The Legacy Chronicles_Up in Smoke

by Pittacus Lore

  CHAPTER TWO

  SAM

  UNKNOWN LOCATION AT SEA

  SAM TRIED ONCE AGAIN TO OPEN THE DOOR USING telekinesis. And once again, the locking mechanism failed to respond. He sighed. He’d hoped it had been a simple bolt, but it was apparently something more complicated. This wasn’t really a surprise, given that Dennings was used to dealing with kids who had Legacies and would have anticipated an escape attempt.

  Since the cabin he was locked in was barely big enough to hold the bed he was sitting on, it had taken Sam all of ten seconds to figure out that there was nothing inside that was going to be of any use to him. The only other thing in the room was a small sink affixed to the wall, with a grimy, cracked mirror above it. The sink’s faucet leaked, and every so often a drop of water dripped into the basin. Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed, counting the seconds between drops.

  Four, he thought, watching the small orb of water forming on the faucet’s mouth as it had hundreds of times since he’d begun his observations. Three. Two. One.

  Drip.

  Twelve. Eleven. Ten. Nine.

  The door opened.

  A tray slid inside, and the door shut again. On the tray were a plate with a sandwich on it, a plastic cup of water, and a paper napkin that looked as if it had previously been used to wipe up a spill of some kind. Sam knelt and picked up the tray. Balancing it on his knees, he took a bite of the sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly.

  As he chewed, he listened. Without a window, he had no reference for where he was. His brief glimpse of the ocean when he’d appeared on deck had not shown him enough to have any idea what ocean he was on. He could be anywhere. And as far as he could tell, the ship wasn’t moving. He heard no engines, no churning propellers, nothing to indicate that the vessel was traveling. There was the occasional clang or thump, but nothing useful. When he reached out with his technopathy, he found nothing to connect with, no computers or machinery to talk to.

  He picked up the cup, paused a moment to wonder if the water might be drugged, then decided he was thirsty enough that it was worth the risk. Besides, the sandwich could also have been drugged, and he’d already taken a bite. He sipped the water, then took a longer drink as his parched throat welcomed the moisture and demanded more. The warm water tasted flat, almost stale, but he drained half the cup before forcing himself to stop and conserve the rest.

  He took another bite of the sandwich, and felt something strange between his teeth. Pulling the pieces of bread apart, he found a folded-up piece of paper inside. His first reaction was disgust that it had found its way in there. Then it occurred to him that someone might have put it there on purpose. It had been folded in fourths, and while the outside was smeared with jelly and peanut butter, the inside was clean. There were numbers scrawled on it: 29.03083333, -118.28000000.

  Sam instantly realized they were coordinates, latitude and longitude. But knowing what they were didn’t help him understand where they were. At least not exactly. The positive latitude meant the spot was north of the equator, and the negative longitude meant west of the prime meridian; but that was still a lot of ocean.

  He closed his eyes and tried to picture a flattened view of the globe. It had been a long time since he’d learned about maps, but he could still kind of visualize it. The equator cut through the top of South America, so 29 degrees north of that was somewhere around the bottom of the United States. And 118 degrees west of the prime meridian put that spot . . .

  “Off the coast of Mexico,” he said aloud. “More or less.”

  Not that this information helped him very much. Or was necessarily accurate. Besides, who would bother to send him map coordinates inside a sandwich in the first place?

  “A radio would have been more useful,” he said to himself. “Or a gun.”

  Not knowing what to do with the paper, he licked the remaining peanut butter and jelly from it, trying not to think about who might have touched it, and folded it back up. He stuck it in his pocket, then resumed eating his lunch. Dinner. Snack. He wasn’t sure what time it was. It had been early morning in Montana when he’d been taken. And it had been dark when he’d appeared on the deck of the ship. How long ago had that been? Two hours? Maybe three?

  His best guess was that it was still morning, probably not yet noon. He also realized that he was very tired. More tired than he should be, even having been up all night running around in the cold. His eyes started to close. He blinked, forcing them open, but they fought back. As he slumped to the side, he glanced at the cup of water falling off the tray and onto the floor and thought, I should have drunk out of the sink.

  When he woke again, he was no longer in the same room, and his head was swimming. Through the fog, he could tell that he was in a larger cabin, seated on a metal folding chair. Actually, he discovered when he tried to move his arms, he was tied to the chair with some kind of restraints. All he could manage to do was bang the chair legs on the floor a little by bouncing the chair.

  “Settle down,” a voice said. “It’s not like you’ve got anywhere to go.”

  Sam looked up and saw the mysterious man from the Montana cabin sitting in a much more comfortable-looking chair, watching him. He didn’t know his name, but he recognized the face. It was the man who had been threatening Drac with a gun and who had shot Yo-Yo.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his words coming out slurred from whatever drug was still lingering in his system.

  “What difference does it make?” the man said.

  Sam shut his eyes, trying to calm his spinning head. The man was right. It didn’t matter who he was. What mattered was figuring out what he wanted.

  “To be honest, I’d prefer if we’d gotten the girl,” the man said. “Six.”

  At the mention of Six’s name, Sam looked up. His thoughts found something to focus on, and he pushed his way out of his stupor to fix the man with a glare.

  The man laughed. “That got your attention,” he said. “Sorry if it hurts your feelings. She’s one of the originals, though, and you, well, you’re just an Earth kid who got lucky, right? Like all these other kids Dennings has got following him around like puppies.”

  Dennings. Was he around, too? Probably. After all, he was the reason Sam was on the ship in the first place, because he’d insisted on hanging on to Dennings when that kid teleported him out of the cabin.

  “Tell me something,” the man said. “How come it picks who it picks?”

  Sam didn’t understand the question. He must have looked confused, because the man tried again. “The magic sky fairy,” he said. “The Lorien god, or whatever the hell it is. The thing that gives people these powers.”

  “The Entity,” Sam said.

  “Whatever. How’s it decide?”

  Sam tried to shrug, then remembered his hands were tied. “Nobody knows.”

  “Come on,” said the man, sounding angry. “There’s gotta be some kind of system.”

  “Pretty sure it’s random. Sorry you didn’t make the list, if that’s what you mean, but you’re a little too old anyway.”

  The man grunted. “Wiseass. You think I don’t know it only picks kids? Why’d you think I had Dr. Frankenstein working on a way to give them to me?”

  Sam looked at him, not sure he understood. “What?”

  The man laughed. “That imbecile who goes by Drac has been working on, I don’t know what you’d call it, a serum? Something to give people these powers you and your friends got accidentally.”

  Sam’s mind began to race. He pictured Six strapped to the table in the room beneath the lodge. What had they done to her? What the man was saying didn’t seem possible. “How?” he said.

  “I don’t know all the scientific stuff,” the man said. “Something about harvesting from the pituitary gland.”

  Sam shook his head. “That’s not possible,” he said. “You’d need to actually remove it, and you can’t do that without . . .”

  He stopped speaking as the horror of what the man was te
lling him began to sink in. “You’d kill the person,” he said. Again he thought about Six. His heart began to pound, and he pulled against his restraints.

  The man, oblivious to Sam’s rising panic, shrugged. “I guess,” he said casually. “Not a big deal if they’re already dead, though, right?”

  “The kids you let people hunt,” said Sam. “You take the glands out of them.”

  The man waved a hand. “I leave all that up to Drac,” he said. Then his face darkened. “Although maybe that was a mistake. Whatever he put in me hasn’t done shit.”

  Sam remembered the argument he’d heard the man and Drac having before he and Nine broke into the room. It was starting to make sense. Whatever this serum was that Drac was working on, he’d injected the man with some version of it.

  The man seemed to be agitated now. He stood up and started to pace. He snatched up a handheld transceiver and pressed a button. “Cutter!” he barked. “Get up here.”

  He continued to pace, now talking to himself. “I should have kept a tighter leash on him,” he muttered. “Who knows what he was doing, what he put in me.” He threw the transceiver against the cabin wall, where it shattered. Then he held his head in his hands. “This goddamn headache!” he bellowed. “It feels like my brain’s on fire.”

  Something was obviously very wrong. The man’s demeanor had changed rapidly. Sam watched him walk back and forth, clenching and unclenching his hands as he shook his head. He was like a wild animal in a cage trying to find a way out.

  There was a knock on the cabin door. The man answered it, and another man entered. Sam recognized him, too. He was the man who had met Rena and Nemo at the diner and taken them to the lodge. Cutter. Seeing him there, Sam wondered again what had happened to everyone back in the lodge. Was Yo-Yo alive? And most important, was Six? Now that he knew what Drac had been up to, his fear for her safety was growing by the second.

  “How are you doing, boss?” Cutter said.

  “How does it look like I’m doing?” the man snarled.

  Cutter glanced over at Sam. Sam met his eyes and glared, thinking about how he was responsible for so many of the terrible things that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. A flare of rage surged through him, and he found himself trying to use his telekinesis to push the man into the wall behind him. When Cutter grinned and laughed, Sam realized that he knew what Sam was trying to do, and also that it had failed.

  “I thought you would have figured out by now that you can’t do it anymore,” Cutter said. “Didn’t you wonder why you couldn’t connect with any of the machinery?”

  Sam didn’t answer. He’d assumed there was nothing to connect with on this old ship. Now, though, he realized that there should have been all kinds of machinery that he could access. And yet, there was nothing when he reached out. And he hadn’t been able to open the cabin door either. What had they done to him? His thoughts flashed back to the compound in Texas, where Drac seemed to drain that girl called Freakshow of her Legacies. Had they done something similar to him?

  The rage in him turned to fear. Without his Legacies, Sam was helpless. Panic seized him. But then just as quickly, he shut it down. He had been in tougher situations than this without powers. If he could survive what had happened to him in the Mog prison, he could handle whatever these guys threw at him. At least, he hoped so.

  Cutter seemed to be waiting for him to reply to his statement, but before he could, Cutter’s boss fell to his knees, howling in pain. He beat at his head with his fists, screaming. “Make it stop!”

  “Mr. Bray!” Cutter said, rushing to him. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, but he shrugged him off with another wail, then collapsed onto his side.

  Cutter took a transceiver from his back pocket and spoke into it, saying something in Spanish. Then he rolled the man, who Sam now knew was named Mr. Bray, onto his back. Bray was breathing heavily, and his eyes were wild, darting back and forth as he panted, trying to catch his breath.

  The cabin door opened, and two men bustled in. They went to Bray, and one took his feet while the other put his hands under the man’s arms. They lifted him, and Cutter said, “Take him down below. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  When the men were gone, Sam asked, “What did Drac shoot him up with?”

  Cutter ignored the question. He looked worried.

  “Doesn’t seem like he’ll make it, if you ask me,” Sam said, goading him.

  “Shut up.”

  “I hope you have the antidote to whatever Drac used on him,” Sam continued.

  Cutter looked at him. “Maybe I do,” he said. “The problem for you is, it might be inside your head.”

  Sam felt the cold grip of fear again. Cutter’s implication was clear.

  Cutter grinned maliciously. “No smart comeback to that? I guess Mr. Bray must have told you what we’ve been working on, me and Drac. Well, mostly Drac. But I’ve hung around long enough to pick up a few things. Figure I could do it on my own by now.” He held up one hand and made a scissoring motion with his fingers. “Course, I’d have to cut you open, but how hard can that be? I’ve butchered plenty of deer. Can’t be any harder than that.” He laughed.

  Sam had no idea how much of what Cutter said was just to rile him and how much was serious. If Drac really was using people with Legacies to make some kind of superhero drug, there was no telling what they had done to get the materials they needed for it.

  “Relax,” Cutter said. “I can’t use you while you’ve got that black goo in you, anyway. Have to wait for it to get out of your system.”

  Sam had no idea what he meant. But the mention of black goo immediately brought back memories. Terrible ones. Was it possible that Drac had gotten his hands on some of the Mogadorian ooze? And was that what they had injected him with to strip him of his Legacies?

  Cutter went to the door. “You can try to get out,” he said as he opened it. “Won’t do you much good, though, unless you’re a long-distance swimmer. Besides, the guys have permission to shoot you if they see you running around. Best to just sit tight until someone comes to get you.”

  He left, shutting the door behind him.

  Sam looked around the room. It seemed to be some kind of office or storeroom, filled with boxes and bits and pieces of equipment. A desk with a computer on it was positioned against one wall.

  Before he could look at anything, he needed to get free. Each wrist was bound with a plastic restraint to one of the sides of the chairback. He couldn’t break through them. However, the chair itself didn’t seem terribly sturdy. It was possible he could break it if he tried hard enough. But it would be noisy, and attract attention if anyone heard it.

  Then again, he thought. What do I have to lose?

  The answer was, nothing. If someone did hear him, what would they do? He doubted anyone would actually shoot him. It sounded as if he was too valuable alive. Probably, they would just tie him up again. And even if they did try to shoot him, that was preferable to sitting there doing nothing.

  He bounced the chair against the floor. It was wobbly, but it held. Fortunately, he was on a rug, which muffled the sound a little. He tried again, lifting the chair up and bringing it down. The jolt sent pain radiating up his spine, and he winced. He rocked side to side, testing the chair’s joints. They squeaked.

  He lifted up with his legs as high as he could, then let himself fall back down. The chair hit the floor with a thud that shook his body. There was a grinding sound, and the left-hand side of the chairback fell away from the seat. Sam tilted to that side, almost tipping over, but righted himself. He then leaned in the opposite direction while sliding his left hand down the now-loose side of the seatback. His hand came free, and he stood. A moment later, he had wrenched the other side off.

  He expected someone to come to the door, but no one did. Either Cutter was incredibly confident that Sam wouldn’t attempt to escape, or there really was an order to fire should he leave the cabin. Sam didn’t have time to worry about it, though
, as he needed to find something—anything—that could help him out.

  He went over to the desk and looked at the computer. It was on. He searched around the desktop, found an icon for an internet browser and clicked on it. When it opened, he said a silent thank-you for his luck, then went to his email account. As it opened, he fished out the paper in his pocket and unfolded it. Then he typed a quick email to Six and hit Send.

  As he was logging off, he heard voices outside, speaking in Spanish. Returning to where the pieces of the chair lay on the rug, he threw himself down on the floor on his stomach. As the cabin door opened, he groaned, as if he had just that moment smashed the chair and had hurt himself in the process.

  Two men entered, the same ones who had carried Bray out a little while before. Seeing him on the floor, they spoke rapidly to each other and dashed over to him. Sam kept his eyes shut, groaning as they rolled him over. He mumbled some nonsense words.

  The men talked to each other in anxious tones. Then they shook him. “Get up,” one of them said.

  Sam fluttered his eyes.

  “Get up,” the man said again. This time, he took hold of Sam’s wrist, while the other man took his other arm. They pulled him to his feet.

  “Downstairs,” one of the men said. “Now.”

  Sam allowed them to think he was still weak as they dragged him towards the door. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do next, but he wanted to maintain the element of surprise. As they left the cabin, he thought about the email he’d sent to Six. Was she even alive to receive it? He prayed that she was. He couldn’t even think about the alternative. She had to be okay.

  Whether he would be okay remained to be seen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SIX

  POINT REYES, CA

  “HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT BRAY,” MCKENNA said.

  He, Six and Nine were in Nine’s office, where McKenna had spent the past half hour on the phone with his contact. Six, still feeling the effects of the Mog ooze, had a pounding headache, which she would have been happy to deal with by trying to get more info out of Drac, but McKenna had called her and Nine up to share his findings with them. Now, she sat in a chair, wishing the jackhammering in her brain would stop.