The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  But it didn’t work. I felt the guard’s hand on my shoulder. He grabbed me at the waist, too, and yanked me over to the side of the lab where he shoved me unceremoniously into a rolling desk chair, gathered my hands together behind the chair’s back, and attached a new plastic strap around my wrists. Callie and Hal were already similarly tied. Nia was being subdued as I got my bearings.

  Two guards had Amanda by her arms. In her struggle, her hair had fallen into her face so I couldn’t see her eyes. Was that why I couldn’t read how she felt?

  This wasn’t supposed to happen, was all I could think. I longed for the comfort that might come just from sharing that thought with Amanda, Nia, Callie, and Hal, but it was not there. I could still hear my own thoughts, of course, but theirs were gone. I felt not only like I’d gone deaf, but like I’d lost my friends. I hadn’t realized how used to our connection I’d become.

  “Heidi?” Mrs. Bragg said. “Heidi, darling!” I looked over to see that Dr. Joy’s efforts at reviving the blood exchange machine had paid off. The lights were on again, and Heidi’s eyes were open.

  The lights on the machine were blinking again. Mrs. Bragg seemed to have calmed down.

  “Is the machine prepped, Joy?” the Official asked. “Let’s get Heidi activated. Once she’s powered up and on the team we’ll be able to work on repairing whatever damage she”—he gestured to Amanda—“caused.” He looked at the guards holding Amanda and gestured toward the empty seat near Heidi’s. “Put her in the chair,” he ordered. Heidi was holding her temples also, clearly in the same kind of pain we were.

  Dr. Joy turned to the Official slowly. He looked at him a few good minutes before he nodded. I wouldn’t say he was moving like a spring chicken. And that wasn’t just because he was nearing eighty years old. There was something about the way he was moving that was—

  Actually, I wasn’t sure I could say.

  I had the feeling like a word was on the tip of my tongue.

  “You’re still letting him have Heidi?” Amanda called to Mrs. Bragg. In spite of the fact that the guards had her by the arms and were dragging her across the room, she spoke calmly and appeared to be completely poised, as if the guards holding her arms were simply members of the modern dance troupe of which she was the star. But when she looked at me penetratingly, I wondered what her look meant. Was there something she wanted? Did she want us to do something? Amanda looked back to Mrs. Bragg. “You’re giving Heidi over to the people who didn’t bother to try to save her life?”

  Again, I couldn’t complete the thought. I couldn’t come up with the word to describe what I was seeing—I could read Amanda right now no better than I’d been able to read Dr. Joy.

  And that’s when I knew. I hadn’t just lost my ability to hide. I’d lost my ability to read people. And where before I’d felt like I’d gone deaf, now I felt like I’d gone blind.

  Amanda was tied securely in the chair now next to the weakened Heidi. Amanda had no hope of escaping the chair’s straps, but she had enough freedom of movement to prevent Dr. Joy from sticking her with the needle. “Be still!” Dr. Joy was harsh-whispering to Amanda. “If you aren’t still, I’m going to stick you somewhere else.”

  “Stick away, old man,” Amanda growled. “I’d rather bleed out onto the floor than let you suck my blood up into your precious little invention there.”

  “Wait,” said Heidi, weakly, looking directly at her mom. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want this anymore.”

  “Heidi—” Mrs. Bragg said. She looked at Dr. Joy. She looked at the Official. She smiled her perplexed anchorwoman smile at Heidi.

  “I said I don’t want to!” Heidi roared.

  Mrs. Bragg started to undo Heidi’s arm straps, her hands shaking. She looked over at the Official. “I’m sorry,” she said to him. “But you promised none of this would happen against Heidi’s will.”

  “Sit down,” the Official said to Mrs. Bragg.

  “But . . .” Mrs. Bragg hovered, her hands still touching the straps.

  “I said, sit,” the Official said. Mrs. Bragg sat. Maude was back at the chair in a flash, her hands tightening Heidi’s restraints where Mrs. Bragg had loosened them.

  Heidi’s eyes opened wide. How many times had she faked the feelings she was having now in an effort to get her way? Tears formed. “Mom?” she said in disbelief.

  Mrs. Bragg looked at her, clearly in pain. “I can’t fight these people,” she said. “They’re more powerful than we are . . . that’s always been the point.”

  Amanda was struggling so furiously now that she managed to dislodge one of her arms from the restraints.

  “Can’t you sedate her?” the Official asked Joy.

  “You promised she’d come willingly,” Dr. Joy grumbled as he shuffled toward a different part of the lab.

  While they were waiting for Dr. Joy to return, the Official walked over to Amanda, and said, “In your last moments of consciousness, I might as well tell you,” he said, “that you will live.” Even without my powers, I could see that the Official was still a little leery of Amanda. He was talking to her confidently, but he was careful to remain out of reach. If only I could read what he was thinking, to get into his head, to figure out more about his fear—to see what he was really worried about—maybe I could shout out some kind of warning to Amanda.

  But I had nothing to offer her. I was useless.

  “In a few minutes, you will begin a new life,” he explained. “You will be just another regular high school student at Endeavor High. You won’t have any actual memories of what has happened to you today. You won’t remember your new friends here, the loyalty you inspired in them, the powers you used to possess. With the exception of some persistent nightmares, you will have no sense of the destruction you have caused. It will all be wiped clean.”

  I thought about the antidote to all Dr. Joy’s work—the bottle of liquid Mrs. Leary had been working on since Callie was born, the one bottle we’d given to Amanda to drink when the time was right. Was this what it would do to her? Render her incurious, powerless, haunted, and in pain? All Mrs. Leary had told us was that she didn’t want us to drink it while the Official was after her—that without our powers, we could not save Amanda.

  But she hadn’t known about the little silver disc that even now was emitting a sound so piercing it was hard for me to think. I felt like it was smashing my thoughts. Interrupting them. Unraveling them.

  And that’s when I figured out how the disc worked. Just as Dr. Joy was approaching Amanda with the sedative, just as the guards were holding her down so he could inject her with it, just as her body slumped into a pose that looked like she was sleeping in the most uncomfortable airplane seat ever invented, just as Dr. Joy easily slipped the IV line into the raised vein on the inside of her elbow, I realized how the machine that looked no bigger than a silver coin was preventing us from using our powers.

  It was doing the opposite of what I do. I could turn invisible because I could slip into the rhythms I could read in other people. I could move in a pattern that matched the pattern of their blinking. I could slip into a song that harmonized with the music of their own minds, such that they couldn’t hear the new voice in the room—mine.

  And this machine, this random, painful, noise-erupting machine was throwing off everything that came naturally to me, every logical conclusion to every song or thought that entered my head—and it must be doing that to each of us. The machine followed no pattern. It made no sense and so it was impossible for our brains to assimilate, to get mastery of, to understand.

  What the Official had invented was something that did not take away our powers. It simply stunted them, like white blood cells attacking virus cells and rendering them inert.

  What we needed to do—I could see this now—was pound out our own rhythm, sing our own song, overwhelm the hasty cycling of the machine on and off at irregular intervals. We needed to prove to it who we were.

  Which would be easy because, thank
s to Amanda, we knew who we were.

  What Nia, Hal, Callie, and I had in common was that after becoming friends with Amanda, everything in our lives had changed. But maybe change wasn’t the right word. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that she revealed us to ourselves. She’d helped us escape our fears. She’d helped us come out of hiding.

  And now it was our turn to help her escape. Already I could see Amanda’s blood flowing into the IV from the needle in her arm. It was collecting in a reservoir on the side of Dr. Joy’s machine, rushing into it. The machine was starting to whir and make gurgling noises, beeps, electronic hums.

  “We can still reach her,” I murmured to the others, trying to talk between the irregular beating of the crushing sound. “But we need to stop listening to this place. Together, we can be more powerful than this machine. We can work together to make Amanda hear us more than she can hear it.”

  Nia, Callie, and Hal looked at me like I was crazy, their eyes full of fear and pain.

  “What should she hear us saying?” Hal finally gasped.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had vague thoughts of saying her name over and over. Or all her names. Or her totem name. Or all our totems. None of these ideas felt right.

  “The poem!” Nia said.

  “What poem?” Callie asked.

  By way of answering her, Nia began to recite, and as soon as we knew what she was saying, we all joined in:

  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.

  Then Callie said, “Amanda, I know you were there that night on Crab Apple Hill. I don’t need to see you to believe anymore.”

  I heard Hal’s voice next. “Amanda, one day I will paint you the way I saw you in the woods that morning, a daisy chain in your hair.”

  Nia quoted from a poem I later learned she and Amanda both loved, “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath. “Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances. Amanda,” she said. “You are God’s lioness to me.”

  I said, “Amanda, I love you like apple pie loves cheddar cheese.” I don’t know if she could have heard the word cheese as my voice broke. It was getting impossible not to cry.

  Hal didn’t let us stop calling out to her though. “Sunflowers,” he said.

  “Stars,” said Callie.

  “Words,” Nia answered.

  “My dad,” I said.

  And then we repeated those words: Sunflowers, stars, words, my dad, over and over, letting the magic of their importance, the love connected to them flow. I felt them raining down over me, softening, blocking the noise of the Official’s machine. They blanketed the noise like snow, light as a feather pillow. I closed my eyes, my entire body relaxed and suddenly peaceful, like I was lying down in a field to watch clouds drift across a late-summer sky. I felt as if I’d fallen into a tank of extra-heavy water. Lifting my arm was an effort I could not summon the strength for. Not that I wanted to. I just wanted to live inside the warmth of the way the four of us felt about Amanda forever.

  And then I opened my eyes, sleepily, lazily, as if I were waking up from a long nap, not even sure right away where I was. I saw something. It was the Official. And suddenly I could read him again. He was afraid. His fear was a cloud gathering into a storm. He was scared because he was starting to think his plan wasn’t going to work.

  Wait, no. He knew his plan wasn’t going to work. I saw that information in the way his pupils were small, his breath coming fast, his shoulders raised a few inches higher than they had been before.

  And he was right. His plan wasn’t going to work. Because the fact that I could read him so easily meant my power had come back. And if my power had come back, then maybe everyone’s had too. Had they?

  I didn’t even get a chance to ask that question aloud, because Callie suddenly burst through the straps on her chair. Our minds opened up to one another again, and I felt the resurgence of Callie’s strength, of her beautiful courage, and realized how much I’d missed it. There Hal was, shouting, “On your left!” to her before the guards came at her from that direction. There was Nia, freed by Callie from her seat, running over to the disc, putting her hand on it until she knew what it was and how it worked. Then she squeezed her eyes shut, concentrated really hard, lifted her hand away and the disc shot off the wall and landed with a few short complaining bursts of sound on the floor. It vibrated a minute and then died.

  Callie ran to Amanda, pushing the Official out of her path. She pushed over the machine between Amanda and Heidi, and it fell with a crash. That didn’t stop it whirring and humming though—the sucking sounds were still there.

  “She has to wake up,” Hal said. “She’ll lose more blood than she can afford to if she doesn’t disconnect from it immediately.”

  I could see Callie didn’t quite know what to do. Did she shake Amanda? Go back to attacking the machine? Was it dangerous to pull Amanda off the machine before it was turned off?

  In the end, it wasn’t Callie who acted. It was all of us. It was all of our thoughts, all of us focusing our desire into one keen blade of need.

  Wake up, we all wished as hard as we could. Hal and I were still tied to our chairs, but it didn’t matter. As Amanda had shown us, our spirit transcended physical strength. Come back, Amanda, please.

  I don’t believe there has ever been anything I wanted more than to see Amanda open her eyes at that moment. I had lost so much: I’d lost my dad, I’d lost Amanda. My dad was never coming back. But Amanda was still here. Separated from us only by the thin skin of her eyelids. Open your eyes, I whispered. Please, please come back.

  Amanda did open her eyes. She rose in her seat. She took a great, deep breath in, her eyes growing wider, her forehead impassive, her jaw soft. Her face was as calm as someone sitting for a portrait—all her focus was in her eyes as she summoned up what seemed to be a great deal of strength. She pulled the IV needle out of her arm and stood, facing the Official, ready for a fight they both knew he would lose.

  But then suddenly the Official had the syringe Amanda had used on him clutched in his hand. And before we could move, he had grabbed Heidi, and held the syringe to her neck. He looked at us wildly, eyes flashing.

  “Joy told me we could not bring you in without appealing to your sense of right and wrong,” the Official said. “So I’m betting I can bargain for Heidi’s life. You let me go, and she lives.”

  Amanda’s mouth twitched slightly. She blinked, the calm of her resolve shaken.

  Because the Official was right. She couldn’t let him hurt Heidi.

  Chapter 30

  Just then, the doors to the lab burst open and we all turned to see our parents running toward us frantically. Mr. Thornhill was at the front of the group, with Rosie, Mr. Bennett, Mrs. Leary, and my mom. Mrs. Rivera and Cisco came in next, and then there was a crowd of adults—Louise Potts, the woman with the cornrows who’d sold us the sunflower purse, and then, shockingly, Chief Bragg among those I recognized.

  Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Callie brought the Official to his knees with two swift kicks, the syringe flying out of his reach and skittering away on the ground. The guards charged at Amanda, but before they could reach her, Thornhill had jumped into the fray.

  It was amazing, watching Amanda and Thornhill fight side by side. I wasn’t sure I had the chronology right, but I think they’d only ever had a few minutes together to spend as father and daughter—Thornhill had kept his identity secret from Amanda until the night she confronted him, just before he was attacked. They seemed so in sync with each other; they seemed to relish fighting the guards off. It was almost like they were dancing, their legs were flying in patterns, their arms reaching out in self-defense, their heads down, occasionally sharing a look that meant, “I�
��ve got this one,” or “Nice move.”

  It was a blur while the C33s—Amanda, Thornhill, Mr. Bennett, and people I could not see—subdued Maude and the guards. A C33 I didn’t recognize used a pair of clippers to release Hal and me from our chairs. We stood, just in time to see that Amanda and Thornhill were left alone fighting the Official. Nia, Callie, Hal, and I made a circle around them, together with the other C33s, and we watched the Official fight. We could have helped, I guess, but it really seemed like their fight to finish. He held out a long time, but eventually, Thornhill pinned him on the ground.

  “Who are you? What’s your name?” Thornhill growled. “I’ve looked everywhere and I can never find your name.”

  “I’m air,” the Official said. “You can’t name me. You can’t know who I am. I don’t belong to you.”

  “No,” a voice spoke from behind the group and we all turned to see Brittney Bragg standing tall, seemingly frozen with one hand on Heidi’s wrist. She looked directly into the Official’s eyes. “Your name is Morton Clavermacle,” she told him. “Otherwise known as C33-2138.”

  A collective gasp went up among the C33 adults present. “Little Morton?” Mrs. Rivera gasped.

  “I was nice to you,” Mrs. Leary breathed. “I held your hand when you had nightmares.”

  I saw a flash of an image—the little boy, begging not to get a shot from the nurse.

  “That was him,” Callie said, looking at all of us, and pointing at him. Well, I guess we were a bit less sympathetic now.

  Just then, Chief Bragg stepped in and pulled the Official up by his shoulder. “You’re right about one thing, buddy,” he said. “You don’t belong to Vice Principal Thornhill, or whoever this man really is. You belong to me now. You’re under arrest.” An officer, just arrived and looking around in confusion, pulled the Official’s hands behind his back and cuffed him.