Knavery: A Ripple Novel (Ripple Series Book 6)

by Cidney Swanson

  So, what was Uncle Fritz up to, taking blood samples? The best way to steal secrets was by indirection—by gaining his uncle’s trust and waiting for a moment when his back was turned. And the best way Georg knew to gain trust was through flattery.

  “Aunt Helga was clever,” continued Georg, “but she was too hot-headed.”

  When Fritz made no response, Georg added, “A cool mind always triumphs, in the end.”

  Fritz grunted. It was an assent. It was progress.

  The next time Fritz came to take measurements, Georg built on the foundation he had laid the week before. “Franz used to say terrible things about you to Helmann.”

  “Franz was an idiot,” said Fritz.

  “Franz is a dead idiot, now,” replied Georg.

  Fritz laughed—a brief, harsh note.

  “Hansel and I were right, you see,” said Georg. “We bet on the winning horse.”

  “You weren’t allowed to engage in gambling,” said Fritz, evidently in a more conversational mood on this visit.

  “No, Uncle. No, we weren’t. Our education was remarkable, you know. Am I right in thinking you oversaw that portion of our upbringing?”

  “Yes,” said Fritz. “The others were too short-sighted to care how you were trained. Well, Helmann obviously had designs, didn’t he? But who steered him? Who guided him? I did.”

  “That’s why Hansel and I were so quick to leave you after the incident in Las Abuelitas.”

  “If I’m supposed to understand the connection between those things, I don’t, boy,” said Fritz, withdrawing the blood-filled vial and then the needle. Fritz placed a Band-Aid over the injection site. “Press here.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” said Georg, parroting the way the children had been taught to reply to Fritz and the others. “It was just … we admired you the most. We held you on a pedestal, Hansel and I. We were planning to ask to be assigned to work for you when we grew up. It’s why we came to you in the first place, after we fled Pfeffer.”

  “Hmmph,” grunted Fritz, gathering his supplies in preparation to leave.

  “And then, when you were willing to risk our lives in exchange for a book—” Georg broke off, having caused his voice to shake ever so slightly. “Well,” he said, as if recovering himself, “it wounded us deeply. We had spent our childhoods hoping to prove worthy of your notice. To find out we mattered less than a book….”

  Fritz regarded Georg for several seconds without speaking. Finally, he said, “You must understand, it was a very important book, my boy.”

  “Yes, Uncle. I’ve had time to think about it.” Here, Georg lowered his eyes. “I understand now that you were only doing what had to be done, to take the next necessary step leading you to greatness. I wish to ask for your forgiveness.”

  “Indeed?”

  Georg continued. “Those few who are truly great, who have risen above the common way, to them belongs the power to orchestrate the lives of lesser beings,” Georg said. He was quoting Girard Helmann. Had he spread it on too thickly? He shot a quick glance at Uncle Fritz.

  “You see that now, do you?” Fritz nodded.

  Fritz didn’t seem to have a “spreading things on too thickly” filter; Georg bowed his head in acknowledgement.

  Fritz tapped his chin with one forefinger. “I wrote those words for one of Father’s speeches.” He seemed to consider Georg for a moment before pronouncing, “You’re a good boy.”

  If Georg noticed that it sounded exactly like the sort of thing one said to a favorite dog, he kept it to himself.

  That day began the change in Fritz’s disposition toward him, as Georg had intended it should. Uncle Fritz basked in Georg’s praise and told him anecdotes designed to show how much cleverer Fritz had been than Helga, Hans, or Franz.

  “You are your father’s true heir,” said Georg, after being regaled with one such story. “And … forgive me for presuming so much, but … it would be a great honor to serve you in a more … active capacity.”

  “Well, well,” said Fritz. “We shall see.”

  It took only another week of fawning for Georg to gain his freedom—or, a measure of freedom—working as a lab grunt.

  Geneses Corporation, International was hemorrhaging money and employees. The money, Georg knew, Fritz could address with a few “overheard” conversations, a few not-so-petty thefts. But it took Georg awhile to realize Fritz was letting employees go because he didn’t really want to oversee vast numbers of workers. Whatever Fritz was up to, it didn’t involve reducing Earth’s population by billions, and Geneses no longer required the infrastructure to support such a task. Entire floors of former employees were let go. Fritz needed only those he judged loyal, and if the loyal fawned and flattered, so much the better.

  Georg was given tasks. Georg was given the freedom to wander several (quite secure) floors in the pursuit of his tasks. He was not, yet, allowed to leave the building, but that might come in time. His long weeks spent ingratiating himself were paying off. And it was only early August. Who knew what he might do, what secrets he might uncover, before autumn came?

  The one thing he had determined against was running away. Escape had been his initial goal, but it was gradually replaced by a new goal. Georg wanted to learn the secrets of being a caméleon. He wanted to learn about others like himself; what had they done with their gifts? What mistakes might he avoid? For here, in the very sanctum sanctorum of Geneses, Georg could glean much. He could find information that had been withheld during his strange upbringing—he could discover his own history as well as that of others of Helmann’s progeny. So he stayed, and he studied, and he fawned, and eventually he exploited an opportunity to regain his ability to vanish at will.

  Certain of Georg’s docile temperament, Fritz had begun to lower his guard. Fritz might not fully trust Georg, but he began taking shortcuts with his protocols. His frequent checks on Georg became more infrequent. Most significantly, Fritz no longer checked and double checked to make sure all of the caméleon drugs were locked safely away.

  And Georg, remembering what Martina had done to trick Pfeffer, was able to exploit this oversight.

  The first time that Georg was allowed to exit the Geneses building on an errand for his uncle, he obtained a vial of tetanus toxoid—the same thing Martina had substituted for her dose of Neuroprine. Georg had a moment’s panic upon re-entering the building—exit and entry were highly monitored and the rare visitors were patted down, scanned, and occasionally strip-searched. He forced himself not to look nervously at the monitoring cameras trained on all parts of the foyer.

  But Georg was allowed to return inside with only a cursory wand scan. The tetanus toxoid remained secret and safe.

  It was during the week before the American holiday called “Labor Day” that Georg managed to substitute the tetanus for the dose of Neuroprine. Twenty-six hours later, after several failed attempts at rippling, the Neuroprine from his previous shot finally wore off and Georg succeeded in vanishing. For the first time in three months, he was deliriously happy. Uncle Fritz was gone for the entire afternoon, and Georg flitted from room to room, testing to make certain Fritz had spoken the truth about certain safety features of the building.

  Fritz had told Georg that, on Helmann’s demise, he had spent four months modifying and securing the Geneses building against caméleons. Helmann had felt that merely monitoring the rooms where sensitive experiments were carried out was enough, and he had created a system that detected the sudden influx of cold air which indicated the presence of a concealed caméleon. This was not enough for Fritz.

  Now, the entire perimeter of the building had been retrofitted with a hollow barrier wall with thermal detector beams which, in the presence of suddenly cold air, would set off an alarm, audible throughout the building, to give Fritz time to vanish to safety. The entryways, the external walls, the ground level floors, and the top level ceilings were all secured. There was no way in or out of the building in caméleon form. Well, not without setting off t
he alarms.

  “So, you see we are safe from being ambushed by my cousin Waldhart,” Fritz had told Georg, “because Waldhart knows nothing of these improvements.”

  Fritz had laughed softly. Georg had refrained from pointing out that there was no “we:” only Uncle Fritz would be safe from Waldhart. But Georg had redoubled his determination to recover his own ability to ripple.

  And now, at last, he had done so. However, Georg was not planning to use his ability to vanish in order to, well, vanish. For one thing, he’d only just been granted access to some of the old journals composed by Helmann and Helga Gottlieb and, occasionally, Franz. He’d recognized at once the “black books” for which Fritz had been willing to endanger Georg and Hansel. When he asked if he could read them, his uncle’s “yes” had come so quickly that Georg thought they must be worthless.

  But just because they were worthless to Fritz, it did not necessarily follow they were worthless to Georg. In addition to this incentive for remaining, Georg had begun to suspect that Uncle Fritz’s blood draws and measurements weren’t, as Uncle Fritz claimed, for the purpose of continued improvement to the enzyme treatment Georg needed to stay alive. In fact, it looked as if Fritz was examining the rippling gene as it occurred in Georg’s system.

  This made little sense to Georg. What could Uncle Fritz possibly want to know about the genetics of rippling? Didn’t he know everything there was to know already? Whatever Fritz was up to, Georg felt sure it wasn’t improved enzyme therapy. So Georg bided his time, waiting for Fritz to slip up and brag about whatever it was he was really studying.

  Georg’s childhood fervor for the uncovering of secrets revived, stronger than ever. Certain tics from childhood reappeared as well. An eye that blinked too often, the rapid tracing of his thumbs back and forth over his fingertips, a desire to grin that was at times difficult to suppress.

  Today, with his uncle gone for the afternoon, Georg knew he ought to spend his time wisely—perhaps researching how to disengage a small portion of the perimeter so that he could pass in and out of the building at will. He gazed out the window beside his lab station.

  The sun shone and thin puffs of clouds raced across the sky. And suddenly, Georg was sick to death of the stale air in the building, dusted with the chalk smell of new construction or the plastic odor of new paint or the unpleasant antiseptic tang of the lab. He yearned to taste fresh air. Not some day, after he’d had a chance to hack the perimeter, but this day, while his uncle was gone. Impulsively, he took the elevator down to the ground floor and lied to the guard on duty, claiming he had permission to run an errand.

  And it worked.

  Georg fled out of doors, breathing deep mouthfuls of fresh air. It was a balmy afternoon in San Francisco; the midday fog had burned away early. Wandering down to the great bay, Georg strolled along the water’s edge for an hour, then two, then three, the reflected sunlight dazzling his eyes, the wet sand exquisitely cold and grating between his toes. He returned only because he feared discovery more than he craved escape.

  He paid for his escape in the form of a bright sunburn, branded across his face and his jutting Adam’s apple. For several minutes, Georg panicked, trying to think how to explain away the evidence of his escape out-of-doors. His left eye twitched fiercely and he felt a strong impulse to hide in an empty cupboard. But his years of crafting clever lies for Mutti’s ears came in handy: he would simply report he had fallen asleep enjoying the sun on the building’s roof top.

  He needn’t have worried; in the forty-eight hours during which the sunburn faded, Fritz neither noticed nor inquired about it.

  Unwilling to chance such exposure again, however, Georg contented himself in the following days with roaming the halls and offices of the quiet building whenever Fritz was unlikely to notice, discovering in fifteen or twenty minute allotments offices and areas that had been barred to him previously.

  The strangest of his discoveries hid behind four doors in the same corridor as his own bed chamber. Fritz’s refusal to discuss what was behind the sealed doors had, naturally, increased Georg’s curiosity. When he passed invisibly into the first of the four rooms, it was empty. The second was empty as well, except for a piece of medical equipment that looked like it might be used to hold an IV. But in each of the final two rooms, Georg discovered sleeping boys about his own age hooked up to IV’s. Georg was unable to awaken the sleeping boys by passing an icy hand over their faces. This had always made Hansel snap to, usually in a very bad mood.

  As Georg stood there, invisibly observing one of the sleeping young men, a Geneses employee unlocked the door, rotated the sleeping person, and changed out the IV. With a sudden chill, Georg understood what he was observing.

  Hypnosis-induced sleep.

  The two boys had the look of all Georg’s other half-siblings from the compound days, where the children had trained in the dubious art of becoming readily hypnotizable. Why did Fritz keep these young men hypnotized in the San Francisco location? Were they loyal servants or dangerous enemies?

  Another secret to uncover.

  So Georg waited and watched and rippled and learned, all the while growing more curious as to what, exactly, Uncle Fritz was up to with his experiments and with the sleepers across the hall.

  4

  VALHALLA WASN’T BUILT IN A DAY

  Attention: Skandor Dusselhoff, you have been selected for a fall internship at Geneses Corporation, International.

  That was the first line of the email that changed the course of Skandor’s life. It arrived the first of September, fourteen days before Camp Midgard would break up for the winter. Well, twenty-one days prior if you counted the women’s book group that had rented the facility for the week of Fall Equinox. Skandor had had to explain to his parents what “equinox” meant, which had been a lot easier than explaining to his parents that, come the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, he, Skandor Dusselhoff, would be moving to San Francisco.

  His parents had been stunned. His Oma, however, had seen it coming. “You can’t expect the boy to stay here,” she said over coffee and butterplätzchen, Skandor’s favorite cookie.

  “But who’ll dress up as Loki for the final campfire?” asked Skandor’s father.

  His mom had been more practical. “How will you afford it?”

  “They pay my way—a ticket on Greyhound,” replied Skandor. “And they cover all my living expenses, too.” This wasn’t entirely true, as only food was covered, not lodging. But Skandor was planning to sleep invisibly, so lodging was hardly an issue. At least, not one to bother his mom about.

  “They’d better pay all your expenses, if they’re to have you as free labor,” said his father.

  “Yeah,” Skandor muttered into his coffee. “We wouldn’t want Skandor working for free or anything.”

  “What’s that?” asked his mother.

  “Nothing,” replied Skandor.

  His parents talked it through, the advantages of interning at a large, international corporation, sighing to one another that they would have lost him to college in any case.

  “And you’re certain you’ll learn transferable skills? To help you run Midgard when we’re gone?” asked his father.

  “Oh, yes,” Skandor replied. “Lots and lots of transferable skills.” He lied with ease, something Loki would have admired.

  His parents weren’t happy about it, but Oma opined that Skandor would never know how perfect his life was unless he shook it like a snow globe once or twice before settling down.

  “Right,” said Skandor, grinning at his grandmother. “I need to leave so I can appreciate what I have.”

  The old woman frowned back. If anyone had ever suspected a fraction of the mischief Skandor got into, it was his grandmother.

  In the end, Skandor got a school friend to take over his last two week’s work at camp and talked the mail carrier into giving him a lift off the mountain and down to the Greyhound station. And by September 3rd , Skandor was fingerprinted, eye-scanned, and badge
d as an intern working night security at Geneses Corporation, International in San Francisco.

  The graveyard shift position in security had been a disappointment. Sure, with his height and bulk, he was naturally intimidating, and he’d indicated that he’d done security work at camp (one of several exaggerations in his application), but he’d been hoping for something a bit more … research-oriented. Still, everyone had to start somewhere, and this was probably better than working the mailroom. Although, technically, the first floor security office was where shipping and receiving were cleared, so he was working in the mailroom, even if the duties of sorting and delivering weren’t his. Well, something better was sure to come along—Valhalla wasn’t built in a day after all—and Skandor was prepared to wait for it.

  He wasn’t prepared for the damp cold, though. Even at camp, at 5000 feet, it had been warm compared to the foggy chill of San Francisco. He had to spend forty of the hundred dollars Oma had slipped into his pockets on a warmer jacket. Only later, when he was staring at security monitors and thinking of his Camp antics with something like nostalgia, did it occur to him that Loki would never have spent money on something that could have been acquired through thievery.

  After that, Skandor came to work wearing a different (stolen) outfit every day. He kept the outfits neatly folded, and invisible, on the stairs of the War Memorial Opera House, where he’d set up invisible camp, figuring Loki would have liked the “war memorial” part of it, at least.

  Originally he’d planned to sleep inside Geneses, but he found it more interesting to get out into the city by day, eating and drinking the new sights and sounds of the vibrant city. It was diesel and fried fish and coffee beans and, occasionally, a flash of saltwater tang. It was the clang of the trolley cars—each operator chiming his or her own rhythm—and the honk of angry taxi cab drivers and the shouts of bicyclists who managed to defy death on the steep, narrow streets. It was fog and sun, in alternation, and Chinese lanterns and tiny mosques and synagogues and bakeries selling things Skandor didn’t know how to pronounce.