The Taking: The Countdown Part 6

Griffin figured it out too, as she got to her feet and stood beside me. She turned her head to the side, giving me a look that asked what it meant, and then looked back at the ground, a smile tugging at her lips. "He's right. It's a star chart."

Tyler's shoulders fell as his voice became distant. "A star chart? No. That doesn't make sense. How can that help us find Kyra? What does it mean?"

Ben chimed in for the first time in what seemed like too long considering this was his daughter we were talking about. "I'm not sure what it means, but I think I've seen something like this before. It's not just a star chart, it's a reverse star chart."

Griffin snapped a picture of the map using the disposable phone.

"There's something else," Tyler added, meeting my eyes, and I braced myself. "Kyra told me she heard me say something. In my sleep."

"What was that?"

Tyler swallowed, his expression guilty. "The Returned must die."

CHAPTER FOUR.

ALERTNESs. .h.i.t ME LIKE A DOUBLE WHAMMY.

An intense, white-hot pain-a pickax trying to gore my insides apart.

Followed by the sudden-searing-terrifying awareness I had absolutely no clue where I was or how I'd gotten here.

I wasn't sure which was worse, but at that moment my stomach convulsed in a way that forced me to swallow back a scream ripping at my throat. With stark clarity, it hit me: Daybreak.

Somewhere, even though I couldn't see it, even though I couldn't see anything, the sun was rising.

Abruptly, my body curled up at the cramps that wracked me, trying to wrap around itself. But even before I'd moved an inch . . . a centimeter . . . the restraints stopped me. They were at my wrists and my ankles, even my neck and chest.

My pulse skyrocketed as a layer of cold sweat chilled my skin and the trembling set in, and somewhere inside my head the number fifteen repeated like some kind of misfire.

Fifteen, fifteen . . . fifteen . . .

I was desperate to open my eyes, but each eyelid weighed a million pounds, making the task monumental. Willing myself to focus on one thing at a time, I concentrated on my breathing, exhaling slowly, evenly, through my nose, until eventually the tremors began to subside. My thoughts were a sticky jumble. Disjointed and disconnected, clumping together and making them hard to sort.

Voices . . .

I remembered that much at least. Hearing voices somewhere . . . sometime before this. And now, here, I was sure I heard voices again.

No, wait . . . not voices. Voices and sound . . .

Familiar yet somehow not at the same time . . . like . . . what was that?

It was fuzzy and faraway.

I swallowed hard, thinking, concentrating. Concentrating.

My throat was raw, my tongue thick and dry.

The word seeped into my awareness like mola.s.ses, slow and gummy: music. The sound with the voices was music . . .

It was significant, that victory, as if I'd crossed some sort of invisible line that divided the imaginary from the real. Dreams from consciousness.

You are now entering life. Population: everyone but you.

It was like being reborn.

I focused on the music, something you'd hear in an elevator or a doctor's office-a crooner from some bygone era. From even before my dad's time, which was practically prehistoric.

There was a smell too. Definitely-certainly-absolutely nothing I'd ever smelled before. It went beyond musty and past decayed. I tried to put a name to it, but it wasn't any one thing. It made me think of corroding metal and decomposing leather and rotting doc.u.ments or papers all at once. Whatever it was, it was definitely old, ancient, and it singed my nose hairs all the way to my brain.

"She's awake," someone said. A girl.

An image flashed through my head, fleeting and incomplete, but it was her-the blonde from the diner bathroom. "Do I know you?" she'd asked. And now I wondered if she had, even though I most surely hadn't known her.

"Watch." The girl's voice again, and I wondered what they were watching because I wasn't giving them anything to look at. My eyes were sealed tight, and at this point, I was barely even breathing.

Then came a guy's voice. "There it is! Go get Ed. Tell him the girl's heart rate's spiking. Ask if he wants us to shut her down again."

Monitors. They must have me hooked up to some sort of monitors.

I wished I had control over my heart rate the way I did my breathing. Stupid heart!

Guess there was no point playing dead. Might as well get a look around.

This time when I tried to open my eyes, they felt less heavy, but still gooey, like someone had glued them shut. The effort was crazy, and it took me several tries before light clashed against my retinas, stinging them all the way to the core.

"Hey there," the girl said, only this time I was sure she wasn't talking to someone else.

She swam into focus and then I could see her and it was most definitely the blond girl, standing directly in front of me, her blue eyes migrating over me. "You were dead to the world for a while there. Took a h.e.l.luva lot to knock you out though."

Knock me out. I turned her words over.

My last truly conscious memory was the flash of her pale-colored hair, followed by a sharp burn in the side of my neck.

That must have been it, the burn. No wonder I'd been so hazy. She'd jabbed me with something, a needle probably-drugged me.

Right after I'd been returned my parents had taken me to the hospital. One of the lab techs had stuck a needle in my arm to draw blood and my skin had healed so rapidly the needle had gotten stuck. I wondered if that had happened this time too.

It made me wonder about the blond girl and whoever she'd been talking to, because when the lab tech had exposed himself to my blood-something the NSA called a Code Red-he'd gotten sick, the same way Tyler had. Only that guy had died.

I studied the girl. Had she been exposed too? Would she die? That's what I'd call karma.

I tried to lift my hand, to check my neck for a needle or punctures or injuries, but it jerked to a stop. Some sort of cuff, brittle leather, kept me bound in place.

Right, the restraints.

My eyes scanned downward.

I was bound to some sort of chair. It reminded me of a dentist's chair, except it was really, really old. I could feel the metal at my back, and not of the spotless stainless steel variety. I could only see part of it at my sides, but where I could it was like a grimy, rusted-out stretcher. Cold and unforgiving.

Above me there was an enormous box light attached to an equally rusted pole. The bulb wasn't on, but the way the lamp was directed, aimed right at me, made it clear it had been positioned there for me.

Beyond the light and all around me-around us-were crumbling and decayed brick, and the smells suddenly made sense.

The building was in shambles. Everything . . . other than the monitors and machines connected to me, the electrodes and wires that slipped beneath the blue-green gown I was wearing, was rotting.

There were two faces watching me-the blonde and some guy. I continued to ignore them. I wanted to get a feel for my surroundings before deciding the best way to handle them, whoever they were.

"Fifteen?" the girl asked, licking her lips intently. "What does it mean?"

Her question caught me off guard, but I managed to swallow my surprise. I gave her an I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean stare, even though I knew exactly what she meant. I must have been mumbling in my sleep, before I'd come to.

A boy came racing into the room then. "Ed says keep her awake. He'll be here soon."

I started a mental file, compiling a list of the things I knew: This Ed guy the boy mentioned must be in charge.

They'd drugged me at least once, and for whatever reason, it hadn't been easy.

It was morning-something I knew because of the sharp stabs that had awakened me earlier. (Which day, I had no clue.) And finally (and this was the biggie in my book), there were no fewer than four of them-one girl and three guys.

My guess: they were Returned, because none of them were sick from whatever needle they'd shoved in my neck-the whole drugging thing. If I was more heartless, more of a soldier like Griffin or Willow, I'd test that theory by biting my own tongue and exposing them to a Code Red. But I wasn't a soldier, and even if Blondie and the others were holding me hostage, I couldn't stomach the idea of watching someone else get sick the way Tyler had.

Not without knowing why they were holding me in the first place.

"Where am I?" I prodded, hoping to add to my list of facts. My voice came out a croak.

The girl tilted her head and her blond hair draped over one eye as she deliberated. "An old asylum," she answered decisively. "No one'll ever come looking for you here." She smirked then, the corner of her mouth ticking up slightly. "The exact 'where' doesn't matter."

An old asylum. Made sense considering the condition of the place. It also explained the creepy hospital vibe it had going for it. Wherever it was, it must've been deserted years ago.

A guy appeared then. Marched in, was more like it. His presence filled the corroded s.p.a.ce and made even the grubby air we breathed seem somehow antiseptic . . . sterile.

Blondie snapped away from me like a tightly strung rubber band. She threw her shoulders back and her chin shot toward the ceiling.

It wasn't hard to deduce this was Ed I was laying eyes on, even through my drug-addled fog.

Acting as if I didn't exist at all, their conversation went like this: Ed: "How long's she been conscious?"

Blondie: "Not long, sir. We sent word soon as we realized." She almost, but stopped herself short of, saluting him. Yeah, this was definitely the guy in charge.

Ed (Looking me over): "She say anything?"

Blondie: "Nothing important. Just wanted to know where we were."

Buzz. Wrong answer!

Ed jerked his head to glare at the girl.

Short temper, duly noted. No wonder she'd gotten so tense the second he arrived.

Then he snapped, "I'll decide what's important." To which she nodded, a silent but obedient, Yes, sir.

His I-could-break-you-like-a-twig stance relaxed, but only by a hair. "You answer her?" he asked, turning back to me.

The way he a.s.sessed me gave me the creeps. He didn't touch me or get too close, only eyeballed me, turning his head from side to side. His eyebrows lowered from time to time. It reminded me of the way people walked through the reptile exhibit at the zoo, crouching and squinting as they tried to glimpse the most venomous predators where they coiled beneath logs or in dark crevices behind the thick sheets of gla.s.s. They were fascinated and horrified all at the same time.

Ed was both fascinated and horrified by me.

He ran his hand over the side of his jaw. "Might as well get started. Hand me Lucy, will ya?"

Blondie pa.s.sed him something I couldn't quite see, a stick or wand of some sort and I tried to figure out what, exactly, we were "starting."

He leaned closer, and even his breath was sterile, almost to the point of being caustic. "Let's start with something easy," he said, this time most definitely talking to me. "Where are they? How much longer do we have?"

I frowned, searching the room to see if anyone else knew what the h.e.l.l this guy was talking about. "Where are who . . . ? How much longer to what?" I gave an uncertain shake of my head, wishing he'd get out of my face. "I have no idea what you mean."

He lifted the thing in his hand, showing it to me. "Know what this is? This is ten thousand volts of truth serum. Answer me, or you'll know the true meaning of hotshot." He spoke slowly this time, enunciating each syllable. "Now, tell me what you know."

I shook my head, still clueless. But he had that short temper thing I'd already noted, and before I could even open my mouth to ask, he jammed the end of whatever that thing was against my bare thigh.

My entire body jolted, wracked by a sudden surge of electrical current. The straps made it impossible to escape, but my wrists and ankles and chest all strained against them nonetheless as my muscles seized involuntarily. The skin where the thing jammed into me burned.

After a few excruciating seconds, he pulled it away and grinned like the sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d I was starting to realize he was. "We call her Lucifer. Lucy for short. Best d.a.m.n cattle prod on the market. Better'n a stun gun 'cause you stay alert." He was proud of himself, and he smacked a now inert Lucy against the open palm of his other hand. "Your tongue feelin' a little looser yet?"

If I had better control over it, this would be the perfect time to use that telekinesis ability of mine. And I tried, the way Simon and I had practiced . . . to get mad . . . really, really p.i.s.sed off, because I was. I was genuinely p.i.s.sed that Ed had just jolted me with an effing cattle prod. One that he'd named no less.

But nothing happened. Maybe I was still numbed by the drugs, or maybe the electricity had short-circuited my brain. Either way, I couldn't manage to throw one of those bricks that were lying all around us at Ed's head.

d.a.m.n!

"Fine," he stated, clearly taking my silence as a challenge. "We can definitely do this the hard way." And I wondered when, in all this craziness, we'd been doing things the easy way. He lifted the p.r.o.nged end of Lucy up so I could see it, and I swore I could smell my own flesh burning on it. "Tell me why you're so d.a.m.ned important? Why is it we got someone so eager to get their hands on you? What makes you so special?"

I blinked, but this time didn't hesitate. I didn't want Lucy to find her way into my skin again.

"Me?" I rasped. Could I tell them I'd been abducted? And even if they were Returned, was it safe to admit I was a Replaced? Was that even what he was getting at? "I have no idea . . ."

"Don't play dumb with me!" He was yelling now, getting right in my face.

He didn't elaborate, just shoved the prod against my shoulder. Crashing against the metal chair behind me, my body went crazy stiff as pain jolted through me. Without meaning to, my teeth clamped on to my own tongue, even as I screamed at myself to release it.

By the time it was over, blood filled my mouth, and I could feel where my upper teeth met my lower ones. I'd bitten completely through my own tongue and suddenly the whole exposing them to a Code Red thing wasn't something I had any control over. Blood was dribbling out of my mouth. I'd heal. Already the wound was sealing closed, repairing itself. If they got sick they'd only have themselves to blame.