Josie braced herself, prepared for Jo to lunge at her. Instead, Jo collapsed onto the floor and dissolved into tears.
Okay. Josie wasn’t expecting that.
“Why are you crying?”
Jo didn’t answer, just continued to sob.
Josie was torn between incredulity and offense. Shouldn’t
“Stop it,” Josie said, more harshly than she realized. “This is all your fault.”
“I know,” Jo wailed. “I know it is.”
“Calm down.” Josie grabbed a wad of tissues from the dresser and shoved them in Jo’s face. “Here.”
Jo stopped wailing and took the tissues, dabbing gingerly at her eyes while she tried to control her sobs. “What,” she started, “what are you going to do with me?”
“Do with you?” Josie had no idea what she was talking about. “I needed you as a hostage.”
Jo’s eyes grew wide and her bottom lip trembled.
“Not like that,” Josie said quickly. “More like collateral. I needed to make sure I had a way home.”
Jo shook her head. “It’s no use. She won’t go.”
“Your mom?”
Jo nodded. “Not after what happened.”
“Look, I don’t care where you guys end up. Your mom sabotaged an experiment and tried to sell state secrets to the Grid? Whatever. Don’t care. As long as my mom and I get to go home.” The idea had never occurred to her that Jo and Josie, Dr. Byrne and Josie’s mom could all stay in the same world at the same time. It would be weird, but whatever. “So your mom doesn’t have to go back if she doesn’t want to, okay?”
“She doesn’t?”
“I don’t see why not.” Another idea flashed in her mind. If Jo and Dr. Byrne could stay in her world, why not Nick?
“We just have to make sure everyone is safe.” Josie slipped the real vial out of her pocket. “I’ve got the injectable, so that’s something to bargain with.”
“You kept it?”
Josie shrugged. “You’re not the only one who can lie. The one your mom has is a fake.”
“Oh.”
“With any luck, your dad and Nick are working out a way to use this to get rid of the Nox for good.”
Jo straightened up, her tears forgotten. “Daddy?”
“Yeah.” Josie turned her back so Jo couldn’t see her smile. “He’s with Nick.”
“What do you mean?” Jo snapped.
Oh, Josie was going to enjoy this. “They’re breaking into Grid headquarters at Fort Meade to steal a laser.”
Josie expected to see jealousy reflected in Jo’s face. Instead, all the color had drained out of it and Josie could see that she was trembling.
“My . . . my father?”
“Yes!” Josie said, exasperated. She felt oddly protective of Mr. Byrne. The way his wife and daughter had abandoned him, lied to him. Like Josie, all he wanted was his family back, and Josie would do everything in her power to make that happen for both of their sakes. “Maybe if you’d bothered to trust him, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Trust him? Trust my father?” Jo looked confused, uncomprehending, as if Josie had spoken her last words in Swahili.
“Duh,” Josie said. “He wants what’s best for you both. Hell, he’s been trying to get my mom out of Old St. Mary’s for the last few days just because I asked him to. And he never even questioned me when Nick and I asked for his help.”
“Getting her out of Old St. Mary’s?”
Why was Jo suddenly so slow in putting all these pieces together?
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
Jo shook her head back and forth. “He’s not going to help your mom.”
There was something in the slow, metered way in which Jo said the words that made every hair on the back of Josie’s neck stand at attention. There was fear in Jo’s voice, combined with a kind of resignation that made Josie’s mouth go instantly dry. “What do you mean?” she croaked.
“Josie,” Jo said simply. “He’s the one who put her there.”
FIFTY-ONE
4:21 A.M.
SCIENCE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO PROVE IT, BUT there are moments when time actually slows down. The exact second you cross the event horizon, for example. Due to the tremendous gravitational pull of the black hole, once you passed the point of no return, time would elongate to such an infinite level that a second might last a year, and if you looked back toward the lip of the black hole, you’d actually be able to see yourself as you crossed into oblivion.
Theoretically, of course. No one had ever experienced the inside of a black hole firsthand. But what Josie felt at that moment was as close to time standing still as she would ever get. It was as if she felt every nanosecond of time from the instant Jo dropped the bomb. Her brain tried to come to terms with the information she’d just heard. The room faded into the background, the mirror and the vial a distant memory. All she saw was Jo, who stood before her tense and edgy, a wildebeest in a Sahara full of cheetahs and lions, ready to bolt at the slightest hint of danger.
“What do you mean?” Josie repeated.
“He sent your mom there. He knew right away she wasn’t his wife.”
Panic gripped Josie’s stomach, twisting and turning it like a wrung-out dishrag. “I don’t understand,” she said lamely.
“You weren’t supposed to trust him,” Jo said. “He’s known about the portal all along. About you and about my mom. He’s the one who made me switch places with you, to try and find the injectable my mom supposedly brought with her when she accidentally zapped into your world. What he wants more than anything”—she pointed to the vial on the bed—“is that. He’ll do anything to get it.”
“He was the traitor. He sabotaged your mom’s experiment. He was going to sell the formula to the Grid.”
“Exactly. He’ll kill anyone that gets in his way,” Jo said. “Anyone.”
Josie’s mind whirled. She could go to the authorities with what she knew, show the antidote, and hope someone would actually listen to her, but that seemed unlikely at best.
No, there was only one way to get her friends and family back. One thing Mr. Byrne wanted more than anything else.
The vial.
“Jo,” she said. “Would your father really kill anyone who got in his way?”
“Without blinking an eye,” she said.
“Even you?”
Jo looked confused by the question. “I—I don’t know.”
“Do you want to save Nick?”
The mention of Nick’s name seemed to brace Jo’s courage. “Yes.”
