“He still says our best chance is to hide our…” She glanced toward the door again. “You-know-whats.”
Scott snorted weakly. “Yeah, well it’s probably too late for me. Sort of blew my cover in the woods. Not that I’d take it back.” He’d seen Agent Steel reaching for her belt, intending to use the “neural scrambler” on Janis, just as she had used it on him in her office.
“And who knows what my escorts saw yesterday in Tallahassee?” Janis said.
“There’s something else I should tell you.” Shame guttered in Scott’s stomach. “Friday night, after the dance… Well, Agent Steel took me into her office for questioning.”
“She did?” Tension hardened Janis’s brow.
“She knew I climbed into Nut’s basement that morning. You were right. Steel had my prints. She wanted to know why and how I went inside. I played dumb until I’m guessing she flipped on that device with the blinking lights. I don’t remember, but…” He peeked up at Janis. “I think I might have answered some of her questions. Look, I’m really sorry.”
“God, Scott, I don’t care about that. Are you okay?”
“My head still aches a little, but yeah. The police found me and my bicycle in a ditch, supposedly. My glasses were smashed. It’s why I’m wearing these.” He touched his thick plastic frames self-consciously.
A shadow passed over Janis’s face. “Your glasses were broken?”
“Yeah, but it’s no biggie. I don’t need a new eye exam or anything. They’ll just replace the lenses.”
Janis pushed herself up from the desk and sidled past Scott. Their legs brushed, and for an instant the room wavered and Scott was back on the dance floor, the soft curves of her lips against his. Scott hadn’t brought up the kiss so far, and neither had Janis. Too much had happened since then.
Janis began to pace. “Do you think our parents know?”
Scott thought about his father and his bags of rental videos, then about his mother and her health and housing infatuations. His parents lived in their own bubbles. When Scott had brought up Blue Sky Realty the previous week, they hadn’t any idea what he was talking about.
“Not mine. Yours?”
“I go back and forth.” Janis frowned. “My dad’s obsessed with the Cold War, but that’s his job, you know, being a professor of political science. He kept in close contact with the investigators on the Nut investigation. But he didn’t seem to know about what happened in the woods on Saturday — or at least he hasn’t said anything. I climbed back through the window when I got home, and it was like he never knew I’d been gone. Just lectured me about going to Tallahassee.”
“Did you notice how nothing showed up in the papers this time?”
“Something tells me that from now on what happens in Oakwood stays in Oakwood,” Janis muttered. “I just can’t shake the feeling that our parents are privy to at least some of what goes on. I mean, they chose to move here.”
“Or maybe they were lured.”
The mattress creaked as Janis sat beside him. “How do you mean?”
“Well, we moved here because my dad was awarded a huge contract with the V.A. hospital. I was only six at the time, but I still remember how excited he was when he got the news. He compared it to winning the lottery. And our house…” Scott nodded toward Janis’s window. “My mom says the transaction happened through a third party — my parents never even saw the house — but it was probably another offer too good to pass up.”
“Thanks to our friends at Blue Sky Realty.”
“Rock-bottom price,” Scott agreed, “upper-middle-class ’burb, zoned for good schools…”
“We moved from California because my dad was offered a position at the university, but I was never told why here was better than there. A huge increase in salary would make sense. A less expensive house.” Janis rested her hand on one of his knees. “My parents were probably thinking about all of the money they’d be able to set aside for Margaret’s and my education.”
Scott watched as one of her fingers absently traced the folds of his pant leg. Was this a date? He blinked back the glazing effect of her touch and searched for something to occupy his hands. “I… I wonder if similar offers landed in the laps of the Hoags and Basts,” he stammered. “I mean, didn’t they ever strike you as, I don’t know, out of place in Oakwood?”
“A little.” Janis propped her elbows on her knees. “And I always wondered why more kids didn’t live here.”
“So what do you think happens when we incubate?”
“Nut didn’t seem to think it would be anything good.”
“So our only option is to hide our you-know-whats and hope for the best?”
Janis stared over the ridge of her knuckles toward her desk, her eyes darkening with grave introspection. “I don’t think that’s possible anymore,” she said after several seconds.
“What, hoping for the best?”
“No, hiding our powers.”
Scott glanced worriedly toward the doorway. Down the hallway, light peeked around the folding doors of her father’s study. Scott had already scanned Janis’s room for bugs and felt none, but still…
“Scott, this is us. This is who we are. There’s no more normal here.”
She dropped her hands and scooted nearer until her legs were touching his.
“Our powers are growing, not plateauing. If you had seen what happened in that hotel room…” Janis closed her eyes and shook her head. “And I don’t know how it is for you, but when I try to suppress my powers, I feel like I’m drawing a line down my middle, separating what I consider the normal me from that other me, pitting them against one another.”
“What about Them?” he whispered.
“You said something about a nerve center?”
“Right, some sort of central command. A place where the Project is being run and the surveillance teams receive their orders. The man behind the curtain, so to speak.”
“Or woman,” Janis said.
“Or woman,” Scott amended.
The muscles in Janis’s temples tensed. “I think I’m ready to yank back that curtain.”
“R-really? But back in January you said—”
“Back in January I still believed that if we laid low enough, the danger would pass. But it hasn’t. Everything I tried to avoid, Scott, every outcome I thought I could change — they happened anyway.” Janis walked over to her dresser and picked up a soccer ball with red and blue stitching. “When you’re in goal and a striker breaks toward you, the worst thing you can do is stay in the goal. That only gives the striker more angles to shoot from. Instead, you challenge her. You take away her angles.” She pressed the ball between her palms. “So let’s challenge them.”
Scott removed his glasses and dug his finger and thumb into the corners of his eyes. Challenge them? He thought of Janis in the Leonards’ front hallway, the spill of her red hair, the cast-off angle of her shoes…
He pushed his glasses back on. “You were there the other day. These people are armed. They don’t kid around.”
“If we’re the assets Nut believes us to be, then they can’t hurt us. Right?”
“Try telling that to Jesse and the Bast brothers.”
“I’m not proposing we run a car through their front door. I’m saying we go there and demand answers. Who they are. What they’re planning to do.” A pair of red splotches had begun to bloom high on Janis’s cheeks. “It’s our lives, Scott, not theirs. We have a right to know.”
Scott held his hands up. “All right. I just don’t want anything to, you know, happen.”
“I understand, Scott.” Her voice softened. “But it’s already happening to me. It’s happening to all of us. We just don’t know what it is. That’s because they have the ball. They control the angles.”
“And by challenging them…?”
“We change the game.”
Scott could have kissed her, but he had to cover all of the bases.
“Assuming we do find the n
erve center,” he said, “what’s to stop them from saying, ‘Nope, nothing to see here,’ and then using those devices on us? I mean, that’s what they did to the other guys. It was only thanks to Tyler’s powers that they were able to recall what happened.”
Janis’s eyes flashed with some remembrance. She rolled her soccer ball off and ducked into the closet. When she emerged, she was holding a device to her stomach about the size and shape of an electric razor.
“You got one of them?” Scott whispered.
“Yeah, it belonged to Nut.” She handed it to him. “But don’t turn it on. It can get kind of loud.”
Scott turned it over in his hand. The metallic device was sleek but solid, its head wider than the body. He couldn’t see the red lights, but he found a pair of dark windows inset in the head. The thought of them blinking on induced a wave of nausea and guilt. He guessed the device cast out some sort of high-frequency wave, affecting neural activity.
Yeah, that’s putting it mildly. The thing made you sing like a canary. Especially about—
“Do you want to hold onto it?” Janis asked.
At the moment, his impulse was to smash it underfoot like a parasite. But yes, the more he could learn about the device the better. If it was the Project’s main means of controlling them, then learning how to inhibit the device’s effect might level the playing field.
“Yeah, if you don’t mind.”
“Does that mean you’re in?”
Scott slid the device into his pocket. “On the condition that we include the others.”
“Jesse and the Basts?”
“Yeah, I know…” Scott had his reservations about them, too. But he had promised to keep them informed. And if he ever wanted to be a leader, he’d have to learn to manage personalities — especially volatile ones. “They’ll be my responsibility. What about Margaret?”
“I’ll talk to her.” Janis made a face. “Who knows, maybe she’ll surprise us.”
“Of course, we still don’t know where the nerve center is.”
“I actually have some ideas.” Janis sat at her desk and took out a sheet of notebook paper and a pencil. Surprised, Scott pulled a chair up beside her and watched as she sketched out what he soon realized was their neighborhood. She spoke as she drew. “Nut said something about the Project hiding us in ‘plain sight.’ What if they did the same thing with their nerve center? Set it up in a place that no one would think to look twice at — most of all us?”
“You mean like a house?”
“Or a farm.” She made a square above the north side of the Meadows and then drew a barn and a couple of outbuildings. “Do you remember that time we climbed the gate at the top of your street, near where the Watsons live, and tried to walk out into the pasture?”
“Yeah, that guy on horseback chased us off. Told us never to come back.”
Janis drew a star beside the barn. “So there’s one candidate.”
“You’ve thought of more?”
“As kids, we had the run of the neighborhood. On our bikes, our skates, just walking around.” She traced the roads with the tip of her pencil. “But were there any places we chose not to go?”
Scott felt his brow wrinkle as he leaned nearer to Janis’s map. Then he sat back, astounded he hadn’t thought of it himself. “Of course!” Janis signaled for him to lower his voice. He tapped on the map about four houses from the end of the Meadows. “The original Wicked Witch of the West,” he whispered. “Mrs. Thornton. It was like she’d wait for us to show up just so she could scream at us for mucking around in her street. I always figured she was crazy or hated kids, and I avoided her like liver and onions — but what if her role was to keep us from getting too close to something we weren’t supposed to see?”
Janis was nodding. “And if we did get past her, especially by way of the woods…” She raised her eyes.
“There was Samson,” Scott finished, “the Rottweiler from hell.”
Janis circled the end of the street and starred it. “Candidate number two.”
“You mean candidates two, three, and four. It could be any one of those houses. And we can’t very well go door to door and demand answers from whoever happens to open up.”
“I’ll try to narrow it down,” Janis said.
He started to ask her how before remembering her nighttime ability. “Oh, yeah.”
“So, how’s the studying going?”
Scott slid his notebook over the map and swiveled his head. Janis’s father was standing in the doorway, his low visor adding weight to his already stern visage. Scott became conscious that his shoulder was touching Janis’s, and he scooted around so his body squared with the doorway.
“We’re almost done,” Janis said.
Her father consulted the watch on the underside of his wrist. “Well, the hour’s up.”
“All right,” Janis said. “Just two more minutes.”
He nodded. “I’ll let Scott out when you finish.”
Scott listened to her father’s footsteps retreat down the hallway. When he turned back to Janis, a psychic weight seemed to pull on her eyes. She had looked sad and tired since the moment she’d opened the front door for him, but now the sadness took on a new dimension.
“Mr. Leonard?” he whispered.
She looked back at her map and nodded slightly. He waited for tears to form on the tip of her nose, as they had when she was nine, but they never did. He put his hand on her back and rubbed where her hair fell down.
“I’m sorry,” Scott said after a minute.
She nodded in appreciation. But his words meant so much more. He was apologizing for letting his guard down. He was apologizing for his certainty that when Agent Steel had asked, “Where’s Mr. Leonard?” he’d disclosed everything: the bunker in the woods, Janis’s first meeting with him, Janis’s plans to meet with him again. He was apologizing for his role in the man’s execution. But he could never speak those things aloud because he was convinced that, no matter what Janis said, a part of her would never trust him again. Whatever closeness they had built over the past months would fracture and fall to pieces.
“So, I’ll see you in class tomorrow?” Scott whispered as returning footsteps sounded in the hallway.
When Janis lifted her face, the rims beneath her eyes were moist and pink. Her lips quivered into a smile. “Yeah.” She reached for his arm and squeezed. “Thanks for your help. Thanks for everything.”
She can never, ever know.
At the front door, Mr. Graystone unlocked the bolt and the bottom lock. “So,” he said, “did you get a lot accomplished?”
“Yes, sir,” Scott replied.
Mr. Graystone tensed his lips together in what Scott hoped was a smile, but his eyes glinted with something else. Judgment? Dislike? Is he remembering the day in the backyard when every pass he threw either sailed through my arms or bounced off my head?
“Thanks for let-letting me come over.”
“All right, Scott.”
Scott’s fingers slipped over one another inside Mr. Graystone’s firm handshake, rendering his own grip feeble and uncertain.
Oh, what’s the use? He’s always going to think I’m a sputtering wimp.
When Mr. Graystone opened the door, Tiger appeared with an inquisitive meow. The stern lines melted from Mr. Graystone’s expression as he chuckled. “Hold on there,” he said to Tiger. “I’m coming out to fill your bowl.”
He stooped for a yellow bag of Meow Mix and stepped out the door with Scott. Tiger performed figure eights between Mr. Graystone’s legs as dry food spilled into her pink plastic bowl.
“Well, good night,” Scott said.
Mr. Graystone nodded toward him and began murmuring to Tiger.
Scott’s neck stiffened as he descended the porch steps and walked along the semicircular driveway. He knew those murmurs. He’d heard them outside the Leonards’ shed door the night he’d set up the voice-activated recorder. And he suddenly made the connection to the voice on the tape,
the one that had provided the “known movements” for Janis and Margaret on February second. He nodded to himself, even as he wished it weren’t true. But it was. After all, who would know best?
Both voices had belonged to Janis’s father. To Mr. Graystone.
31
Three weeks later
Tuesday, April 9, 1985
12:55 p.m.
Tyler peeked over the collar of his jacket, first to his right then, after he’d passed a couple more classrooms, to his left. He scoped out students returning from lunch, all of them oblivious to the bleach-tipped loser in the black jean jacket. And there were no faculty, which Scott and Janis had warned him to be extra careful around. Not a problem for Tyler, who had never trusted them much anyway.
Switching his rolled-up spiral notebook to the other hand, he turned the corner onto D Wing. This had become his new routine. Ten minutes before the end of lunch, he’d stamp out his cigarette and part Jesse and Creed’s company on Titan Terrace, saunter his way to the far end of campus, too cool for school, then cut along D Wing to the downstairs bathroom, where he’d check the back of the toilet for messages.
So far, Scott had only left one slip of paper, asking him to hang tight while he and Janis followed some leads. That had been two weeks before, and Tyler hadn’t slept much since. Or at least not very well.
He was having more nightmares about What Happened, sometimes several in the same night. But now the dreams would end with Agent Steel outside his house, the column of armed men from the woods bearing not rifles but shovels. “The penalty for murder is life in prison,” Agent Steel would announce. “Or in your case, Tyler, the Chair. An eye for an eye, and a fry for a fry.”
And just as they stormed the house, Tyler would awaken, his heartbeats drilling his chest.
His T-shirt fluttered as he walked, his stomach drawn up between the flares of his ribcage. Tyler guessed he’d lost fifteen pounds, easy. No appetite. On his back in bed, his belly looked like a shallow basin. A bottle of Pepto sat in his locker. The knowledge his house was being watched had gnawed his stomach lining to shreds.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 56