The tracker?
“Bloom obviously disabled it and that left us blind. But yesterday, when it began again, we followed the signal from Treble’s office all the way back to your horrible little cottage.”
The light on Paragon’s chest! Stupidly, we had fixed the one bit of Paragon that we really shouldn’t have fixed. By getting it to work again, we’d attracted the attention of the people that Uncle Jonah was trying to avoid in the first place!
I felt sick again.
“Now, enough of this.” He walked back behind the desk and sat down. “There are some questions that I need to ask you.”
He then went on to ask me lots and lots of questions to do with finding Paragon and all the things he’d done since we discovered him. Why didn’t we tell our mothers about him? Why didn’t we tell anyone about him? How did I know how to start him up? What sort of information had he divulged to us? Had he revealed the guns on his arms to us? Had he used those guns for any reason? Had anyone else ever seen him?
I answered most of them as truthfully as I dared, only holding back and leaving out details on a few of the questions. There was very little point in lying now. It had all fallen in on us and the WAB seemed to know most things anyway.
After what felt like hours, I asked a question back.
“What are you going to do with Paragon now?”
Woolf finished scribbling the answer to his previous question on one of the sheets of paper.
“Why?”
“I’m interested.”
Woolf put the pen down and looked up.
“Because your uncle destroyed the blueprints for the Paragon machine, we’ve no idea how it was constructed. So…” He sat back in the chair and crossed his arms. “In order to be able to build others, we need to rip it all apart.”
“You mean kill him?”
He sighed. “Like I said, we need to rip it all apart.”
CHAPTER 20
THE BRILLIANT VIVI ROOKMINI
As the afternoon wore on, I found myself lying on my bed staring over at the barred window. From that angle I could watch the clouds in the sky and it reminded me of the skyspace that had been built into Vivi’s bedroom ceiling.
It seemed like a thousand years since I first followed the clouds “scudding” (that was the word she used) across the sky. Hopeless, wispy clouds that carried so very little rain.
Vivi.
I hoped that she was okay. That she wasn’t too scared. None of this was her fault. It was only because she knew Uncle Jonah that she had found herself caught up in all this mess. It had nothing to do with her. Not really. But she was being punished for it all the same.
I thought about Mum, too, taken away to a cell of her own, worrying herself half to death about me.
And I thought about my dad. Was this how he felt every day? Stuck in a room with nothing to do except stare at the sky and think about other people doing the same? Was this the way he was living his life right now?
At about six o’clock, a soldier brought me my supper—a plateful of warmed-up frozen vegetables with a splodge of reconstituted potato and barely a sliver of roast beef. I gobbled it up hungrily and went back to my bed.
At around seven, a loud bell rang in the camp and suddenly there was a huge collective muttering and a clatter of boots outside. After a couple of minutes, the camp was the quietest it had been all day.
I climbed onto the table and peered out through the bars. Far off, in the distance, everybody was lining up for dinner alongside one of the big tents. I stayed there and watched the queue of hungry soldiers shift slowly along.
“Auden!”
There was a whisper just below the window.
“Auden! You there?”
“Vivi?” I stood on tiptoe and looked down. Vivi was standing flat against the freight container, her head looking upward to see if she could see me. “What are you doing here?”
Vivi smiled. “I’ve come to break you out.”
“I don’t understand. How have you got out of your cell?”
“I’ll explain later. But first I have to find a list of all the codes.” She looked around the camp. “I think I saw the soldier who brought in my supper carrying a board with codes on it into that building there.” She pointed at one of the makeshift wooden structures nearby. “Give me a minute.”
She crept quietly away and I watched as she softly pushed open a door and went in. A couple of minutes later she came back out, a sheet of paper flapping in her hand.
“Got it!” She waved the paper triumphantly. “Go to the door. I’ll let you out.”
My heart jumped about a thousand feet in the air.
I climbed down from the table and waited by the door. Outside, Vivi punched the code into the keypad and it bleeped accordingly. There was a click and the door unlocked itself. I pushed it open and stepped outside.
“Have I ever told you how brilliant you are, Vivi?”
“Not often enough.”
The camp looked almost deserted. Most of the soldiers and officers and scientists were busy feeding their faces in the canteen, and there were only one or two unlucky soldiers patrolling the compound.
“Where’s your mum?” I asked. “Did they bring her here? They took mine away somewhere else.”
“Mine, too,” Vivi replied, her head darting left and right. “I don’t know where. We can’t worry about them now. Come on.”
I followed her. Moving around in between the buildings reminded me of something. It quickly dawned on me that it was like playing hide-and-seek at the Sunny Vale Caravan Park—admittedly on a larger and rather more frightening scale. Instead of residents and Fabius Boyle, the game was to avoid armed infantrymen.
“What about Paragon?” I asked. “We need to save him.”
She looked around. “Have they brought him here?”
“There’s a large wooden building. Possibly the biggest building. I saw it when I came in. I think that might be where they were going to take him.”
We slipped down past a couple of tents toward the wooden structure. And froze. It just so happened that this particular place had a guard on duty right outside. We ducked down and hid behind one of the tents.
“What are we going to do?” Vivi asked. “We can’t get past him.”
I didn’t answer. There had to be a way.
Quietly, I tiptoed around the other side of the tent and peered carefully around the corner. One of the large watercoolers had been placed against the side of the tent and was in the direct view of the soldier on the door. I went back and told Vivi.
“So? How does that help us?”
I thought a little more.
“Well, we could use it as a distraction.”
“How can we use a watercooler as a distraction?”
I held the flap of the tent open and waved her inside. We could see the outline of the watercooler against the canvas.
“Let’s knock it over,” I said.
“What?”
“We need to do it with one big push or else the guard’ll see us and we’ll get caught. If we can do it in one go, he won’t notice us and he’ll just think it’s some sort of accident.”
She had a look on her face that showed she thought I was mad.
“Then what?”
“Then … we’ll see.”
She shook her head. “Not the greatest plan I’ve ever heard. In fact, hardly a plan at all. But … time’s running out and we need to do something. You’re sure he’s in there?”
I nodded. “Why keep a guard on the door?”
“True.”
We positioned ourselves near to where the watercooler stood. Neither of us knew exactly how heavy a watercooler was, so the amount of strength required was going to have to be a bit of a guess.
“Just give it everything you’ve got,” I whispered. “On the count of three. One. Two. Three!”
We both ran hard into the side of the tent, knocking the watercooler—which wasn’t as heavy as either of us had imagined—out of it
s mooring and onto the earth beyond. It hit the ground with a thud and a slosh.
Vivi and I quickly slipped out of the tent and, peering round the corner again, watched the guard at the door.
He was staring at the cooler, his face shaped like a big question mark. Then he looked around and saw that there were no other guards nearby to put the cooler back into its position. You could almost see the debate he was having in his mind being played out over his features. Should he leave his post and put it back? Or should he stay where he was and watch as precious water leaked slowly out of a couple of cracks and seeped wastefully into the ground?
The soldier licked his lips.
Then left his post.
He disappeared from our view, and as we heard him lower his gun to the ground to get hold of the cooler, we made our break. Running on the softest and most soundless parts of our feet, we covered the twenty meters in seconds—Vivi in front, me just behind.
At the door, Vivi twisted the handle without making a noise and pulled the door open just enough for us both to slip in. With the tiniest of clicks, the door locked itself closed behind us.
* * *
The room was filled with equipment and, if I’d paid it much attention, I would have thought that it resembled Milo Treble’s laboratory. But I didn’t pay it much attention. Because strapped onto a table in the center of the room was the only thing that I wanted to focus on.
Paragon.
Wires were attached to his arms and legs and wound their way into monitors and computers. The screens flickered and danced and bleeped and buzzed even though he was lying perfectly still. He was in standby mode and the only part of him that looked alive was the flashing tracker light that fluttered like a heartbeat.
But he was intact.
They hadn’t started ripping him apart quite yet.
“What are they doing to him?” Vivi looked at all the wires.
“This is nothing,” I warned. “Give them a day or two and there wouldn’t be anything of him left. He’d be gone forever.”
We both stood there for a minute or two, imagining this machine so full of soul, so full of life, being decimated.
“We need to get him away from here,” I said, leaning over and flicking the on switch. “Quickly.”
Paragon whizzed and whirred back to life, his limbs lifting themselves slightly from the table; his head twisted left, then right.
“Where … where am I?”
“Paragon?” A wave of panic washed over me. Had they already cleared his memory? Would he look at me like he’d never seen me before?
“Hey, Audendare! Vivirookmini! What’s going on?” He seemed fine. Then a moment of recognition. “Oh. That’s right. Now I remember.” His head tilted at a sort of concerned angle. “Are you both okay?”
“You need to keep the noise down,” I hissed. I could hear the guard taking up his position right outside the door again.
“Oh. Okay.” Paragon turned his head to face me. “Auden. There’s something I need to tell you. Something important.”
“Not now,” I replied. “First we need to get you out of here.”
“What are we going to do about these?” Vivi was holding up one of the wires that fed into Paragon’s legs.
“Don’t worry too much about those.” Paragon sat up and ripped all of the wires out of himself, tossing them aside. “They aren’t important.”
Paragon stood up and made a movement that looked as if he was stretching after a heavy night’s sleep.
“That’s better. What’s the plan?”
We were trapped in a building with one door, directly outside of which stood an armed guard.
“Er … I dunno,” I said. “I was rather hoping you might come up with something.”
Paragon looked around the room. “O … kay.” He was staring at a large pane of glass at the rear of the room that looked out onto another temporary wooden structure. “If we can’t use the door, we’ll have to make another one.”
Paragon went toward the window and pushed a table of equipment aside to get to it. He tapped the glass with his knuckles.
“Not especially thick … so…”
Suddenly his thumb on his right hand bent all the way back, exposing something small, sharp, and shiny.
Then out of the palm on his left hand sprang a rubbery pad. He pushed the pad onto the window and then started scraping the glass with the sharp implement.
“High-grade industrial diamond.” Paragon looked at us over his shoulder. “Will cut through glass like a chainsaw through a bucket of jelly.”
I laughed at the imagery.
Vivi and I watched as Paragon scraped a deep groove upward, then across, then down, and then back to where he started. Once the ends were joined, he slotted his thumb back into position.
“Now, just a little push…”
He pushed with his left hand and …
Clink.
… the large rectangular piece of glass came easily out of the window.
Paragon carefully pulled the glass through the hole he had made and leaned it up against the wall.
“There! That’s how we get out. Now, let’s go.”
He bent over to pick up Vivi.
“Wait!” I cried.
“What is it?”
“That!” I pointed at the flashing light on Paragon’s chest.
“What about it?”
“It’s a tracking device. It’s how they found you in the first place.”
Paragon looked down at the light. “A tracking device?” He sounded sad. “Is that what it is? But I thought—”
“Yes,” I said almost as sadly. “I know. It’s what we all thought when it started beating.”
We stood there silently for a few seconds watching the light on Paragon’s chest pulse.
“I thought it was a heart.” Paragon touched the light with the gentlest tips of his fingers. “Or at least … sort of a heart. A representation of a heart.”
Vivi stepped forward and touched him on his arm. “No. I’m afraid it’s not. It was just a way of keeping track of you. I’m sorry.”
I looked back over my shoulder and saw the outline of the soldier on duty. Time was running out.
“Look. Can you disable it?” I asked.
Paragon shook his head and sighed. “Nope. It runs on a system that I can’t override. Only a human can switch it on or off.”
“But you can’t escape with it active. They’ll find you in minutes.”
“Let me try.” Vivi was holding one of the discarded wires.
“You can’t do it!” I said.
“Auden,” Vivi said with a huge sigh, “some of us actually pay attention to things. When Dr. Treble managed to get the light working yesterday, I was watching everything he did. It wasn’t that complicated. I’m sure I can turn it off again.”
“You think?” I realized as I said it that it sounded as though I didn’t trust her.
Vivi shook her head. “Honestly, Auden.”
“Vivi,” Paragon interrupted. “I have perfect faith in you. Absolute one-hundred-percent perfect faith. As does Auden.” He took the wire from her and plugged it back onto the tip of his finger. “So … let’s do it.”
Vivi stuck the other end into a computer. All the while we were aware that dinner might soon be over and that the scientists would be back to finish whatever job they had started with Paragon.
We needed to be quick.
Vivi sat on a chair in front of the computer and tapped away. Lots of strange shapes flashed up and scrolled across the screen. Her fingers danced like lightning—I’d never seen anyone type so fast in my life.
Then she paused.
“Right.… I think this is the correct thing to do. If not, I might be isolating the tracking device and making it impossible to be turned off. It’s one or the other.”
“Vivi”—Paragon brought his head down close to Vivi’s—“go for it.”
Her fingers continued to blur over the keyb
oard.
“Ready?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.…”
She hit a button and …
The light on Paragon’s chest flickered faster for a second or two and then …
It stopped.
“It’s stopped,” I said.
We nearly cheered but just about managed to prevent ourselves, remembering the guard outside.
Paragon grabbed Vivi’s shoulders. “Have I ever told you how brilliant you are, Vivi?”
“How did you get out of the cell, anyway?” I asked. “You didn’t say.”
“By singing.”
It was my turn to look confused now.
“The lock,” she explained. “It was activated by the keypad tones.” I recalled the different-pitched beeps as the soldier punched the code in. “When the guard brought my supper to me, I listened and tried to remember the notes. Then, after he’d gone, I put my head close to the door and sung them back. Took me some time to get them exactly right—I’m not the greatest singer in the world—but I got there in the end.” She seemed pretty pleased with herself.
“Genius!” I grinned.
“Absolute brainbox!” Paragon added, and both Vivi and I laughed at his choice of words.
“You know,” Vivi whispered, “I really do think we ought to get out of here.”
“Yes. You’re right.” Paragon went back to the large rectangular hole in the rear window. “Come on. I’ll lift you both through.”
He picked up Vivi and eased her gently through the gap before picking me up and feeding me through. Then he climbed as silently as he could manage out into the early-evening light.
“Follow me.” We made our way around a couple of the flapping tents and the wooden buildings, ducking and hiding from the occasional daydreaming guard. We dashed across a thirty- or forty-meter unoccupied space to the broken-down barbed-wire fence, crawling underneath into the field beyond.
Once through, we squatted down to plan our next move.
“So,” I said. “We’re out. Now what?”
“We can’t go home,” Vivi replied. “They’ll be waiting for us there.”
The evening was particularly clear, and already the temperature was beginning to drop. Within an hour or two it would be unbearably cold outdoors. We needed to find somewhere indoors to hide away.
The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare Page 19