by Kelly deVos
Dad stays with Copeland and Terminus. I guess he’s part of this operation now.
But this isn’t Fort Novak.
It’s Fort Marshall.
We go back to the barracks, and Navarro and Jinx do what they always do, which is to exchange a bunch of significant looks and stare at each other all the time. It sucks that this is what passes for dating in our new life. In another version of reality, they’d probably be making out while pretending to watch a movie. Instead, it’s more like a silly, repressed teen soap opera. All that’s missing is an emo piano soundtrack.
I have to wait and wait and wait and wait to talk to Toby. Like, I have to mill around in that drafty hallway where the wind whips through and kinda whistles as it blows across the rocks. And I have to wait out there holding a bar of soap and a towel so that, when the soldiers pass by, I can act like I’m on my way to the shower. Which is weird and suspicious because we have a private shower in our barracks. Which my brother could have used instead of going to the other one attached to A.
Finally, finally, finally Toby rounds the corner from the main showers to our barracks. He’s actually whistling. If he were a cartoon, he’d probably be doing a little jig while he walks. It’s, like, jaunty. Yeah, jaunty. I’ve always wanted to use that word in a sentence, and here it is.
My brother’s walk is really damn jaunty.
When he comes within a couple feet, anger surges. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Toby is wearing green sweats and a camo-green T-shirt. Like the soldiers do. I think he’s trimmed his hair. “And...uh...what the hell are you wearing?”
He’s got a gray sweatshirt in one hand and a towel in the other. He makes a comic show of examining the items one by one. “The guys said it gets cold in here at night. I grabbed some sweats. Just in case.”
Oh. For real?
I’m about to blow. “The guys? The guys? You don’t have guys. You’re not one of the guys. You’re my brother, and we’re supposed to be working together.”
Toby smiles at me like I’m a small child. He actually pats me on the arm. “We are working together. We’re going to get Charles back. Like you wanted. Tomorrow, we’ve got a big day ahead. You need your sleep.”
A big day? It takes a lot of self-discipline not to deck my brother.
What I need is honesty. “Oh. Now you wanna come? This morning you said it was a suicide mission. This morning you said we’d be marching into certain death.”
His smile fades. “That was before.”
He tries to step around me and go to our room.
It’s a weird repeat of what happened this morning. Like all he wants is to get away.
“Before what?” I ask. “Before you took off with that creepy general? Or before you realized that Annika Carver is on her way to Portland?”
He’s cold when he speaks to me. “Before we had an actual plan. Before we had help. Before we had resources.”
This is such a bunch of crap. Like, we already had resources. We had Jinx’s programming abilities, which so far no one has been able to match. We had Navarro, who ran our crew like the marines. We had guns and money. We had each other.
“You’re still in love with her? Are you a total fool?”
His anger flares. His lips form a sneer. “I suppose you and Jinx have been sneaking around again. And as usual, drawing all the wrong conclusions. The general predicted this.”
I put my hands on my hips. “The general predicted this? You know, if it weren’t for me and Jinx, you’d probably still be sitting in a security office at ASU while the government debated which branch of the military was gonna come and execute you.”
Toby tries to pass me again. “I barely know her, Mac. I’m not planning on running off to elope.” He stops for a second and looks me in the eyes. “But she’s one of us, you know. All she wants is a real friend.”
Annika Carver is the kind of girl who carves up her friends and eats them like banana slices on top of her morning cereal. I’m about to say as much, when he goes on.
“You remember when I went through that phase where I was super into pinball?” he asks.
Yeah, sure I do. It was back when Mom was still alive and we lived in Colorado. Toby was twelve and had his braces and was all kinds of annoying. He begged Dad to put some doofus machine called Cirqus Voltaire in our basement, and the thing practically drove me nuts. It had this freaky green head that would pop out and shout, “I’m the juggler,” or something, and—
“I always wanted to find a way to beat my high score. To beat the machine. But now? We’re like those shiny silver pinballs. You, me, Annika, Jinx. Even Navarro. We’re bouncing around from obstacle to obstacle. We barely understand the rules of the machine. And even if we beat it, what do we win?”
Oh. Sure. That makes a ton of sense.
Toby tries to push me gently to one side of the hallway.
I grab his arm. Hard. He flinches.
“What else did the general tell you?” I demand.
There’s a pause, and he answers slowly. “That we have an opportunity. Not to beat the game. But to destroy it.”
My blood turns to ice. “What does he want you to do, Toby? What does Copeland want?” It sounds like, in a matter of hours, Copeland managed to indoctrinate my brother. But then, only this morning, Toby was trying to ditch us.
He expression is calm and nonchalant. “Exactly what he said. Get to California. Hand over the encryption key. We’ll get Charles back and then decide what to do next. Together.”
This sounds like another one of the lies we tell ourselves. “You can’t save her, you know. You can’t save Annika from herself, Toby.”
My brother shrugs and smiles blandly. Which pisses me off even more.
I let go of his arm. “The only reason Copeland is even talking to you—the only reason he didn’t kill you—is because they need Jinx. They need her to fix the bank computers.”
“I’m not sure that they do,” he says, for a second looking and seeming like his old self, not cocky or jaunty or jokey. “I think they need something else.”
“What do they need?”
He hesitates again. “Maxwell Marshall. And she’s the closest thing they’ve got.”
This time, he firmly pushes me aside and enters our room, leaving me alone.
Again.
Which leaves me no choice but to follow.
Back in the room, any hope of a discussion is put on hold when Phil arrives on the utility cart with several plastic bins of supplies. One thing I’ll say about Dr. Doomsday—he, like, really loved things organized neatly.
We unpack the bins.
There are several boxes of hair dye. A pair of sharp scissors. A fake cast. A selection of bright scarves. A few wigs. Birth certificates and social security cards in unfamiliar names. A stack of passports. I open one and find my own face staring back. Except I have a short red bob instead of my long dark hair.
I have a new name.
Hannah Ashley Brown.
Hannah Ashley looks like the kind of girl who spends Saturday afternoon at the gourmet cupcake store unable to choose the perfect frosting and loves taking those internet quizzes to figure out her personality type.
Two things are clear.
One: I do not want to be Hannah Ashley Brown.
Two: I look crappy with red hair.
MacKenna, this is a revolution! Who cares how you look!
I pick up the box of hair dye and the scissors.
“You want me to do it?” Jinx asks. She’s looking at her own paperwork, which shows her with a blue pixie cut. It doesn’t look half-bad, and she can probably cover it up with a hat.
I can feel the tears coming as I head to the bathroom. “No,” I say. “No offense. But hair design isn’t one of your strengths.”
Navarro laughs, but the sound is cut short as I
close the bathroom door.
It’s a small and cramped bathroom that looks like a slightly enlarged version of an airplane lavatory with a shower. I spend a couple of minutes strategically arranging the bottles of hair dye and scissors on the too-narrow steel bathroom counter. And then it’s me and a horrible box of hair dye and an uncertain future.
Step one: perform an allergy test.
Nope.
I crumple up the instruction sheet without reading the rest of it. I’ve been to enough slumber parties to understand the basics. I open up the bottle of color and squirt it on my head. Fast. So I can’t change my mind.
Then.
More waiting.
After a while, I rinse out the color.
And then it’s time.
Well.
The easiest thing to do is going to be to put my hair in a ponytail and cut it off. That’ll be about the right length, and I can try to fix the cut here and there. If I can.
I hold the ponytail in one hand and the scissors in the other.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
This is so stupid, but I want my mom. I want a hug. I want to be back in my room. I don’t want to cut my hair. It occurs to me, in that moment, that my hair is one of the things I really like about myself. I like the color. Dark brown, like tree bark. I like the fact that it’s thick and smooth and straight without much effort.
Tears. Tears. Tears.
Not like a few little droplets that I can wipe away with my sleeve. They run down my face. I turn on the water so no one can hear me heaving with sobs.
What the hell is wrong with me?
My dad is wanted for a crime he didn’t commit, and we’re on the run in Mexico. My stepbrother is being held by a bunch of neo-Nazi goons, and my brother spends all his free time dreaming about being Ammon Carver’s son-in-law.
LEAD: MacKenna Novak is a loser who cries about her hair while people are fighting and dying.
I’m a crap person.
So. Here I go.
I snip the ponytail and am left holding it in my hand, and it’s done. I wash my face and leave the bathroom.
“You look...nice,” Jinx says. Carefully. Diplomatically.
Navarro nods. “Very punk rock.”
Toby is reading a book. Not a novel or a biography. This one is black and old, with the title in large white, block letters on the front.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
“Where did you get that?” I snap.
Toby stops reading long enough to glare at me.
We both know.
It had to have come from Copeland.
Jinx actually answers me. And at least has the damn sense to be concerned. “My father used that book when he taught systems modeling,” she tells me. “It’s old. Even from before Freud. It essentially says that when a person joins a crowd, they leave their individual judgment and morals behind. Dad used some of those ideas in his theories, especially the notion that if you can get people to view themselves as part of a group, they are more persuadable.”
Navarro holds a box of blue hair dye. He acts like he’s really reading how to apply hair color from roots to ends. But he glances up. “And more violent,” he adds.
Toby lets the book fall onto his chest and watches Navarro. There’s something unspoken that passes between them. Like they understand each other in a way they didn’t before.
“Why does Copeland want you to read that?” Jinx asks.
“Why did your father give it to you?” Toby shoots back.
This is the new Toby.
Evasive. Weird. Different.
The old Jinx would have probably turned some shade of red and fidgeted with her shirt.
Jinx 2.0, on the other hand, says, “He didn’t give it to me. I read it on my own. My father used the material as a basis for his experiments in group manipulation, mainly to help get Ammon Carver elected. His conclusion was that, if you got people to self-sort into groups and then made them mad enough, you could get them to do almost anything. So, why did Copeland give that book to you?” There’s an accusation loaded in that question.
Toby gives her a fake smile. “He didn’t give it to me. I’m reading it on my own.”
She’s about to say something else when Navarro intervenes. “Susan, you should get started on your hair or we’ll be up all night.” He passes her the box of dye.
Jinx’s shoulders slump. She takes the box and goes into the bathroom.
She’s been in there for a couple of minutes when there’s a soft knock on the door.
Terminus enters.
In spite of everything, my stomach kinda flutters.
LEAD: MacKenna Novak is a loser who should be focusing on saving Charles and not developing feelings for some creepazoid hacker.
Fact check: I am NOT developing feelings.
Toby keeps reading and doesn’t look up from his book.
“The general wants to see you,” Terminus says.
Even though I haven’t yet figured who you is, Navarro immediately goes to the door like he was expecting this. Waiting for it to happen.
I scramble forward. “Wait. I’m coming too.”
Terminus and Navarro are already out of the small room and into the hall. I hear Toby call after me, but honestly, screw him. I have a few things I’d like to say to the general.
Out in the hall, Terminus and Navarro are double-timing it in the direction of the main lab, the way we originally came in. “Copeland’s at the comm center. We’ll—”
Since it’s possible they’ll go through some door that requires a one-zillion digit code, I call out, “Hey! Hey! Wait for me.”
They freeze midway between where I am and where a soldier stands guard, right before the doors that would take us to the labs, mess hall and storage areas.
I catch up with them and watch a red-faced Terminus glance from me to Navarro to the guard in a repeated, circular fashion. “The general only wants him. I like your hair though.”
“Shut up. And I don’t care what the general wants,” I tell him.
Relax, MacKenna. Relax.
Terminus sighs. “Evans?” He calls out to the soldier. “Take him to Copeland, okay?”
“I’m supposed to man this post, sir,” Evans calls back.
“Just take him back there and I’ll keep watch here.”
Navarro resumes walking down the hall. But even from where I am standing, I can see that this makes the guard uncomfortable. “The general doesn’t think you can be trusted to watch the girl. My orders are to remain here.”
The girl. It has to be Jinx. Something about her scares the shit out of everybody.
“For God’s sake, Evans, it’ll take two minutes to walk this guy over there.”
Evans opens the door to the main lab for Navarro. “Okay. But if anything goes wrong, it’s your ass.”
“Fine,” Terminus says as the door clicks shut.
His eyes are blue.
He stands really close.
Too close.
“Listen,” he says, softly.
“You listen,” I say, making myself say something. “Why are they guarding Jinx?”
He shoves his hands into the pockets of his camo cargo pants. “Why do you think?”
I drum my fingers on my own pant legs and wait for him to answer his own damn question.
He does. “Because Marshall loaded her fingerprints, retinal scans, common access codes, you name it, into the security program, and I can’t figure out how to get in there and make changes. She could access everything. See everything. And Copeland doesn’t want her to see everything.”
“Well, this is Fort Marshall,” I remind him.
“Yeah, yeah. Well, unfortunately Fort Marshall is under new management.”
“What is it that Copeland
doesn’t want us to see? Why does the general want to talk to Navarro?” I ask.
He answers too quickly. “I don’t know.”
I hate to admit it, but Jinx is right. There’s something about Harold Partridge that can’t be trusted.
“Do you want to know?” I ask.
Before he can say anything, I grab his arm and drag him down the hall. I plop his hand onto the thumbprint scanner. It accepts the entry, and then a small screen blinks a message.
ENTER CODE.
I stare at Terminus. Give him my most intimidating glare.
He takes two breaths, his fingers hovering above the keypad.
He quickly presses several buttons.
“Don’t let anyone see you!” he says with a resigned sigh.
Now that I have hair the color of a stop sign, not letting people see me seems more difficult than it used to be. But. Whatever. “Obviously,” I tell him.
He takes my hand.
No one has held my hand in so, so, so long.
We’re back in the main lab room, which is somehow even prettier at night. Or at least more mysterious. There are fewer lights on. The pool of water in the center of the cave, which was green and glowing, is more of a dark, secret abyss that reflects the golden lamplight. Most of the tables are empty. Two soldiers sit at desks on the opposite side of the water. One is wearing a headset and talking into a microphone, focusing deeply. Evans is there, too, talking to the other one. A female soldier with her blond hair knotted up neatly in a French twist.
They don’t see us.
We keep close to the wall and duck behind brownish rock formations. Staying in the shadows. Terminus shoots me angry stares when my boots scuff on the concrete path or when I breathe too loud or when he’s plain ole terrified that we’ll be caught.
We make it to a stack of plastic supply bins around five feet or so from the long table where Copeland was seated when we came in. He’s there again now, with his laptop open in front of him. Navarro stands before the general with his arms crossed over his chest.
The two of them are already in deep conversation, like two people who know each other quite well.
Copeland is talking in his gravelly voice. “We can keep the girl away from the computers until tomorrow morning. In fact, that’s what we’ll do. On orders from Command. But sooner or later...” He trails off.