On the bright side, the antipsychotic prescription meant that apparently the conversation he had with Dr. Brand about his penis had been enough to convince the man he was in need of long-term psychiatric care. Nothing saidyou need serious helplike a paper cup full of modern pharmaceuticals.
If Trevor had to put his finger on the one thing that had sealed the deal with Dr. Brand, it had to be the detailed narrative on the disagreement he and his penis frequently got into concerning which TV shows they should watch. His penis preferred reality shows over scripted entertainment. Yeah, that part was inspired.
He scanned the common area, taking in the twenty others patients hanging out, either staring blankly at the television or absently flipping through magazines.
On the surface, there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious or strange going on. With its brightly painted walls, big screen TV, shelves full of board games and books, loads of comfy chairs, and big windows that let in the last of the day’s light and gave picturesque views of the perfectly maintained grounds around the facility, it was easy to be lulled into thinking this place was some kind of resort. With locks on the outside of the bedroom doors.
But if you looked beyond the obvious, there were some things in this place that should give any sane person pause when it came to parking a family member here.
Trevor hadn’t been in many institutions like this, but there was no mistaking the fact that Stillwater was set up and run like a prison. In addition to bars on the windows, there were lots of cameras and orderlies on every set of doors leading in or out of the main residential areas. Patients were free to walk around anywhere they wanted as long as they stayed in the common area or on one of the three floors of patient rooms. If someone wanted to get out of this section of the facility and into the hospital wing, the counseling and therapy wing, or take a walk outside along the walled-in gardens, they had to get past the orderlies.
Getting into the isolation ward was going to be even harder. It was at the end of a hallway he’d wandered down shortly after getting there. But he hadn’t gotten any closer than fifteen feet from the big steel doors and the security hulk of an orderly stationed there—barely close enough to catch a scent and confirm there was definitely a shifter and maybe something that might be a hybrid in there—when the orderly had told him to turn around.
Yeah, those orderlies were going to be a problem. Between the two with Nurse Ratched, the ones manning the security checkpoints, and the others roaming randomly about the common area and adjoining residential floors, there were easily more than a dozen in this area alone. They were all big and muscular, and if Trevor didn’t miss his guess, they were all carrying Tasers hidden in those pouches on their waists. What kind of psychiatric facility armed their orderlies with Tasers?
He bit back a growl of frustration. He and his two teammates, Jake Basso and Ed Vincent, were the DCO’s espionage/counterespionage team. They spied on people, hacked into information systems and made off with the data stored inside, stole industrial secrets when necessary, and then, just for fun, went after bad guy spies to keep them from doing the same things to the good guys.
He and his team spent their time playing a complicated and dangerous game of spy versus spy, and they were very good at it. But John hadn’t wanted Jake and Ed involved in this mission. Now Trevor was undercover in this place on his own, without equipment or a plan, playing the part of a mental patient and trying to figure out how to get past a bunch of orderlies into a medical research operation that was probably experimenting on a shifter and making hybrids.
He was man enough to admit he was a little out of his comfort zone.
Trevor was considering heading up to the third floor again to see if he could find an entry point into the attic crawl space, thinking that might let him bypass the orderlies completely, when he spotted something interesting—a flash of clear-eyed intelligence that stuck out around here like a unicorn wearing disco pants.
He watched as the slender teenage girl with her dark hair up in a ponytail casually looked around the room, then covertly took something out of her mouth and put it into the pocket of her pajamas. And she did it while standing in one of the few places in the common room that wasn’t covered by a video camera.
Bright kid.
She scanned the room again and this time caught him watching her. Panic flashed in the girl’s eyes for half a second, then they took on a calculating look. A moment later, her gaze changed, becoming unfocused like the other patients, and she slowly wandered across the room toward him.
Her back to the cameras, she gave him that sharp, clear-eyed look he’d seen a few minutes ago.
“You don’t look like the normal type who gets dumped in here,” she said softly. “Who’d you piss off?”
Trevor didn’t know what the girl’s story was, but she was definitely smart.
“My sister,” he said. “She told the doctors that I’m a danger to myself and others, but that’s crap. Mostly, she thinks I’m an embarrassment to the family name. By the way, the name’s Miles.”
“Brooklyn.”
“What’s your story?”
“Story?” she asked.
“Yeah. You’ve obviously been here for a while to be able to ditch your meds so smoothly.”
Brooklyn’s eyes darted around again with an alertness that would have fit better on a deployed soldier—or a criminal in prison.
“I’m not sure how long I’ve been here,” she said quietly. “Four years, I think. But it could be five.”
Damn. The poor kid had been in here so many years, she didn’t even remember how long it had been? What kind of place was this?
“That means you were, what, like twelve years old when they put you here?” he asked. “How’d that happen?”
The girl looked out the window for a long time before answering. “My parents died in a car crash when I was twelve. I was in the backseat, so I saw what happened to them.” She reached up to play with the end of her ponytail. “I didn’t handle it well and did some stupid stuff. My mom and dad were loaded, and since I didn’t have any other family, their lawyers were the executors of my parents’ estate. They sent me here. For my own good, you know?”
“Are they going to let you go home at some point?”
She turned from the window to eyeball the orderly on the other side of the room before looking at Trevor. “I have a friend in here named Ian who helped me break into Dr. Brand’s computer so I could see my record. My parents’ law firm is paying nearly forty thousand a month to keep me here. If that’s what I’m worth to Stillwater, I don’t see Dr. Brand ever letting me leave.”
