Justice (9 page)

‘Hey,’ said M sharply. ‘Why are you treating him like that? He’s wounded and he’s on your side, you know!’

But if the handcuffs surprised Cal, he didn’t show it.
Instead he remained calm and allowed the Fulbrights to lead him away.

‘Cal, I don’t get it,’ said M. ‘What’s going on? Who’s your direct?’

He just smiled and repeated, ‘I’m in,’ and his voice sounded tiny but brave in the overwhelming silence of the sick bay. The Fulbrights pulled him out of the room and into the hallway.

M tried to follow them but was met at the exit by two more Fulbright sentries. ‘Your direct will gather you shortly, Cadet Freeman,’ a gruff voice announced from under the mask as M watched Cal being shoved along on his way.

Once she was alone, the sick bay took on an even more unsettling atmosphere. She didn’t like suddenly having all these guards looking over her – dealing with the directs had been troublesome enough. M gazed over the medical landscape, searching for another way out. The Fulbrights had placed her in handcuffs once, and she didn’t feel like waiting around to let them do it again – she could find her own way back to her room.

Where the large bay had once been dark, a murky light now shined at the far end. The slanted floor pulled her toward the mysterious glow. It felt as if the empty cots and silent machines were tombstones in a graveyard and M were hunting ghosts. But what kind of Fulbright ghosts lived here?

Up close, the dim light cast a quiet shadow as a respirator’s clicking sigh sounded, a sign of plugged-in life.

‘Hello?’ M asked as she pulled back the curtain.

There, lying in bed, was Foley.

Why was he in here? Cal had made it sound like he was a prisoner, but it was worse than that – he was in a coma. No, not just a coma. At a second glance, M could see wires wrapping in and out of him like he was a robot ready for reboot.

This must have been the Fulbrights’ ‘heavy surveillance.’ They were keeping him unconscious, medicated and strapped to a cot. M shuddered over the prone body of her old … friend? Had Foley and M ever been friends, really? Either way, he didn’t deserve this kind of punishment. No one did.

A camera lens whirred above her, signaling that Foley was being monitored, which meant she was being watched, too. Oh, how she hated those cameras. The infirmary trip had been a setup. Someone at the academy
wanted
her to find Foley, to face the likely future of her crew if it didn’t fall in line soon. This wasn’t a discovery. It was a lesson.

Closing Foley’s curtain, M looked directly at the camera to show whoever was watching that she knew the play. With a deep breath, she added Foley’s name to her ever-growing need-to-save list.

Then, as she turned, M accidentally bashed her knee into a nurse’s cart, which crashed into a cabinet door, popping it open. The sound should have woken the dead, but when the metal instruments ceased their angry rattles, Foley’s steady clicking continued in concert with the silence. M tried to replace everything just as she had found it, but the stubborn cabinet door refused to shut. Opening it wide, she found a small fiberglass orb wedged in the corner. She plucked it out – and retched at what she held. It was
an eyeball. Slick and colorless, it slipped from her fingers and rolled into her palm. The black iris tumbled and held in place, staring deeper into the cabinet of what ended up being very disturbing curiosities.

It must be fake
, M thought. Then, regaining her composure, she let the ball roll freely around in her hand as she studied it. It was fake, all right, but it wasn’t a standard glass eye. It had a port on its backside, meant to connect to a computer. Looking into the cabinet, M found the bin of other eyeballs and tossed it back on top. But the eyeballs weren’t the only bionic body parts inside. Artificial lungs, hearts, ropes of silicon arteries, kidneys, and stomachs were all carefully wrapped, cataloged, and stored here.

What kind of roughhousing do these Fulbrights get into if they need extra spleens?
wondered M as she closed the cabinet. She briskly walked away from what felt like the scene of a grisly crime.

Retracing her steps to the front of the room, she heard a commotion coming from the hallway. She sat back on the cot, behind the curtain that had obscured Cal from her view, and listened to the ruckus unfold.

‘Sir, we can’t leave. We have orders to watch over the Lawless kid,’ said one of the Fulbright sentries.

‘I don’t care about your orders, cadets,’ yelled the same doctor who had patched up Cal’s wound. ‘I need you now!’ M heard him storm into the sick bay and rummage violently through drawers, which slid open and slammed shut with the sharp sounds of glass beakers and metal instruments clanging against one another. ‘Or do you want to explain why our mentor died on your watch?’

The curtain before M tore open and the doctor urgently shoved her aside as if she were another cot. ‘Out of the way!’ he commanded as his white coat floated past, heading directly to the very cabinet M had just discovered. She watched as the doctor pulled out some squishy object wrapped in plastic, then ran past her again and through the door. The Fulbrights at the doorway looked at one another and shrugged before turning and following the doctor, leaving M all alone.

Whatever was going on, it was deadly serious. And it afforded M a unique opportunity. Chasing after them, M snaked through the halls, trying to keep a safe distance from her marks so as to not be spotted. Not that it mattered, because the doctor and the Fulbrights were only concerned about what they were running toward, not who was running after them.

Suddenly they veered left around a corner and out of M’s sight, and she turned the same corner only to find a dead end. It had to be another secret entrance. Stepping forward, she pulled her mask down over her face. Whatever was behind that wall was something she wasn’t supposed to see, so it might be better to make sure whatever was behind that wall didn’t see
her
. As the mask settled onto her face, nothing but dead air hissed through her headset. M flexed her hands in her gloves, making sure the Magblast was still at the ready, then she ran her hands over the wall until she found a small latch. Pressing it, the dead end opened to an empty stairway.

Darting up the stairs, M burst onto the next level to find herself adrift in a sea of dimly lit Glass Houses. The clear
walls blended together to create a deep blue hue, which made M feel like she was trapped in the middle of the ocean, only nothing was wet or liquid or living in these dark waters. Instead everything had been frozen solid. Heavy footsteps fell to her left as a hazy set of shadows moved away from her. M took her chances and raced in the same direction. A beacon of light shined in the murky distance, making the shadowed figures she was trailing grow taller and taller as they approached it. But instead of stopping at the light, the shadows ran past it, deeper into the maze of glass.

M had also intended to run past the light, but when she reached the intersection, her heart stopped. Under the pale blue light was Cal, sitting on a glass bed all by himself. His hands were still latched and his eyes stared lifelessly out into the hall, watching and waiting for the Fulbrights to return. But when he saw M’s black-and-red mask, his eyes widened and his nonsmile turned into an all-out frown.

‘Cal!’ whispered M as she banged on the glass wall with her fist. ‘What are you doing here?’

He jumped up and shook his head like a mime, mouthing, ‘Get out of here!’

M waved him back and considered the glass. What would happen if she used her Magblast now? The glass wall would shatter, an alarm would go off, but maybe they’d have time to find her mother before escaping? Although that would mean leaving Merlyn and Jules behind. As she weighed her options and strategized an endgame in which everyone came out alive, Cal suddenly leapt forward to get M’s attention, but it was too late. She felt the suit’s familiar seizing around her body, tightening its grip like quick-drying
cement. M tried to turn her head, but her mask locked in the forward position. Frantically she looked into the glass wall and saw Vivian’s reflection emerge from the darkness behind her.

‘You’re wanted, you’re found’ was all Vivian said.

‘Stupid tracker,’ gasped M. ‘I’m beginning to think you like using my suit against me.’

‘People who live in Glass Houses shouldn’t use Magblasts,’ Vivian said flatly as she walked away, unconcerned that M couldn’t follow her. ‘Noles needs to see you now.’

The suit released her and M felt the blood rushing back into her arms and legs. She hit the cell wall one more time and looked at Cal through the glass. They were both exhausted, but he motioned for her to go. Wherever she was, it wasn’t safe here. M suddenly got the feeling that Vivian had perhaps saved her from making a big mistake.

She waved good-bye to Cal and left him behind in his lonely crystal castle. And even though she hated following Vivian like a lost puppy dog, she was more than ready to leave this new, strange place … counting her steps the whole way, for when she needed to return.

CHAPTER 9

UNLOCKED

‘Are we going to talk about what just happened?’ M asked Vivian as they returned to the regular cadet level.

‘Noles wanted you; I retrieved you,’ Vivian stated. ‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s all that happened.’

Getting Vivian to open up was a tall order. She surrounded herself with a force field of indifference, but M had cracked those types of shells once or twice.

‘And the fact that Cal’s being held in a detention center, does that matter to anyone here?’ pushed M.

‘I suppose it matters to Cal,’ said Vivian. ‘No more questions, Freeman. You’re annoying my knee again.’

M was surprised at how relieved she was to finally reach Keyshawn’s door, which somehow she instinctively recognized this time.
The suit must be working
, she thought.

‘I’ll wait out here,’ said Vivian.

‘You sure I can’t interest you in a quick lap around the Maze?’ snapped M, but Vivian returned only a blank stare.
Happy to have the last word, M made her way inside.

Keyshawn’s lab was as cluttered as ever, but he was nowhere to be found. M noticed Keyshawn’s bookshelves. Most of the texts were exactly what she had expected to find: a collection of science-based, quadratically hard-to-read books filled with more numbers and solve-for-x quotients than actual words. She walked along the four oversized bookcases, tracing her finger up and down the rows, looking for something that might give her a deeper insight about Keyshawn, about his research, or about what the Fulbrights really had in store for M and her friends. That’s when she noticed that there were books on the back sides of the bookshelves as well.

Squeezing through an almost nonexistent gap between cases, M found herself in a hidden section of Keyshawn’s library. Entering this area gave her the same feeling as when she’d walked through the false fireplace at the Masters’ compound. This time, she’d stepped over to another side of the academy.

The books were written in Russian. And Latin. And Greek and French and Italian and Mandarin and Cherokee and even hieroglyphics. M happened upon one especially thick volume with an oxblood leather cover. Pushing against the bottom of the oversized book made it lean and tip off the shelf and into her arms, landing with a startlingly heavy thud that made M’s knees buckle. The book must have weighed twenty pounds easily. Setting it down on a table, she studied the cover. The text on the spine was carefully, artistically hand etched into the taut leather and looked almost like English. But it wasn’t the language that caught her eye; it
was the author’s name: Chaucer. As in Geoffrey Chaucer, medieval poet and revered father of English literature.

Gently opening the book, M was shocked to find herself holding what must have been an original edition of one of Chaucer’s texts. The yellowed pages felt like canvas, strong and barely bending to her touch. Detailed artwork sprang from those pages’ every corner and flourished in the margins as leaves and vines wrapped into pillars, framing the interior text, which was handwritten in richly roping, impeccably crafted calligraphy. M could even see the ghosted baseline traced lightly on the page to keep the writing straight and orderly.

Suddenly aware of the rarity that she had in her possession, M cautiously turned to the title page. The Middle English meant nothing to her, but the art on the page was breathtaking. It was a collection of ornate circles and symbols overlapping in seemingly random ways. The effect of circles within circles was almost hypnotizing, and the crisscrossing grid of curving lines looked like a drawing of a tornado or a hurricane, with arcs and rays spinning off in all directions. Roman numerals ran around the outermost circle like numbers on a clock. Near the bottom, at what would be six o’clock, was the image of a dog’s head. There were birds at other points around that outer circle, beyond which a blast of rays stretched out like snakes reaching to the edge of the paper, changing colors gradually from yellow to orange to red to black with white dots that almost looked like stars.

‘What kind of crazy stuff are you into, Keyshawn?’ M whispered as she heard footsteps coming from the other side of the bookshelves.

Delicately shutting the book as if she were closing a coffin, she peered through and saw Keyshawn dressed in a filthy jumpsuit with stains on top of its stains. He paced back and forth in the lab, slipping between stacks of books and doubling back to scribble notes on a smart board. M tried to decipher his notes, but his handwriting was as abysmal and hectic as chicken scratch. He could have been writing Middle English for all she could make out.

Turning from the smart board, Keyshawn tapped his tablet, and an incredible sight flickered onto the wall across the room. It was a video of the Box in action. The scene made M automatically clench with preparation, as if the room around her were about to transform the way the Box always had. Perhaps the bookshelves would become tidal waves, or the floor would drop out and send her cascading down the side of a cliff. But thankfully the only thing that happened was a video played, showing a Lawless student slinking through an ornate room with marble statues lining the walls.

Keyshawn walked over to the wall and hung a Fulbright outfit under the projection. But M’s attention was on the playback. Whenever she had been in the Box herself, she’d been too focused on the scenario she faced to give much thought to how the Box did what it did, creating realistic simulations of settings and movement and even adversaries. And when she’d stood and watched the Box from the observation room above, all her focus had been on studying the other students and how they escaped from their assigned situations. But now, from a distance, the way the Box worked seemed surreal. The walls of the room
were alive, rippling in waves of endless fluctuating motion, changing form seamlessly from buildings to mountains to water. It was like watching a nightmare forming around someone else and having no way of stopping it from happening. Maybe that’s how Cal had felt just now, watching M get ambushed by Vivian.

As the video continued, though, something even more fascinating happened. The suit that Keyshawn had placed under the projection started to morph, matching the devious variations of the Box. Hanging there on its peg, the suit became the woods, the sky, the Taj Mahal at night, blending into every scenario the video showed.

Suddenly M realized that with Vivian waiting for her outside, she was going to be found hiding in Keyshawn’s lab sooner or later. So it would be best if she kept the upper hand. While Keyshawn was mesmerized by the camouflaging suit, M put the Chaucer book back, slid through the bookshelves, and walked up quietly behind him.

‘You rang?’ she said, and Keyshawn nearly jumped out of his skin.

‘Where did you …’ he blurted out before scrambling to shut down the projection.

‘So where’d you get the video?’ M asked. ‘Looks like it was filmed up in the control room at the Lawless School. Can I assume this is Devon’s handiwork?’

‘How long —’ Keyshawn started. ‘You should, I mean, how long have you been there? What did you see?’

Ignoring him, she continued, ‘I’ve experienced the Box firsthand, but I never learned how it works. What’s the secret?’

‘Forget you saw that, okay?’ said Keyshawn with a hint of true fear in his voice. ‘This could get us both in serious trouble.’

‘So you don’t know the secret,’ guessed M. ‘But you’re close to figuring it out, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, I know the secret, all right,’ he huffed.

Ah, vanity can be an amazing weapon if used correctly
, thought M. ‘Prove it,’ she challenged him.

‘If you promise to keep your mouth shut about this video …’ he started.

‘I promise, Keyshawn, geez,’ said M.

The look in his eyes as he stared at her told her that there was more at stake here than a stern warning from the powers that be, which made M even more curious to know what he was up to.

‘It’s programmable matter,’ whispered Keyshawn.

‘Sure, yeah, programmable matter.’ M nodded. ‘Obviously. But here’s my next question. What’s programmable matter?’

Keyshawn sighed. ‘This isn’t why I wanted to see you, you know. Okay, programmable matter is a material that can be controlled and manipulated to become something else …
anything
else. The walls of the Box, in my estimation, must be made up of millions of tiny, programmable nanocomputers that respond to the control room’s request. The wall essentially remolds itself to create any programmable, three-dimensional situation imaginable.’

‘This matter, umm, morphs into whatever it’s told to become?’ asked M.

‘Exactly,’ answered Keyshawn. ‘But here’s the thing. This tech, we’re years away from this level of expertise.
The network connections alone to coordinate this many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of tiny computers … it’s daunting to even imagine how it works so fluidly.’

‘So the Lawless School beat you to the punch and won first place at the science fair,’ said M. ‘Wait, my dad didn’t invent this, too, did he?’

‘Don’t know,’ admitted Keyshawn. ‘Whoever it was, I thought I was the closest to figuring it out, but there’s the truth.’

‘But you took the same tech and developed it into the suits, didn’t you?’ asked M.

Keyshawn cringed at the suggestion. M could tell that he was on the verge of retreating back into his science headspace, so she tried to keep him in the here and now. ‘But none of this is why you needed to see me, correct?’

‘Right, of course,’ he said. ‘Is Vivian waiting outside? Ugh, we’ve already taken too long, then.’

Flustered, Keyshawn shuffled across the room to the front door and listened for a second. Then, satisfied, he walked back over to M. ‘I’m double-checking everyone’s suits and trackers. Can you roll up your left sleeve?’

M eased her sleeve up as Keyshawn took her arm. He held his tablet over the tracking nodule and clicked his tongue. ‘Yep, all checks out okay.’

‘I could have told you that,’ said M, remembering how Vivian had found her near the Glass Houses. ‘What happened?’

‘You mean besides Fence turning his Magblast on a superior?’ asked Keyshawn. ‘That was the icing on the cake to a totally wasted day. But listen … the suits, the Magblasts,
these are all highly unstable and unproven techs. We need to know that everything is still intact after taking such vicious hits. Magblasts can pack quite a punch. They could potentially short out your tracker, distort your headgear, or wipe out your suit’s functions completely. It was a stupid idea, anyway, to pit you against each other.’

‘You didn’t seem to think it was a bad enough idea to argue with Ben,’ said M.

‘Yeah, well, his orders outrank my opinions,’ answered Keyshawn. ‘That’s a lesson for you to learn if you’re going to survive around here.’

‘I think I’ve proven otherwise,’ said M with a smirk.

Ignoring her comment, Keyshawn continued his calibrations. ‘I checked Merlyn and Jules already and their equipment was operational. Now I just need to check out Cal and we should be in order again. How is he, by the way?’

‘Fine,’ M answered, ‘if you’re fine with being shackled and locked away in a Glass House. What’s going on there, Keyshawn?’

‘How exactly did you figure that out?’

‘Saw him with my own two eyes,’ she said.

Keyshawn’s jaw dropped. ‘Did anybody see you? Does anybody else know you made it up to the Glass City?’

‘No,’ said M. ‘I mean, just Cal. Oh, and Vivian.’

‘Vivian!’ he choked.

‘Yeah, she dragged me back down here to see you before I could Magblast the glass wall and save him,’ said M. ‘What do you think that means?’

‘I think it means you’re lucky to be alive,’ Keyshawn exclaimed. He looked around the room again, making sure
that they were alone. ‘I don’t know what game Vivian’s playing, but protocol demands that you should have been turned over to the authorities for leaving the cadet floor. That’s grounds for early dismissal and could make you a Ronin. And is that what you want? To be kicked back into the real world? To live the rest of your life knowing that, at any second, either the Lawless School or the Fulbrights could show up at your doorstep and do you in?’

‘Okay, so it was a big deal,’ said M. ‘I’ll be more careful next time. But regardless of my actions, Cal doesn’t deserve to be treated any worse than the rest of us.’

‘Like it or not, according to the Fulbrights, Cal made the wrong decision by choosing the Lawless School.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said M.

‘Who said Fulbrights were fair?’ asked Keyshawn. ‘Now, can I please check your suit and get you out of here before you somehow get us all in trouble?’

It was true. M was a purebred troublemaker, but she’d never realized she was so talented at fanning the flames from spark to inferno until joining up with the Lawless School. Her father had taught her to question everything, to see a problem from every angle before attempting to solve the issue at hand. His voice popped in her head again:
An answer today doesn’t mean a solution tomorrow.

‘What happens if this little suit study of yours goes according to plan?’ she asked Keyshawn. ‘If we pass the tests and complete whatever assignment John Doe has in store for us, what then?’