Fear My Mortality Read online

  The doctor gave her one of those calm, medical smiles. He’d told us that he didn’t usually work at this recovery center, which was generally staffed with recovery nurses. His specialty was surgical removals. They’d called him in because of the Basher attack, but it was lucky he was there in the circumstances.

  “Was your sight affected in any way? Did you have any trouble healing?”

  “No, of course not. They didn’t even have to call the Hazard Police. They had a recovery kit at the school. I look okay, don’t I? Why are you asking me this?”

  The doctor gestured at me. “What about your daughter? Has she ever been in an accident?”

  Mom looked at me and back at the doctor. She shook her head slightly. “No.” She shook her head again as if she couldn’t stop shaking it. “Ava’s never been hurt.” Her hands fluttered to her face. “Well, maybe she sprained her ankle once dancing, but it stopped hurting straight away, just like normal, right sweetheart?”

  She barely glanced at me and I was glad because I still remembered the sprained ankle, how long it had throbbed, and how much that still confused me. I’d been extra careful since and I’d made myself strong. Strong muscles didn’t get hurt.

  Mom rushed on. “And then there was Implosion tonight, but I don’t really remember … ” Her eyes clouded over. She touched her temples and rubbed her skin.

  The doctor leaned away. He wrote something down. “Mrs. Holland, we can’t find any evidence that your daughter suffered more than superficial cuts tonight—which are taking an extremely long time to heal. I’m afraid I’m going to have to order tests for her.” He handed Mom the clipboard. “I need your signature on this.”

  “Why?”

  “It authorizes the Hazard Police to carry out the tests.”

  “The police? No. I—” She looked at me. Her hand tightened as though she’d never let me go. She glanced at Officer Reid standing outside the room, her expression suddenly alarmed. “No.”

  The doctor exhaled and there was finally something human in his demeanor. “Mrs. Holland, if your daughter has the same condition as your son, she could be in very great danger. We need to know what’s going on here. The Hazard Police can help with that. I can assure you, the tests won’t hurt. They just need to scan her and take a little blood, that’s all.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “It’s very important we understand what’s happened. There are so many questions about your son’s death. We don’t know if it was caused by genetic factors or something external. If we’re dealing with some kind of biological hazard, then your daughter might have been exposed to it.”

  Mom gasped. “You mean because of the Bashers at the ceremony? You mean they could have figured out a way to kill people?”

  The doctor shook his head. “We don’t know right now, but your daughter’s best chance is to be checked and tested.”

  I glared at the mottled carpet, trying not to look at the stains on my shirt. I tried not to think about Josh’s body. I would never tell Mom that Josh was a Basher, just like I could never understand why he was one of them, not when the last thing I saw in his eyes before he died was a fierce protectiveness …

  Mom was watching me, her eyes filled with tears. “Sweetie, I know you’re scared right now. I am too, but I need to know that you’re safe. Okay? Don’t be worried. The police will take care of you.”

  One of her hands left mine. The pen dipped. She scrawled her signature in big, curvy lines across the authorization. She handed it back to the doctor, squeezing my hand over and over as though she was desperate to make sure I was okay. “I won’t lose another child. I won’t lose my daughter. Please make sure she’s safe.”

  As soon as Mom said the words, Officer Reid sauntered into the room like he had supersonic hearing. I watched him approach, blood pounding in my ears. Safe was the last thing I felt around him.

  As he surveyed the room, his stance was offensive—I could tell by the way he held his arms, the angle of his shoulders. He assumed the same position a dancer did right before lunging. The blood drained from my face. I remembered him now, a few years ahead of me at school. He’d killed five of his classmates the day he graduated—picked them off one by one and locked their bodies in different parts of the school so they missed the ceremony. Nobody ever said why.

  He took hold of my shoulders and pulled me upright with his strong hands. “Come with me, Ava.” He smiled at Mom. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Holland. We’ll bring her back before you know it.”

  I told myself he wouldn’t hurt me. He was a Hazard. They helped people heal, dug people out of damaged buildings. He’d probably just take some blood from the cuts on my wrists and that would be all.

  But the way he looked at me, not like a Hazard at all, turned my stomach into acid. I suddenly remembered what Michael’s godfather had said to me back at the Terminal. They won’t send the usual officers for this one.

  Officer Reid had been at Implosion. He’d sent his wasp after Mom and Dad and then me. He was there for a reason, I just didn’t know why.

  I looked to Mom as the panic spread. She couldn’t let me go with this guy. But she’d dropped her head into her hands and didn’t see the gleam in his eyes, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. The doctor patted her hand, leaning between us, blocking my view. My legs wobbled and would have given out except that Officer Reid clutched my upper arm.

  The door closed behind us, and my imagination went wild as he propelled me down the corridor. “What are you going to do to me? Really?”

  He didn’t answer until we reached the end of the hall and he punched the down button at the elevator. Once inside, he said, “Tests. Just like the good doctor said.”

  “What kind of tests? Blood tests? What?”

  He clasped his hands behind his back, all casual looking. “Don’t you want to know if you can die?” He looked at me with a strange twinkle in his eye as if he’d just told a joke and I was supposed to smile and say, “Good one.” He had the same eyes as his brother, wide, oval, green. I pictured Aaron that afternoon mocking a gun at his chin and pulling the trigger. I pictured Reid dragging his dead classmates into the storage room, the broom cupboard, squishing their bodies in before they woke up.

  The elevator descended, but my stomach remained on the upper floor. “Everyone dies.”

  He paused before he nodded and spoke. “Eventually.” He shifted so he was half-facing me. “You know, the easiest way to figure out if you can be killed would be to slit your throat right now and see if you heal.”

  His eyes were shining gems. I looked away from him and clamped my mouth shut. I stared at the doors as the elevator descended even more. The button he’d punched looked like some kind of sub-basement. He’d inserted a security key as well. As we passed the lowest level, the elevator continued to descend, new numbers flashing on the display at the top of the door. A small panel extended from the wall and Reid tapped it a couple of times before it slid away, seamlessly disappearing into the side of the elevator again.

  I heard myself mocking Michael about scientists lurking in basements.

  The light blipped above the door. Reid pulled me into an entrance room, lit with green fluorescent lights. On the other side of the small entryway, a steel door gleamed. When the elevator doors shut behind us, he seemed to relax, and I guessed there was no way I could escape.

  “Where are we?”

  He beat a tattoo of numbers into the control panel and went through a series of identification tests: fingerprints, ocular, and voice recognition.

  “Not many people get to see this place. In fact, it doesn’t exist.” He chuckled. “Like Eve and aliens.”

  I pressed my lips together. “You’re not really a Hazard, are you?”

  “They prove useful at times.”

  “That would make you—what?—special forces? Central intelligence?”

  He raised a derisive eyebrow as if to say that I was way off the mark.

  Worse then. �
�Black Ops.” Another supposed myth. Like the Mirror Room at the Terminal.

  He smirked but didn’t answer. The door slid open and another corridor stretched away into the distance. It reminded me of the Terminal’s corridor with all the doors. We stopped at the second one. It was steel too, except that there was an uneven patch in the middle, as though someone had taken a hammer to it.

  He saw me looking at it. He nudged me in the ribs, making me flinch. “The last one tried to escape.”

  He was suddenly really close to me, so close I smelled the new plastic scent of his suit like an artificial skin encasing his body. It took every ounce of strength in me not to step away. I said, “I just want to get this over with.”

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he grabbed me, locking his arm around my neck and forcing me over, knocking my head into the warped steel. I tried to scream, but his arm compressed my throat. My whole body froze up.

  He pulled me back and propelled me forward again, dinging the top of my head into the door. “Knock, knock.”

  Chapter Five

  I struggled, tried to grab his hands, rip his fingers off my throat. When his hold didn’t budge, I kicked out with my feet, attempting to connect with his shins, his feet, anything to make him let go, to make it stop. He squeezed harder, crushing my windpipe until I gasped and struggled to breathe.

  The door swung open. My eyes glazed, the room swam, and my stomach churned. It smelled like … copper.

  Reid pulled me into the room at a half-crouch, not letting me up. He pushed me into something hard—a chair I realized—and fastened something around my neck before I could flinch. I grabbed at it—some kind of leather, too tight against my lacerated skin—before he wrenched my hands down one at a time. I tried to scream but the strap around my neck wouldn’t let me draw enough breath and the sound became a pitiful squeak. Straps whipped around my wrists and ankles and locked into place. Something tickled my forehead.

  “Look what you did.” Reid shook his head at me. He grabbed a cloth and dabbed at my forehead. He showed me the coated rag, blood smudged black in the weird green light. He gestured around at the room. “It’s emerald light. Even better than ultra-violet. We can see everything in it.” His eyes finally left my forehead and ran the length of my body. “Bones, muscles, ligaments. Everything.”

  I wanted to turn my face away, not give him the satisfaction of seeing how much I was shaking, but the constraint around my neck was too tight. He leaned closer and poked his finger at the skin around my neck. “Bruising.” Then my forehead. “Still bleeding.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched up before he stomped away from me. I followed him with my eyes, but metal plates jutted up on both sides of my face. All I could see was in front of me. The other side of an empty room: a wall with something splattered on it. I didn’t want to know what. And up: a ceiling made of tiles like the ones in an office, all perforated and bumpy looking.

  Something rattled. I shrank inside. I’d seen this kind of thing in horror movies. The metal tray with the medical instruments on it and the villain saying, just because you can’t die doesn’t mean this won’t hurt.

  I tried to ignore the throbbing in my forehead where he’d hurt me. I needed a wall inside my mind. Something to protect me from what was about to happen. I needed a wall of steel and iron, the toughest substance I could imagine, or I wasn’t going to survive.

  His face popped into my vision again, a syringe filled with black liquid in his hand. “Hold still.”

  My eyes widened. “Wait. No. What is that?”

  He smiled before his face disappeared. “We call it nectar. It’s like … ” He popped back into view and cocked his head, thinking. “It’s like a little bit of immortality. We want to see what it does to you. Probably, it will help you survive what we need to do. Possibly, it might kill you. We’ll see.”

  I rasped, wanted to shriek. “You can’t give me that.”

  “Sure I can.” He patted my arm as if it would console me before he continued, “Don’t worry, you should be really happy in a minute. Or else you’ll be really dead.”

  I struggled, yanking on my restraints. “You can’t do this!”

  My arm stung. There was pressure, fluid being forced into my muscle, and my body warmed as if someone had let in the sun. Like boiled sugar and kaleidoscope candy. It spread through my arm, to my shoulder, up my neck, into my head.

  The throb in my forehead stopped. The sting from the cut went away and it wasn’t just numb, it was more than that, as though it had instantly healed. If only I could touch it, I would know for sure.

  My vision blurred, swayed, and sparkled at the edges. The splatter on the opposite wall melted into the shape of a rose. A red rose blooming just for me. The green wall sprouted vines and leaves, twisting and twining from floor to ceiling, a backdrop of life behind the rose. It was calm, tranquil, a perfect picture of serenity and something else …

  There were flashes of gold as a creature the size of my hand emerged from behind a vine. It was a scorpion. Not black or brown like a real one, but made of gold. It scurried to the middle of the rose and stopped there, gleaming against the deep red. Its stinger rose, ready to strike the center of the flower, but it paused, hesitating like some kind of warning …

  The budding rose was wrong. The scorpion was wrong. None of it was real.

  A ball of heat wound up from my stomach, burning me from the inside out.

  Really happy?

  No.

  I pressed away from the morphing splatter on the wall, wishing I could press myself out through the back of the chair, out of my restraints. My ears rang with the roaring buzz in my head, and the burning sensation scorched my skin. I was going to die. He said it could kill me. If I didn’t breathe, if I didn’t find myself, I’d burst inside my own skin.

  I sagged—retreated behind the wall of iron I’d created in my head, forced myself to relax, fighting the urge to yank myself upward, to scream against the pressure building inside me, willing my arms and legs to go limp.

  “That’s the way, Ava. Just relax. You’re still with us. That’s good.” Reid’s blurry form shimmered toward me. My vision was vague, muddled. I couldn’t see him properly, the nectar had done something to my eyes, but I made out the shape of wide glasses resting on his face. He bent and pushed up the hem of my jeans, examining my ankle.

  When he spoke, it wasn’t to me, glancing past me as though there were people there, watching. “The old ankle injury is confirmed.” He rose to my face, peering at my neck and forehead. “Bruising vanished. Head wound healed. Nectar has caused rapid regeneration.” He separated my eyelids with two fingers. His words were a sharp whisper over the hurtling pain in my head. “Pupils dilated. She’s restful.”

  He wafted around me, undoing my restraints, one after the other. The leather strap around my neck released my windpipes and I gulped in air. I tried to focus as he crooned at me, putting a hand on my arm, beckoning with the other. “Come with me, Ava. We’ll do the tests now. It will all be over soon.”

  Instead of taking the hand he offered, I lurched at him. All the heat inside me burned back to the surface. Air filled my lungs.

  I screamed, a sound that tore around the room as wild as a shrieking wind.

  I paused like the scorpion.

  Then, I smashed my forehead into his.

  His mouth parted in shock, eyes wide, no longer hazy, but severe and piercing.

  The impact stopped the roaring in my ears, the room turned silent, the thud of our heads knocking together eased the pressure under my skin and turned the room clear, but only for a moment. I wanted to do it again. I needed the release of contact, of energy traveling out of me. I kicked him in the chest, sensing the crunch of bones underfoot, and the force inside me eased up again—for a second.

  Reid crashed to the ground, curled up, head in his hands, while panic and chaos swarmed around me.

  I jumped away from the chair
, crouched, bent my legs, preparing to launch myself forward as people teemed inside the room, all of them grasping at me. Struggling to get away from them, I threw myself at the rose on the wall, my entire body connecting. The flower burst against me and the scorpion slipped away. The collision fed every nerve along my side, releasing something inside me, something that had to get out.

  The sound died down around me as though I’d startled them with my crazy jump. One of the watchers threw an arm out, stopping the others as they rushed toward me, herding them back to where they floated in my blurry vision as if they were waiting now, to see what I’d do next.

  I struggled to think, to reason. To see clearly beyond the haze, the shadowy edges of my vision, the sloshing room, and the energy shrieking through me. I fought the nectar pulsing my veins, beating at me, and thumping with every beat of my heart, pounding around and around my body. The green lighting came back into focus. So did the door.

  If I could get to it, maybe everything would stop. Maybe I’d be okay.

  In and out of view, the room around me blurred and cleared, showered in light and dark and shadows everywhere. I forced my legs to move, lurching across the floor, footsteps compacting the ground, jarring deep into my bones.

  The trolley with the scalpels and syringes was in my path and I heaved it aside. It bounced against the wall and rebounded, spraying instruments around me, cutting my face and arms. I flinched, trying to stay focused on the silhouette of the door handle.

  Someone grabbed at me and I shoved him, both hands connecting with Reid’s torso. He crashed backward, rammed into the wall. I stared at his crumpled body while I swayed on the spot, nausea bearing up through me. I didn’t know how I’d pushed him so hard. All I knew was I had to get to the door. I took a step, jerked at the cold steel of a knife under my foot, biting me. I jumped, stumbled. Slipped on another instrument.

  The floor came up at me, pebbled with sharp knives and cutting things—things that would slice me in a thousand places. I tried to regain my balance, reaching out into the air with nothing to stop my fall.