by Jeff Sampson
Wide-eyed, Mr. Cooke began to stammer. “I-I don’t think that’s necessary. They won’t be tracking us, and my phone was—”
Without a word, Mrs. Cooke reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his phone, and threw it with all her force onto the asphalt. Her phone was next.
I met the woman’s eyes and offered her a smile. “Welcome to the team.”
She smiled back. “Thank you.”
Nikki met my eye. “So what do we do now?” she asked. “Who goes where?”
“Let me think,” I said, pacing.
The important thing, even beyond rescuing Evan, was to keep everyone out of sight until nightfall. Just long enough for them to think we were on the run before we doubled back under the cover of darkness. And then…boom. We blow up the portal device.
I didn’t know what, exactly, that would accomplish. But I did know it was a giant flashing beacon the shadowmen could follow to look into our world. And I wanted it gone.
Only I wasn’t entirely sure how we were going to do that. It’s not like we had a bunch of C-4 lying around. Even if we did, it’s not like I knew how it was constructed.
Though I might be able to access files that did have that information.
I stopped, stood as tall and confident as I could, and looked back over my group.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said, turning to my fellow teens. “All of you are going to take one of the cars and go back to Skopamish. I’m guessing the Cookes here have a tablet or laptop or something, anything that can read a thumb drive, right?”
Mrs. Cooke nodded. “We do. You’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks,” I said. Facing my group, I continued. “Once you have that, lay low at their place or, if that doesn’t seem safe, find somewhere else.”
“Our parents can always help us too,” Casey said softly. I barely heard her.
“You want all of us to go back?” Spencer asked, crossing his arms. “You’re going to go get Evan alone now?”
I shrugged. “I’m the one he’s been talking to and it just seems safer to keep everyone else here together. Bigger numbers in case they try to capture you. I doubt anyone will be able to find me in Oregon.”
“But Em Dub,” Spencer said, coming in close and taking my hand. “You can’t go off alone. What if you do get found…”
I smiled at him. “I’ll be fine. You know I know how to take care of myself.”
He smiled back. “I do know. That’s why I love yo—um.” He swallowed the last word and his face went red.
I had to bite my lip to contain my smile. Behind Spencer, the cheerleaders did not look amused.
“Hate to interrupt,” Tracie said, raising her hand. “But where are we meeting up? And when?”
“Let’s say…after dark, in the woods behind the buildings across the street from BioZenith,” I said. “If I’m not there by ten tonight, something probably happened and you’ll need to storm the place without me.”
Brittany raised a hand. I nodded at her and, tucking her wavy hair behind her ears, she asked, “So, how are we even supposed to know what time it is? You made us smash our phones.”
“Maybe a watch?” I asked with a shrug.
“Ew,” Brittany said.
“We’ll have a laptop with a clock on it,” Spencer piped up. “We’ll be good.”
“Sound like a plan?” I asked everyone.
Everyone nodded—except Amy. She crossed her arms.
“Did you forget each car only fits five comfortably? I’m not cramming myself into another backseat.”
I tilted my head. “Is that your way of asking to go with me?”
“You could say that,” she said. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the Cookes, still huddled next to the black Lexus. “Besides, I have some questions for these two.”
I looked around at everyone. “Is that cool with you guys?”
They all nodded, except for Spencer. He raised his eyebrows at me, his mouth a line. I was guessing he thought if anyone should be going with me, it should be him.
“Listen to Spencer here on which tablet or laptop to take,” I said, gently patting his shoulder. “He’s the tech expert. That’s the only reason you get to steal him away.”
He grinned at me. “Uh-huh. But I’ll choose to believe that.”
As one, our entire group turned to face the Cookes once more. Brittany stepped forward and held out a hand. “Keys, please. The silver car.”
“You’re going to be driving my car?” he stammered.
“Marshall,” Mrs. Cooke scolded gently. Again she reached into his pocket. Producing his keys, she plopped them into Brittany’s waiting hand. The cheerleader smiled, her teeth as sparkly as her deceased phone.
“Thanks! I’ve always wanted to drive one of these.” She bounced off around the black car to the silver one, and everyone except the Cookes, Amy, and Nikki followed.
Nikki grabbed Amy’s hand and squeezed it. “Be careful, okay?”
Amy rolled her eyes, but it was clear the wild-haired triplet didn’t mean it. “Yeah, yeah.”
With a cordial nod at the Cookes, Nikki ran off to jump into the backseat of the silver Lexus, next to Tracie and Spencer.
Emily Cooke’s mom smiled at me again as the car containing my friends came to life and Brittany backed out of the space. Wind rose up and caught Mrs. Cooke’s white-and-blond hair, and for a second I saw the other Emily, my lost pack member, staring back at me.
“You handled that well,” she said softly. “We made a good choice making you the alpha.”
Amy’s eyes went wide. “Her? The alpha? Isn’t that usually a man?”
Mrs. Cooke shrugged. “Caroline—Emily’s mother—and I felt differently. We thought…” She shook her head, then cleared her throat. “We should go.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to think about what grand plans my mother may have had for me when this all began. “Let’s go.”
15
THE MANIC GLEE
For the next two hours, we drove and we talked.
The car was definitely an upgrade from Spencer’s mom’s minivan. There was much more space, for one, and the backseat at least was supercomfortable. The air that whooshed from the vents was a comfortable seventy degrees rather than the temperature of the sun’s surface, which was all you got out of the minivan. And the windows were tinted, which I found weirdly comforting. No one could look in and see me and call up BioZenith to give away my location.
As Mrs. Cooke drove, she and her husband took turns answering the lingering questions I had about this insanity.
It all began twenty years ago with a team of scientists who worked for a company called Vesper Industries.
This team specialized in quantum and multiverse theory—you know, the stuff of Michael Crichton novels. Purely by chance, this team discovered a hot spot, as the Cookes called it, while one of the scientists was working on an archaeological dig in Egypt. He’d been messing around with some equipment he brought with him—and the next thing he knew, he temporarily opened a rift to another world.
No one knew how he found the rift, especially since he was unable to perceive it, just like all humans. It was an accident, maybe. Right place, right time. All that mattered was that the rift opened into a proper portal through which he could see the other dimension. He described this other world as beautiful—an endless technological city that was at once familiarly ancient Egyptian and eerily alien. For a very brief moment, he stood face-to-face with a being from that world.
And then the portal was gone.
That man’s name was Michael Handler and, obsessed, he returned to the offices in Washington State to try and find some way back through—some more permanent way.
As I stared out the window and watched the evergreen trees rush by, the Cookes told us how Handler and his team found another breach near their facilities in Volmond, a city north of where I lived. After years of development, they managed to send a team through and make contact with the Akhak
hu.
And that was when the obsession with the beings turned into something else.
“It wasn’t everyone,” Mrs. Cooke said, her eyes focused on the long, empty stretch of highway before her. We were past Olympia by then. “But you could see it in the eyes of some of the ones who spent a lot of time on the other side. Manic glee is the only way I can describe it.”
“It was religion,” Mr. Cooke added, glancing back at me and Amy. “The more of their seemingly magic technology they shared with us, the more enamored many of those involved with the project became. I’d hear names of our Akhakhu contacts whispered in hushed tones, as though speaking the name of gods.” He shook his head. “But we were discovering so much that we didn’t want to question it.”
Amy leaned forward between the seats. “So these Akhakhu people, they’re like some advanced species? And they’re the ones who made it so I have my powers?”
Mrs. Cooke nodded. “Basically. Mr. Handler grew through the ranks rather quickly after his discovery, and he was the one who started the various vesper projects. Marshall and I were part of Branch B, which you now know as BioZenith. We were a team of animal behavioral experts, geneticists, bioengineers, and early development specialists. Caroline Webb”—she nodded at me in the rearview mirror—“Emily’s mother—was the lead on HAVOC.”
“Yeah, I heard that when we were listening in on Mr. McKinney earlier,” Amy said, leaning back into her seat. “Something about how wolves can somehow see and interact with the Akhakhu things, so you mixed wolves with babies or something. We got the gist.”
Mr. Cooke chuckled to himself. “What can I say, we were doing as ordered. But the basic idea, which came down from Handler and likely came from his conversations with the Akhakhu, was that working with the Akhakhu in our world was a matter of perception. We were aware that the Akhakhu were all able to peer into our world—they appear as shadows to those who have seen them, and those shadows only last briefly. Due to some sort of worldwide atmospheric radiation that altered their genetic makeup, even with our portals open they could not simply come through and visit our world as we did theirs.
“But they insisted that our wolf-hybrid children could assist them. That their ability to perceive the shadow forms of the Akhakhu would let them interact and aid them in some way. And from what Harrison told us about what happened to Dalton, it seems they were correct.”
I looked away from the rushing trees and closed my eyes. Flashes of Dalton, terrified and naked and being dragged away by several shadowmen, rushed through my mind.
“So they can only touch us because we can see them,” I whispered.
“Weird,” Amy said beside me.
In the front seat, Mrs. Cooke clicked on her blinker and merged over into the next lane to get around a slow-moving pickup truck. She pressed on the gas and we zoomed past.
“So what about me and my sisters?” Amy asked. “How do we fit into all of this?”
“I wish we knew,” Mrs. Cooke said. “Your parents were part of Branch A, which was handed Project COVEN. All we know is that they were experimenting with various psychic abilities, telekinesis and the like. When Project HAVOC was put on hold and we sealed our records away from Vesper Company and Mr. Handler, we splintered off and lost track of the other branches.”
“But we were told we were made to watch and protect people like Emily and Dalton,” Amy protested. “Are you saying my parents lied to me?”
Mrs. Cooke shook her head. “No, I’m not saying that. I just don’t know. I’m sure Mr. Handler had some reason for having you created, just as he did the hybrid wolves. But we were never told the reason.”
“You keep mentioning Mr. Handler a lot,” I said. “How come he’s not in the picture if he was the one who had us made?”
“We’re not sure,” Mrs. Cooke said. “We told him the project failed and presented the mutated fetuses as evidence. Once we broke off into our own company, he left us alone.”
“So he just let you guys make some new company, no questions?” I asked. “That seems really strange.”
“There were…meetings,” Mr. Cooke said. “We did everything we could to convince Handler and his people that our projects had failed, and that we were uneasy about the Akhakhu in general. He didn’t want dissenters in his ranks, and since we brought in new backers to buy our facilities and equipment from him, he ultimately let us go without too much fuss. Of course, only our unease about the Akhakhu was true. And as you’ve found out, not all of us were entirely against joining their cult.”
I sighed and leaned down in my seat. So much information to parse. At least the history behind all this was finally taking shape.
“So do you know what these Akhakhu want?” I asked. “We were made to perceive them, I guess, and let them interact with portals, and I saw one try to climb into a friend of mine. Am I right that they want to come into our world by jumping into human bodies?”
The Cookes glanced at each other, and for a moment they said nothing.
Amy’s eyes went wide. “Uh, okay, don’t stop being all forthcoming now. What are we dealing with?”
Mr. Cooke cleared his throat. “There were rumors,” he said. “About Handler. That he’d…merged…with one of the Akhakhu. He supposedly claimed he and the Akhakhu coexist peacefully. Many others have visited him and have returned with that look.”
“The manic glee,” Mrs. Cooke said.
The man pointed at his wife. “That. Whatever he promised would come with helping the Akhakhu, they were buying it. A lot like Maureen.”
“Who?” Amy and I asked in unison.
Mrs. Cooke met my eyes through the rearview mirror. “Evan’s mom. She married Marshall’s brother after they met while working on HAVOC, and it wasn’t long after Evan was born that she started to be drawn more and more to the idea of the Akhakhu as gods.”
“What about my—” My voice cracked. I coughed, then started again. “What about my mother and Tracie’s dad? Are they like Maureen?”
Mr. Cooke shook his head. “No. They were made our liaisons to the Akhakhu once we found our own hot spot and made a portal at the BioZenith facility.”
The portal contained within the giant ringed apparatus I’d seen in the basement.
“We splintered with Vesper Company, and our own portal malfunctioned while Thomas—Mr. Townsend—was on the other side. Vesper Company refused us access to their portal and, by the time we got ours working again, Terrance couldn’t come back through due to his prolonged exposure to the irradiated atmosphere compounded with exposure from all his other trips. Caroline went after him through the repaired portal, but she became trapped as well.”
“So they’re stuck there with those things,” I said flatly.
“Yes,” Mrs. Cooke said. “They have been for a long, long time. But they are treated well, and they’ve made a life there. Together.”
Together. No wonder my dad had moved on with my stepmom.
“Wow,” I said softly.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” Mr. Cooke asked Amy and me. “There’s just so much to say I don’t even know where to go next.”
“No,” I said before Amy could say anything. “I think…I think I’m good for now. Can we just drive in quiet for a little while? Today has been a big day and I’d just like to…stop thinking about this for a minute.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Cooke said.
Everyone fell silent, and we drove in relative silence, the only sounds the whooshing of the wind past the car windows and the comforting hiss of the heaters filling the car with warmth. Eventually Mr. Cooke reached forward and switched on the radio. He flipped through the satellite channels and settled on smooth, lilting jazz.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back, letting the music flow in to drown out the sound of my brain trying to process everything that had happened in the past and was going to happen in the future.
“Hey.”
A nudge on my arm.
I opened my left
eye and looked over at Amy.
“Yeah?” I asked her.
“Sorry about your mom,” she said. “That sucks what happened to her.”
I shrugged. “It’s all right. Before last week I thought she was dead, and between then and today I thought she was an evil, mad scientist. I’m not really attached.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say about your mother,” she said.
Mrs. Cooke glanced back at us through the mirror. “Everything all right?” she asked us over the music.
“Yes, Mrs. Cooke,” Amy and I said in unison, like good little girls. Instinctively we met each other’s eyes and then, despite ourselves, laughed.
“Thanks for saying that, though,” I said as our laughter died down. “I appreciate it.”
Amy shrugged. “Whatever.” She looked out her window, then quickly asked, “You think they’re okay?”
“The others?”
She nodded.
“You guys flew and exploded a glass bridge today,” I said. “You were like X-Men, the new class. I’m sure they’ll be fine until tonight.”
“Yeah,” Amy said. “Of course they’ll be. I just worry. You know.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do know.”
For just a moment, she glanced over and met my eye. I could swear, for a tiny instance, there was a flicker of friendliness. The she looked away once more.
“That’s right,” she said. “I forgot you’re the alpha queen head bitch in charge. Don’t mind me.”
I grinned and looked out my own window. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve learned not to.”
16
IT’S A BIG DAY FOR US
It wasn’t long before we were driving over the bridge spanning the Columbia River and were in Oregon. The sky was gray and a light sprinkle of rain clouded the windows. Using the GPS, Mrs. Cooke navigated the streets of Portland until we ended up in a residential neighborhood filled with nice, two-story brick homes.