He and the other animals were taken into a large white room with other cages. He was placed on a shelf. One of the men opened the door of the cage and held Karl still as the other hooked a water bottle to one of the bars. A bowl of kibble was tossed in the corner, and a blanket was placed along the bottom of the cage. Then the door was shut. The men marched out of the lab and left the various creatures to themselves. The many-legged coyote kept up its insane laughter, and some of the other animals howled and burbled and yipped. A rainbow-striped octopus methodically tossed all the rocks from its aquarium onto the floor while a monkey-faced bird yelled, “SOS! SOS! SOS!” over and over. Karl pulled the blanket over his head to try to drown them out, but it didn’t work. By the time the lights in the lab came on again, Karl was more exhausted than he’d ever been and hungry enough to eat the strange kibble that got stuck in his teeth. He was wiping his lips with his little hand when another man arrived, this one skinny with rather bulbous eyes. The man peered at Karl through the thin bars of the cage.

If Karl hadn’t known better, he would have thought the man’s gaze was . . . hungry. As hungry as some of the other creatures that populated the cages.

“Hello, there, Karl,” the man said. “I’m very pleased to meet you, finally.”

The man held up a syringe.

Karl was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Tess

Tess’s dreams were filled with giant eagles smashing through windows, darting through clouds. She dreamed she was on the back of one of the eagles, riding it to somewhere safe. But where was that? The safe place? She didn’t know, but she hoped the eagle did.

She woke up the way she had for the last week, with Theo slumped by the side of her bed. She didn’t say anything about what he was doing, and neither did he. She didn’t know what to say about it. She hated that he felt he needed to do this for her; she hated that she needed it from anyone. She hated that Nine was gone and she was starting to adjust to life without her. That seemed to be the most horrible thing of all, that you could lose something so precious to you, something you loved, and still go on. Grandpa Ben would have said that life itself was about loving and losing and loving again, despite the risks, but she had lost Grandpa Ben, at least in a way, and she didn’t want to lose any more. She hated that she would never be able to stop it.