“Ohmygod, Ben,” said Thomas. “I totally told you where I was going.”
“Thomas,” Alison continued in a weary voice, “just put that stuff back, okay?”
“But why? I don’t see why I should have to ignore such a fantastic opportunity for--”
“And where on earth did you get those blueprints?” said Alison.
“Mr. Sanchez is letting me borrow them. Last night when you were doing the dishes, I went and asked him.”
“No, Thomas, I’m not arguing this any more.”
Ben shook his head and walked away from the fray. The argument between Thomas and Alison was heated enough that they would soon forget about his mangled attempt to talk to them. Ben wandered over to the kitchen window and again stared out at the spire and the city. Somewhere out there their mother was being held captive. What could she have possibly done to warrant being kidnapped? She was a secretary, for a company that made pots and pans. Or was it some sort of bank? No, it was definitely a company that paved the roads and highways. What trouble could she have gotten into? What kind of office supplies had she stolen that would result in her being taken away in the middle of the night by some sort of silver mafia?
The flashing lights on top of the spire were barely visible now in the daylight. The planes cruising above the airport were specks of dirt advancing across the morning sky. How far away was the airport? Ben tried to count the blocks but they blurred into a graybrown smudge of concrete, building, and smog. And how was she going to escape anyways? Was it two days because it would take her that long to escape, or two days because it would take the four of them that long to walk to the airport?
Ben would later estimate that there had been about thirty minutes of peace before the men started yelling. Though at the time those thirty minutes seemed more like tormented procrastination and worry. It was only from the vantage of what was to come that the morning would appear peaceful. About half an hour of wondering what sort of person their mother really was, of staring out into the dusty grid of the gray city. Ben didn’t hear how the men got into the apartment. The snarling voices seemed to come from everywhere all at once.
“Okay, kids, where is it?” A silver figure moved through the brown smoke billowing in the kitchen. Another man, identically dressed but shorter than the first, went straight into their mother’s bedroom and started rifling through her closet. It was the same men who had taken their mother away only hours previous, Ben was sure of it.
“Where is it, you dirty little rats?” The big man seemed to grab Thomas, Hannah, and Alison all at once. He tossed them onto the couch where Ben was sitting. “You know what I’m talking about--don’t pretend you don’t.” Hannah started crying, and Thomas’s eyes grew wide in amazement. In the man’s silver sunglasses, Ben could see the four of them looking incredibly small as they huddled like scared puppies. The shorter man continued to ransack the apartment and was now tearing apart the boxes in the storage cupboard. The gear that Alison had forced Thomas to put away just moments before was now back on the floor.
“Please . . . what do you men want?” cried Alison.
“You know what we’re after,” the tall man said, “so the sooner you hand it over, the sooner you’ll get your mother back and you can go back to your pathetic life here.” He looked around at the apartment and grimaced in disgust.
“Honestly, we have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Please,” said Alison. She was cradling Hannah’s howling head in her arms.
Ben could feel the twig in his pocket poking into his thigh. It was obviously what they wanted. He felt sick with guilt that he hadn’t been able to tell the others anything before the men burst in. It was the only thing he was supposed to do and he’d screwed it up. They could have managed to get away in time.
“Listen, I’m gonna spell this out for you,” said the tall man. “You pretend you don’t know, but I know you do. Your mother stole something really important, something really valuable. And she’s gotta give it back.”
“Look, um, sir?” Ben tried to be polite without sounding mocking. “As you can see, we really don’t have anything very valuable here. Is it possible that you may have the wrong apartment? Or person?” They were the exact same men who had taken their mother, but Ben tried to sound as if he was just as oblivious about what was going on as his siblings.
“One more time, kid. Where is it?” The man pulled a chair up to the couch and screamed at the children. “Where is it?”
The short man was going through the cupboards in the kitchen. Pots and pans clanged onto the floor, boxes of cereal burst open and scattered everywhere. Cans were thrown at the walls, leaving dents right beside the ones that mysteriously appeared whenever Ben got angry.
“Well,” said Ben, “it might help if we knew what exactly this thing is, or what it looks like.”
“You little . . . you know what we’re after.”
“Why don’t you describe it then,” said Ben. The tall man leaned closer to Ben and for half a second Ben thought he was going to get hit. Just then the short man, having now finished kicking all of their possessions around the apartment, came into the living room.
“There’s nothing here,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere.” The tall man stood up from the chair, straightened his back, and breathed deeply. He turned around, cleared his throat, and put his finger into his ear. It looked like he was talking into his hand, or something in it. Thomas craned his neck to see what was going on, but the short man stood in his way.
Ben’s hands were soaked in sweat and his heart wouldn’t slow down. He struggled to suppress a minuscule smile. He had done it. He had managed to keep his courage and not give up the twig.
“Nope, we can’t find it,” the tall man said into his hand. “There’re four kids here though.” There was a pause while the man held his finger to his ear. “Right. All four of them? Okay.” He turned back and smiled. “Well, boss says we have to take all of you with us if you’re not willing to let us have it. So we’re going for a little ride. Come on now, stand up slowly.”
“And where exactly are we going?” asked Thomas with a curiosity that sounded more excited than fearful.
“Headquarters,” said the man.
“So, are you the police then?” asked Alison.
“Ha, ha. That’s funny.” The short man chuckled and smiled at his partner. “Good one.’
“But who are you?” said Thomas.
“As if you don’t know . . . you’d have to be pretty dumb. Now, come on. No more wasting time.”
The tall man picked up Ben and Thomas by their shirt collars. The short one grabbed Alison and the still-wailing Hannah, an arm around each of their waists. As they were dragged out the door, they kicked and screamed, trying desperately to grab door jams, appliances, anything, to get free.
“Wait!” screamed Alison. “At least let us put our shoes on.”
“Just hurry up already,” said the tall man as he let them go.
The four of them went back to the jumbled pile of sneakers just inside the apartment door. While the tall man stood guard, the four kids, tacitly, began to search for their shoes as inefficiently as possible. From the corner of his eye, Ben saw the short man lingering further on down the hall.
“Here, Hannah, let me help you,” Alison said as she bent down to help Hannah. The tall man glared down at them with crossed arms.
“But I know how to tie--” Hannah started to whine.
“Shhh!” said Alison. “Now, Hannah, you remember how to tie your shoelaces: it’s as easy as one, two, three.” Alison looked up at Ben and Thomas and winked. “Right? One . . . two . . . three!”
They all shot up at once. Ben and Thomas broke through the doorway to the man’s left. As he tried to grab them, Alison and Hannah jumped past on his right. There was swearing behind them. And the thumping of eight feet stampeding down the hall.
“What’s going on?” Alison cried from between her breaths.
But up ahead th
e short man snapped to attention and spun around. He opened his arms like a net, bracing himself to catch them. As Ben got closer, he realized that there was only one thing to do. He ran straight at the man and kicked him square in the crotch. To Ben’s surprise, it felt oddly like the wall he had kicked the day before.
“Ooo!” The short man moaned as he slumped to the floor.
They jumped over his crumpled body and sprinted to the stairwell at the end of the hall. Ben risked a quick glance back to see that all four of them were in the clear. And the twig was lodged safely in his pocket. But now where?
Their frantic breathing echoed in the cool, concrete stairwell. They made it down a full flight of stairs before they heard footsteps from above. Just as they were just coming down to the sixth floor, a white blur shot by in the center of the stairwell. Standing there on the next landing was the tall silver man looking as if he had been patiently waiting for them all along.
“What the--” Thomas couldn’t finish his thought when he saw what had just happened.
A thin, steel cord ran from the man’s belt up to the railing of the tenth floor. He had rappelled past them down the center of the stairwell. The short man, swearing under his breath and clutching a hand to his injured midsection, scampered down the stairs behind them.
“Come on now, we’ve had just about enough of this, you stupid little . . . Single file down the stairs. Nobody try nothing and nobody gets smacked, capiche?”
It was all over now. Ben knew they were stupid to even try to escape. Hannah started crying again and she drove her head back into Alison’s arms. They moped their way down the remaining floors as slowly as they could, the tall man in front, and the short man cursing at them from behind.
“Good god, what a bunch of stupid pieces of . . .” the short man muttered to no one in particular. “What the hell you figgya he wants with ‘em?”
“Who knows,” the tall man said as he opened the door into the lobby.
As the door cracked open, two voices floated into the stairwell like a bad smell. The woman’s voice was haggard yet insistent, the man’s bored and unenthusiastic.
“Oh, thank you for coming, officer,” said the woman.
“Sure,” grumbled the man. “Tell me again what the, uh, problem is.”
“Yes, well, as you will soon see, these children are being kept in an absolute hovel by a--”
The door opened completely to reveal the familiar pair of grimy pink slippers. The decrepit old woman was talking to a fat and dim-looking police officer. Mrs. Brodsky took notice of the four kids and her leathery, horse-like mouth went slack.
The police officer took a slug of steaming coffee from a white paper cup and grimaced in satisfaction before he became aware of the two silver men and four children who had just appeared in the lobby.
Mrs. Brodsky’s face narrowed into an evil smile. “Why! Here they are right now. Isn’t that convenient!” Her eyes lit up wickedly. “Those are the kids, officer!”
The police officer swallowed another sip of coffee and furrowed his brow. “Hey, what’s going on here? Where are you two goons taking those kids? You know that Children’s Facility processing has to go through the police.”
“Oh, well, you know how it is, officer,” the tall man explained, his hands moving away from Ben and Thomas’s necks and resting on his hips. “Just doing the police a favor. We were just taking these, uh, kids back to the--”
One of the bizarre side effects of living in such close proximity with one’s siblings was the almost telepathic way the four of them could sometimes make decisions. With a lightning glance at each other, they jumped around Mrs. Brodsky and the police officer and ran for the door. Ben felt his arm push against one of the figures and there was surprisingly little guilt when Mrs. Brodsky yelped.
“Eh! What do you think you’re doing? You have no right to push an old woman like--”
Ben wished he could have savored the moment a bit more, wished he could have stayed a bit longer and practiced his worst words on the malicious hag. But as he pushed against the glass of the front door, and heard noises from his three siblings that sounded like simultaneous cries and laughs, the only thing he could concentrate on was running.
There was a bright heat overhead. The air burned his lungs. The world came alive with noises too infinite and too new to identify. Behind them in the lobby, the silver men tried to run after the kids, but tripped over the old woman and were held up by the confused police officer. A three-way argument erupted, but the shouts soon receded into countless other noises, voices, cries.
Ben’s legs felt weightless. The fearful freedom of being outside was like floating in space.
And cutting through the new madness, the quickening gasps of their own breathing, and the peripheral void opening up all around them, Ben kept hearing his mother’s voice. “Leave first thing . . . leave first thing.”
What else had she said?
Chapter Six: The Undiscovered City
They ran hand-in-hand together through the maze of nearby apartment complexes, between cool shade and blistering sun. Like a school of fish they were pulled by each other’s instincts. It was a mad, unthinking sprint.
There were empty roads filled with trash, where the slapping of their feet on the pavement echoed between the buildings, and then seconds later as they burst back into a main street, there was the mayhem of people shouting and the relentless honking of cars belching exhaust. Nowhere felt safe. Ben was sure that at one point, after what must have been hours of running, he saw one of the silver cars rounding a street corner.
The heat, which they had always thought to be unbearable on the tenth floor of their building, hit their bodies like a deep drumming. The streets were all identical looking (and Ben tried not to think about the possibility that they were going in circles) and wound on endlessly without any sorts of landmarks. All the buildings looked the same. It was entirely possible that they had lived in one or two of them at some point during the previous decade. And everyone they saw looked like carbon copies of others from four blocks back.
Their eyes were caught by strange pieces of litter strewn at the sides of streets, wrappers of things their mother had never given them. There was a drink box with the image of five happy children, glazed in smiles, all sucking on straws. There was a bright red cigarette package with the word SLICK and the picture of a confident looking man, tanned, his muscles rippling through his shirt.
But their surging run couldn’t last. Ben’s stomach burned--they hadn’t eaten breakfast when the silver men burst in. After a while the noise and people petered out and they entered an empty area of gravel and dirt-filled lots. The garbage was older and somehow cheaper-looking. Thomas, Alison, and Hannah began to whine and gasp. It sounded like they were about to mount a mutiny.
“Why don’t we stop,” said Ben. He shot a glance down the street behind them. Two men were smoking outside a corner store. A car was refusing to start. A woman was screaming at a man she either loved or hated. But no police, and no men in silver suits. In the distance, the sun was coming off the pavement in shimmering waves.
“Okay, Ben,” said Alison. “What’s going on?” She obviously remembered Ben’s pathetic attempt to explain something back in the smoky kitchen. Whatever it was, whoever it was, that had burst in on them was probably linked to Ben’s feeble attempt at a confession. Normally Ben would be insulted when Alison automatically looked to him for an explanation of something that had exploded, been broken, ruined, dirtied, or plain not been done. But this time there was no evasion possible. For once Ben felt rightfully accused.
“Who were those horrible men?” asked Hannah.
“Whoever they are, they have some pretty cool stuff,” said Thomas.
All eyes were on Ben.
“Okay,” Ben began, waiting for something in him that was not arriving. “Mom. She left last night.” Silence and confused stares. “I mean, she was taken. By those silver men. Or at least they looked like those two back
there.”
“What?” shrieked Alison.
“I know. I should have told--”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” barked Thomas.
“Well, I guess I tried . . . but then those men arrived,” said Ben. No one pointed out how pitiful this sounded.
Hannah looked like she was about to cry. “But why? What did they want from her?”
“I dunno, Han. She said we have to meet her at the airport.” Ben swallowed hard. “In two days. She said she’d meet us there.”
“At the airport?” asked Alison.
“Yeah. So we can catch a plane away from here, I guess.”
“Cool!” said Thomas.
“No, it is not cool, Thomas,” Alison said with a scowl.
“But why two days?” asked Hannah.
“Beat’s me, Han. Beats me.” Ben felt only slightly better now that everyone knew the situation, as confusing as it was.
They sat in a row on the crumbling sidewalk. Thomas began digging the dirt out of the cracks in the pavement with a small branch. At the sight of this, Ben bit his lip and secretly felt his pocket. The twig thing was still lodged there, where it had been all morning. It wasn’t necessary to show it to them, or to keep thinking about what it might mean, Ben decided, since it would all be over in a day and a bit. All he had to do was get them to the airport and then whatever was happening would end. Their mother had said, “Just in case.” She hadn’t said, “Take this and tell the others about it,” had she? When she had bent down to whisper those cryptic and vague instructions to him, her black hair had fallen over her face, and there had been a look in her eyes that Ben had never seen before, a twinkle and a half-smile between the tears that seemed to say, “don’t worry.” Ben felt sick remembering how he had spoken to her the night before. Whenever it felt right to be angry, it was only a matter of time before it became wrong.
After considering the situation for a minute, Thomas said, “It sounds like she stole something from them.”
The Fortress of Clouds Page 5