The Unpaired (The Pairings Book 3) Page 13

  We had tested Dad, though, and he’d recalled more than just his life before the virus, but everything that had happened in between. Each visit I’d had with him while he’d been in the hospital was there in his mind, but New Zero had blocked them until yesterday.

  He’d apologized for making me feel bad every time I had visited, but I’d told him it wasn’t his fault. I thought of Mom and how she would react when we eventually got the cure for her. All those times when she’d flirted with John in front of me. I smiled at the thought. Her embarrassment was the least of my worries, as she would have full memory of the entire experience and we wouldn’t have to fill in the gaps.

  Somehow, the treatment had reset the connections in Dad’s brain for memory, and it had come back with more clarity than ever before. It had been astonishing, but when he started to fade, there’d been a difference between his clear eyes and the ones slowly clouding over. He had tripped over his words, but his final ones were burned into my mind like a searing brand.

  “It’s going. Lora, I can feel it going…” his voice trailed off before he’d started speaking as he had before. His memories had come in spurts then, and they’d been a stark difference from what we had seen just minutes before.

  Four hours after the injection, he had reverted to the original state we’d found him in.

  I’d had all night to think about a solution. Jarid was right. They were onto something, but they needed that extra piece—me—to figure it out.

  While he had to know I wasn’t going to allow my parents to suffer when we had access to the treatment, I couldn’t let him get any more scans without me getting everything I wanted in return.

  Syeth and I had discussed a plan, as I wasn’t leaving him out of any decisions anymore. Jarid wanted to work with us, and he had a bargaining chip to assure success for whoever had joined him from Sledge’s team. Me.

  The phone that Jarid gave me sat in front of me on the bed. I sent the message, and it had been over twenty minutes already with no response.

  I rechecked the screen as if I wouldn’t have heard the notification even though I had the sound turned up all the way.

  The treatment worked. I’m in. Only on one condition: We get John back.

  The BioPure scientists had the knowledge, but John was the only one I trusted to find a permanent cure for New Zero. The treatment Jarid had given us was proof BioPure was onto something, but I wasn’t about to give up my mind without getting something in return. I wanted my dad back.

  If Jarid’s contact could supply John, I would give them the willing mind they required for the scans.

  My phone pinged, and I clicked on the pop-up at the very moment it appeared on the screen.

  I need to see if it’s possible. Give me some time.

  Time was all I had. Without John, I didn’t see a reason to go to the lab and get in the techs’ way. I wasn’t a part of that team without my father. I was the guinea pig while he was the brains of the operation. Besides that, I wasn’t going to slow the production of the treatment, which I was sure would happen if they split their focus in order to train me. I had one goal, and that was getting a cure. It was John’s legacy, and I wasn’t going to let it end quite yet.

  I tried to busy myself with cleaning up around the apartment and making myself a late breakfast. I constantly heard phantom pings from my phone, but it wasn’t until later in the afternoon that I received another text.

  It’s on. We can get him. More details soon.

  I gasped and read the message three more times before putting the phone on the counter. I retrieved my own phone from the charger by the door to call Syeth. I dialed anxiously. Besides, I wanted to share my excitement in more than just a hundred exclamation points.

  A knock at the door stopped me before I could complete the call. “Syeth?” Had he forgotten his key?

  I opened the door. “You’ll never believe it…”

  Instead of Syeth, four Unpaired stood in the doorway. The one in the front of me was a frowning Isra.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. “Syeth isn’t here.”

  “We know. We have him at the bunker.”

  I tucked my phone into the back of my pants. “You’re looking for me, then?”

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your choice,” Isra said. Like a flash, she reached around me and plucked my phone from its hiding spot.

  I reached for it, but the other Unpaired around her lunged forward.

  Isra lifted her hand to stop them. They didn’t move any closer, but they all had their hands on their guns. Since when had I turned into the enemy?

  Isra held the phone. “I never thought you were this stupid, Lora. I warned you.”

  Marching across the town with a group of Unpaired wasn’t how I’d intended to spend my morning. Isra flipped through my phone as we walked. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why she’d wanted it. Though, how did she know about Jarid and the phone? Syeth wouldn’t have told her. Maybe one of the others on our team had?

  I couldn’t imagine any of them doing that—especially after what we had gone through at the prison. Then I recalled the set-up in Isra’s office. All the monitors and equipment. She had intercepted earlier messages from him. They must have found a signal or loophole from there and figured it out.

  Once we reached the Unpaired bunker, Isra led the way into a small room that was barely big enough to fit a table and two chairs. On the way, I peered into each of the other spaces we passed, but didn’t see Syeth anywhere.

  The door closed behind Isra, leaving us alone.

  “Sit,” she said, indicating the chair furthest from the door. I did. She moved her chair to the side and tossed the burner phone on the table.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “A soldier swept the room after we left.” Isra pushed off the table and crossed her arms. “I knew you saw him, but I didn’t think you would be idiotic enough to take a phone from him, Lora. Did you even attempt to think about what I said about him? BioPure could easily track your whereabouts and listen in on any conversations so long as you had that phone on you. You could have impacted all of us.”

  “Jarid wouldn’t do that!”

  “Why not? I did.”

  I glanced at the phone and then back at her. “You bugged my phone.”

  “You were and are a liability, Lora. We know you met with Jarid. We’ve been monitoring you since you checked it at the door last time I saw you.”

  “That’s an invasion of privacy!”

  “It’s security.” Isra dragged her chair across the floor and placed it next to me. “Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t treat you, Syeth, and your little gang like traitors.”

  Isra had called Jarid a traitor so many times, but hearing that term directed toward Syeth and the others seemed wrong. We were trying to help everyone afflicted by New Zero.

  Even though my body buzzed with anger and I wanted to tell Isra off, I wasn’t in the position to. I had every right to be angry with her for tracking my device, but I was even more upset with myself for not realizing they would when they’d had my phone. If I hadn’t been so desperately focused on finding John, I might have understood the trap I had walked into. But, I had no idea where she had Syeth and if she had the others in another interrogation room. I had to be stronger than my emotions in order to get through this conversation—and get the others out of Isra’s line of fire.

  I took a deep breath. There’d always been a risk of Isra or the other Unpaired finding out about our communicating with Jarid. But I thought I’d have more time to prepare an explanation. I had been too focused on getting the cure. As she said, I’d been a fool for not understanding the danger.

  Isra rolled her hand in a circular motion, pushing me to tell her everything. From the conversation I’d had with her in Denver, I knew she wanted nothing more than Jarid in a body bag. She was black and white in that sense, not believing that Jarid wanted to help us in a different way.

  Right now, he w
asn’t in immediate danger from the Unpaired. I was, and so were the others. The only way Isra would let us out now was if I told her the truth. My priority was the cure, and Syeth, but I couldn’t let the rest of the team fall to Isra…not after everything they’d done and tried to do for me. Taking a deep breath, I began to speak.

  “Jarid is working with someone high up in BioPure. They’ve opened a lab to research the cure for New Zero—outside of what is known to the corporation. They’re tired of having BioPure control them. Jarid gave me a sample of what they’ve been doing. I tested it on my father.”

  “You trusted him enough to put your father at risk?”

  A lump formed in my throat over the idea of what I had done to Dad. At the time, I had thought it through. Hearing that question come from Isra with such scorn made me double-guess everything, though. Still, it had worked. And now I had no reason not to trust Jarid.

  “They’ve made a breakthrough. It’s only temporary, but they’re closer than any of us have been so far,” I said.

  Isra tapped her rifle as if she still didn’t believe me. Her face had been a mask through the entire explanation.

  I’d never understood her hesitance to fight for something that affected everyone from rebels to people within BioPure and their families. “There’s potential for a real cure,” I said, “something that will help the rebels, the whole world. The vial Jarid gave me had enough serum to test on one patient, with enough left over to give it to our lab for study. The researchers at his lab need scans of my brain to figure out how to make the cure permanent. John and I were heading in the same direction, but they’re so much farther along than we were. They have the equipment, and the knowledge. All they need is—”

  “You,” Isra finished for me.

  “Yes.”

  She rubbed her chin against her shoulder as if she was scratching an itch. “You heard all that?”

  I shook my head, wondering what she was talking about even as I spotted the small black device on her collar.

  That lump in my throat hardened.

  “Yeah. Check the surveillance video at the hospital. See if you can verify.” She wasn’t talking to me. Until her eyes met mine. “I understand you want to help those afflicted with New Zero. It’s an honorable desire. From the surveillance, it seems as if that traitor Jarid wasn’t lying about this attempt at a cure, too. If I let you do this—and that’s still a big if—I have a condition.”

  I leaned closer, wanting to show her how much I wanted this.

  “You will tell me where you’re meeting up to do this research. I’ll need time to get my forces in position.”

  “To do what?”

  “When you have the cure, you tell me it’s done.” Isra had ignored my question entirely. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a round pin with a blue glass bead in it. It seemed more decorative than militaristic. Why did she have it? I recalled seeing similar pins on rebels as memorials to lost comrades. She placed it on the table in front of me. “This is a signaling device. Click it once, and it’ll ping me your location.”

  There was no way I was getting out of this situation without agreeing to her demands; following them was a different story, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  I peered up at her, and saw she was staring at the wall behind me. “Get the honchos together. Tell them I’ve found something important, and that I’ve got a plan to exploit it.”

  She turned back to me again and held up a finger. “Last thing. You won’t get in my way when I raid the lab, kill anyone affiliated with BioPure, and kill Jarid.”

  “What? He’s helping us. He’s working on the cure. He set this all up. Can’t you—”

  “Save him? You have no negotiation power here, Lora. You went against direct orders not to speak with a traitor. That’s what he is. He’s dangerous to the rebel agenda. Think about what side you’d rather be on.”

  My heart plunged in my chest.

  Isra swung the rifle over her shoulder as she turned.

  There had to be a way I could get around Isra’s conditions. There will be innocent people in that lab.

  Isra’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t bother trying to help him. We’re better trained. And just to make sure you’re honest with me, I want to be crystal clear. If I find out you helped Jarid again, I’ll kill you instead.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took two weeks for us to set up a time with Jarid to meet at the secret laboratory within BioPure territory. Two weeks of Isra tracking me around the area while I visited my ailing parents and tried to help as much as I could at our lab. And two weeks of three hours of sleep each night with my dreams filled with Isra murdering Syeth’s twin.

  Watching Jarid repeatedly die in my head might have been an omen, or my mind preparing for the inevitable.

  I replayed Syeth’s release from the interrogation room in my head, he’d been less than thrilled with Isra’s plan. From the way his cheeks had puffed and the acid pooling in his eyes, his previous frustration with the rebel system had more than bubbled to the surface again. I kept hearing his response in my head, over and over, after I’d told him everything about Isra’s plan for killing the workers and Jarid.

  “Over my dead body,” he’d said, and I worried that might become true.

  For us, there was no longer a question of Jarid’s loyalty. No matter what, he was still family. To Isra, he would always be a traitor—and she’d pretty much accused us of the same thing, making it impossible to dissuade her. I knew without a doubt that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d killed Jarid or me. Probably both if she had her way.

  We sat outside watching the sun set. “Isra and the other commanders aren’t ever going to stop this war until one side is completely obliterated.” Syeth sounded sad as he spoke, and I thought of my parents—John included—and worried about all of the innocents who would get caught up in their war.

  “Escaping is the only option. Once we get the cure, and get your parents well, we have to leave and strike out on our own.”

  I nodded my head. He was right. Based on her past with my family and the Rothkinds, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine Isra taking her anger out on my family if they were left behind. “We need another way.”

  After clearing our clothes and cell phones of any possible tracking devices or software, again, Syeth and I ran through different scenarios to keep Jarid and my family alive. Every time either of us hit the streets, I was certain Isra had eyes on us, which meant that, in all likelihood, someone would be following us when we eventually met up with Jarid. I could only hope that she would honor her agreement, allowing us to work on the cure before she attacked the lab on the hunt for Jarid. Granted, we were brainstorming ways to outwit her, so realistically, she was planning the same for us. Most of our concerns centered on the lab’s location and layout. We couldn’t ask Jarid about the layout or exits because it would alert him to a problem, and there was still much to do before a cure could be finalized.

  The only potential plan we had was to complete the scans, find a cure, and then ping our position to Isra and run for our lives, bringing Jarid with us. As much as Jarid had worked to keep his cover in Chicago, as a loyal employee of BioPure, it wasn’t worth keeping if he was going to pay for it with his life. I was nervous about all of it. We needed to protect Jarid and my parents while helping those affected by New Zero. I had no idea how we were going to save everyone, but we were definitely going to try.

  The idea that our plan might work carried me through the days until I was to report to Jarid’s lab. He’d given us map coordinates to follow, and we knew we’d have a two-hour drive to the abandoned biotech facility located in a small town north of Chicago. As Syeth drove, I kept looking in the side mirror for any vehicles attempting to follow us or drones overhead, but all was quiet. I didn’t trust Isra, but so far, it looked like we were alone.

  Syeth’s radio crackled, and I grabbed it from the cup holder.

  “Go ahead,” I said into it.
<
br />   “The facility is almost ready,” Harper said over the radio. “It needs new locks and several cameras, but Albrecht and Warren are working on completing everything.”

  “How long until it’s ready?” Once our plan worked, we were going to bring the cure from the BioPure facility to the new manufacturing facility we’d chosen. The two weeks while we’d tried to coordinate with Jarid had given our team enough time to find a suitable location and move in supplies and equipment for our researchers.

  “Tomorrow at the earliest,” Harper responded.

  Syeth glanced at me. Along with rescuing Jarid, we had every intention of retrieving as much research as we could while we were in the lab before the Unpaired swooped in and destroyed everything. I wasn’t about to watch another lab be destroyed in front of me unless I was able to get what I needed from it first, and I knew that Isra’s first priority was killing Jarid and not the cure for New Zero.

  “That’s fine,” I said into the radio. Tonight, we would find a location to hide Jarid when the time came, and then we’d figure out the rest in the morning.

  I placed the radio down on the seat between us and stared out the window. As much as we’d discussed all the potential scenarios which could arise once we arrived at the lab, there was a niggling thread of doubt in the back of my mind. It was something Syeth and I hadn’t talked about aloud, but it hung over us like a thick raincloud, ready to explode and drown everything we had hoped for. There was the possibility that this was all a ploy by BioPure to take me prisoner. I imagined getting strapped to another gurney and BioPure finding a way to get the scans of my brain without my consent, or worse, running experiments on me. Though, there was a distinct possibility that Isra wouldn’t let it go that far. Especially once I pinged the location. The button remained on my collar, and it was a soothing back-up plan in the event that things went south fast. But if that were to happen, both Jarid and my parents would be at risk, so I really hoped I didn’t need to use it.

  On the other hand, we had Isra’s volatility to consider. Syeth and I had discussed Isra bringing her forces into the lab before the cure was finalized. Even if she allowed the mission to unfold as we had planned, her threat echoed in my mind each time I thought about us betraying her.