Wild Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Dana’s eyes were intense. “Babe. No offense. But, worst-case scenario, that is exactly what you’ll end up doing.”

  “First things first. There is nothing more awesome than when you call me babe instead of Scoot. You should never not do that. Also? I feel fine—” Cal suddenly jerked and spun and then doubled over and puked just back beyond his car.

  Dana set down her bags and went to help him as the rest of us tried to give them privacy. Which, frankly, is very hard to do when someone is violently dry-heaving a few feet away from you.

  Garrett checked his email on his phone, while Morgan leaned against the front of the car and simply closed his eyes.

  Milo came to greet me. Still no kiss hello though. But maybe that was because he was chewing his nicotine gum. Of course maybe he was chewing gum as an excuse not to kiss me. Or…

  He broke into my current swirl of crazy overthinking by saying, “I got the GPS marker on our John Doe’s car. When Dana called, it was kinda now or never, so I did it en route. A fifty-mph marking can be ugly, so I’ll have to go back. Make sure it’s secure. Kinda driving me crazy—the idea that we might lose him. But this is important, too.”

  It was an unusually long speech for Milo, and I could smell that he was nervous. Of me? That didn’t make sense. I tried to focus on his words, which didn’t quite make sense either. En route? “Wait. Fifty miles per hour? You seriously put the GPS thing onto his car while you were going fifty miles per hour on the bike?” I had to work really hard to keep my voice from sliding up to octaves that only dogs could hear.

  Milo nodded. “I had to. It’s stupid and dangerous, I know, but letting him just vanish would’ve been even more stupid and dangerous, so…”

  “Seriously, Miles,” I said.

  “He’s coming for you, Sky,” Milo told me, “and I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Now my heart was in my throat. “But first you had to come here to make sure I wasn’t the one who had to kill Calvin, if Calvin jokers and needs, you know, killing.” I looked at him hard. “That wasn’t Dana’s idea—that was yours, wasn’t it?”

  Milo nodded.

  “You’re always trying to protect me,” I said. “But you don’t have to. I’m strong—”

  “And tough, and capable,” he said. “I agree completely. Could you handle this—if Cal jokers? Yes, I know you could. Absolutely. But you shouldn’t have to. Nobody should ever have to kill their best friend, Sky.”

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks. Except he’s your friend, too.”

  “But I’ve seen enough addicts joker,” Milo told me quietly. “Yeah, he’ll have Calvin’s face, but I won’t have any doubts at all that he’s not Calvin anymore. I’ll be okay.” He corrected himself. “More okay.”

  We were talking as if it was a given—that Cal was going to joker, kill Dana, and then die at Milo’s hand. My face twisted as the shock of that hit me, and I almost burst into tears, but Milo grabbed me and hugged me hard.

  And yes, our connection clicked on. God, Sky, I love you so much and I wish to hell I could fix this! He wasn’t so much thinking it in words as he was feeling it with every cell in his body.

  Still thoughts, I sent back for both of us. Still…

  Just then, the alarm for Calvin’s car went off—the horn blared and the lights flashed, and Milo and I sprang apart.

  “Ow! Merde!” Morgan jumped up from where he was leaning on the front hood. “Hello! I just got a shock!”

  “Sorry! Sorry!” We all turned to see Calvin backing away from the car, his hands out. Dana gestured to Milo to give back the car keys, but Cal beat her to it, silencing the car by pointing at it and sending it an electrical current direct from his hand. It would’ve been cool, except it wasn’t. It was scary and weird and awful.

  “Sorry, that was me,” he apologized. “I was leaning against the car and I must’ve… Sorry.” He looked at Dana and added, “I’m okay. Sorry about reprising my role as the Vomit King, but I’m done. And yes, I know I’ve felt better, but—” He shook his head feebly. “I’m not great. I’ll admit that much. But I do know that I’m in complete control.”

  Dana’s expression was grim as she looked at him, especially considering he’d just sent an accidental electrical current through the car that he’d been leaning against. “You think that now. But if something goes wrong and you joker—you could do things. Terrible things. And it won’t be you anymore, Cal. It’ll be the drug, making decisions for you.”

  Calvin’s jaw clenched. I had never seen him look so solemn. “I would never hurt you, Dana. I swear it.”

  Dana nodded as she gazed into his eyes. “I know you believe that, babe. But Destiny is stronger than you. It’s stronger than love. It’s stronger than anything.”

  She picked up both bags again, slinging them over her shoulder as she used her other arm to help support Cal.

  Milo took a step toward them, his brow furrowed in concern.

  “I got this,” Dana said, looking at him—her longtime friend who I knew she loved as much as I loved Calvin. She pointed to the collar of her bomber jacket, and I saw she’d clipped one of those Minicams there.

  Milo nodded and held up the tablet we’d been using to scope out the inside of Rochelle’s house. He must’ve had it in his jacket pocket. “Turn it on,” he said, and she did even as she started to lead Cal through the fence and toward the abandoned mall.

  I leaned in to look, and the picture had already come on line. I was both relieved and horrified that, even from a safe distance, thanks to that camera, I’d have a front-row view of my best friend getting injected with Destiny.

  And then maybe killing Dana.

  I loved them both so much. This whole thing was like one big nightmare that I couldn’t wake myself up from.

  I couldn’t stand it. I bounded after them. “Wait!” I exclaimed.

  Calvin and Dana both turned around, their frowns identically quizzical.

  “Just let me give you both a hug before you go inside,” I said.

  Dana didn’t hide her eye roll. But Calvin grinned. “Lend me some sugar. I am your neighbor!” he exclaimed, stealing a quote from an old-school song he liked to sing when he was in one of his goofy moods.

  I felt way more like crying than laughing. But I managed to smile before wrapping my arms around him. “Be careful,” I said.

  “Always,” he whispered.

  I let go of Cal and turned to Dana. “I know you think I’m cheesy, but I really need to—”

  “Just get it over with, Bubble Gum,” she interrupted me impatiently, spreading her arms wide as I rushed to hug her. “Christ,” she added in a gruff voice. But she hugged me back, hard.

  ————

  “When we’re done here”—Dana’s voice came through the Minicam’s microphone, loud and clear, as Garrett, Morgan, Milo, and I got back into Cal’s car to avoid the mosquitoes—“let’s take a road trip to Orlando and scope out that address you were screaming about. The one near the Doggy Do Good warehouse. Okay?”

  Milo took the driver’s seat—he had the car keys. And Garrett and Morgan climbed in the back, leaving me the seat beside Milo. He propped the tablet on the dashboard so everyone could see. He also put his cell phone in the cup holder between us. Except it wasn’t his cell phone. It was different. That was weird. I shot him a What’s that? look, but his full focus was on adjusting the screen of the tablet.

  “Yeah,” Calvin said from inside the mall, his voice clear, too. “That’s a good idea.”

  “She’s good,” Morgan commented from the backseat. “Dana. She’s setting up a reality where Calvin survives the injection without jokering. It’s good he goes in believing that.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great if your sister was just…there,” Cal said as Dana helped him through the door to our familiar theater six. She was holding a flashlight and the light bo
unced around the big room. “Like, we kick down the door, and she’s the first girl we see? I mean, everything’s always so hard. It’d be nice if something was easy.”

  “I hear you,” Dana said. “That would be nice.”

  “Then we could all go to Hawaii and live happily ever after,” Cal said.

  “Hawaii?” We heard the sound of her putting her bags on the floor, heard a zipper unzipping as she briskly opened the larger one.

  “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go. Take a hike through the jungle to see a volcano. Maybe make out beneath a waterfall…”

  “You have a thing for waterfalls, huh?” Dana teased.

  “I have a thing for you,” Cal told her.

  Dana must’ve turned to look at him, because Calvin’s face appeared on-screen, his eyes shiny as nickels against the glaring beam of the flashlight. He looked like a cat gazing into the dark, and I shuddered. But then he smiled and he was back to being Cal again.

  Dana said, “Wait a sec, let me…” And the image was dizzying for a moment as she plucked the camera off her jacket. She somehow stuck it against the wall, giving us a clear view of the whole room.

  Calvin was sitting against the far wall of the theater. He deliberately focused his gaze onto the camera and waved.

  Garrett, genius that he was, waved back.

  “Here hold this for me,” Dana ordered, crossing to Cal and handing him the flashlight.

  He obediently aimed the beam down onto her two bags as she took out what looked like a syringe. Yup, it definitely was.

  “I wish I could turn on the lights for you,” Cal said pointing up at the theater’s overheads. Last time we were there, he’d used his Destiny-induced power to make them explode. But now, little more than tiny sparks jumped feebly from his fingertips. Look what I can do, look what I can do…

  I shivered again. And I wanted to reach for Milo, hold his hand, but not reaching for him had become our new normal, so I didn’t. Instead I gestured to the phone in the cup holder, mostly to distract myself while Dana prepped that syringe. “Don’t tell me your phone died again and you’re already using the backup.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s…not…” He cleared his throat. “No.”

  “It’s a trigger phone,” Morgan said from the backseat. “Isn’t it?”

  Milo glanced at me as he nodded.

  “A what?” I asked.

  Milo sighed and then answered by taking my hand. Our connection snapped on, and I felt the sudden rush of being shown one of Milo’s memories. He was with Dana. They were both out of breath—they’d been fighting…someone…?

  A Destiny addict who jokered. It was before we met you, and it was ugly, Milo told me, as in his memory, he opened the trunk of the now-dead joker’s car. “Whoa,” he’d said aloud, and Dana came to look, too. “Whoa,” she’d echoed.

  The trunk contained four homemade bombs, all wired to be triggered by a cell phone. I watched Dana reach into the trunk to pick up the phone—it was the same one that was now in the cup holder.

  Dana didn’t want to sell them, Milo said. She was afraid they’d end up in the wrong hands. We blew one up—he shot me another memory, this time of a deserted and overgrown orange grove, similar to the ones out to the east of the interstate, where an explosion ripped through the overcast morning sky—just to see how it worked—if it worked.

  Obviously, it had.

  He shifted to another memory then—this one of Dana stashing the three other bombs beneath the piles of rubble inside the twenty-plex’s theater six.

  Now, inside that same theater, Dana looked up at the camera and spoke. “This thing still on?”

  Milo took his cell phone—his real cell phone—from his pocket, and quickly typed All good.

  The sound of an incoming text made Dana’s phone chirp and she glanced at it to see that, yes, Milo was giving her the green light. We were ready to blow Calvin up if he jokered and killed Dana.

  Dear Lord.

  “All right, boys and girls,” she said under her breath.

  Milo used the zoom feature on the tablet to bring the camera to a relative close-up of Calvin.

  I felt my heart rate quicken. This was it.

  Still thoughts. Still thoughts. Milo’s voice filtered through my mind. I realized he was still holding my hand. And, despite the fact that I could sense those walls he’d erected—the ones that kept his various secrets from me—I knew that he wanted to be there for me, as much as he could be in that moment.

  I, however, wanted to cry.

  Don’t cry, Skylar. Just breathe.

  On the tablet screen, Dana helped Calvin by tying one of those giant rubber bands around his upper arm. His veins popped up, and she tapped them, feeling, exploring with her fingers, then wiping with a little antibiotic swab before settling the needle on his arm.

  “I love you,” Calvin told her. “I love all you guys.”

  “We love you, too,” I whispered.

  “I’m going to do this slowly,” Dana said. “Try to stay as still as possible. If you can, keep your heart rate down.”

  Still thoughts…

  As I closed my eyes, squeamish or maybe just unwilling to watch that needle puncture Cal’s skin, I remembered my recent flurry of texts with Milo and my promise that if I had any questions for him, I’d not not-ask.

  So I asked. What is it, exactly, that you still don’t want me to see?

  Milo got very still, and then almost as if opening a floodgate, he did it. He actually dissolved those walls. I was suddenly hit with hundreds of vividly sharp memories—a brown-eyed young woman singing, me getting off the bus at school, an enormous dog lunging and snarling before being jerked back by a chain, that awful moment in Alabama when Milo’d thought I’d been shot and I thought he’d been shot, a hawk wheeling against a bright-blue sky…

  The giddy, dizzying rush of the street beneath the wheels of a motorcycle—I fell hard into that memory. I knew instantly that it was from this afternoon. The street hummed beneath those wheels as Milo got closer, closer, closer to a gray SUV. At the speed he was going, it was heart-stoppingly dangerous, and I actually gasped. But then I felt him kick that memory away. Not important.

  Don’t, I tried to tell him, but then I was sucked into another memory, just as vivid, but much, much older. The closet, his stepfather, his stepfather’s rage…

  Just like in the dream I’d had, I was Milo, seeing through Milo’s eyes.

  “You want to go? Then go!” the man shouted at us, spittle flying as he flung the closet door open. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  I could feel Milo’s nine-year-old self crying, sobbing: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I have nowhere to go!”

  He—we—shrank farther back into the darkness of the closet as his stepfather laughed—and left us there, the door unlocked.

  I could feel Milo’s shame that he hadn’t run away. He’d stayed.

  You were nine! I told him.

  But I didn’t try to escape foster care either, he said as he showed me a memory from when he was fifteen. Bigger. Stronger. We sat, head down, at a table in an unfamiliar kitchen. Hands almost as big as Milo’s were now clasped together in front of us as yet another man screamed at him. “You worthless piece of shit!” and “How will he ever learn if you coddle him?”

  I knew from being inside this memory that Milo had taken his stepmother’s punishment for leaving the light on in the bathroom—a beating that should have gone to a younger boy who’d only just arrived and was still deeply grieving his real mom’s death.

  I didn’t leave, Milo told me, until Dana showed up. We lifted our head in that memory, as Milo’s foster father raged on, and there, sitting across the rough wood of that table was a teenaged Dana. With long hair and no makeup, she looked very different, but the fire that burned in her ice-blue eyes was exactly the same.

&
nbsp; If it weren’t for Dana, I’d probably still be there, Milo told me.

  Then thank goodness for Dana. She’d put a crack of doubt in Milo’s well-forged belief that he truly was a worthless piece of shit.

  “Almost done,” Dana now murmured to Calvin from theater six. “Just keep breathing, babe.”

  It was then that it happened.

  Calvin’s eyes snapped open. And all the previous absence of color came rushing back to his face, like a wave of life crashing into his body.

  He smiled—and then he made a horrible, hideous face, teeth bared. “ARGH!”

  Electricity seemed to crackle around him, and—bang!—all of the lights went glaringly on in theater six.

  The camera had been set for low light, so we instantly lost the picture to extreme overexposure, but I heard Dana scream, heard something clatter—the syringe—as it hit the floor.

  “Oh my God!” Garrett shouted from our backseat. “Is he jokering?”

  The car was awash with the smell of fear, anger, and grief as Milo dropped my hand and reached for the trigger phone. Morgan lunged for the tablet, working to adjust the settings so we could see what was happening, as over the microphone I heard Cal laughing.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Cal said even as I caught Milo’s wrist. “Easy, easy there! I was kidding, I was kidding! I’m fine! But, girl! Your face! I punked you! It was crazy!”

  “That was not funny, Calvin!” we heard Dana say raggedly. “I could’ve killed you!”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” he said and Morgan got the picture back just in time to see Cal shoot what looked like a lightning bolt from his finger. He laughed again. “I’m so cool!”

  Dana turned to look into the camera, and the expression on her face was a million shades of grim. “Calvin is fine. He punked me. He was just kidding,” she told us.

  She had reason to be grim. The fact that Calvin didn’t recognize just how messed up it was to pretend to joker was a sign of his growing lack of empathy.

  Morgan said what we were all thinking. “So that was definitely not good.” And then he asked the question we were all wondering, “So where do we go from here?”