Push

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“HEY.”

I open my eyes, disoriented and achy. My neck’s twisted to one side, my shoulder pinched. I sit up, rubbing the ache, trying to figure out where I am.

Then it all comes back to me like sewage spewing from a drain. The police. The hospital. I fell asleep in the waiting-room chair. I don’t even get how that’s possible with how wired I am by worry and strain.

Jackson slouches into the chair next to me and takes my hand.

I shove my hair out of my face. “What are you doing here?” That didn’t come out the way I meant it to. I want to add, Thank you for being here. I need you. The words get stuck inside me.

“Sitting.” He squeezes my fingers a little. “In a chair.”

“Not in a tree.”

“Maybe later.”

“How did you know?” I whisper. How did you know I needed you? How did you know to come here?

“Luka came to my place after we dropped you off. We hung out. Played a few games. I was driving him home and we saw a bunch of police cruisers detouring traffic. Luka recognized your dad’s car.” He exhales, a slow, controlled movement, and his fingers tighten on mine. “I wanted to come straight here, but Luka’s dad called and said he needed him home to stay with his sister.” He pauses. “The rest of the way to Luka’s, I kept thinking it was you in that car.”

“No, not me,” I whisper. My dad. Carly. “Did you see Carly’s parents?”

“Yeah. Her dad’s pacing the hall. Her mom’s trying to get him to stop.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“Mrs. Conner said they’re still doing tests.” He takes a slow breath, like he isn’t sure if he should say more.

“Tell me.”

“Carly was unconscious when they brought her in. She hasn’t woken up. Mrs. Conner said she has some broken bones but she didn’t say which ones and I didn’t push.”

I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. I taste salt on my tongue and it takes a ridiculously long time for me to realize I’m tasting my own tears. “Daddy?” I rasp.

“They told Mrs. Conner they were taking him to surgery.” I clutch his hand tighter. He glances at our joined hands and continues, “She said he has a ruptured spleen.” He leans over and presses his lips to my forehead. “You can live without a spleen, Miki. Live a perfectly normal life.”

“How do you know?” I whisper.

“This guy I knew in Texas racked up his bike. They had to take out his spleen. He walked away with a big scar on his left side and a warning not to play contact sports.” He bumps me lightly with his shoulder. “That’ll be okay with your dad. Fishing isn’t a contact sport.”

I try to offer a watery smile, but I can’t. I’m fresh out of smiles.

“So it’s just his spleen? That’s all?”

“I don’t know. That’s all Mrs. Conner told me. That might be all they told her.” He shifts in his seat, angling his body; then he draws me against his chest, my head lolling on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I woke you,” he says. “I just wanted you to know I’m here. Try to sleep. I’ll wake you if anyone comes.”

Tears clog my throat. He held me like this in the caves, ordering me to sleep while he watched over me.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for being here.”

“I’ll always be here, Miki.”

My heart clenches. “Don’t say that,” I say, my tone fierce. “Don’t make a promise you might not keep.” Everyone leaves. “It’s enough that you’re here right now. This moment. You taught me that.”

And I can’t think beyond this moment, because what the moments to come might hold is terrifying and dark and horrible.

We’re both quiet for a bit.

I keep thinking of Carly, lying on the floor of the school basement, covered in blood. Like a portent of what was to come.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. “How could she survive the Drau, and then d—” I can’t say it. Can’t say the word. Like saying it might make it real.

“She isn’t dead, Miki. She’s still alive. Your dad’s still alive. Hold on to that. Hold on tight.”

I push off Jackson’s chest and twist in my seat so I’m looking at him. In this second, I hate his dark glasses. I desperately need to see his eyes, to know what he’s thinking when I say what I have to say. But he can’t take them off—not here, where someone might walk in any second.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. Maybe if I keep it a secret inside it won’t be true. But it’s already true. That’s why we’re here, in this waiting room with its brown, cloth chairs and scratched coffee table and flu-vaccine posters on the walls.

“My dad . . .” I say. “I heard the police out in the hall . . . they were talking about blood-alcohol level.” I jump up and just stand there, wanting to run far away, but having nowhere to run to. And knowing that no matter how far I run, this will still be real.

I start shaking and I can’t seem to stop. Jackson grabs me, pulls me onto his lap, and wraps his arms tight around me.

“It’s my fault,” I say, turning my face into the curve of his neck, clinging to him because if I let go I’ll be swept away by the raging current. “I should have checked if he’d been drinking. Should have driven Carly myself. Should have never fought with you because then you would have been there, you would have been driving her home, you—”

“Would have been the one lying in the hospital right now,” Jackson cuts me off.

I rear back and stare at him. “What?”

He cups my cheeks. “Miki, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if you think the cops were talking about your dad, you’re wrong. It’s the driver that hit him who blew something like point one eight. He was on the wrong side of the road. Hit your dad head-on.”

“What?” I ask again, parroting myself.

“Your dad isn’t at fault. They were hit by a drunk driver. That’s why I said if I’d been driving Carly home at exactly that second, through that same intersection, I would have been the one the guy hit. I’d be the one in surgery instead of your dad.”

I stare at him, uncomprehending, and then understanding hits like a wave, crashing over me, dragging me under.

My dad wasn’t the one who was drinking.

I have a flashback of Carly when we were maybe ten, standing with her hands on her hips in my kitchen, laughing and pointing at me. When you assume it makes an ass of u and me.

I jump to my feet and back away.

The sounds from the hall—conversations, beeping, the hiss of an automatic door opening—expand and echo, too loud, like a power sander in my head. I clap my hands over my ears. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. The air rasps my lungs like shards of glass.

The brown chairs turn bronze and glow too bright.

The red type on the posters on the walls turns to bloody claws, reaching for me.

Colors too bright. Sounds too loud.

The antiseptic hospital smell burns my nose.

No. Not now. It can’t be now.

Jackson gets to his feet, so slow.

“Miki!”

My name’s dragged out, the syllables pulled like taffy.

The world tips and tilts.

Jackson leaps forward, grabs my hand.

And we’re tumbling, tumbling, falling through nothing.

We respawn in a room with no floor, no walls, no ceiling. I mean, I know they’re here—I can feel the floor under my feet and when I stretch out a hand, I can feel the smooth, cool wall—but I can’t see them. Everything is just a bright, blinding white.

This isn’t the lobby.

Were we pulled directly on a mission?

Terror bites at me. I can’t do this—not now. I don’t know what shape Dad and Carly are in, don’t know if they’ll live or die, don’t know anything about their injuries. I’m a scattered mess. How am I supposed to fight Drau like this?

I’m a danger to Jackson, my team, myself.

Jackson grabs my hand and pushes me behind him, using his body as a shield. Except, am I behind or in front? Hard to tell when the room has no doors or windows, no beginning or end.

The light ramps down. A door appears. Not because it was always there and the light was making it hard to see. It literally appears, a piece of wall sliding open to reveal a rectangle of complete blackness.

I freeze. I know this place. I’ve been here before. In my nightmares. I stare at the dark doorway remembering the fear I felt, the certainty that danger lurked on the other side. Remembering that when I walked through, Lizzie was there with her Drau weapon in hand.

I’m about to signal Jackson to see if he thinks it’s okay to talk; then I realize of course it is. We have no weapons, so we’re not here to fight. And if the open door is any indication, whoever—whatever—brought us here knows we’re here.

Whoever brought us here . . . the Committee? How could they? How can they think I can do this now? I make a low sound—part moan, part howl.

Jackson pushes his glasses up on his head and turns to me, his expression intent. He grasps my upper arms. “Miki, I know this is rough—” He shakes his head. His jaw tenses. “I know your mind isn’t here. But we don’t get a choice. Do you understand? We don’t get a choice.”

I nod. Jackson shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around me. Only then do I realize how cold I am. I have the incongruous thought that he was wearing his jacket when we got pulled, but mine was on the seat beside me.

“You can do this,” he says. “We make it through. We go back. Your dad and Carly will be waiting for us.”

I stare at him, into his mercury-bright eyes. “Will they?” I whisper, not so sure. “And if they are alive when we get back, what shape will they be in?”

New guilt swamps me. I don’t feel like the accident was my fault now. Jackson disabused me of that. Now I feel guilty because I doubted my dad, blamed him, suspected him.

But he’s as much a victim here as Carly.

“They’ll be alive when we go back because they were alive when we left.”

Of course. We’ll respawn in the exact instant we left.

I notice he doesn’t make any comment about the shape they’ll be in. We have no way to know and there’s absolutely nothing either one of us can do about that.

“I’m scared,” I whisper. “I don’t trust myself to keep it together.”

A muscle in his jaw jumps.

“You cannot do anything for them from here. The only thing you can do is keep yourself safe. Focus on the moment, this moment, just this one. Then on the next one. Then the next. You can’t change the situation, so work with it. Think only about this.”

I catch my tongue between my teeth and nod. “I’ll try.”

I will. I just don’t know if I’ll succeed.

I think of Dad and what it will be like for him if he wakes up and I’m not there. I think of Carly and all the things I want to do for her when I get back. And I realize I have to do more than try. I have to succeed. I can’t die in the game. I won’t be the one who leaves.

“I will keep you safe, Miki,” Jackson says, and then presses his lips to mine. “I swear it.” He pulls back; his expression shifts, growing harder, colder. He tips his glasses back down, clasps my hand tight in his, and heads for the door.

“You stay close,” he warns.

“Close enough that you can hear me breathe,” I say.

“Stay behind me.”

I slide my fingers between his, then curl them in. “I’ll stay beside you.”

He glances at me and smiles, a spare curl of his lips that hints at the dimple in his cheek. “Beside me, then.”

“What is this place?”

“Don’t know,” Jackson says, his tone terse. “Never seen it before.”

“I have. In a nightmare.”

He turns his head and I can feel him studying me even though I can’t see his eyes. “Tell me.”

“It was exactly like this. The walls. The floor.” I jut my chin forward. “The door. When I went through—” I break off, hesitate.

“Tell me,” he says again.

“When I went through, the girl with the green eyes was waiting for me. She had a Drau weapon. She aimed it. Fired.” I shiver, remembering, and as I do, I can see the spray of tiny droplets of bright pain shooting toward me. Skimming my left shoulder. Missing me. “She wasn’t firing at me,” I say. “She was firing at something behind me.”

Jackson nods. “We’ll count your dream as a warning.”

Cautious, we make our way to the door, separating just before we get there, Jackson going to one side, me to the other. I’m not sure why we bother. We have no weapons and there’s no doubt that whoever brought us here knows we’re here.

I’m about to say exactly that when Jackson says, “They know we’re here. Let’s just do this. Find out who they are and what they want.”

“Great minds think alike.”

We walk through the door to a curving corridor. The sight lines suck. We can’t see what’s waiting around any corner, because there are no corners.

Despite Jackson’s jacket, I’m shivering. The air’s cold and dry and smells artificial, like there’s a hint of air freshener being pumped in.

We don’t pass any windows or doors, just smooth, white walls, white ceiling, white floor that all meld together seamlessly so I can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.

At one point I pause and stretch my hands out to both sides, wondering how wide the corridor is. My fingers extend as far as they can go, but I don’t hit anything solid. So it’s wider than my arm span.

We keep going, following the curve, until ahead we see a massive arced bank of what appears to be computers. There’s a person there with her hands on some sort of control panel. She’s dressed all in white, her back to us, her hair pulled in a high ponytail.

She twists at the waist and turns her head back toward us until we have a three-quarter view of her face.

Jackson stops dead.

Her nose. The shape of her face.

Her eyes.

“There you are,” Lizzie says, and smiles.