Suspicious Minds (Stranger Things Novels #1)(85)

Breathe. You’ll find a way out of this for everyone. Somehow.

Despair nearly crushed her. What if she couldn’t?

She hung up the phone and stared at it.

Becky had her hands at her hips. “What in the world…I can tell you’d love to climb through the phone. You’re not up to any experiment right now.”

What to do? The truth would trouble her sister, but Terry was through lying.

“I think I need to tell you about the Hawkins laboratory,” Terry said. “About what they’ve been doing to me there. To all of us. And, Beck, he knew I was pregnant with Andrew’s baby, for how long I don’t know, but long enough. But first, I have to make a call.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just wait.” Terry hunted out the sheet that Stacey had made with everyone’s home and dorm numbers, then picked up the phone and dialed Gloria.

“Gloria, hi—can you go get Alice and bring her here? I’ll call Ken, too. We need to talk.”

“Of course,” Gloria said.

Terry gave her the address, then she phoned Ken. He didn’t even make a quip about already being on his way.

Then she walked into her bedroom, where Becky waited for her.

The presence of the Disappearing Boxes had lost their comfort, but her sister still was one. And that gave her the beginnings of an idea, a remedy for her despair after talking to Brenner. They had a fellowship. They had allies. They had abilities.

Brenner had ambition and cruelty and, yes, a government installation at his command. She’d never let him have her child. And she sure as hell wasn’t letting him have Alice, either. Or abandoning Kali there. She wanted to leave him with what he deserved…

Nothing and no one.

This was a war for the future, and she didn’t mean to lose anyone else.





8.


Within an hour, everyone had assembled at Terry and Becky’s.

“Do you mind if we go upstairs? Talk in private?” Terry asked Becky, when Ken came through the door. Alice and Gloria had arrived moments before.

“I’ll make some brownies,” Becky said.

Terry hated keeping anything secret from Becky, now that she knew most of the truth, but it was safer this way. Becky had been born skeptical. The idea of people with special abilities or the government developing them would push her to the edge of what she could believe. She’d had a hard enough time with the revelation that Dr. Brenner had pumped Terry full of acid for months, knowing she was pregnant. She believed Terry only intended to go back to the lab to demand a payoff for her trauma. Raising children was expensive.

And so up the stairs they went. Terry had been scrambling to come up with ideas, and she had a few.

She’d meant for them to go to her room, but Alice turned into the nursery-in-progress instead. That was fine.

Terry followed and flipped on the light.

“Becky’s already been putting it together,” she said.

There was a secondhand cradle from a girl Becky went to high school with, and a blue and red clown mobile dangling above it.

“I’ve never met a kid who was into clowns, but this is cute,” Gloria said, giving the mobile a jiggle so the various pieces rotated. “Little baby Jane will probably love it.”

“Everyone loves clowns,” Ken said.

“I’m terrified of them.” Alice.

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” Terry said. “Dr. Brenner called here.”

Maybe, just maybe, if she was able to convince the others of her completely off-the-rails plan and pull it off, that idyllic vision of raising her child in peace would come true. There was one thing for certain, though. They couldn’t discuss it openly here.

No way Martin Brenner wasn’t eavesdropping on her. She was counting on it.

Terry grabbed a notebook where Becky had been taking measurements for curtains and flipped to an empty page in the middle. She held up a finger and her friends surrounded her as she wrote them a note: Go along with what I’m about to say—they’re listening. Real plan later.

“He threatened…me,” she said. “Said I have to come back.”

“Oh?” Gloria as cool as a spy. “Soon?”

“I’m going back this week, but I need your help with something. All of you. Alice, he’s onto you.”

Alice fidgeted, her eyes gravitating to the notebook as Terry scribbled in it. “What?”

Terry wrote: Would you be willing to go stay with your cousins in Canada for a while? As long as needed?

Alice nodded, her brows drawn together.

“We’re all in danger.” Terry took a breath. “I want to get proof once and for all of what’s going on there. It’s time to take Brenner and his project down. If I can get files from his office, I can leak them to someone—not just to the Gazette, but The New York Times or The Washington Post maybe. Someone who can do something to get those kids out of there and shut it down. And then we never go back there again.”

“Where do we come in?” Gloria asked.

Terry looked at Ken. “Do you think we can do this?”

Ken said, “I have a good feeling.”

“Then that’s all I need to hear,” Terry said. “Tough luck, Brenner.” Please let him buy this. And she launched into outlining her fake plan. “Gloria, do you think you can trip a fire alarm?”