Page 62 of Dangerous Deviance
I scoffed aloud. That fucking voice. Dr. Bates, telling me to let her make her own decision, when I hadn’t been allowed to make any for myself. The ringing started again, pulsing in my head, growing until I could hardly think. Maddie raised her brow at me, and Billy pursed her lips. But it wouldn’t stop. I held my head in my hands. Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop. But the sound was enormous, expanding until it seemed like my brain would pop. I breathed deeply in staggered breaths. I could be stronger than this. Stronger than the voice. I could—
A warm hand on my back startled me. Maddie smiled, her voice dimmed. “You okay?”
Sometimes it felt like it would be easier to accept Dr. Bates’s voice than it would be to fight it. The pain was like nothing I had experienced, as if my entire existence could be wiped out with one headache.
“I’m fine,” I said. But I wasn’t fine at all. I needed to figure out what the hell was going on. “Where is the Skyline Shift?” I asked. “Do any of us remember?” Billy shrugged. “You ever heard of it?” I asked Maddie.
“Brackston,” Jane said. The three of us looked at her curiously, wondering how much she remembered now. “The program was in Brackston,” she repeated.
“Right,” I said. Brackston. I remembered that. Brackston was only an hour or so away from where Julie and I lived. “Yeah. It was in Brackston.”
“Brackston?” Maddie asked, her voice higher-pitched. “Are you sure it was Brackston?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”
She bit her lip, then looked down at the table. “Fuck,” she muttered. “Brackston?”
I nodded. “What’s wrong with Brackston?”
She turned towards the doorway, looking at the window. Wil and Derek were visible in the glass, talking to each other. I assumed Axe was down the hallway.
“Let me talk to Derek,” Maddie said. She stood up. “Keep me posted if you figure anything else out.”
Maddie excused herself from the table, then locked us in the room. I looked up at the walls. I had stopped coming in here after I decided that it wouldn’t give me the answers to my past, but as I looked at the black and white photo of Wil’s family on the wall, I realized it was there all along.
“Are you sure we can trust her?” Billy asked. Jane perked up, nodding her head too. “She seems cool, but she’s with them, isn’t she? Which means—”
“She’s not with them,” I said, raising a hand to remind her to stop. We couldn’t say the trigger word in front of Jane. In the window, Maddie was talking frantically, raising her hands above her head, while Derek nodded, scratching his chin. Wil was off to the side, sighing.
“She’s not with them,” I repeated, knowing deep down that it was true. “She just works for them.”
“Which means—”
I shook my head. “No.” I turned to Billy. “I mean she literally cleans for them.”
“Oh,” Billy said. Jane looked down at her shackled wrists. Derek put his hand on Maddie’s shoulder, looking into her eyes. She shook her head, turning away. Then Wil spoke to Derek. I tried reading his lips, but I couldn’t make out anything.
You’ll never be able to trust him, the voice said.
“Fuck!” I yelled. I pulled on my restraints, the cuffs digging into the bruises on my wrists. “I am so sick of Bates’s voice in my mind all of the damned time.” Jane looked up, her eyes wide. I breathed out hard, letting the air take my anger with it. “Aren’t you?”
“You hear him too?” Jane asked.
“We all do,” Billy said. She shook her head, the brown hair shuffling on her scalp.
Maddie came in abruptly, slamming the door behind her.
“You do realize that Brackston means whoever owned the Skyline Shift could have been working directly with Midnight Miles Corporation, right?”
My chest tightened. She seemed so scared now. What did that—
“Miles Muro,” Billy said, rubbing the back of her neck. Maddie glanced at Billy’s neck, then moved her hands out of the way. “Hey!” Billy yelped. But Maddie stared at those markings, shaking her head.
“Not just working with,” Maddie said to herself. “He probably owned it. Built it, even.” Her voice was grim, her head hanging low. She nodded at the tattoo. “Not hills. Not a curve. MM. His initials. A logo.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, knowing it was there too, marking me with his name.
“What does that mean for us?” I asked.
