by C. L. Stone
“No,” I said. “They keep saying they’re waiting for dark to move us.”
His eyes shifted, calculating and then looking toward the wall. “Is that a camera?”
“I broke it. It still works but it’s pointed to the ground.”
“I can’t really see well. You’ll have to be my eyes.” He twisted his body. “How did you get like that?”
I think he meant untied, but he wasn’t saying so out loud. He wasn’t giving away the fact that I was free. He was smarter than the last one. “They dragged me in here like you,” I said carefully. Maybe that was the trick. A couple more people to keep an eye on me. But the way he squinted, blind, and also just his presence, actually bruised up and way more distressed and careful than the last guy… “But I was able to get my hands to the front at least.” I left it at that.
He twisted his body, and then pointed to me with his feet, legs partially up off the ground. “Maybe you can help me with that?”
“Why don’t you ask your friends to come in and help?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m with them? Because they tricked you?”
“I don’t know who to believe anymore.”
He sighed and then looked toward the masked body on the floor. “You should take that bag off. He could be awake listening to us. Maybe that’s the new trick.”
He could be telling the truth. “How do you tell if he’s faking?”
“Just open one of his eyes,” he said. “I’ll tell you if he is.”
I went to the lanky body. I hadn’t really recognized it, but now looking at it, it was odd to see some old scars along his shoulder and at his lower back. Scars that were familiar to me, as I had similar…
I touched the black bag on his head but the moment I did, the body jerked around, coughing, body gyrating like he was retching.
“Get it off!” Buble called to me.
I gripped the top of it and yanked up.
My brother’s face appeared. Wil. Eyes wild, his mouth contorted as he was trying to breath in the fresh air.
I couldn’t believe it.
“Who is he?” Buble asked.
I wasn’t sure what to do. My own brother. They’d found him. They’d brought him here. This Buble… I didn’t know him. It could be another trap. If they didn’t know who he was, then I didn’t want to tell them.
I didn’t want to risk his life, thinking they could get to me through him somehow.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked up at Buble, trying to focus on him, looking upset. “Someone else I don’t know. Someone else thrown in to try to get information out.”
Wil scanned the room and then me, shaking his head and looked over at Buble. “Who’s that? Where are we?”
“Long story,” I said. “Why don’t you start by telling us who you are?” I put a hand on his bare shoulder, squeezing just enough and giving him a long look. Just go along with this. Trust me.
He seemed disoriented and tried to sit up, only to realize he couldn’t get there on his own with his hands tied behind his back still. “What the hell…”
“Easy, kid,” Buble said. “Just take it easy. They caught us, too. But who are you?”
“William,” he said carefully. His full first name. He looked at me as he said it. “What’s happening?”
“We’ve been tied up, and we’re being kept here.” I motioned to Buble. “He was brought in when you were. Do you recognize him?”
He looked over at Buble. Like Buble, Wil normally wore glasses and he squinted to see his face. “No. I don’t…I don’t think so.”
I helped him sit up. “Do you recognize me?”
He blinked rapidly and a little more high pitched, he said, “No?”
At least he caught on. “Okay, so let’s start at square one. How did you get here?”
“I was…” He stopped short and looked over at Buble. “I think I was at school?” He swallowed thickly and then looked at his nude body. Instinctively, he tried to turn himself and then looked at me and realized I was naked, too. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “They just brought me here.” Did I have bruising? The car crash did more to me than the one slap across the face. “I was in a car accident. But I think I’m fine.”
“We’re not fine,” Buble said. “We’re tied up, and they’ll attack you if you try to escape or make trouble, believe me. I have no doubt our sleeping companion here did something very similar.”
“If we’re all being honest with each other,” I said, “they said they don’t want to hurt us.”
“But they do want something,” Buble said, He nodded to Wil. “If neither of us recognize him, then he’s got to be with Alice. He is the trick to get us to talk.”
“Alice? Is she here?” Wil asked.
My eyes widened. “You know her?”
“Sure,” he said. “I mean if it’s the same person. Red hair. Blue eyes. Like late twenties or something like that?”
My insides were on fire with anger. “How long have you known her?”
He blinked rapidly, seeming surprised by the question. “For weeks. At least? Ran into her and she asked a few questions about something.”
I gripped him by the shoulders. “Like what? What did she ask you?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Nothing bad. But she helped me with some problems I was having at school. Then I said I’d help her.”
“And then what?”
“I haven’t heard from her for a while. Until you mentioned her.”
“She tricked you,” Buble said.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he said. Wil looked at me, motioning with his elbow. “Get me out of this? How do we get out of here?”
“We need to bide our time,” Buble said. “Wait until the right moment.”
“So they can move us where they want us?” I asked as I helped Wil move to where his hands were in front of his body by moving his legs enough. He scraped part of his feet on the hard plastic ties as his legs were a bit longer. It was more difficult to do, but it eventually worked. “Waiting just gives them time they want. That’s why they want us in here.”
“What do they want from us?” Wil asked. He sat back down on the floor pulling his knees up and using his tied hands to hold his legs to his body. “Why us?”
“They’re looking for information,” Buble said. “It’s the only reason to detain us.”
“Someone,” I said. “They want someone who is in charge.”
“Who someone?” Wil asked. “Who?” He paused. “Is it that Academy? It’s not that, is it?”
Buble coughed roughly. “They’re listening still. Even if the camera is broken.”
Wil seemed confused. “But is that who they want?”
“What are you talking about? What Academy?” I asked him carefully.
“Alice,” he said. “She told me about them.”
I wanted to curse, but I did my best not to give anything away. “Some school? What does that mean?”
“I don’t think it’s a school.” He turned those big brown eyes on me, wide and fearful. He then looked at Raven on the ground. “Who is that?”
“It’s Raven,” Buble said. “Her husband.”
It was something I hadn’t told Buble, but if he knew Raven enough to know his full name…if he was Academy, he’d possibly know that, too. Just like my face was familiar. But was he? Or was he one of them, sent to confuse us more using the same name, and he was just better than the other guy?
Wil choked and coughed once. “What?”
Surprise, surprise. “He was knocked out like you two.” I didn’t give more away. We were supposed to not know each other right now. There was no time to explain it. “He might be out for a while. They drugged him enough to keep him like this. It was the only way to keep him contained, apparently.”
Wil rubbed at his face with his palms, the wrist ties tightening to indent into his skin as he tried to pull them apart. “They just want
to know a name? Why can’t we just tell them one?”
“They’re looking for a boss,” I said. “At least that’s what they say.”
“So who is it?” Wil asked. He looked at me. “Who leads this Academy?”
On instinct, I looked at Buble, unsure how to answer. Could that be who they were looking for, for sure? They hadn’t mentioned the Academy once, just Wil did.
Buble’s lip twitched as he said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about. What Academy school? With kids? Explain this to me.”
He was lying about not knowing. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Still, it could mean he was one of the bad guys and knew who they were, or he really was Academy and had to lie for whoever was listening.
Wil looked from me to Buble and back. “You don’t know?” he asked me. “Do you know the Academy?”
“Not really,” I said. Wil could tell when I lie, he was the only other person to be able to tell. If they were listening, they’d hear this but he’d know the real deal. “Rumors, maybe. I don’t really know. Some sort of school?”
“So why did they pick you up?” Wil asked. “What have you been doing that would make them think you’d know?”
“I’ve been scraping by, picking up odd jobs.” I remembered the note I left for him—and he never picked it up—and confronting Jack about it and the aftermath. He never checked in, according to the Academy. “You’ve been at school?”
“For the most part, yes,” he said. “Lots of tests. Taking some computer science stuff.”
I tried not to show surprise here. He hadn’t been to school. The Academy brought me there to look in on him, and he’d been basically signing in at school and leaving, not showing up for classes at all.
Buble looked from me to Wil and back. “So we’re all here, normal people, with no connection? So why would they put us in a room together?”
“Someone knows something,” I said. “They’re waiting for one of us to say what they want.”
Buble nodded. “So we don’t talk. If we don’t say anything, we have a better chance to someone looking for us to find us.”
“Or we can just tell them something,” Wil said. “Anything we actually know. Maybe we don’t know what’s going on, but we could piece together information. Give them what they want.”
“So they can just shoot us?” Buble asked. “No. I’d rather not.”
I went to check on Raven again, kneeling next to him. I opened one eye of his, but it didn’t look back at me, still unconscious. “William,” I said. “Who…who else was around Alice?”
“No one,” he said. “She always came around alone.”
“No one else?”
“No.”
“Not some people who spoke German?”
He blinked at me. “No.”
“She didn’t tell you her real name?” I asked and turned to look at him. “Anja?”
He seemed surprised by this. “What?”
“Or that she almost married Ethan Murdock, the son of the old Mr. Murdock, head of the Murdock empire? His father and Anja, which was Alice’s real name, tried to take over his son’s secret experimental cell phone network to use for nefarious reasons, at least until it was turned over to authorities. Not to mentioned kidnapping, attempted murder…”
Wil shook his head, his lips sucking in with a heavy breath. “I think we have the wrong person. That’s not her.”
I was livid, because if it was the same person—and I was pretty sure it was—she did get to him. He was here now, possibly because of her connection to him.
Maybe this wasn’t about us… Maybe it wasn’t about the Academy at all…
I looked over at Buble. “You know, I haven’t heard one peep from the older Mr. Murdock after he disappeared. Just Alice. Just people that scammed a lot of money out of the Murdock corporation and invested it with them, supposedly with her as the investor. If there were two billion dollars at stake, hidden by an investor, people would be looking for that, wouldn’t they?”
Buble tilted his head, considering what I said. “And maybe…maybe to access that two billion dollars, they need Mr. Murdock? Because he was in charge of the whole thing.”
Wil scrunched his eyebrows together. “Two billion? Where do you get two billion dollars from?”
“Fixing the books of several companies from around the city,” I said. “I was looking for it, too, to get it back into the company.”
“But when other groups hear about two billion dollars up in the air,” Buble said, “they’re going to come out of the woodwork. They want it, too.”
“Including this Academy?” Wil asked.
I turned on him, twisting around while sitting close to Raven. “Why do you keep bringing it up?”
Wil shrugged. “You’re talking about groups. It’s one that’s involved. They aren’t trying to get in on so much money? Like you all said, anyone would make an attempt.”
Something in the way he was talking made my heart hurt, maybe because I didn’t believe that to be the case, and it felt like Wil was accusing them. Not once, not one minute I spent with that Academy team did they indicate they wanted money.
But they got it from somewhere. There was an entire hospital, right? They bought out entire neighborhoods to fix them up.
Yet, it didn’t seem to be the case. The guys lived in an apartment together. They helped people who were abducted…or like my father and that entire neighborhood they redid to help people like him. Greed didn’t seem to be the motivation for anything they’d done, so two billion, while it would help a lot of people, it didn’t seem likely they’d kidnap and torture people to get to it.
“It wouldn’t matter if this Academy group were interested in the money or not,” Buble said. “Without the elder Mr. Murdock, everyone would be out of luck.”
“But if he’s missing…” Wil said. “I mean, just think. Who has him? You said he’s been missing.”
I wasn’t sure how many lies Alice had told him, but I needed one little detail to prove something.
Avery said that the police had been close to finding Mr. Murdock, they were on his trail.
I got up, leaving Raven to move to the camera.
“What are you doing?” Buble asked.
I picked it up, looking right into the face of it. “Someone come in here.”
In just a few minutes, the tired guard came in. “Yes?”
“What’s your name?”
He seemed surprised by this. “Joe.”
“Can I come out and talk to you, Joe?”
“What are you going to tell him?” Buble asked. “We shouldn’t—”
“We don’t need to talk,” Joe said, cutting him off.
I raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“We don’t need information. We have a lead on who we want. Now we’re just waiting.” He smirked. “We’ve got more people, we just needed to find one who would crack. And we did.”
“Who?”
“Natalie wasn’t doing so hot,” he said. “So he traded information for getting her to a hospital. Her brother-in-law. And his friend. The guy we brought you in with.”
Axel? And Blake? “What are you talking about? Where are they?”
He put a hand on his chest. “Swear on my life, we’ll find the guy and everyone gets let go. Just give us some time. If they were right, we’ll be gone soon. Just go sit down.”
“Wait a second,” I said, and gripped at his arm before he could shut the door.
He shifted quickly, taking just my pinkie and pinching it in a way that felt like it was going to break in half. He twisted my wrist until I was on my knees on the floor trying to relieve the tension. I cried out, wanting to bite at him, but I couldn’t get an angle in close enough.
“I don’t need any trouble,” Joe said.
“I just wanted to know if you really have Alice,” I seethed out. “Or if you really work for her? And let me go.”
“She doesn’t know where he is,” the guy said. “She’s been lo
oking for him. Thought you all had him.” He tightened the pinch until I squealed. “Now you get back in there or…”
There was shuffling behind him. “Let her go,” a familiar, stoic voice said.
I was released and was on my knees on the ground. But I knew the voice.
Behind our guard was Axel. He was clothed, in basic jeans and a clean T-shirt. He had a cut across his left eye, taped together for it to heal. He had bruises across his arms.
“Look, she was causing trouble,” our guard said. “I didn’t hurt a hair, just like I said.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Axel said. “She’s coming with us.”
“What? She’s a liability.”
“She’s too smart to leave here,” Axel said. He looked in at the others. “And you should tranq the big guy again before we leave. Don’t let him wake up. Maybe even the kid, too.”
“He hasn’t done anything.”
“It’s her brother. He’s smart, too.” He nodded toward Buble. “We don’t need him. We can use her. She’ll help.”
I was stunned into silence. I refused to understand that this was him, that he was giving up information. But if Joe wasn’t lying to me, then this was a third party, some other group who was after the two billion dollars.
It was why Alice was hunting us. It was why she hadn’t killed us. She thought we had Mr. Murdock somewhere. We didn’t.
So where was he?
“Your brother?” Buble said behind me in a surprised tone. “You said you didn’t know each other.”
“And you said you weren’t in the Academy,” Wil said. “I know who you are. So we’re all lying here.”
“Enough,” Joe said. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me out of the room. “You’re with us. The rest of you, just shut up.” He closed the room door.
Axel yanked me out of the guard’s grip and pulled me into him. “I’ve got her,” he said. “Get her some clothes.”
“You don’t think she’ll just run off first chance she gets?” the guard asked.
“No, she’ll go with us.” His hand around my arm tightened like he wanted me to pay attention to this part. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
“Look, as long as we find Murdock and we get what we’re promised, like I said, no one gets hurt.” Joe waved us off. “She doesn’t cooperate, it’s on you.”