Page 68 of Shaped to Be Yours

“And me!” Bina jumped on the bandwagon.

“Fine. Then help them if they’ll let you.” Jason pointed at their parents. “It’s more dangerous for everyone if the portal sucks in new victims. I need to meet up with my mom at the house first to make sure she’s okay. Ready?” He looked at me.

“You better believe I’m not getting left behind,” I affirmed.

Jason offered a grateful nod, and when he jogged off toward the exit, I was right on his heels. “This powder keg is about to get lit.”

I hated how much he was right.

But we had no idea how right until we saw that the people outside the facility were dispersing too, and clearly not to go home. Everyone was headed to the woods, and most of them had a huge head start.

Chapter 13

JASON

As soon as we neared the house, I knew it was as bad as we’d feared.

More protesters. A lot of them. Some I recognized from the facility, some from the news report at the school. It was all converging on my neighborhood. Security guards were keeping some people out, but others were breaking through the line and scattering into the woods, right past the DO NOT ENTER signs.

Whitmore’s car was in our driveway, and Mom’s was in the garage, but we didn’t see either of them when we hurried inside. Then I spotted Mom out on the deck.

“The police are everywhere!” she was yelling at the people daring to cut through our yard as we flung open the sliding glass doors to join her. “What do you people hope to accomplish?”

“Monster are mayhem!” I heard from below, so talking sense was clearly off the table.

“Mom!” I called, rushing up behind her. “Where’s Whitmore? Are you okay?”

She immediately flung herself at me for a hug, and then hugged Ricky just as tightly. “I am just so glad you weren’t at the school. They were practically out for blood. They still are. Everything was okay at the facility?”

“Okay enough,” I said.

“Agent Whitmore already went in to touch base with the guards at the portal. No one is listening to reason. It just keeps escalating. We need to get inside,” she tried to tug both of us back toward the doors. “Lock the house—”

“Mom, we can’t.”

“You are not going out there!” Her voice cracked as she screamed that.

Mickey was at our feet, having snuck out with us, and rubbed against my legs. He chirped, so I picked him up to pass him to Mom. Hopefully, if anyone tried to be stupid enough to break in, that little fighter of a cat would give them the same treatment he’d given me when we met. “I have to, Mom.”

“Wehave to,” Ricky said. “And don’t even try to tell me to not go with you. There’s a storm coming. I can feel it.”

I glanced up at the sky. “I assume you don’t mean in the metaphysical shitstorm kind of way.”

“That too, but also a real one.”

“Great. Sucks. Why does it matter?” I’d always hated storms but there were worse things.

I hadn’t noticed before, but Ricky had taken one of the scanners from the lab and pulled it out of his jacket pocket. Besides an initial screen of readings I didn’t understand, he was able to scroll back through previous data both from the man-made and natural portals and compare them to each other.“Remember when Beck said there were fluctuations the other night, when we, um… when it started raining before we went to bed?”

Right. That night. “Yeah. So?”

“Think about it. What does each occurrence of portal activity have in common? The day your dad disappeared. The day you were attacked. The day we arrived and first found the portal when someone screamed and disappeared. The other night too.”

“It was raining,” I realized with a slowly sinking dread, given the dark clouds rolling toward us now. “Storming in most cases.”

“Exactly. At varying levels, but I think the worse the storm, the worse the activity spike.”

While I didn’t understand the meaning behind the numbers he showed me, I could tell he was right that the readings were more extreme during those dates and times.

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