“There isn’t.” Conrad’s patience was at its end. He picked up his case for the last time. “Now let’s get out of here!”
Before Conrad could reach Piper, she shot off of the floor and flew out of the window, hovering just out of his range. Conrad rushed forward.
“What are you doing? Get out of sight before someone sees you!”
“I can’t do it, Conrad. I just can’t leave without ’em. Violet’s my friend and all those animals and things I saw on the fourth level—they nearly broke my heart. Where am I going to hide that I won’t remember them?”
Conrad didn’t have an answer. Piper knew that she might not be as smart as Conrad, and she even knew that she was probably in shock and wasn’t thinking straight. But even so, she knew that she couldn’t live out the rest of her days knowing that she’d left the others behind.
“Either we all leave together or we don’t leave at all. And that’s the end of it. If you’re such a genius, you’ll just have to figure out a plan that works.”
“I’m telling you I can’t. Nothing will work. Piper, we’re not some comic book characters with happy endings all mapped out for us. Half these kids have got abilities that are all but useless for the purposes of mounting an escape—or for anything else, for that matter.”
“All the same, I reckon you’ll find a way to make it all work out.” Piper floated back and forth.
“I knew you were going to be a problem.”
“I’m not aiming to cause you problems, Conrad. The way I see it, we’ve got no one but each other right now and so we’d best figure a way to get along.” Piper started to fly back to her room. Over her shoulder she said, “You’ll think up a real good plan. And don’t you worry yourself, I’m gonna help out too.”
Piper help him think up a plan? If Conrad wasn’t worried before, he was now.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CONRAD WAS desperate.
His desperation meant he needed Piper McCloud, and Conrad Harrington III had never needed anyone. It’s certainly safe to say that no one had ever needed him, let alone cared about him. Both his father and mother saw to it that he had absolutely anything and everything except their time, attention, and affection. A child was a necessary accessory in a politically motivated power couple, and they were overjoyed when Conrad III arrived. He was exactly what he should have been, only more. Unfortunately, much more. His acute intelligence was something neither of them wanted, and initially the only use they could find for it was as a dinner party diversion.
“Thank you, Nanny. Do put Connie on my lap.” Abigail Churchill-Harrington accepted the boy outfitted in a spotless silk sailor suit and held him as one slightly afraid, like he was a wild chinchilla or an exotic snake. Dinner guests instantly cooed on cue, their dessert forks pausing en route to their lips, dripping with zabaglione and balsamic-roasted strawberries.
“What a lovely child.”
“He looks just like his father.”
“You must be so proud!”
“Yes, yes, thank you.” Abigail smiled, turning to the guest seated at her right. “You know, Mr. Vice President, our little Connie has already memorized all the presidents and states too. Such a wonder for a two-year-old, don’t you think? Of course, both Galileo and Newton are in my family tree, but that is neither here nor there. All the same, you simply can’t get away from good breeding. Nanny, why are Connie’s eyes closed? NANNY? Oh, they’re open again. Connie, dear, recite the states and their capitals for our nice guests.” Abigail proudly held her child until he had finished his recitation and the guests applauded, whereupon Nanny whisked the child out of sight, not to be seen or thought about again until he was required at the next dinner party, or tea party, or photo opportunity.
At the age of six, darling little Connie’s performance schedule was cut short when he questioned his father on a matter of foreign policy in front of the Chinese ambassador at the annual Thanksgiving cocktail party.
What had begun as a lovely diversion was proving to be an embarrassment and liability to the family. Conrad’s intelligence was so extraordinary that no teacher could surpass it, let alone match it, and no other school would accept him, particularly the best ones. Not long afterward, Conrad started to—in the words of the best child psychologist in Washington D.C., at a rate of five hundred dollars an hour—“act out.” At seven years old, little Connie’s acting out culminated in a foray into the national Defense Department mainframe, where he remotely reprogrammed an orbiting satellite armed with nuclear missiles. When the CIA notified the Oval Office, the president found he was not well disposed toward a seven-year-old having his finger on the red button. Rather than deal with the embarrassment, Abigail and Conrad Harrington willingly handed little Connie over to Dr. Hellion when she came knocking on their door, no questions asked, thus neatly avoiding any political fallout from the debacle.
Incidentally, the satellite that caused the kerfuffle in the first place had a new trajectory, thanks to Conrad, which prevented a collision with an aging Russian space station that had slipped from its orbit. No one, least of all the president, bothered to attach any significance or thanks to this factoid.
Conrad’s ability was at once a blessing and a curse. With relative ease, he immediately saw through Dr. Hellion’s lies and understood the true nature of I.N.S.A.N.E. Unfortunately, that same intelligence informed him that there was nothing he could do about it. Conrad and Dr. Hellion were equally matched opponents; Conrad’s intelligence versus Dr. Hellion’s security systems, agents, research, and drugs. While Conrad couldn’t escape, he took effective countermeasures that made him immune to Dr. Hellion’s tactics. Had Conrad’s parents not been such political powerhouses, Dr. Hellion would have eagerly employed the more drastic rehabilitation means at her disposal, but in Conrad’s case the Harrington name bound her hands.
Conrad couldn’t escape. Dr. Hellion couldn’t make him normal. Thus they remained in a deadlock year after year with no end in sight. Escape was all Conrad thought about. It was the only thing that mattered. And escape was absolutely impossible.
For four long years, Conrad remained buried alive on the thirteenth level in a state of unspeakable agony. His brain activity was relentlessly in motion, analyzing, creating, problem-solving, calculating, its capacity exponentially growing in staggering leaps and bounds. Day and night it worked nonstop, yet Conrad had no vent for any of it (Dr. Hellion made sure of that), no way to turn it off, and it gushed inside him—a raging river of intellectual power battering against the feeble dam of his body, demanding an outlet. Year after year, he existed like a half-starved dog chained in a dirt yard under a burning sun without shade or water, and the pain and pressure turned Conrad mean and mad.
If he didn’t get out soon, Conrad Harrington knew that he was going to go insane. And escape was absolutely impossible.
Until there was Piper McCloud.
The probability of a flier is so rare, so completely out of the ordinary, and it was the very thing Conrad needed to make an escape plan work. The minute he saw that Piper could fly, he knew hope. He carefully plotted and prepared for every eventuality except one—Piper’s refusal to leave without the others.
How can she be so colossally stupid??!! Didn’t she understand?
To make matters worse, Piper had somehow developed the mistaken impression that they were now friends. Each night when Nurse Tolle finished night check and Conrad sat down to plan the escape, Piper made a habit of flying through his window and chattering nonstop about anything and everything that was going on inside her head. (Some information, even a genius like Conrad dreaded to know.)
“I saw Violet eating that chocolate brownie at dinner, and I nearly split, I wanted to warn her so badly. You reckon we’ll be able to tell ’em soon?” Piper sat on Conrad’s bed, holding Sebastian and gently stroking him. The little black cricket was fully recovered and liked to hop between Piper’s fingers.
“Mmmmm,” Conrad mumbled, not really listening.
&n
bsp; “I know I’ve been down here a good long stretch already but I’ve got to admit, it’s like I wasn’t here at all. Like my eyes were taken right out of their sockets and I was walking ’round as blind as a bat. It’s as plain as day to me now that this whole place is crazy. Like how all we do is weave baskets and memorize the same names and dates over and over again. Sure we’re busy but we’re not learning or doing anything useful. It just doesn’t sit right with me. I gotta tell you that when I saw what I saw and you told me what you did, I felt awful in here.” Piper pointed to her heart. “A person wants to believe in folks and trust in things, and when you can’t, life doesn’t seem worth living anymore. That’s exactly how I felt. Like it was hopeless. But the more I got to pondering it, the more I just figured that even if some folks are bad, there’s others who aren’t. So I reckon I just won’t ever give up my flying for anyone ever again. I don’t care what they tell me. There’s just some things you gotta keep for yourself, no matter who asks you or how nice they’re being. Then it doesn’t make any difference if folks are good or bad ’cause they can’t do anything to me if I won’t let ’em. Know what I mean?”
“Mmmm.”
“You sure are working hard, Conrad. I’m fixing to help you too, if you tell me what to do.” Conrad didn’t respond. “I’m real useful if you give me half a chance. Even my ma says I can husk a corn faster then anyone and she’s stingy in the praise department.”
Conrad not only doubted that Piper could help but, except for her flying, it was clear to him she was a terrible liability. So when the very next night Piper landed in his room in a state of great excitement and grandly announced that she’d figured out exactly how to help, he braced for the worst.
“I got to thinking how you explained about Dr. Hellion and her way of getting us not to use our gifts. How she explained things in such a way that we’d think we didn’t want to do it anymore. And we wouldn’t. Well, it makes sense then that if we wanted to use our gifts again then we would, right? So then I got to wondering how I’d get the others to want to and it came to me right off. Just like that. They need to dream! You know, think up what they would do with their talents, and get them real excited about it, and then they might get a hankering to follow that dream.”
“Ahh,” Conrad said out loud.
That is absolutely ridiculous and won’t work, Conrad said inwardly.
All the same, Conrad knew that if Piper’s time and attention were occupied, she was less likely to get in his way, or otherwise screw up an already difficult situation, and so he let the matter go.
“So I got right to it and I started with Violet and you know what she told me? She said that if she was to get out she’d be an archey—an archeyolo-something. It’s when folks go to far-off lands and dig up stuff from way, way long ago. Like tombs and crypts and the like. Violet explained the whole thing to me. She says when they get to digging, they find things all sealed up and so she figures she could shrink down really small and go inside before the others. She reckons she’d be the first one in places that no one’s been near in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and see stuff painted on the walls and look at old King Tut. Soon as she gets herself an eyeful, she’ll come right out and tell the others what was what and how to get in without hurting anything. Isn’t that something? I told Violet that she had herself a real good plan.” Piper looked to Conrad but he didn’t turn around or acknowledge her presence in any way.
“That Conrad sure don’t say much,” she whispered to Sebastian later on as she settled into sleep. Piper chalked his silence up to all of the hard work he’d been putting into planning the escape, and the next morning approached her day with a renewed vim and vigor, excitedly reporting her findings to Conrad that night.
“You ask folks a question and they’ll tell you the most amazing things. Things you’ve never heard of or would’ve thought up, even if you lived to be a hundred. Like Smitty’s got everything all worked out. He’s gonna be a detective and solve all the real hard crimes because he can see stuff other people can’t. Isn’t that something? I told him he’d be really good at it and I’d hire him, and his chest swelled up like he’d got a balloon in it.
“And then Lily, she’s all small and dainty, but I can tell you right now that her insides are as strong as steel. Lily’s gonna join NASA and be an astronaut. You know why?” Conrad didn’t answer and Piper didn’t notice. “ ’Cause she says that when they go up in space, it’s real troublesome moving stuff outside the spaceship and Lily figures she can do that easy as pie. Don’t that just take the cake? I can see it too. Lily, all fine in her space, outfit, looking out the window of some ship, picking up space rocks or fixing a broken engine. She’d be a real credit to us all and it’d be a shame if she didn’t get to go up to the moon and I told her so straight out. She told me that when you’re on the moon and you look down on Earth, it’s real pretty and promised that she’ll take a picture to show me. Think of that!”
Once Piper got started, she learned everything about her classmates. She learned that Myrtle Grabtrash, a tall, thin, gawky girl, whose dark hair somehow managed to completely conceal her face, was her mama’s twelfth child. Myrtle was born in a one-room shack on a piece of real estate shared by the railroad tracks of the Georgia Amtrak, and at the moment of her birth, a train crashed right through their tiny shack. The train, which had been mistakenly rerouted onto the abandoned tracks, didn’t bother to stop, and so it took a whole week before Myrtle was finally apprehended at the Peachtree, Georgia, station. Her mama liked to say that it was the first time Myrtle ran away. It wasn’t to be the last.
Myrtle’s best friend was Daisy, and Piper discovered that Dr. Hellion apprehended Daisy after she picked up a whole bulldozer and threw it upside down to prevent the construction of a hazardous waste dump. Only after persistent questioning and great patience was Piper able to extract from Daisy the information that the dump was going to destroy a family of pygmy rabbits burrowing in the soil of the proposed land.
“Small,” Daisy told Piper in her slow way, and then held out her large hand and cupped it in the approximate size to show Piper exactly how tiny the fluffy gray-and-brown rabbits were. “Extinct. Too small, not strong enough.” Daisy didn’t exactly have a way with words.
After Daisy tossed about a few more large pieces of heavy equipment, including a crane and an asphalt machine, the developer got a little antsy, and Daisy earned herself a one-way helicopter trip to I.N.S.A.N.E., leaving behind a family of pygmy bunnies to wage their own battle against a multinational construction company. Every day, Daisy worried about her miniature bunny family, wondering if they had managed to escape and find themselves a new home.
“I told Daisy that them tiny rabbits got out, no problem. They might be small but I bet they can run, I told her. So you know what Daisy and Myrtle would do if they got out? They figure they’ll work together and make homes for things that don’t have homes anymore. They don’t have it all worked out yet exactly but Myrtle’s gonna do the legwork and Daisy’ll handle the heavy lifting and they’ve got a mind to get a piece of land and just collect up plants and animals and people that’s looking for a place where folks will let them be.”
Conrad snorted. Without a doubt, that was the most ridiculous idea he’d ever heard, until, of course, the following evening when Piper related how Nalen and Ahmed’s grand plans were so detailed that they had already selected a name for their company, Mustafa Weather Solutions, and had a business plan that included a bread-and-butter base of helping farmers get rain, as well as dabbling in government contracts to reverse global warming. All of that work would support their main passion—hurricane wrangling, tsunami interception, and possibly even some covert operations in counter-weather terrorism (that last part was, of course, very hush-hush). Hearing this, Conrad just about threw up his hands in disgust at the craziness of it all.
Two nights later, Piper excitedly reported that Kimber’s dream was to use static electricity to create an act for the Cirqu
e du Soleil in which she would be called “Mistress of Electricity.” Kimber’s act was going to be so electric, so amazing, that her audience would give her standing ovations each and every night. (No comment from Conrad.)
There was one stumbling point that Piper endlessly discussed with Conrad but had no success overcoming. No matter what Piper did, Jasper could not remember his ability and had no dream other than getting home and seeing his grandmother, who promised him a puppy whom he planned to call Rex.
“It’s like they went right into his head and took a piece out,” Piper complained to Conrad. “Jasper just plain doesn’t know. I reckon I’ve asked him every which way to Sunday and still he doesn’t know. It’s a right shame too.”
As soon as Piper sensed that the uprising of enthusiasm and excitement for their dreams was firmly established among the class (with the exception of Jasper), she began posing subtle questions designed to cause suspicion and fan the flames of discontent.
“I sure miss my ma and pa. Don’t you miss yours? Dr. Hellion keeps telling me she’ll pass on any letters they send but she doesn’t. Are you getting letters from your folks? No? Huh, why d’ya think we don’t get to talk to them?”
The more Piper prodded and poked, the more she got the others to think hard about things that hadn’t yet occurred to them.
“But Dr. Hellion says that if I go around using my telekinesis all the time, I’ll get really bad headaches and she doesn’t want to see me in pain,” Lily said with wide eyes.
“But did you ever get a headache before?”
Lily thought hard for a moment before saying slowly, “Well, no, I guess I didn’t. I can’t ever remember having a headache.”
Piper nodded meaningfully. “Well, then it’s a mighty strange thing for Dr. Hellion to tell you, don’tcha think?”
“I said it to her just like that,” Piper reported passionately to Conrad. “I said, ‘That is a mighty strange thing for Dr. Hellion to tell you,’ and I could see Lily got to thinking the same thing. And when I pointed out to Kimber that we kept learning the same lessons over and over again and asked her why she thought they weren’t teaching us anything new, it was like you could have knocked her over with a feather. She just plum didn’t realize they were teaching the same things day in and day out. Did you notice how she was all fidgety and angry all afternoon and asking all those questions? It’s ’cause she knows something’s not right.”
The Girl Who Could Fly Page 14