Sanctuary Bay (35 page)

Sarah closed her eyes, forcing herself to push the panic down. Panicking wouldn't help.

“Sarah.” Ethan's voice was quiet, close. She opened her eyes, finding his face inches from hers. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against hers. “I know you're scared. I am too.”

“This is suicide,” she whispered.

“But if we stay, it's worse than death,” he said. “I don't know what happened to Karina, but I'm willing to bet she was in that room with Izzy. Maybe Philip is too. I don't want to end up there, Sarah.”

“Me either.”

“If we can get to the floating wind farm, we'll be safe. The worst of the storm is over,” he said. “We just have to get to the wind farm.”

Sarah nodded. “Okay.”

“The hardest thing is going to be to keep off the shore,” he told her. “The waves will push us back in. There's a motor, but I don't know if it'll be strong enough.”

He pulled her into a quick hug before hauling the boat up and dropping it into the water at the end of the dock. Shaking, Sarah climbed down the wooden ladder and managed to get her feet in the boat. She sat down fast, clinging to the sides, trying not to retch from the motion of the waves. Ethan jumped down after her.

“Ready?”

She felt tears on her cheeks, warm against the cold wet of the rain, but she nodded. She'd thought she had no choices growing up, but those people in the lab truly had no control over their lives. Ethan was right. She'd rather die than live with every movement dictated by some demented scientist.

Ethan pulled the motor, turning it on with a sputter that seemed pathetic against the roaring wind. “Look!” Sarah yelled, pointing at lights on the bluffs. Flashlights in the darkness, pointing in every direction.

“They're too far away to see us,” Ethan yelled back, steering the boat out to sea.

Sarah held on tight to the sides and kept her eyes on the lights. The swells were high, and almost immediately began pushing them back toward shore, just like Ethan had said. “Hold the tiller!”

Sarah scrambled over next to Ethan and held the tiller the way he showed her. He grabbed an oar and struggled to keep them off the rocks. They made it free and got out to open water—

Only to have the waves hurl them back into the rocky stretch near the shore again. And again.

At least we've moved away from the asylum and the Fortitude lab,
Sarah thought.
If we could survive being slammed back onto the shore, maybe we could hide on the island for another few hours before they found us. We could try again when the weather's calmer.

The third time they made it to open water, the motor cut out.

“Damn it!” Ethan struggled to make it turn over, but it didn't work. They both picked up the oars, fighting against the tide. Sarah knew it was a losing battle, but that didn't mean she was going to stop trying.

Suddenly a spotlight shone on them, so bright that it dazzled her eyes. It bathed the entire boat in light. She slowly put down the oar. Ethan did too, defeated. They were caught.

“Stay where you are, we're throwing a rope to you,” a voice announced through a megaphone.

“Maybe we should jump in the water,” Ethan said.

“No way,” she replied. “You obviously don't know this, but poor black girls don't learn to swim.”

He gave a crooked smile. The rope splashed into the water next to them, and Ethan leaned over to fish it out of the ocean. He tied it to the boat, and Sarah felt them being reeled in toward the bright light.

When they banged up against the bigger boat, somebody tossed down two life jackets. Sarah put one on, her fingers shaking with the cold. There was a rope ladder, and Ethan gestured for her to climb it first. She forced her hands to hold on, forced her legs to bend and climb. Her entire body felt like it was going to shut down, and her mind wanted it to. What were these people going to do to her?

At the top, a pair of strong hands grabbed hers and pulled her over the side. Sarah looked up, trembling, into the eyes of the guy in the uniform.

“What in god's name are you kids doing out here in this storm?” the guy bellowed. “You're lucky we found you!”

Sarah stared at him, weak-kneed with relief. “You're … you're the Coast Guard.”

“Who were you expecting, the Tooth Fairy?” he asked.

Sarah laughed, turning to see Ethan as he was hauled on board. “It's the Coast Guard!” she cried, hurling herself into his arms. “We're saved.”

“And we didn't even have to make it to the wind farm,” he laughed, hugging her back.

*   *   *

Ten minutes later they were wrapped in blankets, huddled inside the cabin of the rescue boat. Their rescuers had given them hot coffee, and Sarah finally felt her body stop shaking. Her mind was whirling, but she wasn't sure they could talk about the island in front of the crew.

“Should we tell them?” she murmured, moving closer to Ethan. He lifted his blanket to put his arm around her so they'd be closer. “We don't have any proof.”

“Which is why we need to think very carefully about how to report them,” Ethan said. “We can go to my house and figure things out from there. My parents know a million lawyers.”

His house,
Sarah thought, shocked at the sudden return to real life.
He has a house, and parents, and buckets of money. I have my muddy pajamas—and nothing else.
She pushed the thought away.

“Will they help us, though? They never told you they went to Sanctuary Bay,” Sarah said.

“But there's no way they'd be okay with all this Fortitude stuff,” he replied.

“Okay, kids, we're here,” the captain said, sticking his head into the cabin. “All ashore.”

Ethan got up and smiled down at Sarah. “I've been trying to get home for years. I can't believe we really did it.”

“I'm happy for you,” she said, covering her own worries with a smile.

The captain climbed down first, then Ethan, and Sarah followed slowly after them. Her clothes were still wet, and Ethan's too-big shoes made it hard to find her footing on the ladder. When her feet hit the ground, she realized it was made of familiar smooth stones.

A chill of terror ran up her spine.

She was standing on the same jetty as when she'd first arrived at Sanctuary Bay. Sarah turned around to find herself staring at Dean Farrell.

“Welcome back, Ms. Merson,” the dean said.

 

19

Sarah whirled back to the Coast Guard captain, who was already halfway back up the ladder after escorting them down. “What are we doing here? You were supposed to take us to the mainland.”

“Your school called us and told us to search for you,” he replied. “If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have been out in this storm. You should be grateful.”

“You can't leave us here,” Ethan said. “The school is experimenting on students.”

The captain laughed. “That's a new one.” He disappeared onboard without another glance.

The two security guards behind Dean Farrell stepped forward, and Sarah felt as if she'd fallen back into a nightmare. “Take them to my office,” the dean said. She turned her back on them and clacked away down the dock in her completely inappropriate low-heeled leather boots.
Karina would be appalled,
Sarah thought, feeling sick at the thought of her roommate. Was she going to end up like Karina? Or Izzy? Or even Nate?

One guard took Ethan roughly by the arm and the other one took Sarah. She didn't have a chance to speak to Ethan again until they were deposited at the door of Dean Farrell's office.

“Maybe she doesn't know how bad it is,” Sarah said to him in a rush. “She thinks Fortitude is running a medical trial, she probably doesn't know about the rest.”

“Then she's about to find out,” Ethan replied, as one of the security guards opened the door.

Dean Farrell wasn't there.

Instead, there was a man sitting behind her desk, grinning from ear to ear. Midforties. White, dark hair, brown eyes, two-thousand-dollar suit.

“Well, well, look at this!” the guy crowed. “You're alive, even after braving the Atlantic in a nor'easter!”

Sarah and Ethan just stared at him, baffled.

“Sorry, where are my manners? Have a seat,” the man said. “I'm Mr. Carothers, senior vice president of the Fortitude Corporation, but you can call me Dave. We're going to be friends.”

“What are you doing in the dean's office,
Dave
?” Sarah asked. “Where's Dean Farrell?”

“Oh, she's really more of a figurehead, Sarah,” Dave replied. “I'm the actual dean. Hmm. Maybe I should add that to my title, what do you think? SVP of the Fortitude Corporation, Dean of Sanctuary Bay Academy. Sounds great.”

“What are you talking about?” Ethan asked. “Fortitude is a contractor.”

“Well, not so much.” Dave gave him a wink. “It's more like Sanctuary Bay is a front.”

Sarah sat down heavily in one of the guest chairs, a strange buzzing feeling seeping through her. She wasn't sure she could take any more surprises today. “A front for what?”

“‘Front' might not be the right word,” Dave said thoughtfully. “Technically, the word would be ‘subsidiary,' but we do use the school as a front. So I guess it's an okay term. Though we also use it for recruitment and training and placement … I have to say, kids, after consideration I'm not comfortable calling Sanctuary Bay a front. It's much more than that.”

Ethan sat down next to Sarah looking grim.

“I guess the best way to put it is this: Sanctuary Bay Academy is the public face of the Fortitude Corporation,” Dave went on cheerfully. “See, we own the school. The school is us. It exists for no reason other than to complete our mission.”

“Your mission is to give kids illegal drugs and do mind-control experiments on them and then strap them down to metal beds and torture them?” Sarah asked edgily.

Dave looked offended. “There's nothing illegal going on here, Sarah. Why would you say that?”

Did Call-Me-Dave not hear the word “torture”?
Sarah thought wildly.

“Bromcyan was banned, but you're using it on students,” Ethan said.

“Ahhh, I see the confusion,” Dave replied. “You're right, Ethan, Bromcyan
was
banned … but not for us. You could say that the government placed a ban on anyone else exploiting the drug called Bromcyan.”

“It was banned before the school even existed,” Sarah argued. “Before the asylum even closed!”

“Riiight…” Dave said. “About that: The closing of the asylum wasn't entirely a closing. It was more like a retreat from public view. The 1930s were all about research for us, and the 1940s brought a really wonderful new supply of test subjects. You see, we'd been testing the uses of Bromcyan on the nutbars at the asylum. Oh, I'm sorry, Sarah. You don't like those kinds of terms.” He smiled warmly at her. “You're very compassionate that way.”

He'd been watching her? Listening to her? Of course he had, she realized. Lab rats were always observed.

“Instead, let's say that we were testing Bromcyan on the mentally ill patients. We were able to retain many of them after the official closing of the asylum. On the down-low, you understand,” Dave continued.

Sarah found herself staring at his teeth. They were blindingly white, and there was something mesmerizing about the way they moved when he spoke. She couldn't bring herself to look at anything else as his words washed over her.

“But the fact is, we didn't so much care how Bromcyan affected the loonies. We wanted to know how regular people would tolerate it. And in the 1940s, there was a war—that's World War Two for you kiddies.”

“Yeah, we know about World War Two,” Ethan snapped. “We know there was a POW camp here.”

“You experimented on the prisoners,” Sarah said. “That's why that German soldier went crazy. Why someone carved the word ‘Bromcyan' into the cell wall.”

“Exactly! It was a real stroke of luck, let me tell you. We found out that Bromcyan's effects on those of normal intelligence were everything we could have wanted,” Dave said. “You see, it works like a charm on the mentally ill—it orders their minds, if you will. It calms the mania and makes them open to suggestion. Give them talk therapy, suggest a new pattern of thinking, and they do it! It's really a shame it will never be available to them.”

“You are such a bastard,” Sarah muttered.

Dave went on as if he hadn't heard. “But on regular people, well, it renders them extremely suggestible, as well. The trick is, you have to use a much lower dose. In high doses, it helps the mentally ill but destroys the mind of a healthy person. In low doses, though, the healthy mind becomes putty in our hands.”

“What you're saying is that you destroyed the minds of a bunch of German prisoners to find this out,” Ethan said, a low growl in his voice.

“Well, sure. But they were Nazis,” Dave said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“I don't understand. Bromcyan was discovered by Herman Wissen at the asylum. You keep saying that Fortitude did all this, but Fortitude wasn't there. It was an asylum and then a government POW camp,” Sarah said.

“Technically you're correct, of course. It wasn't until after the war that the Fortitude Corporation officially came into being,” Dave replied. “When the POW camp closed, the government decided to create some distance between themselves and our work with Bromcyan. Plausible deniability, I believe it's called.”

Sarah closed her eyes, not wanting to hear more, but unable to stop herself from asking, “Fortitude is the government?”

“No, no,” Dave said. “Fortitude is a government contractor. Did you miss the part about plausible deniability?”

“Who founded Fortitude?” Ethan asked.