Breaking Page 19

  Emotion bubbles up inside me. I release a low sigh and lift my hand to my mouth, but the feelings vanish as suddenly as they appeared. I lower my hand back down to the file, lightly touching the photograph with two fingers.

  “They did an autopsy,” I say, reading the paragraph below her photo. I point to a line near the bottom of the page. “What do you think that means?”

  “‘Fail-safe kicked in,’” Zoe reads out loud. She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  She reaches past me and grabs the next file, marked “Devon Savage.” Her expression doesn’t change as she reads, but, after a moment, her eyes flick up to meet mine. “Are you sure you want to see this?” she asks.

  I pull the file toward me. There’s another photograph, only now it’s Devon lying on the slab with dull skin and vacant eyes. I wait for another kick of emotion, but it doesn’t come. I look from the photograph to the block of text below it.

  “There it is again,” I say, pointing. “‘Fail-safe kicked in.’”

  Zoe flips through the rest of the files, frowning.

  “More names. Hey, isn’t this your boyfriend?”

  Zoe pulls a folder out of the cabinet and hands it to me. Jack Calhoun.

  I let the folder fall open in my hands. There’s a photograph clipped to the inside cover. It’s like looking at a fun-house-mirror version of Jack. His eyes are slightly too far apart, and his hair is styled strangely—too long on the back and sides. His smile is too wide, too perfect.

  “This is Jack’s dad,” I say, pointing to the date at the corner of the page. “See? 1989.”

  “Whoa,” Zoe says, leaning over my shoulder. “They look exactly alike.”

  I scan the text below Jack Sr.’s photograph, frowning. “This doesn’t say anything about a fail-safe. And look”—I point to a row of additional dates—“he got more than one dose of the serum. Whatever he got must’ve been different from what they gave you.”

  I close the folder and slide it back in place. “They’ve been doing this for years,” I say, examining the dates on the rest of the files. “Some of these files go all the way back to the sixties.”

  “They only chose a handful of kids,” Zoe points out. “See? 1989, 1989, 1989, and then it goes straight to 1994.”

  “Weird,” I say, quickly scanning the rest of the files. All names. “Do you see anything about an antidote?”

  Zoe shakes her head. “These are all just patient files. Your—Dr. Gruen must keep the top secret stuff somewhere else.” She swears in French, sliding the drawer shut. “This was a waste of time.”

  “Wait. There’s still this.” I grab my clutch from Mother’s desk and pull out Ariel’s mystery phone, which I grabbed while I was in the dorm changing into my dress. I hand it to Zoe. “You said you could switch the SIM cards, remember?”

  Zoe lifts her eyebrows. “I’m going to miss my train.”

  “Don’t you want to know what Ariel had to say before you disappear forever?”

  Zoe hesitates, glancing at the door. “Fine,” she says. She takes a paper clip from Mother’s desk and uses it to pop open a tray in the side of Ariel’s phone, removing a card the size of her pinkie nail. I hand her my phone and she does the same, then slides the card into my phone.

  “That’s it?” I ask.

  Zoe jabs the power button with her thumb. “That’s it. Is this the file?”

  She shows me the screen. Ariel looks out at me through a fan of her eyelashes.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s the file.”

  Zoe hits Play.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Ariel peers out from the tiny phone screen. Red curls rustle around her pale, heart-shaped face. Her lips curl into something that could be a smile or could be a smirk, and you could only know for sure which one it was by asking her.

  “Hi, Charlotte,” she says. “If you’re watching this, that means I’m already dead. I know, such a cliché. But don’t worry. This video isn’t my suicide note, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s way better than that—one last game. You’re holding the first of three clues right now, so listen closely.”

  She clears her throat, and when she speaks again, it’s in her storyteller voice.

  “Once upon a time,” she says, “there were three beautiful princesses. Their families decided they didn’t want them anymore, so the princesses ran away and hid inside an old castle in the middle of the woods. They told each other secrets and they drank stolen wine, and they explored the castle and the woods around it. Before long, the princesses became witty and brave as well as beautiful. They decided they would never leave the castle. It would be their home, forever and ever.”

  Ariel’s smile curls into something darker, bordering on cruel. “But, of course, the castle was cursed. Castles are always cursed, you see. For while the princesses danced away inside, happy and safe, the world on the other side of the castle’s walls was changing. Strange fires destroyed the woods they once loved. Children were being captured and transformed into terrible monsters. And an evil witch plotted against them. The princesses didn’t know about any of this, of course. Not until it was too late.”

  Ariel holds the tiny bottle of serum up for the camera. “One day, while walking through the woods, two of the princesses met the evil witch. She appealed to their vanity and their egos, and persuaded them to take a magical potion. The potion changed the two princesses. It made them cruel and cold. They no longer cared about dancing or secrets or family. They no longer cared about anything at all. They became monsters themselves.

  “And so it was left to the smartest, bravest, and most beautiful princess to save them.” She winks at the camera. “That’s you, idiot. There are two more clues following this video. I’m sure you’ll find the second clue, but the last one is the hardest, so I’m going to give you a hint. All you have to do is go through the wardrobe. Like in the story, remember? Go through the wardrobe and you’ll find the doorway to a new world. I know you’ll figure it out. You’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for. That’s why I always loved you best.”

  Ariel pauses, and a tear slides down her cheek. She swipes it away with one finger, then stares down at her hand like she’s not quite sure where it came from.

  “I guess this is good-bye,” she says in a small voice. “It’s kind of strange that I can still cry. I can’t feel anything. It’s like I’m numb. ”

  Her eyes flick back up to the camera. They’re wide and scared, but empty. Like she’s hollow. The video stops.

  “Are you okay?” Zoe asks.

  I swallow. I don’t know what I am. I’m dimly aware of emotions rumbling around inside of me, but they don’t affect me like they’re supposed to. It’s like sitting in a warm room while a storm rages outside. I hear the wind howl, and I remember what it’s like to be cold, but I don’t feel it.

  “‘Through the wardrobe,’” I repeat.

  “Like in the story,” Zoe adds. “She’s talking about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, right?”

  “She liked that one,” I say, nodding. I never read the book—Mother wasn’t a fan of fiction—but Ariel made me watch the movie our freshman year.

  “Do you think she meant our dorm?”

  “I searched our closet pretty carefully. I think I would have noticed if she left something for me there.” I look up, my eyes landing on the closet on the other side of Mother’s office.

  Zoe follows my gaze. “You don’t think—”

  “She knew where I kept the keys. She could have gotten in here as easily as we did.”

  I cross the office and pull the door open. Three white lab coats and two dark blazers hang inside. A pair of black loafers sits on the floor. Otherwise, it’s empty.

  “Nothing here,” I say. I start to push the door closed, when my fingers brush against a thread wrapped around the base of the doorknob. I roll the thread, frowning. It’s bright yellow, like the bricks Ariel left in the woods.

  My heart beats faster. Zoe says
something, but I don’t hear it. I try to dig the thread away from the doorknob, but it’s attached to a tiny card wedged between the metal base and the wood of the door. The edge juts out, but I doubt anyone would notice if they weren’t looking for it. I dig at the card with my thumbnail, but the paper’s old, and it starts to tear. Shit. I try again, this time pinching the corner between two fingers. It gently pulls free and falls into my palm. Tiny letters dance across the creased surface.

  Go through the wardrobe, they read. And at the bottom of the card: 3/3.

  I pull the door open again and, this time, I push past my mother’s lab coats and blazers, to the very back of the closet. Zoe steps inside behind me.

  “Charlotte—”

  “In the movie, she goes to the very back of the wardrobe, remember?” I say. “The little girl pushes through the coats, and the back of the closet opens into another world.”

  I rise to my tiptoes, and then drop to my knees, running my hands over every inch of the back wall. I find nothing, no secret door or note or clue. It looks like my mother barely even uses this closet.

  “I need a little help here, Ariel,” I whisper.

  I stare into the darkness, but the closet is just a closet, the wall is just a wall. Zoe drops to the floor next to me, my mother’s coats rustling around her. She sighs. Music plays somewhere deep in the hospital, and the sound travels up through the floor, making the floor vibrate beneath my knees. I press my lips together, waiting.

  Come on, I think. What is it? What did she want me to see?

  Ariel loved fairy tales, and she could never figure out why I didn’t love them in the same fierce, all-consuming way. Ariel wanted to crawl inside them and live her life there. It was the real world she hated.

  I never got the point. They seemed simplistic to me. Boring.

  “There’s nothing really there,” I told her once, and she looked at me like I was a damn fool.

  “You’re trying too hard,” she explained. “Let it be what it is.”

  Let it be what it is, I think now as I crouch in my mother’s closet. Stop trying.

  I stare at the back wall, letting my eyes go unfocused. The distant sound of music fades away. I focus on my own heartbeat. My own breath.

  Something flashes from the upper corner of the wall. I jerk my head up, and there—I see it.

  A tiny silver keyhole.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  My hands tremble so badly that Mother’s tiny key slips from my fingers twice before I manage to hold it steady. I stand on my tiptoes and slide the key into the lock. Turn.

  The wall stays still. Zoe stiffens next to me. I guessed wrong, I think. There’s another key, a key I haven’t found yet. Maybe I’ll never find it, and this will stay a mystery forever.

  Then a grinding sound rumbles from somewhere below me. The wall moves inward.

  “Holy hell,” Zoe whispers, and the breath I’d been holding releases in a huff of air.

  There’s a secret room at the back of Mother’s closet. I remember the command to get my legs to move and step forward, hurrying down the short flight of stairs. It’s probably good that I can’t access my emotions right now, because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think about this. My mother has been lying to me.

  Fluorescent lights buzz to life the second my shoe hits the floor, illuminating a large room with high ceilings. Everything is white. White tile floors, white walls, white metal cots covered in crisp white sheets. The sleeping faces peering over the tops of those sheets are the only spots of color. Tubes trail away from their noses and wrists, connecting them to strange, beeping machines. I try to count them and quickly lose track. There are rows and rows of cots. Hundreds of unconscious people.

  “Charlotte,” Zoe says, stepping into the room behind me. “What is this?”

  “They’re patients,” I say, but that can’t be true. Patients wouldn’t be hidden behind a secret wall in the closet. Patients wouldn’t look like this.

  I walk down the aisle between the cots, listening to the slow beep of the machines. There’s a boy submerged in blue liquid, tubes trailing away from his body. And a girl with skin so dry it almost looks like scales. One of the cots is inside a metal cage, the bars warped. Whoever’s inside must’ve been fighting to get out.

  I glance at the girl lying in the cot nearest to me. She has short black hair and dark skin. Burns crawl up the side of her face and over her lips, leaving her skin black and shiny. A thin hospital sheet covers her body. I move it aside. Thick leather restraints bind the girl’s wrists to her cot. The skin beneath them is raw and red, bleeding.

  Zoe pulls a chart off the wall next to the girl’s cot and squints down at it, reading. “She was doing some sort of experiment on her,” she says after a moment. “It says here that she’s pyretic, whatever that means.”

  Bits of old conversation flip through my head. I remember a lecture from a unit on Greek myth: pyro, from the Greek pyr, meaning “fire.”

  I think of the forest fires in the papers and on the news. The man brought into the Med Center in a coma, his face covered in burns.

  The world on the other side of the castle’s walls was changing, I hear Ariel whisper. Strange fires destroyed the woods they once loved.

  Zoe makes a face and turns the page. “Gross. There are pictures.”

  The cot next to the girl holds a boy with a metal halo circling his skull. Thin metal rods stretch from the halo to his shaved head. There’s dried blood crusted to his skin. Another cot holds a girl who’s so thin she looks like she might break in half.

  Children were being captured and transformed into terrible monsters.

  I ball my hands into fists. Sweat coats my palms. I’m feeling horror, I realize. Full-on horror, like I haven’t felt since I was a little kid hiding from the monsters under my bed.

  “I’m going to be sick.” I make a beeline for the trash can in the corner of the room and double over. My chest constricts and the acid burn of vomit climbs my throat, but I haven’t eaten enough to throw up. I heave and spit something sour into the trash. My stomach roils.

  I’ve never asked my mother about her work. I always told myself it was because we didn’t have that kind of relationship—we weren’t the type of mother and daughter who’d make cocoa and cookies and gossip about our days.

  But there were other reasons. Even as a child, I knew there were rooms in my mother’s life that I never wanted to enter. And now I’m standing in her most secret room, staring at the things she’s kept hidden from the rest of the world.

  “Charlotte?” Zoe touches my shoulder, and I flinch. I didn’t hear her come up behind me. She frowns. “Are you okay?”

  I straighten, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I look around the room, at all these people strapped into narrow cots, sleeping while my mother does God knows what to them. Zoe’s plan to run away doesn’t seem foolish anymore. We don’t want to be found here. “We should go.”

  “But we haven’t found anything yet.” Zoe is still holding the chart she pulled off the wall next to the girl’s cot. “Don’t you want to know who all these people are?”

  I shake my head. I’ve never known fear like this before. It squeezes my throat and pounds in my ears. I glance at the lab coats dangling in front of Mother’s secret door and wish I’d never found this place. Some boxes should never be opened. There are some secrets you can never unlearn.

  “Zoe,” I say.

  “Give me a minute.” She studies the chart, her lips moving as she reads. “It says here that this girl came from a juvenile detention center called—” I rip the chart from Zoe’s hands. “Hey! I wasn’t done with that.”

  I slide the chart back onto its hook, not bothering to glance at what it says.

  “Look around,” I say. “These people were hidden. They’re strapped down and locked away in cages. Something seriously sick is going on here. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t get it.” Zoe crosses her arms over her chest. It occurs to me t
hat she isn’t even a little bit afraid. “You can’t pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with you. Your own mother is playing Dr. Frankenstein on a bunch of kids she found in juvenile detention centers. Meanwhile, you and your rich friends get handed a miracle serum that turns them into superheroes. Don’t you think those two things are connected?”

  My mouth suddenly feels dry. I swallow, tasting vomit at the back of my throat. “You think she did this for us?”

  Zoe nods. “Ariel must’ve found this place when she figured out that the serum came from the Med Center. I’m guessing she wanted you to see it for yourself.”

  I glance at the boy lying in the cot beside me. His eyelids flicker. His chest rises and falls beneath the thin hospital sheet covering his body. I wonder how long he’s been sleeping.

  My fear is fading, bit by bit. Any second now I’ll forget that feeling of bone-deep horror. I’ll no longer hear the animal voice deep in my subconscious, warning me to run.

  I turn, and stumble toward the door. I have to get out of this room, I think. I take the stairs two at a time. I don’t turn around when Zoe calls my name. Things will make sense once I’m out of here.

  I step into the closet, and—

  Mother pushes through the lab coats, her eyes widening at the sight of me.

  “What are you doing in here?” she demands.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Mother’s black gown looks wrong in the white room, like a bug floating in a bowl of milk. The blue-tinted light gathers in the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, making her face look old.

  “How did you get in here?” she asks, but she sweeps across the room without waiting for an answer, her heels snapping at the tile. The sound vibrates off the walls, making the metal cots tremble. She stops beside a phone hanging from the wall and lifts the receiver to her mouth without dialing.

  “I need security in room three-A.” She pauses, and anger flashes across her mouth. It disappears a fraction of a second later. “Yes, that’s correct,” she says in a voice like honey. “Please hurry.”