“She is the last remaining survivor of the first Supremacy trial.”
Alex took the picture from me and let out a wolfish whistle.
I snagged it back and rolled my eyes. “Ew. She’s, like, old now.”
Across the room, next to Dax, Mom cleared her throat.
“Older,” I corrected quickly, waving the picture at Alex. “Too old for you.”
Dax snickered and threw his arm around Mom’s shoulders. “Smooth.”
I coughed and turned back to Ginger to avoid Mom’s stare. I’d made the mistake of mentioning makeup to her once, and she thought I’d implied she looked old. Didn’t take it very well. “Didn’t Denazen kill everyone from the first trial? That’s what Dad said…”
Ginger took the picture from me and stuffed it back into the envelope. I didn’t miss how she snapped the file shut, either, as I leaned in to get a closer look. “This is the one that got away. She is, in part, how Marshal Cross was able to cure Kiernan.”
I froze. “Kiernan?” This must be what Brandt was talking about. The component. “You mean this chick has the cure for the crazies? She can save us?”
“She is the cure. Like Kale’s blood renders Sixes pliable, Penny Mills’s blood cancels the negative effect of the Supremacy drug. From the information Henley gathered, we believe they combined it with a formula stolen from a scientist named Franklin Wentz to create the third generation.”
“If she escaped back when the first trial went live, how did they get her blood?”
“Henley said they didn’t know about the blood until June. Each Resident has a vial on file. Mills’s was lost in storage, and because they thought her dead, they had no reason to go looking for it. You see, the first trial’s symptoms were ten times worse. After it was clear that batch wasn’t viable, they simply turned them lose and let them fade away.”
“So they didn’t monitor them at all?”
“There wasn’t any reason to. The trial was conducted in private; none of the volunteers knew the names of the other participants. When nothing happened right away, they were informed the experiment failed, and they were released—Denazen found the fatal flaw in its formula and knew the members would all grow sick and die.”
“But Penny Mills didn’t.”
Ginger shook her head. “No. She didn’t. Recently they discovered she was the only one still alive. Of course they went after her, but by some miracle, she evaded them. They assumed Penny’s survival was genetic and searched for the blood. What they found was a component that bypassed the side effects as well as bridged a gap in Wentz’s research, making a successful trial of Supremacy possible and curing Kiernan.”
“So we find Penny Mills and, what? Get her to bleed on me?” If they thought I was drinking some chick’s blood, they were in for a surprise. I’d start digging my own grave now.
“The blood alone won’t cure you because it stopped working after a while. However, with Franklin Wentz’s formula and some of the blood, we can duplicate a cure.”
“They had the blood in storage,” Mom mused. “That would be why there wasn’t much to go around. The vials are only several ounces. They take them from all Residents.”
“And since they can’t find Penny, they have no way of getting more,” Dax said.
I hated to be the naysayer of the group, but someone had to put it out there. “If they’ve already started producing the new trial—which uses the blood—what are the chances there’s any left for the cure?”
“Henley has confirmed that a small amount remains.”
It bugged me that she kept calling him Henley. His name was Brandt—no matter what his outside looked like. And worse than that, I hated that she’d involved him at all. If Dad were to get his hands on someone like Brandt, with his soul jumping ability, the potential damage could be catastrophic. Denazen could simply kill Brandt off a thousand times, allowing him to gather multiple Six abilities, giving them an all-powerful weapon.
This whole thing was a disaster and I was torn. On one hand, I wanted to try talking some sense into Kale. If anyone could get through to him, I was sure it’d be me. On the other hand, while I’d always been a little careless with my own life, ten others were now on the line. “Okay, so we need to get the blood, like, yesterday. But say we do find this Penny Mills chick—we need the formula Denazen stole from that Wentz guy.”
“Technically we don’t need the formula. We have something better. We have Wentz,” Ginger said with a grin. “He’s been here for about a week now.”
“He’s here? As in, right now? How have I not seen this guy?”
Mom rolled her eyes. “He’s a little bit…different. Ginger set him up in a lab on the third floor. He doesn’t come out much.”
I hadn’t known we had a third floor.
Ginger tapped her cane against the floor. “We need that blood.”
“And Denazen has the blood. Maybe Kale can help with that. He’s obviously been on the inside. Maybe if I talk to him—”
Alex snorted. “Are you really that stupid? You saw what he did to that guy last night! What the hell makes you believe he’d think twice about doing it to you? In case you missed it, you’re nobody to him anymore. Worse than nobody. You’re the girl he blames for all this. The person he hates.”
I flinched as if each word were a physical blow. Knowing it was one thing, but hearing it was another—especially from Alex.
His eyes widened and he shook his head. He’d gone too far and he knew it. Alex had always acted first and thought later. Most people got better with age—he’d gotten worse. “Dez…”
Alex could be a dick—hell, he’d perfected it to an art form—but I knew he was only trying to keep me safe. He was wrong, though. Kale would never hurt me. Not really. He might not remember my face, but I’d seen something in his eyes at the party. Something deep down that could never let me go. Kiernan was proof of that. She had to dress like me, make him call her a name that sounded like mine, and had to redirect his anger by slapping her crappy name on me. All I needed was a little time and an opportunity.
I turned away from Alex and focused on Ginger. “If I could just get him alone… It seems like we’d have a better chance pursuing Denazen to get the blood rather than a woman who could be God knows where. The world is a big place. Kind of the ultimate needle in a haystack, don’t ya think?”
She shook her head. “We find Penny and the others first, then we’ll deal with him. It’s late December, Deznee. You’ll be no good to Kale if something happens to you. For the moment, he appears to be safe.”
She was right. My birthday was only a few months away, and whether I admitted it to them or not, I was beginning to show signs. I asked Mom once why it happened at eighteen. She told me that the way she understood it, there was a protein in the original formula that kept replicating. By the time the subjects reached eighteen, it was too much for their bodies to handle. The sand in my hourglass was almost gone.
I hadn’t felt Kiernan hit me with the knife at the party, and I couldn’t be sure if it was Supremacy—or stress—but lately I found myself easily distracted, my mind wandering to nonsensical things. Other than the little Mom knew, we had no one to ask about the stages of the Supremacy decline. We just had to wait it out and take things as they came. Finding Penny Mills was the logical first step.
Still, doing nothing about Kale, when Kiernan was throwing him right under our noses, would be hard—if not impossible. At least for me.
I stuffed down the lump threatening to crawl up my throat and tried one last time. “He’s not safe with Denazen. No one is safe with Denazen. What about the damage he does before we get to him? How will he live with himself? He killed someone last night.”
“Do you really think he’d want you pursuing him if there was a cure to be found? He’d want you to find it first.” Mom leaned forward. I didn’t miss her hand resting atop Dax’s and I felt an irrational pang of envy. My hand was cold. And empty. “He won’t be able to live with himself if we don’t find
it in time because you went after him instead.”
Again, I wanted to argue, but they all made sense. Annoying, piss-me-the-hell-off sense, but still. Sense. This was hard for my mother, too, even if she wasn’t showing it. She’d raised Kale inside Denazen like her own child. But one of the few things I’d learned about Mom in the short time we’d been together was that she was coldly logical when it came to sizing up dangerous situations. Emotion took a backseat. It made sense. So many years with Denazen taught her to push her feelings aside to get through tough situations.
I sighed and kicked at the edge of the chair. “Fine. Where do we start?”
“Penny Mills will take some time. She’s deep underground and Denazen, with all its resources, has been searching unsuccessfully for her since October.” Ginger pulled out another picture. Scribbling an address on the back, she handed it to me. “In the meantime, we start tracking down the others.”
The girl looked about my age with an infectious smile and bright blue eyes. Her long brown hair was twisted into an artful knot with a pair of wooden sticks to hold it in place, and there was a blue smudge across her right cheek. Paint. She looked happy, and I wondered how long ago the photo had been taken. Where was she now? Did she even know about Supremacy?
Was she even alive?
“Deznee, I’d like you to take Alex and go to Kelpsbergh. That’s the address we have for Ashley Conner.”
“What’s her 411?”
“Looking over the bit of information Henley provided, it would seem she’s a remote viewer.”
“What’s that mean?” Alex asked, taking the picture from me.
“Ashley sees things that are happening in other places. She’s living with foster parents who I assume are Denazen agents, but I can’t be sure, so proceed with extreme caution.”
I stood and took the picture from Alex. “We can save time if I check out Ashley and Alex beats down the door of another. Two birds in half the time.”
Ginger narrowed her eyes. “You’re not going alone. I’m not asking you to make out with him, for Christ sake.” A truly wicked smile slipped across her lips. “I suggest you leave now before I insist you take Jade along as well.”
That was all the motivation I needed. As much fun as it was to watch them snipe at each other, I wasn’t in the mood. I grabbed Alex’s arm and headed for the elevator.
5
It took us almost an hour with traffic, and I laid into Alex in the car for siding with Ginger about Kale. He and I once had an intense relationship—until he cheated. I found out later it had been an act, staged to keep me safe, but there was no going back. He insisted he still loved me and nothing could ever change that, but if we couldn’t be together, he wanted me in his life as a friend. Friends, though, didn’t side against you. They had your back. Apparently, Alex hadn’t gotten the memo.
We arrived on Ashley Conner’s doorstep a little after ten in the morning. There weren’t any cars in the driveway, but I saw someone moving around in one of the rooms upstairs when we pulled in.
Alex raised his hand to knock, but I grabbed it and pulled back. “Wait a sec. Ginger said she thought they might be agents. This chick’s foster parents.”
“So?”
“So? If they’re agents, wouldn’t they know who we are and why we’re here? They’re not exactly gonna want to invite us in for cake and cookies, then spill their secrets.”
He stuffed both hands into his pockets and sighed. “You think Denazen has your picture plastered all over a Most Wanted list? You’re hot, but come on now—”
“I’m being serious.”
He hesitated, then stepped back and took a long look at the house. The downstairs was quiet and dark, but the room in the corner on the second floor had the light on. “Well, either way, they’d be Nix, right? Agents are always Nix. Easy to take out.”
“Let’s check things out first.”
Rubbing his hands together, Alex waggled his eyebrows. “Play Peeping Tom? Twist my arm. The girl in the pic is a hottie. Maybe we’ll catch her doing something naughty.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved him back down the stairs. “You’ve been hanging out with Curd a little too much lately.”
We crept along the side of the house and around to the kitchen window. The lights were off, and there appeared to be no one around. From there, we peeked in the small, grime-covered window on the side door of the garage. No cars.
The backyard was also deserted. The only things in sight were an old tire swing hanging from a questionable-looking branch, a peeling picnic table missing a leg, and a lawn with small patches of snow from the first storm of the season.
We circled the house, coming back around the other side with the intention of knocking on the door. “Wonder which one is her room. Maybe she’s in there undressing?” Alex said. He clasped his hands together and flashed me an impish grin.
“Not likely, since she’s standing behind you,” a girl’s voice snapped.
We whirled around, nearly knocking each other over. The brunette from Ginger’s picture, complete with various colored paints splattered across her T-shirt and an extremely annoyed expression stood, arms folded and glaring at us. “U-Um,” Alex stuttered. “Yeah, so about that—”
“You have twenty seconds to tell me why you guys are skulking outside my house or I’m calling the cops.”
I pushed Alex aside. “Are you Ashley?”
She narrowed her eyes. “If Carl sent you, you’re wasting your time. It’s over. I don’t do cheaters.”
I smiled. “Neither do I. See? We have something in common already. My name’s Dez.” Hitching my thumb over my shoulder, I said, “The perv is Alex. We need to talk to you.”
She didn’t look like she was in a conversational mood. Glaring from me to Alex, she asked, “About?”
When Kale and I hunted for the Sixes on Denazen’s hit list over the summer, I’d developed a whole spiel to break the news gently, and for the most part, it worked. But this situation was a little different. We didn’t have a lot of time, and every second I wasted here was another I wasn’t looking for Kale or the cure.
It was probably a little selfish, and a part of me felt bad, but I decided the best thing to do was dive right in. “We’re here because if you don’t let us help you, you’re going to die.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Alex groaned.
Ashley blinked. I thought maybe I’d scared her silent, but when she yanked out her cell phone and I heard a distinct three-number call, I knew maybe I’d approached this the wrong way.
Alex swiped the cell from her and held it out of reach when she made a move to take it back. “Okay, so Dez is lacking decorum today—more so than usual, anyway—but what she said is true. We are here to help you.”
I rolled my eyes. Since when had he been Mr. Compassion? “Do you know what a Six is?”
She sucker punched Alex and grabbed her phone, dancing out of reach as he tried to steal it back. I liked this girl more and more every passing second. Hitting me with the evil eye, she took another step back and said, “Six? Yeah. It’s a number. Comes after five and before seven.”
“It’s a person, actually,” I corrected. “A kind of person. Like you and me.”
She looked me up and down and snorted. “Sorry. I don’t think we’re exactly the same brand of crazy, girlfriend.”
“No one is her brand of crazy. Trust me.” Alex chuckled. “But we are like you.” He waved his right hand and Ashley’s cell shot from her grasp. It hovered for a moment between us, then zoomed straight up and landed on the roof with a clatter.
She gasped, staring after it, and turned to Alex. “How—how did you do that?”
“The same way you can do what you do,” I said, nodding to the house. “Are your parents home? Can we talk for a few minutes?”
The wonder drained from her face, replaced by caution. “Now you want me to let you into my house?”
“It won’t take long,” I prodded. “I promise.”
She w
as still wary, but after a moment, she nodded up to the roof. “As soon as I get my phone back.”
“Sure thing.” With another wave of Alex’s hand, her cell shot off the roof and back into his palm. He handed it over.
Ashley led us around to the front of the house and up to the door. Every few steps she’d glance over her shoulder like she was afraid we might tackle her or something. Mainly, she watched Alex. I didn’t blame her. To anyone who didn’t know him, he came off kind of shifty. Maybe it was the spiky white-blond hair or the weird happy face labret bead we’d named Fred.
When we got inside, I had to tell myself not to stare. Her place reminded me of my old house. Pristine hardwood floors, ugly furniture, and a fireplace mantel complete with pictures to make it look nice and homey. A part of me wondered if this was standard Denazen issue. The cookie cutter mold used to raise their crazy little army.
“You can sit if you want,” Ashley said, sinking into the couch. I didn’t miss how she settled next to the telephone or how there was a plate on the table next to it with a fork and knife waiting conveniently. “But don’t get too comfortable. My dad will be home soon.”
Since meeting Kale, I’d become more aware. Some of it was his coaching, while some was simply observation. The fingers on her right hand twitched as she spoke and her foot began to tap. Her dad wasn’t on his way home. If I had to guess, she’d be here alone for hours. It was winter break. School was on hold, but people still had to work. It was all an act.
Alex settled in the armchair across from her, but I stayed standing. Like she said, there was no reason to make myself comfortable. I had no plans of hanging for chips and dip. “I’m not gonna beat around the bush, ’cause honestly? There’s not a hell of a lot of time. We were sent here today to warn you. I’m gonna give you two choices and the truth. What you do with it is your call. No one’s here to force you to do something you don’t want to.”
“Dez,” Alex warned.
I ignored him. During the summer, Kale and I had to literally drag a couple of the Sixes, kicking and screaming, back to the hotel for their own good. I was over it. If they wanted the help, then great. We’d be there. If not, we had no right to force them. Denazen was all about taking away free will. I wouldn’t do the same.