Given: Project Xol Read online

  He picked up after three rings. The dial tone ended but nothing followed.

  I frowned, wondering why he wasn’t speaking.

  “Zero?”

  A whoosh of air came over the line.

  “Thank God.”

  Alarm flooded my system.

  “Someone called on Cassie’s phone minutes ago,” he said.

  Michael! I held back a growl.

  “I knew something was up. I terminated the call and ended that trail. Are we compromised? Is she?”

  “She was taken.”

  “What!”

  I closed my eyes, hearing the accusation in his voice. He blamed me.

  “They came for us.”

  “Where?” Noises of something shuffling sounded next. “Where’s Tramer?”

  “He took off after the vial.”

  “Goddammit! Who has Cassidy?” he asked.

  “Xol. Michael showed up and Elena was being…difficult, arguing with Cassidy and—”

  Zero growled. “Fine. Fine. Hold on. I’ll see if I can find her.”

  “Cassidy?” I huffed. “She’s in a helicopter the last I saw.”

  “That’s fine.”

  I gripped the phone so hard I feared I’d crack it. “That’s not fine!” I didn’t doubt his concern for his friend but hearing such blunt words tore at me. I wouldn’t be fine until she was at my side again.

  “I mean, it doesn’t matter if she’s in the air or on land. I can still get a location on her.”

  I gaped at nothing, trying to process his words. Zero had some insane skills behind the screen, but…

  “T-man gave her a tracker. Both of you, actually.”

  I opened and closed my mouth, shocked at this news. Tramer put trackers on us? It felt…sneaky.

  “We wanted to make sure nothing would happen if you were to split up.”

  When? How? I hadn’t felt anything. “What—”

  The incredulousness of my tone must have said more than enough. “Didn’t he give you a small switchblade?” He hummed for a few seconds. “Yeah. He did. I got your location right here.”

  “That knife?” He’d slipped it into my shoe when we were captured by the cartel. I’d assumed he’d given it to me for the purpose of a blade.

  “Okay. Head west,” he said, likely consulting a map on his screen. The fact I had a tether to him helped. Knowing Cassidy’s location was traceable made me feel even better. “May as well head toward the city. If they’re in the air, you need to get there too.”

  I jimmied the gearstick into drive and sped from the refuge. “Where is Cassidy?”

  “Heading northwest. They’ve already got her over the border.”

  Back to the States? At least I wouldn’t have to contend with the cartel there.

  “What about Tramer?”

  “No clue. He didn’t have another tracker for himself. The phone you’re using was supposed to be my connection to him.”

  Foolish move. Then again, it wasn’t like we’d had much time to prep for all the worst-case scenarios and stock up on trackers or anything of the kind.

  “Now tell me what the hell happened,” he ordered, “while I try to find him in real time. How long has he been running and which way?”

  “He headed east. Maybe twenty minutes ago?” I said. Then I gave him an abbreviated summary of what happened.

  “Where’s Elena?” he asked.

  “No clue. Maybe they dumped her in the water?”

  Zero scoffed. “I’m going to keep looking for T-man. But we need to get you back here and on Cassidy’s trail before she loses that tracker.”

  I nodded, instinctively ducking as I drove under a low tree branch, even though it couldn’t hit me through the van’s roof. “Okay.”

  “You didn’t have a warrant, so it shouldn’t be as much of a problem.”

  “Except the fact everything’s gone.” If Michael had Cassidy’s backpack, he had everything. My wallet, the money Zero had wired us, the passports.

  “I’ll…figure something out.” He exhaled hard. “Just keep driving toward the city. I gotta keep an eye on where Tramer might be headed. You’re going to head to the airport, I can tell you that much.”

  “And flying where?” It was imperative to watch where Cassidy was headed, but a destination would give me something to plan for. If I were to lose touch with Zero, I needed to know how to finish this on my own.

  Chapter Three

  Cassidy

  When the plane landed, I braced myself for more violence. Or another tranquilizer. Neither sounded good. I was sore and edgy, still feeling the effects of fighting at the refuge and the drug they’d given me. I was more alert and clear-minded, but neither of those were any kind of a defense to what may come next.

  When the cargo door slid open, though, I was greeted by someone familiar.

  I never wanted to see Jolene again, but there she was, immaculately styled in another power suit. Smirking at me and waving at me in a cutesy style. The skin of her hand and forearm was flawlessly smooth, not what could be expected from when I’d last encountered her holding flames. She was clear of any burn scars.

  “Long time, no see,” she teased.

  “Fuck off,” I replied. I had no choice but to be here under their power, but it didn’t mean I had to be nice about it.

  Two Xol freaks came to her side, forming a barricade of mutant humans in a hallway of some sort. Oh, as if my dinky little mortal self was such a threat. I wasn’t in control and the need for backup was laughable.

  Jolene’s stare turned frosty but her smile curved up. Like she knew something I didn’t. In fact, I guaranteed she knew many things I was in the dark about. And I wasn’t eager to face my fate here. “This way,” she ordered, beckoning me to come toward her.

  I deadpanned at her as I walked out of the cargo space. I didn’t need the guns pointing at me for a cue to move. I’d obey for now. Once I’d gone as far as my chain could allow me, I jingled my cuffs at her and raised a brow.

  “Oh. Right.” She strode toward me, swaying her hips side to side. Her black high heels clicked on the metal floor as she approached me.

  Keeping her steely glare on me, she smiled like I was a fool. She gripped the chain, wrapped it around her dainty, delicate-looking hands, and pulled. The links broke apart easily. Still with that haughty smirk locked on me, she opened her fingers and let the broken chain fall with a clang to the ground.

  Okay. Display of power. Noted, bitch. I swallowed. Hard. I didn’t need her showing off to remind me that I was the weaker one here. I bet she’d wished that was my neck for how I’d gotten away from her before.

  “This way,” she repeated with too smug of a tone, walking away from me and into whatever building we’d arrived at.

  The two Xol men parted to let her sashay down the hall. With my hands still cuffed together but no longer chained to the plane, I disembarked and followed her.

  The corridor was devoid of color and style. No decorations. Beige paint. Linoleum on the floor. A sterile walkway that sloped down from the point where I’d exited the cargo space. I wasn’t stupid enough to think we were at any airport.

  She walked briskly, and with my hands bound together and in front of me, my gait was off. No. Something else… I schooled my face to remain blank as I concentrated on the slight pain in my foot. Pain? More like something was stuck—

  In my shoe! Tramer had given me that slim knife and I’d forgotten about it in there. No one had frisked me for weapons or anything else. Even if they had when I’d been out, they wouldn’t have left it there.

  A glimmer of hope shot through me. It was small. I was no master of knives. But it was something. Having even a tiny defense bolstered my spirits.

  Hurrying to keep up with Jolene, I took stock of where she was leading me. Not an airport. More like a hospital. Some kind of a health clinic. After passing empty hallways with no markings for directions, we came into a more open space. One by one, we passed rooms. Glass doors bl
ocked most of them, but many had curtains hiding the people inside. Men and women, all in various forms of rest. Every patient had the works: IVs, wires leading to monitors, and charts of statistics.

  It all seemed…normal. Like I was strolling through an ordinary hospital department.

  “What is this?”

  “The head labs,” Jolene answered.

  Right. Nothing normal about this. It should have been. It could have been. If Scott lived and he and Rosa could lead their team, this place could have existed as a hub of medical miracles. That original dream for a cure to cancer was a nightmare instead.

  “Is this where all the torture happens?”

  Jolene ceased walking. She spun in a slow pivot to face me, her perfect brows raised. As she tilted her head to the side, she crossed her arms. “Torture?”

  She was going to play ignorant? I snorted. “Where you injure patients to see how far they can go before regenerating and living. Where they remove organs to see if patients can still live.”

  Shaking her head, she smiled. Like I was a child missing a simple fact. “There is no torture in Project Xol. Only miracles. Gifts from the most talented woman on earth.”

  I stepped forward. “How deluded are you?” I blinked, realizing she likely couldn’t even consider what I was saying. “There’s no talent in taking…” I huffed, recalling what Dale had explained to us, what Zero had dug up. “There’s no talent in taking babies to pump them with drugs to see how they react. There’s no gift in repeatedly pushing criminals to death only to draw them back.”

  She lowered her arms, seeming more flustered. “You’ve got it wrong. What we do here is good. It’s a privilege.”

  Someone passed around us in the wide hallway. The gurney went by first and I gasped at the sight of Ryan again. He was still lying there, shackled to the surface. His face was taut as he strained against something, his skin red, his eyes watering. A groan escaped his lips through clenched teeth.

  “That’s a privilege?” I snapped, pointing at the beast.

  He jerked upright, his chest shaking.

  Panting faster, freaked at the sight of him convulsing, I stepped back.

  “One moment,” Jolene politely asked of the person pushing Ryan by. The gurney stopped and Jolene gestured at him.

  “A privilege. He’s a perfect example of a man who’s been blessed by Dr. Shaw’s work.”

  Blessed? Did she hear herself? Blessed? Like he’d been treated with some reward by a goddess?

  I spluttered, trying to find the simplest words to argue with her. “He— He…he’s a murderer! He’s supposed to be in prison. No. He’s supposed to be dead for his crimes.”

  Jolene huffed. “Why should you care about who murders others when you’ve been screwing that…man you’ve been with.”

  She was not going there. Luke had killed because he had to, not because he’d wanted to. He’d done it to protect another. Kill or be killed. He wasn’t anything like Ryan.

  “Ryan isn’t blessed to be alive because of Tami’s manipulation. And it’s no right of anyone on this team to play God and decide his life or death.”

  He groaned again and the agony of the sound hit me hard. I grimaced, watching his chest rise and fall in heaving gasps.

  “How…did…” I swallowed hard. “How is he even here again?” I hated this man for trying to kill Luke, but I wasn’t so cold to tune out his roars of pain. It cut me right down to the soul to witness another suffering, regardless of how horrible of a person they were.

  Jolene grinned. “His body is meant to recover no matter the injuries sustained. He’s one of the patients to have received the most advanced cure.” She laid a hand on the rail of his bed, smiling at him like he wasn’t jerking and in pain. “All of the advanced patients have trackers in them.”

  She faced me directly now, her face harder. “Dr. Shaw and Mr. Poole realized that when these advanced patients suffered bodily trauma, the commoners wouldn’t know how to explain their recoveries. You know, like when fools shove others out of airplanes.”

  “Because he was trying to kill us!”

  Rolling her eyes, she dismissed me. “No one would kill you. Not yet.”

  “Well, I sure feel special now.”

  “You’re not. From what I can tell. Your beliefs are so…common, it’s hard to think of you as her daughter.”

  Common. Like it was some insult? And they were, what? Xol elite?

  “Dr. Shaw is… She’s the most intelligent, generous person to exist.”

  “Only a sadistic psychopath would participate in unethical human experimentation.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Haven’t you ever heard of Machiavelli?”

  “This is not the end to a means! It’s torture. Haven’t you ever heard of the Holocaust?”

  Turning from me, she shook her head and started leading me further into the lab. “You don’t even want to understand the beautiful, marvelous work that’s happened here.”

  I fully comprehended what was going on. And more to the point, I was one against many of the same mind. Like a cult, these Xol freaks, if Jolene was any indication, were brainwashed to believe that they were doing something for the good. That they were the chosen ones to receive the cure to be abnormally regenerative and damn-near immortal. The praising tone and awed smile Jolene had when speaking about Tami—it was a show of reverence. No wonder she couldn’t even consider how wrong all of this was.

  “Right up here,” Jolene said before a set of doors. Glass didn’t make this entrance, and the idea of privacy beyond this way frightened me even more. There wouldn’t be a single person to help me here, but I did not want to face my biological mother alone.

  Still, I held my head high and entered the room. Jolene smirked at me and gestured at a chair. We were the only ones there, as the guards who’d trailed us remained in the hallway. Besides the standard waiting-room style seat I had, there was a counter with a blank computer screen, an exam table, and a stool. In any other circumstances, it would have looked exactly like a real doctor’s exam room.

  One difference was the depth. More space was cordoned by a curtain and I shivered to think of someone else back there.

  “Is she here?” I heard a woman say from the hallway.

  “Yes, Dr. Shaw,” Jolene said, making room for someone to enter. Her posture straightened like a soldier would for a commander. “She’s right here.”

  “About time,” Dr. Tami Shaw snapped as she strode in. With a sure gait, she moved with the speed and practicality of a woman who likely didn’t waste her breath on anything beneath her esteem.

  Which, with the way she narrowed her sharp gaze on me and curled her lips into the start of scowl, seemed to be me.

  She doesn’t like what she sees? I mocked a grin. “Never is too soon to give you the time of my day.”

  She straightened from studying me and I quickly noticed the similarities. I didn’t doubt she’d conceived me. We shared the same blue eyes, hers a little darker. Our chins carried identical points and her cheeks were high like mine. After assuming so many false ideas, and after learning of deceptive lies, I was facing my biological mother. The woman who’d birthed me.

  “Has she been like this the whole time?” Her words were twisted uglier by the wince on her flawless face.

  Jolene scoffed. “She’s very…”

  I finished it for Jolene. “Common. Yeah. I’m as ordinary as you’ll get.” And I was damn proud of my difference to these people.

  “She’s been out for the majority of the day,” someone else said.

  Tami stepped to the side and I watched as Michael stood closer. “She remained unconscious during the chopper and plane flights.” He shrugged peering at me.

  Helicopter and plane? How long was I asleep? Hours? So much time had passed since I’d been gone from Luke. Worry for him spiked.

  Still staring at me, Tami paced a bit back and forth.

  I could only take so much of the scrutiny, this awful, trapp
ing sensation of being something like an object for them to appraise. “Don’t like what you see?”

  She had yet to lose that disapproving expression.

  I huffed. “No surprise. You clearly didn’t like me when I was a baby either. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new trick—”

  She backhanded me. My face flung back like I’d been assaulted by a two-by-four.

  Sucking in a deep breath, I willed my eyes to remain dry. God damn, does she pack a punch. With my hands still cuffed, I raised them to touch my tender skin. Tasting blood, I swallowed hard. Punch. Slap. Whatever. My biological mother resorting to physical abuse on our first reunion spoke volumes.

  I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of my pain. Lowering my hands to my lap, I straightened in my seat and faced her. I licked my split lip and met her gaze.

  She stood there with her hands in her white lab coat, one foot away from her stance, jutting a hip out. So…indifferent. “No, I’ve never liked what I saw in you—there was no reason to. But I’d needed you. I slept with Scott to persuade him to agree to my research goals. Anything to distract him from listening to Rosa’s nonstop caution.” She huffed. “You only exist because I needed an in with your father.”

  My breaths flared from my nostrils. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. Hatred spread through me like a disease, torching my every thought. Hearing her so callously dismiss me, like I didn’t matter at all except to be her pawn.

  “And now you’ll be of use once more.” She tore her disdainful regard from me and went to the countertop. She tapped at the monitor to wake up the screen as she asked Michael, “Do you have the vial?”

  “No.”

  As soon as the man spoke, Tami pounded her fist to the metal countertop. The surface dented in several inches, creating a deep V for a pencil to roll toward and fall. Her hand had done that. Like a sledgehammer might. I slowly released the breath I’d sucked in, realizing she’d gone easy on striking me. With her display of super force, I had to accept an uglier fact. Tami wasn’t just the mastermind of keeping Project Xol alive, she’d given herself the cure.

  “Where is it?” she seethed.