“At the plant, they kept calling me Rho for some unknown reason,” Jordan continued. “And I never got to see my dad. Does he even know what happened to us?”

“That’s a good question,” Mom said as she picked up one of her tranquilizers and readied a syringe. “We’ll get answers soon, Jordan, but for now, I want you to get some rest. This will help.”

She injected the needle into his arm.

Jordan wasn’t going down quietly, though, continuing to talk about the supernatural scientist and his own enhanced powers. His words grew more slurred, his eyelids fluttered and sagged, and his story faded into the ether.

It was all too fantastic to believe. Why would this spooky scientist take such an interest in my friend? Why would the military follow suit?

Then again, why did that officer tell Jordan they knew how to find him? Why were they keeping us in town? Even if Jordan was imagining things, that didn’t mean that things weren’t being kept from us.

Could one of those things involve Jordan? What did they actually do to him at the sick camp?

CHAPTER 30

Jordan

I WOKE UP with a splitting headache, which I guess shouldn’t have been surprising, given all I’d been through, but that didn’t make it any less painful. That shard-through-my-skull sensation made me forget about my nasty leg wound—at least until I tried walking and felt like a hundred bees were sticking their stingers into it. All in all, I felt topsy-turvy and upside-down and discombobulated and any other built-fora-fun-house phrase you could think of. I wasn’t having fun, that was for sure.

I eventually determined that it was latish afternoon. (This wasn’t great deductive reasoning. I looked at a clock, and it said 3:47.) I found Maggie sitting out back reading a library book, Radioactive Contamination for Dummies, which made me realize I’d underestimated the reach of that series.

“Learning anything useful?” I asked.

She gave me a concerned look that reminded me of my mom when I would come downstairs the morning after getting the flu.

“C’mere,” she said, and after I limped over there, she lay her palm across my forehead and said, “Better.”

“Tell me something that I don’t know,” I said, nodding toward the book.

“Overexposure to radiation can cause cancer,” she said.

“Duly noted.”

Soon we were back in her car with her once again behind the wheel. I’d asked whether we could return to my house and see whether anything was salvageable now that the place had cooled off. I also was curious whether my note for my dad was still there.

As I gazed out the car window, though, everything suddenly looked … wrong. It was as if a haze had fallen over everything, or some Instagram filter had been activated to give the world an old-timey sepia tone. The grass was brown, and most of the trees were bare, and the few leaves that remained were twisted and gray. The white paint on the Baptist church was dirty, cracked, and peeling; the road was lined with potholes; and cracks in the asphalt were springing up with weeds.