Keystone (32 page)

“Welp, this one’s lost her marbles,” Zane says, but the woman keeps babbling.

“The Mastermind promised…he will give me
everything
I want! I won! I have The Key!”

Garrett’s eyes narrow on the girl. “What key?” he asks. The girl twists to look at him.

“Him!” she says, bucking her forehead toward Nok. “He has the Vision!”

Garrett doesn’t look at me, even though I dart a glance at him. I straighten up quick, but catch Zane’s skeptical gaze flash between us.

“Yes,” Nok tells her simply, but his shiny marble eyes flash at me.

“Liars!” the girl shrieks and throws her head back to laugh. “A Tralate never tells what they are!” Her head drops, her long purple bangs obscuring her face and her mumbles rise out of her hair. “Unless you are and you don’t want me to believe you are, so you say you are to make me think you aren’t. You must be! But Veritas never are! No, he is disguising himself like he disguises himself! I’ve caught a Veritas! The Mastermind will double my prize!”

She obviously doesn’t get how being held by two Contego works. She can’t go anywhere, much less take Nok with her. She thrashes around, but it’s not so much like she’s trying to get away as to laugh hysterically and throw herself toward Garrett or Nok, or whoever she’s talking to at the moment. She doesn’t seem to have any other plan for obtaining her prize, other than thinking she’s found it.

“The Key is a Veritas?” Garrett asks. The woman suddenly sobers. She stands still, training a dull glare on him.

“No, you idiot. It doesn’t matter who. Or what. The Vision…the Tralate…that’s The Key! And now I can have everything I want! All I have to do is give The Mastermind The Key!”

“What does the Mastermind want with The Key?”

“To read!”

“Read what?”

“Who cares?” The woman cackles, throwing her head back again. Her purple hair splashed across my face. “I’ll have my palace! My face! My lovers!” Her eyelids droop and she smiles something I think she means to look sexy, but it looks kind of grizzly instead. She lunges toward Garrett.

“You…I’ll have you for one of my lovers!” Her purr is course and gritty as she yanks at Zane and I to get closer to Garrett.

“Oh no you don’t,” I say and Zane strikes quickly, with two fingers, at the girl’s field. “He’s taken.”

She collapses in my grasp.

“Go,” Nok says, pointing us down one of the tunnels.

“Without you?” Garrett asks. I have the same prickly feeling in my bones, the one that says,
Protect,
but Nok plants himself on the ground beside the unconscious woman. He begins drawing in the dirt with a stone.

“What’s he doing?” Zaneen asks.

“Who knows?” Zane says. “Veritas do all kinds of weird crap.”

Nok makes lines and scriggles, dots, shapes and scrapes and then he drops the stone and moves his hands over the drawings, like he’s pulling a bed sheet over the dirt. The letters rise gently off the ground, in the colors of soil, water and grass, linking together and popping softly like bubble gum in front of me. I don’t know why it surprises me that Nok knows I am a Tralate, but it does.

M-A-N-K-I-N-D

I-P-R-O-T-E-C-T-T-O-O

Y-O-U-V-I-S-I-O-N-N-O-T-C-H-O-I-C-E

F-E-A-R-C-H-O-I-C-E

W-E-C-H-O-S-E-N-O-F-E-A-R

The feeling of having to protect Nok disappears as if released from an open palm. Maybe he doesn’t want us to take the girl because it would mean more tromping around in his tunnels. Whatever the reason is, I try not to let it stick in my head. I just think,
thank you, I’ll try
and Nok smiles.

“Rings,” he says, pointing to his own chest. Then he waves a hand down one of the tunnels. “Outside.”

“Was that two whole words?” Garrett grins at the little Veritas. “Maybe Mark and Brandon are right. You trying to steal my girl, Nok?”

Zaneen groans from behind us.

“Where does this one lead?” Zane says, peering down the twisting tunnel.

“Back,” Nok shrugs. He flutters his fingers at us. “Go.”

No one wants to leave, but Nok refuses to come with us. We finally start down the tunnel and turn two corners before we hear the avalanche behind us, sealing off the tunnel. It means that Nok is sealed off too.

We walk and walk and walk, in silence at first. Everyone seems to be wondering the same thing I am and I know it for sure once they all start talking and asking each other if we’ve done the right thing. I don’t have a clue. We just keep walking. Jeez, we walk. Garrett and Robin walk behind us, him cradling Robin’s hand in his palms until she says, “God, you’re good.”

“It must’ve just been sprained,” Garrett says. “That’s the fastest healing I’ve ever done.”

I remember when he healed my own broken arm and how his touch felt like Indigo, the color spreading up my arm. I can’t help feeling a little jealous, wondering if Robin feels his beautiful healing color melting up her arm too.

She bends it around a few times to test it. “Good as new,” she says before catching up to Zane, a few steps ahead. Garrett stops, waiting for me.

We walk close to one another, the static playing between us like two antennae trying to get a signal. No one else seems to notice. Instead, the conversation spirals in a confused circle, the same questions asked over and over again, without any of us able to answer them.
What’s got them so motivated? Who’s the Mastermind? Why is The Fury calling a Tralate ‘The Key’? Did she confuse The Key with Nalena’s Grandfather’s Memory? Does the Fury even have the Memory? Is Nok really a Tralate? How did they know about Nok at all?

Garrett and I stay particularly quiet when they talk about the Vision. There’s an itch inside me to tell, to just have it out in the open and be honest with these new friends, but Garrett isn’t telling and I remember what Addo told me about keeping it quiet.

There’s a momentary lapse in the conversation, while everyone turns it over and then the same questions start back up again, until we come to the end of the tunnel and there’s a ladder, mounted to the wall. We climb it and pop up like prairie dogs into a broken dryer, climbing out to stand in the Hotel Celare’s laundry room that is connected to the gym.

“This is monumental,” Zane says, standing in front of the long row of washing machines. I realize that Zane is still talking about the Fury’s attack and not how we walked for miles through incredibly hollowed out, underground tunnels that aren’t even part of the city sewer, and then just climbed a ladder, right into a hotel appliance.

“I thought he was sending us to see the Addo?” I say. Garrett turns from his conversation with Zane.

“We are,” he says. “The Veritas never reveal their direct tunnels unless they have to. Added security. No one knows all the ways in and out, but them.”

We go out of the laundry room and into the gym, past the ellipticals and the open mat where Zane trained me last night, to the very back of the room. There are rows of treadmills, facing flat screen TVs at the front, but we follow Garrett toward the back wall. There are no doors, no exits, no nothing. Just a long wall, covered with a mural of sweaty athletes, behind the treadmills. Garrett goes to the furthest corner and I’m wondering if one of the treadmills will flip up or fall into the carpet to reveal the access to the underground bunker where Addo’s hiding.

Instead, Garrett turns back, smiles right at me and passes his hand through the wall. He pulls it out and runs his hand against the decorated wall again and suddenly, his hand is missing to the wrist. Then the elbow, and then he winks at me and he’s gone.

“Cool,” Zane says. “Double wall.”

It’s not until Zane pulls me along with him that I even see it. There’s a recessed place in the corner that is completely invisible until I lean against it and look sideways. There is a door that would look just like a continuation of the wall, if it wasn’t open. I step into a narrow, crazy-colored corridor.

Robin swings the door shut behind us and there is the sound of rods passing through the door from the ceiling to the floor and from between the walls. It makes me feel a little claustrophobic, all of us scrunched together in this narrow hall as the mechanisms slide and lock in place. The colors are so vibrant and crazy that it makes me feel a little dizzy and disoriented.

“Just don’t ever touch this,” Robin wraps her fingers around my jaw and nudges my head up. There’s a tiny, black trapeze hanging high up beside the entrance door that we just came through. Hard to see in the whirlwind colors, I’d have to jump to grab it. “Unless you want to be buried alive in here. It collapses the entrance down to the bunker, the whole thing, so if you happen to grab it while there are people on the stairs, guess what? No more people on the stairs.”

“I won’t touch it,” I say. I’d say anything to get out of the hallway and not go blind.

Garrett opens a second door at the end of the hall. This one leads down a set of stairs, with dark gray walls on either side. It would be Heaven, compared to the colored room, except that my eyes are still swirling and blinded by the colors we just left behind. Against the gray walls, it’s almost worse, with every blink still exploding in a blotch of color. Twice I trip going down the stairs and nearly crush Zane. The second time, Zaneen grabs my elbow to steady me on the step.

“You alright?” she says and her voice is so sincere, I nearly miss catching her when she stumbles and crashes into me.

“I’m good.” I smile, pushing her gently back onto her step. “Thanks.”

Garrett raps his knuckles on the wall as we go down and it sounds like bongo drums. My eyes finally adjust at the bottom, on the gray door that the Addo swings open with a startling hoot.

“Come in, come in!” he bellows in a baritone, waving an arm in welcoming circles. “Welcome to the bunker!”

The bunker is a rounded hole of a room, small and darkish with a hard dirt floor and real, live, fat green leaves sprouted across the ceiling as thick as carpet and some growing, bright and green, off tree roots that poke out of the walls. Sean is sitting at a splintery gray wood table to the left. He lifts his mug to us in greeting.

There are three doors that bow a little inward on the curved wall just beyond Sean, and an empty gold couch on the opposite wall, only a few feet away. To the right is the strangest kitchen I’ve ever seen. Knotted tree roots poke through the walls and twist beneath the lengths of counter top, holding the counters up. There is a clump at the far end that frame an ancient refrigerator and the cupboards and shelves nestle between the gnarled roots and leaves, one with teacups hanging from an off-shooting branch. Addo grabs his tea mug off a ledge of twisted roots that stick out of the wall near the door.

“It’s nearly a table.” He chuckles as he closes the door behind us. The Addo continues to rattle on, as if we’ve been down in the bunker a million times already. “Beautiful things, Manga trees, they grow upside down
and
they thrive in the dark. Just have to be sure the leaves don’t drop in your tea. Those buggers will close up your throat in seconds.”

He glances at the leaf that was hanging over his mug on the knuckled shelf.

“I guess I’ll just dump this to be sure,” he giggles, but before he moves to the sink, he closes the door and shoves a knob across it. I hear a metallic scrape inside, bolts moving up and down and sideways all at once, just like the door at the top of the stairs. Addo turns back to us with a giggle and a shrug and says, “So, who wants a cookie?”

“I’ll take one,” Zane says. Addo shuffles over to the sink, dumps his tea and gets a new mug along with a glass jar of cookies off a gnarled shelf.

“We were ambushed at Big Dog’s Junkyard,” Robin says and it’s like our cue to spread into the room. Zaneen and Robin take the couch with Zane sitting at Robin’s feet, while Deeta and I sit on either side of Sean. Garrett leans against the wall beside my chair.

“So I heard,” Addo says as he circles the room, offering the jar of cookies. Nok comes out of the third bowed door across the room. He looks like he’s emerging from a nap, not from taking care of an unconscious Fury chick. Nok crosses the room to the kitchen, keeping his eyes down. He pulls out a pot and unloads vegetables from the fridge to the chopping block on the counter. Addo takes the last chair at the table and shoves the jar in front of Deeta with a wink. “Have some. They’re spectacular. No nuts.”