Masterminds (11 page)

Four?!

Frantic, I identify Tori and Malik. Someone else is here too! I can see him in silhouette.

Were we so worried about the Purples in the cart that we didn't notice the one hiding three feet away from us?

Tori and I stand frozen, but Malik doesn't freeze so easily. Like a panther, he lunges at the stranger, hauling him up by the scruff of the neck.

“Ow, Malik, that hurts!”

Hector.

Malik is furious. “Where do you get off following us here?”

Hector stands up to him. “I didn't follow
them
; I followed
you
! Why are you leaving me out?”

“You think this is some kind of game?” Malik demands.

Hector spreads his arms wide. “Whatever it is, I can help you guys!”

“No!” Malik rasps. “You'll treat this like a club you want to join. And then you'll get scared—”

“I won't! I swear! I'm a part of this!”

Malik is beside himself. “If you don't know what it is,
how do you know you're a part of it?”

I have a thought. “Randy's note said some of us are special. It could be Hector as much as any of us.”

“Yeah, I'm special,” Hector says, pleased. “Special how?”

“We'll explain later,” Tori assures him. “Let's get out of here.”

From my jacket pocket I pull out my iPad, and snap pictures of the loading bay, the
Keep Out
door, and the high windows. “Maybe we'll notice something that we missed,” I explain.

I'm about to slide the tablet back into my jacket when I see something that makes me frown. Along the bottom of my screen, right beside the battery indicator, I spot the icon for Wi-Fi. Why would I have Wi-Fi? I'm too far from home where our router is, and there are no other houses here, so I can't be piggybacking on someone else's network. This Wi-Fi has to be coming from the factory!

I open the browser, and a pop-up appears, asking for a security code.

I'm a little surprised, since we don't use passwords a lot in Serenity. We know what they
are
—our parents order things from online stores from time to time. But I've never seen the internet itself protected by a PIN.

The others gather around, offering suggestions. “Try
Serenity
,” Malik supplies. “Around here, every toilet is stuffed up with that name.”

I type it in.
ACCESS DENIED.

“How about
plastic
?” Hector puts in. “Or
plastics works
?”

ACCESS DENIED.

“Maybe
Honesty
?” Tori offers. “
Harmony
?
Contentment
?”

We test them all—every word or phrase we've ever heard associated with our town—
Serenity Cup
,
Pax
,
traffic cones
,
factory
, and the last names of every town official. No luck.

Then I notice something. The sign-in page isn't all that different from the screen that's on display when I hack into my Xbox. If Randy and I can exploit glitches in our video games . . .

A few taps later, I'm probing into the actual HTML coding of the web page. Most of it's gibberish—long strings of letters, numbers, and symbols. But in the middle of all that programming stew is a single word I recognize:
Hammerstrom
.

“Hammerstrom?” Malik repeats. “What's that?”

“One of the Purples,” I reply. “But if he's the guy who
set up the portal, maybe he used his own name as a PIN.”

I backtrack out of the coding until I see the password page again. My hands are trembling as I type the letters into the field:
HAMMERSTROM.

We hear a beep, and there's the Google home page. We're in!

The whirr of the golf cart is audible again. It's the patrol coming around to make another pass. The others duck back into the bush, but I'm frozen to the spot, tapping the virtual keyboard.

“What are you doing, man?” Malik hisses. “Get down! We've got company!”

I'm still typing as if my fingers are moving on their own:
BOSTON TEA PARTY.

Malik reaches out and drags me backward into the bushes just as the golf cart rounds the corner. Tori smacks the tablet against my chest, dousing the glow of the screen. We suspend breathing. Bushes don't breathe.

The crisscrossing flashlight beams swing over us. The Purple People Eaters move on again.

“You idiot!” Malik rages in an undertone. “What was so important to see on there? Are you checking your fantasy football team?”

I pull the iPad out and show it to them.

THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

           
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against taxation without representation by the Sons of Liberty against the British government . . .

“This website came up for me during the storm!” I explain to them. “Compare this with what they taught us—that the colonists and the British drank tea and decided to form a new country.”

“I don't care!” Malik is still angry. “You almost got us caught!”

Light dawns on Hector first. “They're tampering with our internet!”

“Who's ‘they'?” asks Tori. “The Purple People Eaters?”

“They're just the enforcers,” I reply.

“Mrs. Laska!” Hector breathes. He turns to me. “And your dad!”

“It's worse than that,” I tell him. “The Purples, everybody who works at the school, or the factory—”

“Our parents!” moans Tori.

“It's the whole lot of them,” Malik adds angrily. “Every adult in Happy Valley.”

“Right,” I agree. “And if they control our internet, and they control our school, and they control our town, then we can't trust anything we think we know about our lives!”

There's dead silence as this sinks in.

Hector has a question. “But if our internet is phony, how come it isn't phony here?”

I'm guessing at the answer, but it makes perfect sense. “Because this is the
factory's
internet, leaking out through the walls. They want the real thing in there. Whatever's going on in Serenity, I'll bet it's being controlled from inside this building.”

On a whim, I tap two more words into the search field:
McNALLY ACADEMY
.

           
McNally Academy is a private coeducational boarding school located outside the town of Pueblo, Colorado. Founded in 1954 . . .

“Randy,” Tori whispers. “He was telling the truth.”

There's no way my absent friend could hear me, yet somehow it feels important that I say it aloud. “I never should have doubted you, man.”

Malik slaps the bricks of the Plastics Works. “We have
to find a way to get in there.”

It's funny—we've snuck out, trespassed on factory property, hunkered down like criminals, hidden from the Surety. Yet Malik's words scare me more than anything else that's happened tonight.

It doesn't make sense. The risky part is almost over. Why am I suddenly unable to control my runaway breathing?

Maybe it's this: nothing is over.

This is just the beginning.

The instant I step inside the house, the projectile strikes me dead center in the forehead, landing on the tiles at my feet.

“Steve—” My mother's voice is exasperated.

“Shhh!” Dad hisses urgently. “This is a delicate operation. It requires the utmost concentration . . .” Another shot is coming toward me. I open my mouth to catch it, but it bounces off my chin and hits the floor beside the first miss.

When I reach down to pick them up, my father stops me with a wagging finger. “Uh-uh-uh. There's an art to this. An artist like you should understand that.” He takes another piece of caramel popcorn from the bowl and tosses it in my direction.

It's a good throw, but it bounces off my teeth as I try to snap it out of the air.

“You'll attract every bug in New Mexico,” Mom warns, but she's smiling.

Dad's next attempt is wide to my left, but I'm able to catch it with my mouth. We celebrate (“. . . another Torific reception . . . !”) and Mom doesn't even say anything when I scarf down the first three missed attempts. (Our house is so clean you really
can
eat off the floor.)

“Where were you, honey?” she asks.

“Oh, just at the park.”

“Who with?” Dad probes.

“Eli and Malik,” I reply carefully. “Hector was there too.”

“Amber stopped by, looking for you,” Mom informs me. “I'd assumed you were with her.”

I try to sound casual. “No, not this time.”

This is the hardest part—not that I'm plotting to break every rule of the only place I've ever known, but that I don't dare tell my closest friend.

Amber suspects something's up, and it really hurts not to be able to confide in her. But I don't dare, and not just because I promised the guys. What we learned at the factory the other night is something she could never accept.

So I can't tell her—not until I have real proof. The problem is: proof of
what
? We know that things are being kept from us, and our internet's different, and the factory isn't exactly what it's supposed to be. But that's not the same as understanding
why
. Yes, we're being deceived, but what's the purpose of the deception? What is the “something screwy” Randy warned us about?

“What about our project?” Amber demands. “How are we ever going to get it finished by Serenity Day?”

“Don't worry,” I assure her. “Once I get the faces right, the rest of the mural should be a breeze.”

She obviously notices that I'm not around as much, but I don't think she suspects who I'm with instead. And the fact that the four of us are planning a break-in—well, that's something she can't ever know.

It goes without saying that we're not experts. (In Serenity, the only thing we learn about breaking and entering is that it's someone else's problem, somewhere far, far away.) I draw a map of the entire town, detailing every single building, house, and flagpole. We walk, bike, scooter, skateboard, Rollerblade, and even pogo stick every inch of the place in search of a fresh view of the Plastics Works that might reveal a way in that we haven't thought of yet.

Here's what we've come up with so far:

1)
Find a thirty-foot ladder and try for a window.
Flaws: window may be wired to an alarm; impossible to estimate drop to factory floor; no place to hide ladder from Surety patrol. Plus, this is a small town with no tall buildings. If anyone has use for a ladder that big, it would be the Plastics Works themselves. And we obviously can't ask them if we can borrow it.

2)
Splice extensions into the existing alarm wires in order to bypass the door.
Flaws: not sure how to cut the wire to splice it without setting off the alarm in the first place. And even if that's possible, we'd still need to pick the door lock quickly enough to avoid the patrol (not a skill they teach at our school).

3)
One of us stows away on the golf cart and is driven inside by the Purple People Eaters themselves.
Flaws: golf carts aren't limousines; there's no place to hide and very little clearance underneath. Also, we have no evidence that the golf cart ever enters the building.

“In other words, we've got nothing,” Eli concludes sadly.

“Not necessarily,” I muse. “What about the roof?”

“The
roof
?” Malik repeats incredulously. “If we can't reach the windows, how can we get up to the roof?”

“The windows are harder because they're exposed,” I explain reasonably. “The patrol can spot us from the golf cart. But once we're up on the roof, we're out of sight. And we've got all the time in the world to find a way in.”

“We can't even
see
the roof,” Hector points out. “How are we going to know if there's access to the building?”

“No problem,” Malik says sarcastically. “I'll just ask the Purples if we can borrow their helicopter.”

“He's got a point,” Eli admits. “There's not a place in town high enough for a view of the factory roof. Not even the flagpole.”

“What about the online archives?” I wonder. Steve showed me how to access them on my computer. There are all kinds of images of the town and the surrounding area, some of them really cool. “Maybe there's an aerial photograph.”

“We've already checked,” says Malik. “They've got pictures and schematics and blueprints of every building in Happy Valley
except
the Plastics Works.”

Hector speaks up. “Maybe we can get our own aerial photograph.”

Malik snorts. “You got a pet hawk I don't know about?”

Hector makes a face at him. “Go fly a kite.”

Here's a tip: never let boys into your studio. They're all thumbs.

The thin wooden dowel snaps in Malik's hand when I ask him to hold it; Hector pours quick-drying glue on his shoes; Eli can't cut through a two-ply plastic garbage bag without shredding it. I end up doing everything myself while those three clods stare at me like I'm spinning straw into gold.

I'm just wrapping the plastic around the frame of the kite to make the sail when I spy Amber outside my house. “Get down!” I hiss.

“Why?” asks Malik. “So we're here? So what?”

“I've been ducking her to work on our plans,” I explain breathlessly. “You want me to have to explain that?”

We sit on the floor away from the window, crouching low as I finish the sail. The doorbell rings . . . once . . . twice. My parents aren't home so nobody answers.

Eventually, I spy Amber through the window, walking away.

“The coast is clear,” I announce, suddenly feeling like a lousy friend.

The day is sunny and blustery—at least, blustery for around here. Sometimes the prevailing winds are pushed
south toward us by the mountains of Colorado. Of course, that information comes from school, so it isn't necessarily true. For all we know, some mythological wind god blows over Serenity through titanic lips.