by Jeff Hirsch
Eventually, the snow stopped and the clouds retreated. Above Amy, stars glittered hard in the black. The white landscape stretched out before her, clean and still. Her foot struck something hard and Amy threw her hands out to keep from falling. They touched wood. Amy looked up and saw dark timbers stretching into the sky. Rough planks stretched to either side. A wall.
Amy reeled forward into a wide doorway, fully expecting to see Grace and Dan and the others waiting for her, and to smell food cooking. Instead she found herself in an empty room covered in ivory sheets of snow. The floors were white. The walls were draped in it. Amy craned her head back and looked up. The roof was riven with gaping holes. She could see the stars through it.
Amy fell backward and struck ground without any pain. She sank deep into snow so soft it felt like a feather mattress. She felt herself float, weightless and dreamy, looking up at the dark sky. Some part of herself told her to get up, keep moving, but the voice was faint and her body wouldn’t listen anyway. Every part of Amy was retreating deep within her, forming itself into something wrinkled and hard, like a seed or the stone buried in a piece of fruit. Her body became a shell, thick and unfeeling. The world fell away except for the distant whispering of air from somewhere high above.
“Amy! Amy, can you hear me?”
It was Dan. He was standing right beside her, looking exactly as he had when she left him. Amy used every ounce of her strength to reach out to him, but her hand only brushed air.
“I’m okay,” she croaked. “I found Bhaile Anois.”
There was a flash of white light and Amy was weightless, rising out of the snow. Dan was gone now and it was Jake at her side, gliding along, his lips moving without sound, his hand wrapped around hers. There was a gust of wind and Jake became Evan and Evan became her father and then her mother. Amy felt her heart turn painfully. She was so happy they were here. So happy to be going home.
Cara closed her laptop, settling her aching body into her executive chair. She had been training nonstop for her next bout with Galt and was feeling it.
Down the hall, the door to her father’s study opened and slammed shut. Galt had gone in hours ago. Since then, all Cara had heard was murmuring voices interrupted by spikes of laughter.
Laughing at me.
Ever since her defeat in the gym, her father had been spending more time with Galt while she was stuck helping out with her mother’s annual teddy bear inventory. If she had to count one more bear, she felt sure she’d scream.
There were footsteps as Galt and her father went to their separate rooms, shutting the doors behind them. The house settled into quiet. Cara left her room and wandered in the dark. She moved from the kitchen and through the den to the open doorway of her father’s empty study. When she and Galt were kids, they would test each other’s courage with escalating dares. I dare you to touch his door and come back. I double dare you to step one foot inside.
And now Galt went in and sat down behind closed doors and had hours of conversations while she was shut out. Why him? Cara racked her brain.
Because he beat me. Because he’s faster. Stronger. Smarter. Better.
The realization hung on her shoulders like a sheet of lead. Cara left her father’s study and headed back to her room. Maybe if she slept on it, she would feel a little better in the morning. She stopped and jumped back at the sound of someone else moving through the house. It was her father. What was he doing in the kitchen at this hour?
Her father clicked on an overhead light and reached into a cabinet. He pulled down a juicer and various powders, and then the family’s protein shake bottles.
He’s making our morning shakes, Cara thought. He’s been giving us these things for ages, and I’ve never actually seen him make one.
He started by juicing a number of different fruits and vegetables: apples, grapes, peaches, broccoli, kale, some strange-looking grass. He poured equal amounts of each juice mixture into each bottle, followed with a scoop of protein powder. Then he took something out of the pocket of his robe and held it up into the light.
It was a squat glass vial, full with a thick-looking greenish liquid. Her father took a syringe out of his pocket and tore off its sterile wrapper. He plunged the syringe into the vial and filled it with the liquid.
Cara looked on, shocked. That’s not protein powder, Cara thought. That’s a drug! What’s he doing?
Pierce held the needle tip over Galt’s bottle and carefully pressed the plunger. A long stream of the drug shot into Galt’s shake. When the needle was empty, Pierce shook the bottle vigorously and put it in the refrigerator. He turned to Cara’s bottle next, but this time he filled the syringe less than halfway before squeezing it into Cara’s shake. He capped her bottle, shook it, and put it in the fridge next to Galt’s. Once the kitchen was spotless, he hit the light and left.
When she heard the door to Pierce’s bedroom shut, Cara crept toward the refrigerator. She pulled the bottles out and set them down on the counter, feeling her rage build as it all became clear.
Galt wasn’t better than her. He wasn’t stronger or faster and he certainly wasn’t smarter. He was cheating! Worse than that, her father was cheating for him.
Cara stood quietly for a while, staring at the bottles. Then she grabbed hers and worked a fingernail beneath the label. She switched her label with Galt’s so she got the full boost and he got the scraps.
What will it be like, Cara wondered, to feel all that strength? To show Galt once and for all who’s number one?
Cara’s stomach knotted with anger, and a strange sort of hunger.
Let’s see who the fittest is now, Dad.
Amy woke in a half-lit room, bleary, her body as heavy as a sack of concrete. There was a strange tearing sound in the air, like paper being ripped again and again. Her muscles ached as she pushed herself up. She was in what looked like a generic hotel room, white and beige walls, big-screen TV, shaded windows.
“You’re in Oslo.”
Dan was sitting at a desk across the room. As she turned to him, a scrap of paper fell from his hands into a trash can by his feet.
“How . . . ?” Amy began, recoiling from the pain of what felt like ground-up glass in her throat.
“The boat captain got Attleboro on the radio,” he said, his voice a flat line. “They sent a helicopter to pick me up and then I came to get you.”
“So you really were there,” Amy said, almost to herself. “That was you.”
“If we’d gotten there a few minutes later, you would have been dead.”
Instead of relief in Dan’s voice, Amy thought she heard something harder, like an accusation. Her arms were weak but she managed to haul the down-filled comforter off. She recoiled at the sight of herself. Her legs were covered in ugly purple bruises and so were her arms and her side. The tips of three fingers were numb beneath white bandages.
“We need to get moving,” she said, trying not to groan as she pushed herself to the edge of the bed. “We can still get the seeds in Tunis. Maybe if we —”
A plastic bag rattled as it flew across the room and landed on the bed. It was full of small tan seeds. She looked up at Dan. “How?”
“Atticus and Jake got a plane to Tunis. They tracked the seeds down through their dad’s friends.”
“Everyone’s okay?”
Dan said nothing. Just nodded. He wasn’t even looking at her.
“Dan —”
“Explain how you could do something so completely insane!” Dan said, exploding out of his chair, his face red with anger. “Do you have any idea how worried all of us were? You could have gotten yourself killed!”
“I did what I thought was best,” Amy said, trying to control what was building up inside her. “I’m the leader of the —”
“Don’t give me that ‘leader of the Cahills’ junk!” Dan yelled. “We work together! We always have. Everything good we’ve ever accomplished, we accomplished together!”
“Then why are you leaving!?” Amy’s c
ry felt like it was ripped from the very center of her. It battered the walls of the small room. “I saw those brochures, Dan. The ones you’ve been hiding from me. What? It’s okay for you to go off on your own but not me?”
Dan’s face was so red it looked as if it was burning. “I told you, I was going after this is over. After.”
Amy couldn’t control the tears coursing down her cheeks. “This is never going to be over! You said that yourself. After we deal with Pierce, someone else will come along, and then there’ll be someone else after that. If you want to leave so badly, go now!”
“Is that what you want, Amy? You want me to leave? Want all of us to leave? Didn’t almost dying out there show you how crazy that was?”
Dan waited for a response, but it was a long time coming.
“You can’t have it both ways, Dan,” Amy said, her voice so quiet he could barely hear it.
Dan couldn’t meet his sister’s eyes. “I called Jake and Atticus,” he said. “They’re meeting us here in Oslo tomorrow. Once we make a plan, we’re all heading to Guatemala. Together.”
Amy wanted to protest, but she didn’t have the strength. She nodded weakly. Dan reached into his pocket and tossed a new phone across the room and onto Amy’s bed.
“From Pony,” he said. “To replace the one you lost in the vault. He also wanted me to tell you he’s sorry.”
“For what?”
“He said there must have been something wrong with the network. He was waiting at his computer the whole time you were in Svalbard, but he never heard from you.”
Amy frowned. “I don’t understand. Pony’s the one who got me out.”
Dan shook his head. “He said he never heard from you.”
“But that’s not possible. If I wasn’t talking to him, then who . . .”
Dan shook his head and started for the door.
“Dan, wait. Please.”
He stopped with his back to her, one hand on the doorknob. Amy remembered the brochures in his bag, each one filled with boys his age, laughing and smiling. Carefree.
“Evan had so many plans,” she said softly, a tremble in her voice. “Did you know that he and his dad were going to take a year off together after he graduated high school? They were going to go to South America and help build houses for people who needed them. After that they were going to go to meet his mom in China, because they always dreamed of seeing the Great Wall. They had no idea that —”
The words caught in Amy’s throat, too big and too terrible to pass.
“I want all of you to be happy. You and Jake and Atticus and all the others. I don’t want this for you. I don’t want this for anybody. But you should go right now, Dan, before it’s too late.”
Dan seemed about to say something, but he didn’t. He opened the door and stepped into the hall.
“Dan, wait, I —”
The door closed behind him with a slap. The silence in the hotel room settled heavily on Amy’s shoulders. She looked away from the door and noticed that Dan had dragged the trash can out from under the desk. She remembered the sound of tearing paper and got herself out of the bed and went over to it.
Inside, there was a crumpled ball of paper streaked with blue and yellow and candy-apple red. Scraps of paper blew out of her hand and onto the floor as she unfolded it, like the feathers of some small, brilliantly colored bird. Dan’s brochures. Each one, with its bold colors and smiling, lighthearted boys, had been torn in half and then torn again.
Amy’s heart broke, looking down at them. She knew part of her should have been glad, but suddenly the thought of Dan staying made her ache worse than the thought of him leaving ever had.
There was a soft ding behind her. Amy flipped over her new phone and saw an e-mail waiting to be read. It was from Jake. She stared at it for a long time, her stomach turning, before she finally worked up the nerve to click on it.
Amy,
I don’t think there’s much to say, or anything that Dan probably hasn’t said already, but there’s one thing I had to get off my chest. First off, Atticus and I are glad you’re okay. We were all pretty mad when you took off without us, but that was because we were terrified. None of us know what we’d do if anything happened to you.
I want you to know that I’m not going to stop trying to help you fight Pierce. But I accept what you said before you left and want you to know that I agree. There was never anything between us and there never will be. Don’t waste any more time worrying about feelings that neither of us ever had.
— Jake
Amy closed the e-mail and then sat without moving for some time. She looked around at the stark walls of the room, and for a moment she felt like she was back in the vault, trapped and alone. Amy hit REPLY and started to type:
Jake,
I only said what I did because if you knew how I really felt, you would have pulled that plane out of the sky before you let me go off alone. And I’d rather you hate me and live than die because you care. I couldn’t forgive myself if you or Atticus were hurt. But I’m tired of lying. And the truth is, there’s no one I’d rather fight with, no one I’d rather be infuriated by, than you.
Dan said that the best things any of us have ever accomplished, we accomplished together. That’s true for me and you as well.
— Amy
Amy stared at the message, thinking of how Jake teased her on the beach in Tunis, and then his face as she boarded the plane.
She highlighted the e-mail and hit DELETE.
Once the e-mail was gone, she moved to her browser and typed in Guatemala and Riven Crystal. A long list of hits came up and she moved through them one by one, examining each, making lists of notes, losing herself in the research.
Nellie crouched in the weeds at the edge of the Trilon parking lot, looking up at the dark building. There were four labs with lights still on. She waited, legs cramping, until the lights went off one by one. Soon the straggling scientists left the building and got into their cars.
Nellie slipped out of the ditch and ran across the parking lot in a low crouch, doing her best to avoid the pools of light streaming down from towering steel poles. There was a security station just inside the main entrance that was manned 24/7, so that way was out. Luckily, she had the building’s schematics all but memorized. Nellie left the parking lot and came around the north side of the building, belly crawling underneath the first-floor windows just in case.
Nellie found the side door and pulled a set of lock-pick tools out of her back pocket. She eased the thin metal tools into the lock and closed her eyes as she dug around inside, judging her success by the vibrations coming back through the metal. She felt tumblers move out of her way one by one, but got stuck on the last. It slipped and slid out of her grasp and her hands went tense.
Nellie heard footsteps out in the dark. No doubt a guard on patrol. He was getting closer. Twenty feet away. Then fifteen. Nellie poured her whole concentration into the tools, twisting and turning them. Come on. Come on. A flashlight beam appeared. Nellie held her breath. Ten feet. Five. The final tumbler lifted and the lock clicked open. She threw her shoulder into the door as the guard appeared. She rolled inside, sticking out one hand at the last second to stop the door before it slammed against the frame. She held it there, listening until the guard was gone again. Nellie eased the door shut and then turned into the gloom of the building.
She was in a first-floor stairwell. To get back to the vending machine she needed to go up three flights and then wind through the corridors until she was on the far-west side of the building.
Nellie got moving, slinking up to the fourth floor, then peeking out the door until she was sure no one was coming. The hallways were half lit by safety lights, filling the string of labs and corridors with an eerie gloom. Nellie froze at every sound, her body going on high alert until she realized that it was simply the building settling or the air-conditioning cycling on. She had memorized the placement of the video cameras and took a long and winding route to avoid
them. It felt like it took her hours before she finally ended up back at the dead-end hallway.
The snack machine glowed in front of her. As she approached it, the glass front picked up her reflection. Nellie’s skin went cold as she imagined the black machine was a huge mouth, poised to devour her.
Come on, Gomez, pull yourself together. It’s just your imagination.
Nellie’s hands shook as she pulled the stolen key card from her back pocket. She had definitely picked up a thing or two over the years. A subtle shoulder bump and the pharmaceutical rep she had seen outside of Dr. Callender’s office had been distracted enough that Nellie could swipe her card without being noticed. Nellie ran it through the reader. There was a click and one edge of the snack machine popped away from the wall.
Nellie peeked around the side of the machine. There was now a sliver of space between it and the wall behind. She slipped her fingertips into the crack that had formed and pulled. The snack-machine door swung open easily and without a sound. On the other side was a narrow concrete staircase leading down into darkness.
Nellie swallowed a growing lump of fear in her throat and stepped into the black, shutting the door behind her. She stood there in the dark, her heart hammering, until there was a faint hum all around her and a series of dim fluorescent lights cut on all along the staircase. Huh, Nellie thought. I guess you can be evil and energy conscious at the same time.
Nellie descended the stairs, crossing switchback landings at each floor until she had descended five levels. There, she found a landing and a steel-jacketed door. The basement should be just on the other side. She swiped her A card in the reader by the handle and the door popped open.
Nellie peeked through the doorway. On the other side was a nondescript hallway with large picture windows running down its length. She didn’t see any people or hear any voices.