Criminal Destiny

by Gordon Korman

  We fill them in, and the next few minutes are a mad scramble of kicking into shoes, and gathering up our freshly stolen backpacks. We snatch the keys from the kitchen hook, and race for the garage.

  The girls pile into the back of the Jeep; Malik and I take the front, with me at the wheel. We try every button and switch, looking for the garage door opener, starting the wipers, the washers, high beams, and fog lights. Finally, Malik locates it rubber-banded to the sun visor. He presses the button, and the door begins to rise.

  I watch it through the rear-view mirror. It reveals the last thing any of us want to see. A taxi is parked at the curb, and the Campanella family is piling out, retrieving their luggage. They stop what they’re doing, and stare open-mouthed at their garage.

  “Hang on!” I throw the Jeep into reverse and stomp on that gas pedal like it was a venomous spider. The car shoots backward down the drive, clipping one of the suitcases, which bursts open, hurling clothing up in the air. A Hawaiian grass skirt comes down on the windshield, and Malik tries to brush it aside with the windshield wipers.

  The dad of the family is sprinting toward us now, bellowing in fury.

  I stomp on the brake, throw the car into gear, and we take off with a squeal of tires. I have to swerve to avoid Mr. Campanella, and jump the curb, flattening his mailbox.

  By the time we turn the corner out of sight, he’s already on his cell phone.

  “Calling the cops,” Malik guesses.

  I get up to speed on the main road, keeping my eyes peeled for a freeway entrance away from this neighborhood. “Listen, you guys,” I toss over my shoulder. “In another minute, this car’s license number is going out over the police radio as stolen. There’s no way we can drive it to Jackson Hole.”

  Amber pounds the back of my seat. “We have to ditch it!”

  “Not here!” Malik counters. “They’re looking for the car, but they’re looking for us too. We’ll be four morons, wandering on random streets, just waiting to be arrested.”

  I make a snap decision. “The bus station.”

  “In downtown Denver?” This from Tori. “Isn’t that too risky? There are more cops there than anywhere.”

  “Not necessarily,” I counter. “We’ll separate so they’ll never see four of us together. They don’t know what we look like, and they won’t recognize Amber. Then it’s on to Jackson Hole—by bus.”

  “There’s only one problem,” Tori muses nervously. “If they find the Jeep near the terminal, they’ll know we left town on a bus. They can radio every driver, and ask about four kids.”

  “They won’t find the Jeep near the bus station,” Malik promises.

  “What are you talking about? Of course they will!”

  He grins. “Just get us to the bus station, and leave everything else to me.”

  I have absolutely no idea where I’m going, but the Jeep’s navigation system is easy enough to follow, and soon we’re headed downtown on the highway. I can’t tell you it’s a breeze. We spend most of the ride in stiff-necked misery, scouring the road for police cars. We even spot a couple. Luckily they’re too far away to notice us.

  At one point, we hear a siren, and I nearly drive up a telephone pole. But it turns out to be an ambulance. False alarm.

  When we reach downtown, the traffic thickens, and so does the tension. Pedestrians and fellow motorists can see right into our car. In my mind, our license plates are the size of billboards, pulsating with the neon message: Stolen Car. Arrest These Kids. If we’re going to get caught, it’s sure to happen here, and soon.

  And then the bus station is looming on the right. “What now?” I ask Malik.

  “Drop the girls here,” he instructs. “We’ll meet on the platform for the next bus to Jackson Hole.”

  Tori is anxious as they climb out of the Jeep. “What are you guys going to do?”

  “We’re going to find the worst neighborhood in Denver.”

  I’m pretty sure they think he’s joking—which is what I think until he directs me through the narrow streets behind the terminal, carefully choosing each turn so that it will take us down a dirtier, more dilapidated, garbage-strewn block. Soon we see graffiti on the walls, security bars on the windows, and seedy-looking characters on every stoop and corner. I know everything seems kind of seedy compared with Serenity. But even by big city standards, this is pretty scary.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I ask nervously. “This looks like a really dangerous place.”

  “Probably,” Malik agrees, his voice nervous but determined. “But when you need to make a car disappear, it’s where you want to be. Stop here, and don’t turn off the engine.”

  “But why—?”

  He shuts me up with a look. “Just follow my lead.”

  We get out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition and the motor running, and begin to hurry up the block. By the time we reach the corner, there are already two figures circling the Jeep.

  “They’re going to steal the car!” I hiss.

  “That’s the whole idea,” he intones. “By the time the cops find it, it’ll be miles from the bus station, and we’ll be long gone.”

  “Those poor Campanellas.”

  “What do you care?” he demands a little peevishly. “They already know their car is stolen. They watched us take it. What difference does it make if we keep it, or pass it on to the next crooks?”

  Next crooks. My stomach sinks further. “I’d hate to meet the guy you’re cloned from.”

  “He’s old news,” Malik scoffs. “He’s rotting in jail somewhere. I’m the one you have to worry about. And I’m just starting to get the hang of the outside world.”

  Sometimes Malik scares me.

  10

  AMBER LASKA

  The bus ride to Jackson Hole takes fifty years. At least, that’s what it feels like. The real number is more like thirteen hours, which is bad enough. When you grow up in a town that can be crossed on foot in eight minutes, five hundred plus miles has no meaning for you.

  We decide that it’s too risky to sit together. The police are searching for a group of four, so traveling as solo kids seems the safest. At first I’m almost looking forward to it—some alone time to organize my thoughts, maybe even make a mental to-do list. But then I realize there’d be nothing to put on it. Ballet practice? Yeah, right. Homework? I’m not even in school. My goal weight? I haven’t stepped on a scale since leaving Serenity. The things I worked so hard to keep under tight control before just aren’t in my life anymore.

  And the weirdest part? I don’t even care. Compared to what we’re facing out here—like finding Tamara Dunleavy, and learning the truth about ourselves—worrying about grades, or ballet, or a diet just seems dumb. It’s like mourning my long blond hair that I’ve been growing for the past thirteen years. It needed to be gone. Too bad. We did what we had to do. End of story. My “mother” called it my crowning glory. Consider me uncrowned.

  “Very womanly,” was Malik’s official opinion on the new me, delivered at the station in Denver. It’s revenge for my crack about the princess backpack—which is currently riding in the baggage compartment under the bus even though it could easily fit in the overhead rack.

  “Seems to me it’s more manly not to get all bent out of shape over a little pink knapsack,” I told him as he placed it in there among the giant suitcases and trunks.

  “There’s plenty of room for you down here too,” was his reply.

  Come to think of it, maybe I have one thing to put on my imaginary to-do list:

  THINGS TO DO TODAY (ONE ITEM ONLY)

  •Punch Malik in the face . . .

  But that’s not an option until we get to Jackson Hole.

  Okay, fine. It’s not really an option, period.

  Oh, please get me off this bus!

  My seatmate conked out on my shoulder ten minutes out of Denver, and is pressing me up against the window. I’m actually questioning whether I’m cloned from a real criminal.
A true mastermind would have figured out a way to toss her out of the speeding bus a hundred miles ago.

  I shouldn’t complain. Tori is two rows behind me, and she’s much worse off. The man next to her can’t seem to believe that anybody sent a twelve-year-old alone on a thirteen-hour bus ride. She had to come up with this elaborate lie about how her parents are divorced, and she’s on her way to visit her dad. The problem is she was so convincing that now the guy is peppering her with questions. If this keeps up, she’s going to have to invent an entire life story. Maybe when this nightmare is over, she can write a book.

  We were writing a book together in Serenity—a picture book for young children. Tori was going to be the illustrator. Funny what never occurred to us: that there hardly were any young children in our town. The only kids that mattered were the Osiris lab rats, and we were all in middle school.

  I try to pass the hours by going over what little we know about Tamara Dunleavy. Now sixty-three years old, she’s one of the richest women in the world. She started out a daring and brilliant computer hacker, but later founded VistaNet, the company that made her a billionaire. She’s currently retired, living on a ranch somewhere outside Jackson Hole.

  “Somewhere outside” might be the operative words here. I gaze at the endless miles passing by the window. We don’t even know if we’re going to be able to find her, or what kind of reception we’ll get if we track her down. But we do know that she walked out on Project Osiris, which could mean that she objected to the idea of creating human beings just for the purpose of experiment.

  Maybe—just maybe—she’ll be on our side.

  According to Tori, the scenery around Jackson Hole is supposed to be some of the most beautiful in the country. We have to take everybody’s word for that. It gets dark before we get a chance to see anything. We pull into the bus station after midnight, and wander the main strip, taking in our surroundings. At least we’re allowed to be four kids again. There’s no way the Denver police followed us up here.

  The town, Jackson, is nice. It’s the first place we’ve seen that’s as neat and clean, up-to-date, and shiny-modern as Serenity. I can’t even find a crack in the sidewalk or a single piece of litter. In school, my mother told us that our town was completely unique in that way. Lie number ten thousand, or maybe more.

  One difference, though—Jackson seems to be all stores and restaurants, and most of the shops sell either ski equipment, fancy candles, or T-shirts.

  “People here must be real dopes,” Malik concludes. “They can’t remember where they live unless it says ‘Jackson Hole’ on their clothes and coffee mugs.”

  “That’s not it,” Eli puts in. “People come here on vacation to go skiing. These shirts and things are souvenirs.”

  Vacation. Souvenirs. These are alien ideas to us. I have to say I’m not impressed. Life has big challenges, and deciding between the Jackson Hole steak knives and Ski Wyoming alpine bobblehead shouldn’t be one of them.

  “We’re not going to find Tamara Dunleavy now,” Tori points out with a yawn. “It’s the middle of the night. We need a place to crash so we can go after her in the morning.”

  “How are we going to do that?” challenges Malik. “I don’t think any of these stores went to Hawaii like the Campanellas.”

  We walk a little farther. After hours of sitting on the bus, it feels good to stretch our legs. The high-class shops and eateries thin out a little, giving way to the less fancy kind of places that we saw in Denver—convenience stores, burger joints, and something called a pawn shop, with a variety of unrelated objects in the window. You can’t tell what kind of store it really is. I’m pretty sure they’re not selling pawns, like in chess.

  The farther we go from the center of the strip, the less Serenity-like it gets, until at last we come to a neon sign that reads: MOTE, which is really MOTEL, but the L is burned out. Underneath it says Reasonable Rates, which sounds like us, since we’re running low on cash. It actually says Reasonable Rats, but that’s only because the E fell off and is lying on the grass.

  “I don’t want any rats, even reasonable ones,” grumbles Malik.

  “I thought your problem was bugs,” I needle him.

  Malik scowls. For a guy who makes a lot of jokes, he has no sense of humor.

  Tori comes up with a plan. I take our money and head into the small office. The clerk, who doesn’t seem that much older than me, has been sleeping, no doubt about it.

  “A room for one night, please.”

  He blinks at me, trying to wake up. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” I say, bumping up my age by two years. Credit to Tori for choosing me for this mission, since I’m the oldest girl. “My mom gave me the money to pay. She’s just parking the car. We’ve been on the road all day.”

  For a minute, he looks like he’s going to wait until I produce “Mom.” I feel like he can hear my heart racing. If we can’t convince one semiconscious teenager that there’s nothing fishy about us, we might as well go back to Serenity right now.

  In the end, the idea of going back to sleep is stronger than his curiosity about me. He comes up with a form to fill out, and slides a key across the counter. I give him ninety dollars, which doesn’t seem like a very reasonable “rat,” but I’m hardly an expert at the price of things in the outside world.

  “Thanks,” I say, and head out to sneak myself and my friends into room 12.

  The “Mote” is kind of cheesy, but as we walk to our unit, we pass a glassed-in room designated Guest Services. Inside we can see a coin-operated washer and dryer, an ironing board, a battered treadmill, and a computer and printer on a folding card table marked Business Center.

  “Internet.” Eli’s eyes light up. “You guys go to the room. I’ll see if I can find an address for Tamara Dunleavy.”

  Room 12 is smallish and not in the greatest shape. But this is our second night in a row with actual beds, a working TV, and a real bathroom. Luxury.

  We watch a news broadcast and discover that the outside world has more important things to worry about than the missing crazy girl in Denver and her three friends who broke her out of custody.

  I let out a sigh of relief. It was my screw-up that got us wanted by the Denver police in the first place. It would be awful to be caught, but even worse if it’s my fault. I was so sure talking to that cop would solve all our problems. For all my lists and organization, I was the one who did the stupid, impulsive thing that almost sank us.

  THINGS TO DO TODAY (AND EVERY DAY)

  •Look before you leap!

  But we seem to have lucked out. Nobody’s searching for us anymore except the Purples—and they have no way of knowing where we are.

  I hope.

  Malik is almost insulted that the manhunt is over. “The cops are such idiots. They’ve got four criminal masterminds on the loose and they don’t even know it.”

  Tori stares at him. “You’re kidding, right? This makes our lives a million times easier. Can you imagine trying to find Tamara Dunleavy if we didn’t dare show our faces in public?”

  “And we’re not criminal masterminds,” I add pointedly. “We just got our DNA from them.”

  Malik shrugs. “Stealing cars, running from cops, busting into a house—if you ask me, we’re putting together a pretty good rap sheet.”

  Tori glances at her watch. “What’s keeping Eli? You don’t think the desk clerk caught him?”

  “That guy?” I snort. “I guarantee he’s dead to the world.”

  “You know Frieden and computers,” Malik adds. “He’s probably all nerded out, surfing and downloading and reprogramming, having the time of his life.”

  When Eli finally turns up half an hour later, though, his expression is grim. “I can’t find Tamara Dunleavy.”

  “But everything we read says she lives around here,” I protest.

  “I’m sure she does,” Eli agrees. “But there’s nothing more than that—no address, no phone number. Not even a hint, like north o
f town, or near a certain mountain or river. Turns out you can be ‘unlisted,’ where your information stays private. It would be pointless in Serenity, where everybody knows everybody else. But here, rich people try to protect their privacy.”

  Malik shakes his head in disgust. “That makes no sense. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t show it off?”

  “I hope you never get rich,” I tell him.

  Tori looks thoughtful. “Just because she’s unlisted doesn’t mean she’s invisible. The local people must know about her—where she lives and places she goes. We’ll have to ask around.”

  There’s a new desk clerk at the motel when we leave that morning. When I hand in the key, I say, “We’re going. My mom’s just loading the car.”

  This clerk is an older woman, but she doesn’t seem any more interested in the clientele than the sleepy teenager who took my money last night. She gives me an absent “Have a nice day.”

  “Mom wanted me to ask you,” I forge on. “She’s heard that Tamara Dunleavy has a ranch around here somewhere. Is that true?”

  The woman looks blank. “Tamara who?”

  “Dunleavy,” I repeat. “You know, the internet billionaire.”

  She shrugs. “Never heard of her.”

  We have a very economical breakfast of toast and cereal at a diner. Why does everything we eat have to be unhealthy just because we’re fugitives? Can’t outlaws like vegetables?

  Eli tries the waitress. “Does Tamara Dunleavy ever come in here? It would be cool to meet somebody so rich and famous.”

  The waitress thinks it over. “Tamara Dunleavy—didn’t she play Penny on The Big Bang Theory?”

  “No, she founded a company called VistaNet. She’s a billionaire.”

  “We get a lot of celebrities here,” the waitress replies, “but mostly during ski season. Zac Efron came in with his new girlfriend once and he was so nice. And Lady Gaga broke her ankle snowboarding last year, but that was at one of the resorts. My brother is an EMT, and he got a great selfie with her in the ambulance.”

  We exchange bewildered glances along the counter. Zac Efron? Lady Gaga? Who are they and what do they have to do with a scientific theory about the origin of the universe? What is she talking about?