Payback

by Gordon Korman

  “We’re sorry,” Tori says shamefaced. “We won’t do it again. Please don’t report us.”

  The guard’s face softens. “We can let it go this one time. Return to your rooms immediately.”

  We hurry toward the exit, our drenched sneakers squishing on the granite floor.

  We’re almost out when a brassbound door opens and an elderly man steps out of the casino. The sound hits us immediately—ringing bells, cascading coins, and an assortment of groans and cheers. Unlike the rest of the resort, the casino is open twenty-four hours, and even now there are guests in there. I guess you’re allowed to lose your money at four in the morning so long as it doesn’t float out of your pocket while you’re in the pool.

  That’s when we see him. Laska grabs my shoulder and squeezes so hard that it’s all I can do to keep from screaming. There, sitting at one of the dice tables is a tall, lean man with impossibly broad shoulders. We don’t know his real name. We always called him Major Nosehair, because—well, do I have to paint a picture?

  He’s a Purple People Eater.

  21

  TORI PRITEL

  The sight of a Purple People Eater not sixty feet away from us changes everything. Before, we were walking around like tourists, gawking at the wonders of Poseidon. Now the wave pools and the waterfalls and even the volcano might as well not exist. All that matters is what we have to do.

  As soon as we’re away from the casino and back out on the grounds, I take charge. (I’m not sure why that always happens. In certain situations, where nobody else knows what to do, it’s as clear to me as if I’m reading an instruction sheet.) “The first problem is our clothes.”

  “What’s wrong with our clothes?” demands Malik. “Besides the fact that they’re wet and gross.”

  “Nobody wears jeans to a water park,” I explain. “We want to blend in with everybody else in this place. We need bathing suits so we’ll look like all the other kids here.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Eli agrees. “Except we’ve got hardly any money left. And none of the shops are open till morning.”

  I lead them along one of the paths to the base of an elegant condo building ringed by outdoor terraces. As I expected, at least half of the units have bathing suits and T-shirts draped over deck chairs to dry.

  “Swimwear department,” I announce.

  “If you’re a monkey,” Malik adds.

  I am a monkey, and the three of them should know it by now. “Come on, give me a boost.”

  Eli and Malik hoist me up to the point where I can get a handhold on a second-floor balcony. I force away the image of Yvonne-Marie Delacroix climbing in the window of a bank as I swing a leg over the rail. Ah—a one-piece, a bikini, and—uh, oh. There must be a really massive dad in this room. Eli and Malik could both fit in those trunks together. I toss the girls’ stuff down to the others.

  “What if they’re the wrong size?” Amber calls up. (Leave it to her to stress over a perfect fit.)

  I whisper a reply. “We pride ourselves on our selection.” I step back on the rail, grip the support bars of the balcony above and pull myself up. I clamber onto the third-floor terrace, only to find no suits up there. But next door there’s a larger balcony, probably belonging to a suite. They’ve actually set up a wooden drying rack covered in suits and towels. Jackpot.

  The problem is it’s ten feet away—too far to jump. (I may be a monkey, but I’m not a bird.)

  I scan my surroundings. There’s a small window about halfway between the terraces, creating a hint of a ledge. It isn’t much (maybe an inch and a half or two inches) but it should give me a temporary toehold. From there, I can jump to the other balcony.

  I hear a triple gasp from below as I step out to the window ledge. I shift my weight forward, preparing to launch myself the rest of the way, when the door slides open on the balcony I just left. Out steps a young woman in a long silk robe, a glass of milk in her hand. At first, I’m positive she’s seen me. But, no—she’s looking straight out at the volcano, her eyes blinking with sleep.

  Desperately, I try to sink behind the stucco of the façade, pressing my face into the window. I’ve got nothing to hold on to, so I push hard against the slight overhang with the heels of my hands, just to give me some stability. There I hang, the pounding of my heart threatening to launch me off the side of the building, praying that the woman goes back inside before it occurs to her to glance to the right.

  Far below, on the ground, three horrified faces stare up at me. It’s a sign of how quickly things can turn in an operation like this. Climbing is no big deal for me, but it only takes one tiny glitch to put my life in danger.

  My bent knees are on fire and my shoulders ache from the effort of keeping myself wedged in position with my arms. How much longer can I stay like this?

  Come on, lady, it’s five o’clock in the morning! Go back to bed!

  She makes the milk last, smacking her lips with every sip. Finally, she reenters the room, closing the slider behind her.

  I leap for the next balcony. When my hands grasp the railing, they’re so cramped up that I can’t grip. But I manage to propel myself over it. I lie on the tiled floor for a few seconds, breathing hard with exhaustion and relief.

  This time I don’t worry about sizes or styles. I take everything on the drying rack and dump it over the side. I don’t care if I have to wear a size nine hundred bathing suit. I’m done with climbing for the day. For good measure, I toss down three baseball caps that are hanging over a chair back. The more of our heads and faces we can cover, the better.

  I descend very carefully, and when I make it to the bottom, I get a big reception. I guess they’re glad to see me in one piece.

  “You’re not the one who’d have to face the Purples if you got yourself killed!” Malik rants, his angry voice muted. (That’s what passes for heartfelt concern coming from Gus Alabaster’s DNA.)

  Amber and I change in the bushes. The guys use the opposite end of the building. Eli, Malik, and I take the baseball caps. Amber’s the safest to go hatless, since her hair is different from what the Serenity people will remember.

  We stuff our clothes in a locker, but of course, the kiosk where the locks are given out won’t be open for a few hours yet. Now we just need a place to lie low until the resort comes to life and we can start our clone hunting.

  We stumble on a storage hut piled high with inflated inner tubes for the waterslides. Comfort-wise, it’s a real find. Those things make amazing beds. Exhausted as we are, though, nobody sleeps. We’re in the middle of the lion’s den, and closing your eyes is a bad idea.

  “The last time I wore a bathing suit was Serenity Day—the big water polo match,” Eli comments.

  “The best part of that came later,” Malik adds. “When we busted out of town on their own cone truck.”

  “The best part comes now,” Amber amends, “when we shut them down once and for all. No clones, no Project Osiris.”

  “If we can pull it off,” adds Eli in a nervous tone.

  I nod, understanding better than any of them just how incomplete our plan is. Sure, we know who we’re looking for and who we have to avoid. We know where our boat is, and we know it has more than half a tank of fuel (enough to get us back to Florida). All the important pieces are in place. But then I think of the balcony, where one lady with insomnia nearly made me a grease spot on the grass. If helping myself to a few bathing suits could go so wrong, who can predict what the coming hours might bring?

  We can already see light through the doorframe of our hut. Soon we hear sounds of activity around us—resort employees setting up for the day. I crack the door a touch and peer outside to make sure the coast is clear. Then I lead the others into the open.

  Wow. Poseidon by day is really something—water features gleaming in the sun, lush greenery, cascades of flowers, sea-foam green buildings. Sea-foam—a word I learned off a tube of oil paint in my attic studio in Serenity.

  (No time to think about that. Not
now.)

  An attendant stocking the towel kiosk offers us a friendly laugh. “You kids must be really eager this morning. The pools don’t open for another forty minutes.”

  The resort is definitely coming to life, though. People are having breakfast on patios and balconies, and young families are out walking with little kids. We’re obviously in the open, exposed, but in a way, we’re not, because we look like everybody else. We stroll around, smelling bacon, eggs, and toast, and feeling hungry. Malik helps himself to a banana from a display.

  As the time ticks down to nine a.m., the walkways bustle, mostly with kids. I scan the passing parade, hoping for a familiar face, but also alert for a different kind of familiar face—an Osiris scientist, or (even worse) a Purple. I see neither. I’m starting to get a sense of how hard it’s going to be to track down our six kids in a resort this big and crowded.

  A bell sounds, and Poseidon is open for business. The splashing starts immediately, laughter and excited screams drowning out everything else. There’s a real traffic jam as kids and some adults carry bulky inner tubes to line up for waterslides. Happy bathers sail by on the lazy river.

  “Now what?” asks Eli.

  “I guess we go swimming,” I reply.

  Malik glares at me. “We don’t have time for that. We have to track down six people before someone from Poseidon stumbles on our boat.”

  “Or worse,” adds Amber, “one of the Purples stumbles on us.”

  “Look,” I say, “we can’t very well line up everybody at Poseidon and peer into faces until we find the other six clones. They’re going on stuff; we have to go on stuff too.”

  “Not very scientific,” Eli disapproves.

  “It kind of is,” I argue. “If we circulate, we give ourselves the best chance of seeing the most people.”

  That’s when we discover something unexpected: big, tough Malik is afraid of waterslides.

  “Are you serious?” Amber explodes. “You were a beast when you played water polo. The rest of us were scared to get in the pool with you.”

  “The pool wasn’t at the top of a ninety-foot volcano,” he says, tight-lipped.

  “This isn’t a real volcano,” Amber reminds him.

  “It’s still high,” Malik whines.

  I shake my head in amazement. “All the things we’ve been through, all the times we’ve almost gotten killed—the least you can do is suck it up for a waterslide that five-yearolds ride every day!”

  So we grab inner tubes and join the procession up the stairs to the top of the towering volcano. With our eyes on him, Malik can’t weasel out. He doesn’t scream, but his face is full of apprehension, his mouth wide open, so he looks like a screamer on mute.

  The rest of us follow, twisting and turning down the “lava flow.” It’s a steep drop and a wild ride (probably a lot of fun if we weren’t so stressed). I keep my hands on my hat so it won’t fly off.

  We hit the bottom of the volcano and shoot off into a huge pool with riders from the other slides. I locate Malik, and if anything, he looks even more agitated than before. He’s slumped into the center of his tube and seems to be hiding inside of it.

  Amber swims over to him. “Don’t be such a baby—”

  He grabs her and turns her in the direction he’s staring. Her eyes widen.

  I follow their gaze to a sturdily built boy about our age. I almost don’t recognize him at first because his full head of curly hair is wet and plastered to his scalp.

  He has a narrow, angular face and intense eyes I once saw on an internet photograph of the master counterfeiter he’s cloned from.

  It’s Robbie Miers.

  22

  MALIK BRUDER

  Miers!

  Considering we’ve crossed a whole continent looking for him and five others like him, I’ve never been so shocked to see anybody in my life. He’s our first connection to Project Osiris since we busted out of Happy Valley that night. Maybe that’s why I’m freaking out—this is a big moment.

  Laska is the one with guts enough to approach him. “Robbie.” Her voice is huskier than usual.

  He looks at her blankly. I blink. Doesn’t he recognize her? He saw her every day for thirteen years. I think of my so-called father and his fancy pills designed to make us kids forget things Osiris doesn’t want us to remember. Have Robbie and the others been medicated so we’re wiped from their memories?

  And then his eyes are on me. “Malik?” All at once, his face is wreathed in smiles. “You’re okay! And Tori! Eli!” He turns back to Laska. “Amber? Is that you? You look so different!”

  “I cut my hair,” she replies. “And dyed it black.”

  “Was that part of the treatment?” Robbie asks.

  “Treatment?” Eli echoes.

  “For the sickness,” he explains, like that’s supposed to mean something to us. “It must have been really bad if you had to go all the way to the hospital in Santa Fe.”

  We exchange meaningful glances. So that’s how Hammerstrom and the other parents have been explaining our absence. We didn’t escape. How could anyone be crazy enough to leave America’s ideal community? No, we contracted some plague halfway through the Serenity Day fireworks and had to be hauled off to the hospital to keep everybody else from catching it too.

  It’s a classic Osiris move. If they catch us, they can say we got better. If they don’t—well, I guess there’s only so much the miracle of modern medicine can do.

  Robbie is ecstatic. “This is awesome! We knew Hector was cured. But when you guys didn’t come back, we got really worried. It had to be serious if Dr. Bruder couldn’t help you!”

  We’ve been out of Happy Valley for weeks, but thirty seconds with Robbie brings it all back to me—the perfect town where nobody learns anything bad. The honesty, harmony, and contentment. Suddenly, I realize that getting ourselves to Poseidon was the easy part of this operation. How are we ever going to convince these brainwashed kids that we’ve come to rescue them? They have no idea that they’re clones. They probably don’t even know what a clone is. We didn’t either until we stumbled on the real internet and looked up Project Osiris. And you can bet they’ve never heard that name before.

  “Listen, Robbie,” Eli says grimly. “There’s something you have to hear—”

  “Not now!” Robbie exclaims. “We’ve got to find the others! Everybody’s going to go nuts when they see you. And just in time for the vacation too!”

  I cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, we’ll see everybody. But we have to talk to you first.”

  I look around. We’re in a huge pool at the base of seven slides. Fountains and spouts are gushing around us. Every few seconds, new riders splash down, squealing all the way. The water churns like a storm at sea. The roar of voices is nonstop. It has to be just about the worst place on earth to learn a horrible secret about yourself. But if we go anywhere else, we run the risk of Robbie spotting someone from Happy Valley and calling them over to share the good news that we didn’t die of “the sickness.”

  Right there, in the midst of the sloshing, spraying chaos, Frieden, Laska, Torific, and I circle around Robbie and give him the terrible story: his whole life is an experiment, his parents are scientists, and he’s an exact genetic copy of one of the worst human beings ever. We share the telling, taking turns to fill in the gruesome details. This story is too huge to come from any single person.

  His first reaction is laughter. He thinks we’re joking! Then, slowly, his smirk disappears and his eyes widen. “No!” he cries, shoving me back and breaking away from us. I tackle him and hold him underwater for a few seconds. He’s yelling at me, his angry words bubbling to the surface. Luckily, there’s so much horseplay going on that nobody notices.

  I pull him, choking and gasping, out of the drink. “You have to listen, Robbie! Why would we make this up? You think we’re happy about it?”

  “You’re lying!” Robbie flails and screams and struggles as the others start talking again. I lock my arms around him to k
eep him from bolting. He pounds his fists against my chest and face. I’m not even mad. Just watching Robbie go through in the space of a minute what the four of us had weeks to get used to makes me want to weep for the guy. And trust me, Gus Alabaster’s DNA doesn’t weep. Never before have I felt such sympathy for anybody.

  By this time, Robbie’s red face is a mask of pure horror. “You’re crazy!” he manages. “Getting sick made you crazy!”

  Frieden is amazingly calm and patient. “We’ve been inside the plastics factory, Robbie. We saw Osiris headquarters with our own eyes.”

  “Listen to yourselves!” Robbie rants. “Look what the outside world did to you! Breaking rules! Sneaking! Lying! That’s not how we were raised!”

  “The way we were raised is the biggest lie of all,” I insist. “And the second biggest is the people who passed themselves off as our parents!”

  “I loved Serenity,” Laska adds in a quieter tone. “I believed in our way of life more than anybody. The outside world is messier and meaner and more unfair. But at least it’s real.”

  Robbie shakes free of us and backs away. “The sickness did this to you. I’ll get Dr. Bruder. He can help you.”

  Sudden panic grips me, and it isn’t just the prospect of a reunion with my Serenity dad. Sure, we’re strong enough to hold Robbie down physically. But then what? Mug him and drag him bodily to the Gemini? And five others too? We could never pull that off. We have to convince him—all of them.

  What if it can’t be done? When the four of us accepted the truth about ourselves, we’d seen the proof in the factory and on the internet. And now we expect Robbie and the others to chuck their entire lives and run away on the spur of the moment based on no evidence except our say-so? What were we thinking?

  And then a voice behind us says, “Listen to them, Robbie. They’re telling the truth.”

  I wheel. There he is, the waist-deep pool water making his bony legs look even bonier.

  Hector.

  My fist comes up all by itself. Or maybe it’s an Alabaster instinct—I don’t think Gus was very forgiving toward the people who sold him out.