“Right. Which is why she said it hurt.”
Ben scratched his stubble, worrying over the problem. “Not ‘help me’ or ‘I’m cold’ or even ‘resistance is futile.’ Just ‘my throat hurts.’”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “‘Resistance is futile’? Really?”
Sam was hovering in the doorway. Big brown saucer eyes. “Is she okay, Cassie?” he asked.
“She’s alive,” I said.
“She swallowed it!” Ben said. The Idea Man. “You didn’t find it because it’s in her stomach!”
“Those tracking devices are the size of a grain of rice,” I reminded him. “Why would swallowing one hurt her throat?”
“I’m not saying the device hurt her throat. Her throat has nothing to do with it.”
“Then why are you so worried about it being sore?”
“Here’s what I’m worried about, Sullivan.” He was trying very hard to stay calm, because clearly somebody had to be. “Her showing up out of the blue like this could mean a lot of things, but none of those things could be a good thing. In fact, it can only be a bad thing. A very bad thing made even badder by the fact that we don’t know the reason she was sent here.”
“Badder?”
“Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can’t talk the Queen’s English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.”
I sighed. The rage was leaching out of me, leaving me a hollow, bloodless, human-shaped lump.
Ben looked at Megan for a long moment. “We have to wake her up,” he decided.
Then Dumbo and Poundcake crowded into the room. “Don’t tell me,” Ben said to Poundcake, who of course wouldn’t. “You didn’t find nothing.”
“Anything,” Dumbo corrected him.
Ben didn’t punch him in the face. But he did hold out his hand. “Give me your canteen.” He unscrewed the cap and held the container over Megan’s forehead. A drop of water hung quivering on the lip for an eternity.
Before eternity ended, a croaky voice spoke up behind us. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Evan Walker was awake.
38
EVERYBODY FROZE. Even the drop of water, swelling at the edge of the canteen’s mouth, held still. From his bed, Evan watched us with red, fever-bright eyes, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question, which Ben finally did: “Why?”
“Waking her like that could make her take a very deep breath, and that would be bad.”
Ben turned to face him. The water dribbled onto the carpet. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Evan swallowed, grimacing from the effort. His face was as white as the pillowcase beneath it. “She is implanted—but not with a tracking device.”
Ben’s lips tightened into a hard, white line. He got it before the rest of us. He whipped on Dumbo and Poundcake. “Out. Sullivan, you and Sam, too.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.
“You should,” Evan said. “I don’t know how finely it’s been calibrated.”
“How finely what’s been calibrated to what?” I demanded.
“The incendiary device to CO2.” His eyes cut away. The next words were hard for him. “Our breath, Cassie.”