“I would agree that we seem to be sitting ducks.” Principal VanWeider adds, rapping his knuckles on the table. “From what I’m hearing, I vote that we spread out, so we’re not such a concentrated target.”
“Or stick together…so our strength is concentrated in the small number we have left.” Freddie adds, crossing his own arms. Mr. Middleditch raises one finger in the air, one lip hitched over a chipped canine tooth.
“I agree with Freddie,” he says. “I don’t think hiding is the right strategy. The Curas will become suspicious if we drop off the radar with the only remaining Addo. The Fury obviously knows who we are already. They seem to know where we’re at too. Dividing up will make it easy for anyone to pick us off one at a time.”
The muttering breaks out around the table instantly, but Mrs. Reese wallops the rising concerns with her voice again.
“It’s time to be ready for anything,” she booms. “And at the same time, we’ve got a huge amount of work ahead of us. We need people searching for the Addo’s thumb drives and we need surveillance on both the Fury and the outer Curas. We will all need to call on any of our reliable and loyal Simple relatives that would be willing to help in the areas of child care, errands, light surveillance and specifically, filling in at the jobs we hold. We need to continue bringing in money for the community.”
“At least there won’t be any school this year,” Zaneen grumbles from across the table, but Principal VanWeider shakes his head with a grin.
“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion, Miss Middleditch,” Principal VanWeider says. He dusts invisible crumbs from the edge of the table. “At some point, this battle too shall pass, and you know the priority the Ianua places on education. Luckily, there has been a fascinating development that might suit us all very nicely, especially during this period.”
“I have to agree with my daughter on this one,” Mr. Middleditch says. “Besides needing all the help we can get right now, if we’ve got Ianua kids sitting in school, we might as well get out there and just paint a bulls-eye on the side of the building.”
“Except that I have a small development worth mentioning,” Principal VanWeider adds with another grin. “There isn’t going to be a school next year.”
“The district has been considering a new educational program, and now it seems that it couldn’t have come at a better time for us,” Principal VanWeider continues. “Simon Valley has been invited to be part of an experimental program for virtual schooling. I was expecting to turn it down, but this might be exactly what we need.”
“So…we wouldn’t have to go to school?” Carducci suddenly emerges from his fog. He hasn’t done anything the entire Totus except stare off into space as he rubbed his thumb on the arm of the little troll girl bunched up under his armpit.
“No Senior year?” Sasu peeps, rising from the crook of Carducci’s elbow.
“What it means,” Principal VanWeider says, “Is that the high school would be computerized. Our student body would satellite from home computers and all of our classes would be on-line.”
“Even gym?” Deeta asks. VanWeider gives her a nice try grin.
“There are instructional videos and a tracking program for physical education,” he says.
Deeta groans and the Principal continues, “The computers would be available to distribute in two weeks, so the students will have the next two months to get familiar with the system by the time school starts in the fall. Most importantly, for our purposes, virtual schooling would keep our younger Contego a little less in the public eye.”
“We do need to keep all of the kids out of sight,” Mrs. Reese says. “And I also agree that they need to be continuing their studies as soon as we can get things under control.”
“I gotta say,” Larson adds, “The Fury does seem to have a real good idea of who’s who. We should all be laying low for now. We don’t want them picking us off one by one, like they did with the Alo.”
“True,” Mrs. Neho says, leaning on the table to peer at Larson. “But we not the Alo. Our purpose is fight. Protect. Defend. Not scare together like little girl.”
“Divided, we are vulnerable,” Mr. Middleditch says. “We saw what happened to Basil Reese. We know The Fury’s got some of our old Contego. And even if the Fury Contego are half outta their birdhouses already, if they pig-pile twenty of their half-baked cuckoos on just one of our competent warriors, or target a school full of our kids, there’s still going to be a problem.”
Garrett is a statue beside me. I move my leg close to him and when we touch, he swallows, breathes.
“So, Van, this computerized school idea,” Freddie says, “what’s the name of this thing?”
“Quantus.” Principal VanWeider thrums his fingertips once on the table. I don’t hear anything else he says, because Nok tears into the room, dragging Iris behind him, as the explosion over our heads rocks the entire building.
Chapter 7
IT HAPPENS ALL AT ONCE. A dirty cloud of smoke billows down the stairs and the ceiling rains dust and wood splinters. My bubble explodes around me as Garrett pulls me from my chair. The other Contego dart through the smog and surround the steps.
Nok lets go of Iris, and like lightening, Mrs. Reese, who was at the back of the room, is suddenly three steps in front of me, pulling the Addo along with her as she scoops up her daughter.
“Exits!” she shouts. She hustles Addo down the hall and pushes him into one of the rooms to the right, before the swinging doors.
In the same second, Freddie lunges forward and grabs Nok by the upper arm. In one fluid movement, Freddie flips the tiny Veritas into the air. My soul, or whatever I am when I’m outside my body, vibrates like a window slammed with a soccer ball. All of my instincts draw me to Freddie, to maybe tackle him or to snatch Nok up before he falls, but my body doesn’t move. Instead, I watch as Nok drops onto Freddie’s back, hanging on like a koala as Freddie rockets off, past the staircase and past the room where Mrs. Reese just disappeared. In seconds, Freddie and Nok slam through the double doors at the far end of the hall and vanish.
Garrett’s hair brushes my cheek.
“C’mon.” His voice is shockingly calm. He tags Sean on the arm and then the three of us are running down the same corridor, in the same direction that Freddie went with Nok. Over my shoulder, I see the Contego, all dropped into fighting stances, still as statues, with their eyes trained on the stairs as the dusty haze clears. Even little Sasu, poised beside Carducci, looks like she’s about to climb over the rows of Contego and destroy whatever comes down the stairs first.
Two words suddenly pound in my head: Follow. Protect.
Garrett is on one side of Sean and I’m on the other. It’s like Sean’s a hockey puck and we have to keep him going along between us as we run toward the goal. And I know exactly what the goal is. It blasts through me each time my foot hits the floor.
Protect.
It’s the same feeling I had as I stood beside Freddie and Nok. Except that now it feels like my nerves are all metal shavings and Sean’s wearing a magnetic body suit, so it’s pretty obvious that Sean’s the one that I’m supposed to keep safe.
The noise wells up behind us, as if an army is beating down the door upstairs. I want to grab Sean’s arm to try to speed him up, but I don’t. I just stay beside him and Garrett drops a step behind us as we blow through the double doors.
But my dress isn’t meant for running. I trip twice and even though my body adjusts for it and keeps me from slamming face-first onto the tile floor, this dress might just get me killed. The footsteps thunder down the stairs far behind us—a stampede, mixed with the voices I know and the ones I don’t—all of them shouting. I drop back right on Sean’s heels and Garrett’s on mine. We are a shield.
“Go left!” Garrett’s voice is urgent. I grab Sean’s arm and dive through the door on the left. Garrett slams into me.
“It’s just a stock room!” Sean groans.
But it’s worse than that. It’s a stock ro
om with nothing in it but piles of books and huge cardboard boxes overflowing with more books. There are no doors and no windows. I twist in a circle, looking for a way to escape, but there’s nothing. Just four walls surrounding a swamp of cardboard and books.
Garrett moves into the maze of boxes and my body drops into a fighting stance, angled toward the door. The shouting from down the corridor roars in my ears…Find the key! We need the key!
“There’s no way out!” Sean yelps, but Garrett doesn’t answer. Instead, he throws his shoulder against the tallest box in the center of the room. Most of the boxes are as high as my chin. Garrett groans as he muscles each one out of the way. Sean jumps in beside him and the two of them make a narrow path ending at the far wall.
When they clear it all away, all that’s left is one rectangular box left against the wall, on the floor. The box is a little smaller than a basement window, but instead of lifting it out of the way, Garrett kneels down and pulls open the flaps. He pulls out a pile of books and dumps them to the side before jumping back onto his feet. He lifts one foot over the box like he’s going to stand in it.
It doesn’t make sense. Maybe we’re going to stack up the books and climb up through the ceiling. My eyes flick upwards, searching for a ladder or an open tile to escape through, but there’s nothing there.
But instead of going up, Garrett brings his foot crashing down, right through the open flaps of the box. Even though the box is on the floor, something shatters inside it and the echo of falling pieces only whispers around the room, beneath the shouting from outside.
“Here!” Garrett waves Sean toward the box.
“Here where?” Sean says.
“Veritas’ passage way! Go!”
Sean peers into the open box.
“There’s a ladder in there!” He laughs, delighted.
“Go!” I hiss, motioning to Sean from the door. Everything in my body is standing on tiptoes—balancing on the point of a needle. The shouting and fighting beyond the door drowns out the sounds in the room. Any second, The Fury might break through and find us.
“Go now!” Garrett says and Sean climbs into the box. Or, actually, down the box. He disappears the way I saw someone’s brother do once, when he pretended to be walking down stairs, behind a family couch.
The second the tip of Sean’s head disappears, the sound outside the door explodes. The screaming and shouting swells closer…The key is here! Find it! Find it!
“Nali, now you!” Garrett waves me away from the door and there’s no time to argue. I cross the room and step into the box and my feet instantly find the metal rung of a ladder. As I climb down, Garrett shoves some of the huge boxes back in front of the one we’re disappearing into, obscuring the path he and Sean made to the wall. Before I am out of sight, I see Garrett throw his shoulder against an enormous box that bursts open as it hits the floor. It gushes a gooey liquid. Thicker than water, a clear gel covers the floor all the way back to the door. But the liquid disappears in seconds, soaked up by the rest of the cardboard boxes in the room.
Garrett jumps onto the rungs above me. He pauses to slide a sheet of something over the opening so that everything goes black and the sounds that were filtering into the stock room suddenly go silent.
“What was that stuff you poured out?” I ask, as we climb down in the dark.
There’s a grin in his voice. “It’s a dissolving fluid. The boxes will soak it up and fall apart in seconds. We rigged the books inside to spill all over the place, so it’s going to take a while for the Fury to clear everything away and figure out where we went. Homemade booby trapping.”
“How did you know to do that?” I ask. Focusing up at him, I see Garrett peer down at me with a wide grin. I stop focusing once he looks away, too chicken to look down.
“Nok,” he tells me. “He showed me this escape route, just in case this happened, and how to rig it and how to collapse it.”
“Cool,” I say.
“Let’s just hope it takes care of all the boobs.” Sean jokes from the rungs below me.
The way down seems to go on forever.
“Did you hear what they were yelling up there?” I say.
“Yeah, they’re looking for the key,” Garrett answers.
“The key?” I ask. My dress gets under my foot and I slip on the rung, whacking Sean in the head.
“Hey! Steady as she goes up there!” Sean wheezes from below me. He doesn’t have the Contego lung capacity, that’s for sure. “The Ianua have long referred to your grandfather’s Memory as The Key, since it’s believed he had uncovered the information that would end the Fury.”
“But I thought the Fury have the Memory,” I say.
“So did we,” Garrett says.
The sound of Sean jumping down on solid ground comes up from the shadows. My arms are waterlogged strands of spaghetti. I am relieved to finally step off the ladder and land on hard, cold dirt, but when I do, I also land on the pieces of whatever Garrett smashed in the box overhead. It’s not glass, but big, jagged plastic pieces that poke my toes.
“Ow!” I grab for the ladder and Sean squawks, “What’s the matter?” as Garrett jumps down beside me. I jump back onto the ladder as Garrett brushes the rest of the broken pieces away with the side of his foot.
“Try now,” Garrett’s says and I jump down again on plain, cold dirt. Once I’m there, I focus again and wish I hadn’t. We’re at the bottom of what looks to be a round, brick well.
“Too bad you’re not wearing the orange sweats Nok gave you,” Sean says. His eyes are wide, casting around blindly, even when he looks right at me. “We could’ve used a life-sized flashlight.”
“Nali likes to come to an ambush, dressed for a party,” Garrett says, kneeling down on the dirt floor. His laugh is strained, as he jerks open one of five, hinged, wooden door flaps that are set into the brick at our feet. The rectangular cover flips up with a rusty creak.
“What’re you doing?” I whisper. Garrett looks up with a grin.
“This is the way out,” He whispers back as he grabs Sean’s wrist, yanking his brother down beside him.
Sean grunts as he lands. “Ok, now, what’re we doing again?”
“You’re going through this hole you can’t see,” Garrett says. He puts a hand on the back of Sean’s head. “Remember what Dad showed us about getting through a tight squeeze? Do that. And I’m sending Nali in right after you, so crawl through as fast as you can. I’ll be right behind you two.”
“Perfect. A hole,” Sean grumbles as he ducks into the little trapdoor. It seems too tiny, but Sean wiggles through the opening like an earthworm in dress shoes.
“You’re next.” Garrett says once Sean disappears. I kneel beside him, but I don’t crouch down to go through the hole. I’m not claustrophobic…at least I never was until now, but focusing on how small the opening is, it looks like I’ll fit about as well as a wine cork. Even repeating my mantra over and over in my head, I can’t make myself want to stick my head inside.
While I’m worrying over the hole, Garrett’s eyes roll over my dress’s spaghetti straps. He blocks the opening with his knee.
“Wait,” he says as he unbuttons his shirt, leaving him in just his undershirt. “That dress isn’t going to cut it.”
He must think I’m just worried about keeping my dress intact, when really, I’m flipped out about scraping all my skin off as I go through the hole. In my head, I chant my mantra as I take his shirt from him.
He moves his knee aside. I breathe like I’m hitting speed bumps. The shirt smells like him, which helps, but not enough. I can’t stop staring at the hole and wondering how I’m going to make myself go in.
“Think of it as rock climbing, but sideways,” Garrett says. “Instead of using your fingers, use your forearms and elbows to kind of scoot yourself along. Use the balls of your feet to push yourself through.”
He moves completely out of the way and I stop focusing. Garrett and the hole and the shattered bits on the ground
disappear. I figure if I’m not looking, it’ll be easier. I feel around for the opening and then Garrett’s hands are on mine, warm and pulsing in time with my own heartbeat, helping to stretch my arms out ahead of me. I push myself into the tiny tunnel.
It’s a round hole and the sides are tight, which makes bringing my elbows back down near my chest a lot tougher. I bang my skull on the top of the tunnel when I try to raise my head.
I don’t focus. Instead, I keep my eyes squeezed shut even though it doesn’t stop me from thinking about what I’d be looking at. Dirt and tree roots, bits of rock. I can feel them as I pull myself along. The dress tangles around my feet. My toes slip off the rocks. I think my foot is bleeding. This is a grave, if I can’t make it out. I can’t stop thinking it.
But I have no other choice than to be brave, especially when I feel Garrett’s hand on my foot and I hear the trapdoor slam shut behind us. Seconds later, the tunnel vibrates with the rolling thunder of an avalanche. I can’t cover my head if I wanted to- my arms are trapped beneath me- but the avalanche isn’t in the tunnel. I’m sure it’s above us or around us but all I keep thinking of how it is burying one end.
“Sean?” I call. My voice comes out wavy.
“You okay?” Garrett’s voice leaks up around me.
“Yeah,” I tell him. Just saying it has to make it a little more true.
“I just set off one of the booby traps to cave in the well.” He sounds as calm as if we were sitting at his kitchen table. “The Fury’s going to have a lot of digging to do if they want to find the doors to these tunnels. Even if they do, it’s going to take them a while to figure out which one we went through. We’ll be days gone by then.”
“Good,” I say. What I don’t say is that now there’s only one way out and no going back.
My nose is nearly rubbing the bottom of the tunnel, so my breath bounces off the dirt and comes back dusty, in my face. The harder I breathe, the more of a cloud I imagine around me. I forget all about the smell of Garrett’s shirt and the Fury blowing up the library a half-mile over my head, the avalanche in the well, and Sean waiting at the other end. What comes rocketing back to me is that I’m trapped in a tunnel that is the size of my shoulders. I can only wiggle myself along by inches.
Cornerstone 02 - Keystone Page 10