Wild Sky 2 (34 page)

Frankly, it was kinda crazy. So much had changed in the months since that party. And although he wasn’t a bad guy, I would never have imagined that Garrett would find his way onto our official team of good guys. And yet here we were.

“The exam room’s over here,” Garrett said, pulling our attention back to the other open door as he reached in to turn on the overhead lights.

That room was a pretty standard medical examination room. It held a padded table with one of those rolls of paper on the end. There was a little footstool in front of it, to assist the shorter patients. A sink was in the corner with a set of cabinets above it. A stool on wheels was tucked under a desk, and another chair sat in the corner. A plastic case for a box of nitrile gloves was attached to the wall, along with a very large flat-screen TV.

“You said your father had a medical scanner,” Morgan said as he opened the cabinets above the sink. Inside were bandages and gauze, and more boxes of those gloves.

“It’s on wheels. It must be locked in the new operating room.” Garrett led us back into the hall, toward that closed door. It was metallic and reminiscent of the door to a fridge rather than a room. Beside it, on the wall, was another keypad. “This one’s
garrett
, all lowercase.” There was silence for a moment, then the keypad lit up green, and the door beeped.

Garrett opened it. A swoosh of cold air came rushing out, then we all stepped inside.

“Whoa!” I exclaimed. The room’s automatic sensory lights clicked on, illuminating the area. It was like stepping into a legitimate hospital operating room. There was a shining metal operating table, along with an array of fancy, high-tech equipment and computers of all shapes and sizes, including, yes, a medical scanner on wheels. Complicated-looking illustrations of bisected humans lined the walls—along with several ginormous computer screens. The floor shone with an intimidating sterility.

For a moment, I pictured Calvin laid out on the table while Dana leaned over him and ordered me to pass the scalpel. I was suddenly very glad Morgan had offered to help.

“Relax,” Morgan murmured to me. “The detox procedure is relatively noninvasive. No cutting Calvin open anyway. We’ll use various drugs and electrical currents to stop and then try to restart his heart.”

“Try?” I asked, but Morgan had already turned away.

“So, here’s the deal,” Garrett announced. “You guys can use anything you want, but you have to clean up afterward. And…? No stealing anything.”

I grunted. “Yeah. You know me and my nasty bedpan-stealing habit.”

“I’m just saying,” Garrett replied defensively.

Morgan was looking at the scanner. I knew what it was even though I hadn’t seen one up close all that often. I rarely went to the doctor because I didn’t get sick. My annual checkups were all done by my mom’s doctor friend—I called her Dr. Susan. And she didn’t use a scanner, preferring the old-fashioned methods for taking blood pressure and pulse.

But I’d seen enough medical shows on TV to know that a scanner gave doctors easy access to those vital stats as well as far more intricate info like imaging of internal organs and X-rays of lungs and bones. The biggest bonus was that the scanner analyzed blood without breaking the patient’s skin.

Medical scanners also—according to Dana—revealed telling information about neural integration. In other words, if you were a Greater-Than, and you were scanned, your G-T-ness would show, provided your doctor knew what to look for.

And, huh. As I stood there, watching Morgan drool on Dr. Hathaway’s state-of-the-art scanner, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t an accident that my personal doctor was a non-scanner-using “friend of the family.” I suddenly remembered how upset—crazy upset—my mother had been when I’d been rushed to the ER after a bad car accident. The doctor there had scanned me again and again, amazed that I’d walked away from the wreck without a scratch. This was back when we’d lived in Connecticut, right before we moved to Florida…

Huh.

But announcing
I think my mother might have known I was a G-T long before I knew it myself
wasn’t going to help us save Calvin. Here and now we had better things to discuss. Like, “How does it work, the Destiny detox? And what did you mean, we’d
try
to restart Calvin’s heart?”

Morgan glanced up at me as he moved from the scanner to the operating table, where he checked what looked like a series of leather restraints, probably there to make sure the patient didn’t roll off mid-procedure. “We’re going to need more than this,” he said. “Chains. In case he changes his mind or gets scared.”

“Because chaining people who are scared helps them…how?” I asked.

“If he leaves, mid-procedure, he’ll die,” Morgan said bluntly. “The concept—how the detox works—is pretty basic. It uses the theory that as a D-addict dies, as he or she is actually physically dying, their body burns off all of the Destiny in its system, in kind of a hail-Mary self-healing move to try to stay alive.”

I was following him, but he glanced over to see Garrett frowning so he said, “Picture a Destiny addict. Rochelle. Say she starts to joker while she’s at the mall, so she goes on a rampage, and she’s just going crazy and people are dying because she’s flinging them around, off the balconies. Right? And the SWAT team shows up, and they shoot her, right in the chest, and she goes down. She’s bleeding—she’s basically got a hole in her body. But the Destiny in her bloodstream kicks in with its self-healing abilities—kind of the way Cal got injected and can suddenly walk?”

Garrett nodded.

“So the drug is working to rebuild Rochelle’s damaged tissues and organs and blood vessels,” Morgan continued, “but the injury is too severe. Still, the Destiny won’t give up and it works and it works and it works. And she’s still moving around, too, and maybe even accessing some additional powers—like maybe she can breathe fire—which uses up even more of the drug. Everything’s accelerating—it happens really fast when you throw a catastrophic injury into the mix. And suddenly, there’s no more Destiny in her system. She’s burned it all off, but
boom
, then she’s dead, because she’s got a bullet hole in her chest, which is something that can’t be fixed with a snap of your fingers.”

Morgan turned back to me. “Autopsies done on former addicts revealed that more often than not, there’s absolutely no trace of the drug in their bloodstream. That’s one of the reasons why the people who are lobbying to legalize Destiny claim it’s not dangerous. Yeah, the users died, but how could D be the cause of death if they weren’t using it when they died? All other drugs and toxins leave a trace. But not Destiny.

“So what we’re going to do with Calvin,” he continued, “is strap him down and stop his heart. The Destiny in his system will kick into overdrive, trying to fix something it can’t possibly fix. We use the scanner to monitor the level of D in his blood, and as soon as it’s down to zero, we’ll zap him with electricity and, hopefully, restart his heart.”

“So we’ll kill him,” I said, to make sure Garrett understood, “so to speak, but then we’ll bring him back to life.”

“Hopefully.” Garrett had caught that word, too.

“There are no guarantees,” Morgan told us somberly. “The odds are not good. But we’ll try our best.” And then he added the words I was hoping not to hear: “And the worst-case scenario is far less bad than it would be if Cal jokered and died on his own terms. This worse-case scenario only needs one body bag, as opposed to half a dozen.”

Garrett exhaled hard. “I don’t know, dudes, I’m not sure I’d agree to do it, if I were Cal.”

“Good thing you’re not Cal then,” I said, except I was thinking
I’m not sure I would either.

————

Morgan continued to explore the OR, while Garrett and I went into his dad’s office to access his computer—to attempt to break into his National Medical Database account.

When I touched the mouse, the screen came to life, so I sat down in the big leather chair behind the ginormous wooden desk. Garrett leaned over my shoulder. “Check his browser history. He never clears it. It’s like he just doesn’t care.”

“Or maybe he just doesn’t watch any porn,” I suggested. And there it was—a bookmark for the NMDB. I clicked it open and a sign-in box popped up. The user name was filled in, DocHath, but the box beneath, marked Password, was empty. Inside of it, the blinking icon waited for me to type.

I took a deep breath and typed
GARRETT
in all caps.

It was amazing. Doctor Hathaway
was
the dumbest smart person in the world.

“Bingo,” I said, watching as the database opened for us.

For the past several decades, starting back before I was born, the whole HIPAA deal—where doctors weren’t allowed to divulge any information about patients to anyone non-consenting—had become obsolete. Anyone who worked in the medical field, including nurses and techs—or anyone who pretended to work in the medical field—had access to any and all medical records. It had started as a way to monitor women in particular, in response to personhood laws. And it had gone south, fast. It was a total invasion of privacy. But today? Easy access to medical records was actually working in our favor.

I pulled up a search box. The simple search function required the patient’s name, date of birth, and/or NID—National ID number. I found the advanced search, where I typed in
Jilly
,
Jack
,
Ron
.

No results
was the result.

I tried
Jill
,
John
,
Ronald
.

And suddenly there were more than twenty thousand matches. I clicked through to a few and realized that, in many cases,
John
or
Ronald
or
Jill
was the first name of the doctor involved in someone’s treatment.

We needed a way to narrow down our search. “What more do we know about them?” I mused. I looked up at Garrett. “You told me Rochelle went up north and then brought Jilly back with her. Do you remember where—which state?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think she ever said, but…” As his voice trailed off, he looked like he was deep in thought. Which was kind of scary in a way. Then, all of a sudden, he started jumping up and down. The move was so abrupt, it made me jump too.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“The number on her arm!”

“Number?”

“Yeah!” Garrett stopped jumping and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He scrolled through it for a few seconds and then tapped on the screen excitedly as he held it out for me. “See that? That’s a selfie that Rochelle made me and Jilly take, back when she was still pretending Jilly was her daughter and we were gonna be one big, happy family. You can see Jilly’s arm—she’s holding the phone out. And see that number?”

In the photo, Jilly’s hair was streaked with bright orange and yellow. And sure enough, a series of numbers and dashes was written on the inside of the girl’s forearm, next to the little bump that we now knew was a tracking device. The color of the ink and size of the print reminded me of photos I’d seen of the concentration camp ID tattoos that Nazis gave Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“At the time, I just thought it was one of her weird goth moves,” Garrett continued. “She’d write it on her arm on some days. Other days it would be scrubbed off. Anyway, I was thinking about it, and…I’m pretty sure that’s her National ID number.”

“Holy crap,” I mumbled, because he may have been onto something. It
was
the right number of digits to be her NID.

We all had one. Everyone in the country did—which, yeah, was pretty creepy.

I didn’t waste any time. Yanking the phone out of Garrett’s hand, I enlarged that part of the photo and went back to the original search screen where one of the options was for the patient’s NID. I typed in the numbers, realizing that I didn’t even need her name. I just pushed Enter.

The computer thought for a moment.

Then?

“Holy crap, it
worked
!” Garrett was jumping up and down again.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I squealed, too.

Morgan heard us and came in.

I read out loud. “
Jillian Teller. Deceased.
” What? I looked up at Morgan and Garrett. “Somebody’s claiming that she’s already dead,” I said. I clicked over to what was definitely a death certificate for Jillian Margaret Teller, age fourteen at the time of death. “As of ten months ago. It’s signed by a doctor, who was obviously lying, but what if her parents think she’s really dead?”

“Go back, go back,” Garrett said, and I returned to Jilly’s main page.

“
Parents: Cynthia and Ronald Teller
,” Garrett read from the screen. “
Twin brother: Ronald, Jr.; younger brother: John, age three.
I thought he was named Jack.”

“Jack is a nickname for John,” I told him. How could he be eighteen years old and not know that? But there was no time for even an eye roll, because…

“There’s an address here,” Garrett told Morgan. “And a phone number.”

Jilly’s family lived in Virginia, just outside of Richmond.

I reached for my phone. But Morgan was already holding out his. “Better use
my
burner,” he said. “After you make this call, we’re going to have to smash it, and I know you’re waiting to hear from Milo.”

I was. “Thanks.” I took it, dialed the number, then set the phone on speaker.

It rang once, twice, and then a woman answered.

“Hello,” she trilled. Her voice sounded cheery. Singsong. Not the way I imagined the voice of a woman who had lost her only daughter not too long ago would sound.

“Um, Mrs. Teller?” I asked in a careful tone.

“Yes? This is she.”

I cleared my throat. I needed to sound confident. “I’m calling with news about your daughter.”

I paused, and there was silence on the other end of the line, although I could tell that Jilly’s mom hadn’t hung up.

I continued. “I wanted to let you know that Jilly is not dead. She’s safe. Well, she’ll be safe soon if—”