Expelled (2 page)

Her eyes were bright, but her skin looked a bit sallow. She wore tight jeans and a sleeveless, green button-down shirt. Loose, crepe-like skin hung off her arms and her neck.

“That's great,” Li Jing mumbled. “I'm sorry, but my dad's waiting for me.”

“But I'm out,” Carolann said. “I need more.”

“Well, the experiment is over. I'm sorry, but it has to be.”

The smile fell off Carolann's face. She drew closer. “You CAN'T!!!” she shouted, right in Li Jing's face.

Li Jing was hit by a wave of stench. Carolann's breath—it was dank and sick-smelling. If this was a side effect, it might be a problem. She wouldn't be able to study it now, though, thanks to Penny Lindstrom.

Li Jing's head was starting to pound from where it had hit the wall. She needed an Advil. She cursed herself inwardly—she'd left a bottle of it in the room.

“If you just give me, like, five or ten more doses, I'll be okay.”

“They kicked me out of school,” Li Jing said. “Because of what I gave you. So just be happy with what you got. A seventy-five-pound weight loss, all for free!”

Several students passed by coming from the parking lot. A thin, blond man and a leggy brunette clutching books to her chest. They looked at Li Jing and Carolann and exchanged a snarky glance.

“You can't just cut me off like that,” Carolann hissed. “I get headaches. I need more. I miss … I miss the
sweetness.
”

Headaches. Great.
Now
the data was starting to come in. Meanwhile, the head of the department, Professor Stead, had made it clear that if Li Jing continued to treat Carolann with the compound, he would press charges against her. Her advisor, Professor Hewitt, the traitor, had sat there shaking his head during the meeting. He didn't stand up for her at all. He should have told Professor Stead about how brilliant her research was. They should have made an exception for her …

“I'm sorry, Carolann. There's nothing I can do. I've been expelled. I can't even get into the lab to make more.”

Li Jing turned to head toward the parking lot, but Carolann yanked her back, hard. Li Jing's shoulder screamed in protest and she lost hold of the box with her research. It fell onto the grass, spilling out her files and notes.

“Look what you did!” Li Jing said. A man in a gray suit, some kind of administrator passing by, stopped to help pick up the papers.

“You can't do this to me!” Carolann said, menacingly low, right up in Li Jing's face with her rotting breath. Then Carolann reached up and grabbed Li Jing at the throat. She started to squeeze, “You give me more or I tell the cops!”

Li Jing gasped for breath.

Then Carolann went limp and the man in the gray suit was right there, with his shoulder under Carolann's arm. He pocketed a little metal device which he had just pressed into Carolann's neck. It looked like a short brass cigarette.

Li Jing drew in a shaky breath as another man in a gray suit came up. His suit was a lighter color, and drawn tight in places over his muscular physique.

“Just put her in the car, Rob” said the first man. Rob took Carolann's weight and walked her away, around the corner. The way he had his arm supporting her shoulder, it seemed almost like they were both walking, and she wasn't being dragged.

“Who are you?” Li Jing stammered. “Why did you do that?”

“I'm Rick Phillips, and my employer, Mr. Timothy Almstead, would like a word with you. Would you care to walk this way?” he asked. All the while, he was putting the pages back in her box, closing the lid, lifting the box and handing it to her. Guiding her off, escorting her toward the corner of the building.

“My father is waiting for me,” she said. She knew it was foolish to go with strange men, but they had Carolann.

“It won't take long, I promise. He wants to talk to you about your research.”

“My research?”

A sleek, black SUV pulled up to them, right on the grass.

“Please, get in,” Mr. Phillips said, opening the door for her. Li Jing couldn't help it. She was intrigued. She set the box down on the carpeted floor of the SUV and climbed in. It was a relief to sit down. She slowly eased her backpack off her shoulders and set it on the floor.

Li Jing saw that Carolann was sitting up front, slumped against the window, next to Rob, who she realized was the driver. There was tinted privacy glass up, dividing them from her.

Mr. Phillips closed her door, went around the back of the car, and climbed in on the other side. The massive SUV had a custom interior with two rows of black leather seats facing each other, like a limo. He slid into the seat catty-corner to her and opened up a laptop.

He pressed a few buttons and a face appeared on the screen in a smaller window. “I have her here,” he said to the screen. Then he turned the laptop toward Li Jing.

The man on the screen was old. He had bright blue eyes, picked up by an aqua-colored tie. His eyes were the color of the sea on a brochure for a trip to the Caribbean.

“Ms. Wu! What a pleasure to meet you. My scouts tell me you've had a hard morning!”

Li Jing nodded.

“Well, look, I know you must be wondering what the hay's goin' on here. Let me come out with it. I got contacts, people I pay, in all the best undergrad and graduate biotech labs in, well, heck, not only in the States, but all over the globe. I'd heard, a few weeks ago, about your work with some kinds of fruit extracts. Make you lose weight?”

“But I kept it a secret,” she said.

“Well … there's secrets and there's
secrets,
aren't there?”

“I don't understand,” Li Jing said.

“So listen up, then, and you will! I'd like you to come work for me. And when I say me, I mean the Pipop Corporation.”

Now, she realized who he was—Timothy Almstead, the President of the Pipop Corporation. He'd been in the news because there had been an assassination attempt on his life. Some deranged man blamed his obese wife's death on Pipop soda. Now, it all made more sense. Of course he would be interested in a new diet sweetener. Li Jing sat back against the black leather seat.

“We'd like you to come and work for us. I can offer you two hundred and fifty thousand a year. How does that sound?”

Li Jing coughed at that sum of money. She had no idea what to say to a quarter of a million dollars.

“You're wondering what's the catch?” Almstead said. “Clever girl.”

He'd mistaken her boggling as some kind of negotiating tactic.

“The catch is … the work really has to be a secret this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we'd prefer to, hmmm, how can I say this? How do I say it, Phillips?”

“Mr. Almstead is proposing that you become a part of our top-secret research initiative,” Mr. Phillips explained. “The scientists we recruit agree to limit contact with friends and family. In some cases, we even create new identities for members of our team. Some of them, you understand, come from situations that require them to start anew. Countries that don't want their top scientists recruited. That kind of thing. They live in our dormitories on our research campus.”

Li Jing was thinking now.

“We could make up a whole new identity for you. You could be Kim Sum or Jang Lang, I don't know,” said Mr. Almstead. Li Jing didn't bat an eye at the racism in his remarks. Old men were the worst. And they always thought they were being funny.

“Mr. Almstead,” she asked, “if I come to work for you, I get to continue my research—”

“Heck yeah, why do you think I sent in the SWAT team?”

“On human subjects?”

“We have volunteers, at our lab. They're paid very, very well,” Mr. Phillips interjected.

“And they know how to keep their mouths shut,” Almstead said from the screen.

“When the time comes … could my new name be Elise?” Li Jing asked.

“Ha!” he barked. Then, “Girls. Can be one of the top scientists in all the world, and still got a pretty name in mind. Sure thing. Why Elise?”

She shrugged.

There had been another Chinese girl in Li Jing's kindergarten class named Elise. She had been the darling of the class, while Li Jing had remained friendless week after week.

“Want a Chinese last name or a regular one?” Almstead said.

“Zhang,” Li Jing decided. “It is a very common Chinese last name.”

“Elise Zhang. Sounds like a scientist not to screw around with. I like it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Mr. Phillips said. “We also need to ask Ms. Wu how many people know about the research.”

“Well, almost no one,” Li Jing answered. “My project advisor, and the head of the department, they both knew. And my roommate, Penelope Lindstrom. She's the one who got me expelled.”

“Oh, believe me,” said Almstead, “all our best scientists got kicked out of school for one thing or another.”

“Is that all?” Phillips asked. “You're quite certain?”

“I guess it's possible that Penny could have told some of her friends, but I don't know. Oh, and Carolann, of course. My test subject. She knows.”

Mr. Phillips nodded.

“I see. Well, Phillips, that manageable?” Almstead crowed.

“Yes, sir. Perfectly so.”

Li Jing got goose bumps all up and down her arms and legs. What did that mean,
manageable?

Phillips crooked his arm up and rapped on the dividing glass twice. The driver reversed the car and drove backward, out toward the parking lot.

“What should we do about the test subject, Mr. Almstead?” Phillips asked. “She's quite unstable. She assaulted Ms. Wu right as we arrived.”

“What do you think we should do about her, Li Jing?” Almstead asked.

Li Jing thought for a moment. “Her rapid weight loss and her growing aggression would be consistent with someone suffering from meth addiction,” she volunteered. “Maybe we could find a place where addicts are and … give her some and leave her there.”

“Thatta girl! You're one of us, I can tell already! We'll give her … rather too much meth, if I'm catching onto your idea.”

Li Jing nodded. It had never been a good experiment. No blinds. Only one subject. The dosage hadn't been monitored as it should have been, she could admit that now. And it had been hard to keep up with Carolann's increasing demand. Some of the product had not been as pure as it should have been. It had been a sloppy experiment.

The SUV had to make a three-point turn right in front of her father's banged-up white delivery van.

Li Jing's breath caught in her throat.

“He can't see you, through the glass,” Mr. Phillips said.

Her father was leaning on the van and smoking a cigarette, watching for her. She could tell, just from his posture, by the tension in his body and the way he was jiggling one foot, how angry he was. How ready he was to lay into her, as soon as she rounded the corner.

“But we should talk about him,” Mr. Phillips said, as the SUV finished the turn and pulled away. “Would he believe it if you ran away?”

His eyes darted to her arm. Unintentionally, Li Jing thought. She put her hand over the ugly crescent-shaped marks.

“Yes. He would believe that.”

“Did he know about your research?” Mr. Almstead asked.

“No,” she said. Then she closed her eyes. The excitement and the adrenaline were wearing off and her body was beginning to remind her of the beating she had received. Her head pounded. Her shoulder ached. The swelling bruises and welts on her upper arm were thumping in time with her heartbeat. “Wait.”

Li Jing cleared her throat, “You know, I did mention it one time,” she said. She couldn't quite look at Mr. Almstead on the screen.

“I almost forgot about it. Yes, he does know. He said I should try to sell it.” She knew the lie sounded hollow, but she couldn't stop herself. “He offered to try to sell it for me.”

She glanced at Mr. Phillips and saw he was looking out the window, away from her.

“He's very possessive of me,” Li Jing added. “He would try to find me if I disappeared.”

“I see,” Almstead said from the screen. “Well, then maybe we need to take care of that. Do you think so?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes,” Elise Zhang said.

Get ready for a dream vacation that first goes comically, then tragically, then horrifyingly wrong!

Keep reading for a sneak peek of

SWEET

 

LAUREL

DAY ONE

A GUY WEARING SKINNY JEANS
and a neon-blue fedora is leaping into the air, vaulting up onto the backs of the people in the crowd, waving like crazy and shouting, “Baby Tom-Tom! Baby Tom-Tom!” like a man on fire calling for a bucket.

The dock is a zoo. Fans, maybe two thousand fans, are crammed into the space on either side of a red carpet that extends from the limo drop-off point, all the way up the dock, up a narrow gangplank and onto the luxury cruise liner, the
Extravagance.