‘Come on, Chad,’ I said. ‘Don’t give up now.’
I tried feeding some liquid to him. He started to cough, and I stopped.
‘Just a little at a time,’ Drink said, looking around.
I could understand his concern. We were in a tiny valley, but still out in the open. No-one was around, but that could change in seconds.
‘We’d better keep moving,’ Zachary suggested.
Nodding, I forced some more of the mixture down Chad’s throat. Despite his coughing, it seemed like some was staying down. I wanted to keep him on his feet, so we half carried, half dragged Chad through the valley. I could smell the sea. I’d already felt a strange impulse in my arm. It was where the chip had been inserted. Almost like a compass pointing north, I knew the invisible craft was located on the coast to our left.
The valley flattened out into farmland. In the distance were a few farmhouses. A family was working outside one of them.
Taking refuge behind a ridge, we watched the farmers. We needed to keep moving, but I was worried about the farmers seeing us and raising the alarm.
I also wasn’t sure how long it would take for the authorities to realize there’d been a jailbreak. Possibly the other prisoners might see an avenue of escape had opened up, and they’d break out. I wasn’t too sure how I felt about that. Some prisoners were obviously dangerous, but many of them were innocent men. I supposed there was nothing I could do about it, so I pushed it from my mind.
The escape plane was nearby. Maybe only a couple of miles. We had to keep moving, but we had to do it in the open.
‘What about your powers?’ Drink asked, peering over at the farmers. ‘Can you use them to get us to your ship?’
‘They’re a bit depleted right now,’ I said. I didn’t want to say they’d stopped working. ‘We need to do this on our own.’
‘I say we go,’ Zachary said, eyeing the family. ‘Most people in North Korea will mind their own business. This is a government-controlled state. Raising a fuss because they’ve seen strange people in a field may not be in their best interest.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Drink agreed.
We started across the field. By the halfway point, we noticed the people at the farmhouse had stopped and were watching us. They didn’t wave or show any interest in communicating with us. Neither did we. Ignoring them, we crossed the field to a tarred road on the other side.
Here, we headed diagonally over another field that dipped down to the shore. I felt the strong pull of the GPS device.
‘We’re almost there,’ I said.
‘I think I can hear an engine,’ Drink said.
We paused momentarily. A truck weaved around a bend and headed down the road. We didn’t look back as the field eventually gave way to gravel. The rocky shoreline lay ahead.
A shot rang out.
‘Run!’ Zachary yelled.
We scurried down an embankment and out of sight as a bullet pinged off a rock to our left.
‘There it is!’ I said.
A modern looking fighter craft sat on the beach.
‘Where?’ Drink asked.
He couldn’t see it. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s there.’
We hurried across the rocks as quickly as we could, but it was slow going. I need my powers! But they weren’t working. I could feel it. Chad was getting heavier by the moment. Now the fighter lay less than fifty feet away. More shots rang out, and bullets pinged off the rocks around us. I tried forming a shield around us, and nothing happened.
No!
My powers were gone. Just as we reached the craft, the plane shimmered slightly. Zachary and Drink gasped in amazement. Obviously, they saw it too. A hatch opened automatically on the side. Bullets were flying everywhere now. Drink climbed in. I followed as Zachary struggled Chad into the aircraft. As the hatch started to swing shut behind us, Zachary cried out in pain, and fell to the floor.
‘I’m shot,’ he gasped, grabbing his leg.
‘Get us out of here!’ Drink yelled. ‘I’ll look after him!’
Getting us to the ship suddenly seemed the easy part. Now I had to work out how the fighter worked. I climbed into the flight cabin.
‘What do I do?’ I muttered.
‘Flex fighter online,’ the computer announced, and the display came to life.
‘Flex?’ I said.
‘Enter audio input,’ it said.
‘We need to get out of here.’
‘Destination?’
‘We need to get back to the United States.’
‘Destination inputted.’
The fighter lifted off the ground with a mighty roar. I fell sideways as it rose up into the air. Bullets were striking the side of the ship, but it seemed to be dealing with the attack with no problems. It surged forward and upward. Looking through a window, I saw the North Korean mainland fall away behind us.
‘Yes!’ I said, punching the air.
Now I had to make certain Zachary and Chad were okay. The others were back in the main compartment. As I entered, I saw Chad strapped into one of the seats. His eyes were slightly open, and he was looking confused.
‘How did we end up here?’ he asked. ‘Where’s the jail?’
‘We escaped,’ I told him. ‘We—’
I didn’t get any further. At that moment, I glanced at the others. Drink was strapped into one of the seats as well, but the person sitting next to him wasn’t Zachary. It was a girl looking at me with a grimace of pain on her face. A ragged bandage was wrapped around her leg.
My mouth dropped open as I looked about in confusion. ‘What—’ I began. ‘Where’s Zachary?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the girl said. ‘My name is Cecelia.’
‘Where did Zachary go? How’d you get here?’
‘I’m a shapeshifter,’ Cecelia said. ‘Zachary died nine months ago, and I took his place.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ferdy liked puzzles. He looked into Ebony’s face and saw two blue eyes. A nose. A mouth. Blonde hair. Her face was a type of puzzle. It was hard for him to focus on all its features at the same time, but he knew when he put it all together, it made up the person he knew as Ebony.
‘Ebony,’ he said.
‘That’s right, Ferdy,’ she said. ‘I’m Ebony, and I need you to open this cylinder for me. It’s a code. A cipher.’
Ferdy looked down at the cylinder. He saw the rows of numbers and letters. ‘E794…’ his voice trailed off.
‘What does it mean?’ Ebony asked. ‘Can you tell me?’
Ferdy looked into her face again. The man next to her was named Jeremiah. Ferdy didn’t like Jeremiah. He was a bad man, and he’d known a few bad people. The first bad people had been back at the place they called The Agency. There was a time before The Agency. Ferdy could remember snippets of it. A man and a woman. His parents. A brother and sister.
There had been a car accident, and after the accident, he couldn’t remember seeing them again. He remembered doctors, and he remembered one of them quite clearly.
‘This won’t hurt,’ the doctor said.
But the doctor had lied. It had hurt—a lot. After the drugs had taken hold, his teeth had clenched together, and he’d almost bitten through his tongue. After that, the doctors had placed a piece of rubber between his teeth.
When he’d awoken, the world had become both small and huge at the same time. It was small because he could only focus on one thing at a time. An entire human face was too complicated. Too confusing. By comparison, math problems or books were simple things. He could read and understand them immediately because he could see them all at once. They were easy.
Ferdy knew the entire periodic table of elements. He could recite them forwards or backward or tell anyone that Rhodium’s atomic number was forty-five, and its atomic weight was 102.905.
It was discovered in 1803 by a man named Wollaston. Usually, when he told people information like this—even his friends—they often interrupted him or ignored him.
People missed out on a lot of things. Sometimes they were stupid. Even his friends could be stupid, but that didn’t mean he didn’t like them. He liked them a lot.
Like Ebony. She was his best friend, and she paid him the most attention. Right now, her whole focus was on him as she stared into his eyes. ‘Ferdy, listen to me,’ she said. ‘You need to open this cylinder. You need to crack this code.’
‘A cylinder is a three-dimensional geometric shape,’ he said. ‘Its area is twice pi times r times h where r stands for radius and—’
‘That’s right,’ Ebony said. ‘But we need to work out this cipher. Do you understand? We need to work this out, or Dan is going to be hurt.’
Dan played computer games with Ferdy, and they had fun. He was another friend.
‘Cipher,’ Ferdy said. ‘In early times, it meant zero. Now it’s an algorithm used to perform either encryption or decryption.’ He stopped. His stomach was making a strange sound. It was hard to focus on so many things at once. ‘Ferdy needs chocolate.’
Jeremiah looked annoyed when he said this, but Ebony almost smiled. Almost. The expression on her face was something between a smile and looking sad.
‘Ebony looks sad,’ Ferdy said before continuing. ‘The Dorabella Cipher is one of the world’s most famous ciphers. It was developed by Edward Elgar to amuse his friend Dora Penny.’
‘Ferdy—’ Ebony began.
‘Ferdy solved it last Tuesday. What a funny thing for Mister Elgar to say to Miss Penny. Who would imagine he’d say—’
‘Ferdy.’
He looked at her. He saw her eyes, her mouth, her lips, her hairline. He thought about quoting Shakespeare again but realized she was pointing at the metal tube.
‘Can you solve this?’ she asked.
Ferdy looked at the numbers and letters—and laughed.
‘So funny,’ he said.
‘What is?’ Jeremiah asked.
Ferdy glared at him. He wouldn’t answer Jeremiah because he was a bad man.
‘What’s so funny?’ Ebony asked.
‘A substitution cipher,’ Ferdy said. ‘Ferdy likes substitution ciphers.’
Jeremiah looked very serious now. He was staring quite intensely at Ferdy, as was Ebony. Ferdy looked at them both, and then he looked at the string of letters and numbers, and now he started to recall the many books he’d read.
There were literally millions of them. Ferdy could read an entire book in three minutes on an ebook reader. Some days he read hundreds of them. That wasn’t including all the books he read during his early days at The Agency.
He thought about all those books, and he started to substitute letters and numbers, and they were all like the colors of a rainbow. The books didn’t line up together. Instead, they lay on top of one another, and he could see through them all at the same time.
There were the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Bible and a book about the lifecycle of woodpeckers and other books about music, and now the letters flowed like water in a river.
‘You can’t step into the same river twice,’ he said gravely.
He was checking on how seats were laid out in commercial airplanes and the works of T. S Eliot and how they would look if represented in Morse Code and the birthdates of thousands of famous people and a list of all the known stars and planets.
He laughed. ‘Pluto isn’t a planet anymore.’
It was all coming together now, and that’s how he liked it. He was Ferdy, and Ebony was his friend, and she’d asked him to work out the code. Now he was reading the Washington Phone book and checking lines of longitude and latitude and checking the population growth for the countries of the world.
He reached out with a hand and started pushing buttons on the keypad.
‘So simple,’ he said. ‘Stephen Hawking was born on the eighth of January in nineteen forty-two.’
Ebony and Jeremiah stared at him in silence as he continued to push buttons. Finally, he hit the enter key, and the Barricade device gave a soft click. It slid open to reveal two vials filled with a pale blue liquid.
‘Ferdy still likes chocolate,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty-Five
‘But I know everything Zachary knew,’ Cecelia said.
I felt ill in my stomach. ‘Such as?’
It was a terrible shock to realize that the person we’d thought was Zachary Stead was actually an eighteen-year-old girl named Cecelia Watson. I couldn’t believe the person we’d just helped escape from Yodak jail had taken his place. It didn’t seem possible. Yet here she was sitting in front of us, bleeding all over the floor.
‘I’m a shapeshifter,’ she said. ‘But I’m only able to do it for people I’m with at the time of their death.’
‘So where is the Sanctuary Compound?’ I asked.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘That’s my business. Where’s the compound?’
‘I’m happy to tell you,’ Cecelia said. ‘But then I want to be allowed to go on my way.’
‘After we make certain that what you’ve told us is the truth,’ I said. ‘Then you can go.’
‘I’m not satisfied with that,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to be.’
I felt like throwing her off the ship. Cecelia had lied to us, and now she was trying to use blackmail to get her own way. But before I could show her the door, a beeping sound came from the console on the flight deck. I entered the room, slid the door shut behind me, and punched a button on the console.
‘This is Palmer,’ a voice came over the speaker. ‘Do you read me? Over.’
Agent Palmer had told us before we left that she’d use her surname in any communications in case anyone else was listening. I examined the console. A lesson on how this thing worked might have been handy. I finally hit the right buttons, opened a channel, and explained what had happened.
‘Get Zachary—or Cecelia—or whatever she calls herself to pinpoint the location of the compound on the flight display,’ Palmer said. ‘Agree to whatever she says. We have no interest in apprehending her.’
‘Uh, okay,’ I said.
I brought Cecelia onto the flight deck. She spent the next few minutes studying a swipe map on one of the display consoles. Finally, she pinpointed an area in Montana. I kicked her out of the room and opened up the line again to Agent Palmer.
‘I see the area she’s pinpointed on your display,’ she responded. ‘We’ll have agents move in immediately.’
‘What’s happening with Brodie and the others,’ I asked. ‘Have you heard from them?’
‘Negative,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you at the compound.’
The line went dead.
I sat back in the flight seat as the Flex plane soared across the sky. According to Agent Palmer, it was going to take us around ten hours to reach the site. While there were no beds on the plane, the seats were comfortable. I applied more of the plant to Chad’s wounds and forced a little more of the mixture down his throat.
With Drink’s help, I tightly applied a fresh bandage to Cecelia’s leg. Fortunately, she’d only suffered a flesh wound, but she still looked pale. She dozed off, and I turned my attention to Chad, whose color had improved a lot. The cut on his shoulder seemed to be drying out. While I examined it, he opened his eyes and gazed at me blearily.
‘Hey, is that you, Axel?’ he asked.
‘It’s me?’
‘I don’t remember you being so ugly.’
He sounds better already.
‘I’ve always been this ugly,’ I said, smiling. ‘You’ve always been the good-looking guy.’
‘That’s how I remember it.’ He looked past me at Cecelia. ‘Who’s the beautiful girl?’
‘Oh, you’ve already met her.’
‘Really.’
‘That’s Zachary,’ I said.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘I think I’m going back to sleep.’
And he did.
I returned to the control area and examined the flight controls. This was tr
uly a fantastic piece of technology. The controls were touch screens, and although I didn’t dare touch anything, I made a mental note to get lessons after this whole situation was over.
I remembered the promise Chad, and I had made to The Agency.
Well, I thought. I might learn how to fly this thing if we work with The Agency. And a whole lot more.
Returning to the main cabin, I slumped into a seat, but then remembered there was probably a significant barrier to that happening. The Agency might not want me working with them. After all, my powers were fading. Maybe the others could stay.
Closing my eyes, it seemed like only seconds, but suddenly I awoke. The sound of the engines was changing. Much to my amazement, Chad was up on his feet and looking out the window.
‘How you going, partner?’ I asked.
‘Better,’ he said. ‘Much better. It looks like this thing is coming in to land.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘And not a moment too soon for sleeping beauty,’ Chad said. ‘She’s looking as bad as I felt.’
I went over and touched her arm. Cecelia felt cold and clammy, and her face was pale. She looked up at me through half-opened eyes.
‘Are we there yet?’ she asked.
It was Chad who answered. ‘We are,’ he said. ‘And there’s a welcoming party waiting for us.’
I looked over his shoulder and saw a forest below. Helicopters and vehicles were parked all through the woodland. Through some miracle of automatic flying, the Flex fighter found a clear area and landed.
We climbed out, and I breathed in the scent of the Montana wilderness. Wow. I felt like falling to my knees and kissing the earth. Home. Dorothy was right when she said there was no place like it! I helped Chad down the ladder. Drink followed next and lingered behind. I spotted Agent Palmer.
‘Well done, guys,’ she said. ‘You’ve really broken open this case.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We couldn’t have done it without Drink and Zachary…er, Cecelia.’
‘Drink?’ she said.
I turned around, but Drink was gone. The agents checked the plane and the surrounding area. He wasn’t to be found. It looked like he’d used the opportunity to escape.
Teen Superheroes Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 29