Masterminds

by Gordon Korman

  “No wonder they don’t lock the case,” Eli comments. “The instant someone lays a finger on that thing, they’ll know.”

  There are several views of town streets, as well as two shots of Old County Six—one to the west of Serenity and one to the east. One image seems to be out in an area of sagebrush. Spotlights illuminate a large helicopter parked on a concrete pad. There are two Purple People Eaters in the picture. One is Baron Vladimir von Horseteeth. The other I don’t recognize—he might have been hired after Eli and Randy made the cards.

  The reality sinks in for all three of us.

  “They’ve got cameras everywhere!” I whisper. “They’re spying on us!”

  Eli draws a nervous breath. “It’s a miracle we haven’t been spotted sneaking out to the factory. Look—they’ve got one on the front door but nothing on the gate.”

  “What about our route through town?” I wonder.

  Tori’s gaze moves methodically from screen to screen. You can almost see her putting together a picture of Serenity with the cameras superimposed on it. “Pure luck,” she concludes. “We haven’t tripped any of their surveillance.”

  “We have to retrace our steps exactly,” I add anxiously. “In fact, we should probably start right now—”

  “Not until we check out that,” says Eli.

  He’s pointing to an opening in the floor ringed by a wrought-iron railing. It’s a tight spiral staircase winding down to another level.

  “What about the guy from that chair?” I protest.

  Tori sneaks a glance over the rail. “I don’t see anybody. Let’s go.”

  I follow them, mostly because I’m too scared to stay in the room by myself. Even when we tiptoe, our footfalls on the iron steps reverberate with a gonglike sound.

  Downstairs, we step off into what seems to be some kind of publishing office. A large printing press dominates the center of the room. Eli nudges a computer mouse, and the machine’s large monitor comes out of hibernation. The display shows the front page of the Pax, dateline: tomorrow. The headline reads:

  SERENITY VOTED #1 IN NEW MEXICO

  FOR QUALITY OF LIFE

  UNPRECEDENTED 14TH STRAIGHT YEAR

  Eli snorts. “They ought to know how great it is. They’re watching every inch of the place.”

  There are always a few national and international news stories in the Pax, and now we know where they come from. The front pages from several well-known papers are up on two huge touch screens—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and a few others. Some of the stories have been highlighted, others deselected in gray.

  For example, in the Los Angeles Times, Two Dead in Gang Shootout has been nixed, but the piece directly above it, Celebrity Flower Show Opens, has been left intact. On the next screen, where the Times of London is displayed, Terrorist Bombing Rocks Mayfair has been cut. However, Buckingham Palace to Get Spring Cleaning is totally okay.

  “This is how the Pax chooses what to print?” I whisper in awe. “By taking out any bad news?”

  Eli nods. “They do it to the internet too. No Revolutionary War, just tea.”

  “But we learn about wars too,” Tori reasons. “And crime.”

  “Only as an example, to show how much better things are here,” Eli explains. “The Boston Tea Party was a rebellion. Think about the Essential Qualities—honesty, harmony, contentment. Nothing about questioning authority, or fighting for your rights.”

  “All the more reason we should get out of here before anybody catches us rebelling!” I beg.

  Tori points toward the spiral staircase. “There’s another level below us. Didn’t you see it?”

  “We’re pushing our luck!”

  But Eli and Tori are already tiptoeing that way.

  I’m getting really scared, but I follow them to what seems to be the bottom floor. At least, this is where the steps end. It’s a large circular conference room, dimly lit. The rounded walls are made almost entirely of whiteboard material. These are covered in photographs and note cards, hundreds—no, thousands of them, pinned up by small magnets.

  Tori shines her light on a section of the wall.

  The shock begins in the base of my spine and works its way northward until I hear a buzzing in my ears.

  It’s me.

  My first baby pictures, toddler shots, photographs of me at every age, right up to this year’s school portrait. Some of the prints and notes are faded, curled, and yellow with age. At the top of the board is a large label, spelled out in block capitals:

  OSIRIS 11

  HECTOR AMANI

  BORN: 02/15/2003

  Osiris?

  It’s my whole life, documented in detail—how much I weighed at birth. How long my mother was pregnant with me. There’s a picture of her as a younger woman, feeding me in a high chair, and a high-angle shot of our classroom that seems to show me angling my test paper into Malik’s field of vision. There must be hidden cameras at school!

  More: my academic records, behavior charts, results of medical tests. Brain Scan, 7/29/2005; I had a brain scan? There are medical printouts and graphs I can’t even begin to understand. Notes scribbled in my parents’ handwriting, Mr. Frieden’s, Dr. Bruder’s, Mrs. Laska’s . . . stratospheric IQ . . . exceptional reasoning skills . . . emotionally immature . . . socially awkward . . . vulnerable to intimidation . . . Incident report: subject took extra brownie . . . Extra brownie? Are they serious?

  There are dozens of these reports, maybe hundreds. Subject failed to reveal unfair advantage in recreational test . . . It’s dated Serenity Day, 2011. Has everything I’ve ever done been under a microscope? And why are they calling me “subject”?

  The beam swings away, and I’m left staring at the darkened wall. “Hey, I was reading that!”

  “Oh my God!” exclaims Tori in a hoarse whisper. “It’s me! And you, Eli!”

  She pans the wall. Eleven Serenity kids are chronicled in vast collages of pictures, papers, and notes. Each display is just as thorough as mine. Amber is there as well. She’s Osiris 6. And also Malik, Osiris 3. Eli has the top spot—Osiris 1, whatever that means. But there’s no Randy, no Stanley Cole, no Melanie Brandt, no Fowler twins.

  “How come not everybody’s here?” I wonder.

  Eli’s voice is strangled as he quotes from Randy’s letter. “Some of us are special.” He takes out his iPad and circles the room, meticulously photographing every whiteboard, and the long conference table, which is covered with papers.

  I don’t feel special. I feel violated, invaded, and extremely creeped out. I feel like I’m some kind of lab rat!

  Tori is visibly upset. “Don’t try to make sense of this! None of this makes any sense! I’m supposed to be Osiris 9! It’s on notes signed by my own parents! What’s an Osiris?”

  I’m so gobsmacked that I’ve forgotten where I am and what I’m doing. At that moment, my mind is a boiling whirlwind of questions. One question, really: Why? Why have eleven kids been studied since the minute they were born?

  That’s when we hear footsteps gonging on the spiral staircase two flights up, and the fear returns in a skipped heartbeat. The purple butt that fits in the video station chair is on its way down.

  I look around in desperation. A single door leads to the main factory area. Eli beats me to it, so he gets the bad news first: locked.

  We can make out the jingling of keys now, and a gruff voice humming a tuneless melody. It’s like all the worst-case scenarios rolled into one. In a few seconds, he’ll be upon us, and we’ve got no escape.

  Eli and I stand there, looking helplessly at each other. His eyes flicker toward the conference table—the only available hiding place. But it has a glass top, so the guard would have to be blind and stupid not to notice us hunkered down underneath it.

  I’m coming to terms with the fact that my life is about to change in a fundamental way, and not one I think I’m going to enjoy. My mind reels. Is there a way out of this—?

  “Ove
r here!” Tori hisses in a barely audible voice.

  She’s squatting at the wall beside an air-conditioning register. The grate is off, and she’s motioning us into the duct.

  I’m so frozen that Eli practically has to drag me. He crawls into the opening, pulling me after him. Tori scrambles in last, crushing my legs, and replaces the grille behind her. Through the grid, I see boots topped with purple cuffs on the tile of the conference room. That’s how close it is. Another couple of seconds and we would have been too late. We’re out and he’s in, almost in the same instant.

  We cower there, listening to him clearing his throat. We don’t even breathe, much less move. If he hears us, we’re cooked.

  The boots issue a sharp report—crack!—with every step on the tile floor. I feel each one inside my skull, a series of jarring knocks against my brain. But—

  Are the footsteps becoming quieter? I peer through the grating. The guard is walking away from us!

  With her finger, Tori gestures above us. At first, I don’t understand. And when I finally do, I wish I didn’t.

  The duct we’re in is an offshoot of the ventilation line we crawled across on. It is plumb-line vertical. In other words, the only way out of here is by climbing straight up through a featureless metal tunnel without so much as a single handhold. And we have to do it silently, to avoid attracting the attention of the Purple People Eater on the other side of the wall.

  Above me, Eli presses the rubber soles of his shoes into the sides of the tin passage and lifts himself a few inches, pushing outward with his hands to jam himself in so he doesn’t fall.

  “I can’t do it,” I whisper. But I have to be so quiet that my words don’t reach the others.

  Tori is already shoving me from below.

  I try to say no, but I don’t dare produce any sound. I realize in horror that I’m going to have to do the impossible because there’s no way to refuse without giving away our presence in the duct.

  It’s the most grueling, exhausting, painful, and unpleasant thing I’ve ever attempted. Once we’ve made it a few feet up from the bottom, warm, slimy droplets begin to rain on me—Eli’s sweat. I realize that I, in turn, am sweating all over Tori, who deserves better. Not only is she climbing herself, but she’s boosting me ahead of her.

  About ten feet up, we reach the print shop level. Gingerly, Eli eases the grating out of the wall.

  “Did you catch that Dodgers game last night?” comes an adult voice.

  A flash of purple fabric passes by the opening. A second guard!

  Eli is so startled that he drops the grating to the tiles. In that instant, the entire world grinds to a halt as we freeze inside the duct. If they heard us . . .

  “Yeah, a real pitcher’s duel. It all came down to that squeeze play in the bottom of the seventh . . .”

  Three kids have never been so perfectly still and soundless. Somehow, in their baseball conversation, the Purples missed the clatter of the grating. Miracle.

  Carefully, Eli fits the register back into place and we climb on, an inch at a time. I’m getting better at this, but not much. The agony in my shoulders is excruciating, and the effort to keep my sneakers jammed against the sides feels as if I’m being torn in two, like a wishbone. It’s an unimaginable ordeal when you can’t allow yourself so much as the luxury of a groan.

  Eli passes the outlet for the surveillance monitoring station. He doesn’t even consider exiting there—not with two Purples on the scene.

  Still ten feet to the top. A new worry begins to nag at me. We’re now high enough that if Eli slips, he’ll wipe us all out permanently. It’s a very long way down, the equivalent of a three-story building. And it’s only becoming longer.

  I can tell when Eli sees the end in sight. He speeds up, if you can use the word speed to describe our snail-like progress. Whimpering with exertion, he hauls himself into the main passage and reaches down to help me. I swear this is the scariest part—to be so close, with the danger of falling still very much a possibility. The walls are slick with perspiration and my body is a single blinding ache.

  And then I’m there, lying flat on my face on the cool metal. Never could I have imagined that simply being horizontal could feel so glorious. I can’t move; Tori has to climb over me, digging her sneakers into my back. I barely notice. There are degrees of pain, and this one barely registers after what we’ve just gone through.

  Gonging footsteps on the metal stairs indicate that the Purples are on their way up. I grasp the problem immediately, but Eli and Tori haven’t figured it out yet. And there’s no way I can warn them—not with the guards so close.

  I squeeze past them in the tiny space. The next time Malik calls me shrimp, I intend to tell him about this moment. No way could somebody his size have managed it.

  There it is in the duct ahead of me—the grating we removed to climb down to the security station. If the Purples happen to look up, they’re going to see a hole in the ceiling where the grille is supposed to be!

  The gonging sound is very close now. They must be right at the top of the stairs! I can’t risk crawling—it would make too much noise. In desperation, I launch myself forward, belly-sliding along the passage. Without stopping, I snatch up the grating, reach it down through the opening, and then pull it back into position, just as the two Purples appear at the top of the stairs below me.

  One by one, we slither noiselessly over the security station, clutching our guts during those terrifying seconds we spend exposed, directly above the guards. Once we’re past, though, moving forward, instead of up, it seems as easy as a stroll down Fellowship Avenue. We cross over the factory floor and soon reach the main feed from the air conditioner on the roof.

  That first glimpse of night sky is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever laid eyes on. Then it’s gone, and Malik’s big ugly mug is blocking the view. Actually, he looks beautiful too. Anybody would.

  “What took you so long?” he rasps.

  “Not now,” Eli groans. “Get us out of here!”

  Malik drops the rope down to us, and we climb up to the roof. The second my feet hit the gravel, my legs collapse under me, and I sit there, cross-legged, weeping.

  “Are you guys all right?” asks Malik. He seems pretty frazzled himself. It couldn’t have been easy, waiting up here all alone, wondering what he would do if we didn’t come back.

  “I’m not sure any of us are all right,” Eli says wearily. “But this isn’t the place to talk about it.”

  Tori puts an arm around me. “It’s okay.”

  But it’s not okay. It might never be okay.

  “Come on, Hector,” Malik chides. “Get a grip.”

  You get a grip! I want to yell at him. You didn’t escape by the skin of your teeth like we did! You didn’t see what we saw!

  Blinking back tears, I look at Eli and Tori, who heaved me up, dragged me along, and never once considered leaving me behind, even when my clumsiness slowed us down and threatened to get us caught. There’s no way I could have made it without them.

  Then I picture myself skimming across the duct and resetting the grating in the nick of time. My shoulders straighten a little. There’s also no way they could have made it without me.

  My mother’s words from long ago come back to me: I’m valuable.

  I think of the conference room and wonder: Valuable how?

  15

  AMBER LASKA

  THINGS TO DO TODAY

  •Piano Practice (1.5 hours)

  •Ballet Practice (1 hour)

  •Begin Diet (Goal weight: 99 lbs. Currently 101.5)

  •Tread Water (18 minutes—preparation for big game)

  •Work on Book with Tori

  •Work on Serenity Day Project with Tori

  I stare at the page for a few minutes and then cross out “Work on Book with Tori.” Your Own Backyard has to be put on hold for the time being. Then I draw an arrow, moving our Serenity Day project to the top, and add the tag “prioritized.”

&nbs
p; Serenity Day will be here before we know it, but every time I mention our mural to Tori, she acts like it’s something she vaguely remembers from a distant past. Never mind that it’s 50 percent of our Contentment grade, and pretty much the most important thing we do in school all year.

  It’s more than just the project. When you’ve been best friends with somebody your whole life, you know when they’re acting weird.

  We’re more like sisters than friends. I call her parents pseudo-Mom and pseudo-Dad, and she has her own drawer in my dresser so she’ll have clothes available for spur-of-the-moment sleepovers. There are things in my closet that I don’t remember if they’re hers or mine. That’s closer than close.

  Until lately. Neither of us has slept at the other’s house for weeks. We hardly even hang out these days. I can’t quite explain it. Nothing’s changed. We haven’t had a big fight—it’s nothing like that. It’s just that she’s never got time for me anymore. Even when we’re together, it always seems like her mind is somewhere else.

  What changed? Sure, I know I annoy some people—okay, Malik—because I’m kind of a perfectionist with my to-do lists. But Tori and I have been best friends since the cradle. If that stuff bugged her, it would have come out years ago.

  What’s so different about now?

  My mom has a theory. “You girls are getting older, Amber. You’re reaching the age where your interests might be, you know, evolving.”

  Translation: When you get to the upper grades, you start wanting to have boyfriends and girlfriends. I get that. How clueless does she think I am? You’d have to be locked in a closet not to notice that Tori has been brewing kind of a crush on Eli. But this is different. Something’s bugging her. The last few days she’s been pale, with dark circles under her eyes. I’m positive she’s having trouble sleeping, although she insists she’s fine.

  When I finally nail her down to work on the project, I’m shocked by how little progress she’s made. The background of the mural looks great—just the right hints of Carson National Forest, with the mountains in the distance. But she’s barely started on the faces, which is annoying because last week she blew me off, saying she was too busy working on the faces!