The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  “But—” Dr. Joy sputtered.

  “Or, more specifically, I doused the room in lighter fluid and dragged in some of those old dry mattresses that for some insane reason you kept on the beds in the old dorm where our parents spent their childhoods—you should be more careful. Stuff like that can really become a hazard.”

  The Official and Dr. Joy were giving her looks that clearly said, “How did we miss that?”

  “You see,” Amanda explained, “while you were busy kidnapping my friends in an attempt to lure me to the lab, I was here already, ahead of you, preparing for this little party we are having.”

  “You set—” the Official began. “You set the blood storage room on fire?”

  “And know what’s crazy?” Amanda continued, “I did it without the help of any of the superpowers Dr. Joy spent so much of his life trying to instill in my mom and dad. You see, sometimes you don’t even need powers. Or power. Sometimes all you need is a match.” She held up a matchbook from Play It Again Sam’s, her favorite vintage store run by former C33 Louise Potts, who was crazy about little touches like matchbooks, a detail Amanda appreciated. “Sorry,” she added, seeing Dr. Joy’s face, which had gone white. He’d aged ten years in a minute. “Was there something in there you didn’t want barbecued?”

  Chapter 28

  Dr. Joy ran for the blood room door, opened it and was immediately engulfed in flames.

  Or at least I thought I saw that happen. When I blinked I realized he hadn’t moved an inch, but was standing, mesmerized by the fire. I glanced at the rest of the guides. They all had their eyes wide open in awe, as if they had seen the same thing—the same vision that I had. We had shared a vision.

  So now our brains were connected even when we weren’t touching? Was there no limit to what we could do?

  “Zoe,” Amanda hissed, breaking me away from my thoughts. “Go!” And I knew what I was supposed to do.

  I ran toward the fire. Dr. Joy, the Official, Heidi and Brittney Bragg, and even Callie, Hal, and Nia were watching the light. They were hypnotized by it. No one saw me move.

  And then, just as he had done in our vision, Dr. Joy started to run to the room.

  As Dr. Joy was making his dash, I quickly pushed a wheeled tray of empty beakers in front of him. He ran right into the cart, and it was enough to knock him off balance, to keep him from throwing his body into the door that was hot as an oven.

  Then, I watched in horrible slow motion as Dr. Joy stumbled to his feet. And despite my new powers, I couldn’t stop him. He tried the doorknob, but it was too hot, and he burned his hand. Wrapping his hand in the bottom of his lab coat, he tried again. But before he could so much as turn the handle, the knob burned his coat. When he released his hand and coat, I could see brown holes the size of tennis balls scorched into the fabric.

  He scrambled suddenly for something on the counter: a glove that looked like a cross between an oven mitt and something an astronaut would wear into space. But by then, Callie had joined us, and with the strength of one hand she was able to hold Dr. Joy off. She, Amanda, and I had saved his life.

  But he didn’t seem to care. He backed away from the door, staring at it in disbelief before collapsing on the floor. “All my work,” he cried, his arms open toward the door as if he expected the blood samples to turn into people, and come running for him. “My life. My legacy. The future of the human race.”

  “Rendered inert,” Amanda said with a matter-of-fact tone. “Cooked beyond recognition.”

  Hal said, “Amanda, the guards are coming. They’re on their way.”

  “Nia,” Amanda said. Was she speaking out loud? Or was she using our newfound power to communicate telepathically? “Nia, it’s time to lock the doors.”

  I had no idea what Amanda was talking about. I could feel Nia’s confusion echoing mine.

  But then, within an instant, Nia was sharing an image with us—something bold and clean and factual. Something that was a relief to my clouded, terrified brain. It was the drawings Nia remembered from her vision of the workers installing the locks on the door.

  But the workers weren’t part of the vision anymore. All I saw were blueprints propped up in front of me. Clear lines, clean proportions, grids and graphs. Schematics. A drawing of rooms, bays, hallways, doors, and on top of it all, smaller, lighter lines. Looking at them I was able to discern that they were the electrical wiring plans, data cabling, power, remote control activation of the system that controlled the alarms, the locks, the window closures, venting. It should have taken a computer to understand and break this information down, but Nia was reading it like it was a bumper sticker—something to be understood in a flash.

  I heard a clicking, sliding, thudding sound. Followed by the sound of the doors being rattled by the guards.

  The Official pressed a button on a handheld radio. “Get in here,” he called.

  A voice buzzed back through: “Sir, we’re locked out.” It was Maude speaking in a flat voice.

  “You did this,” the Official said, glaring at Amanda.

  Amanda shrugged and shook her head. “Actually,” she said, “it was Nia. She’s figured out how to tap into the building’s systems. You’re completely at her mercy.”

  The Official’s head swiveled around and his gaze now landed on Nia. “But that’s not your power,” he said to her. “I thought you were confined to visions attached to objects. Visions of the past.”

  “I thought so too,” Nia said, pleased, despite the situation, to acquire new knowledge.

  “But that’s—” the Official began. I think he was going to say “impossible,” except by the time he’d got to that part of his statement, his brain registered the fact that he was looking at the spot where Amanda had been standing, and she was no longer there.

  “They’re evolving,” Dr. Joy said, rousing himself from where he was still sitting on the floor. His words were nearly inaudible, as if he were speaking more to himself than anyone else. “Just as I believed they would. They’re growing even before our very eyes. I knew they had this power. Like Amanda, they have the capacity to adapt and become more powerful when their powers become necessary.”

  And then we all became aware of Amanda’s presence again. She was standing on a countertop in the middle of the room. She was kicking things off the counter—lab equipment shattering as it hit the floor, stacks of papers drifting.

  “Guys, help me,” Amanda said. “We’ve got to trash this place.”

  And this part, at least, was fun. We emptied out drawers, dumped files, smashed beakers, overturned neat lines of tubes in racks. I glanced over at Heidi and Mrs. Bragg. They were staring at Amanda impassively, resolved and confident in their ability to wait out the storm, to not get in anyone’s way.

  For a few seconds, Dr. Joy just stared too. Then he rushed toward us, starting to pick up what we’d scattered. “You . . . ,” Dr. Joy said. He looked up at Amanda. He took a step toward her.

  “Zoe!” Amanda said—and, thanks to a vision Hal shared, I saw what was about to happen, what I was meant to prevent from happening. It wasn’t hard to keep Dr. Joy from seeing me as I cut him off as he moved toward Amanda.

  “You had no right,” Dr. Joy was saying, taking one step after another toward Amanda. “Those samples. Those mutations. They were my life’s work. I created you but you are too strong now. You are like your father—determined to thwart me. You are spoiled. I have to stop you.”

  Dr. Joy pulled a syringe out of his pocket, raising his arm up as if he were going to use it to stab Amanda in the chest. But I was more than ready for him. As he plowed by me to lunge for the counter, I reached out and plucked the syringe away. “What?” he said, turning to me, his lab coat flying out to the sides as he moved.

  “Zoe?” he said, looking into my eyes, darting down to take in the syringe I was holding, then looking back up at me. “Give it to me,” he said.

  Amanda hopped down from the countertop, held out a hand so that I could give her the sy
ringe. The Official chose this moment of distraction to lunge at Amanda himself. But just as the Official pounced on her, Amanda jerked out of his grasp and turned herself around and into a crouch behind him. He crouched to match hers and swung out a leg.

  Amanda jumped backwards, with amazing strength. The Official leapt for her again and she stepped away from his grasp, hopping into the air to lunge across him before he could get to her. He stepped back with a laugh. “You realize of course that in training to use your powers against me you developed the very strengths I am going to need. You take a large risk in doing so—for if you delivered yourself to me defenseless you would also be—for the most part—useless to me.”

  Amanda said, “I will always be useless to you.”

  But this time, she wasn’t fast enough. The Official reached out his hand and got it wrapped around her wrist. He tugged on her wrist, pulling her toward him even though she was struggling to resist. Nia, Callie, Hal, and I rushed toward them—we outnumbered him five to one, but before we got there, Amanda swung her arm over to his, and stuck him with the needle at a spot just above the elbow. “Don’t move,” she said.

  “What’s—?” the Official started. He looked down at the needle as if for the life of him he could not imagine how it had come to be stuck in his arm. “You stabbed me?” he said. Then, after thinking for a few beats: “What exactly is in there? Joy?”

  Dr. Joy was back to muttering. It was as if he hadn’t even heard the Official speak.

  “Do you know what it is?” the Official said, looking up at Amanda now.

  “I don’t but I’ve got my thumb on the plunger,” Amanda said. “So unless you want to find out, I’d suggest you do whatever I say. Even now, drops of this solution may be leaking into your bloodstream.”

  The Official didn’t move.

  “I’m sure Dr. Joy would never have wanted to inject me with anything but some harmless saline, right? Dr. Joy loves me. He promised that just now, didn’t you hear him? So he’d never inject me with say, promazine, that stuff he used on my dad when he tried to break out that time? Or phenobarbital, the stuff he used on my mom to keep her docile after they made those bogus tests of her powers out in the real world?”

  “Uh,” the Official said. “Joy? What’s. In. The. Syringe?” the Official said, but Dr. Joy was busy trying to reassemble papers that had cascaded to the floor. I was starting to wonder exactly how sane Dr. Joy could really be.

  “Come with me,” Amanda coaxed the Official, leading him by the elbow to the computer station in the center of the lab. He winced as the needle dug into his arm.

  “Sit,” Amanda said. The Official sat in a chair at one of the stations. You could see he was terrified from the spasms that kept crossing his face.

  “Start typing,” Amanda commanded.

  “What do you want me to type?”

  “Whatever sequence wipes the data,” Amanda said. “Nia, come watch him. I think if you put a hand on the computer, you’ll be able to follow what he’s doing.”

  The Official hesitated.

  “Don’t you see?” Amanda spoke softly, her voice calm and clear, as if this were all in a day’s work for her. “As heavyweight champion Joe Louis once said, you can run, but you cannot hide.”

  The Official started to type. Nia put her hand on the computer and nodded occasionally to show Amanda that he was doing as he was told.

  “Are we done?” he said.

  “Not quite yet,” she said. “I want you to access all the accounts where you are storing the money to fund any further research, investigation of former C33s, data collection, blood storage, lab creation, everything. I want you to donate the funds inside those accounts to these charities.” She pulled a list from her pocket. “You’ll be happy to know your gift will support programs to help children without parents, like the ones Dr. Joy originally collected for the C33 program.”

  Amanda looked over in Brittney’s direction. “This might be a good time,” she said, “to unhook Heidi from the machine. I don’t know what the adjustments we’re making to the computer might do to it.”

  Brittney backed off toward Heidi, but didn’t start to unhook her. She looked conflicted, her selfish little eyes getting small with the strain of her decision. I guess she was holding out hope that the Official would regain power.

  “I can’t destroy the system in the way you want me to,” the Official announced at last. “The system is set to repel any attempts to delete this information. I would need an override card and I don’t have one.”

  “An override card?” Amanda squinted suspiciously.

  “I keep them in a lockbox in Washington D.C. There’s no way you could get to them. Especially now. So I’m sorry. You can kill me. But you can’t destroy the operation completely. Without those key cards, it will live.” He could not keep the smug smile off his face.

  “Oh,” Nia said. “Do you by any chance means these key cards?” She leaned down and pulled the red and blue cards out of her boot. It says something about Nia’s innate elegance that she managed to make that gesture look cool.

  Looking at the Official’s face, waiting for the squirm, Callie added, in her sweetest, most innocent voice, “Just think, guys, how Nia almost threw them into the Potomac! That would have been a shame.”

  Amanda smiled ruefully, then slid the cards into two slots located under the counter on the Official’s left-hand side. “Let’s go,” she said, giving the needle a tiny wiggle.

  Again, the Official started to type, but now something started to happen to the machine attached to Heidi. The lights on the sides faded out and you could hear the low whine as the machine powered down. At the same moment, Heidi lost consciousness.

  “No!” Dr. Joy shouted, sounding very much like the Wicked Witch of the West when she is melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz. He was directing his gaze at the Official. “Morton,” he said. “If you activate the system malfunction, you’ll kill the subject in the chair.”

  “Heidi!” Mrs. Bragg cried out. “Help me, someone please help me!”

  I guess caring about whether Heidi lived or died was what did Amanda in. Because she turned to look at the Braggs just then, and in that momentary break in her concentration, the Official took a short sharp breath, grabbed Amanda’s wrist and threw her off so she stumbled, catching herself on the railing near Hal. Nia started toward him, but with one shove, he carelessly tossed her small form to the ground.

  He pulled the syringe out of his arm and threw it across the room.

  Mrs. Bragg was standing now, keeping one hand on Heidi’s arm, but stretching the rest of her body as much as she could toward the rest of us. “Something happened to Heidi!” she called out. “Dr. Joy, help me!”

  The Official was fumbling for something in his pocket, and as Amanda got closer to him, the Official pulled out something in the shape of a coin, small and silver. Palming it, he slapped it onto a wall where it stuck and began to emit vibrations. It wasn’t loud, but it made noise, uneven and high-pitched. Within seconds, I was in tremendous pain.

  Chapter 29

  Amanda, Callie, Hal, Nia—they felt the pain coming from the Official’s metal disc also. It was emitting a sound that was causing us agony. Like dogs, we were attuned to the machine’s whistling. It wasn’t that it was loud. It was that it was perfectly calibrated to hurt us.

  Amanda let go of the Official’s arm and bent her head down to her knees. Callie covered her ears. Hal squeezed his eyes closed. Nia blocked her face with outstretched palms.

  A smile crept across the Official’s face. His eyes were reenergized, hands shaking with excitement, his hair—which had been combed back before—was standing on end. He grabbed his two-way radio, “Maude,” he spoke into it as he was busily typing into the keyboard. “I’m bypassing the internal locking system now. Activate intruder protocol.”

  “What about Heidi?” Mrs. Bragg shouted across the room to him. “Get some help for Heidi!”

  “Joy, what’s happening
over there?” the Official barked. He gestured toward Mrs. Bragg with his chin. “Can you fix it?”

  But Dr. Joy had stopped working on Heidi and the blood-exchange machine. He pointed to the little silver disc on the wall and looked at the Official curiously. “What is this device?” he asked. “You were keeping a secret from me?”

  “It’s immunity,” the Official boasted. “It’s like kryptonite. It prevents these kids from using their powers.”

  “You made it?” Dr. Joy said.

  “I had it made.”

  “And I had no idea.”

  Gray-faced and ashen from fighting the noise coming from the disc on the wall, Amanda lunged at the Official, stumbling. She actually was able to get his elbow into her hand, but her grip was weak. The Official tossed off her one-handed grasp.

  At that moment, the doors burst open and Maude came running in, followed by both guards we’d been seeing plus the third guard—the one we’d last seen at the Metro station in Washington.

  The guard with the tattoo and his sleepy sidekick ran straight for Amanda, but she ducked behind a lab desk and ran for the back of the room. They followed her, knocking over a tray of metal instruments, holding onto the edges of counters as they took corners going too fast.

  Maude took Callie roughly by the arm. She tried to free herself. Ten minutes before, she would have been able to shake off Maude like she was nothing more than a cardigan sweater. But now, no matter how much she struggled, Maude was holding her too tightly. The Official was right—this woman had no empathy.

  The third guard came for me and I ducked behind a pillar. I’d be out of his line of sight for only a few seconds, but it would be enough. I saw a tall, draped, boothlike structure a few feet behind me, and I knew I could slip inside there. Or turn to one of the desks and assume the identity of a lab worker. All I needed was a white coat, and there one was. The name badge read Kelly Black. I slipped my arms into it and stared down at the table, moving my hands as if I were decanting liquids into tubes. I concentrated on elevator music—an orchestrated version of “Windy,” by the Associations. I hummed in a way that was so calm and peaceful no one hearing it, thinking it, inhabiting it could not help but feel a cold, numbing gel descending between their eyes and their brain.