr. Rivera's voice was as nasal as I remembered from the first time we'd met. “At least some part of him might have enjoyed this experiment.”

“What are you giving me? Wh-what do you mean,
experiment
?” I watched him take the needle from Cooper and lift it toward my arm.

Adrenaline pulsed through my veins, lending me temporarily renewed strength. I kicked off the ground, driving the guards holding me back into the wall behind us. One lost his grip, and I used the opportunity to punch the guard who still held me in the nose with my newly freed hand. I heard a crunch, and he cried out and released me. Pain shot through my wrist after the impact, but I felt a grim joy as his nose immediately started bleeding.

The guard who'd lost his grip on me first now recovered enough to jump on my back, knocking me down onto my hands and knees. My arms crumpled beneath his weight and my face ached as he pushed it into the tile floor. Two more guards ran in. They rolled me over, each pinning down an arm or leg.

I held my breath as Dr. Rivera stuck the needle into my arm and then watched him press the plunger, sending the terrifying black goo into my body. I tried to breathe evenly, but my pulse felt like it had doubled before he'd even put in the needle.

Then the other effects hit me with the force of a semi on the freeway.

The room around me slanted slightly one way and then back the other. Everything around me looked deeply shadowed in unnatural ways. I focused on Cooper's face, trying to understand what was happening.

“What did you just do to me?” My voice echoed oddly, my words slurred.

Cooper laughed. “Your dad might have caused a lot of problems, but he was also a genius. He had this theory, you see, that the different kinds of Night Walkers really aren't all that different biologically.”

My body felt like I wasn't inside of it anymore. I was floating above it, but I heard my garbled voice speak. “Biologically?”

“Yes.” Cooper smiled wide and gestured to Dr. Rivera, then squatted down beside me. “The doc here isn't even a Night Walker. He's just an average doctor who, nine years back, got caught up in one of your dad's schemes. Your dad asked him strange questions about chemical differences in the brain—what things could be changed without damaging brain tissue, what kind of effects different chemicals would have. Eventually, your dad told Dr. Rivera our big secret.”

My dad didn't work with this awful doctor.
The thought echoed back at me a million times, like I was standing at the mouth of a cave and screaming it. I hadn't actually spoken, but I was definitely trying.

“No.” Finally the word worked its way from my brain, down my face, and out of my mouth, but it was barely recognizable.

“Yes, Parker.” Cooper grinned and leaned down over my slumping body. “It's taken Dr. Rivera time to learn to understand us, but now he more than understands. He's learning to manipulate our brains. Your dear old dad's research really did help him quite a bit, though. The dad you always think of as such a hero actually worked with Dr. Rivera to try to test his hypothesis that Night Walkers are biologically mostly the same. The main differences they noted were related to elevations of various hormone levels and accelerated activity in different areas of the brain. They were even able to isolate the differences they found, down to a few select chemicals, and so believed that if you found the right way to do it, you could flip a switch inside our brains. They thought that with different drugs, you could turn one type of Night Walker into another—permanently.”

Cooper reached into Dr. Rivera's coat pocket and pulled out the almost-empty bottle of black goo. He held it out before my vacantly staring eyes. “And if we could find the right drug for each specific type of change, we could all
choose
what we wanted to be. All we'd have to do is
flip—that—switch
… ”

His last word echoed to me as if from far away …
itch—itch—itch—

I tried to understand what he was saying, but my brain was foggy and Cooper seemed very far away. I couldn't make sense of things the way I wanted to. Nothing in my body or mind was working right. One thought floated through like a passing idea on a breeze, and I heard my lips mumbling the words: “Watchers could become Builders to survive.”

My voice strained, like the words mattered so much, but I wasn't entirely sure I was the one speaking them. Everything was incredibly fuzzy and full of echoes. My body felt numb from head to toe. “And Takers could, too … and Takers, like you, could … ”

“Become something less than we are meant to be? Just to
live
?” Cooper said, spitting out the last word hard like the taste in his mouth was bitter. “We're better than that.”

Dr. Rivera brought over a stethoscope and was listening to my chest, but I couldn't feel the pressure I should feel as he pushed it against my skin. I couldn't see through my eyes anymore. It was like I was floating above them instead of watching them. I stared at my body, crumpled in a ball on the floor, and tried to make sense of it.

“But then your dad had a another breakthrough. He found a formula that would help the Takers survive as Takers: Eclipse. It helped us in a different way—a better way.” Cooper recited the words as though they were a memorized story. “But instead of giving it to us, he turned on the Night Walkers, betraying us all and taking the only solution the Takers had to save their lives with him.”