The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  I know this is totally insane, but from that moment on, I knew that Amanda was in control. No matter what anyone else did or said, Amanda was going to get the better of this. She jumped down from the tomb’s platform and began walking in our direction.

  After a long, deep look into her sister’s eyes, which turned into a long, deep grin, Amanda turned to us, and we all ran and collapsed into a huge group hug. “I can’t believe you’re here!” Callie cried. Nia said, “I know!” Hal just squeezed everyone really hard, and Amanda, standing in the middle, smiled warmly at each of us, touching a shoulder, a cheek as she went.

  Amanda smelled the same, felt the same. “I am so glad to see you guys,” she said, and I said, “Right back at you.”

  Of course, as soon as we all were touching, I felt the same kind of electric connection come to life with a tingling explosion—it had never been this strong before. I had this plastic puzzle when I was a little kid and I remember loving the way it felt when the pieces clicked into place. I felt that way now.

  “The joy of meeting pays the pangs of absence; else who could bear it?” Amanda said, her voice soft and moving unexpectedly, like a barely suppressed laugh. As always, she’d found a quote that put what we were all feeling into words.

  Nia’s face lit up—I could see that Amanda’s presence gave her the same energy and sense of possibility I felt also. “Nicholas Rowe,” she said. “Totally obscure. How did you know I’d just come across it?”

  Amanda raised her eyebrows again and smiled.

  “Amanda,” Callie said. “Are you okay? You’re in danger.”

  “We all are,” she said, her voice sounding anything but rushed and afraid. “But can you feel it?”

  I nodded.

  “You feel stronger when we’re all together,” she said. “Because we are stronger together than we are apart.”

  “That’s what you’ve been trying to tell us, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “I have so many questions,” Nia said.

  “I’m sure you do,” said Amanda. “I’m sure you all do.”

  “Yeah, but suddenly they don’t feel important,” said Hal.

  “I feel—” Callie began. “I feel amazing right now.”

  I nodded, because it was true. Colors were brighter, sound was clearer. The smell of the freshly cut grass somewhere nearby was carried on a breeze to my nose. The feel of my fingers rubbing the fabric of my shirt was heavenly.

  Amanda turned to me. “I want to talk to you. I want to be your friend. But your listening is important right now,” she said. “Pay attention. To everything that I have said and that you’ve heard today.”

  To Callie, she said, “You’re learning that strength is not just in your muscles but in your heart. You will not bend.”

  To Nia: “You can see the past but you must think only of the future.”

  And to Hal: “There is no such thing as destiny.”

  Her last comment made me think of an entry I’d seen recently on the Amanda Project website. A girl from Nevada, Rebecca Laewima, wrote in to say that Amanda had once helped her pick out her own totem—the horse, which usually means leader, but which Rebecca said can also mean “destined.” Did Amanda really not believe in destiny?

  Amanda picked up the scavenger hunt sheet. “Was this horrible?” she said. She smiled and I could see in her eyes that she understood how hard all this had been, how in the dark we’d felt, how scared.

  “It’s going to get even worse,” she said. “But I know we can beat this. I have a plan.”

  “My mom wanted me to give this to you,” Callie said, handing Amanda the enhancement eraser. “Don’t drink it now, but if you ever want to go back . . . to the person you would have been without all the changes Dr. Joy made, she thinks this will do it.”

  Amanda raised her eyebrows. “If I drink this, the Official will no longer want me.”

  “So drink it,” said Rosie. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t just want to save myself,” Amanda said. “I want to save us all.”

  “Ariel,” Rosie said, calling Amanda by her real name. “Are you sure you understand him as well as you think you do? Do you know what he wants?”

  “He wants me,” she said. “He’ll take all of you too, but it’s me he really wants. And if he can’t have me, then he wants my blood. I think he wants to use our blood to re-create us—like cloning, but less direct.” She lifted her head suddenly, like a deer who has heard something. “I have to go,” she said. She crossed her fingers, held them out to us in a little wave, as if waving and wishing good luck were the same thing. Then she disappeared behind the tomb.

  Suddenly, Hal was pulling at my elbow, just as I heard the rhythm of running feet. We all ducked behind a series of grave markers in time to see the guards who had been chasing us all afternoon take off, running after Amanda, wherever she had gone.

  “I guess they’re not interested in us anymore,” Callie said watching them go.

  Hal nodded. “What should we do now?” he asked.

  “You should go back to the group,” Rosie said. “You’re safer there.”

  “We do have a check-in soon—in less than an hour,” Nia said. “And I want to make sure that Cisco is safe.”

  “Come on, then,” said Rosie. “We can walk over the Arlington Memorial Bridge back to the Mall. We’ll have to hurry.”

  Callie sighed. As we started to cross the bridge, I took some shots of the waves, just starting to get choppy in the brisk spring wind. The cherry trees lining the bank formed a cloud of pink. I captured the image of our shadows cast forward on the sidewalk. The five of us walking side by side.

  “There’s something I think we should do,” Rosie said. “Anything we have, any physical evidence of what’s going on here, could put us in danger. You want to be careful not to have any of it with you. It could be used against you. Or it could get into the wrong hands.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Whose hands?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know that my father was very clear about that before they took him, and he told me to be sure to tell you too.”

  Nia pulled the envelopes out of her pocket. “How about these?” she said.

  “Rip them up,” said Rosie. “Toss them into the water.”

  Nia did as Rosie told her to and the flakes of ripped paper were picked up by the wind and swirled high up into the air before they drifted, randomly, gracefully, down to the gray water, like snow.

  “Anything else?” she said.

  Nia held up the red and blue key cards. “We still don’t know what these are,” she said. “We forgot to ask.”

  “Keep them,” Rosie suggested. “But somewhere safe.” Nia stuffed them down into her boot.

  I rubbed the pendant in my pocket.

  Was I imagining it, or was Rosie looking at me? Did she know?

  I started to put parts of my dad’s stories—the ones he and Amanda’s mom would go over in our kitchen back in Pinkerton—together with what we’d seen in the lab. In one of my dad’s stories he talked about how kids got woken up in the mornings with classical music blaring, so that the first thought of their day would be light-filled harmony, but it only left them all feeling sick. In contrast, as a kid I got woken up in the mornings with a cream cheese–bacon omelet—my favorite.

  Amanda’s mom had laughed about the use of stopwatches timing what they ate.

  My dad had reminded her about how, for one whole year, they’d never eaten the same food twice—one week it was all curry, another all pancakes, working their way through every culture’s foods. My dad was so scarred by this he used to let us eat mac and cheese from the box every single night if we asked for it.

  Suddenly, I felt a pang of understanding, for what my happy, goofy dad had gone through. Flash cards instead of family, the rows of beds instead of rooms where you could close a door, weekly check-ins with the nurse instead of spontaneous conversations with a
parent who actually cared about you.

  It wasn’t fair. Any of it.

  And this was my chance to help to make it stop.

  I pulled the pendant from my pocket, removed the vial, and held it up to the light. The sun shone through it, turning the almost black color of the blood a vibrant scarlet with lights of orange. “This is my father,” I said. I turned to the others. “He loved me.” I squeezed my eyes shut, but the tears poured down anyway. “And this is all that’s left of him.”

  The others nodded, and it wasn’t a fake kind of “we feel your pain” nod. Because I could see in each of their faces that they were experiencing the feelings I was having, that they had managed to absorb what I knew.

  The story of my dad was part of them now. . . . I was not alone in my pain. That knowledge gave me the strength to extend the vial over the side of the bridge, remove the seal, and peel my fingers away one by one to let the vial fall into the surf, where it hit and bobbed for a second before the water enveloped it. I watched it sink below the surface.

  I didn’t say good-bye out loud. But I squeezed my eyes shut and thought it. I pictured his face in my mind, smiling at me, knowing that I was carrying him inside me.

  Callie, Hal, and Nia reached out for me, wrapping their arms around me. I felt the current pass from each of them, through me and back out again. But instead of jumping away from it as I had the first few times, I relaxed into it.

  This was what we had now. Each other.

  Chapter 23

  We walked across the rest of the bridge in silence. On the other side, we saw a kiosk selling drinks and Washington, D.C., T-shirts, maps, and postcards, and Callie moved toward it.

  She stopped in front of the rack of postcards as if she were thinking very carefully about which one she wanted to buy. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket, and lined it up in front of a postcard of the Museum of American History. She pressed a few buttons on her phone, then held it up to show Hal, Nia, and then me.

  “Brilliant,” said Nia, getting Callie’s idea right away.

  The photograph in the phone made it look like Callie herself had taken a picture of the Museum of American History.

  Nia picked up a postcard packet—twelve postcards bound together in an accordion fold: Monuments in Bloom: 12 Must-See Attractions in Cherry Blossom Season. “This should do it,” she said. I lined up my camera and started to take pictures.

  Callie and Hal continued to scan the racks of postcards for more shots taken while the cherry trees were in bloom. The spinner racks were set up in a row in front of the kiosk, and we worked our way around to the back. Which is lucky, because it gave us somewhere to hide when Hal grabbed my arm, pulling me back. He glared at Nia and then Callie and they froze as well. Rosie, seeing our near-instantaneous stillness, shifted so she couldn’t be seen.

  Through a space in the racks, I saw what Hal must have known was coming—one of the guards, heading right for us. Between two rows of postcards, I caught the glint of the metal snaps on his shiny jacket, the pleats on his black pants. He was walking purposefully, like he already knew where to find us. In just a few seconds he would have us.

  Except that, when he was only five steps away, Rosie dashed out from behind the postcard kiosks. Before we could do anything to stop her, she took off at a sprint. The guard recognized her and took off after her.

  It all happened so fast, it was over before we could do anything to stop her. Rosie must have known that we wouldn’t have let her sacrifice herself to save us.

  Nia’s face had gone from olive to gray. Hal pushed his hair off his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Callie put a hand on his shoulder and he kind of leaned into her for strength.

  We made our way along the mall, passing the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the World War II Memorial. As we were getting ready to cross 17th Street, we heard police sirens in the distance, in the direction that Rosie had sprinted. A shudder passed through my body, thinking that those sirens might be connected to her, or to Amanda, or to both. I thought about how their mother had died. An accident that was the result of being chased. Nowhere felt safe anymore.

  By the time we reconnected with the group, we were late. The buses were already loaded and Mr. Fowler was standing at the open doorway, checking his watch and looking panicked. We took the last few dozen yards at a jog.

  “Well, thank you very much,” he said to us in a huff. “I almost had a heart attack here. We will not be able to even go on History Club field trips any longer if students behave as inconsiderately as you four have. You have my number—you did not think to call? If not for Heidi Bragg letting me know how routinely irresponsible you four are, I would have alerted the police. And you’ve almost made us miss our tour of the Capitol. Mr. Thornhill worked very hard to secure tickets to a viewing of the Senate chamber, and I would hate for your carelessness to ruin that for the rest of the group.”

  I barely heard him. I didn’t even care that we were getting yelled at, it was so good to be safe inside the bus reunited with Cisco and our group.

  “Let’s go,” he shouted to the driver as soon as we had boarded the bus. It smelled like old lunches and air freshener.

  “Sorry, Mr. Fowler,” Callie said, hanging her head. I could see that she was smiling. But her smile turned to a thin-lipped look of resolution. Yes, we were safe here on the bus. But what about Rosie? And what about Amanda?

  At the Capitol, there was a security check-in just inside the doors. There were a number of students ahead of us—and Heidi had a lot of jewelry to unload—but after waiting for a while we got to the front of the line. I laid my camera carefully in the plastic tray to slide it through the X-ray machine and got in line behind Callie. Hal had a guitar pick, house keys, and his duct tape wallet and duct tape phone. Nia tossed in a giant green plastic ring, a pocket-size edition of The Death of Ivan Ilych, a lipstick, a much-chewed pencil stub, an expensive-looking green leather wallet, and a hair clip. Callie had almost nothing in her pockets, but the security guy emptied her backpack of a water bottle, lip gloss, a copy of Lucky magazine, some loose change and dollar bills, a pen shaped like a candy cane, and a pack of bubble gum. The guard picked up my camera, rotated it in his hands, and asked me to take a picture to prove it wasn’t some kind of explosive.

  “Smile,” I said, framing his pimply face—his hair was so light you couldn’t even describe the stuff on his upper lip as peach fuzz.

  But for a second, as I was focusing in, the foreground of my picture went blurry and I could see only what lay deeper in the shot. And that’s when I noticed a kindly-looking man watching from a few steps away, his hands folded together as if he was struggling to stay still. He was staring straight at my camera lens, which was weird—was he watching us? But what was even weirder was that I recognized him, though it took me a second to remember from where. All I could remember was that I’d had a good feeling about him. It was an association with my dad, with grown-ups I liked.

  As soon as I pressed down on the shutter—he must have heard the noise—he flinched slightly, like someone who is so modest he doesn’t like to think his picture is being taken.

  I’d seen him recently.

  And then it hit me. He was the kindly businessman who’d picked up the scavenger hunt sheet when we’d dropped it on the way to the Vietnam Memorial. Where we’d come as close to getting caught by the Official’s guards as we had all day. How did this man get here, to the Capitol? Was it a coincidence? He wasn’t some kind of a senator or something, was he?

  I felt like maybe his being here was a good thing. A sign that things were about to turn around for us. He wasn’t my dad, but he sure looked like a dad. That had to be good news, right?

  Callie must have noticed him at the same time I did. When I lowered the camera, I saw that she’d already taken a few steps in his direction, addressing him with a casual, happy grin. “Hey,” she said. “Remember us?”

  The man smiled, the same slightly skeptical but int
rigued smile he’d given us on the sidewalk. I remembered how likable this man was. He nodded. “You were working on the scavenger hunt, right?”

  Callie nodded brightly. I glanced at Hal and Nia. They were both watching intently, and I could see the same kind of hope in them that I was feeling. I remembered Rosie saying we were safe with the school group. Maybe this man had something to do with our safety. He seemed so comfortable and relaxed, and in control of everything.

  “Do you work here?” Callie asked, her smile trusting. All of us were ready to believe. I look back and wonder at this—how this man had made us feel we could trust him.

  The man laughed, and for the first time, I felt a shudder of doubt. I think a door opened inside my brain, a tiny crack of an opening. I didn’t want to change my mind about someone just because he had a laugh that wasn’t very nice. But then again, the way people laugh says a lot about them. There are people out there who laugh at things that aren’t funny. It doesn’t make them evil, it just means they might not have much of a sense of humor.

  “I don’t work in this building,” he said. “I’m just visiting it, like I assume you are. But I do work for the government.”

  I was starting to trust him again, to forget the suspicious way he’d laughed.

  Callie relaxed as well. “You work for the government?” she said. “That’s cool. What do you do?”

  And then the man seemed to almost wink as he said, “Oh, me? I’m just another of many officials.” Or maybe it wasn’t a wink. Maybe it was a blink. Maybe he was narrowing his eyes. I don’t know exactly what happened to his face, except it changed. Dramatically. And suddenly, he wasn’t nice anymore. He wasn’t an amused businessman helping a group of kids.

  I knew then. We all knew. He wasn’t just one of many government officials.