Unforsaken (20 page)

And that was why Prentiss had taken Prairie.

Which meant that he knew how Rattler felt about Prairie. I had to hand it to Prentiss—his intelligence was remarkable.

Dr. Grace shrugged. “There are other subjects who I’ve studied at length,” she said.

“In Chicago?”

“That’s not something we need to discuss. Now, I suggest you make the most of your time together.” She looked at her watch. “You have fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes, I thought with a sinking heart. Not a lot of time. “Can you at least leave us alone?”

Dr. Grace shook her head. “I’m afraid not, but I’ll stay out of the way. You won’t even notice me.”

But it was hard not to notice the way she watched us, sitting in a straight-backed chair in the corner. I turned my back on her, but I could still feel her eyes on me.

The fifteen minutes passed more quickly than I’d imagined possible. Kaz and Chub rolled on the floor in a tickle fight; Chub crawled into my lap and pretended to read a book about birds, pointing at each page and telling me what he saw. “This a red bird. It has a worm, see?”

I was proud of my little adopted brother; he’d continued to learn and develop even here. His preschool teachers in Chicago had told Prairie during his first week that he was catching up with the other kids; as I held him and listened to him chatter, I was so full of hope for his future that I thought my heart would burst. He chattered on about ducks and monsters and numbers, about games he had played with Dr. Grace. He told me about playing hide-and-seek with numbers, and good monsters and bad monsters, and I was relieved
that being cooped up in the room hadn’t dampened his spirits or taken his imagination away.

“Time’s up,” Dr. Grace said, rising from her chair. “Chub, tell Hailey and Kaz goodbye. You did very well today. If you can talk to me the way you talk to them, tomorrow when we do our games together, maybe you can see them again.”

Chub pressed against me, holding on to my arm with his hands. “I don’t like her games,” he mumbled.

Dr. Grace blinked. “They’re fun,” she said unconvincingly.

Prairie was a scientist too, but she was nothing like Dr. Grace; she was lively and intuitive and interested in the world around her. And she loved me, of that I was certain; watching Dr. Grace, I wasn’t convinced that she loved anyone or anything other than her work.

She was a zealot. That was the key that Prentiss had figured out. Zealots were devoted, but they were also dangerous: because they were so focused on a single passion, they ignored everything else, allowing terrible things to happen.

In her own way, Dr. Grace was as dangerous as Prentiss.

I glanced around the room, looking for a camera; there it was, up in the corner over the door. I caught Kaz’s eye and he gave me a tiny nod to show he’d seen it. But what could we do? I’d be surprised if someone wasn’t monitoring Chub at all times. And the rest of us too, for that matter; somewhere there was undoubtedly a bank of monitors showing all the rooms, including mine and Kaz’s. There was no way we would be able to make a move without being observed.

At least I had seen for myself that Chub was all right.

Dr. Grace led us back into the hall. My last glimpse of Chub was of him standing in the middle of the room, watching us without blinking, a sad pout on his face. It nearly broke my heart.

“I can’t wait until tomorrow to see him again,” I said. “Let me stay with him. I can sleep on the floor.”

Dr. Grace shook her head. “That is not possible.”

I felt my frustration escalate. I was tired, to the point of breaking. “Who the hell are you to say what’s possible? You let Prentiss order you around, you let him tell you what to study and how, and you think you’re really doing the work you were trained to do?”

“Now wait just—”

“My aunt was just like you,” I continued. “She believed Bryce. She did everything he told her to. Right up until the day he tried to have her killed. You saw how they were downstairs, how they were ready to let
us
kill you. Is that really what you want?”

“Prentiss doesn’t—”

“Prentiss only cares about one thing,” Kaz interrupted. “And it’s not you. Look, we’ll help you with your research, we’ll get Chub to cooperate with you, but you have to do something for us.”

“Like what?”

“Let Hailey stay in the room with Chub.” Kaz looked at me as he said it, his gray eyes gentle. He knew how badly I needed to be with Chub.

“I can’t do that,” Dr. Grace protested. “There’s a video feed. There’s no way I could get away with it. There’s someone watching the monitor twenty-four hours …”

Then she paused, looking thoughtful.

“What?” I demanded.

“There
is
something. A small favor that I can do for you. But only if you promise that
you’ll
do everything you can to help me with Chub.”

Kaz and I exchanged looks. “Depends on what it is.”

Dr. Grace gave him a small smile. “I can let you see your mother.”

“She’s here?” Kaz demanded. My heart sank—had they kidnapped her, too?

She shook her head. “No, but they’ve put surveillance cameras in your house.” She looked embarrassed and didn’t meet Kaz’s eye. “I can take you to the viewing room and you can watch the live feed. You’ll be able to see her on-screen, real time. The resolution is quite good.”

Kaz and I looked at each other, and I could see that he was trying to contain his fury. But it was nothing that we hadn’t expected; we both knew they would be keeping close tabs on Anna.

“All right,” he said quietly. It was the best deal we were going to get, and we both knew it. “But how can you justify bringing us there? Won’t Prentiss mind?”

Dr. Grace shrugged dismissively. “Prentiss isn’t here. And besides, I outrank everyone in security.”

So it all came down to her position within the organization,
I thought as we followed her back toward the center of the complex. She was intimidated by Prentiss, and there was little trust among her and the other senior staff—but she didn’t care about those whose rank was below hers.

That was the arrogance that had contributed to Bryce’s downfall, the belief in ruling with intimidation. He had thought that as long as he was in charge, he was invulnerable. Dr. Grace was making the same dangerous mistake, and I wondered how we could use it against her.

S
HE LED US TO THE TOWER
that anchored the main building, rising above the rest of the office park. I had thought it was decorative, and in fact the top of it probably was, with its tall arched windows. But there was a floor below that I hadn’t noticed from outside, and that was where Dr. Grace took us.

The room was octagonal, windowless and ringed with large monitors. As Dr. Grace had promised, the resolution was remarkable. At first glance I saw the cafeteria, empty now except for a lone custodian moving the tables out of the way to vacuum, displayed on a four-foot-wide screen, and the courtyard out front, where a gardener in coveralls tended a row of small trees. Four people wearing headsets were seated at workstations, watching the dozen monitors, making notes on their laptops. They glanced up as Dr. Grace walked in,
and one of them moved his earpiece out of the way and looked at her questioningly.

“It’s all right, Chetan,” she said. “They’re here to observe with me.”

The man shrugged and adjusted his earpiece.

There was an empty area in the middle of the room, behind the bank of workstations, and Dr. Grace led us there. We had an unobstructed view over the heads of the other viewers. “You have five minutes,” she whispered. “Look at the screen over there.”

I spotted Anna immediately. She was standing at a window of her bedroom, already dressed for work in her nursing scrubs. She had her back to the camera, her long, wavy chestnut hair pulled into a low ponytail, her sharp-angled shoulders sloped in defeat. Next to me, Kaz sucked in his breath.

“She’s all right,” I said softly.

“She doesn’t know that I am, though,” he muttered. “That must be killing her.…”

Almost as though she could hear us speaking, Anna turned away from the window and regarded the rest of her room bleakly. The bed was neatly made, a stack of folded laundry waiting to be put away.

She touched the edge of the bed, smoothing out the spread, and then she slowly lowered herself to the floor. For a moment I thought she had collapsed, but when she folded her hands together under her chin, I realized she had knelt to pray.

Kaz squeezed my hand, and my heart constricted with
pain for him. I had seen Kaz fearless in the face of incredible odds, even death—but watching his mother struggle seemed like more than he could bear.

I turned away to give him privacy. Dr. Grace was conferring quietly with one of the technicians, going over something he was showing her on a log sheet. I looked at the other banks of monitors, which displayed every corner of the facility. There were bedrooms like Chub’s, but with real windows and more personal details—staff quarters, I assumed. There were views of the parking garage, the courtyard, the research facilities. Some were empty, and in others people worked at computers and banks of equipment.

There was the specimen room; I saw that the zombies were lined up in their chairs, where we’d left them. The one that had nearly fallen on us had been removed, but there was a stain on the floor where it had lain. I glanced quickly away from that screen.

There was a hospital bed with a lumpy, still form under a white sheet. Another zombie? But something wasn’t right.…

It took me a moment to absorb what I was seeing.

Sensors blinked and tubes protruded from the body’s throat and extremities. As I watched, the body shifted slightly, its arm skittering a few inches on the sheet. Clawed fingers scrabbled at nothing. But what was wrong with them? They were hideously deformed, mere stumps, crusted with …

What was that?

I squinted at the face exposed at the head of the bed and felt my stomach turn. The skin had melted from the bone, a
mask of peeling, bandaged shreds attached to a skull. A lipless mouth pulled back from leering teeth. Its eyes stared piteously at the ceiling, its lashes and eyebrows gone. There was no hair on its skull, and its ears were mere knobs of flesh—

And that was when I knew: this tortured body had been horribly burned, and then saved by extraordinary measures, the best medical care money could buy. It would have been far kinder to let it die; its every moment was screaming torture, but its lungs had been too badly damaged to produce a scream.

It was Bryce Safian.

The man we had left for dead. The man who’d been pulled from the inferno of his laboratory, carried out on a stretcher, one charred foot dangling free. From what I could see, most of his body had been burned beyond recognition.

But Prentiss had contacts everywhere, sources I could only imagine. If there was a way, he would buy or steal it. He would pay people to perform miracles on Bryce, and pay others to look the other way.

In the old lab, the one we had destroyed, Bryce had been in charge, and I had feared him. He tried to imprison me, to use me and Prairie to learn how to turn ordinary people into Healers. Had he succeeded, he could have produced the seeds of World War III, giving every army that could afford to pay access to zombies who would carry out their acts of war.

We had destroyed Bryce’s lab, his data—but we hadn’t destroyed his backups. We didn’t think it mattered: with him
dead, the passwords and locations were lost forever. But with him alive …

That
was why he was here. Even if all he could do was scrawl on a pad of paper—even if all he could do was blink yes or no—with enough patience and enough time, they could make him tell everything. First would be the passwords; then they would force him to explain the data. By keeping him alive, they had round-the-clock access to a consultant whose every moment was clearly agony.

My heart sank. If they had already got the passwords from him, everything was lost. There was no way we would be able to pull off burning down a lab a second time. I had no doubt they’d redoubled the security here. They would be on high alert for any kind of invasion.

But …

Bryce was still alive, and there had to be a reason. As much as I hated Prentiss, I didn’t believe he was deliberately cruel. Bryce held the key to the work being done here.

So we had to get to Bryce.

I glanced at Dr. Grace again, but she was engrossed in the report she was reading, tracing a column of numbers with her fingernail. Next to me Kaz watched his mother pray and held my hand tightly in his.

After a moment Dr. Grace summoned us. “Time’s up, I’m afraid,” she said. “We need to get you two to your rooms so you can get some rest. If you’ll follow me?”

As he turned to go, Kaz traced a fleeting sign of the cross on his forehead, chest and shoulders and mouthed the words
I love you
to his mother. She continued to pray, her lips moving steadily, her back straight.

As we left the lab, I—who had never set foot in a church—said the most desperate prayer of my life.

Keep us safe, and help us do what must be done
.