Took Me Yesterday (book 2 of The Tomo Trilogy)

If I Were Going To Die

I dreamt of my mother sitting on the edge of a boat, her frizzy hair bobbing with the waves, her sunglasses slipping down her nose, her eyes closed against the sun. And then, I got behind the wheel to drive. Someone had to get us back to shore. Someone had to do something. But when I pressed on the throttle, the boat lurched forward, and she went with it, falling off the edge into the churning sea.

"Sophie!"

My eyes opened, and even though my world bobbed, I was nowhere near the ocean. The floor was cold. The walls were mirrors. A hundred reflections of me looked back at me, dazed.

I groaned, closing my eyes to the dizziness as I sat up and rubbed my head. Blood came off onto my fingers. I stared at it before I remembered what had happened.

The compound. Louise. Noah. Tame. Mr. Tomery in the elevator.

"Sophie!" Noah screamed my name instead of my mother. His shouts had been what woke me.

I looked up only to see a single crack in the doors, not big enough for people but big enough for light. We'd gone half a floor down from them, and Mr. Tomery watched them with me.

"Welcome back to your new reality," he said, lighting a cigar as he did so.

"Sophie!" Noah screamed, and then screamed again.

"Fifteen minutes," Mr. Tomery snarled, then dropped his voice so that only I could hear. "He hasn't stopped his incessant screaming for a minute. Reminds me of when he was a boy, a baby. He never liked to be put down." The gun Louise had given me laid in his lap. "Doesn't matter how much he begs now or then. I never picked him. And nothing but that key will get this thing moving." He cradled the gun but pointed his head at the wall's console. "Unless of course they cut the cables."

I studied the distance between him, the key around his neck, and the gun in his hand, but he lifted the weapon to aim at me.

"Don't even think about it," he said.

I leaned my back against the elevator's mirrored walls, images of us bouncing around in the smoke. "What do you want?"

He grinned through the fog the cherry lit up. "I want to understand, Sophia," he said, then blew out more smoke. His squint deepened. "You see, I've been wracking my head over why Phelps gave you The Odyssey and The Iliad of all people. A book about traveling and fighting and gods?" He scratched his scalp with the gun. "Those are three things he doesn't believe in, so why would he want you to consider them? And only you?"

The memory flooded back, Phelps' hardened hands as he flipped through the pages before placing it in my hands, hands that shared genetics.

"He never told me I couldn't share it with others," I said.

"Oh, but he knew you wouldn't," Tomery said, leaning forward. "He knew you were an illegal immigrant. A child who lost everything, including her father once Phelps took him from you." My father's job always kept him away. "No, Phelps knew you'd treasure it. He knew you'd see it as a challenge. He knew you, because he knew his sister."

"I'm not my mother."

"Aren't you, though?" he asked. "We're all a result of our parents, after all." Before I could argue, tell him Noah and Rinley were nothing like him, he continued, "You know what I think? Phelps wanted you to escape. He wanted you to take me out."

My fingers curled. "You're insane."

"Am I?" He drew in another drag. "If I am," he said, holding the smoke in his lungs, "then I'm no more insane than you." He let it out, and my nostrils burned. "That's what he wants. You, insane. He created you to win the war he was destined to lose. That's why he protected you, watched over you so closely, and when he realized we had you on our side, he tried to kill you." The bomb. "He'll go after his sister next."