The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  “That’s why you became an accountant?” Hal said.

  “Accounting is easy for me.” Mr. Bennett smiled. “I can manage inflows and outflows for a multinational corporation with the earning capacity of a small country in my head. There aren’t too many people out there who can do that.”

  “And that’s why you travel so much?” Hal asked. “Because Dr. Joy trained to you be a really excellent—” I think Hal was thinking about Thornhill, his talents as a soldier, his fierce fighting skills, his ability to strive heroically and sacrifice all for a cause he believed in. “You got trained to be a kind of genius accountant?”

  Mr. Bennett laughed. “Well, that wasn’t exactly Dr. Joy’s aim. But that’s what happened in the end. Accountants never starve during tax season. And it’s been a great cover for the work I’ve been doing for Thornhill. I’ve been helping him identify and protect as many former C33s and their families as we can possibly reach. I’ve been creating a database. But it’s not what you saw on Thornhill’s computer.”

  “How’d you know what we were looking at?”

  “Because I have my laptop set up to view the home computer remotely.”

  “And you didn’t make us stop?”

  “I needed you to have that time. Because of your connection to Amanda, your talents . . . you guys are the only ones making any forward progress to find her, and she’s at the heart of any attempt to stop what’s going on. Why do you think I raked the lawn for you?” Mr. Bennett smiled.

  “Yeah, okay,” Hal said, shaking his head. “Wow.”

  “I knew after what you found yesterday you’d go to the college, and trust me, I did everything I could to keep you safe. We have a network watching that place—and you guys. That’s how we knew about the guard shift and exactly how long you’d been inside. Anyway.” Mr. Bennett took a small, neat bite of his cone. “The material you were looking at is actually a copy of the Official’s database. We managed to hack into it, although I’m sure that’s been updated since we downloaded it about a month ago.”

  “So, wait,” Nia said. “What was that place back there? You lived there when you were a kid? With Amanda’s parents? And Zoe’s dad?”

  “And your mom,” Mr. Bennett said gently.

  “But I’ve visited the place where my mom grew up,” Nia said. “In Colombia.”

  “Your mom was the youngest of our group, only ten when we were released, so she was able to have a somewhat normal childhood after that. She was placed in Colombia because she was of Colombian heritage, but nothing more about her biological family is known. For her, her years in the program were fuzzy. A nightmare, really. She was not one of the fighters, the older kids who worked hard against what Dr. Joy was trying to make us become.”

  “So he performed experiments on you?” Hal said. “And it was legal?”

  “That’s right,” Mr. Bennett said. “At the time, our government lived in fear of becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union. Dr. Joy pitched his research to a Congress desperate enough to endorse secret programs like his to give us a better chance against the Soviets.”

  “So did it work?” Hal asked. “Did you all turn out to be superheroes?”

  Mr. Bennett laughed bitterly. “Hardly,” he said. “A few of us are quiet geniuses, like your mom, Callie, or have skills that we use in our work, like me. But most C33s are barely able to function in society. They’ve either worked very hard to reintegrate themselves or they’ve died, or they’re living entirely off the grid. I can’t tell you how many stories of C33s end with them abandoning their car on the side of the road and just disappearing.”

  “Whoa,” said Hal.

  “You guys—you kids—have turned out to be the ones with the extra-human capabilities.”

  “You mean—?” Hal began. “You know?”

  Hal’s dad nodded. “There are others like you out there. I tracked down a family living in Alaska who has a seventeen-year-old who communicates with animals—we believe Amanda already tracked him down before she came to Orion. His powers manifested during a window of time when we didn’t know where she was. Another child of a former C33 in Japan started programming multiplayer video games when he was eight—again, we think it likely Amanda was on the scene while on vacation with Amy. This guy doesn’t just program computers. He has some strange way of communicating with machines and creating artificial intelligence in them. Now he’s eighteen and has gone underground, using his self-learning computers for a criminal franchise. We’re trying to track him—this kid is incredibly intelligent but naive to the danger he might be creating for himself.”

  “A criminal franchise, huh?” Hal said. “I guess that makes all the lies I’ve told Mom in the last few weeks seem like less of a big deal.”

  Mr. Bennett cleared his throat. “You should never lie to your mother.” He sounded like he was making the statement in case Hal’s mom might have a surveillance video. Mr. Bennett might be a secret agent fighting the forces of evil, but that didn’t change one important fact: You never cross Mrs. Bennett.

  “How you kids developed—that’s what Dr. Joy has always been after.”

  “Really?” I said. “What about the whole soldier-prototype thing we read in the files?”

  “Yes, initially, that was Joy’s plan. You know how every now and then, human beings emerge who are capable of great things—genius, you could say, but it goes beyond intelligence. Abraham Lincoln was a genius statesman. Martin Luther King Jr. a visionary and a born leader. Joan of Arc the perfect soldier—unflinching in her commitment to her ideals, strong, able to endure, persistent. Beethoven . . . he composed his three greatest symphonic works when he was completely deaf. Can you imagine a world in which you could engineer that kind of power? That’s how Dr. Joy envisioned his program. At first.

  “Then, as time went on, he grew more ambitious, pursuing the kinds of abilities you four have. He never achieved this in the lab.”

  “What finally made Dr. Joy stop?” Nia asked. “Before? When the original program disbanded?”

  “Oh, he didn’t want to stop. But the Cold War was ending. Under Reagan, the focus was shifted to space-based missile defense. Joy’s funding was cut by the government and we were all released. But then we had to attempt to live normal lives after having been raised without families or parents, all within the walls of one building. For years he followed us around the country. We’d see him sitting in his car in a parking lot outside our jobs or churches or homes. He was watching us, keeping tabs, working illegally. For a while I think he was put behind bars, back before . . . well, before Amanda.”

  “It always comes back to Amanda, doesn’t it?” Callie said wistfully.

  “Amanda,” Mr. Bennett repeated. He sighed. “Yes. Amanda is an anomaly. By the time the program was disbanded, Max and Annie had fallen completely in love. For life. They were married within months of the program’s termination. Amanda is the only one who is a child of two C33s.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Max left, right?”

  “He had to,” Mr. Bennett explained. “You see, Max and Annie didn’t think they could have kids. They assumed that all the damage that had been done to their bodies under Dr. Joy’s care would make it impossible. They had adopted Amanda’s older sister, Robin, and were seeking to adopt a second child, when to their very great surprise, Annie realized she was pregnant.”

  “That’s an amazing story,” Callie said.

  “Dr. Joy had been hanging around their lives for years at that point,” Mr. Bennett went on. “He was out of prison. I don’t know what he was doing for money. I think he was sleeping in his car a lot of the time. He must have had an address, though, because in an act of extreme generosity, or extreme stupidity—I’ve tortured myself and I still don’t know which one I care to attribute it to—Max and Annie decided to share their joy with good old Uncle Joy, as he made us call him, though we nicknamed him Uncle Joe after one of the most vile dictators of all time, Joseph Stalin. Anyway, Max and Annie sent
Dr. Joy a birth announcement.”

  “So?” said Nia. “What harm could that have done?”

  “All the harm in the world,” Mr. Bennett said, shaking his head sadly. “Because Dr. Joy realized the potential in Amanda’s birth immediately. We believe he used the fact of it—her direct biological link to two genetically modified former C33s—to make a pitch to the Official to get the facility up and running again.”

  “The Official,” I said. “Who exactly is the Official?”

  “That,” Mr. Bennett said, “is a very good question. Unfortunately, we don’t know. We haven’t found out his name—all records or memoranda we can get our hands on refer to him as the Official. We believe this derives from his line of work. He has some ties to the federal government, ties that allowed him to direct all kinds of funding into restarting Dr. Joy’s research. We don’t believe it’s actually sanctioned, even in a top-secret capacity, by Congress, but we’re not sure. The way these things work—it’s complicated.”

  “It’s depressing, is what it is,” Hal said.

  Mr. Bennett smiled ruefully. “Just after joining up with the Official, Dr. Joy made an enormous tactical error,” he went on. “You see, he’d always overestimated our loyalty to him. I think through some massive delusional fantasy, he convinced himself that he really was our uncle, that the gifts he was bestowing on us would make us grateful to him. So, rather than simply kidnapping Amanda in her infancy, Joy approached Max and Annie and flat-out asked them to give him their baby.

  “He showed up on their doorstep and told them of the great life he had in store for Amanda. First, there’d be the testing. She’d be scanned, quizzed, opened up, bled—all this as a baby. Then she’d be altered—of course. Then she’d be studied some more. And finally, she’d be launched into the world. She’d be a diplomat, a world traveler, rich beyond belief, powerful, and good. This was Dr. Joy’s vision. Unbelievable as it sounds, he thought they’d be thrilled.

  “Max and Annie’s response was to go into hiding. They split up as part of the disguise. Eventually, Max came here, to Orion, once he’d realized that to save his daughter, he was going to have to unite all the former C33s, or as many as he could gather. After Annie’s death, he’d realized hiding was no longer an option. He was going to have to bring Dr. Joy and the Official down.”

  “Wow,” I said. Through my shirt, I fingered the pendant. I couldn’t believe my dad had known about all this, had lived with this secret, this fear, and never let on.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell us any of this?” Hal said. “If you knew we were looking for Amanda, why didn’t you help?”

  “That was Max’s idea.”

  “Who is Thornhill, right?” Hal said.

  “Exactly. Max is an amazing leader—always has been—it’s like he has a sense of what people are capable of even before they know it themselves. He told us that if we let you discover the mystery for yourselves you would learn and grow in the process, and gain the skills that you needed to save Amanda. To save all of us.

  “God, I wish we could just keep you hidden from the Official and Joy, keep you safe.” Mr. Bennett looked so distraught, for a second I thought he was going to choke on a sob. He brought himself quickly back under control. “But unfortunately, your abilities, and Amanda’s, the things you can do—not only are they what Joy is after, they seem to be our only chance of finally stopping his project, of putting all this to rest. Your powers—your connection with Amanda—they allow you to go farther than anyone else.”

  “Wow,” Hal said. He looked as overwhelmed as we all felt.

  Later, when we were back in the car, almost at the public library where our bikes were waiting, Callie said, “Do you know where my mom is?”

  Mr. Bennett shook his head. “She isn’t working with Thornhill, or even in communication with him. But I know her. She wouldn’t have left you without a very good reason, and I believe she’s still alive.”

  “We’ve all been trying to help out with what your family’s been going through,” Mr. Bennett went on. “Ramona—Nia’s mom—I don’t know if you realize the extent that she has been looking out for all four of you during this adventure. She’s been using her volunteer commitments as opportunities to pave the way for your investigation as much as she can.”

  “My mom?” Nia said. “Really?”

  “Well.” Mr. Bennett smiled. “She talks a lot about keeping you all safe. Feeling secure and confident so you can reach your potential, which is not a feeling we ever got to have. And well-fed. She dropped off many a casserole at Callie’s after her mom left, made sure there was milk in the fridge. She’s been sending extra portions of food in your lunch.”

  “That sounds like her,” Nia agreed.

  “Does my dad know?” Callie asked. “He doesn’t, does he?”

  “Very little. For everyone’s safety, we’ve been communicating on a strictly need-to-know basis,” Mr. Bennett said, peering up at us in the backseat through the rear-view mirror.

  “What about my mom?” I asked.

  “She knows more than she used to, but I can’t go into details,” Mr. Bennett explained. “I know this is hard, but Thornhill thinks it’s best that you not discuss this with anyone, including your parents. We all know the pieces that we know, but he doesn’t think it is safe for us all to be talking openly—at least not yet.”

  “I don’t mean to buck Thornhill,” Hal said, “but does he remember that we’re only ninth graders?”

  “He does, but he told me that if I ever had the chance, to tell you there’s something he wants you to remember instead. He said to remember that not all C33 offspring have powers,” Mr. Bennett said. “Despite her obvious talents, Cornelia doesn’t show any signs of it.” He looked at Nia. “Neither does Cisco. And, Zoe, your sisters, too—nothing. Saving Amanda—saving all of us—is truly up to you four.”

  Chapter 10

  Sunday night is always the best night of the week in our house. Whatever scarcity of food there is during the rest of the week, my mom makes up for it on Sundays. She sets the radio to the jazz station, cooks something delicious that’s bound to make lots of leftovers, and the four of us eat together in the dining room. With candles.

  When I pulled up to the house on my bike, it was great to see that all the lights were on downstairs—but it was weird. I felt like I was a visitor from another planet. I felt like I’d been gone for years, not just a day. I knew so much now. About my dad. About what had happened to him and to us.

  Inside the house, it was warm. I smelled onions and garlic frying in olive oil, the sweet aromas released by cooking tomatoes. And some kind of meat? I knew we had some kind of ground beef in the freezer—my mom has been too busy to grocery shop for the longest time, which usually means there’s not much to eat around the house, but when she does take the time to cook, she is amazing at turning whatever random piece of zucchini or crust of Parmesan cheese and half a box of pasta into a meal. And usually that would be a Greek meal. To me, home is all about the smell of moussaka, lemon and rosemary-scented olives; yeasty, stretchy flatbread; thick, creamy yogurt with just the right kind of tang. And baklava. When my mom invests the time to layer nuts and phyllo dough and butter, the house smells like cinnamon all day—yum. One of the first pictures I took and really loved was of Iris and Pen licking the honey sauce off their fingers when they were four. The print used to hang on the wall by the stairs in our old house. I wonder where it is now?

  I felt so different I half expected my mom to be able to tell just by looking at me, but she glanced at me hurriedly and said only, “Hey, Zo, great you’re here. Can you set the table quick for me?”

  My mom has never looked like other people’s mothers. She’s kind of like a bird—her legs are little sticks and her neck is graceful and long. Her hands are so small she can hardly span an octave on the piano, but she can—she plays beautifully. I’ve never seen her dress casually, except in the early days of the RV trip, when she wore my dad’s old sweatshirt every
day and alternated between crying and driving. Usually, she wears silk and finely woven wool jackets with tailored dark jeans and cute shoes. I’ve seen her mow the lawn in an angora sweater.

  Now, she wore a vintage top, skinny jeans, and suede ankle boots that drooped at the top. My sisters were sitting across from each other doing their homework in the breakfast nook, and while I hung up my jacket, my mom stepped away from the stove to lean over them, checking Pen’s math sheet as the wooden spoon in her hand dripped red sauce onto the paper.

  “Think about it. Half of the factory’s output is four hundred and sixty-eight apples. So what’s a third of the basket? How would you figure that out?”

  Because she’s a tiny person, you don’t expect it, but when Mom opens her mouth she sounds like Billie Holiday. Sings like her too.

  Pen looked up at her now. Both twins have huge brown eyes set deep into their faces. My mom calls them “Greek eyes,” which always made my dad laugh out loud.

  “There’s two ways to do it,” Iris prompted.

  “Don’t help me,” said Pen. She doesn’t like it that Iris has a great math brain and finishes her math homework in half the time.

  “How was the library?” my mom said, glancing up at me as she went back to the stove.

  “It was great.” By this point, I was pulling out a stack of plates. Brown with wheat stalk designs on them. Chipped. When we first moved to Orion, my mom rented this house and bought everything we needed to furnish it at an estate sale. It all belonged to an old lady named Eunice—we ended up with five yellowed notepads that say at the top, From the Desk of Eunice P. Clarke. Amanda loved Eunice’s things, but I didn’t.

  “Mom,” I said, laying down Eunice’s nasty old polyester napkins and her long-dulled stainless steel forks—also patterned with a wheat stalk on the handles. “Do you ever think about Pinkerton?”

  Mom froze in place over the stove, oven mitt poised dramatically. She put one hand out in front of her to grasp the oven’s handle, as if to steady herself. There are silent rules in my house: We don’t talk about Pinkerton. We don’t talk about my dad. “Do you think we’ll ever go back?”