Justice (8 page)

Jules and Cal reluctantly joined each other back-to-back and counted off their ten paces. Jules had a good jump on Cal and let out a whirlwind burst that scribbled a trail across the room, but missed her target. Cal ducked the blow and threw back a rippling attack that started thin and spread out like the beam of a flashlight as it traveled. It scraped the walls and forced M and Merlyn to the ground in order to dodge the blast from the sidelines. Jules leapt over the wave of force just in time, but Cal had already sent another pulse
that worked its way into a small webwork pattern, catching Jules before she landed. The blow popped her up and away, carrying her kicking and screaming into the wall.

‘I’m okay,’ said Jules, sprawled on the floor.

‘No fair,’ said Merlyn. ‘Cal’s clearly done this before. Look at the sophistication of his attacks. That can’t be beginner’s luck.’

‘I swear, Merlyn, I’ve never done this before in my life,’ promised Cal.

‘He’s telling the truth,’ said Keyshawn. ‘While showing alarmingly good skill, he could not have touched this tech until now.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Merlyn. ‘Maybe his dad trained him on it before Cal shipped off to Lawless?’

‘Impossible,’ announced Ben. ‘Fence’s father is unauthorized to use this tech, given his dubious relationship with Lady Watts. If anything, M should know the tech best.’

‘And why’s that?’ asked Cal.

‘Her father invented it,’ answered Keyshawn.

M wondered how many more times she would be tortured by hearing a new secret about her father from strangers. It’s not like she’d never met her dad, but she’d known him as the person who stumbled heroically into her room at night to calm her down after a nightmare, not as an art thief who also invented high-tech magnetized weaponry. And why would he invent something like this for the Fulbrights if he wasn’t really on their side? Maybe he was on their side after all. Maybe he
had
been, until something changed his mind.

‘My father invented a lot of things,’ said M. ‘From
fabricated stories to this weird new device. But that doesn’t mean he taught me how to use them.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Keyshawn. ‘Because you did escape the Maze in no time flat.’

‘The Maze? My father did that?’

‘None of this is more important than our current experiment,’ said Ben. ‘Freeman and Fence. Fight.’

M faced Cal. ‘Looks like it’s you and me.’

As her back met his, she realized how tall Cal had grown. He must be almost a foot taller than her now. Their steps began, but M was lost in thoughts about her father. His calmness, his dopiness, his knack for always making people laugh, even at his own expense … those details didn’t match up with this mad-scientist criminal-cum-Fulbright who was quickly overshadowing the father she once knew. A jolt coursed over her skin as her feelings flared. She was angry about the mysteries hidden under the mysteries in her life, and the suit channeled that anger. She felt it tingling through every bone as she pivoted on her heel and released a powerful Magblast at Cal, which looped like a crushing tornado. But at the same moment, Cal fired a cometlike blast and the two attacks tussled and held in midair, pushing and pulling against each other. M held her ground, digging her heels in as her outstretched hands shook and her legs trembled. Where the attacks converged, the friction of the pulses caused actual sparks to pop in the turbulent air. The smell of burning filled the room.

Cal closed his eyes, and M thought for sure that he was about to give up. Then a final thrust burst forth from him, blowing her tornado apart. A flowing pulse descended on
her, thudding against her chest. It felt like her legs and arms were being pulled apart.

Collapsing on the floor, M tried to catch her breath, but the blast had knocked the wind right out of her. The room blurred. Even through her mask, with its magic corrective lenses, the world looked like a loose watercolor painting: Everything poured into everything else. M felt someone lift her head and heard a distant sound that could have been a voice or merely the ocean crashing on the shore. When at last she regained focus, she realized that Jules was cupping her head and yelling at someone. She rolled her head to the right to see Keyshawn running out of the room. Then she picked her head up just in time to see Cal Magblast Ben with an attack that was ten times more forceful than what she had experienced. Ben crumpled and the audio finally broke through to M’s ears. It was Cal.

‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting out of here.’

He bolted for the door, and something inside M clicked into place.

It was panic. It was a vision of Cal captured and never released. But more than that, it was the notion that she needed Cal to help find her mother, to help find the moon rock, and to help stop whatever their parents had set in motion. And that wasn’t going to happen if he set one foot out of that door.

M jumped up and screamed, ‘Don’t run!’

Then, effortlessly, she fired a throbbing pulse that not only cut off Cal’s escape route, but tossed him clear across the room, creating a large dent in the wall where he impacted. He lay helpless, like a bird stunned by a window in its flight path.

As quickly as the energy had surged into her, it flushed out, leaving M shaking and feeling hollow. Something horrible had happened. But what horrified her wasn’t the sight of unconscious Cal or barely-there Ben. It wasn’t the appearance of several Fulbrights rushing in to secure the area. It wasn’t even the empty looks that Jules and Merlyn’s masks were casting on her. No, M’s horror was a sense of déjà vu. She had run screaming from this situation before in her fever dream. From the Fulbright who had held Devon coldly underwater. The Fulbright who screamed, ‘
Don’t run
.’ The very Fulbright who M had just become.

CHAPTER 8

BEAHERO

The Fulbright guards were not gentle. In fact they were exactly as rough as M remembered from her last time being caught, at Lawless. Ben led the way as the guards marched M and Cal through the illuminated hall. And even though M and Cal weren’t struggling against their captors, the Fulbrights still forced them along angrily until they came to a dead end. It was the first time M had seen evidence that the endless twisting hallways weren’t literally endless, and she didn’t like the looks of it. Ben faced the wall, which seemed monolithic and impassable, like the final turn in the wrong path of a maze. But instead of retracing their steps to find another way out, they watched as the wall slid open. It was a secret entrance … and now she and Cal were being ushered inside.

The room was crisp. White walls ran to a black ceiling and black floor, making the space feel as if it constricted around them, like a living beast. The rigid furniture was all right angles, and behind a stark, monstrous black desk
sat the first adult M had met since arriving. His blond hair was groomed carefully to create a helmetlike style that gale-force winds wouldn’t muss up. Refusing to stand, the man directed them wordlessly to the straight-backed glass seats opposite the desk. As M came closer, his eyes, his high cheekbones, and his strong build gave him away. He was one of the men who’d been watching them from behind the glass on the vertical course. And more than that, he was …

‘Mr Fence?’ asked M.

‘Ms Freeman,’ he replied curtly. ‘I do not like having to do this.’

‘What?’ spat Cal. ‘See your son?’

‘Enforce Fulbright standards on cadets who cannot behave themselves,’ Mr Fence answered firmly and without any emotion. ‘Downing, what happened here? Are you unable to manage the task given to you?’

Ben snapped to attention. ‘No, sir, I had things under control until —’

But Mr Fence interrupted him. ‘Until you didn’t. Guards, please escort Downing to one of the Glass Houses. We will continue our discussion there, but know that you’ve earned a demerit.’

The same guards who had marched M and Cal here on Ben’s orders promptly turned on the direct, and Ben’s eyes exploded like flares sending an SOS in the deep night sky. The very threat of the demerit instilled terror in this hardened teenager. M almost couldn’t believe that this was how the Fulbrights treated their own, but it made sense. Fear was a surefire way to keep each recruit on the straight
and narrow. Ben was being turned into an example, just as he had tried to turn her crew into examples by forcing them to duel each other.

‘Don’t take it out on him, Dad,’ said Cal. ‘He’s a jerk, but all he did was get blasted by me.’

Ignoring his son, Mr Fence said, ‘Freeman.’

The way he used her name was totally devoid of personality, as if he were naming an inanimate object.
Freeman. Cup. Table. Doorknob
. M stiffened in her seat, wrapping her feet around the glass chair’s legs, determined not to be dragged to a third location like Ben.

‘Don’t be a hero yet. There will be plenty of time for you to prove your bravery. I appreciate,’ Mr Fence said, swallowing hard after the word, as if it had been a foreign object lodged in his throat, ‘your efforts to keep Calvin in line and protect him from his own delusional ideas of escape. As you surely know, Calvin has not always proved the best at making the right decisions, but I am content that your paths have crossed. You brought him home and we don’t intend to lose him again.’

It was apparently the closest Mr Fence could come to saying,
Thank you for returning my son,
though he said it with all the emotion of an empty packing box. And maybe that was how he saw himself, thought M. His love for Cal was a job. It was up to him to protect his son, to shield Cal from the harmful outside world. If anything could hurt the implacable Mr Fence, it was probably Cal choosing the Lawless School over the Fulbright Academy. As if suddenly the prized package he had carried all those years turned out to be damaged.

‘Both of you,’ he continued, ‘focus on your training. You are safest there.’

‘What do you mean, safest?’ asked M.

‘Ms Freeman, please escort Calvin to the infirmary,’ Mr Fence ordered, as if she were one of his personal guards. ‘That cut on his head will require stitches.’

Indeed, a wet patch of red had matted into Cal’s blond hair.

‘Cal! Your head!’ exclaimed M as a fresh set of Fulbrights pulled him to his feet. They guided them both out of the room.

‘That will be all,’ they heard Mr Fence announce as the door shut behind them.

Six stitches later, Cal lay behind a white curtain. His father hadn’t said a word to him, had hardly acknowledged him aside from mentioning the laceration. If their situations were reversed, if it had been M’s father behind that grim wall, he wouldn’t have been able to shut up. M’s father had always been a talker, especially with M. He would lead her down bizarre paths, taking unexpected twists in conversations about anything and everything, making connections between subjects where M wouldn’t have seen them. A meal he ate in San Jose would transport him to a mountaintop monastery where he’d been hired to clean some ancient painting and where they had fed him a similar tortilla soup. As easily as that, he would make connections in his life and share tales of those experiences with M. She used to dream of a day when she would travel the world and make her own connections. And now she was, only
instead of eating another amazing meal, she was in yet another infirmary, listening to Cal breathing deeply as the stitches wove through him.

At least it wasn’t her who required medical attention this time.

Wanting to avoid the gory details, M hovered outside of Cal’s closed curtain as the doctor sewed him back together. The rest of the room was cloaked in darkness, cold and alienating, just like everything else at the academy.
How was anyone supposed to get better in a place like this?
wondered M. The concrete floor was smooth and tilted downward just slightly, hardly noticeable, but it made her gag to feel the lean. Because the slant, she knew, led to a drain at the far side of the floor, designed to drain people’s insides.

‘Hey, where’d you go?’ Cal called out from his bed. ‘The stitches are done, you big baby. You can come back now.’

‘Yeah,’ she responded. ‘Like I’m falling for that old trick.’

‘Scout’s honor, M,’ said Cal. ‘I swear it’s all done.’

Pulling back the curtain, M saw Cal sitting on his cot, suddenly smaller, like an actual kid, instead of a master criminal turned supercop. ‘It’s not the stitches,’ she said. ‘It’s the hospital. I’m not a fan of these places since, well, you know.’

‘Oh yeah, that,’ said Cal. M’s time in the Lawless sick bay had marked a turning point in their relationship. Not because Cal had anything to do with putting M there – but because he had taken it upon himself to avenge her against the person who had, by subjecting Devon Zoso to a surge of electric shocks. Devon still had her hair cut short as a result.
It made M queasy to remember that side of him. That darkness.

Anxious to change the subject, M took control of the conversation as Cal’s doctor exited into the hallway, leaving them alone in the large room. ‘So, I’ve met the whole Fence family now. Your father seems nice.’

‘Yeah, if by nice, you mean he hasn’t tried to harm you yet,’ said Cal with an attempted laugh that sounded more like a staccato cough.

‘Can I ask … well, what was it like, growing up with them?’

‘Well, it mostly wasn’t a
them
household,’ answered Cal. ‘My mom split when I was little, like, too little to remember her, really. My father raised me himself.’

‘Wait, if you were raised by a Fulbright, then why would you ever choose to go to Lawless?’ M asked, but what she really wanted to ask was,
Why were you given a choice?

‘It’s a twelve-year story,’ Cal said as he absently massaged the white gauze around his new stitches. He looked like an amnesiac struggling to remember the truths in his life, but M sensed that the truths were closer to the surface than Cal was comfortable acknowledging. ‘My dad, he meant well, but he set me up, you know? Not as in setting me up to get caught for a crime, but, like, for, I don’t know, failure at everything I tried. I was a late bloomer in school. Teachers wanted to hold me back, but he wouldn’t let them. He couldn’t imagine that his son was having trouble reading, having trouble making friends, or having trouble following the rules. I was supposed to be his ‘good soldier.’ That’s what he called me all the time.
Morning, good soldier. These poor grades are perplexing, good soldier. Good soldier, we need
to
discuss the phone call I received today from your school.’

Cal’s tone, when he impersonated his father, was spot on at recalling the man she’d just met. Direct, orderly, and demeaning.

‘I mean, there wasn’t anything I did that he didn’t take the opportunity to correct. And his worst threat, the worst future he could ever imagine for me was that I’d grow up to be like my mother.
Study harder, good soldier. You don’t want to end up like her
. That’s all he would ever call her.
Her
.’

‘Geez, how did they ever meet in the first place?’ asked M, though as soon as the question fell from her lips, she wished she could take it back. ‘No, wait, you don’t have to tell me that. I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to think of them as your parents, is all. It’s hard to wrap my head around Ms Watts as a mom.’

‘No,’ started Cal. ‘I mean, it’s okay. I ask myself the same question. It’s always weird when parents divorce, but my mom, she, like, disappeared. Pictures of her, pictures of us together, they didn’t exist, so it really was like she didn’t exist, either. All I knew about her was whatever my dad let slip, and he didn’t have a very high opinion of
her
.’

M’s bedroom at home had been filled with pictures of her father. She cherished them after he passed. They were a part of him that stayed behind to be with her. It would have destroyed her if those old photos had been taken away.

‘So, then, one day, I got in a fight at school,’ continued Cal, ‘with this kid who had lied about me. He told the teacher I had cheated on a test, but I hadn’t … I mean, I got a C on
the test, for crying out loud, but the teacher believed this other kid. So I found him and, I don’t know, I just lost it. My dad had to pick me up from the principal’s office and that’s when we had the talk.

‘He told me that it was very important that I tell him the truth. Was I mad at this kid because I was caught cheating or because I was wrongly accused? I told him that I was innocent, and that it tore me up inside to know that this kid was getting away with a lie and I was getting punished when I hadn’t done anything wrong. That’s when he told me about the Fulbright Academy and the Lawless School.’

M smiled. ‘Hey, at least you got that much. I didn’t know anything about the Lawless School when I signed on. And I’d never heard of the Fulbrights before they tried to kidnap me.’

‘Hmm, I may not have come from the most honest family, but I guess I got the truth eventually. He finally told me about my mom as part of the talk.’ Cal shook his head. ‘Long story short, he’d had no idea who she really was until, one day, a fellow Fulbright told my father that he’d been compromised by his wife. By the time he got home, she was gone and I was alone, asleep in the bassinet.’

‘Whoa, no wonder he dislikes her,’ said M. ‘But then, why’d you choose the Lawless School over the academy?’

‘To find my mother,’ admitted Cal with a steely look in his eyes. ‘And make her pay for what she did.’

As he sat on the hospital cot, Cal’s whole body tensed like it had just been pulled out of the freezing waters of Hamburg.

‘Why did you chase that painting onto the frozen river, Cal?’ asked M. ‘You were on thin ice and we had already
discovered the hidden message about Wild and the Black Museum.’

‘Because she wanted it so badly,’ he said coldly. ‘I wanted to be the one who destroyed it and I wanted her to watch me do it.’

Being here, so close to Cal again, like that night under the icy waters, M realized something. Despite the darkness in him, she would dive into anything to save him again if she had the chance.

She looked around to make sure they were alone. ‘Cal, I’m sorry I took you out with the Magblast, but I need your help. There’s another moon rock out there, and your mom is after it. If we don’t get out of here soon, well, we all know what she’s capable of. And I think that’s exactly what the Fulbrights are training us for. We need to play along for a bit while I figure out a plan and Merlyn figures out how to hack our suits. Will you help us out, for old time’s sake?’

If M expected Cal to be taken off guard by her hastily explained, secret mission, he didn’t deliver. Instead he smiled so wide, it looked like he’d just won the lottery.

‘I should have known you were up to something, M. Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard all day,’ he whispered. ‘I’m in.’

Almost on cue, a set of Fulbright escorts arrived to collect Cal. He slid off the gurney, and the masked men clamped his hands tightly behind his back with luminescent white cuffs.