I laid it down, everything that’d happened, everything I knew or guessed or didn’t know. She worked on the restraints as I spoke. Didn’t interrupt, her dark gaze locked on mine, though her lips pursed around questions I knew she wanted to ask.
I blurted it all out, fast as I could, and when I finally ran out of words—all of them totally unbelievable because WTF?—she only nodded once.
Helping me sit upright, she asked, “How do we get out of here?”
My eyes stung with tears. “Weren’t you listening? There’s no point. They’ll just come after us. They have serious resources. Maybe they’ll let you go, though.”
“We go together. You and me. It’s always been us, together.”
“But—”
“But nothing. We get out of here with your blasting thing”—she waved her hand like it was so easy—”and then we worry about them coming after us later. I’ve got friends. I’ve got favors to call in. Places we could go.”
I trembled, half afraid, half grateful.
Sometimes I forgot she wasn’t just my mom, broken and fragile; she’d gone to nursing school while she was a single mom, had made a life for us with no one else to help. In fact, she’d helped a ton of other people. She was smart and hard-working, pretty and kind. And tougher than anyone I knew.
If the world needed another heroic warrior queen, plus or minus the armored bustier, it had one in my mom.
I took a deep breath and looked down at my bandaged hand. What had he done to me while I was unconscious?
Wedging my fingernails under the bandage, I swiveled around toward the surgical tray with its debris of needle caps and tool wrappings. “I need to get this off.”
Mom pulled a pair of scissors from the back pocket of her good mom jeans.
I stared at her. “Mom. I’m shocked.”
“Grabbed them off a desk I passed.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Not much, but it’s something.”
Careful but quick, she snipped through the bandage. As she peeled back the final layer of blood-tinged white, I let out a harsh breath, almost a sob. The X was still there, a pale amethyst instead of its usual virulent purple, but there.
“Oh, honey,” she sighed. “You should’ve showed me when it happened. This is an ugly laceration. It could’ve gotten infected!”
“It kinda did,” I answered with a laugh.
“Not funny. You get hurt; you show me. It’s very simple.”
“The purple is fainter than it was earlier. Alling must’ve gotten some of the hive out of me.” I angled my hand under the unforgiving track lighting. A ring of reddened needle points circled the X just inside a larger circular bruise, as if he’d attached a vacuum hose to the site of the infection. Had he tried tosuckall the moths out of me? If so, he’d missed some, and now they were regenerating.
He hadn’t outright killed me, so that was a good sign, right? Unless he was just keeping me on ice while he checked the viability of the bugs that he’d retrieved. Would that satisfy him? And where did that leave me?
Maybe Mom was right. Escape first, then worry about staying free after.
I took in another slow breath as I glanced around the room. I pointed to the mini fridge. “Can you get me a few of those energy drinks? Alling seemed to think they were important for the moths. I think they need fuel.Ineed fuel.”
Though she wrinkled her nose in disapproval, she raided the fridge and handed over a couple bottles. As I chugged one, I eyed the other cabinets. “Is there anything else here that would, like, supercharge my metabolism? Anything we could give the bugs to power up faster.”
Finally, she could hold back her disapproval no more. “I am not giving my daughter drugs,” she burst out.
“Just this once,” I reassured her. “Because it might be the only thing that keeps us alive.”
Her jaw was set so hard I was afraid she’d break a tooth, but she got up to look through the med cabinet while I gulped down another bottle. My stomach gurgled.
Mom came back to me with a loaded syringe in her hand and a mom glint in her eye even more unnerving than moth fire. “If I could take the infection from you…”
I dredged up a smile for her. “If I could give them to you…” Maybe someday I could, and heal her. But that wasn’t right now.
She prepped an injection site in the bruised ring of my hand. “According to the label, this is a cocktail of amphetamines and methylphenidates, B vitamins, creatine and tyrosine, some herbs I’ve never heard of, and much too much sugar. There is no condition or disorder I know of that would be treated with something like this.”
