Mya

"Good morning, guys."

Mom walks in the front door only moments after Finn and I have sat down on the couch in the living room. Finn drapes his arm around my shoulders along the back of the couch, resting one ankle on his kneecap.

He's never sat like that in his life.

I cross my legs, beaming over at Mom.

"Good morning!" we chime together, something we haven't done since we were little. The corners of Finn's mouth turn up, but he doesn't look over at me.

"Did you guys sleep good?" she asks, getting a glass of water and coming to sit across from us.

"Oh yeah," Finn says, "like a baby."

I stifle laughter, pretending to scratch my nose.

"Something wrong, Mya?" Mom asks, raising one eyebrow at me.

"No. I just agree. We slept like newborn babies."

Finn chuckles, and Mom just looks between the two of us in turn.

"I apparently missed the joke," she mutters, tilting the cup back and draining it. "Well, I'll let you get back to studying. I should go check on our guest. I'll see you later."

With that, she stands, dropping the cup off in the sink as she heads towards the spare bedroom. The door slams behind her, and Finn drops his ankle.

"You pushed it too far," he says, standing up.

"What? I just repeated it!" I say, gaping up at him.

"Exactly. It was ruined the moment it came out of your mouth."

I roll my eyes and stand up beside him.

"Listen, I found out some things-"

He cups his hand over my mouth, blocking the next few words. I scowl around his soft hand, breathing in the scent of soap on his skin.

"Not here," he hisses, dropping his hand and gripping my wrist.

I purse my lips closed, trudging behind him as he pulls me into the library. Once the door shuts behind me, he collapses into the leather chair. Light purple bruises line the skin under his eyes, and his shoulders slump forward.

Did he sleep any last night?

"So, what did you find out?" he asks, rubbing the back of his neck.

I take a deep breath, falling into the floor to sit in front of him, and recount the conversation I had with Sakir. Finn reacts at all the right moments, humming with surprise as I tell him about Sakir's father working with Mom.

"His dad's making a cure too?" Finn asks, sitting up straighter.

"Yeah, apparently."

"But it hasn't been created yet?"

"He said 'it's complicated'."

"What does that even mean?"

I shrug, exhaling in a long hiss.

"I didn't have a chance to ask."

Finn swings his legs down into the floor, resting his elbows on his knees.

"What gets me is his comment about the medicine."

"All that, and you're worried about the experiments?"

"Mya, mine is tomorrow," he says, meeting my eyes.

Goosebumps spread over my arms, and I shiver.

Finn's experiment. I'd forgotten about it.

"He's right," Finn whispers, standing and pacing across the small room. "The experiments shouldn't make us sick, and I think we've always known that. We blame Mom and say she sucks at her job, but she can't be that bad. It doesn't make sense, Mya. We need to come to terms with the fact that something's going on here. Something we are stuck right in the middle of."

I grab a handful of his pants leg, tugging him down to the floor with me. We sit together, kneecaps touching. I lean forward and rest my forehead against his.

"Whatever it is, we figure it out together," I say, holding his hands where our knees meet. "That's all we can do."

He nods, rubbing his forehead against mine. I grimace, grateful he doesn't notice.

"Did you break Mom's controls on the tablet?" I blurt.

Like Finn's approaching experiment, I'd forgotten that he was trying to research the list. My mind has been wrapped up in meeting Sakir. I'm not thinking straight.

"Actually, I did," he says, reaching behind him. He removes a book from the shelf, digging his hand into the dark space behind it. When his hand returns, a piece of paper hangs from his fingertips. The yellow tint tells me it's the list, but I could have sworn I left it under my bed. Either way, it's here now.

Finn spreads the paper on the floor between us, putting his tablet beside it.

"What I found matches up with what Sakir said," he continues, typing in a long ten-digit passcode with lightning fingers.

"Explain."

"Well, these are substances, not medication. Some of them are naturally found, organic chemicals. Some are bacteria, and others are man-made chemicals."

"And?" I prod, picking up the list. Finn snatches it back out of my hand.

"They're toxic," he says, looking up at me. "Every single one of them. In the right environment, all of them can kill a human being."

The silence stretches between us, tense.

"Mom's not making a cure, is she?" I ask, and my heart drops miles below the floor of our library.

"I don't know, YaYa," he mumbles, poking the list with one of his pencil fingers. "It looks like she's trying really hard to kill someone, but that person apparently doesn't want to go down. I looked up some side effects of some of these. This one? Extended numbness."

My eyes go wide. The leg incident. My hands begin to shake.

"And this one, Entamoeba histolytica. It's a bacteria that causes dysentery."

I scrunch my nose up, struggling to remember the definition of dysentery.

Finn groans.

"Seriously? After all the history lectures you've been listening to?"

"I slept through most of them!" I whine, shrugging.

"It's diarrhea, Mya!"

I grimace, remembering the worst week of Finn's life. He moaned for five days straight. We both slept in the bathroom. Mom finally gave him some medicine, but it didn't help right away. He lost nearly twenty pounds, which is more than he can spare.

"Mom's giving us these?" I ask, motioning to the paper.

"It sounds like it," he says, sighing.

"Is Mom trying to kill us?"

"I don't know, Mya." He reaches across our legs, brushing a strand of hair out of my face. "But we'll figure it out together, like you said. I won't let anything bad happen to you."

I smile, squeezing his knee.

He understands that the feeling's mutual. Finn is everything to me; I am everything to him. We stick together regardless.

We pass the rest of the afternoon listening for Mom to leave. Time ticks by. We eat lunch, play some catch, and then go back to fake studying. The words don't even register in my brain. Letters and numbers filter through my eyelids like a coffee filter littered with holes.

When it's time to go to bed, we do, getting changed and sitting on our respective beds.

"Think she'll stay the night again?" Finn whispers, pulling his covers up over him.

I shrug.

Moments later, we hear the electronic lock on the door leading upstairs beep through the crack in our bedroom door. We left it open so we could hear Mom leave. Instead, she storms down the stairs, throwing our bedroom door wide open.

"Mya, honey," she says, panting, "when you were upstairs, did you see a yellow sheet of paper?"

Her face is red and covered in sweat. Her hair sticks out of her ponytail, curling out at odd angles. One hand grips the doorframe so tightly that her knuckles turn white.

Is she talking about the list? Isn't she worried about the missing file, too? What's so important about that piece of paper that it outweighs everything else?

Either way, I can't tell her we have it hidden in the library behind a book titled Chemistry in the Modern World.

"No," I say, shaking my head.

"Are you sure?"

I nod, narrowing my eyes at her.

Mom sighs and runs a hand over her messy hair.

"If you see it, will you please let me know?"

"What was it?" Finn asks as he sits up in his bed, eyes going wide.

Will Mom lie to us about what was on the list?

"It was a list of ingredients for tomorrow's test," she says. "It had some very important numbers on it, and without those numbers the test results might be skewed."

I nod and swallow the knot rising in my throat.

She didn't lie, but the truth seems a thousand times worse.

"We will let you know if we see anything that looks like it," Finn cuts in, smiling at her. She nods and leaves, shutting the door behind her.

The list is crucial for tomorrow's test.

If we don't turn it in, Finn's test could go wrong. If we do turn it in, both of us will be in serious trouble. I glance over at my brother. It's his test after all. I can't make that decision for him.

"No," he blurts, shaking his head. "We are not going to turn it in. Forget it."

With that, he flops down on the bed and covers himself up with his blankets. Only his hair sticks out like a halo against his pillow. I lay down as well, sighing as the lights click off.

The worries follow me as I fall asleep, tossing and turning on the thin mattress.

If anything happens to my brother, I don't know what I'll do.