Drop of Doubt

by C. L. Stone

  “If I can’t help the guys find out what’s going on, at least let me fill in for them.” I took out the cell phone and showed it to him. “Can I text someone to come get me?”

  Dr. Green glanced at the phone. “Victor got new ones?”

  “I don’t know who he gave the others to, but he’s got one, and there’s two more.”

  Dr. Green nodded, seeming a little reluctant. I thought perhaps maybe I was asking a bit much, but could I stay in the office while he worked like this? Would he? He seemed to understand and relented. “If it’s safe.”

  I tapped at the keyboard on the screen for one of the three cell phone numbers. I wasn’t sure if Victor had enough time to divvy up the cell phones with anyone else, but I crossed my fingers someone was available.

  “Wait,” Dr. Green said. “To make sure it’s Victor, say something random.”

  “What?”

  “Protocol,” he said. “Text him a random word that pops into your head.”

  “How is that a protocol?”

  “If anyone’s infiltrated or is listening in, they’ll assume you’ve sent a mistake and will ask your meaning. Victor will know you’re trying to make sure it’s him. He’ll send something random back that has nothing to do with the first thing you said. It makes others believe we’ve got a weird code that they can’t crack, and it prevents us from having to make one up all the time.”

  Is that how it worked? Random was protocol? I supposed it made sense. Unless I’d known, I never would have thought of it.

  I racked my brain for a word.

  Sang: Fish.

  Unknown: Sequences.

  I showed it to Dr. Green. He nodded in approval. “Nothing to do with the original. If he’d said ‘chips’ or another animal like snake, you’d know it wasn’t him. Anyone trying to break the code would probably try something that was associated with the original word. And anyone who had no idea and you sent a message to the wrong person, you’d get someone asking who you were and what that was about.”

  “When were you going to tell me how to do this?”

  “I just trained you,” he said. “What do you want from me? I can’t insert my brain into yours. Well, I probably could ...”

  I groaned and sent another text.

  Sang: It’s Sang. Are you busy?

  Dr. Green inched closer, hovering over my shoulder.

  “Do you need to get going?” I asked, sensing his mood.

  “I can put it off a little,” he said.

  “Dr.—”

  “Sean.”

  I sighed, and half smiled. “It’s okay. I can stay here until someone shows up.”

  Dr. Green glanced at the clock on the wall. “I don’t want to leave you.”

  The phone buzzed in my hands.

  Unknown: Are you okay? What’s wrong? You’re still at the hospital?

  Sang: With Dr. Green, but he has to go to do other things and I’m going to be by myself down here in the office. I thought I could go help out at the diner. Is this Victor?

  Unknown: This is Mr. Blackbourne. Do you want to meet me out front? I can be there in ten minutes.

  My heart paused for a moment. It felt like a lifetime since I’d spoken to him and I’d been worried. Getting his was a huge relief. I showed Dr. Green the phone. “Mr. Blackbourne got one of the phones.”

  “Well, I guess if he’s on his way.” He glanced at the clock again. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to run.”

  “We do what we have to.”

  His smile lit up. He patted my cheek. “I suppose our first date had to end sometime.”

  I started giggling at his ongoing joke. I felt loads better now that I wasn’t going to be standing still.

  His fingers slid from my cheeks to my lips. I stopped instantly, surprised by the touch.

  “What did I tell you about that giggling?” He winked at me.

  But the wink set me off. I started giggling more, feeling better. “I can’t ...”

  He smirked, pressing his fingers harder over my mouth as if he could squash it. “Don’t ... don’t ...”

  But his funny eyes, and the way he was grinning was too much. I started giggling against his hand, backing away slightly to tuck my head away in an attempt to hide my face. I pressed my own hands over my face, trying to comply, but giggling behind my hands.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, but his voice tripped with laughter. “What did I tell you?”

  I snickered.

  “Sang,” he said in an attempt at a stern voice. When I glanced over my wall of fingers, his shoulders betrayed his laughter. “I’m telling you to stop.”

  I dropped my hands, clutching at my ribs. I gulped in air, but my giggles raked through me like wildfire. “You started it.”

  “I did not!”

  “You’ve been teasing me all day!”

  “Not all day,” he said, snickering.

  “Yeah, maybe not during the nap.”

  “Oh no, I was teasing you then. You just didn’t hear me.”

  I started laughing again, stepping away from him and holding on to my sides.

  Dr. Green was laughing. He cupped his hand over his mouth, sucking in a deep breath. He dropped his hand, his face forming a more serious expression, but his eyes betrayed his smothered giggling. “No, stop. I need to stop. I’ve got to go cut open a body and I can’t think about you giggling.”

  With the idea of a cut up body and Dr. Green giggling to make a wobbly incision, I started giggling again. It was a sick idea, and a very pitiful one, but I couldn’t erase the image from my head.

  “No,” Dr. Green spread his hand out toward me, lunging. “Okay, go. Go before I can’t stop.” He nudged me toward the office door.

  “Bye, Dr. Green.” I opened the door, stepping out.

  “I said, call me Sean,” he called after me.

  “Bye, Dr. Sean.”

  “Bye, smart ass.”

  I started breaking into another fit, and closed the door behind myself. Though I heard him starting to crack into laughter behind the door.

  I dashed down the hallway. I sent a quick text to Mr. Blackbourne that I would meet him by the front entrance and I was heading there now.

  TAKEN

  I stood by the front door of the hospital wing where I had entered earlier. The sun was low, dropping toward the tree line. Somehow it made me think of my bedroom. It had been a while since I’d been home. I thought I should go there soon. I should check up on Marie. Was she alone? I was sure the boys were keeping an eye on her like they promised, but not seeing her or the house felt surreal in the moment. I couldn’t help thinking about how my life had changed. Maybe I was starting to trust them more. I trusted them now to look out over the house and Marie while I was gone.

  Only, now that I thought about it, they didn’t have their phones. Like mine, they didn’t have the apps, so I couldn’t check in on her, either.

  I tapped at the screen of the iPhone, wondering if I should text Mr. Blackbourne back or try the other phones to see who Victor might have given them to, but I stopped when a familiar gray BMW approached the sidewalk.

  When the BMW stopped in front of the door, I paused, expecting Mr. Blackbourne to jump out and open the door for me like he and the other guys did. Instead, the side door was opened from the inside. I smiled. Mr. Blackbourne wasn’t going to treat me like a dainty snowflake all the time.

  I approached, aimed to wedge myself into the passenger seat.

  The car zoomed forward the moment I picked my feet off the ground, before I was even fully settled into the car.

  “Whoa!” I said, closing the door quickly. “Are we in a hurry?”

  “Yes,” said an unfamiliar voice as the car doors automatically locked.

  I slowly turned, sure that what I was hearing was only Mr. Blackbourne but with a sore throat or some sort of frog he needed to clear out.

  But instead I met face to face with a white mask.

  The rest of his outfit was black: shirt, shoe
s, gloves. Not one inch of space was left to reveal who he was or why he was here.

  I may have made a squealing sound but with my voice broken, it came out like a gasp. My heart raced, thundering against my rib cage. I backed up into the door. “Where’s Mr. Blackbourne?”

  “You shouldn’t worry about him.” The man turned out of the parking lot at a speed that left me swiveling in my seat. “Get your seatbelt on.” His voice sounded like it came from a machine.

  I ignored his request. Terror threatened to immobilize me. I willed myself to think, to not submit to panic and figure a way out. I turned to the door. I gripped the handle until my knuckles turned white and tried to release the lock.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, the mechanical voice wavering, sounding as if a couple of voices were talking at once. He jammed on the accelerator. The car zoomed and he weaved around traffic to head toward the highway.

  I was going to open the door and tumble out the moment he slowed down. “Stop the car,” I said in a determined voice. I don’t know where my faux spine came from, but after getting spooked too many times in the last couple of days, I wasn’t about to let him know how scared I really was.

  “Sang, I’m here to help you.”

  “Let me go!”

  “You need to hear me out,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. If I wanted to, I could have done it sooner and easier than this. I’m just here to help you.”

  “I wouldn’t need help if you would stop following me.”

  “I know about your parents,” he said. He swerved, cutting off another driver. The other driver blared his horn, but the masked man ignored it. He swung the car around sharply to get onto the exit ramp, hard enough that I was grasping the suicide handle just to hang on. “And I told you about your seat belt. You might want to get it on now.”

  I hesitated, but obeyed. If he swerved and got too crazy, he might collide with the other cars. I didn’t want to go sailing out of the car if he crashed. I fingered for the phone in my hands, pushing it next to my thigh on my right, pretending to hold on to the seat for dear life. I tapped at the phone with my thumb, remembering where Mr. Blackbourne’s emergency phone button was. I turned the volume down, before I tapped at buttons. “Who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the man said. The warped voice changed in pitch again. “What you have to do is find the first ticket out of this state and run as far as you can.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Just in case I hadn’t hit it properly the first time, I tapped at the phone again in the right spot, hoping I wasn’t hanging up on Mr. Blackbourne. I couldn’t tell if he was listening or even see if it was on because of the angle. I just hoped.

  “You're not safe here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have to get away from them.”

  “Them?” I asked, being coy. I just wanted him to keep talking.

  “The Academy isn’t for you.”

  My skin prickled. “How do you know?”

  “How do you think I knew you were at the Academy hospital?”

  Academy hospital? I had suspected it but how would he know? “It’s just a normal hospital.”

  “That wing was taken over by the Academy years ago. Anyone within the wing is an Academy member or an Academy guest.” He hit the cruise control and sat back, his shoulders dipping into a relaxed state. “It’s why you were dropped off there. There’s not a fly that enters Academy doors that goes unnoticed.”

  I leaned forward. My heart was thundering inside of me. I was being kidnapped by someone who manipulated me, pretending to be Mr. Blackbourne, which meant I was in danger, but he hadn’t threatened me yet, and I couldn’t help my curious nature. He was warning me, which meant something. Dr. Green had said we should figure out what he wanted and get to know him. “Are you from the Academy?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. He shook his head, but the mask stayed focused on the road. “You should never join. They do horrible things and you need to get out from under them.”

  “What horrible things?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed your limping. Your bruises. I know what they do to you.”

  I recoiled. “No, you’ve got it wrong. It wasn’t them.”

  “No. Not directly.” He half turned his head for a second as if he wanted to look at me, but stopped short, looking back at the road. But I’d caught it: the eyes of the mask were covered over in blackness so I couldn’t see his eyes at all. How he was able to see the road, as the sun set and darkness descended, I wasn’t sure. “But that’s always the case with them, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “If you know they aren’t hurting me, then why are you here?”

  “They put you in danger, Sang. I know. They’ll put you in the line of fire if it means getting what they want.”

  “They’ve been working hard to get me out of danger,” I said. “From people like you who would kidnap me.”

  “Who ran into whose car last night?” The masked man spit back.

  “That’s because you ...”

  “Because I was asking you to come talk to me? No. They wouldn’t let you because they didn’t want you to know. So instead of approaching the car themselves, they tried to run me over. They didn’t ask. They didn’t check to see who was in the car. They grabbed you and hit me. If I hadn’t taken off, I might not be here right now.”

  “They were trying to make sure I was safe.”

  “They didn’t see who I was,” he said. “They didn’t even care.”

  “They fall back before they figure out the details.”

  “But you were already falling back with the big guy before he hit my car.”

  “Maybe it’s because you had to manipulate us.”

  “I do what I have to do,” he said. “And I don’t have to do this at all. I could leave you with them but I’d hate to see you go down with them when they do. You don’t know what they’re doing.”

  My spine stiffened. The threat was clear. “What do you mean?”

  “What did they tell you, Sang? Family first? That they do good when they can?”

  I blushed, knowing as much as that. What I didn’t understand was how he knew. Was he from the Academy? But what did that mean? Something tickled the back of my mind, and I found myself repeating something similar to what Mr. Hendricks had once told me. “If it has to be a secret, it must be something bad they’re hiding?”

  The masked face nodded, but continued to stare off at the road. “You’re not an idiot Sang, but you’re not like them, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They manipulate little kids. They catch them when they’re young. They train them, trying to get them to trust in what they do. Then when they have you by the balls, they ask you to do things. Sometimes bad things.”

  I shook my head, toying with the phone in my hand. Was someone else hearing this? “That’s not true,” I said. I remembered something Luke had told me once. “It’s a choice. You choose what you do and who you are with.”

  “Don’t you find it funny that the Academy picks out a group of boys who were neck deep in trouble with their own families? They need dysfunctional kids, Sang. They need people like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “People who can disappear,” he said. “If you left your family, would they come look for you? No. If you get picked, it might be for no other reason than you can disappear and no one will bother to report you missing. Your parents don’t want you, so they think you’re a good match.”

  “How do you know about my family?’

  “I don’t have to know much to understand why the Academy is interested in you. I don’t know the details. Did they abuse you?”

  I blushed, unable to hide the truth. How could I trust him? But what he was saying had all been true. Didn’t Kota tell me they were all like me once? I wanted to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want to let him know any more secrets, but what I did want w
as to learn everything he knew. “My mother was sick ... she is sick.”

  “But she’s not there now.”

  “No. She’s in the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They took her?”

  “She was ... I ... The guys...” How could I relay what had happened to me? He didn’t understand.

  “Yeah. That’s how they get everyone. She was hurting you, so they did you a big favor and removed the problem. When someone is in the way, they take them out. That’s how they work. They’ll be good to you until you’re a problem. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “What do you mean they remove the problem?”

  He changed lanes, passing up a couple of cars. The signs stated we were getting close to Summerville, but he didn’t change speeds or turn off the cruise control. “Why do you think they’re so scared all the time? Why do you think they’re so quiet? They’re a bunch of teenagers. Have you ever seen teenagers work so hard? Doing what they’re told all the time? Keeping secrets like this?”

  I didn’t know how to explain it. “I mean, they swore. They love what they do. They love the Academy.”

  “They’re boys. Guys that age should be dating girls, and playing video games and sleeping in on Saturday and thinking about college. It’s healthy teenager stuff. Not eliminating people. Not dealing in what they’re dealing with. Not kidnapping your mother.”

  This couldn’t be true. It seemed impossible. The guys were nice, protective. They saved me. He had the wrong idea. “Wait, you said—”

  “Let me ask you something, Sang,” he said. He passed the Summerville exit. Part of me thought he was going to stop there, but now that we were beyond the exit, I had no idea where we were going. In a panic, my heart threatened to take over, to pump against my eardrums so hard, I couldn’t hear his words. He changed lanes again. “Was there anyone else you haven’t seen lately?”

  “What?”

  “Someone who was threatening you. Did they suddenly disappear?”

  Part of me was thinking of my father for a moment, since we had been talking about my mother. He had gone away, but I didn’t think that was what he was talking about. “Do you mean Mr. McCoy?”