Obviously, it had.
He shifted to another memory then—this one of Dana stashing the three other bombs beneath the piles of rubble inside the twenty-plex’s theater six.
Now, inside that same theater, Dana looked up at the camera and spoke. “This thing still on?”
Milo took his cell phone—his real cell phone—from his pocket, and quickly typed
All good.
The sound of an incoming text made Dana’s phone chirp and she glanced at it to see that, yes, Milo was giving her the green light. We were ready to blow Calvin up if he jokered and killed Dana.
Dear Lord.
“All right, boys and girls,” she said under her breath.
Milo used the zoom feature on the tablet to bring the camera to a relative close-up of Calvin.
I felt my heart rate quicken. This was it.
Still thoughts. Still thoughts
. Milo’s voice filtered through my mind. I realized he was still holding my hand. And, despite the fact that I could sense those walls he’d erected—the ones that kept his various secrets from me—I knew that he wanted to be there for me, as much as he could be in that moment.
I, however, wanted to cry.
Don’t cry, Skylar. Just breathe
.
On the tablet screen, Dana helped Calvin by tying one of those giant rubber bands around his upper arm. His veins popped up, and she tapped them, feeling, exploring with her fingers, then wiping with a little antibiotic swab before settling the needle on his arm.
“I love you,” Calvin told her. “I love all you guys.”
“We love you, too,” I whispered.
“I’m going to do this slowly,” Dana said. “Try to stay as still as possible. If you can, keep your heart rate down.”
Still thoughts
…
As I closed my eyes, squeamish or maybe just unwilling to watch that needle puncture Cal’s skin, I remembered my recent flurry of texts with Milo and my promise that if I had any questions for him, I’d
not
not-ask.
So I asked.
What is it, exactly, that you still don’t want me to see?
Milo got very still, and then almost as if opening a floodgate, he did it. He actually dissolved those walls. I was suddenly hit with hundreds of vividly sharp memories—a brown-eyed young woman singing, me getting off the bus at school, an enormous dog lunging and snarling before being jerked back by a chain, that awful moment in Alabama when Milo’d thought I’d been shot and I thought he’d been shot, a hawk wheeling against a bright-blue sky…
The giddy, dizzying rush of the street beneath the wheels of a motorcycle—I fell hard into that memory. I knew instantly that it was from this afternoon. The street hummed beneath those wheels as Milo got closer, closer,
closer
to a gray SUV. At the speed he was going, it was heart-stoppingly dangerous, and I actually gasped. But then I felt him kick that memory away.
Not important
.
Don’t
, I tried to tell him, but then I was sucked into another memory, just as vivid, but much, much older. The closet, his stepfather, his stepfather’s rage…
Just like in the dream I’d had, I was Milo, seeing through Milo’s eyes.
“You want to go? Then go!” the man shouted at us, spittle flying as he flung the closet door open. “Get the fuck out of here!”
I could feel Milo’s nine-year-old self crying, sobbing: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I have nowhere to go!”
He—we—shrank farther back into the darkness of the closet as his stepfather laughed—and left us there, the door unlocked.
I could feel Milo’s shame that he hadn’t run away. He’d stayed.
You were nine!
I told him.
But I didn’t try to escape foster care either
, he said as he showed me a memory from when he was fifteen. Bigger. Stronger. We sat, head down, at a table in an unfamiliar kitchen. Hands almost as big as Milo’s were now clasped together in front of us as yet another man screamed at him. “You worthless piece of shit!” and “How will he ever learn if you coddle him?”
I knew from being inside this memory that Milo had taken his stepmother’s punishment for leaving the light on in the bathroom—a beating that should have gone to a younger boy who’d only just arrived and was still deeply grieving his real mom’s death.
I didn’t leave
, Milo told me,
until Dana showed up
. We lifted our head in that memory, as Milo’s foster father raged on, and there, sitting across the rough wood of that table was a teenaged Dana. With long hair and no makeup, she looked very different, but the fire that burned in her ice-blue eyes was exactly the same.
If it weren’t for Dana, I’d probably still be there
, Milo told me.
Then thank goodness for Dana
. She’d put a crack of doubt in Milo’s well-forged belief that he truly was a
worthless piece of shit
.
“Almost done,” Dana now murmured to Calvin from theater six. “Just keep breathing, babe.”
It was then that it happened.
Calvin’s eyes snapped open. And all the previous absence of color came rushing back to his face, like a wave of life crashing into his body.
He smiled—and then he made a horrible, hideous face, teeth bared. “
ARGH!
”
Electricity seemed to crackle around him, and—
bang!
—all of the lights went glaringly on in theater six.
The camera had been set for low light, so we instantly lost the picture to extreme overexposure, but I heard Dana scream, heard something clatter—the syringe—as it hit the floor.
“Oh my God!” Garrett shouted from our backseat. “Is he jokering?”
The car was awash with the smell of fear, anger, and grief as Milo dropped my hand and reached for the trigger phone. Morgan lunged for the tablet, working to adjust the settings so we could see what was happening, as over the microphone I heard Cal laughing.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Cal said even as I caught Milo’s wrist. “Easy, easy there! I was kidding, I was
kidding
! I’m fine! But, girl! Your face! I punked you! It was
crazy
!”
“That was
not funny
, Calvin!” we heard Dana say raggedly. “I could’ve killed you!”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” he said and Morgan got the picture back just in time to see Cal shoot what looked like a lightning bolt from his finger. He laughed again. “I’m
so
cool!”
Dana turned to look into the camera, and the expression on her face was a million shades of grim. “Calvin is fine. He
punked
me. He was just kidding,” she told us.
She had reason to be grim. The fact that Calvin didn’t recognize just how messed up it was to pretend to joker was a sign of his growing lack of empathy.
Morgan said what we were all thinking. “So that was definitely not good.” And then he asked the question we were all wondering, “So where do we go from here?”
Chapter
Twenty
We went to Dr. Hathaway’s office “to regroup.” That was how Dana put it.
But we all knew she was hoping to convince Cal to attempt the dangerous detox procedure sooner rather than later.
Milo took off on the motorcycle to check up on John Doe the bounty hunter. He’d left without kissing me good-bye, which had made me shake my head.
Didn’t you recognize how glad I was that you shared those memories with me?
I wanted to shout after his receding taillights.
Don’t you know how much I love you?
It occurred to me then, in a flash of clarity similar to Cal’s trick with the lights in the movie theater, that maybe Milo
didn’t
know. What if his shame was so powerful that it made him literally unable to feel anything else?
But as we pulled into Garrett’s driveway, Dana asked Morgan, “How long will it take you to set it all up? The detoxing? From the moment Calvin says
go
.”
“I haven’t said
go
,” Cal was quick to point out.
“Maybe an hour?” Morgan said. “I’ll want to defrost another batch of instafreeze adrenaline to have on hand. Dr. Hathaway has some in his medicine fridge, but not enough.”
Adrenaline was one of the drugs Morgan would use to try to restart Cal’s heart. After we killed Cal by stopping his heart.
“Also,” Morgan added, clearing his throat, “I want to make a quick run to the hardware store.”
To pick up chains, because he believed the leather straps on the OR table wouldn’t be enough to hold Calvin.
Cal was oblivious about that little uncomfortable detail. “I thought we were going to Orlando,” he complained.
“We were,” Dana told him, “but then you were a giant asshole.”
“I said I was sorry.” Cal sounded affronted, but then must’ve realized that he could win Dana’s heart more easily with sugar than vinegar, so he added, “And I
am
sorry, babe. Right now I just feel
so
great. And I know you’re gonna try to talk me into letting y’all stop my heart, and since the purpose of that is to get the D out of my system, then doesn’t it make sense to wait until I have less D in my system? If Morgan’s right, it’s only gonna be a day or two before I start puking again, so why not let me have this time?”
It
was
a compelling argument. Plus it was then that Milo called.
It seems he’d lost track of our bounty-hunting John Doe. Milo was going to find the man—but until he did, he wanted me to go into deep hiding. Preferably somewhere outside Coconut Key.
“Orlando’s outside Coconut Key,” Calvin pointed out.
Which is how we found ourselves in Cal’s car on yet another road trip, when instead we should’ve been strapping my best friend to a table and stopping his heart.
————
Dana and Cal did a sneak-and-peek of the huge warehouse’s perimeter, while Morgan, Garrett, and I crouched in the lengthening shadows beside the car.
During the three-hour drive, Cal had pulled up a map of the area and we’d all studied it, although now that we were here, Garrett was still confused.
“We’re at the back of the warehouse,” I told him, gesturing with my chin toward the door, where a feeble streetlight flickered to life in the growing darkness, its bulb popping and buzzing as it cast weak shadows across the deserted and overgrown parking lot. “This must’ve been an employee entrance. The front is the part with all of the cargo bays. You know, where trucks can pull right up and load in or out?”
Those huge garage-like doors were made of battered, ribbed metal. As we’d pulled up and driven slowly past the address that Calvin had burped out, we’d all made note of the heavy padlocks that kept the three doors securely shut. There had also been a fading sign out front: “For Lease, 80,000 square feet in the Heart of Orlando’s Thriving WestPark Industrial Center!”
It had been quite some time since the word
thriving
could be used to describe this industrial complex. In fact,
ghost town
seemed more fitting. As far as I could tell, out of five separate warehouses positioned around a giant truck-sized cul de sac–type circular driveway, only the largest—the Doggy Doo Good—was currently in use.
“That’s the Florida headquarters for Doggy Doo Good,” I told Garrett as I pointed toward the only slightly brighter lights that came from the gargantuan DDG building two warehouses down from us. If we were at twelve on a clock, DDG was at four, with the burned-out hulk of a decaying and only partially boarded-up building between us. We couldn’t see more than the glow of DDG’s lights from here—but likewise, anyone over there couldn’t see us.
I told Garrett, “We know that their trucks are used to transport kidnapped girls like Sasha to Destiny farms. And we suspect both the local police and the FBI are involved. At the very least, they’re looking the other way. See, after the thing with Sasha, we made some anonymous tips about the kidnapping ring using DDG’s trucks, and Dana watched them go into this very warehouse, but they didn’t find anything. So either the kidnappers knew the police were coming and moved the girls or…” I looked again at this seemingly deserted building that bore the numbers 5543. “Maybe they’ve been keeping the girls off-site but somewhere nearby, like, oh, say,
here
.”
With five empty warehouses to choose from in this complex, the people who kidnapped G-Ts and sold them for their blood could stash those girls anywhere. The bonus was the distant but incessant echoes of dogs barking and howling. The Doggy Doo Good warehouse included a horrible puppy mill, and the noise of the dogs would no doubt hide any stray screaming and crying from the human victims.
I caught Morgan gazing at the burned-out warehouse next door. “This is awfully familiar, Skylar,” he murmured. “Both the visual
and
the soundtrack. Sasha was here. Definitely.”
“But that was months ago,” Garrett pointed out. “Wouldn’t Lacey have been sold to some creepy Destiny addict by now?”
“Maybe it’s like what Jilly described,” I suggested. “Maybe they bring the really powerful, older girls back here—the ones who survive. And they get them healthy and back in shape before they send them out again.” But even as I said it, it sounded really unlikely. Most girls like Jilly probably died when the clients—their mistresses—jokered. They’d be lucky to survive. Or
unlucky
, as Jilly had implied.
Garrett, however, must’ve thought that was possible, because now he was pondering other big questions. “Why didn’t you do your creepy morph-into-a-dog thing, instead of sending Dana and Calvin out into the void?” he asked Morgan.
“(A) It’s not a void,” Morgan said. “It’s twilight. It’s spooky and shadowy, and spooky and shadowy is good when your goal is to not be seen. And (B) Doggy Doo Good has canine sensors outside the warehouse. I spotted them when we drove in. Trust me, I’ve learned to recognize them. They’re set to sound an alarm if a dog gets loose. So, don’t be a dog, right? I don’t know their range, and I didn’t want to accidentally set them off.” He looked at me. “They’re also probably set to sound an alarm if the sensors are triggered by small humans. Small females, around Sasha’s size and age…?”