by Katrina Cope
Jayden nodded, and Avando turned and left the room with his cane making its familiar clicking on the floor.
Jayden started to move around the walls of the buildings. He was able to get a good look at what was happening inside the first building. From what he could see, it was an all-male dormitory. However, not many male students seemed to be in the dorm at the moment.
Perhaps they are still in class or maybe still plotting more terrorist acts, he thought.
He moved on to the next building, which appeared to be a large hall. He moved stealthily around the outside of the building while trying to get a better look inside. As he passed underneath the window to reach the other side, he heard strange sounds coming from inside the hall. When he was sure that he was in the best place for looking discreetly inside, he peeked into the room. Knowing that he was in enemy territory, he wasn’t happy with what he saw.
Standing face-to-face were many students who were dressed in white martial art uniforms. They had their heads, arms, legs, and chests all well padded, and it was clear that they were also wearing mouth guards. Jayden could see black belts hanging just under the chest padding—some with one stripe, and some with many. The whole room was set up like a typical martial arts center, with the floor covered in blue, padded mats. The black belts were facing each other in serious fighting mode.
Jayden stopped for a moment to watch and to see how good they were. He knew one thing for sure—he wouldn’t like to be caught by the students in this room if he were there in person. Realizing that what he was watching was only a very competitive martial arts lesson, he decided that it was time to move on.
He moved over to the next window of the martial arts room. This window turned out to be a sliding glass door that reached down to the ground. He dropped to his stomach and commenced a commando-style crawl past the glass. With the rush of adrenaline from his being exposed, his heart was beating hard and fast again. He kept an eye on the martial arts students while crawling slowly past the glass door, hoping that they wouldn’t look in his direction. His heart jumped to his throat when he noticed that the black belt closest to him took a quick glance his way. While continuing to crawl slowly forward, he watched the student carefully.
Terror filled him as he saw the black belt face his opponent, make a bow, and then excuse himself from the fight. He turned toward Jayden and began waking in the direction of the door. By this time, Jayden had reached the other side of the door, jumped up quickly, and searched frantically for a hiding place. Seeing that there were no such places available, he ran in between the martial arts building and the next.
As he reached the corner of the building, he heard the glass door opening. With his stomach in knots, he was unable to find a hiding place. He noticed that the two buildings were very close to each other, so he placed one hand on the wall of one building and one on the wall of the other. Happy that he could reach both, he did the same with his feet and started edging his way up the walls until he had gotten over a story high. Glad for the super strength of the surrogate, he hung there in stretched limbo above the height to which most people were likely to look.
Only seconds after he felt confident of his hiding position, the student—with his opponent accompanying him—appeared in the gap in between the two buildings. They were looking for something, searching every gap and looking in every shadow. Even though he knew his surrogate didn’t breathe, Jayden held his own breath, not wanting to be discovered. To his relief, the two boys continued past him, following the gap all the way to the other end of the buildings. They even had a good look in the open area that was brightly lit on the other side of the buildings.
“I swear I saw something,” the black belt said to his opponent.
“Well, I can’t see anything out here,” the other responded. “You just wanted to get out of the fight ’cause you were losing,” he teased his friend.
“Ha, ha. Nice try, but totally incorrect. I believe I had you beat,” said the first.
“Yeah, whatever.” They nudged each other playfully as they headed back to their class.
“I honestly thought I saw something,” the first student said again as they passed under Jayden’s surrogate.
“It’s all good. Better safe than sorry.”
They reached the back of the building and checked again in the open, grassy area at the rear before going back inside.
Jayden began breathing again. He positioned himself to climb back down but then realized that one part of the robot wouldn’t go any lower. Turning his head to have a look over the robot’s shoulder, he saw something white that seemed to be attached to him. He tried again to climb down, but to no avail.
“Um, Professor Showden?” he called.
“Yes?” the professor responded without looking up from what he was doing.
“I appear to be stuck—and what’s this thing on my back?” he asked, a little annoyed and also embarrassed because he was trapped.
Professor Showden looked up to see what Jayden was talking about. “Oh! That’s a backpack.”
“What? Why would I need a backpack?” he asked.
“That’s so you look like a student if you’re caught in a normal student area.”
“It would’ve been nice to know this before,” Jayden said, annoyed. “No wonder the other students saw me when I was doing a commando crawl in the dark.” He unhooked the straps on the bag, released himself, and jumped down from his hanging place. Then he grabbed a stick from the ground to knock it off where it was stuck. It appeared to be caught on a hook hanging between the buildings. He thought perhaps to hand signs to advertise events. “Do I really need it on my back?”
The professor appeared to be thinking and then answered, “Probably not.”
“Then I’d really like to get rid of it. I honestly think it’ll make it harder for me to travel around in the dark unseen.”
“If you must. However, I will show you a place soon where it shouldn’t be found.” The professor walked over to where Jayden was working his robot and watched as he continued.
Jayden proceeded to move around the buildings to where there was some sort of science lab. He moved around it with covert skill, carrying the white backpack under his shirt so that it wouldn’t be seen so easily. He peered through the window. The lights were on, and a small group of students were assembled inside the room. He stopped and tried to listen to their conversation.
Professor Showden had a good look at the outside of the science lab. “Just here would be a good spot to stash your backpack.”
“Here?” Jayden questioned. “Really?”
“Yes, here,” the professor said, smiling to himself. “The walls on the outside are white, just like the bag. You can prop it up against that pipe just over there so that it’s a little more hidden.”
Jayden wasn’t as sure, but he did as told. He noticed a large, towering tree nearby that would offer a good view into the room. He climbed up and watched the students inside the science lab, listening intently to every bit of conversation. He was amazed to discover that the ears on the surrogate had an adjustment for sound, so thankfully he was able to turn up the volume.
The students were talking about the bombing and how extreme it had been. After a while, a male student, who sat with his back to the window, turned around enough for Jayden to see his face. Jayden couldn’t believe his eyes—it was Brendan, Aaron’s surrogate. He looked over to see what Aaron was doing inside the “real” room. He had been so preoccupied by his own mission that he’d forgotten that Aaron was working right next to him. He looked over at Aaron’s screen and pieced together the different points of view. Yes, it was definitely Brendan in that room. Disappointed with himself for wasting so many precious minutes, he climbed down the tree and looked for his next location.
- Chapter Fourteen -
Message Of Difference
Hayley, Liam, and Dryden were already in the science technical lab when Brendan, Aaron’s surrogate, walked in to join them.
> “Hi, guys,” Brendan said to the others, who had their heads down and were working studiously on their combined assignment. They looked up.
“Hi, Brendan,” Liam responded.
“Where have you been?” asked Hayley. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“Oh?” Brendan seemed surprised.
“Yeah,” Dryden said. “We were supposed to work on a combined project together.”
“Seeing that we couldn’t find you, we made a decision without you,” added Hayley, oblivious to Brendan’s seeming puzzlement. “We decided to make a remote-controlled train that moves just like a car—freely and not on a track.”
“We’re copying it from one of the older students’ prototypes,” added Liam.
“A train? And copying it from an older student’s work?” Brendan asked. “Isn’t that kind of cheating?”
“No, genius.” Hayley stood straight and crossed her arms. “Seeing as we’re only juniors, we’re supposed to see if we can copy the older students’ work. Also, this tests whether or not the older student wrote down their construction notes correctly.”
Noting the annoyance in Hayley’s voice, Brendan said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean that doing so was a bad choice. It’s just that I was watching the news just before I came in. There has been a terrorist attack.”
“What?” all three of them said in unison.
“Yeah, I was shocked, too. Not only that—it was in a busy train station, and they said that it was set off by a remote-controlled toy train.” He looked at the plans for the train. “And it had many carriages, just like this one has,” he added, “packed with explosives.”
“Oh, Man! That’s really horrible,” Liam said, looking horrified.
Dryden looked as if he were going to be sick. “I’m not sure I want to build this now,” he said.
Hayley was holding her stomach.
“Do we know who made this prototype?” asked Brendan.
Liam shook his head. “No, they don’t want us to know who, in case we ask the inventor any questions that are not answered in their notes.”
They all fell silent while they all thought about what to do next.
“How about we continue making this to see if it works?” Brendan suggested. “Then, if it does, we can research some more and try to find out who made it. If it doesn’t work, then we know that it wasn’t this inventor who made the train bomb.”
“You know—that actually sounds like a brilliant idea,” Liam said.
“And to think I’d written you off as one of those vague, absentminded geniuses,” Hayley teased Brendan.
~~~~~
JAYDEN CONTINUED TO stealthily move his surrogate around the school campus. He had been operating the surrogate for a while and was becoming proficient with the functions. So far, he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, or anything that could help with the detection of the terrorists who’d set off the bomb. He hoped that the others were having more luck than he was.
Feeling more confident that he blended into the surroundings, Jayden edged his way closer to busier areas of the school. Getting used to his super strength, he’d often find himself easily climbing trees or going up walls. He’d peer into different rooms, listening to students’ conversations and watching what they were doing in those rooms. Mostly, they appeared to be either studying or having an early night, in preparation for a early start in the morning. He had scouted nearly every room at the school and was beginning to think that his time here had been a waste.
Under the last row of rooms he was about to investigate, he crouched in the shrubs. He studied the area for a sign of anyone nearby. While he was searching, he manually adjusted his hearing to a louder volume using the dial back in the room in the Sanctum. Picking up a hint of excited chatter, he concentrated on the source. Listening attentively, he singled out a few different girls’ voices.
“Did you see that?” one asked, bordering on hysteria.
“See what?” asked another.
“How intense was that?” answered another, also rather frenzied.
“What was?” asked the same girl who didn’t know.
Jayden started to think that maybe—finally—he was going to get some information. He paid close attention to the conversation.
“Didn’t you see Ethan Brady look our way?” asked the first one while accentuating his name.
“No. Did he look our way?”
“Oh, Karla! How could you miss Ethan Brady looking at us? He’s the cutest guy in the school. He even smiled at us,” said the first.
Jayden shook his head as he started to turn the volume on his hearing down. Girls, he thought, shaking his head while he listened to them going on about how adorable some boy called Ethan was. Shifting his focus to an area outside the building, he noticed a large, sturdy tree with strong limbs protruding from its sides. He saw that it had enough foliage for good cover, but not so much that it’d block his view.
He moved swiftly and quietly across the lawn to the tree and started to climb the thick trunk. He edged up the branches until he reached the correct height to let him see into the top row of rooms, above the level of those smitten, female teens. Laying the surrogate flat on a large, strong branch, he could look into the rooms on that level. He turned the volume back up and zoomed his vision in so that he could see clearly across the distance. While he checked the rooms on each row individually, he thought that not much was different from the other rooms in the buildings that he had already searched. These rooms had girls occupying them, and the top rooms seemed to have older students.
Pausing at the room just above the lovelorn girls, he noticed some older girls who were huddled together. They seemed to have a serious air about them and looked to be discussing a topic more serious than the girls below were. Having trouble hearing them over that excitable group, he shuffled his surrogate farther along the branch toward the building, while at the same time increasing the volume of his hearing.
“What happened?” one of the somber-faced girls asked.
“The train station in the middle of the city was blown up this morning,” answered a girl with pretty eyes.
Jayden’s heartbeat increased.
“They said it was hidden in a remote-controlled train,” the girl with the bushy eyebrows said.
“Didn’t—”
At that moment, one of the younger girls in the room below squealed in excitement at something one of the others had said.
“Make a prototype of that?” the older student continued.
“Yes, he did,” agreed Bushy Eyebrows.
“He either copied the model, or someone must’ve stolen it,” said Pretty Eyes. “Or, he did the bombing himself,” she added in a disbelieving tone.
“I doubt it,” Big Nose said, and shook her head. “I heard about the station, but what else was Amber saying?”
“That there was another explosive device found at the next train station.”
“What?” Big Nose asked in disbelief.
Jayden couldn’t believe his ears. That can’t be, he thought.
“Yeah. Apparently Amber and her team managed to find it and got rid of it before it detonated,” Pretty Eyes said. “The reason they found it was that it looked just like one of Dale’s prototypes of a toy robot.”
“The maker of the bomb must be furious,” Big Nose said while smiling.
“I bet the bomb maker is,” agreed Bushy Eyebrows.
“Do they have any idea who it is?” asked Brown Hair.
“Not yet. They’re still working on it,” responded Pretty Eyes. “I hope they find the culprit or culprits soon.”
They all agreed and started to talk about something else. Jayden figured that was his cue to leave. After what he thought was going to be a fruitless venture, he had now heard something worthwhile. He edged his way back to the trunk of the tree and decided to climb farther up to the highest secure point. He then wrapped the robot’s arms around the trunk while sitting its bottom on a solid
branch. He figured it was so high up in the foliage that it probably wouldn’t be discovered.
Unhooking himself from the surrogate’s controls, he approached Professor Showden, who’d gone into the other room with all the computers. Aaron was just starting to take his surrogate gear off as well. Eva and Robert had finished and were waiting.
Eva lit into Jayden. “Well, you sure used me a lot, didn’t you?” she said sarcastically.
“Sorry, Eva. As it turned out, I didn’t have any codes that needed to be broken or problems that needed to be solved,” Jayden said.
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said, laughing. “Professor Showden had me hook up to watch a room through a fixed camera as well as be available for you two, ’cause Aaron didn’t need me, either.”
Aaron joined the group, which was sitting in a scattered circle of chairs behind the office desks.
“So how’d we all do?” asked Professor Showden. “Did anyone find out anything interesting?”
Robert and Eva shook their heads in disappointment.
Aaron offered his information first. “I spent most of my time with my fellow students at the school. They were working on a group project, which just happened to be a remote-controlled toy train. They said they were using an instruction manual of a prototype made by one of the senior students.”
“Really?” Professor Showden eyebrows rose. “Did they know the student’s name?”
“No—they said that names aren’t given to them. They also didn’t know about the attack and were quite sickened by it. We decided to make the model to see if it worked and then try to find out who made the model,” he added proudly.
“Very good!” cried the professor. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us an answer tonight, but I will get you to continue your work on that as soon as you can.”
“I think we’ll find out,” said Jayden.
“Really? Why is that?” asked the professor.
“I’m not one hundred percent sure, but the last group of students I came across seemed to know something about the attack. Well, not the attack, exactly—but they knew a little more information related to it.”