Does not compute.
“Bethany, what are you doing in my bedroom at”—I looked at the clock on my nightstand—“five forty-four in the morning? How did you even get in?”
Bethany shrugged.
“Forget it,” I said, deciding I had bigger things to worry about. “I don’t want to know.”
We were getting close enough to dawn that I could almost taste the coming change. The idea that I might not die seemed disturbingly novel, like there was a bigger part of me than I’d realized that had believed, from the moment I’d decided to save Bethany, that it was all over for me.
One hour and thirteen minutes.
“Are you even listening to me?” Bethany’s pointed whisper broke into my thoughts, and I realized that I hadn’t heard a word she’d said.
“We need to get out of here. Now.” Bethany crossed her arms over her chest. “Come on, Kali. Chop-chop.”
“Bethany, it’s five forty-five in the morning. I slept maybe three hours last night, and I feel like someone’s coated my entire body in wet cement.” I wasn’t much of a morning person to begin with—and chupacabra possession wasn’t exactly helping the matter. “I just want to take a nice, long shower and forget that any of this ever happened.”
“They were at my house, K.” Bethany’s words broke through the fog in my brain. She couldn’t meet my eyes, and in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture, she worried at the end of my comforter, rubbing it back and forth between manicured fingers. “That woman from school. Her little henchmen. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were there. At first I thought they were looking for me, but then I heard my dad—he was talking to them, and it wasn’t about me.”
“Okay,” I said, forcing my brain to wake up and process the situation. “What were they talking about?”
Bethany angled her eyes upward, the comforter clutched in one hand. “Specimen retrieval.”
Specimen.
The word alone was enough to send a chill creeping across the back of my neck. I’d been raised in academia. I knew what people would do to get their hands on grant money, private funding, elite access. I could only imagine what those same people would do if they knew there was uncharted territory out there: a species they’d never studied, an impossibility no one had quantified.
Me.
“What kind of specimen?” My throat felt like sandpaper, the words catching as I pushed them out of my mouth.
“The kind that can be injected into teenagers during random drug tests.” Bethany’s voice was higher and clearer than mine, and in the course of that single sentence, it went from light and wispy to diamond-hard. “I know it sounds crazy, and I don’t have any proof whatsoever, but I’m telling you, Kali, I have a really bad feeling about this.”
If I’d thought someone was purposely infecting teenagers with a lethal parasite, I probably would have had a really bad feeling about it, too.
“Did they actually say that was what they were doing?”
Bethany’s eyes flashed at my question, and she threw down the comforter. “Yeah, Kali. The woman in charge laid out all of their most unethical and illegal activities for my benefit. There was a PowerPoint presentation, followed by a musical number, and I caught it all on tape.”
I ignored the sarcasm. “What did she say—exactly?”
Bethany stood up, smoothing down her skirt and fixing me with a hundred-yard stare. “She said that one of the specimens had taken and that there were indications that it had selected a new and as yet unidentified host.”
Well, that was something to be grateful for at least.
“She also reported that the situation with the MC-407 model had been contained and that they’d squelched any reports about the incident in the press.” Bethany took a deep breath. “And then she asked my dad to activate the tracking system on the missing specimen.”
The second I heard the words tracking system, my eyes went to my stomach and then to the bloody tips of my fingers.
What if I hadn’t been trying to scratch through the ouroboros? What if I’d been trying to gouge out the tracker?
“I don’t know what’s going on, Kali, but once my dad gets that tracking system up and running, they’ll be able to pinpoint your location. Unless you want them to know your name, too, you probably shouldn’t be at home when that happens.”
My brain finally kicked into high gear. Bethany was right—the last thing I wanted was for the men in suits to have my home address, especially since there was a decent chance that, if they were working with Bethany’s dad, they knew who my dad was, too. I could just imagine his reaction to being asked to bring me into the lab for testing.
In fact, the whole scenario—being tracked down, caught, thrown in a tiny room with bright lights, loud noises, white coats, needles … it was all too easy to imagine. I couldn’t let myself go there. I had to move.
Rolling out of bed, I stripped off my blood-soaked shirt and replaced it with a new one. Since I hadn’t bothered to change into pajamas the night before, I didn’t need to search for my jeans. Looping my hair into a loose ponytail, I glanced back over my shoulder at Bethany, half expecting her to have some kind of comment on my personal hygiene.
“Ready?” she asked me, not bothering to editorialize on my sense of fashion—or lack thereof. I nodded, and a second later, the two of us were creeping down the stairs and out the front door, my father fast asleep in his room and none the wiser.
The BMW was parked down the street, and without a word, the two of us made our way toward it. I knew this was a bad idea, knew that I should ditch Bethany before it was too late, but she had a car, and I didn’t want to do this alone.
“Where are we going?” Bethany turned the key in the ignition, and the car purred to life.
“As far away as we can get.” I hadn’t thought through this plan—in fact, I didn’t have a plan, but putting distance between the tracking device inside of me and any tie to my real life was the only option that made sense.
Fifty-nine minutes and thirteen seconds.
This close to the shift, I didn’t even need to look at my watch. I just knew. I had less than an hour until my blood turned toxic, which meant that I had less than an hour to evade capture, ditch Bethany, and hole up somewhere the real world wouldn’t dare to tread.
“Hit the highway.”
Bethany didn’t have to be told twice. The two of us fell into a loaded silence, and I couldn’t help but think how different we were. I was perpetually on the outside, looking in, and she was on the inside, oblivious to the fact that there was anything else out there at all.