Page 7 of The Girl Who Broke Free (Death Fields 5)

“I know how all this started, Jane. I was there for every hellish step. What does Chloe want you to do now?”

“Right,” Jane says, pushing her brown hair over her ear. She’s slight—smaller than I am, with blunt bangs that cover her eyebrows. Her hair used to be short but it’s grown out now and our eyes are a similar shade of gray. “She didn’t give me a lot of details but specifically asked me to repair the Hybrid vaccine so that it didn’t conflict with EVI-1.”

“She wants to make sure people with the EVI-1 vaccine can get the EVI-2 injection and have the desired transition?” I ask, mulling over the idea.

“Yes, she wants the enhancements as well as absolute mind control over everyone.”

“Unlike the Mutts, who were given the Hybrid injection after being given EVI-1 and maintained their independent thought.”

“Yep,” she says.

I think on this for a moment. “The EVI-1 was given to very few people. The Fighters, like myself, who went to the first distribution center, and later Erwin’s soldiers and the recruits we picked up along the way.”

“Yes.” She doesn’t meet my eyes when she adds, “The remaining civilians at The Fort were given the Hybrid injection shortly after you left. I’d already transitioned into using them as my main force.”

I recall them storming the vaccine center, looking for me and my friends. We’d narrowly escaped until we were cornered soon after by Chloe.

“With the millions of survivors out there that never had any inoculations, why is she worried about a clean Hybrid vaccine?” I ask, wondering if Chloe is just making Jane run in circles the way she has me cleaning baseboards and windows.

Jane sits in the chair next to my makeshift hospital bed. She doesn’t answer my question but I know she, at the very least, has some ideas.

“Other than Cole, when would Chloe have realized that Mutts are useless to her?”

I think back to what Wyatt told me when we found one another last year. That he’d escaped the south looking for me just before the Hybrid army found him and Erwin down in Savannah. I look up at my sister. “She captured Erwin’s army and injected them with the EVI-2.” Jane holds my gaze, giving me no signal that I’m right, but the goose bumps on my flesh tell me that I am. “She accidentally created an entire army of super-soldiers that she can’t control.”

Jane simply says, “I don’t have any confirmation on this theory, Alex. Nothing at all. She may have figured it out long ago and slaughtered Erwin’s entire base.”

“But if it’s true,” I whisper, suddenly worried I’ll be overheard. “It means Erwin may still be out there with his men and he could be stronger than ever.”

*

They come for me as expected, two Hybrids dressed in full black. They cut the ties that bind me to the table and I sit up, stretching my stiff back.

“Help her dress,” one of the soldiers says to Jane. The woman stands at the door while Jane helps me back into my prison wear. I inhale sharply when she accidentally grazes the bruise.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s fine.”

The elastic waistband is loose enough that it doesn’t hurt too badly and I’m able to move around a little better than I had the day before. I’ve just slipped my feet into my pathetic shoes when the guard at the door jumps to attention and Chloe breezes into the room with two additional Hybrids following her. It’s the first time I’ve seen her face-to-face in months—since the night she killed Wyatt.

“Alex,” she greets me with a wide, weird smile. “You look like hell.”

“Yeah, I feel like it too, but thanks for noticing.”

“Give her a hairbrush or something,” she snaps at my sister. “It’s like a beast was unleashed on top of her head.”

Jane opens a desk drawer and pulls out a small, travel-sized hair brush and hands it over. I begin the tedious process of working the bristles through my thick hair.

Chloe moves behind Jane’s desk, picking up various reports and papers she’s accumulated. It probably reads like nonsense. I certainly can never understand what she’s scribbling on the paper. I think it’s some sort of shorthand only Jane understands. Although it’s possible my father and Avi are privy to her language.

Chloe once was the flip-side to Cole’s coin. Twins that favored one another with matching ice-blue eyes and blonde curly hair. The medics shaved her hair after she’d been shot in the head when we first got to PharmaCorp, but it’s regrown now, wilder, but a shade darker than before. Her eyes are the hard black that signals the Hybrid transformation, similar to an Eater but without the sickly spider-webbed veins that criss-cross the whites of their eyes.

It makes me physically sick to look at her, to know what she’s done to so many people and to think I once considered her a friend.

“Sit down while you tame that mess,” she points to the chair across from Jane’s desk. She looks up at two of the guards. “Please take the former Director on a walk. We need a little privacy.”

The room has a small flurry of activity as everyone follows directions. The remaining guard lingers at the door until Chloe gives her the signal to leave too. My stomach twists nervously as the guard leaves the room. I know the Hybrids will not help me, but honestly? I’d like a witness to whatever she plans on doing to me next.

---