Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,97

plastic drops down behind her, sealing us into the stifling dark.

We pause for a moment, in case somebody comes running, but there’s only silence, and if the jets are on their way, the research team must have already evacuated. The center’s double doors are an arm’s length away. I reach out, pull lightly on the handle, and it opens with a squeak.

“Should we just go in?” I ask.

Reese shrugs, her shoulder brushing mine. “What, you want to knock?”

Inside, the main lobby looks the way it did on my first day at Raxter. Faded and yellowing, the walls painted with abstract shapes in shades of green and blue. We cross the room to the reception desk, which is long enough for three or four people. Only one chair behind it, and most of the surface covered by wilting catalogues about the area’s recreational points of interest.

“It’s so quiet,” Reese says. “And so warm. Do you think anybody’s here?”

I think of Headmistress, promised a way out and then left behind. “No. They must have evacuated.” I lean over the desk, pick through the catalogues, but there’s nothing important, nothing to help us find Byatt.

“Where would they put her?” I say, turning to Reese. “They’d need a big enough room.”

“There’s an event room at the back of the building, in the new bit.”

She leads me along the ground floor. We follow signs down a main hallway and then around a room labeled as a chapel to another lobby, this one smaller, shabbier.

There’s blood on the linoleum. That’s the first thing I notice. Pools of it, drawing a path in either direction away from the stairwell that leads up to the antenna tower. I exchange a look with Reese. It’s a lot. More than anybody could really stand to lose.

“Left or right?” Reese says.

We head left, follow the signs for the event room. A bank of windows opens up, and inside, the room is all gurneys and curtains and tears in the linoleum tile. Along the far wall, a small row of cabinets and a sink, a wet bar for the parties nobody ever had here, and above the cabinets, papered over but showing through, posters advertising all Raxter has to offer.

“Where do you think they went?” Reese asks. “The doctors, I mean.”

“Back to the base on the coast, maybe. This place is far enough from school that we wouldn’t see if somebody came to get them.”

The door’s open, the trail of blood disappearing through it, and I go first, take careful steps into the ward. Four beds, three slept in. Across from me one bed is rumpled, the covers thrown off, an IV stand knocked over next to it. Red stains are smeared across the floor.

Reese picks up the clipboard tied to the foot of the gurney and scans it. “This is her. There, see? Byatt Winsor.”

She really was here. But I’m too late. I’m always too late.

I turn, scanning the rest of the room for some sort of clue, when I notice the bed to the left of the door. It’s drenched, the covers soaked with deep maroon splotches. In the middle of it all there’s a scalpel, glinting softly in the flickering light. And there’s something else too.

“Hey,” I say, and Reese turns. “Look.”

“What the hell is that?”

We inch closer. It’s not moving, but Raxter taught me not to trust my eyes. Things can be dangerous long after they’re dead.

“Is that—”

“A worm,” Reese says.

It’s caked in dried blood, but underneath I can see pale, translucent flesh. And somehow it looks familiar. I’ve never seen it before, I’m sure of that, but there’s a twitch in my gut; like answering like.

The worm, and the scalpel, and I can put it together now. Byatt here, with the scalpel in her hand, digging through her insides until she found what she was looking for.

“That was inside her,” I say. And then, because we’re both thinking it: “There’s one inside us, too, isn’t there? It’s the Tox.”

Parasites, living in our bodies, making us their own. Using those who can take it, abandoning those who can’t. Protecting themselves at all costs. Inside me, inside the animals—inside Raxter. Making us wild.

I can’t keep looking at it. I bend over, convulsing as I dry heave.

“It’s okay,” Reese says, rubbing my back.

“I want it out of me.” Tears spring to my eye, and I’m breathing too fast, I have to slow down, I have to. “Please, get it out.”

“We can’t do that.”

I straighten, push her arm