Enders (7 page)

Hyden watched the maintenance man get out of his truck and walk toward the service door before he unlocked the van doors.

“See this?” Hyden pointed to the thick walls of the vehicle. “It’s a blocker.” He knocked on the side of his door. “Lined with ti-steel.”

“This must have cost a fortune,” I said.

“How much is your life worth?” He looked directly at me.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re priceless to some people,” he said, looking away. He patted the side of the car. “When you’re in here, my father can’t access your chip.”

Just hearing those words made me shiver. I was there, talking with the
Old Man’s son
. I never could have predicted this.

“What does he want with me?” I asked.

“You’re one of a kind. The only Metal whose chip has been altered so you can kill when someone’s occupying you. And you retain your consciousness. I’m sure he wants to study your chip.”

“I’m happy to give it to him. I’d like nothing more than to get it out of my head.”

Hyden looked at me with serious eyes. “If only it were that easy.”

My stomach tightened.

“There’s so much I have to explain,” Hyden said, “and it’s all going to sound weird.”

“What’s not weird? Voices in my head, a chip that could explode, now you telling me the only way to be safe is to be in a tank lined with ti-steel for the rest of my life.”

“Or very high up. Or deep enough underground, like here. That way my father’s scanning technology can’t access your signal.”

“He accessed me when I was in my renter’s mountain cabin.”

“I know. I’ve been able to follow him in the chiptalk airspace.”

“What?”

“It’s like this: sometimes I look for his signal trying to access Metals—I call it chipspace. And I work to block him.”

“How do you know how to do that?”

“Before I was born, my father—his name is Brockman—was working on developing a chip for mind-body transfers. Lots of other scientists were trying. My mother told me that when I was young, I’d wander into his lab and stare at the whiteboard. She said I was listening, absorbing. I don’t remember it. My father didn’t believe her. Then, as she told it,
one summer day, before I could speak, I picked up a pen and figured out an equation that had been eluding him for days.”

“Really?”

“Maybe she was exaggerating.” He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen that.

“From then on, he observed me, treating me like another research project. Eventually, I figured out how to make it all work. We developed it together but argued about how it should be used. I saw medical uses, but he of course chose to go for the money.”

“Why didn’t he just sell it off, then, instead of building Prime?”

“He needed Prime to raise capital to perfect it. Prime also publicized the tech to the top-level buyers.”

“Like who?”

“Foreign governments, terrorists.”

“He’d be selling out his country.”

“That’s the kind of man he is. He only cares about himself. That’s why you have to be in a safe location.”

Something about the way Hyden said those words made me wonder. “You mean I can’t go back to my home?”

“There’s no choice.”

“But my brother, what about him? And Michael?”

“First of all, they’ll be safer if they’re not with you. You’re the prize, the one he must have.”

I squared my jaw. “I’m not going to leave them.”

“Your mountain cabin would be safe for them,” he said.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a package of mint strips. He popped one in his mouth and then looked embarrassed. “Sorry, would you like one?”

I took the mint strip and it melted quickly on my tongue.

“But he accessed me there, at the cabin.”

Hyden squinted. “He knew your chip identification number, which makes it easier to access you. It’s a unique number. But he lost the other chip numbers when Prime was shut down.”

“So how did he hijack Reece?”

“He found her on a scan.”

“Just a random scan?” I said.

“He’s looking for Metal. I can do that, but it takes time.”

“A Metal detector?” I pictured something I’d seen in an old movie.

“A very sophisticated one,” he said. “So now that you believe what I’m saying, that the Old Man is really my father, and you understand more about how this all works, you’re ready to hear the next part.”

I waited to see what could possibly be next. “Tell me.”

“I’ve already arranged for Michael and Tyler to be delivered to the mountain chalet.”

“You what?”

“And Eugenia.” He looked at his watch. “They should be there now.”

I was about to ask him more, when I started to feel sleepy. I leaned against his SUV.

“You okay?”

I nodded. “I’m fine. Just really tired.”

He opened the passenger door and I climbed in. I settled back in the seat and felt like I could sleep for a … hundred … years.…

CHAPTER FIVE

I was having a dream: I was in our house. It was before Tyler was born. My dad and I were huddling on the couch with a blanket over our legs. I could smell the buttery popcorn my mom was making in the kitchen. We’d ordered up a vintage movie on the airscreen, an old Western.

My dad laughed his warm laugh at how the gunslingers were mishandling their guns.

“That’s all wrong,” he said.

All of a sudden, a gun appeared in his hand. He wrapped my hands around the gun and pointed it at the airscreen.

“Hold it like that, see?” he said.

I wrapped my tiny fingers around the big, heavy gun. When I pulled on the trigger, the airscreen actor fell back, shot.

“I killed him, Daddy!” I cried. “I killed him.”

My father laughed.

I woke up with a dry mouth, in the SUV, rocking to the movement as Hyden drove the freeway. Below us, in the distance, the city lights sparkled.

“Hey, have a good nap?” Hyden asked, taking his eyes off the road for only a second.

“I was so sleepy,” I murmured, stretching my arms.

“All the excitement must’ve gotten to you.”

He exited the freeway. I didn’t recognize the area. Industrial. Seas of empty asphalt surrounded silent warehouse buildings. We entered the driveway of one of them.

“Where are we?” I asked, still groggy.

“My lab.”

I felt so tired. What had we been talking about before I dozed off?

Hyden drove behind a boxlike, windowless building, then pulled up close to a metal panel. A red laser beam scanned his license plate. Then the panel rose, revealing an orderly garage. No bikes or toys stored there, just some strange tools and a few metal containers. He drove in, and the panel shut behind us.

Hyden turned off the engine and I reached for my door handle.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t move.”

“Why?”

“Let me check it out first.”

“But this is your lab, your home, right?” I asked.

“My safe house.”

Hyden got out and examined every corner of the garage, holding a device and running it over the walls and behind each container. I figured he was looking for electronic bugs. I noticed a heat sensor panel on the wall showing Hyden’s
body as a moving red blotch. His was the only one, but still he checked everywhere, looking up, down. He couldn’t have been more thorough.

He went to an old-fashioned communication system on the wall and pressed a button. After talking into the speaker, he came back.

“Okay,” Hyden said. “You can get out now.”

He watched over me as I exited the SUV, then led me to a thick metal door and pressed some numbers on a pad on the wall. An elevator door slid open with a heavy grinding sound, like a sliding stone revealing a portal to a magic lair.

As we rode down, the air grew colder, making me more alert. I wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but the idea of going so far below ground level seemed wrong. Unnatural.

Hyden must have read my face, because he gave me a small reassuring smile.

The elevator door opened up to a corridor. From there, Hyden opened a metal door that led to a large, darkened tech lab. Small lights illuminated various spots, giving the space the effect of a museum exhibit. Airscreens dominated every corner, and strange components filled the room, some hanging from the ceiling—twisted bits of metal, thin, glistening strands of poly-tubing with colored specks moving through them. When I examined them more closely, I saw that the specks were tiny geometric shapes with moving parts. It was geek heaven.

Across the room, hunched over a desk, a man with long, wild white hair kept his back to us as we approached. Could it …? Could it be him?

“I brought someone,” Hyden said to him.

The Ender turned around. Even in the darkened space, I recognized him.

“Redmond!” I shouted.

I rushed up and hugged him. No sooner had I done it than I felt the awkwardness of it. He was an Ender who wasn’t even related to me, and I felt more for him than I was sure he felt for me. Embracing him just made me ache for my father. I pulled away.

“Callie,” he said with his clipped British accent. “That’s a much better greeting than the last time, when you held a gun to my head.”

I felt my cheeks redden.

“No hard feelings,” he said.

“I thought the Old Man had you captive,” I said.

Redmond looked at Hyden. “Hyden came to me, explained what he was doing, and I signed up. The paycheck is rather good, and I can’t say I mind working for a genius.”

Hyden shrugged in a halfhearted attempt at humility.

“But if the Old Man didn’t take you, who burned down your lab?” I asked Redmond.

“I did,” Redmond said. “We didn’t want to leave anything behind.”

I thought about the safe where he had indeed left something for me—the special key drive that detailed how he had adapted my chip. I didn’t know if he’d ever told Hyden about it, but there was no reason to bring it up. It was more of a backup in case anything happened to Redmond. And he was fine.

“So you’ve been working together. What can you do now?” I asked. “You can’t remove the chip?” Even though Hyden had already told me, I had to ask.

He shook his head. “No. I haven’t made much progress there.”

I knew he was going to say that. But the chance that we could get it out of me and Michael and my brother …

Suddenly I remembered Hyden saying something about the chip and my brother before I fell asleep. I turned to face him.

“What was that you said about everyone going to the cabin? My brother, Michael, Eugenia?”

“Ernie, my bodyguard, made sure they got there safely,” Hyden said.

“They’re safer there, at that altitude,” Redmond said. “He can’t access a chip there that he can’t identify.”

Redmond’s level of comfort with this plan reassured me … somewhat.

“Like the way they say phone reception used to be?” I asked.

“Very much so,” Redmond said.

“There was no time to discuss it with you,” Hyden said. “Once I saw that my father could blow up the chips, I had to move to protect your family.”

My brother. So far away in the mountains. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

“I know. I’m really sorry about that. But I’ve rigged up something for you.” Hyden brought me over to an airscreen. “We can’t risk this again—the fewer signal links, the better. But I knew you’d want to see for yourself. So we’re doing this once.”

He pulled up a chair in front of the screen and I sat. He touched an icon and Tyler’s face appeared.

“Tyler!” I leaned in closer to the screen.

“Monkey-Face!” Tyler grinned.

I recognized the weavings behind him from the family room of the chalet. “You look so good. Everything okay?”

“We had ice cream sundaes for dessert tonight.”

“It’s really late. You should be in bed.”

Michael joined him on the screen. “I let him stay up to see you.”