Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(36)

I’d found a new kind of family in Tyson and Abiodun. People I could genuinely trust. The thought made my chest clench, but I managed to keep those emotions buried at the moment. I had other things to deal with, and I was glad to have Tyson there. Giving his hand a grateful squeeze, I took a breath and asked Dr. Edwards a question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to, yet had to know all the same. “Ryan told me I was never a Visticorp subject, so how do I know you?”

The room dropped to its chilly temperature again.

“Can you guys please take this conversation far from here?” Geek asked, shifting nervously. “If she freaks, she could melt the place down. Do you know what kind of damage that would do? In fact, for this particular conversation could you take her outside the mountain altogether?”

“Why?” I demanded, my eyes snapping to the jittery soldier. “What is it about this man that I’m not going to like?”

Okay, I’ll be honest; maybe I growled a little bit, because Geek’s face paled and he took a step back.

“Why don’t we go find Ryan?” Tyson whispered. “He’s probably in the gym.”

He tried to tug me into the hall, but I fused my feet to the floor and flipped on my power switch. Tyson dropped my hand with a yelp. “How do I know you?” I demanded. They were hiding something from me and I didn’t like it.

Dr. Edwards said the last thing I ever would have expected. No, not even that. He said something I never, ever, ever would have expected. “I was your English teacher in high school.”

There was simply no way to respond to that.

“You were on Visticorp’s radar,” Dr. Edwards continued. “After I escaped them, I went to keep an eye on you, but I knew you’d freak out if you learned who I was, so I took a job at your school. I promised Teodoro I would watch out for you until I could get him out. We figured you’d react better to him telling you who he was than me coming forward first.”

Several bits of information clicked in my brain, and I gasped. “Blake?”

My guess was correct. Blake’s eyes lit up with a spark of hope. “Teodoro mentioned me?”

Some of my apprehension eased, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever trust the man entirely. “Constantly,” I admitted. “He told me all about working with you at Visticorp and coming up with the plan to get both of you out of there. He idolizes you.”

The news made Blake glow, but then his face fell. “Does he know what happened? Why I didn’t come for him when I was supposed to?”

“He knows you were in jail.” I nodded. “He said you went down on bogus charges as some sort of fall guy for a Visticorp cover-up. He has a little wall calendar that he’s been crossing the days off of until your release. He’s even got a few fake IDs for you. All they need is a recent picture. I suggested breaking you out—I had a foolproof plan—but he said we couldn’t. He said Visticorp would have known it was us and learned we were still alive.”

“They would have,” Blake agreed immediately. “You were right not to come for me.” He gave me a boyish grin that made me take note of his handsome face. “As much as I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Fat lot of good it did. They found us anyway. I totally screwed up, and Teddy got taken as a result. I have to find him and get him back. If Donovan hurts him because of me—”

My voice cracked at the unacceptable thought.

“He won’t,” Blake promised. “Teodoro’s too valuable to him.”

He took a step closer to me with his hand outstretched, as if he meant to try and comfort me. When I flinched away, he stopped and looked at the ground. Swallowing thickly, he lowered his voice to an almost whisper. “We were friends, Jamie. I was your teacher, but you liked me, trusted me a little even.”

His words ignited something inside me. “I trusted you? And the whole time you were lying to me? Just like Teddy.” I was angrier with Teddy than Blake, but he made a good scapegoat at the moment. “Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t care about the past. Right now I don’t know you, I don’t trust you, and we’re not friends.”

“So let’s get out of here,” Tyson said, sending a seething glare to Blake. “We’ve got you back now. We don’t need him anymore.”

I sighed and shook my head. “But we need Geek. He might be the only chance we have at cracking those microchips.”

“What exactly is on those microchips?” Major Wilks asked.

Blake’s enthusiasm came back with vengeance. “Everything!” Impossibly, he was even more excited than Geek. “Teodoro backed up Visticorps’s entire mainframe.” He looked at Major Wilks with a greedy gleam in his eyes. “We could have all of Visticorp’s scientific findings since the company began.”

“No!” Tyson shouted, startling us all with his outburst. The way he frantically shook his head spoke volumes to his sudden desperation. “You can’t give them that info, Jamie. Teddy developed a software program that used the world’s online data to locate other potential PACs. It’s how Visticorp found us. Even you. You can’t let that software get into the wrong hands.”

Major Wilks stepped forward, a giant frown on his face. “Son, have I, or anyone in this program, ever mistreated you?”