The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  Looking simultaneously scared, distracted, and grateful, Mr. Fowler nodded, and began to wave his arms in front of his body, as if he could speed the pace at which the rest of our class was filing out of the gallery and through the double doors into the hall. Mr. Fowler looked back down one more time, as if wondering if it was really a good idea to leave four of his students alone with a strange man whose name he didn’t even know. At that point, the Official laid a heavy hand on Callie’s shoulder, and smiled his safest, most “Hey, I love kids” smile. By the time Callie had shrugged his hand off her body, Mr. Fowler had turned around and was gone.

  “Oh, don’t,” the Official said in response to Callie’s gesture, his voice languid and draw out as if he were deeply bored.

  “Aren’t you afraid there might be an actual fire?” Callie said.

  The Official just smiled, confirming for me that this alarm was no coincidence. Just then, the woman who I still thought of as Waverly Valentino had come down from the podium and was standing at the Official’s side. “Maude Cooper,” he said, by way of introduction. “A former C33. Did you read about her?”

  “No,” Hal said.

  “While so many C33s were given enhanced empathetic capability, Maude was given less. She would make an excellent prison guard or executioner. Joy had intended her as a mole—she would infiltrate secret organizations without ever being swayed by the relationships she formed while there. As you can see, some of the C33s have proved quite useful instead of being troublesome. She’ll escort you to your next destination.”

  “Right this way,” Maude said, gesturing for us to move ahead of her.

  The hallways of the Capitol building were filled with people leaving it: secretaries in sneakers and pantyhose, important-looking women in bright red suits and enormous pearls, young men reading blue-backed memos as they walked, their wing-tip shoes treading the paths they knew so well they didn’t have to look up, a cafeteria worker in black-and-white-checked pants and a chef’s jacket.

  We turned a corner into a corridor where the river of people slowed to just a trickle, and then we passed through a door and down a staircase where we were alone. It went down several levels into what must have been a basement. There were lockers running the length of the hallway, break rooms, utility rooms, an enormous kitchen—I could smell food cooking—the same steamy smell you get in the hallway outside the cafeteria at school. The alarm was still ringing as Maude opened yet another door, which led through a dining room where tables were set with white tablecloths and fancy napkins. Lunch was long over and the tables looked like they were set up for the next day.

  “Is this the senators’ dining room?” Callie asked. Nia could not help but look interested. Even with her life in danger, any opportunity to learn could engage her mind and distract her.

  “It is,” Maude said, no trace of kindness in her voice. Not too far from the dining room’s front doors was the train that led through tunnels under the Capitol, connecting congressmen and -women to their offices, the dining rooms, and the floors of both chambers whenever a vote was called.

  The trains didn’t look like trains. They were more like the kind of trolleys you ride around in at amusement parks—open on the sides with an awning over the top, benches that sit three across.

  I wondered if the trains were even running, given that a fire drill was in progress, a question that was quickly answered when Maude beckoned for us to walk down onto the tracks in front of the train and head into the tunnel.

  “What if the fire drill ends and the trains start running again?” Nia asked. “What happens then?”

  “You’d better hurry,” Maude said, “or else we’re going to find out.”

  “Fire drills don’t last forever,” I told her. “Mr. Fowler’s going to notice when we’re not there. He’ll call the police.”

  “We fully expect him to,” Maude said. “And when the police come, our team will give them all the evidence they need to determine that you four used the cover of the fire drill to run away. Heidi will assure them—and I’m sure she won’t be the only one—about how strange you’ve been acting recently. The police will be sure to discover evidence of how each of you were secretly a friend of Amanda Valentino, how her disappearance stunt inspired you all to try the same thing. You four show all the trouble signs. You’re malcontents and you’ve been using your friendship to concoct this running-away plan.”

  “My parents will hire a private detective,” Nia said. “They’ll be all over this. My mom will camp out at the Washington police headquarters, making sure the cops are doing everything in their power to find me.”

  We were getting to the end of the tunnel where we could see a pinpoint of light.

  “And the Washington police will come up empty every time,” Maude said. “Because you won’t be here.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. Since my dad died, I’ve lived in a lot of places. It seemed that every time I’d get used to one, I’d be forced to leave it. So the feeling of being dragged somewhere against my will is something I was used to. What I wasn’t used to was the feeling that this might be the last time I ever went anywhere new. The way Maude’s tone had changed as she told us we were leaving Washington, I wondered if that feeling meant we were going to have to get ready to die.

  Eventually we picked our way down the tracks to the end of the tunnel. We were in the basement of the Senate office building now, and because this building was not in the midst of a fire drill, Maude rushed us past janitors and men and women in suits. We turned down a few more hallways and up another set of stairs. One flight up, a hallway, then another flight down. I wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse us, disorient any sense of direction so that if we did try to escape we wouldn’t know how to get back.

  It didn’t matter. With one guard walking in front of our little quartet and another behind it, we weren’t trying to run.

  We ended up in a parking garage, walking to an unmarked van. The license plate read 2Q2Q10. Hal took a sharp breath in. I knew what he was seeing—the inside. We all saw it, too, when they opened the back doors and unceremoniously shoved us inside. It was there that we were handcuffed with the kind of plastic straps my mom uses to anchor bookshelves to wall mounts. There were benches along the sides of the stripped-out van and we were pushed down onto them. Each of us had an ankle strap attached to bolts in the floor, but we otherwise weren’t secured to the bench in any way.

  “My mother will be outraged when she finds out about this. You’ll be locked up forever when she’s done with you,” Nia hissed at Maude. Maude smiled.

  “For once in your life you’ll find yourself in a place where you are outside your mother’s control. I would think you’d be happy about that.”

  Nia glared at her. “Nothing about the current situation makes me happy.” And then Maude shut the door.

  And it was dark. Very, very dark.

  The thing about riding in a van sitting on benches with your hands tied together and an ankle strapped to the floor is that you get very uncomfortable very fast. And then you stay uncomfortable. Every time the van went over a bump, I tried to brace myself on the seat, but still, we all were sliding, careening, and smashing into each other and the walls of the van.

  Within minutes of being cuffed, I could feel the sharp edge of the plastic tie on my skin. I couldn’t imagine how intense it felt for Callie and Hal. Nia and I, at least, were wearing boots.

  Eventually the van must have moved onto a highway because the ride got smoother. I wasn’t jerking around as much and the pain in my wrists, arms, and ankle subsided. A bit.

  “So I guess we failed the scavenger hunt,” Hal said. He and I were sharing a bench with Callie and Nia across from us.

  I couldn’t help it. The laughter came bubbling up. At least laughing was the only thing that I’d done in the last forty-five minutes that didn’t hurt. “I guess so,” I snorted.

  “But we tried,” Callie said, laughing as well. The whole situation�
�it was absurd.

  Nia was laughing too. She tried to talk anyway. “And no one else had to work on their scavenger hunt while being chased—” It took her three tries to get the rest of her thought out. “Being chased—” she repeated, but still she couldn’t do it. “Being chased by—the Official’s goons.”

  I was laughing so hard at this point that I think a few tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried wiping them away with the backs of my tied-up hands. It was too tricky an angle, so I had to let the tears just flow.

  When we’d all laughed ourselves out and were ready again to pay attention to the throbbing parts of our bodies, Callie said “What do you think is going to happen to us?”

  Even though they couldn’t see me in the dark, I shook my head.

  “Wish I knew,” said Hal.

  We were quiet then for a little while. I don’t think anyone had the heart to say anything more.

  Until suddenly, out of the darkness, I heard Nia’s voice: “Train up a child.”

  It took me a second to remember what she was quoting from. Then I did—it was the line from JFK’s inaugural address that we’d excerpted on our scavenger hunt sheet.

  “The torch has been passed,” Hal said.

  “Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend,” I added.

  “We here shall have a new birth of freedom,” Nia remembered.

  “The names were inscribed,” Callie said.

  “They were taken from us,” I added.

  “The eyes of the world are upon you,” said Hal.

  And, as with all of Amanda’s clues, I didn’t know if it was about something real, if it was a secret code, if it was a message sent directly into our souls, or if it was all three at one time. I did know one thing for sure—she had been the one to paint those letters with the highlighting that could only be seen through a camera’s lens. These words were her message to us.

  And strangely, what those words told me was that whatever the Official was doing, whatever had happened to our parents, we were going to put an end to it. We were going to destroy the Official’s plans.

  The crazy thing? Even tied up in a van, slipping around on a bench, my arms aching, my back seizing up, my face streaked with tears—I still believed in Amanda. I believed that if Amanda said we were going to take the Official down, we were.

  I believed in Amanda because she believed in me. And I believed in her. I knew that what made Amanda who she was wasn’t the result of any genetic tampering inflicted on her parents by Dr. Joy. It wasn’t special powers, or secret skills. It was her essence, her personality, the look in her eyes. It was the way she transformed everything she touched into a work of art. Her notebooks, her clothing, even her years living on the run had been stamped by her as her own. Her metaphors could not be flattened. Her voice could not be silenced. She could take a city of stone monuments to great leaders and wartime loss and transform them into a poem that brought a little part of her personality into this horrible van. I recited her poem now, in my head, over and over. It was all I had to hold on to, but it was just enough.

  Train up a child.

  The torch has been passed.

  Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend.

  The names are inscribed. They were taken from us.

  We here shall have a new birth of freedom.

  The eyes of the world are upon you.

  Chapter 26

  It was dark out by the time the van stopped and the guards opened the doors. By then, my leg was screaming in pain. As soon as the guard snapped the cord bolting it to the floor, the pain got worse. It was like waking up a part of your body that’s fallen asleep. My shoulders were aching, my wrists were on fire.

  In the fifteen steps between the van and the building we were being dragged toward, I struggled to make out some sign of where we were. We were in a parking lot. I saw oak trees. The building was brick. We could have been anywhere.

  Except that just as the guard was pushing me over a curb, I saw a sign: STAFF PARKING. And under that: ORION PHARMACEUTICAL COLLEGE.

  Of course, I thought. The Official would haul us back to where it all began. Dr. Joy’s abandoned C33 human experimentation facility, and in the basement below, his recently constructed, fully operational, state-of-the-art lab.

  “Hurry up,” I heard. It was Maude, emerging from the passenger door of the van, finishing a call on her cell phone.

  “What exactly is the Official going to do with us?” Nia demanded.

  “Nothing, probably,” Maude said. “It’s Dr. Joy you need to worry about. But first, you better hope Amanda really comes for you. That’s your main purpose. If she isn’t forthcoming, I don’t know what the Official will have to do to you to get her attention.”

  “She won’t come,” Callie said. “She’s too good for that. She knows we can handle ourselves.”

  Maude smiled, passing us in the hallway, waving a hand behind her.

  Of course, Maude was right.

  But we didn’t know that yet when the guards practically threw us into a room that was empty except for four beds like the ones we’d seen in the C33 dormitory. There was a plate of sandwiches, four cartons of chocolate milk, and a note on a table:

  Children:

  Enjoy this food. We will talk soon. All will be well.

  Uncle Joy.

  Children? Did he think we were nine?

  It occurred to me that the food might be poisoned or drugged, but we ate it anyway because we were starving. And we weren’t sure anything worse could really happen to us at this point. After eating, Callie rubbed the red marks on her wrists, Nia limped around the room in a circle, as if waiting for feeling to return to her leg, and Hal sat on the edge of one of the beds, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress, his head tilted back, his eyes closed.

  Even though I didn’t need to hide from anyone here, I felt myself giving into the temptation of making myself invisible. I stood in the shadow of a cabinet. I slipped my hands inside the cuffs of my jacket. I closed down my face by breathing gently into a memory of watching my dad making Christmas cookies and humming “We Are the World”—my dad had always been ridiculously attached to ’80s culture, which I was only realizing just now was owed to his sudden introduction to pop culture in 1984. This memory of him singing, his back to me, stepping from one end of the counter to another was my earliest of him, and now, it was enough to make me strong. Inside my head, I started humming along with the song he’d been humming tunelessly, connecting to the music’s vibe.

  When I heard Hal say, “Where’s Zoe?” I stepped out from the cabinet’s shadow, letting them see me. Nia looked up also, as if Hal’s voice had taken her out of whatever trancelike state she’d slipped into.

  “I just had this weird vision of the Official in his office,” Hal said. “Come on, maybe if we’re holding hands, I can see it better.”

  We joined hands and Hal was able to share his vision—it didn’t even faze us that now, we could see both what Hal and what Nia saw. Our powers had just upgraded again. We were too focused on the vision itself to care.

  Unlike Nia’s fragmented, film-footage-like visions, Hal’s were hyper clear. They had the sharpness and the reflected light of something seen through glass and water—the rocks in a fish tank, plants glowing under a UV light.

  And there the Official was, tipped back in his desk chair, cracking his knuckles.

  “He’s scared,” I said, because to me, that was obvious.

  “What’s he scared of?” Nia asked.

  “He’s scared of Amanda,” I said. “He’s waiting for her and the longer she makes him wait, the more scared he becomes.”

  “Wow,” said Hal. “That’s amazing.”

  “It means we can’t give up,” said Callie. I felt myself growing calmer and more resolute just hearing her voice. “That’s what the Official expects us to do. It’s what he wants. But we can’t let it happen.”

  “You’re right,” said Nia, clearly strengthened
by Callie’s conviction, too. “First things first. Callie, is there any way out of this room?”

  The windows in the room were so high up we couldn’t reach them. Callie tried the door but it was solid metal and wouldn’t budge. Nia laid her hand on it. “It’s enclosed by a steel frame. There are steel bars that extend two feet into the walls on each side.”

  “Wait,” said Hal. “How did you see that? I thought you could only see things about people.”

  “Well, it is actually about people,” Nia explained. “I saw the men installing the bars. One of them says to the other, ‘That’s some strong bolt,’ and the other replies, ‘What are they trying to do, rebuild Fort Knox?’”

  “But you also knew the bars extended two feet into the wall.”

  “True,” Nia agreed. “That is strange. How did I know that?” She thought for a moment. Then her face lit up. “They were holding the building’s plans!” she said. “I saw the plans, in the vision—they were holding them out in front of them, studying them. Maybe that’s how I knew the measurement? Maybe my brain was reading them without my consciously knowing it?”

  “Maybe,” said Hal, uncertainly.

  “Can you see any more?” Callie asked. “Like, is there a secret door to this room or something?”

  Nia squeezed her eyes shut, then shook her head. “I can almost see them. I get close to them and then they blur in my mind. I can see the hands holding the pages. I can see the white of the pages, the lines, the writing, but I can’t get it to stick inside my brain all at once, you know?”

  “Then I’m not seeing an obvious way for us to get out of here.” Callie pursed her lips.

  “Sorry,” said Nia.

  “You don’t need to be sorry,” Hal said. “It’s crazy you can see those blueprints at all.”

  “Our powers are getting stronger,” Callie said. “But I keep being surprised by the direction they’re taking.”