Hardwired Read online

  The edge of panic in her voice was a good sign. It meant she hadn’t checked out entirely, that she might still care enough about what happened to Carly to help us.

  “I got her out of that room like I promised. I was right behind her,” I said, bending the truth. “But somebody pulled me back in, and by the time I fought my way back out, she was gone.”

  “What about the guards? Have you asked them for help?”

  “No,” I said. “They’re still trying to get control of that room. You were there; you saw what it was like. I’m begging you, please help us find her.”

  She stood there silently for what seemed like an eternity, watching us, her head tilting from left to right as if trying to piece together a puzzle, debating whether to believe a word we were saying.

  “We had an interesting conversation with an old friend of yours,” Chris said. He’d given me a chance to try the pathetic and helpless route, and now he was going to do it his way. “One Joe Thompson. That name ring a bell to you?”

  “How do you know Joe?” she asked.

  We didn’t, not really. But I didn’t say that. That would require me telling her exactly who Carly was and why she was here, and I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet anyway.

  “It doesn’t matter how we know him. Let’s just say we encountered him during our little adventure on the outside, and he was quite eager to get ahold of you,” I said. “He even gave me a flash drive full of information he swore you’d be interested in, then pointed us back here.”

  She held out her hand, thinking I was simply going to hand the flash drive over.

  “Not a chance,” I said as I met her glare head-on. “You help us find Carly, and then maybe I’ll consider handing it over.”

  She wavered for a minute, her eyes roaming over every inch of my body as if she was trying to figure out where I’d stashed it. I couldn’t help it—I laughed. If she thought she had a chance in hell of parting me with that information before I was ready, then she was an idiot.

  She sighed, seeming to accept our terms. “And how exactly is Carly involved in all this?” she asked.

  “She’s not,” I quickly said.

  She shook her head, no longer buying our story. “The three of you are connected. Anybody who’s spent more than five minutes with you could figure that out.”

  “Her name is Carly,” I started, easing my way into the full truth with information she already knew. “Carly Denton.”

  “Denton?” The whispered name parted her lips, her mouth opening in a silent gasp as she made the connection.

  “Cameron is her brother,” I said, answering her unspoken question.

  Ms. Tremblay swallowed hard, her eyes sliding from Chris to me. “And you know her how?”

  “Lucas’s brother, Tyler, used to date her sister,” Chris replied. He seemed irritated, as if this little who’s who game we were playing was nothing more than a waste of time, and he was trying to hurry it along by answering for me.

  “Her name was Olivia,” I said, filling in the rest. “She killed herself the day we buried Tyler. Cam is all Carly has left now.”

  “Sweet mother of God,” Ms. Tremblay said as she backed up. “This isn’t possible.”

  I nodded. “It is.”

  “But why is she here? Why in God’s name would you drag a girl, a girl who has already been through so much, into a place like this?”

  Technically, Carly had dragged us in here, but whatever. “She’s here for her brother.”

  Ms. Tremblay stood there for a minute, a look of total confusion covering her face as she struggled to make sense of it all. The deaths. The gene. The madness that linked us all together.

  “We have to find her,” she finally said. “We need to get her out of here.”

  “Why the hell do you think we came looking for you?” Chris asked. “You got a map of this place? Like a floor plan or something? We can’t find her if we don’t know where the hell we are.”

  She started walking down the hall, gesturing for us to follow. “I don’t need a map. I know where every door leads. The guard in the basement—Murphy—he made sure I had the layout memorized in case something like this happened. He can—”

  “He’s dead,” Chris blurted out.

  Ms. Tremblay stumbled into the wall, her face going impossibility white. “Dead.” She mouthed that one word over and over, never once speaking it out loud as she paced the hall, fighting off tears she obviously didn’t want us to see.

  “How is that possible?” It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she and Murphy were more than simply colleagues.

  “No clue. We found him sprawled out in the isolation unit,” Chis said, unfazed by her distress. “My money is on Cam, though.”

  “Cam?” she mumbled in disbelief. “Impossible. Murphy was armed and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. And Cam … he was … ”

  “Was what?” Chris took a step closer, towering over Ms. Tremblay. “Not all there? Mentally toast? A walking veg—”

  “Sedated,” Ms. Tremblay corrected. “He’s on an eight-hour regimen. Murphy knows that. All the guards here know that. He would’ve given him a dose shortly after we’d pulled you two up into the staff lounge.”

  I thought back to the three white pills I’d found in Cam’s glass cell, the ones I’d shoved in my pocket for some unknown reason. I pulled them out and dropped them into her hand. “I think it’s safe to say he hasn’t taken one in a while.”

  “Where’s Cam now?” she asked, closing her fist around the pills.

  “Beats me,” Chris said. “His cell is empty.”

  “Empty!” she gasped. “We need to find him. We need to find them both.”

  Thirty-two

  We filled Ms. Tremblay in on the smashed emergency lights as we walked, opting to leave out the part about Chris screwing with the electrical panel. More than once, she asked about seeking help from the other guards, and each time we came up with an excuse, hurrying her in the opposite direction under the false claim that we’d “thought” we’d seen Carly. I knew we’d have to go back to that room eventually, see with our own eyes what we’d manipulated those boys into doing. But if I had my way, I’d avoid it as long as possible.

  “Even if Cam wasn’t sedated, if somehow he managed to spit his pills out, I don’t think he would’ve hurt Murphy,” Ms. Tremblay said. She’d been talking through scenarios for the past ten minutes, each one always ending up the same way. Uncertain.

  “What makes you say that?” Up till then, I’d held back from asking her, afraid she’d insist on seeing Murphy for herself, further stalling our search. But I was pissed and more than a little bit curious as to why she insisted on defending Cam, the only guy in the Bake Shop who’d actually shown violent tendencies.

  “I’ve been thinking about it, and it just doesn’t make sense,” she said, searching the kitchen for any sign of Carly or her brother. “Cam wasn’t violent, not the way everybody thought.”

  I didn’t agree, given that he’d apparently knocked his roommate out and then hung him with his own bedsheets, but whatever. Arguing with her right now wasn’t going to get us anywhere.

  “He showed distinct signs of distress his first night here,” Ms. Tremblay continued, “but nothing I would categorize as unusual. And he’s never lashed out at any of the guards or me. He was more withdrawn than anything. The first time I spoke with him, he begged to be sent home. He wasn’t aggressive or even angry like the rest of you. He was petrified, so much so that I placed him on suicide watch.”

  “What did you expect?” Chris asked. “You ship us up here, treat us like a bunch of lab rats, and you expect us to be cheery and cooperative?”

  “No. I suppose not,” she mumbled, but even that little concession wasn’t particularly gratifying. It couldn’t erase the four weeks of testing I’d suffered through, and it def
initely couldn’t bring Tyler back.

  “By the second day of testing, Cam had completely shut down, refused to respond to any form of stimulus. I told the guards to ease up, but they insisted that he was just being defiant. They called the supervising office in Washington and had them send up orders to step up the protocol, push Cam harder.”

  “And … ” Chris prompted.

  “I talked to Murphy. He convinced the medic to at least do another physical exam, look for self-inflicted wounds—something I could use to get them to stop testing him for a little bit,” Ms. Tremblay continued. “Cam thrashed around the entire time, and Murphy had to strap him to the exam table in order for the medic to do something as simple as check his heart rate. And even then, Cam kept begging us to let him go before he ended up dead.”

  “Are you saying he tried to kill himself?” I asked, desperately trying to shut out images of Tyler sitting in the lawn chair in our backyard, the empty bottle of pills on the ground next to a fifth of whiskey.

  “No,” she replied. “Cam was covered in defensive wounds. His chest and back were bruised beyond belief.”

  “They beat him?” I ground out, remembering the look in Ryan’s eyes, the way he’d singled out that one guard he wanted dead. Is that what they’d done to Cam … beat him into submission?

  “No, not any of the guards,” Ms. Tremblay clarified. “I made sure of that. It took days for Murphy to get me the footage from the surveillance camera in Cam’s bunk room. And even then, he had to make up some story to the guards about wanting some time alone with me in the control room.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, who did it then?”

  “When the guards were instructed to intensify Cam’s testing, they took upon themselves to back off when his roommate got physical. They thought that extra note of aggression would be the perfect stressor. Cam may have killed his roommate, but I don’t believe he did it because of his genetic profile. He was afraid, and he had good reason to be from what I saw. He did it because he had no choice.”

  “And the guards who stood by and watched all this, the doctor who was overseeing the testing—what happened to them?”

  “They were dismissed,” she said. “That’s why we moved your group out in spite of the storm. We were understaffed. And that’s why we moved everyone into the lounge earlier. There wasn’t enough staff to monitor your individual rooms once the generators failed.”

  “So the plan was to keep Cam down there, drugged up, forever?” Chris asked.

  “No. I was only trying to keep him comfortable until I could have him transferred to an inpatient facility,” Ms. Tremblay explained. “Cam wasn’t down there as some sort of punishment; he was on suicide watch. I was overseeing his care myself. I was in the process of making arrangements for him to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric facility closer to his home. I thought being nearer to family might help.”

  I thought about challenging that, informing her that Cam had been within ten feet of his sister for over five hours and he hadn’t so much as flinched. There wasn’t a person alive—friend or family—who could help Cam now.

  Chris cursed long and hard. “Did Cam’s family know this? Did his sister or his parents have any clue that you weren’t planning on locking him up for good?”

  I’d been wondering the same thing but was too afraid to ask. If we’d left well enough alone, Cam might be home or near his family, Chris and I would be bitching our way through the reintegration phase, and there wouldn’t be twelve kids, with their drivers and guards, lying dead at the bottom of some ravine.

  “Yes, Cam’s family knew about the incident and that he was being held longer than the rest of his group,” she replied. “But no, they didn’t know about his possible transfer. His treatment plan hadn’t been finalized yet, and I didn’t want to give them false hope.”

  False hope was better than nothing. Those kids lying dead at the bottom of that ravine would’ve taken false hope over the fate the Bake Shop had handed them any day.

  Thirty-three

  We continued to search for Cam and Carly in silence, checking every nook and cranny of the Bake Shop’s large industrial kitchen. No matter how hard I tried to push the thought aside, my mind kept circling back to the idea that Ms. Tremblay knew what this place was doing to us. She’d witnessed it with Tyler and Cam, and yet she’d done nothing but sit back and let them continue poking at us.

  “Why?” I asked. “Can you tell me why, after knowing what happened to Cam, you did nothing to help any of us?”

  She sighed, her eyes looking everywhere but at me. “Sometimes the ends justify the means, Lucas. If we could only find a way to identify those with a proven potential to become violent offenders, do you know how much safer the world would be?”

  I’d heard all that crap before. Some government-paid scientist had discovered an anomaly while studying the brain of a school shooter, a “kink in the warrior gene,” he’d first called it. A couple of trips to Congress and a promise to end the youth-violence epidemic that seemed to dominate the nightly news, and bam, our government wrote him a billion-dollar check to develop a dozen facilities just like the one we were trapped in.

  I slammed a pantry door with more force than necessary and twisted around to face her. “Do you have any idea what your stupid testing does to us?” I yelled. “Do you even care? I’ve done nothing wrong. Chris did nothing wrong. Tyler did nothing wrong. Yet here we are, your own personal science experiment, because some scientist who probably doesn’t even have kids of his own decided screwing with our minds was a good idea.”

  Ms. Tremblay shook her head. “Your brother wasn’t adjusting well, Lucas. We shouldn’t have let him go. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. You shouldn’t have brought him here to begin with,” I said, hoping that she’d let go of her save-the-world philosophy and admit it. Just once, admit that what they were doing here was wrong.

  “I had a child once,” she said, and I tossed my hand out in a so what gesture. Joe had pretty much said that was the reason she’d changed sides, that her husband and daughter’s deaths somehow convinced her that these facilities were the key to her revenge. I didn’t much care.

  “Her name was Emily,” she whispered, her eyes glossing with the memory. “We were travelling through Philadelphia. Sam—her dad—and I were at a conference in Atlanta, a preliminary hearing about IGT’s claim that they’d found a correlation between the MAOA-L gene and the propensity to commit violent crimes. Emily’s nanny was sick with the flu, so we’d brought her along with us.”

  “Good for you,” I said, irritated that she’d stopped looking for Carly altogether and was now standing in the middle of the kitchen, reminiscing.

  “Let me guess—your husband was a geneticist of some sort?” Chris snapped.

  “No,” she said, “he was a psychologist like me. A profiler.”

  I laughed at the irony of it all, wondering what he’d make of us.

  “We were on our way home. I was driving; Sam was on the phone with Joe. Both of them were opposed to what IGT was proposing.”

  According to Joe, so were you, I silently added.

  “I pulled off the highway, not even thinking about where I was. We needed gas, and Emily had been complaining about having to go to the bathroom for the past hour. We should’ve gotten back on the highway as soon as I saw the neighborhood, but the gas light was on, and, well … ” Ms. Tremblay trailed off. She didn’t need to fill in the blanks; I knew what had happened next.

  “I waited in the car while Sam brought her in to use the bathroom. They were victims of circumstance, ‘wrong place, wrong time,’ or so the police told me. They caught the person who did it, but he died awaiting trial, some gang-related incident in prison.” She paused and looked at me. I don’t know what she expected to see. Understanding? Forgiveness, perhaps.

  “If
we’d known about the gene, if we could’ve identified his potential to become violent, then we could’ve removed him from society.”

  “Then what?” Chris prompted. “Your husband and daughter would still be alive?”

  “Yes,” Ms. Tremblay whispered. “I lost everything that day. Everything. Over something that should’ve been preventable. Is preventable.”

  “And you’re assuming the guy who killed your family was defective? That he carried that same gene as me and Lucas?” Chris asked, and she nodded her answer.

  “The files,” Chris said, nudging my arm. “Give her the damn flash drive.”

  It was time. I bent down and yanked off my sneaker and sock. “Here,” I said as I placed the flash drive in her hand. “That guy who shot your family, they did test him.” Or so Joe had told me. “And he wasn’t a carrier. He was just some random guy, doped up on heroine.”

  I closed her fingers around the flash drive, squeezing a little harder than necessary. “It’s all on there. You should think about that next time you lock one of us up in your little lab and play with our minds.”

  Ms. Tremblay whirled around and walked out of the kitchen, muttering something incoherent under her breath. Chris shot me a what do you want to do look, and I shrugged before following her out.

  She ducked into a room to the left, leaving the door open for me and Chris. There was a massive TV on the far wall, and it wasn’t until I was within touching distance of the screen that I realized it was actually twenty-four frameless monitors all hung side by side. A U-shaped table was positioned in the center of the room, keyboards and laptops littering the surface. And in the corner, spilling out of a cardboard box, were what looked like broken surveillance cameras.

  Ms. Tremblay went down the row of laptops, hitting the power button on each one. The fifth one down lit up, the tiny blue light flickering to life. She inserted the flash drive and waited impatiently, her fingers drumming the enter key until the information she was searching for finally scrolled across the screen. She scanned the documents so fast, I doubted she’d even begun to appreciate the extent of Joe’s research. But apparently the small glimpse she got was more than enough.