by Jeff Sampson
“You found Evan,” Dalton said. “And Evan found me. He’s a nice guy. I remembered him from third grade.”
“You never said who’s here,” Tracie said from behind us.
Dalton peered back at her and smiled. “Hey, Tracie. You joined the pack. That’s cool.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have much of a choice. But it’s not all that bad being one of us once you get used to it.”
Steam hissed and water dripped, the sound pinging and echoing down the long, empty hallway along with our footsteps. We hadn’t seen any guards or robots in a long while. It was making me nervous.
Dalton let go of me, walking on his own now. “I never gave up,” he said to me as his cheeks flushed red, his arms bulging with muscle. He was going Nighttime. “I thought about attacking those creatures, but I told myself, Dalton, no. You are not a killer. Emily said that. So don’t kill.” He met my eyes. “We’re still not killers, right? They wouldn’t tell me, but…is Megan alive?”
The image of Megan’s blue, frozen features inside the glass chamber entered my mind.
“You didn’t kill her,” I said. I did, I added silently.
Dalton exhaled. “Good. I’m glad.” He reached out, grabbing my arm urgently. “But, Emily, they’re already here. The shadowmen, those creatures. Their leader is Rebel. She’s the only one who would ever talk to me up until she disappeared. And then the others told me she was here now, and they’d be coming soon.”
Swallowing, he peered ahead into the gloom of the hallway. “They kept coming to me even after Evan helped me escape. They kept coming as shadows into my room and watching me, and touching me, and it made me scream and scream. But Mrs. Limon wouldn’t believe me. They said I was just traumatized. That’s why they gave me the padding.”
A lump rose in my throat and my eyes burned. Poor Dalton. Lip trembling, I forced myself to keep from crying. But I did lean over and wrap my arms around him.
“I’m so sorry,” I said as I leaned into his broad chest. “It was my fault you got taken. I should have tried harder to save you.”
“You did try,” Dalton said, hugging me back. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t.”
Ahead of us, Amy came to a stop at the base of a flight of grated steps. She regarded us with a raised eyebrow.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “Whenever we find Nikki, try not to get all up on her boyfriend like this.”
Grinning, I let Dalton go. “Don’t worry, I’ve only got eyes for one wolf. I’m not trying to be Dalton’s girlfriend. Just his alpha.”
Dalton smiled at me. “I knew there was a reason the wolf side of me always told me to listen to you, even when it really didn’t want to.”
Tracie patted Dalton on the back and offered him a warm smile, then walked past us to stand at Amy’s side.
“I’m glad you’re all right, Dalton,” she said. “But we should probably be quiet from here on out.”
I nodded. “Let’s move.”
We climbed up the steps, the grating cutting into the bottom of my bare feet. With another blast of Amy’s telekinesis, the doors at the top of the stairs burst open.
And crisp night air whooshed over us.
I hadn’t realized how stifled we’d been inside the building, how stale the air was in the hallway, until I stepped onto rough asphalt and inhaled fresh, cool air. We were in a parking lot behind one of the Vesper Company buildings. A few streetlamps attached to the wall and hanging from poles lit up small spotlights amidst the darkness.
Ahead was another building, several stories high and unremarkably white. That was where Spencer was being held. I strode forward, intending to take the lead.
That’s when the alarms sounded. The noise was screeching, piercing, and I instinctively clutched my ears. Small lights attached to the buildings swirled red and white.
I saw shadows moving behind windows in the building across the way, and distantly heard the engines of large trucks rev to life.
Vesper Company was sending in reinforcements.
Amy dropped the map and darted forward, racing across the parking lot to the dark line of trees beyond. “Come on!” she shouted over her shoulder.
Tracie and Dalton started to follow, but I grabbed their arms and held them back. “No! We’re not all free yet. We need to get Spencer!”
Amy stopped and spun around, throwing her hands in the air in frustration. “We can come back for him. But this is our only chance to get out of here.”
I knew she was right. The new guards would be equipped with tranq guns now that they’d rallied. If we got captured again, they’d step up the security even more, and then…
But luck was on my side that night. I didn’t need to make a decision at all.
Tires squealing, a dingy, old gray car veered into the parking lot and raced toward us. I noticed Evan in the passenger seat right away, but it wasn’t until the car squealed to a stop right in front of me that I saw past the glare in the windshield and realized who the driver was.
Spencer leaned out the window and grinned at me. “Hey, Em Dub,” he said. “Need a ride?”
27
ALL GOOD SUPERHERO TEAMS HAVE A NAME
Amy, Tracie, Dalton, and I dove for the car. We yanked open its ancient, heavy doors and piled into the backseat. It was cramped and we were basically sitting on top of one another, but hey, you don’t look a gift escape car in the radiator. Or however the old saying goes.
“Spencer!” I cried as he pressed on the gas and spun us in a tight U-turn. “We thought we’d have to come back for you. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” I ran my hands through my hair, almost elbowing Tracie in the nose. “Oh wow, I missed you guys. I so missed you guys.”
He glanced at me through the rearview mirror as he drove around the back of the building. His smile was lit up by the blinking red alarm lights.
“I’m good,” he said. “And I’m glad to see you, too. But I kind of need to focus on driving now.”
Amy reached over and slapped my wrist. “Yeah, shut up. Let the man drive.”
We reached a small access road that disappeared into the woods and veered onto it just as the big black trucks of the Vesper Company security personnel pulled into the parking lot behind us. It led to a big concrete bunker, beside which Spencer parked and turned off the engine and headlights.
“Why are we stopping?” Tracie asked.
Spencer and Evan both leaned past the front seats to look back at us.
“It’s a dead end,” Spencer said, his voice hushed. “We need to get back to the main road, but we can’t with all those guards out there.” He raised a hand in greeting. “And, hey! I’m glad everyone is in one piece. They wouldn’t tell me who was here and who wasn’t.”
“Me neither,” Tracie said. “They were pretty rude about everything, in fact. I still don’t even know why they were holding us there all this time.”
Evan shrugged. “I tried to listen in on conversations when I was leaping around. But I couldn’t figure out much, just that Mr. Handler has a plan.”
Tracie tilted her head. “Evan, right?” she asked. “We never actually officially met.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. He reached into the back, offering her a hand. Tracie shook it. “I’m Evan Cooke.”
“Tracie Townsend,” she said with a smile. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” he said, pulling his arm back.
“So you found Spencer?” I asked Evan. “What about Nikki or Patrick? We couldn’t find them on the monitors.”
Evan shook his head. “I don’t think they’re here. I know they were captured, but they’re not in any of these buildings.”
“Nikki?” Dalton asked. “They took her too?” His face fell. “They’d better not hurt her.”
“Don’t worry,” Amy said next to him. “If they try, they’ll have to deal with me.”
“Hey, big man,” Spencer said softly to Dalton. “You all right? Evan filled me in on how he got you back. Sounded rough.”
Dalton shrugged and tried to look casual. “I’m good.”
Not what he’d said when it was just him and us girls. But I let him have his posturing.
I reached forward and grasped Spencer’s hand and he clutched it back. We smiled at each other.
“How did I know you’d end up saving the day?” he asked.
“It wasn’t just me,” I said. “It’s a team effort.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Amy said. “You know what they called our two groups? ‘Deviants.’ All ’cause they didn’t get to observe us from birth or whatever.”
Tracie gaped. “I am in no way a deviant. How obscene.”
Evan laughed. “I’ve heard worse insults lobbed at me. I say we claim it! All good superhero teams have a name. The Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Scooby Gang…”
I grinned. “The Deviants.”
We spent half the night sitting there in the dark car, catching up and sharing tales of our captivity. I told them about how I was frozen and my run-in with Mr. Handler, and how Megan—ShadowMegan, Rebel, whoever she was now—was similarly frozen.
They were all curious about the possessed girl in the frozen chamber. But again I pictured Megan’s silent, peaceful face, knowing what it felt like to have your body turned to ice but unable to imagine what it would be like to have another soul controlling my limbs on top of that.
I changed the subject.
Flashlights pierced the darkness of the access road, but no one came down, and soon we figured that the guards must have given up and assumed we escaped into the woods. Slowly, carefully, we drove back into the parking lot with the headlights off—none of us wanted to go anywhere near the place again, but it was the only way out.
The alarms no longer screamed. There were no trucks in sight.
Spencer drove us slowly around the front of the building and then onto the main road. All of us but him ducked down, our heads in each other’s lap. I saw him go tense when another pair of headlights drove by, but it was just someone else leaving the facility. To anyone who wasn’t working frantically inside to try and figure out a way to track us down, and who instead was just going home after an insane night at work, we just looked like another employee getting the hell away from Vesper Company.
The Vesper Company facilities turned out to be a sprawling set of buildings on a large campus in a city called Volmond, which was across a bridge from and to the northeast of Seattle. Volmond is home of lots of rich tech companies and so the streets are pristine, clean, and the neighborhoods look like the suburban sets in old 1950s family sitcoms.
Not too far from where we’d been kept prisoner was a new, in-development community Evan had found while zipping between universes. The safe house he found for us? A model home. How very Arrested Development. It even had a conveniently unlocked garage in which we could store our stolen car.
Spencer, Amy, Tracie, Dalton, Evan, and I spent the remainder of the first night together, huddled under blankets we’d stolen off the flimsy beds, trying to sleep. I’m not sure any of us got more than a few hours. The next morning we set about making the place more homey. We blacked out the windows with cardboard and tape we found downstairs so that no one would see us, then we claimed our rooms and did our best to make them warmer, adding towels and curtains to the blankets. Our breakfast was a box of gourmet cookies we found in a cupboard, apparently there to serve when showing off the home.
Thank our crazy parents for giving Evan the ability to cross dimensions, because if it wasn’t for him we might have frozen or starved. He was the one who snuck into the corner stores, grabbed a basket of food, then hid in a corner and disappeared…only to show up back in our kitchen with goodies to share. He was the one who also jacked us some battery-operated space heaters from a nearby hardware store.
We didn’t know when, or if, anyone would come to the house. As far as we could tell, construction was on hold due to the weather. I tried not to think about it, tried to pretend we were just a bunch of kids camping out.
It was just good to be free.
We spent the next days hiding out in the house, trying to lay low and not draw any attention to ourselves. It was getting colder by the day, and sheets of rain came down outside. The grounds around our squatting residence turned to ice and mud. We spent a lot of our time huddled underneath our blankets around heaters, trying to keep one another entertained.
This couldn’t last forever.
Most of our time was spent talking. Planning. Avoiding speaking about how we were now a bunch of teen runaways.
For all my bravado and righteous anger inside Vesper Company, now that I was free I felt weirdly lost. Empty. I mean, it was nice to be surrounded by my new friends, and really nice to have Spencer back, to cuddle with him on the living room couch. But for all our talks of where to go and what to do next, and reminders from Amy and Dalton that we needed to find Nikki—and Patrick, when we remembered the poor guy—I could tell we all felt uneasy. Like there was some giant, Old Mother Hubbard shoe hovering above us just waiting to drop.
And it didn’t help that I got the distinct impression from my fellow Deviants that they were all waiting on me to make the plan that would save us all.
Sometimes I needed to be away from the others. I snuck off to one of the dark, cold rooms and sat on the cheap particle board furniture and just stared at the walls, remembering the people who made up my whole world before that first night when I found myself climbing out of a window.
Dawn. My beautiful, peppy, social butterfly stepsister who saw a fellow monarch in me despite my old cocooned caterpillar ways. Last I’d seen her she was just stirring back to life in the back of Patrick’s car. I hoped she was fine after her temporary coma, that she was as vivacious and full of life as ever. I hoped they fixed Jared’s hands, and that he’ll continue to be the best damned police deputy/drummer in all of Skopamish, Washington.
My dad. The last he’d seen me, I’d been so angry. I’d never been mad at my dad—well, at least not to the degree I’d been during those last few days before we were captured. I couldn’t see a way that I could go back to him without drawing Vesper Company’s attention. I didn’t even know if he was as all right as Mr. Handler claimed he was.
My home, my life with him, was all warm, sappy memories, and I wanted so bad to go back to him and be his normal little Leelee. He was sort of involved in making me the deviant I am, but screw it, we all make mistakes. I’d have to find him one day. I vowed to.
And Megan. I didn’t like to remember her in her in those final, desperate moments before she gave herself over to the Rebel. I hated the visions of her as a frozen corpse. With the exception of forcing myself to write about it in my account for Vesper Company, when I put down every last detail I could remember so they could feel even a small portion of what I felt, I tried my hardest to block out any image of her except for the one I knew before junior high.
She’ll always be the young, excitable, exuberant girl with the big nose and the long hair who came over to my house to drink homemade milkshakes and play insane made-up games. The angry, bitter Megan of high school, the shadow version of her when she was possessed…those weren’t her.
I sat there alone in the dark, wanting to remember the good times, but always ending up thinking about how messed up the lives of everyone around me had become.
Eventually I would give up, and I would creep back downstairs and join the others. We would resume talking and planning and pretending that all of us were fine with being a bunch of scared kids with an uncertain future, with no homes and no families to protect us except the flimsy building we slept in and the family of Deviants we’d been forced to become.
At the end of the third day, someone showed up at the model home.
Dalton was upstairs, sleeping. The rest of us were taking a break from pretending we had any plan other than “attack Vesper Company again and hope for the best.” Spencer, Tracie, Evan, and I were halfheartedly playing a game of Clue, which we’d
found laid out in the kids’ room. Amy was curled up in a recliner, head in hand, watching us.
And someone knocked at the door.
We all stiffened. My hand stopped, hovering over the little pad used to mark off suspects. We sat still, silent. Waiting.
Another knock. Then, a man’s muffled voice shouting, “Hello?”
Meeting the others’ eyes, I put a finger to my lip. Then, I crouch-walked as silently as I could toward the front door.
I heard the man on the other side let out a disgruntled sigh. There came a beep, and a few seconds later he began to speak.
“Yeah, it’s James Chapman. I’m here to set up for a viewing. One of your people was supposed to meet me here with a key, but—” He stopped talking. A few more seconds of silence, then, “What do you mean next week? No one called to reschedule. I—” A pause. “Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, a Katrina does work for me.” Another pause. The man sighed. “Fine. No, no need to apologize for the mix-up. It’s not your fault everything is frozen. We’ll just come back when it thaws.”
Another beep as the man clicked off his phone. Muttering obscenities, he stomped off, his footsteps growing quieter and quieter.
Slowly I turned around to face my fellow Deviants, the man’s final words sparking the first real idea I had in weeks.
Quite suddenly, we had a deadline.
And just as suddenly, I had a plan.
“Hey, guys,” I said as I walked back into the living room. “I know how we’re going to take down Vesper Company and make sure they leave us alone.”
Interested, Amy sat up straight in her seat. “And how’s that?” she asked.
“You know that old cliché, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”
Everyone nodded.
I met their eyes one by one. “I say we go back to the plan we had before we were captured, only this time we’re going to blow up Mr. Handler’s portal. But with the powers he has, we’re going to need a little help if we’re going to face off with him.”