Authors: Kat Zhang
What's Left of Me (25 page)
M
r. Conivent didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t hold up the screwdriver and demand to know who it belonged to. He just bent, picked it up, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he gestured toward the security guards, telling them to take us and Devon back to our rooms.
We didn’t go quietly. We screamed and fought and kicked and heard Devon fighting behind us. But they were stronger, and they shoved us into our room, that terrible room with the heavy metal beds and the boarded-up window. The security guards stayed outside after throwing us onto our bed, but Mr. Conivent came into the room with us, and I wanted to attack him—I wanted to shove him against the wall—but we didn’t. We grabbed the edge of the bed and cried, “Why?”
Mr. Conivent’s eyes were hard. “Because I want to see you get out of this one.” He came toward us, and we scrambled away from him on the mattress until our back was pressed against the wall. Still he came closer. “I’d like to see you tear the wood from the window with your bare hands, Addie. I’d like to see you knock down that door.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Addie said hoarsely. “You don’t have to lock me up.”
Mr. Conivent stopped at the edge of our bed. “But just to be safe,” he said. “I don’t want you anywhere but locked in here while Hally Mullan is on the operating table tonight.”
We slumped against the wall.
Tomorrow. Dr. Lyanne had told us the operation was tomorrow.
She’d promised us
tomorrow.
“You could almost say it’s your fault,” Mr. Conivent said as he backed away, leaving us frozen in our bed. His tone turned chastising, disappointed. “You’re the one who nosed around where you shouldn’t have. If you’d just behaved, Hally wouldn’t have made a misguided attempt to help you. She wouldn’t have been chosen.”
He closed the door behind him and left us in the aftermath of his words.
We tried the window. But not until we’d pounded and pounded and pounded on the door. Not until we’d tried kicking at it until our shinbone ached. They’d taken away our nightstands, so the only furniture remaining were the beds, and they were too heavy to make good battering rams. Finally, someone outside our door shouted for us to shut up and quiet down. A guard, maybe. Mr. Conivent had left a guard in the hall. There would be no easy escape that way.
So we tried the window. We wedged our fingers into the cracks between the wood and the wall, braced ourself, and pulled as hard as we could. We pounded our fist against the center of the planks, hoping to smash it. The cut on our left hand reopened and leaked blood through the white bandage. But nothing budged. Nothing even cracked.
We went and sat back down on the bed. Everything ached. Our chip lay beside us on the thin mattress, pulsing softly red. What was Ryan doing in his room?
How could we have dropped the screwdriver?
Guilt crumpled our chest, crushing our ribs like scrap metal. The sharp edges bit into our heart. My guilt, my plan—my stupid plan. We’d helped Dr. Lyanne, yes. But we’d lost the screwdriver. And with it any chance of getting out of our room.
I’d thought I was mastering power over our body, but then the tears came, and I wasn’t controlling them at all. They seemed to be controlling me.
Tears for our parents, who’d been too afraid to protect us.
For Hally and Lissa, who needed so badly to be protected.
For Jaime, for who it was already too late.
I cried until we were limp, our hair sticking to our cheeks, our vision blurry. Our hands throbbed painfully.
But I said
Keep hope.
Keep hope.
I could feel Addie there, huddled next to me. Warm and sturdy and a source of strength.
If the operation hadn’t already started. If it wasn’t already too late. But it couldn’t be. I refused to believe it was. We could still do it. We could still save Lissa and Hally and Jaime and all the other kids—
Where were the other kids? It had to have been more than an hour since Mr. Conivent locked us in here. Everyone should have been back at the Ward by now.
But a guard would quickly call an alert, and then the place would be crawling. I knew that. I just wished it weren’t true.
But just as that was sinking in, just as our eyes slid back to the ground, our shoulders slumping against the wall, a key clicked in the lock, the door opened, and Dr. Lyanne walked in holding Kitty’s hand.
I was off the bed before the door was all the way shut again, running toward her, jerking Kitty away from her, hissing, “You lied. You
lied
. You said it wasn’t until tomorrow. You—”
“Plans change,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“You
didn’t know—
”
“
Shh,
Addie,” Dr. Lyanne said. She still wore her white doctor’s coat, and her hair was smooth, brushed back from her face.
“Why?”
I demanded.
“Why should I?”
“Because the guard won’t let me take you if you’re kicking up a fuss,” said Dr. Lyanne. “He’s by the outer door, but he’ll come running if you keep screaming like this. And if he does, I’m leaving you behind.”
I stared at her, then down at Kitty, who looked at us with so much confused hope in her eyes I couldn’t speak.
“I called Peter,” Dr. Lyanne admitted, as if that were a failing, as if even now—even in the middle of this—it felt wrong for her to contact her hybrid brother. “He knows the time. He’ll be there, at the side door. They’ll have vans—” She stopped. Looked at us. “I’m sure you already know.” I nodded dumbly. Kitty’s hand tightened around our own. “That boy—Devon. He’s the one you told Peter’s people about, isn’t he? He can disable the alarms?”
Was she tricking us? Had she discovered our plan somehow and was trying to—I didn’t even know. But if she already knew so much, what was the point of questioning us?
“Yes,” I said.
“Then come on,” said Dr. Lyanne. She dug something out of her coat pocket and tossed it at us. I had to scramble to catch it before it hit the ground. A key. “For the maintenance room. You still have the map?” I nodded, bending and tucking the key in our left sock, never taking our eyes from Dr. Lyanne’s face. The key was colder against our skin than Ryan’s chip. “The other kids are waiting. We don’t have much time.”
“The other kids?” I frowned. “Everyone? Jaime and Hally, too?”
“No,” said Dr. Lyanne.
“Then we’ve got to get them,” I said. “It won’t take too long, not with the code—”
Dr. Lyanne shook her head. “It isn’t that easy, Addie.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course it won’t be easy, but—”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“Then explain.”
Dr. Lyanne looked away from us and toward the boarded-up window. “We’re not taking Hally.”
Addie and I reacted at the same time, disbelief building on disbelief, anger feeding anger.
“What?” I choked on a laugh. “Of course we are.”
She shook her head. “Addie, don’t you get it? You think this hospital is just empty at night? That everyone just packs up and leaves all the patients here alone?”
“No,” I said. “No, of course not—”
“There are
always
doctors here,” Dr. Lyanne said, her voice rising. “Always. Always nurses. Always someone making rounds.”
“Yes, but—”
“Except,” she said. “
Except
on the days when they operate on one of you kids.”
I fell silent. I couldn’t be hearing this. She couldn’t be saying this. But she was. She was, and she kept on talking.
“Addie, people go to see. People go to watch. Not all the doctors, but a good number of them. The review board will all be there. And the nurses will be thinned out, too; they’ll need them in the operating room, so there will be fewer in the halls. I can tell them I’m taking the kids for an exam. It’ll be suspicious, but as long as they don’t—”
“No,” I said.
“No.”
“Hally’s surgery is giving us our chance,” Dr. Lyanne said.
“No.” I didn’t scream it. I didn’t shout it. But I said it, and our voice was steel. “Never. We don’t leave her behind. And what about Jaime? He’s down there, too. Are you abandoning him?
Again?
”
Dr. Lyanne took a step toward the door, a dangerous flush in her cheeks. “When you grow up, Addie, you’ll realize that sometimes you have to make hard sacrifices so you can—”
“Is that,” I said, “what you told yourself when they cut into Jaime?”
This stopped her.
No one spoke.
Kitty’s hand squirmed in ours, and it took me a moment to realize she wanted us to let go. I looked down at her, but she was focused on Dr. Lyanne. I released her hand. A few short steps took her to the woman’s side. Kitty wrapped the fingers that had just been entwined with ours around Dr. Lyanne’s.
“Take me out of here,” she said, watching Dr. Lyanne with those wide, dark eyes, that pale, almost fae-looking face. “Take me out of here, please. Let Addie go to the basement. And just get the rest of us out.”
I
t took an eternity for Dr. Lyanne to unlock Ryan’s door. I had to hold myself back from snatching the keys from her hand and doing it myself. If we had any hope of making it to Hally before the surgeons did, we had to move fast. There was the tightness in our chest, too, the pinch I knew would lessen, just a little, if I could see Ryan and know he was okay.
Then the door was open and he was jumping out of bed, and in five steps I knew it was Ryan, not Devon, running toward us, confusion all over his face, and I reached up, wrapping my arms around his neck and burying my face in his shoulder. I felt his heart beat beneath his shirt,
thump, thump, thump-ing
just as fast as mine. The heat of his chest in the chill of the hospital. There was a second—but only a second—before his arms wrapped around me, too.
“Eva,” he murmured into my hair. I nodded, and his arms tightened. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”
“We’ve got to run,” I said.
The halls were still half lit, but empty. Our footsteps echoed, our shadows trailing us like burnt ghosts. Every once in a while, we’d pass a window, running through a patch of moonlight before plunging back into the darkness. Darkness and light. Darkness and light.
Then we reached the stairwell, and there was no light at all. Our hand hovered over the railing, ready to grab hold if I stumbled, but I didn’t. We just kept running and running and running. Ryan was sometimes beside us, sometimes a little ahead, sometimes a step behind. By the time we reached the basement landing, we were out of breath.
Yellow emergency lights lit the basement like a danger zone, and we couldn’t help slowing our pace. Other than a faint buzzing, all was quiet and still. The silence amplified our breathing, the rustle of our clothes, the sound of our footsteps on the tiled floor. We passed by door after door. I peeked in all the windows, catching glimpses of examination tables and surgical lights on long, plastic arms—flashes of our nightmares. But no Hally. No doctors. Wherever they were, it wasn’t in this wing of the basement.
It didn’t take long to find the right room. The emergency lights bathed both us and the stark, sturdy door. They had cut into the boy behind this door. For no good reason, no good reason at all—
And he was the only survivor.
I could barely enter the numbers in the keypad. I got it wrong the first time and was terrified to try again. What if we had only a certain number of tries? What if an alarm went off if you did it wrong too many times? But Addie said
“Jaime,” I said. “Jaime, wake up. We have to go.”
He woke with a start and a cry. I leaped backward, ramming into Ryan. He took hold of my waist, steadying me, just for a moment. Then I had to tear myself away again so I could go closer to Jaime.
“Shh, shh,” I said, reaching out to him. “It’s just me. Do you remember me? I came the day before yesterday. We talked through the speaker.”
He neither nodded nor shook his head. He said nothing. But there did seem to be a light of recognition in his eyes.
“Can you get up, Jaime?” I said. “We’re going to take you out of here. We’re going to go upstairs, okay? Trust me, Jaime.”
He nodded, pushing aside the blankets and slowly moving his legs until they hung over the side of the bed. He managed to stand by himself, but he swayed, and I was about to reach for his arm when Ryan grabbed it instead. Jaime looked surprised, and Ryan nodded at him.
The other boy gave him a lopsided smile in response. He seemed smaller now that I could see him more clearly—small, with a shock of curly, dark-brown hair and ashen skin. Skinny. And bearing that long, curved incision line.
I was closing Jaime’s door behind us when we heard the screaming.
Ryan pressed Jaime to the side of the hall. “Stay here—”
I was already running, flashing past him.
Lissa screamed again, and this time there was a word in the terror. She cried for her brother. I careened around the corner, flying down the hall. Up ahead, I could see a glow of light. Not yellow emergency lights but brilliant fluorescent ones. The kind that lit Nornand’s other floors.
The next corner brought me to a white-lit hall, everything gleaming, almost blinding. There was only one door open, and the screaming came from within. I darted inside, Ryan a step behind me.
One guard, his back to us, arms spread. Two nurses, one holding a syringe, both wearing gloves. And a girl, thrashing and screaming and screaming and screaming and—
Ryan surged forward. I bolted after him. He shoved the security guard aside—hard. The man slammed into the wall. The nurses looked up, pale-faced and wide-eyed. Lissa’s glasses had fallen onto the ground, the white rhinestones glittering in the light.
Ryan and I reached the nurses at almost the same time—he grabbed the nurse still clutching Lissa; the other, the one holding the syringe, had already stumbled back a step. I latched on to Lissa’s arm. We yanked them apart.
The security guard had recovered his footing. I felt his hand close around our shoulder, and without thinking, without thinking at all, I smashed our foot into his knee. He grunted. I rammed our elbow into his face and that,
that
made him let go. There was blood. Blood and his shocked, pained cursing. One of the nurses tried to seize Lissa again. I saw the flash of the syringe, and then Ryan knocked it out of her hand. His shoe came stomping down on it, nearly snapping the needle—bending it beyond repair. He jumped forward and scooped Lissa’s glasses from the ground, tossing them to her. She slipped them on. And there we were, the three of us, the six of us, in the middle of the room, surrounded by the nurses and the guard, panting. Sweat gleamed on pale skin. The guard had taken his hand from his nose, blood dribbling on his lip. It made our stomach revolt, but we couldn’t think about it. We had to fight, still. We had to fight past them and out the door and then run, run, run.
The door. If we could just make it to the door—
For a moment, just a moment—a millisecond—everyone was still. One second. A snapshot of fear and sweat and blood.
Then the siren went off.
It sliced through everyone’s concentration—everyone’s but mine.
I already grasped Lissa’s wrist. Our eyes met Ryan’s, then flashed to the door. We ran. Everyone’s attention snapped back to us, but it was too late. The room was small. We barreled through the nurses, darted just out of reach of the guard, and made it to the door, gasping. I whirled around. Slammed the door shut. And with Ryan and Lissa helping me hold it shut against the nurses’ and the guard’s banging, I entered the code in the keypad, locking it.
The siren wailed and wailed. The same siren we’d heard our first day here. The one they’d tested us with. The one that had pushed me from our bed, now broadcasted for the whole hospital to hear.
I had a feeling this time, it wasn’t a test. This time, it was real. Something had gone wrong. Very wrong. No one in Lissa’s room had contacted anyone; none of them could have reported us. So it had to be the other kids and Dr. Lyanne. Something had happened to them.
The guard was still pounding on the thick door, his shouting muffled, barely audible over the siren’s keen. Ryan gripped our arm. Lissa’s clutch on our hand hurt, her nails digging into our bandaged palm. But the pain helped me think, even as it shot sparks of fire up our arm.
“Come on.” I jerked them both after us. “We’ve got to get Jaime. Then upstairs.
Now
.”
Jaime staggered toward us as soon as we came into view. He was in his night clothes, and he looked like a ghost in the corner, his dark hair in sharp contrast with his white pajamas. Lissa grabbed his arm with her free hand, pulling him behind us. But he stumbled—he stumbled and cried out and fell and we had to stop.
We could hear them. Rushed footsteps and garbled words. Back down in the direction we’d just come.
But Jaime could only go so fast, even with Lissa and me half carrying him between us. Ryan rushed back to give us a hand, and the three of us slowly, achingly slowly, helped Jaime into the stifling darkness of the stairwell.
The siren wailed its unearthly noise until I thought our heart would burst. It reverberated in the stairwell, covering up the noise of our feet against the steps. Only one floor to go.
Lissa slowly pushed open the door on the first-floor landing, and we all peered across the dim lobby. There was only one hall leading away from it. The side door would be down that hall somewhere. It couldn’t be far. And the lobby was still deserted, still safe . . .
I released Jaime.
Ryan reached for us. “What—”
“I have to go upstairs,” I said. “I’ve got to make sure the others got out.”
Lissa gaped. “Eva, that’s
insane
.”
I tried to swallow, but our throat was so dry. “Something’s wrong. I have to go check. I just—Kitty. Cal. The other kids . . . they—”
“Eva
—
” Ryan said.
“Side door,” I said. “Across the lobby. Just keep going until you find it—it can’t be far. Tell Jackson I’ll be right there.”
“
No
,” Lissa said. Her hair was wild from the struggle in the basement, her cheek scratched, her eyes gleaming. She tried to grab our hand again. I pushed her forward.
“You’ve got to go, Lissa. You’ve got to get Jaime to the door before they come. He can’t go fast. You’ve got to start
now
.”
Still, she hesitated. She shook her head. She looked toward her brother.
“Go,” he said. “Please, Lissa. Go. We’ll be there in a second.”
Lissa wavered a moment longer. Then she nodded. I watched her slip into the darkened lobby, melting into the shadows, clutching Jaime.
“I’m going,” I said to Ryan. If I hadn’t been so stupid and lost the screwdriver, everything might have been different. Everyone might already be in Peter’s vans, zooming away to safety. This chaos, this uncertainty, was my fault. “I have to go. You can’t stop me, Ryan.”
“Then I’m going with you,” he said, and held out his hand.
I took it. We darted up the stairs. We’d just hit the third-floor landing when the lights snapped on—full strength.
I shook our head.
“Eva,” Ryan said, “if the lights are coming on, then they’re going to be searching the halls. Even if the others haven’t gotten out already, there’s no way we’re going to be able to sneak them past the guards.”
I bent down, slipping our free hand into our sock and pulling out the key I’d hidden there. The bandage on our palm slowed us down, but I managed it. “Then we’ll have to turn off the lights. All of them.” I pressed the key Dr. Lyanne had given us into his hand, along with Jackson’s map. “It’s on the topmost floor. There’s a door, a maintenance room—”
“Shut off all the lights,” he finished.
We stood in that barren stairwell, the siren screaming in the background. And suddenly, he laughed, shaking his head. “God, Eva. Do you keep everything in your socks?”
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh back or start crying. I sort of felt like doing both, so I did neither, just pushed him toward the next flight of stairs and smiled and said, “I’ll see you soon, okay? Down at the door. I’ll meet you at the side door.”
He nodded, his own smile strained.
The siren stopped.
Both our smiles fell. What did that mean?
“Go,” I said.
Ryan ran up the stairs. I took a deep breath and pushed open the door to the third floor.
