“Hey, Wist, how you feelin’?” asks Whit.
I wince and croak back, “What’s with all the noise and the bumpety-bump?” I’m still not able to open my eyes properly to see where I am.
“We’re having another New Order van ride,” he says, helping me sit up.
“Water?” I croak.
Whit shakes his head. “Strangely, they didn’t give us the van with the minibar.” He leans up toward the front seat. “Anywhere up here on the right will be fine,” calls Whit through the grate, as if we’re riding in a taxi going to a Sunday matinee. He’s trying to cheer me up, I guess.
The goon riding shotgun-and wouldn’t you know it, he actually has a shotgun-slams the bulletproof-glass divider closed.
“Nice fellow,” says Whit. “Maybe a little too intense.”
A wave of panic engulfs me now. I don’t know if I can go through another imprisonment-the endless hunger, the mind-splitting thirst, the soul-crushing hopelessness…
Whit senses that I’m freaking out. “We’ll be okay,” he says. “We wouldn’t be here today if we weren’t survivors, and if we stunk at jailbreaks, right?”
I know he’s trying to be sweet, but what an idiotic thing to say. I’d scream at him if my head didn’t hurt so much. “We wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t fallen for…” Eric. I can’t even say it. Just the thought of that sad, pitiful, god-awful betrayal is like another knife in my gut.
“Look,” Whit says, pointing to the window at the back of the van. “At least this time they gave us a view. Want to take in some Overworld scenery?”
I shrug listlessly. I can still see Eric in my mind, and all I want to do is stay curled in a ball and just give up.
Then I see Mrs. Highsmith in my mind’s eye. And I remember the music. Positive energy… beating the blues. So I let Whit help me up.
Now I can see what’s going on.
We’re speeding down an empty six-lane highway with those New Order billboards lining both sides-giant ones, every tenth of a mile or so. It’s kind of hard to stay positive watching all of this pathetic crap-His Resplendent Baldness cavorting with upper-level bureaucrats, unveiling plaques to renamed Freeland cities: ONETOWN, NEW ORDER ACRES, VICTORYVILLE, BRAVE NEW ESTATES. It’s no wonder Beaners look so glassy-eyed and out of it 24-7.
I’m ready to sink back to the floor when the monotony is interrupted by a giant message in horrifyingly bright-red New Order lettering.
WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.
CLASS 1 CRIMINALS ELIZA AND BENJAMIN ALLGOOD ARE IN CUSTODY.
STAY TUNED FOR EXECUTION EVENT DETAILS.
THIS IS ANOTHER GREAT DAY.
And there, in the middle of the video displays, are my parents-in orange prison jumpsuits, gagged and shackled.
My knees buckle, and I sink back to the floor.
Chapter 43
Whit
AS WISTY FALLS to the floor again, sobbing against my pants leg, I keep my face pressed to the glass, waiting for the details of the execution event. I don’t actually want to know, but I have to know. How much time do we have? To find our parents, to plan our escape?
But we’re in between billboards now, and traffic is slowing down. I pound the back of the van in frustration. I’m about to crumple on the floor next to Wisty, but I’m suddenly jolted alive with a rush of -
Celia.
It’s her scent, no doubt about it. The perfume she wore the day she originally disappeared. It’s like she’s right here with me, like she never left.
I’ve never heard of a portal in a moving New Order vehicle. Is it even possible? I start pounding on the floor, the walls, then the back van doors, shouting her name.
“Whit, stop it.” Wisty looks at me with red, weary eyes. “Celia’s gone. You’ve lost it. Our parents are scheduled for execution! Why are you -?”
But I’m pounding the window again. I see her hair. Waving across the next billboard some hundred yards away, streaming in front of her face.
Whit, Celia says. Her voice is muffled, as if it’s coming through a loudspeaker outside. You’re okay. You’re doing the right thing. Don’t give up.
I hurl my body against the door. “Get us out of here, Celia!” I know, at least I think, it’s nuts. How can she be a projection on a billboard? But she’s so real. And I can smell her.
Are you even listening to me, Whitford Allgood? I said, you’re doing the right thing.
I don’t even care that she sounds annoyed. I love it. It reminds me of when she’d start telling me about her chem test in the hall at school, and I’d just give her a kiss right in the middle of her sentence. “Are you even listening to me, Whitford Allgood?” she’d say, and I’d feel seriously warm all over.
Am I listening to her now? I am actually. The sound of her voice is like a drug I can’t get enough of.
The van is getting closer to the billboard. My face can’t be pressed any harder against the glass, my body flattened against the door. We’re passing right by her image, and I practically feel the heat of her breath on my cheek.
You need to turn yourself in, she continues. And you’re on your way to The One right now. It’s the only way. If you want us to be together again, it’s the only way.
“Together again?” I ask.
“Together again,” she repeats as we pull away.
And then she’s gone. But I’m still dazed by the lingering image of Celia until we turn in through a very high gate marked BUILDING OF BUILDINGS.
Chapter 44
Wisty
WHIT AND I MAY have electrodes all over our arms, but at least we’re upright and sitting in high-backed leather chairs so comfy it’s like swimming in butter. And we each have a glass of water next to us. It’s all five-star accommodations here at the Building of Buildings, which is basically The One’s crib and bat cave-type place, and it’s where the very grumpy men in the van brought us.
Maybe I could get used to this?
Whit and I had both been curled in the fetal position in the back of the van when suddenly we were yanked out and escorted into the B of B. So this had started out as one of our most pathetic public parades into captivity yet.
I actually made eye contact with some of the citizens who were watching as we trudged across the luxuriously outfitted marble lobby. Maybe I’ve been infected with a big-ego savior complex, but I thought I saw a flash of… respect, maybe even admiration, or at least something vaguely hopeful buried deep in some of the glazed Beaner eyes. It helped me get my groove back anyway.
The more I stare at our interrogator right now, the more I think maybe I see it in him, too. Grudging respect? He’s hiding it pretty well, though. He’s definitely polite but sterile to the point of being scary.
The questions have also been pretty sterile so far-such as name, address, and N.O. ID number. As if we have an address or carry N.O. IDs!
Then he throws this real doozy at us.
“Have either of you had any children in recent months?” he asks, deadpan. We both stare at him blankly. “Now that we have you and your parents on death row, we need to ensure there are no other living members of Clan Allgood. Please answer so that the polygraph can register a result.”
“No,” we both manage to say.
“Excellent,” he says, watching the readout from the lie detector.
“I get an A plus for not being an unwed pregnant teenager?” I say. “Wow. Maybe I like the New Order after all.”
He completely ignores me. “Now let’s get down to some very important business. On a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how would you characterize the efficacy of your parents’ instructions to you vis-à-vis harnessing your… abilities?”
“What are you talking about?” I demand. “As you said, let’s get down to business. Tell us when our parents are due to be executed! Are they being held here?”
“Ms. Allgood,” he says. Ms. Allgood? Never in my life…“I’m afraid I am the only one permitted to ask ques
tions here.”
“News flash, mister. I’m not big on following rules!”
Whit nudges me as if he’s signaling I should settle down. Since when is he going all Golden Boy again? We’re Resistance leaders, aren’t we?
The interrogator clears his throat. “We know your parents trained you. And we know they imparted to you certain, uh, highly sensitive pieces of information and/or equipment having to do with the scientifically proven energy forces that you both possess by dint of your genetic makeup.”
“Are you talking about magic?” I ask. Whit frowns. Mute Golden Boy.
Mr. Interrogator looks extremely alarmed. “Shhh! Take my word and do not use that term in this building-or anywhere! You’re living very dangerously.”
Perfect invitation for me to get punchy. I’m practically singing at this point: “Magic, magic, magic, magic, ma -”
The Repressed One finally explodes. He’s up and grabbing us by our collars, my shirt in one hand and, surprisingly, that of my Mute Golden Boy brother in the other.
“You make me ill!” he practically spits.
He looks at Whit. “You, with all your potential, and look what you do! Nothing! Sitting here like a mannequin! And your dynacompetent sister, here-why, she possesses a power so amazing, so devastating, so -”
There’s a sharp noise as the automatic dead bolt on the room’s door clicks open.
“Ah,” says our interrogator, suddenly whiter than a pickled egg. “Said too much, did I?” he whispers to himself. “Oh!” he manages to squeal as somebody steps softly into the room behind us and the temperature drops, oh, maybe fifty degrees.
And just like that the interrogator turns into a medium-size rubber tree in a large terra-cotta container. Somebody has just made him into the quintessential potted plant.
And I have a good guess who.
Chapter 45
Wisty
INSTANTLY, IT’S AS IF someone’s quadrupled the gravitational force in this place, and the energy’s leaking out of me. I can’t even sit up straight anymore. He has these electrifying Technicolor eyes-you’ve never seen anything like them. They’d be, like, model gorgeous if he wasn’t so evil. As it stands, they’re like an instant barf inducer. I’m queasy. But Whit’s still locked into his weirdly placid state.
The One Who Is The One steps around the table, sliding our former interrogator’s pot into a corner of the room with one foot.
“He’ll need some watering,” he says to nobody in particular, and then smiles silkily. “Or not.”
The One waves at the far end of the room and transforms what had been a featureless white wall into floor-to-ceiling windows. He can turn a man into a plant. He can fly. He can vaporize children. I guess turning a wall into windows with a panoramic fiftieth-floor view must be a walk in the park.
“Now,” he says, eyes briefly pulsing red but then turning a charismatic blue-a shade you might see on some touched-up face in a magazine ad (that is, if they made magazine ads for Pure Evil).
“Come,” he invites as if we’re old friends. He gestures at the picture windows. “Have a look.”
“Um,” says Whit, “we’re kind of hooked up -”
But all the polygraph wires are now gone, like they’d been particularly unlikely figments of our imaginations.
The One beckons gently. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” he says. I’m shaking now. The One seems to “enjoy” nothing except torture and death. What’s up his sleeve? And what’s up with my brother, for that matter?
Whit gets out of his chair and walks over to The One like an obedient child.
“S’all right, Wisty, come on.” Does he have some intel I don’t? Last I heard him say more than a few words, he was bouncing off the van walls with rage.
But I don’t want to be sitting over here alone. “For lack of anything better to do,” I say begrudgingly, “okay. Let’s have a look.”
“Why the impudence?” The One asks. “You do know I don’t intend to kill you.” He puts his creepy, long arms around our shoulders and leads us to the windows. Strangely, his touch feels totally warm, even a little reassuring.
“Will you look at that?” he asks almost wistfully. “Do you see how the sky and the mountains there seem to be joined? Almost seem to be one?”
We gaze out across the city, the foggy street and building lights twinkling through the gloom. The clouds on the horizon are a sinister purple that does kind of merge with the snowless mountains beyond the valley.
“Do you have any idea how much work it took to make this perfect evening?”
I start shaking again. It’s as if he’s a cat playing with mice. He just said he wasn’t going to kill us, but is he about to anyway? In any case he’s definitely going to put some serious hurt on us.
“I bet you’re wondering what I mean by that,” he goes on. “A terrific high-pressure zone had been screaming down across the northern plains and would have brought torrential downpours tonight. Possibly even hailstorms.”
We look at him blankly.
“So I stopped it.”
Now I get it, and what he’s done is pretty mind-blowing actually.
He raises his arms to point at a cloud on the horizon, and with the most casual of gestures, he steers it in over the city. Now he’s making a spinning gesture with his other hand, and the cloud rotates. And now he’s guiding in another massive cloud, and another, and another… Soon there’s an enormous swirling, lightning-streaked vortex circling over the entire city.
As it churns and intensifies, the winds start rattling the windows. My ears pop as the pressure in the room drains. Does he plan to have us sucked up into the black core of the vortex? Is that tonight’s plan? The rain is crashing down in iron-colored curtains. The building is groaning on its foundation. Is he going to vacuum the entire city off the face of the Earth?
But then he snaps his fingers, and the storm moves in reverse. The spiral turns backward and de-intensifies, and then the clouds retreat to their original stations in the sky.
“Now, you try, Wisteria,” he says.
Chapter 46
Wisty
“WHAT?” I’M CAUGHT off guard-completely flabbergasted. Then it gets even weirder. Suddenly it’s as if I’m at my piano lessons again, and he’s Mr. John Masterson, my sweet-as-pie teacher, encouraging me to believe in myself. Say what?
“You have more than enough power to do it. Just tell the energy what it should do, and let it out. You saw what I did. Give your power that same image, and let it go. I have every confidence in you and your wonderful Gift.”
He’s out of his mind. Turning people into animals is, I admit, pretty cool, but it’s, like, finite. Graspable. I can’t wrap my mind around the sky, the wind, clouds, hurricanes-that’s big-time.
“I can’t do that,” I whisper.
“Now, Wisteria,” he says, a tone of threat creeping into his recently soothing voice.
I close my eyes and try to remember exactly how the clouds raced in over the city, how they joined together and began to swirl like an upside-down, ink-filled toilet flushing in the sky, the lights of the city twinkling below and almost disappearing as the rain whipped down. I let the tune of Mrs. Highsmith’s song work as a soundtrack as I imagine it all playing before me… Can I actually do this? More important, do I want to? How can I live, and be the same person, with so much power?
And then I feel my heart flip inside me. My whole being flips.
“Idiot!” he screams.
I open my eyes. The clouds are exactly where they were. The only thing that’s changed is that the city has gone entirely dark; even the lights in the room are out. We’re bathed in evening shadow.
“You put out the lights, Wisty. All the lights,” whispers Whit.
Chapter 47
Wisty
THE ONE IS PAST polite whispering. “You turned off the city’s electricity!” he screams. “Reactivate it immediately!”
I try, but I don’t know how I did it in the first plac
e, much less how to reverse it. Hum Mrs. Highsmith’s song backward? I can’t. I’m panicked.
“You chaotic child!” he says. “You really don’t have a shred of control, do you? Now The One Who Manages The Power Grid and his incompetent minions will be spending hours attempting to repair what you so blithely have done!”
I’m madly trying to think of a poem about light dawning. There must be one! Why is my mind like a slushie when I’m around The One?
He pauses as some deeply unpleasant thought settles into his mind.
“Do you have any idea how much power it takes to do what you’ve just done? Or the applications to which such an ability might be put? Do you?”
He grabs my head in his long-fingered hands. It’s no longer a warm touch. His skin is so cold it stings. He’s hurting me now. A lot.
“Time for a pop quiz, my dear Wistful,” he says ominously. “Do you remember anything, anything at all, from your Biology 101 class? How about physics? Chemistry?” His hands are pressing harder into my temples.
“I… must’ve… skipped… those,” I manage to eke out through my clenched teeth. This is pain like I’ve never experienced before.
“Ah. I should have expected as much from a truant. What a shame that you know so little,” he spits out, “about your Gifts. About how the functioning of the human mind, and thus the body, is controlled by electrical impulses. Electricity, in a sense.”
The One’s coldness extends invisible tentacles inside me. Ice is growing down my spine. “And I… should care… because…?”
“You. Foolish. Child!” he screams, shaking my head now, practically crushing my skull. “You have no respect for what you’ve been given!”
I try to flame up but realize I can’t. He’s entirely draining the magic from me. All the warmth is slipping from my body. Like I’m dying. He’s actually killing me right now, isn’t he?
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