New Sight (7 page)

“What do you mean?” Kamau asked.

“Which story did he give you?” Mr. Doyle asked again.

Kamau stared hard at the man across the desk. “Drugs.”

Mr. Doyle nodded and looked at Lys. “And you?”

Her heart dropped into her stomach. “Drugs.”

“I thought so.”

Silence descended. Lys spoke. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

“Our good friend, Mr. Mason as you call him, is a sham.” Mr. Doyle sat forward again. “He poisons people, and then swoops in to save them before their mysterious condition can turn fatal.”

Poison? What in the world—Lys didn’t know what to think. She didn’t even know what to ask.

“It’s ingenious, really,” Mr. Doyle said. “He causes the symptoms, waits until he sees you are in the advance stages of the poison, and then comes to the rescue.” He turned his attention. “Where are you from, Kamau?”

“I am from Mozambique.”

“Interesting.” Mr. Doyle nodded. “It’s rare that Mason goes so far for people. He must have seen something special in you.” He turned to Lys again. “What did he see in you?”

Lys didn’t feel like this conversation was going anywhere constructive. “I’m sorry,” she said again, “but who are you and why are we here? So far all you’ve done is sling accusations at someone who isn’t here to defend himself. Accusations, I might add, that we can’t verify because we’re being held prisoner.”

There went her internal censor again. She’d only meant to spill about half of that.

“Oh, you’re not prisoners.” Doyle laughed.

Kamau frowned. “The cells that we just came from suggest differently.”

“You’re right about the cells; they don’t seem very friendly, do they?” Doyle waggled a finger at Kamau. “But that’s for your own protection. Mr. Mason gave you some tonic, if I’m right, and that stuff can really mess you up for a while. The cells are to keep you safe—a clean room environment that suppresses the effects of Mr. Mason’s poison.”

Lys was tired of this man telling her things that Mr. Mason supposedly did. “You haven’t answered my question. Who are you? Not your name,” she said quickly, “but what you do and who you work for.” She was now channeling her inner attorney. Her dad would be proud.

Doyle nodded. “Fair questions. I’ve already told you that my name is Roland Doyle. We work for an independent branch of law enforcement. It is our job to track down people who deal in these . . .” He seemed to choose his next words carefully. “These crimes against youth who don’t have any idea what they’re getting themselves into.”

Lys took a breath to ask another question, and Mr. Doyle held up a hand. “Mr. Mason is a criminal. As far as we can tell, he searches out teenagers that have a mental or physical ability that he is interested in. He then poisons them, as I told you before, and swoops in at the last minute with the only available cure.”

Whoever this guy was, he knew Mr. Mason. He’d just told Lys’s story. Minus the poisoning in the first place part.

“What kind of abilities?” Kamau asked.

Doyle shrugged. “It depends on what experiment he is working on.”

“What sort of experiments?” Lys asked.

“Well,” Mr. Doyle said, “the ‘hospital’ that you were in had a laboratory in the basement. We think Mason was trying to gather select DNA in order to clone a perfect human being.”

A perfect human being? Lys repressed an eye roll. Secret experiments? This wasn’t a movie. Besides, she’d been in that basement. Dust practically encased the place; it obviously hadn’t been used in ages.

“I know it sounds insane,” Mr. Doyle conceded, “but he’s been doing it for a few years. Our team has been on his trail, and yesterday was the first time we’ve ever caught up with him.” A look of regret imposed itself on his face. “Unfortunately it was just an experiment site. We were hoping to find his main facility.” He glanced back and forth between Lys and Kamau. “The two of you don’t happen to know where that is, do you?”

Lys shook her head. Her thoughts flew in ten different directions, none of them good. She tried to line up Mr. Doyle’s story with what had happened to her, with what Mr. Mason had said to her, and then with what she’d experienced since all of this had started. It just wouldn’t fall into place.

“Too bad,” he said with a sigh. “I guess we’ll just have to keep looking. It’s lucky for you that we found you in time.”

“In time for what?” Lys asked, sitting forward. “What did you save us from?”

Doyle looked into Lys’s eye. He held her gaze for a moment. Lys felt the Need stir, wiggling under the blankets.

“A fate worse than death,” he said.

Chapter 8

“A fate
worse than death?” Kamau asked, raising his eyebrows. “Please explain.”

Mr. Doyle nodded. “Yes, I know it sounds impossible. Mr. Mason has been performing experiments on people for years. Are you familiar with the mass suicides in Vermont about six months ago?”

Lys nodded. She remembered. Almost fifty teenagers had barricaded themselves into an old mansion for a month. They’d made some demands—Lys didn’t recall exactly what—and had somehow gotten on the wrong side of the law. When the police or FBI or whoever took care of this stuff charged the mansion, all of the people inside had killed themselves.

“His people initiated that whole affair.” Mr. Doyle pulled open a drawer and retrieved a picture. Lys immediately recognized a younger Mr. Mason. He and five other men stood in front of a wooden sign that said “Mending.” The man on Mr. Mason’s right was the leader of the people in Vermont. Lys had seen his picture a dozen times over the course of the standoff. Her social studies teacher tried very hard to keep her students up to date with the latest news.

“You recognize him?”

Lys nodded. Kamau shook his head. “I am sorry; I am not familiar with the event.”

Mr. Doyle cleared his throat. “This man here was attempting a mind control experiment in Vermont.” He pointed at the photo. “He and his people were harmless at first, but more and more innocent kids got sucked into the cult—for lack of a better term—and their parents grew concerned. When a handful of parents tried to come and retrieve their children, they found that their kids had been completely brainwashed. Not one of them would leave. When law enforcement got involved, the man in this photo convinced everyone in his little cult to kill themselves.”

Lys watched Kamau’s reaction. His frowned deepened.

“How does this relate to Mr. Mason?”

Mr. Doyle turned the photo so he could look at it. “Mason was still in contact with this man up until just a few days before the whole thing blew up. We’ve been unable to find out what their communication consisted of, but we can only presume that Mason had a hand in suggesting that these people destroy any incriminating evidence against him.”

That seemed pretty extreme to Lys. First off, the people in Vermont had made it very clear that the decision to end their lives was a completely individual choice. They left letters to their families, if Lys recalled correctly, that stated as much. Something about not being able to live in a world where being different made them outcasts. At the time Lys figured they were all mentally unstable, and had been led down the wrong path by someone who just wanted to either make money or revel in fame.

Thinking about the whole thing from a different angle, she had no way to tell what those people had been through or what their reasoning had been.

Kamau’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Forgive me if I seem doubtful, but this is all very strange.”

“I realize it sounds insane,” Mr. Doyle said with one of his now-familiar smiles. “I’m just glad that we got the two of you out before anything permanent went wrong.”

“What about Brady?” Lys asked.

“You mean the other boy that was with you outside the hospital?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Doyle’s smile faded. “I’m afraid he’s in bad shape. Until he wakes up we won’t be able to assess how much damage Mason’s drugs did to him.”

Drugs. Lys couldn’t wrap her head around all of this. Mr. Mason said she was addicted to a rare drug. This man, this Mr. Doyle, someone she’d never seen before in her life, claimed that Mr. Mason had poisoned her so he could get her to his facility and then either use her for her DNA or brainwash her. This made less sense than Mr. Mason’s original explanation. Thoughts of her first visit with Mr. Mason brought her memories back to her parents.

“Can I call my parents?” she asked. “They were planning to visit the hospital a few days after I got there.”

“We have contacted your parents.” Mr. Doyle looked back and forth between them. “They are aware that you are safe. Unfortunately we cannot let you speak to them, or release you, until this matter has been officially investigated.”

“Release us? I just want to call my parents.”

“I spoke to them myself,” Mr. Doyle said. “They know you’re safe.”

A beep came from Mr. Doyle’s watch, and he glanced down at his wrist. “Looks like I’ve got a meeting in just a few minutes. Why don’t you let some of my people get you some food? I’m sorry to say that you’ll have to stay in the cells for at least another day. The residual effects of the poison can be fairly nasty, if you know what I mean, and it’s safer for everyone if you’re locked up.”

Wait, what? This guy was going to give them a snack and return them to their cells?

Mr. Doyle stood as Jed and Erik came back into the room. “Get these two back downstairs and bring them some food.”

He looked at Lys and Kamau. “If you know anything about where Mr. Mason’s facility might be, please tell me. We’ve been tracking this bloke for a long time, and it would put a lot of people at ease to know that he’s been captured and put behind bars.”

The short walk back to
their cells felt like a thousand miles. Lys’s mind was weighed down more than her limbs could ever be, and she didn’t know which would give out first.

Had Mr. Mason lied to her? She had felt so sure about going with him. He promised to help her, and as far as she knew he’d kept that promise. Until this Mr. Doyle and his agency had kidnapped her.

Kamau’s arm bumped hers, but the contact held no comfort. The world as she knew it a month ago lay in pieces. For a time she thought Mr. Mason could put it back together for her. Could he? Could anyone?

And Brady. Was he really too far gone? What did Mr. Doyle mean by all of that? The more that Lys thought about the basement at the hospital, the more she knew she had no idea what really happened.

If she believed her own version of the events she had seen a vision of Brady. Not a dream, not a memory, but a clear vision of either what was happening to him right then, or what happened a few minutes later. She’d seen it through his eyes. The only proof she had was the memory of going down into that basement and finding him in the room with the mirror.

That’s when things started to get jumbled. She saw a light like he did, but when Lys saw it through her own eyes it looked different than when she’d seen it through Brady’s eyes. So that didn’t match up. Not completely, anyway. And Kamau had seen something totally different.

The issue of the door bothered her the most. Lys clearly remembered Brady crumpling the door like a piece of paper. With his bare hands. Kamau claimed he only saw the door open. Why would a barred, emergency exit that probably hadn’t been used in years be open? Brady hadn’t had a key. Kamau hadn’t been close enough to be able to use a key. Had he?

She felt Kamau’s hand brush her back as he led her through the door into the hall outside their cells.

“Are you alright?” he asked in a voice so quiet that Lys barely made out the words.

Not knowing what else to do, she shrugged. No, she wasn’t alright! Was he?

Lys didn’t even bother to speak as the two men put her back in her cell. They’d asked her what kind of sandwich she wanted just after they’d left Mr. Doyle’s office. Another man arrived, handing them their lunches and leaving.

Turning to watch the men go, Lys stood at the barred door of her cell and wondered who to believe. She took a bite of her sandwich.

“You seem troubled.”

Lys looked across the hall to where Kamau stood behind bars. “Aren’t you?” she asked. “None of that seemed strange to you?”

To her surprise, Kamau smiled. “All of it seemed strange to me.”

“Do you think he’s lying to us?”

“Everyone lies,” Kamau said. “Even people who think they are telling the truth, or doing things for the right reason.”

Everyone lies? Lys wondered again if Mr. Mason had been lying. If Mr. Doyle had just lied to her. If Kamau really came from Africa. She supposed that she lied. Not a lot. Her parents had instilled a regime of truth throughout her childhood. Even when she did something stupid, if she told them the truth about it they would usually be reasonable. The few times Lys had tried to get away with a big lie, they’d caught her and she’d been punished.

“What do you think?” Kamau asked.

A harsh laugh escaped before Lys could stop it. “I think that anyone who leaves us in a dungeon, however bright and shiny it might be, isn’t telling the whole truth.”

“I agree,” Kamau said. “He is hiding something.”

Lys glanced around. The bars under her hands were cold metal covered in white paint. She couldn’t reach anything else from where she stood; not even Kamau’s hand if she’d wanted to. Turning, she studied her cell: sink, toilet, a pillow and a bed with sheets and a blanket. The sheets were fastened to the mattress, which was bolted into the frame which was encased in a steel box. Nothing there.

“What are you thinking?” Kamau asked.

“Just trying to figure out how to get out of here,” she said. “If he would let me talk to my parents I might be inclined to stay, but he won’t.”

“You have a plan?”

She shook her head. “No. And we probably shouldn’t be talking about it.” She couldn’t see any video cameras, but a place like this—a dungeon for some “independent branch of law enforcement”—had to have a camera somewhere. Maybe microphones, too.

Kamau nodded. She hoped he understood. He’d seen movies, right? Didn’t he say he’d been going to university before Mr. Mason had found him? It seemed strange to think that the boy standing right across the hall from her, someone she’d talked to and even been through danger with, lived halfway around the world. Their differences should be more apparent than the color of their skin. But they weren’t. They were both in the same boat. Did that make them friends? Or more?

Lys sat on the floor by the door and they both ate their lunch in silence, Lys not even tasting the food as she chewed.

“What does your father do?” Kamau asked.

“Uh,” Lys said. “He’s a lawyer.”

“How long will it take him to realize that you are not where he thought you were?”

“I’m not sure,” Lys said. “It depends on when they were planning to come and visit the hospital. It could be today or tomorrow or even the next day. They were supposed to call Mr. Mason and set up a couple of appointments.”

That brought Lys back around to Mr. Mason. He had been very secretive about where he would be taking her. Her parents received some information from him, but Lys hadn’t been privy to it. Not about the location of the facility anyway.

“I think that perhaps we should . . .” Kamau started. Then stopped.

A low rumble filled the air, and the ground beneath Lys’s feet began to shake.

“What is it?” Kamau asked, looking around.

“Earthquake.” She shrugged. “Not a very big one.”

“How do you know?”

“I live on the west coast. This happens all the time.” Although when the shaking didn’t subside after a few seconds, she looked around.

When the wall on the other side of her bed blew open, she was so surprised that she didn’t bother to duck. Rubble few at her, but most of it went to her left.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” a weak, but familiar, voice asked through the settling dust.

“I’m sure,” Brady replied. “I can feel them through here.”

“Brady?” Lys asked, coughing as a storm of particles enveloped her, rolling out through the ruined wall like fog.

“Hah!” Brady said triumphantly. “I told you we were going the right way.”