Wake Up Missing by Kate Messner Page B

what.”
    Pause.
    â€œExactly.”
    Pause.
    â€œSo what’s the plan if she dies here?”
    I was leaning against a sun-warmed pipe, but his question made me shiver. If
who
dies here? Was one of us in such bad shape that might happen? It couldn’t be me or Sarah—but we hadn’t seen that Kaylee girl around. Quentin said her injury was more serious.
    All the anxiety that had lifted from me watching the birds came back, twisting my stomach, pounding on my head from the inside. Now I
had
to stay hidden; somehow, I knew I was hearing something I shouldn’t.
    A wave of nausea hit me. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes.
No. Don’t get sick. He’ll hear you. Don’t get sick.
    â€œWell, hopefully it doesn’t come to that. We’re close. The new genes are establishing nicely in the Perkins boy, and he shows no signs of tumor growth. We did the implant last night, and everything’s progressing as it should.”
    Tumor growth . . . The Perkins boy . . .
That had to be Trent, the kid from breakfast.
New genes?
Sarah said he was different from before. And what was
the implant
? Thoughts fired like machine guns in my head. There was no time to pull them together.
    â€œMuch better, yes. We’re moving ahead.”
    The mama osprey called again, and I opened my eyes. She was circling overhead. I don’t think she trusted either of us on this roof.
    â€œWe’ll finish with the next two kids and then speed things up—do Phase Two and Phase Three together—for the new ones. They’re good candidates for the procedure so it should be fine. . . . I told Gunther we need to move on this. I’d say . . . what’s today, Wednesday? Figure by Monday, we’ll have four more subjects undergoing the change.”
    Change?
It wasn’t how most people would describe treatment for a concussion.
    â€œOkay. Sounds good.”
    Unless . . .
    â€œYeah, I will. Bye.”
    What if . . .
    I stayed on the roof while he walked back to the door and climbed down the stairs, and I felt it in my body, more than thought it.
    What if Sarah was right?
    And something at I-CAN was horribly, dangerously wrong.

Chapter 8
    â€œI want to call my mom.” I knocked on the half-open door and blurted the words at the same time. Mom fixed everything. She could fix this if something was wrong or, more likely, bring me back from my crazy ideas and remind me everything was okay.
    Dr. Ames put down the MRI scan he’d been studying. “How come, Cat? You feeling okay?” He tipped his head, looked at me from across his desk, and my throat got all tight. He couldn’t have known that I was on the roof. I’d waited until he finished his conversation, until he was gone, and then counted to a hundred to make sure he wasn’t coming back.
    â€œI’m fine.” I wasn’t really. I was hot and thirsty and dizzy and confused and . . . “I’m homesick. I need to talk to my mom.”
    â€œOf course. You know you can call home anytime.” He smiled, handed me the cordless phone from his desk, and motioned to the chair opposite him. “Have a seat,” he said. “I need to finish reviewing these scans. Pretend I’m not even here.”
    I dialed with shaky fingers. What could I say? Something felt wrong. But I couldn’t explain what—I didn’t know. All those bits of conversations . . . My head hurt, and I couldn’t pull them together to explain, and I couldn’t even
try
to do that with Dr. Ames sitting across from me.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œHi, Mom.”
    â€œCat, honey! Everything okay?”
    Dr. Ames looked up from his papers for a second. Could he hear her side of the conversation, too?
    â€œYeah . . . fine.”
    Why was my chest so tight? What
was
it I’d heard up on the roof? He had called our treatment “the change,” but so what? Fixing something broken was changing it. Suddenly, the phone