Heartless Read online

  Lucy shook her head violently. “Maybe he’ll go to the house? Scope it out?”

  “We can’t tell him, Luce! I’m not ready to die.” Despite the lack of tears in my body, some of my physical reactions worked just fine. My lower lip trembled as I tried to quell the hysteria building inside my stomach, or whatever was left of it.

  “He wouldn’t…” But she trailed off. She knew what he’d have to do. What just about anyone official would have to do.

  She stood up suddenly. “I’ll be right back.” Lucy ran to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  While she was gone, I reread the email. Again. My creator. Dearest Jolene. I can help you. I’m the only one who can help you. I remembered waking up on the steel bed, naked and alone. I thought about letting this person finish what they started and then coming back to resume my normal life. I wondered what normal would even look like for me. I wondered, for a long time while the fan in the bathroom whirred and clanged, what exactly it was that they started. I thought about my parents, and wanted to see them so desperately, my absent heart ached.

  By the time Lucy returned, nursing a ginger ale from the hallway vending machine, I’d made my decision.

  “We’re going.” I said. To prove my point I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I pushed. I pulled. I stood. I had my power back. “At least, I am.”

  She nodded, sipping carefully from the can. “In that case, we better call Eli.” She reached out and tossed me my cell phone.

  “No, absolutely not.”

  I almost dropped the phone. “But I…I need you! Please?”

  “What the hell do you think is going to happen, Jo? This person is going to welcome you with open arms? Fix you? Let you come on back to your normal life? No way, Jo. You’re going to get yourself killed!” He was angry, but whispering.

  “Where are you?”

  “Dickson Hall. I was in class, Jo, like a normal person. I’m exhausted, thanks to you. I’m stressed out, thanks to you. And I’m not obligated to help you anymore.” He sounded like he was reading from a script, and I wondered how many times he’d rehearsed this little speech while sitting in class that morning.

  I took one of those deep breaths I didn’t need, but that somehow made me feel a little more human, a little more alive. “Please? I need you.”

  “I have a mid-term in an hour. I finish this class, and then go right into a mid-term. For which I didn’t study, I should tell you.” He paused, and in my mind I saw him looking at his to-do list. “After that I have a bio-chem lab, and if I don’t ace it, I’m going to be a C in the class at best. So it’s not a good time for me.”

  “Right. Okay. Thanks anyway.” I felt flat, deflated. My voice shook. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Yes, fine. Right. That’s exactly what you’ll be.” He hung up the phone.

  I sat in the bed and stared at the silent phone in my hand. “Asshole!” I said, and I wound up my arm to toss the phone into the wall.

  Lucy caught my hand. “Easy there. I guess we can’t count on Eli?”

  I shook my head, too upset to talk. I wished I could cry, but no tears could come. Of course.

  Lucy slid her arm across my shoulders and gave me a little squeeze. It was the closest thing to a hug I’d had in days, and I leaned into it, trying to make it last. “Well,” she said, pulling her arm away and looking slightly green. “I guess we’re in this together, then. Just the two of us.”

  “Are you sure? This could be dangerous.” I didn’t want to put Lucy into any more danger than I already had.

  “Danger’s my middle name,” she said, and she grinned. Fear stood bright in her eyes, but I knew Lucy—there was no stopping her once she had her mind set.

  We spent the next hour rigging up a car charger for me so I could continue charging away from our home base. We took a phone car charger and cut the end of it off, exposing some of the wires. Lucy found an extension cord in a janitorial closet down the hall, and we cut the end of that off as well. Then we took the “innie” end of the extension cord and spliced it to the “outie” portion of the car charger, wrapped the spliced part with electrical tape like Eli did on my back, and we called ourselves brilliant.

  We giggled while we worked. We argued over the best way to cut, the proper splicing methods. For the first time in days, both of us felt normal. Neither of us wanted it to end, so we took our time and were extra careful, wrapping the tape around and around, testing the sparks against my metal nipples. But all good things must come to an end, and soon it was complete.

  I moved about the room using furniture to support myself, pressing against desks and bed posts for balance and strength. When Lucy saw, she laughed. “You look like an old lady,” she said, snorting. “I mean, really, do you want me to get you a walker?”

  “Shut up,” I said, though she wasn’t far off from the truth. Still, though, I was happy to realize: the more I moved, the more limber I became. I felt myself growing stronger.

  We packed a few supplies for our journey. Pepto-Bismol for Lucy, whose stomach still bothered her. Another ginger ale. A field hockey stick that we thought might be handy in emergencies. And, of course, my car charger.

  “So what do we hope to accomplish?” she asked when I sat down to recharge before we were ready to go. “I want to know your plans before we head out into the abyss.”

  “The way I see it,” I said, “there are two things that could happen. First, maybe this creator guy really wants to help me. I don’t know why he did this, but maybe there’s some better plan for me, you know?”

  Lucy sighed. “Maybe. But do you really think so?”

  “No. More likely, they’re going to try to kill me. I don’t know why, but that feels more right. Still, I can’t not know why they did this to me. I have to go. And no matter what, if things get messy, we get out of there, and then you can call Strong.”

  She patted me on the arm, and then gave me a quick squeeze. “I’m not ready to say goodbye yet. We’ll figure something out. Something that doesn’t involve calling Adam.” Lucy sniffed, then stood up. “Okay, I’m going to get my car. It’s in the lot on the far end of campus. It’ll take me about thirty minutes to get there, probably, in this snow. Wait here, charge up. I’ll come up and get you when I’m back. We’re…not going to have an easy time getting you past the front desk anymore. I’m thinking you need a scarf. And the ski mask. And a hood.”

  I glanced in the mirror. She was right. The night before, while I lay motionless in the snow, my nose had blackened from the cold, and a large chunk of it had fallen off. I was becoming a monster. “Yeah. All of the above.”

  Lucy sighed. “Your smell’s getting even worse. I’m not kidding. When we come back, unless this creator person can perform miracles, we’re going to need a whole new level of smell control.” She walked through the door to my room and took a deep breath of the comparatively fresh, always-stale hallway air. “Be right back, Stinky.”

  Under normal circumstances, the thirteen-mile drive to 2959 Primrose Path should have taken about forty-five minutes. But with several feet of iced-over snow covering most of the steep, windy roads through the mountains, and Lucy’s little Honda, which hadn’t been out of the parking lot since we’d returned to school after winter break, the drive went less than smoothly.

  Lucy’s GPS didn’t help. “Turn right,” it said as we neared our destination, and Lucy looked doubtfully at a snowy street that inclined to near vertical.

  “I don’t think I can,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “Don’t, then. The GPS will adjust,” I said, shrugging. The warm, steady hum of electricity through our converted car charger was a balm that kept me mellow and calm. Laid back, even. Strains of Bob Marley filtered out through the radio speakers, and I leaned my head against the headrest. “Every little thing…is gonna be all right.”

  Lucy slowed the car to a stop, pulling it off to the side of the road and eyeing the turn with suspicion in her eyes. I grew more nervous w
atching her, and suddenly my decision to go in search of the person or people who had done this to me seemed much less sound.

  “Maybe we should turn around, Luce. What do you think?”

  Lucy turned to face me with sudden fury in her eyes. “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?”

  “I said, are you kidding? We’ve come this far, Jo. I didn’t want to come, but here we are. And you want to give up? No way. We see this through to the end. Together.” Then she bent over, toward the steering wheel, holding her stomach. “Ouch, crap.”

  “Are you okay?” Panic swelled inside me. She didn’t answer immediately. “Talk to me, Lucille!”

  “It’s just my stomach,” she said, sitting up straight again. “It cramped. I’m okay.”

  “Your car can’t make it up that road, and you’re sick. These are bad omens. You need to be back at the dorm, in bed.”

  Lucy just rolled her eyes. “Eff it,” she said, and turned the car back on.

  She turned the blinker on and jerked the car back onto the main road without looking. There was only one car on the road, driving toward us. It honked as the Honda fishtailed slightly toward it. Lucy flipped the driver off.

  For one blessed, quiet moment I thought Lucy was going to take us home. As she started to turn the wheel, easing the car into a U-turn, I would have breathed a sigh of relief if I’d had any breath in my lungs to exhale. Home sounded good.

  But then she turned and gave me one more glance. “Screw it,” she said again, and then, midway through the U-turn, she cut the wheel further and floored the gas pedal. “We’re gonna get you fixed if it kills us!”

  The Honda surged forward, its nose pointed toward the vertical side street. It slid around, almost out of Lucy’s control. We flew up the steep hill, barely staying on the road, but moving forward, at least for a minute.

  Then all forward motion ceased. The car slid back the way it came.

  Lucy screamed. I screamed, too, my voice raspy and weak beside her shrill one.

  I turned around as best as my stiff neck would allow. Behind us, on the main road, stood a long, gray van. No windows in the back, chains on the tires, dark, tinted glass on the driver’s side. It looked threatening, and I felt like I’d seen it before.

  I screamed again. I didn’t want to crash into that van. It was bad news.

  Lucy took her foot off the gas pedal when we began our descent, and she pulled both knees up to her chin, curling herself into a ball of panic.

  “Lucy!” I shrieked. “Hit the gas! Hard as you can! Go! Go! Go!”

  We each screamed, a cacophony of terror. As if in a dream, I watched Lucy move in slow motion, her arms and legs cutting through thick, invisible ether as she slid her foot down to the floor and pressed the gas pedal.

  “Harder,” I cried. “Harder!”

  For a moment the car filled with the squeal of spinning tires trying to find purchase on the icy street below. Smoke rose on both sides of the Honda. Still, we went down the hill on a collision course with the gray van that filled me with dread.

  Finally, after breathless moments filled with screaming girls and burning rubber, the tires caught clear pavement, and the car stopped sliding and shot forward like a bullet. We flew up the hill, past the spot that caused our initial slide, and away from the van that waited below us.

  We rounded a corner and the road evened out some. Still screaming, Lucy removed her foot from the gas. The car slowed and rolled to a stop. Finally, Lucy stopped screaming. So did I. We were out of the danger zone. The van would never make it up the incline; we shouldn’t have, that was for sure.

  But had we gone straight into another danger zone? There was no way to know for sure, so we crept silently along the winding roads toward Primrose Path. As we drove, the wind picked up and dark clouds blotted out the sun. Soon, it began to snow.

  From the OoA files, dated February 16

  Memorandum:

  Agent 55 continues attempts to extract Subject 632G-J from her dorm.

  During this time, Agent 55 identifies Subject 645-L as a new possibility. Her mother is of high position with the State Department. Tall, attractive, red-headed. Agent 55 has begun to work to pull the new Subject in; however, at this time, she refuses all advances at private contact. Attempts to pick her up in Agent’s car were denied. Public meeting places are all Agent 55 has at this point. Attempts will continue until extraction is complete.

  The sky burned black but the rest of our world was bleached white with snow as Lucy pulled the Honda up the driveway at 2959 Primrose Path. If blood still flowed through my veins, it would have frozen solid at the sight of the innocuous-looking cabin. A ghostly stomach pain gripped my abdomen in a vise, and I wanted more than anything to throw up. But there was nothing inside me to evacuate.

  “Is this it?” Lucy whispered, letting the car roll to a stop. The windshield wipers worked double-time to clear the small area on the frozen windshield through which we peered.

  I could only nod. My vocal cords were unresponsive.

  “I wish Eli had come,” she said.

  “We can turn around,” I managed to say after a long moment in which we both stared at the front door with the welcome mat turning white with gusting snow. “There’s still time to go back.”

  “In this storm? We’d crash before we made it ten feet down the road. Going up is one thing, going down is something else entirely. We have to stay, at least for a little while. Besides, what about the van?”

  The memory of the gray van, waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain, made me shudder. I wondered if I had goosebumps beneath the layers of clothes I wore to hide my tattered body. Probably not, I thought, and then I forced myself to focus. “We can go down the road, just a little. Wait out the storm in a different driveway. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I’m not backing out now. If you don’t want to go in, I’ll go by myself. I want to see the people who did this to you, face-to-face.”

  I eyed her.

  Lucy was still pale, either with sickness or with cold. I wasn’t sure which, but her skin was milky, devoid of its usual pink, cheerful flush. She also looked misshapen, all folded up on herself in the driver’s seat of the Honda, her head swallowed up in an oversized pink hat. She’d not been able to shed her thick down jacket to drive. My stench necessitated open windows so she wouldn’t asphyxiate, and the air outside was frigid. Her gloved hands held tight to the steering wheel, and I imagined her knuckles stretched white within the knitted wool.

  In short, she looked awful. Terrified, sick, scared—whatever it was, it wasn’t good. And as such, her determination shamed me. I hadn’t come this far to let my best friend fight my battles for me. Add to that, deep inside, I still clung to the idea that the composer of the email, which had led us to Primrose Path, wanted to help me. Maybe it was still possible for my story to have a happy ending.

  Lucy groaned and curled up tighter for a second. “My stomach needs to knock it off,” she said, scrunching her face in pain. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

  Sick but still fearless, that was Lucy. Well, I could be brave too.

  I opened the car door and stood, turning my face into the onslaught of tiny, icy snowflakes. I looked back to Lucy, still seated in the car, and gave her a half smile, aware of a crack opening in my frozen cheek as I tried for what used to be my most winning facial expression.

  Lucy laughed, suitably horrified. “Oh, crap, your face!”

  “Never mind my face,” I said, smiling more broadly. The crack widened to my ear. “I’m ready to go meet my goddamn creator. Are you?”

  She stood up beside the Honda. “Like a frat boy in a sorority house.”

  I laughed. It felt good to laugh. There was no other way to release the emotions at war within me. “Let’s go.”

  Clutching each other, we walked through the shrieking winds, our boots silent in the powdery snow. Lucy’s hat flew from her head, the pink cloth disappearing over
the side of the mountain, and off a cliff behind the cabin. She started to squeal but clapped a hand over her mouth. “We should be quiet,” she whispered.

  “Screw that.” I walked up the front porch steps, my legs stiff and inflexible from the cold, pretending the cracks and pops I heard weren’t permanent damage. There was no way to silence the clomping sound my heavy, uncoordinated feet made on the frozen wood, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I walked up to the solid front door and banged on it with all the strength I could summon from my wrecked arms.

  “Hey, in there!” I shouted, my voice raw, inhuman. “Hey! It’s me! It’s Jo! Jolene! You wanted to see me, so let me in!”

  Lucy jumped back, startled.

  I turned back to her. “Well, I just figured, might as well let them know I’m home.” The words surprised me as I said them, but I meant them. Home. The cabin was a home to me. Sort of. If you looked at things a certain way, I was practically born there.

  Home.

  “Somebody let me in!”

  No one came to the door. I tried again. “Come on, you in there! You told me to come! Answer your door! Come on!” I banged harder, pulling off a glove in the hope that my bare, marble skin would make more of an impact. It didn’t, and pieces of me rained down amid the snowfall.

  Still, there was no answer.

  Beside me, Lucy stood almost knee-deep in the snow, her body shaking and shifting against the sub-zero temperature. The tip of her nose was turning white as the snow worsened. We were in a blizzard, nearing whiteout conditions, and could barely see the car, not ten feet away. If we shifted our feet, they emerged from the powder, but like bare toes in the surf were almost immediately covered again with the next gust of wind.

  “We have to do something,” Lucy shouted over the howling wind. “I’m so cold! Maybe we can wait out the blizzard in the car?”

  “You’ll freeze to death!”

  I reached down and tried turning the doorknob. It moved easily beneath my hand, and with a loud click, the door slid inward. We rushed inside. I slammed it behind us, closing the storm out, and Lucy and me inside.