The Healing Power of Sugar: The Ghost Bird Series: #9 (The Academy Ghost Bird Series)

by Stone, C. L.

  “Sang,” he said quietly. “You’ve taken my job.”

  “Huh?”

  “You do what I used to do,” he said. “I used to be the one that stayed in place and passed messages. It’s an important job, even if you do it in your pajamas”

  I sighed and rubbed my cheek against the rough material of his polo shirt, feeling his chest underneath, the dense muscle. “I don’t mean to complain.”

  “Are you thinking we are treating you like a girl? Or that you don’t belong?”

  “I’m just anxious to do more than sit here and stare at cameras pointed at nothing.”

  “I know,” he said. He smoothed a hand over my back. “I am, too.”

  “Is this it?” I asked. It was what I’d been concerned about since Black Friday. “Did Mr. Hendricks find out we were going to smooth things over? Are we stopping him from pointing more fingers, so he’s trying to fish up more dirt on others? What’s going on?”

  “He doesn’t have enough dirt to throw, like he thought he did,” Kota said. “I’m thinking he’s getting pretty desperate. So we gave him something that looks like it might be big, but really isn’t anything at all. He’ll have to wait until Monday to use it. In the meantime, we’re preparing.”

  “For what?”

  “Changes,” he said quietly. “Our only snag is you, though.”

  Why wasn’t I surprised? I wiped at my face, but still Kota held me. “Because of my father? Or the school?”

  “For a lot of reasons,” he said. He kissed the top of my head and kept his lips there, tucking my head under his chin. “It’s just a big risk. He could easily make a phone call or point a finger at you—and he doesn’t even know the whole of how you would be affected. He doesn’t know that he carries the possibility of taking you down, or at least how strongly we’d fight it if he tried. Don’t worry.”

  Maybe that was why they had me playing dispatcher. Maybe it was an important job, like Kota said, but I was the person doing it because if I made a wrong move now, it could bring down everything around me. My father could get a phone call. The police could be notified that we were living alone in our house. The school board could look into my records, and dig deep, only to find my stepmother wasn’t my real mother. They could demand my sister and I go to foster homes.

  There were footsteps in the hall, faint ones. I was surprised when they stopped and went still. Usually people just walked in, talking, or I could hear them picking up food from the small display of sandwiches and other things I’d left out for them in the kitchen.

  I pulled myself from Kota’s arms and straightened up, looking over the edge of the couch. Kota turned his head to look, too.

  It was Luke standing over us. He looked down at Kota and then at me.

  The corner of his mouth dipped down for a second, but he wiped the frown away quickly. “Sorry,” he said.

  Kota released me and waved his hand. “Don’t be,” he said. “We were just talking. How’d it go?”

  Luke looked at me and then at Kota again. He walked around, pushing the laptop I was using aside before he sat heavily on the coffee table in front of us. His hair was tied back in a messy ponytail and his eyes had deep shadows. His jeans and the blue shirt were rumpled.

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “No good,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere. I can’t find hers or any of our phones in anyone’s house, nowhere in their cars. Not on their person. Mr. Hendricks. Mr. Morris. Rocky. Jay. I even checked a few more Mr. Hendricks sometimes has on his team. Our phones aren’t there.”

  Kota frowned. “You’ve gotten that close to all of them?”

  “I’ve been in every house,” Luke said, his brown eyes serious. He smoothed a palm over the top of his blond hair. “Victor’s not able to pull any data at all, he can’t recover anything. He’s temporarily disconnected our numbers, but whatever we used to not allow our phone messages to get tapped, they are completely useless. They still got hacked somehow.”

  “And it doesn’t appear to be Mr. Hendricks and his team,” Kota said. He picked up his laptop from the couch, but put it on the table next to Luke. “They went to some trouble to replace Sang’s phone.”

  “Victor thinks maybe that was the trick,” Luke said. “Her phone was the gateway to figuring out how to do all this. Once her phone was stolen—whenever that was—they had just enough time to hack the rest of our phones.”

  I froze on the couch, my hands clenching around the leather of the seat cushion. “This was my fault.”

  “No, Sang,” Kota said, waving his hand. “This could have happened to any of our phones.”

  “When did you last use yours?” Luke asked Kota.

  “Right after Sang left,” Kota said. “I sent out a message to Mr. Blackbourne about Sang going with you. I got an okay from him. That was all.”

  “I’m thinking from the moment we weren’t able to call, that’s about when we were hacked,” Luke said. “It adds up to her phone getting stolen.”

  “That was quick though,” I said. “I had my phone in my bra for a while. We called the moment we saw Mr. Hendricks. That was the moment I switched my phone from my bra to my pocket. It had to be between the time Gabriel and I went in looking for you…”

  “It was crowded,” Luke said. “There were lots of shoppers in that mall.”

  “But our phones weren’t calling out then,” I said. “And they’ve done that without switching my phone out. We’ve been having problems.”

  “Our signals could be blocked,” Kota said. “Somehow they are blocking our calls.”

  “They block our calls and then steal my phone?”

  Kota sat up, touching the corner of his glasses. “Or the two things aren’t connected. It could be Mr. Hendricks somehow found a way to block our calls. Whoever stole the phone and hacked our data might be about something else entirely.”

  I looked at Luke, the only person I knew who could pick a phone out of my pocket without me noticing. “Who else can do what you do?” I asked quietly.

  Luke jerked his head back, and then frowned. “What do you mean, asking that?”

  My eyes widened. Did it sound accusing? “No, I just mean, I know you can steal phones from pockets.”

  “I didn’t do this,” he said defensively, his voice rising.

  “Calm down,” Kota said, pausing in his work to look up at him. “She didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I’m tired of everyone asking,” Luke said, pulling away to pace in front of the television. “You think I’d steal them and cause all this uproar? I’m the one trying to find them.”

  I glanced at Kota, suddenly afraid to say anything further. What had I said? Had the others been bothering him with questions about how this might have happened?

  Luke had disappeared when my phone might have been taken.

  And if he didn’t want to find the phones, he could just say he couldn’t find them.

  He had access to all of us.

  I kept my lips shut, though my suspicions burned inside me. I didn’t want to say anything further, and I didn’t want to even think it, but the more I considered recent actions, he did seem like a likely culprit. Could it be the others had pondered the same thing?

  “I’m sure they were just covering their bases,” Kota said.

  “Well, I haven’t done anything wrong,” Luke said. Without another word, he stormed around the coffee table toward the kitchen.

  Kota got up, looking over the couch at him. “Where are you going?”

  “To look for her phone!” Luke cried out. The front door opened, but before Kota and I could stop him, he slammed it shut.

  Kota jogged around the couch, heading toward the front door. I followed.

  By the time we got outside, Luke was gone. I wasn’t sure how he could have gotten into a car and taken off so quickly. Either he had the motorcycle, which I couldn’t hear, or he’d run off.

  Kota stopped on the walkway heading to the drive, scanning the neighborhood. He
groaned. “Why would he say that?” he asked. He turned to me, a new pain in his eyes, disappointed. “Have people been accusing him?”

  “I haven’t,” I said. “Although…I thought perhaps…”

  Kota lifted an eyebrow. “Thought what?”

  He didn’t know? Had I said some of my suspicions to Mr. Blackbourne? No. Maybe not directly. “I told Mr. Blackbourne about the masks. You know, right? How Luke admitted to it?”

  He nodded.

  I slid my bare foot against the cold sidewalk. I didn’t want to be the one to pose this question. “I may not have said so out loud, but…I’ve been thinking. What if Luke…is Volto? Like what if the eight masks meant he was saying there would be only eight on the team? What if he stole my phone? He was right there. And before that, he…there were times when…” I tried to present more evidence, but I wasn’t sure where to start.

  Kota’s eyes widened. “He would never do that,” he said. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  I lifted my hands up, motioning toward the road. “He put the masks on your house, right?”

  “He said he did,” Kota said.

  “And then again? The second time?”

  “I don’t have confirmation on that.”

  “But…” I fought my brain for the connections I’d made before. “He left his phone at his house, hidden, and took another one with him. He said it was an Academy job and it wasn’t.”

  “And Mr. Blackbourne asked him about it,” Kota said. “He said he wanted to be alone. He was dealing with…something.”

  I pressed my lips together. “What did he say?”

  “That it was personal.” He came toward me and put a palm on top of my head as he looked at me. “Sang, he’s not Volto. He got knocked out at Victor’s house.”

  “By Muriel,” I said. “He could have been…” I paused, questioning my own suspicions, my thin evidence. There were a whole lot of accusations, and I was trying to pick out the clearest evidence that would support what I was thinking. Even when I hoped it wasn’t true.

  Kota shook his head harder this time. “And he was accounted for when you were kidnapped.”

  I quieted, unable to account for that. Maybe there was an explanation but I hadn’t had time to think on it. “He’s just…”

  “Been acting strangely?”

  I breathed in deeply, another nod. “Yeah. And there’s…circumstances.”

  “Weren’t there circumstances as to why you got suspension?” Kota asked.

  I took a step back, surprised he would bring this up now. “What?”

  “When Ms. Wright looked at your records and accused you of skipping classes, why didn’t you tell her the reasons you had for not being there? You didn’t go into much detail.”

  “Because…of the Academy stuff, and…”

  “Sang,” he said, his lips moving up in a sympathetic smile and his eyes brightening. “Don’t you see? Of course it looks to you like there’s something funny going on. He is acting strangely. You’ve been acting oddly, too. Ms. Wright saw a girl who was absent from class, who never even tried to defend herself as to why she was gone. Well, you did defend a bit, but you offered nothing to her that would have explained yourself. What conclusion could she have had except to think you were skipping?”

  “Yeah…”

  “So if Luke seems like he’s doing something funny, should we go around accusing him? Or find out what’s the truth is? There’s probably some very reasonable explanation.”

  I knew the answer to that. “Shouldn’t we do that now?”

  “Maybe not,” Kota said. He came forward kissed the top of my head, and guided me toward the door. “I’ll let Mr. Blackbourne know he seemed upset, but for now, maybe we should give him a break. Okay?”

  It had to be enough for now. I felt terrible for talking about Luke in such a way. I wasn’t sure he knew my thoughts about him being Volto, but it was clear he had been interrogated about what had happened. After the week he’d had of being yelled at by North, maybe he’d simply had enough.

  For the rest of the day, I did what they needed me to, though quietly. No one said a word about Luke to me. Either Kota kept it to himself, or the others weren’t going to talk to me about it.

  It didn’t alleviate the guilt or the questions I had about Luke. It sounded like Luke had been asked by some of the others about his actions. He didn’t answer us directly, he simply ran off.

  What was he hiding?

  UNPREDICTED

  By Monday morning, I was so tired, I was sure I got dressed, ate a quick breakfast and got into Kota’s car without ever opening my eyes.

  It was my first day on a new schedule, at least until Mr. Blackbourne could figure out how to change it again without creating more problems.

  I was told by Kota that Mr. Blackbourne would follow me via the cameras for the day and that someone would always be there to meet me at the end of each class and escort me to the next.

  From this point on, I had to attend every class, every day.

  Mr. Hendricks supposedly would be in today to continue his scheme to draw attention away from himself. Kota suspected it was his exit plan, that Mr. Hendricks would wait until someone looked like he was going to jail or at least close, and then scoot out of town.

  That was the theory, anyway. Mr. Blackbourne and the others planted some false dirt for Mr. Morris to hand over to Mr. Hendricks. They wouldn’t tell me what it was and I suspected not all of them were made aware of exactly what it was.

  We returned to school Monday morning. Anticipation weighed on me. The boys put their uniforms back on this time. They hadn’t gotten together to discuss what to do about uniforms, so the consensus was to simply continue to wear them.

  When we passed people by walking in the hallways, I was alert, focusing on everyone, and no one. I passed by familiar faces. Karen waved quietly to me from across the hall. I spotted Jay talking with someone I didn’t know.

  I stopped to look at Jay, wondering if I should go talk to him.

  Kota squeezed my hand and tugged me along. He seemed aware of what I intended and then quietly was telling me not to.

  Maybe he was right. I wasn’t really awake yet. Confronting anyone at this point probably wasn’t something I personally should be doing.

  During the morning wait for homeroom, I was leaning against Silas, the only one of the boys I was safe to lean against during school hours. He held me up while I rested my head against his arm. He and Nathan were surprised they hadn’t gained any weight from the Thanksgiving food, while Kota tried to explain thermodynamics and why they likely hadn’t gained any actual fat.

  I wasn’t really listening to them, my mind focused only on trying to follow the new schedule. I tried memorizing it, but then two minutes later after I put the paper away, had to pull it back out when I realized I couldn’t remember where to go after English.

  Too much stress over the weekend.

  Luke was there, too, although he was quiet. I looked for signs that he knew what I’d said about him to Kota, but he gave no indication of it.

  During homeroom, I put my head down on my desk. What felt like two minutes later, Luke was nudging me awake.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You look pale.”

  I nodded, thinking I was simply stressed and overtired. “Just tired. Maybe a little anxious about the new classes,” I said.

  “Don’t be.” He grabbed my book bag for me and he and North walked with me toward class. “Don’t even worry about it. Your teachers won’t know what to do with you, and will try to simply get you to join in where they are. You might have slightly different reading and assignments. We’ll catch you up. Collect what you need. Kota will sort it out after school.”

  I appreciated him talking so nicely to me. I wanted to talk to him about yesterday, but I didn’t want to get into it right now.

  I tried to pretend that homework was all I was worried about. I followed the boys outside to walk along the path toward the trailers,
and to our English class. Luckily this one I shared with them hadn’t changed. Unfortunately, I was still tired and out of it. Maybe I needed another coffee. The one I’d had this morning didn’t seem to be working.

  Ms. Johnson asked everyone to split up into different groups, except she chose the groups. “You all seem to pick the same two or three people every time. Let’s change it up a bit.”

  Groans erupted from the students that we didn’t get to pick our own groups, but that didn’t change her mind. She counted off teams. I ended up in a group of mostly girls.

  There were eyeballs on me, but I was too tired to care.

  “Suspension,” was whispered among a few of them.

  Maybe it was because it was all four of us that had been gone: Me, Kota, Luke and Gabriel. Was Ms. Johnson notified I’d been stuck in suspension? Would she have told the class?

  What did it matter to them?

  Everyone got to work. For a while, I just listened to my group debate how they were going to do the project. I had my head propped up in my hand, looking over the material of some old American short story, pretending to read it.

  Suddenly, during the discussion, my stomach rumbled and twisted. I sat up carefully, examining what I was feeling. Were my nerves getting to me? I needed to calm down, to listen to the others and not worry.

  Minutes creeped on. The girls talked, still debating on what they were going to do and how they were going to divide up the work. I pretended to be listening, but I began to sweat. Why was it so hot in the classroom? I took off my jacket, needing to feel something cold against my skin.

  I sank down, resting my head against the desk. It was cool to the touch but it wasn’t enough.

  “Sang,” someone called.

  I picked up my head slowly, looking over my shoulder.

  It was Gabriel, looking upset and concerned.

  My next focus was at Kota on the other side of the room. He had stood up to look at me over the heads between us. I didn’t see anyone else. I didn’t even care that they were all staring. I was wondering why they wanted my attention. Had something happened?