“Skylar told you to come here?” I asked dumbly.
“No,” Bethany said. “Skylar told me not to come here. Same dif.”
“I knew you’d come if I told you not to.” Skylar rounded the bend in the road a second after I heard her voice. “Reverse psychology. Behold my genius.”
As Skylar walked fully into view, I realized she wasn’t alone.
“Elliot?” Bethany said, sounding as surprised as I felt. “What are you doing here?”
“My little sister snuck out of the house carrying a circular-saw blade and a can of Mace.” Elliot gave Skylar a look. “I couldn’t exactly let her come alone.”
A can of Mace? What did Skylar think she was going to do, pepper-spray the big, bad biomedical conglomerate into submission?
“Look,” I said. “I appreciate the gesture, but whatever Chimera is keeping in there”—I gestured to the land that lay beyond the barbed wire—“I’m betting it’s not pretty, and I can’t do what I need to do if I have to worry about the three of you.”
“You can’t do it without us,” Skylar corrected. “I’ve seen it, Kali—seen it for as long as I can remember. Most of the psychic stuff, it’s pretty new, but this place, tonight, us—I’ve been dreaming it since I was twelve.”
Elliot ground his teeth together. “For the last time, Skye, you aren’t psychic.”
She met his eyes, and I was reminded of the things she’d told me in Bethany’s dad’s lab—It’s going to get better. But first, it’s going to get worse.
“Yeah, El,” Skylar said softly, “I am psychic. And you can pretend to be a skeptic, but if you hadn’t believed me when I said we should come, you would have duct-taped me to a chair in the kitchen instead of coming with.” Skylar must have seen the question in my eyes, because she clarified for me: “I’ve been duct-taped to chairs a lot.”
Sensing that she’d gone off topic, Skylar smiled—a sad smile, the kind strangers exchange in cemeteries when they don’t know what to say.
Sometimes there aren’t any good choices, she’d told me. Sometimes making the right one is hard.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told her, unsure what it was that she thought she had to do, but feeling the weight of it in the air between us.
“Yeah,” Skylar replied, responding to my assertion the exact same way I had replied to Zev’s. “I do. If you go in there by yourself, they’ll kill you. You’ll die.”
There was something about the way she said the words that made me believe her, absolutely and without reserve.
“If we don’t go with you, you’ll die, and a hundred thousand things that are supposed to happen—things that you could do—will die, too.”
I wanted to ask her how I could do anything, how one genetic freak of a girl could be of any importance at all, but before I could, Skylar switched from psychic proclamations to good old-fashioned logic. “Evidence has a way of disappearing when it implicates powerful people, Kali. You’re evidence, and they’ve already tried to kill you once. They’re obviously going to try again.”
“As much as it pains me to admit this,” Bethany interjected, “Skylar’s right. One dead teenager in the middle of nowhere is easy enough to explain. Four dead teenagers, two of whom have a brother in the FBI? That gets tricky no matter who the CEO is bribing, blackmailing, or sleeping with.”
In Bethany-ese, I took that to mean something along the line of “there’s safety in numbers.”
And maybe that would have been true—if there was any safety to be had. Glancing out over the dirt-dry land to the building in the distance, I got the feeling that there wasn’t.
The sign in front of this complex might as well have been labeled POINT OF NO RETURN.
“I’m bulletproof.” I countered Bethany’s logic with fact. “You guys aren’t. Worst-case scenario, they catch me. Worst-case scenario, you die.”
I saw my words hit home with Elliot. Bethany pursed her lips. Sensing the chink in their armor, I turned the full force of my gaze on Skylar.
“You either let the bad things happen,” she said softly. “Or you don’t.”
Her eyes shone—with certainty or tears, I wasn’t sure which. “Everybody has choices. This is mine.”
And then, before any of the rest of us could sort out the exact meaning of her words, she turned on her heels and ran.
Right through the gate.
I caught up with Skylar quickly enough, but by the time I did, the gate that had separated the premises from the rest of the desert had clamped shut behind us.
Someone knew we were here.
“Stay behind me,” I hissed. She melted into my back. The sound of footsteps told me that Elliot and Bethany weren’t far behind. For better or worse now, the four of us were in this together—at least until I could find a way to get the three of them out.
“We get in, we get Zev, and we get out,” I said, revising my earlier plan. Reducing this facility to ashes and dust would have to wait. I had more to think about now than just Zev.
“It’s a search and rescue,” Skylar said, nodding. “Got it. My brother Charlie is in the marines.”
Of course he was. One of these days, Skylar and Elliot were going to run out of brothers. It was only a matter of time.
“Kali,” Bethany said, her voice a ghost of a whisper, lost to the desert night. “We have visitors.”
I expected to see the men in suits, or, worse, Rena, but instead, I saw eight pairs of blood-red eyes, glowing with hunger.
Hellhounds. Again.
“Seriously,” I said. “These things are not endangered.”
Automatically, my mind started playing out ways this fight could go. I was faster and stronger than I’d been two days earlier, but there were eight of them this time. Three adults, five juveniles—all bigger, heavier, and uglier than me.
“Stay back,” I told the others, keeping my voice low and praying that Skylar wouldn’t get any more crazy ideas and that Beth wouldn’t feel compelled to give a repeat belly-dancing performance.
I continued eyeing the beasts. “No sudden movements.”
I’d bled enough in these clothes that if given the choice, the hellhounds would probably go for me and not my friends, but probably wasn’t good enough—not when there was anyone’s life at stake but my own.