Keystone (14 page)

“Alright,” she says softly. “We appreciate your honesty, Addo. This is awful news, but now that we all fully understand what has happened, we can all work on finding a solution. If we can just look through the last thumb drives you received, we might still be able to determine who will be our allies in the other Curas.”

“His honesty?” Mr. Middleditch interrupts. “I can’t say I appreciate one damn thing that just came out of him! The Indiciums were just parties where all the Addos got together to blast the Curas? The Contego
paid
for those luxury motels with their overtime hours and financial sacrifice. That’s not just some mistake of humanity. That stinks of Selfish to me.”

The anger springs up around the table.

“This bad.” Mrs. Neho shakes her head. “If we not working for greater good, what make us not The Fury?”

“Gotta say, the only difference between us and communists was that we never had the corruption,” Larson squawks. “Guess that’s out the window.”

“Well,” Principal VanWeider says, his hands laced on the table in front of him, “I have to agree that this development is quite shocking.”

“I’m thinking,” Larson adds, “there oughta be some kind of consequence for getting us into this mess!”

Mrs. Reese stands up at the head of the table, her beautiful sand-colored dress flowing around her like an emptying hourglass. She waits a moment while the firing squad continues to blast the Addo. Then, she adjusts the comb holding the swirl of her hair before she slams her fist down so hard on the table that the teacups rattle all the way to the opposite end.

“Enough!” she booms. It even shuts Larson’s mouth. “We can get caught up in what’s happened, but the fact is, The Fury is on our doorstep right now. We need to pull the Ianua together, not push it any further apart. Our Addo has obviously made some devastatingly human mistakes, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is our Addo and that we can’t waste any time in moving forward. The first thing we need to do is get a hold of those thumb drives and get an idea of who’s out there. Without those, we don’t even know who is in the outer Curas. Anyone could say they’re in the community.”

“I’m not sure it will matter,” Principal VanWeider says. “If we only have old files, we still won’t know who’s gone to The Fury and who hasn’t.”

“We could track patterns and consistency,” Trig offers. “It’s not fool-proof, but we could at least narrow down the members with long-term, loyal standing.”

“Yes, all the information on the drives would be lovely,” the Addo interrupts with a frown, “if I had them. Each Addo keeps a vault and I’d be willing to bet the Fury hoisted mine out of the rubble after they burnt down my trailer. At least the refrigerator should’ve been inconvenient to carry.”

“We can’t be sure until we’re sure, though,” Freddie says.

“True,” Zane’s dad agrees. “We’ll have to get out there and sift through what’s left of all the Addo’s houses and see if we can locate some of these vaults. Are they all in the fridges, Addo?”

“No, they could be part of anything. I’ll draw up a list of possibilities. I do know there should be two at Addo Gita’s home, since she inherited Addo Chad’s vault when he passed,” Addo adds with a solemn bow of his head. “However, if you fail to recover them, the only shameful comfort I can offer is that all thirteen of the Addo’s thumb drives might be empty anyway. I know for a fact that last year, Addo Gita admitted that she hadn’t recorded anything for the previous year on her own drive.”

Trig glares from beneath the brim of his ten-gallon. “Are you serious? Didn’t the other Addos have a problem with her saying that?”

“Well,” Addo coughs into his hand. “They weren’t exactly present when she told me.”

“Where they were then?” Mrs. Neho asks.

“Who knows?” Addo says. “I just know they weren’t in bed with Addo Gita and I.”

Zaneen, across the table, gags into her hand.

“Sweet tangerines!” Larson explodes. “So now what do we do? We’re getting blasted on all sides by the Fury and now we have absolutely no way of knowing who’s on our side and who’s not?”

“We duck sitting.” Mrs. Neho crosses her arms on her chest with a frown. But then she looks at the Addo and shakes her finger at him with a smile that’s almost joking. “They other Curas going to come after us for you. We should give you them, crazy man.”

“I would agree that we seem to be sitting ducks.” Principal VanWeider adds, rapping his knuckles on the table. “From what I’m hearing, I vote that we spread out, so we’re not such a concentrated target.”

“Or stick together…so our strength is concentrated in the small number we have left.” Freddie adds, crossing his own arms. Mr. Middleditch raises one finger in the air, one lip hitched over a chipped canine tooth.

“I agree with Freddie,” he says. “I don’t think hiding is the right strategy. The Curas will become suspicious if we drop off the radar with the only remaining Addo. The Fury obviously knows who we are already. They seem to know where we’re at too. Dividing up will make it easy for anyone to pick us off one at a time.”

The muttering breaks out around the table instantly, but Mrs. Reese wallops the rising concerns with her voice again.

“It’s time to be ready for anything,” she booms. “And at the same time, we’ve got a huge amount of work ahead of us. We need people searching for the Addo’s thumb drives and we need surveillance on both the Fury and the outer Curas. We will all need to call on any of our reliable and loyal Simple relatives that would be willing to help in the areas of child care, errands, light surveillance and specifically, filling in at the jobs we hold. We need to continue bringing in money for the community.”

“At least there won’t be any school this year,” Zaneen grumbles from across the table, but Principal VanWeider shakes his head with a grin.

“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion, Miss Middleditch,” Principal VanWeider says. He dusts invisible crumbs from the edge of the table. “At some point, this battle too shall pass, and you know the priority the Ianua places on education. Luckily, there has been a fascinating development that might suit us all very nicely, especially during this period.”

“I have to agree with my daughter on this one,” Mr. Middleditch says. “Besides needing all the help we can get right now, if we’ve got Ianua kids sitting in school, we might as well get out there and just paint a bulls-eye on the side of the building.”

“Except that I have a small development worth mentioning,” Principal VanWeider adds with another grin. “There isn’t going to
be
a school next year.”

“The district has been considering a new educational program, and now it seems that it couldn’t have come at a better time for us,” Principal VanWeider continues. “Simon Valley has been invited to be part of an experimental program for virtual schooling. I was expecting to turn it down, but this might be exactly what we need.”

“So…we
wouldn’t
have to go to school?” Carducci suddenly emerges from his fog. He hasn’t done anything the entire Totus except stare off into space as he rubbed his thumb on the arm of the little troll girl bunched up under his armpit.

“No Senior year?” Sasu peeps, rising from the crook of Carducci’s elbow.

“What it means,” Principal VanWeider says, “Is that the high school would be computerized. Our student body would satellite from home computers and all of our classes would be on-line.”

“Even gym?” Deeta asks. VanWeider gives her a
nice try
grin.

“There are instructional videos and a tracking program for physical education,” he says.

Deeta groans and the Principal continues, “The computers would be available to distribute in two weeks, so the students will have the next two months to get familiar with the system by the time school starts in the fall. Most importantly, for our purposes, virtual schooling would keep our younger Contego a little less in the public eye.”

“We do need to keep all of the kids out of sight,” Mrs. Reese says. “And I also agree that they need to be continuing their studies as soon as we can get things under control.”

“I gotta say,” Larson adds, “The Fury does seem to have a real good idea of who’s who. We should
all
be laying low for now. We don’t want them picking us off one by one, like they did with the Alo.”

“True,” Mrs. Neho says, leaning on the table to peer at Larson. “But we not the Alo. Our purpose is fight. Protect. Defend. Not scare together like little girl.”

“Divided, we are vulnerable,” Mr. Middleditch says. “We saw what happened to Basil Reese. We know The Fury’s got some of our old Contego. And even if the Fury Contego are half outta their birdhouses already, if they pig-pile twenty of their half-baked cuckoos on just one of our competent warriors, or target a school full of our kids, there’s still going to be a problem.”

Garrett is a statue beside me. I move my leg close to him and when we touch, he swallows, breathes.

“So, Van, this computerized school idea,” Freddie says, “what’s the name of this thing?”

“Quantus.” Principal VanWeider thrums his fingertips once on the table. I don’t hear anything else he says, because Nok tears into the room, dragging Iris behind him, as the explosion over our heads rocks the entire building.

Chapter 7

IT HAPPENS ALL AT ONCE. A dirty cloud of smoke billows down the stairs and the ceiling rains dust and wood splinters. My bubble explodes around me as Garrett pulls me from my chair. The other Contego dart through the smog and surround the steps.

Nok lets go of Iris, and like lightening, Mrs. Reese, who was at the back of the room, is suddenly three steps in front of me, pulling the Addo along with her as she scoops up her daughter.

“Exits!” she shouts. She hustles Addo down the hall and pushes him into one of the rooms to the right, before the swinging doors.

In the same second, Freddie lunges forward and grabs Nok by the upper arm. In one fluid movement, Freddie flips the tiny Veritas into the air. My soul, or whatever I am when I’m outside my body, vibrates like a window slammed with a soccer ball. All of my instincts draw me to Freddie, to maybe tackle him or to snatch Nok up before he falls, but my body doesn’t move. Instead, I watch as Nok drops onto Freddie’s back, hanging on like a koala as Freddie rockets off, past the staircase and past the room where Mrs. Reese just disappeared. In seconds, Freddie and Nok slam through the double doors at the far end of the hall and vanish.

Garrett’s hair brushes my cheek.

“C’mon.” His voice is shockingly calm. He tags Sean on the arm and then the three of us are running down the same corridor, in the same direction that Freddie went with Nok. Over my shoulder, I see the Contego, all dropped into fighting stances, still as statues, with their eyes trained on the stairs as the dusty haze clears. Even little Sasu, poised beside Carducci, looks like she’s about to climb over the rows of Contego and destroy whatever comes down the stairs first.

Two words suddenly pound in my head:
Follow. Protect
.

Garrett is on one side of Sean and I’m on the other. It’s like Sean’s a hockey puck and we have to keep him going along between us as we run toward the goal. And I know exactly what the goal is. It blasts through me each time my foot hits the floor.

Protect.

It’s the same feeling I had as I stood beside Freddie and Nok. Except that now it feels like my nerves are all metal shavings and Sean’s wearing a magnetic body suit, so it’s pretty obvious that Sean’s the one that I’m supposed to keep safe.

The noise wells up behind us, as if an army is beating down the door upstairs. I want to grab Sean’s arm to try to speed him up, but I don’t. I just stay beside him and Garrett drops a step behind us as we blow through the double doors.

But my dress isn’t meant for running. I trip twice and even though my body adjusts for it and keeps me from slamming face-first onto the tile floor, this dress might just get me killed. The footsteps thunder down the stairs far behind us—a stampede, mixed with the voices I know and the ones I don’t—all of them shouting. I drop back right on Sean’s heels and Garrett’s on mine. We are a shield.

“Go left!” Garrett’s voice is urgent. I grab Sean’s arm and dive through the door on the left. Garrett slams into me.