Twist (23 page)

“It's not mine. It's my—”

I froze and stared at the wall of admonishment and concern in front of me. A wall that was missing one key parental unit.

“Where's my mom?” I asked.

“I haven't seen her,” said Charlotte.

I looked at Quigley.

“I've been busy at Resthaven cleaning up this mess.” Quigley frowned. “She hasn't been in.”

“That would have been the first place she would have gone when she heard I'd supposedly been kidnapped.” Panic stirred in my stomach. There was no way she would have waited twelve hours, not with it all over the news.

“I'm sure she's okay.” Finn tried to put a reassuring arm around me, but I pulled away.

“She's not. I can feel it. Look at me. Whatever the change was, I'm a mess now. I have to get back to her.” I willed my tendrils to take me back, right then and there, but they didn't budge.

Quigley was trying unsuccessfully to hide her own concern.

“Check in with me as soon as you're able,” she said. And with that she disappeared.

“I'm going back with you.” Finn pulled me closer to his side, and what I would have done to sink into those arms forever, to keep him with me.

“You can't.”

“I just got you back,” he said. “I can't lose you again.”

“You never lost me,” I said, even as my tendrils started to prickle. “And you never will.”

“I know.” He kissed the top of my head. The rest of the Mastersons had the decency to turn away and pretend to talk amongst themselves.

“Promise me if Jafney comes here, you won't use her to go back to my time,” I said. “She doesn't need to be pulled any further into this.”

“I promise.” Finn looked stricken but resigned. “If you run into her, would you apologize for me? I know it was for a good cause, but I still hate that I put her in danger.”

“I will.”

“And for me, too,” said Georgie.

“What did you do?” Finn narrowed his eyes at her.

“There might be the tiniest stink bomb planted beneath her bed.”

“You did that for me?” I said.

“For you.” Georgie gave me a big hug. “And for my own entertainment.”

“Aww.”

“Could we have a moment alone?” Finn asked his family.

Charlotte gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You be careful, dear.”

John patted my shoulder.

When they left, Finn pulled me into an embrace. I knew full well that every minute I was gone was another minute I'd need to explain away to the authorities to keep Finn safe. A minute I didn't know if my mother was all right, if she was even alive. But it was also a minute I wouldn't have to wonder when I'd see him next.

“Hey,” he said, tilting my chin up. “This is temporary. Your mom's going to be fine.”

“Yeah.” I tried to force a smile but couldn't muster one. Finn's optimism was usually more contagious than capuchin fever.

Not this time.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.” There was so much feeling pressed into those words, it physically hurt to say them.

“I'll see you soon,” he whispered. His kiss lingered on my lips as the familiar tug pulled on my every cell. When I opened my eyes, that's exactly where I was. A cell.

A jail cell.

 

chapter 18

WHEN I WAS TWELVE,
my mom got sick on a work assignment. Yellow fever. The virus somehow slipped past the decontamination chamber after she got back, and she ended up quarantined for a week while the Office of Temporal Health backtracked her movements to contain any potential outbreak.

After I'd been immunized, they let me stay with her at the hospital. I remember curling up next to her on the narrow hospital bed and running my fingers through her thick mane of hair that was so her—a little wild, a little untamed, always a bit of a mess, so much fun. Beautiful.

“Someday,” I had said, “I'm going to invent a medicine that protects everyone against every sickness ever.”

“Hmm. What about heartache?” She snuggled me up close.

“Especially heartache,” I remember saying. “It's the one that hurts the worst.”

*   *   *

“Mom?” I recognized her profile immediately. She sat in the corner of the six-by-six feet holding cell, a hoodie pulled around her face. Her posture spoke defeat. I rushed over and threw my arms around her. “You're alive. I was so scared.”

“Bree?” She peeled me away. “What are you doing? You can't be here.”

“What happened?” I asked. “Why are
you
here?”

“Bree…”

“Never mind. It doesn't matter. I'm going to get you out.”

“It's not that simple.” She pulled back her hoodie, and that's when I actually saw her. In all her bald glory.

The thing about hair is that you don't think about how it defines your appearance until it's gone. But in our society, where your hair is your identity, it doesn't just define your appearance, it defines
you
. It allows you to buy groceries. It gets you from point
A
to point
B
. It opens doors. Literally.

I ran a shaking hand over my mother's bald scalp. She was a Shavie now. It was like staring down some alien that had taken over her body.

“What happened?” I let out a choked gasp.

Mom twisted away from me, all twitchy and fidgety. She peered around the corner of the force field that held her captive. We were alone, but she chewed on the tiny sliver that was left of her thumbnail. The rest were bloody stumps.

“You can't be here,” she said again.

“Tell me why you're here.”

“I got caught.” Her voice trembled.

“Caught? What are you talking about?”

“With the sleeping medicine.”

“What sleeping medicine? Wait. The narcotics? Mom! That's impossible. I threw those in the incinerator.”

Mom stood and paced the tiny cell.

“The chronocrime unit arrived the morning after you took the vial.”

“That was yesterday. That's when I was drugging Wyck.”

“It was Wyck who went to the police.”

“What?”

“He told them he'd caught me trying to throw it into the incinerator at the Institute. He had the bottle as proof,” she said.

“That doesn't make sense,” I said. “I was the one who threw it in the incinerator. How did he even get ahold of it?”

“I don't know, but my fingerprints were all over it.”

“Well, so were mine.”

“No. Yours had been wiped clean.”

“What does it matter? They're fingerprints! Everyone knows they're completely unreliable.” Again though, it didn't make sense. If Wyck was out to destroy me, the most direct route was to put
me
in this cell. And if he was after the reverter, the most direct route was to drug
me,
like Georgie had said. “At least it was only fingerprints. That evidence will never hold in court.”

My mother glanced away.

“Mom?”

She swallowed and blew out a slow breath. I could tell she was fighting back a deluge of tears.

“What aren't you telling me?” I asked, holding back my own.

“When they searched our house, they found … the others.”

“The other whats?”

“The other bottles.”

“What other bottles?”

“I had more of the sleeping elixir that I'd bought in your father's time,” she said. “And … other medicine, too. Pills to help me stay awake.”

“
More
drugs?”

“I didn't think—”

“Yeah. You didn't think! You didn't think about me. You didn't think about Dad.” It was the first time I'd ever called him that instead of “my father,” not that these were the circumstances in which I wanted to suddenly feel a kinship with him. Then something occurred to me.

“How do you even remember any of this?” I asked. As an unchipped Shifter, she should have been as clueless to the events leading up to the change as I was. She should have been trying to piece together her last few days like I would have to piece together mine.

“When the police showed up, the first thing they did was check my chip. One more damning piece of evidence.” She twisted her hands in unending knots. “They assumed I tampered with it to get the drugs. I couldn't argue otherwise or it would have exposed the Haven. The police turned my chip back on.”

“They what?'

“I'm Anchored, Bree. Permanently.”

“Mom, I can't … I'll fix this.”

“Bree…”

“No. I'll fix this. I'll, umm, I'll blackmail Wyck to go and change it back or … or … Charlie! Charlie got accepted into the Neo program. I can talk him into going back and stopping Wyck or … something.”

“Bree, stop.” A single tear slid down her cheek and splashed to the floor. “When the doctors checked my system, they said that if I had taken any more, I would have overdosed.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think this may have saved my life.”

I couldn't lose her again. But this wasn't a life. This wasn't
her
life.

We held each other, sobbing. With her hair gone, it was like she'd shrunken three sizes.

Her hair.

“Why are you a Shavie?” I asked.

“They, umm”—her shoulders shook—“they had one of your hairs with them. Wyck told them that he had caught me using it to get to the incinerator.”

I let loose a wide swath of swears, every word I'd come up with for that snerfwad for six months.

“Wyck won't get away with this.”

“The thing is,” my mom choked out, and it was the most pitiful sound, like someone had stepped on a bleating lamb, “he didn't do anything I hadn't already … considered.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“I mean, when you took the laudanum to school to dispose of it, it gave me the idea. I knew I needed some way to dispose of the bottles in a pinch. I hadn't done it yet. I hadn't stolen your hair, but…”

“But you were going to?”

She nodded and tried to look at me but couldn't meet my eyes.

“I should have taken you to a detox center when I found out about the drugs,” I said. “This is all my fault.”

“No.” She finally met my gaze full on. “I did this. I'm done blaming anyone else.”

There was this saying my grandpa always used to toss around. There's nothing as inevitable as inevitability. Grams said she heard it so much she should cross-stitch it onto a pillow so he could just point to it. But the thought of it sitting on their couch, staring at her, was too depressing.

I wondered how depressed she'd be to see her only child trapped in prison with no hair and no hope.

Mom slumped over, curled into herself, like the very act of existing was too much. I tried to muster more fury at Wyck, but the truth was that he hadn't forced her to take those drugs. He hadn't turned her into an addict or made her so desperate she had considered using her only child to keep that addiction going. He'd peeled away the fa
ç
ade to expose the inevitable.

But maybe it wasn't inevitable. I thought about Quigley's Point Zero theory. I didn't believe that Mom had always been destined to be some sort of drugster junkie. Mom had never used so much as an aspirin before all this mess with ICE started.

My pocket let out a low whir. I yanked out the glowing reverter and yelled, “Not now!” as if the person meddling with his past could hear me. Mom was still in jail, and I still had all my teeth, so apparently it wasn't a change that had too direct an impact on me.

“Aren't you going to get that?” Mom asked.

“I'm not leaving you.”

“Bree, you can't stay here. You know that. And you're the only hope that unchipped Shifters have right now of maintaining any semblance of sanity.”

No pressure or anything.

“You have to focus on ICE.” She held my hands in hers. “You have to go back to the Institute and pretend that everything is normal, that you knew nothing of my drug use.”

“No.” I squeezed her hands. “I can't do that.”

Mom let go and instead gripped me by the shoulders. Gone was the whimpering waif.

“You will.” She positioned my thumb on the end of the reverter. “Now go.”

“But I—”

“Go.”

“I love you so much,” I said.

“And I love you.” She kissed my forehead and pressed my thumb down before pulling herself away. “More than all the minutes of my life.”

This change couldn't have come at a worse moment. I needed more time with her. I needed to know she'd be okay, that somehow I'd fix this.

I closed my eyes as I faded and tried to conjure a mental picture of Mom—my real mom—to cling to, but it was no use. This shrunken Shavie had rooted itself in my mind like a weed.

When I opened them, I was inches away from another weed in my life.

“Leto Malone.”

I pulled back my fist and slammed it into his face as hard as I could.

 

chapter 19

I'D GIVE THIS TO LETO.
The man knew how to take a punch. He smeared the drip of blood away from his nose with the back of his hand and spit another trickle out of his mouth. I didn't think I'd hit him that hard, but whatever. We were tucked away in a dark back corner of a nearly deserted convenience store.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“For treating the space-time continuum like your personal playground.” I got another little shove in and pulled my fist back again, but he caught it midair.

“Do we know each other?” He gripped his forehead as if it was throbbing.

“Oh, I know you. And stop being so dramatic.” I hadn't hit him
that
hard.