The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (21 page)

Chapter 26

It was dark
out by the time the van stopped and the guards opened the doors. By then, my leg was screaming in pain. As soon as the guard snapped the cord bolting it to the floor, the pain got worse. It was like waking up a part of your body that’s fallen asleep. My shoulders were aching, my wrists were on fire.

In the fifteen steps between the van and the building we were being dragged toward, I struggled
to make out some sign of where we were. We were in a parking lot. I saw oak trees. The building was brick. We could have been anywhere.

Except that just as the guard was pushing me over a curb, I saw a sign:
STAFF PARKING
. And under that:
ORION PHARMACEUTICAL COLLEGE
.

Of course, I thought. The Official would haul us back to where it all began. Dr. Joy’s abandoned C33 human experimentation facility,
and in the basement below, his recently constructed, fully operational, state-of-the-art lab.

“Hurry up,” I heard. It was Maude, emerging from the passenger door of the van, finishing a call on her cell phone.

“What exactly is the Official going to do with us?” Nia demanded.

“Nothing, probably,” Maude said. “It’s Dr. Joy you need to worry about. But first, you better hope Amanda really comes
for you. That’s your main purpose. If she isn’t forthcoming, I don’t know what the Official will have to do to you to get her attention.”

“She won’t come,” Callie said. “She’s too good for that. She knows we can handle ourselves.”

Maude smiled, passing us in the hallway, waving a hand behind her.

Of course, Maude was right.

But we didn’t know that yet when the guards practically threw us into
a room that was empty except for four beds like the ones we’d seen in the C33 dormitory. There was a plate of sandwiches, four cartons of chocolate milk, and a note on a table:

Children:

Enjoy this food. We will talk soon. All will be well.

Uncle Joy.

Children? Did he think we were nine?

It occurred to me that the food might be poisoned or drugged, but we ate it anyway because we were starving.
And we weren’t sure anything worse could really happen to us at this point. After eating, Callie rubbed the red marks on her wrists, Nia limped around the room in a circle, as if waiting for feeling to return to her leg, and Hal sat on the edge of one of the beds, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress, his head tilted back, his eyes closed.

Even though I didn’t need to hide from anyone
here, I felt myself giving into the temptation of making myself invisible. I stood in the shadow of a cabinet. I slipped my hands inside the cuffs of my jacket. I closed down my face by breathing gently into a memory of watching my dad making Christmas cookies and humming “We Are the World”—my dad had always been ridiculously attached to ’80s culture, which I was only realizing just now was owed to
his sudden introduction to pop culture in 1984. This memory of him singing, his back to me, stepping from one end of the counter to another was my earliest of him, and now, it was enough to make me strong. Inside my head, I started humming along with the song he’d been humming tunelessly, connecting to the music’s vibe.

When I heard Hal say, “Where’s Zoe?” I stepped out from the cabinet’s shadow,
letting them see me. Nia looked up also, as if Hal’s voice had taken her out of whatever trancelike state she’d slipped into.

“I just had this weird vision of the Official in his office,” Hal said. “Come on, maybe if we’re holding hands, I can see it better.”

We joined hands and Hal was able to share his vision—it didn’t even faze us that now, we could see both what Hal and what Nia saw. Our
powers had just upgraded again. We were too focused on the vision itself to care.

Unlike Nia’s fragmented, film-footage-like visions, Hal’s were hyper clear. They had the sharpness and the reflected light of something seen through glass and water—the rocks in a fish tank, plants glowing under a UV light.

And there the Official was, tipped back in his desk chair, cracking his knuckles.

“He’s
scared,” I said, because to me, that was obvious.

“What’s he scared of?” Nia asked.

“He’s scared of Amanda,” I said. “He’s waiting for her and the longer she makes him wait, the more scared he becomes.”

“Wow,” said Hal. “That’s amazing.”

“It means we can’t give up,” said Callie. I felt myself growing calmer and more resolute just hearing her voice. “That’s what the Official expects us to do.
It’s what he wants. But we can’t let it happen.”

“You’re right,” said Nia, clearly strengthened by Callie’s conviction, too. “First things first. Callie, is there any way out of this room?”

The windows in the room were so high up we couldn’t reach them. Callie tried the door but it was solid metal and wouldn’t budge. Nia laid her hand on it. “It’s enclosed by a steel frame. There are steel bars
that extend two feet into the walls on each side.”

“Wait,” said Hal. “How did you see that? I thought you could only see things about people.”

“Well, it is actually about people,” Nia explained. “I saw the men installing the bars. One of them says to the other, ‘That’s some strong bolt,’ and the other replies, ‘What are they trying to do, rebuild Fort Knox?’”

“But you also knew the bars extended
two feet into the wall.”

“True,” Nia agreed. “That is strange. How did I know that?” She thought for a moment. Then her face lit up. “They were holding the building’s plans!” she said. “I saw the plans, in the vision—they were holding them out in front of them, studying them. Maybe that’s how I knew the measurement? Maybe my brain was reading them without my consciously knowing it?”

“Maybe,”
said Hal, uncertainly.

“Can you see any more?” Callie asked. “Like, is there a secret door to this room or something?”

Nia squeezed her eyes shut, then shook her head. “I can almost see them. I get close to them and then they blur in my mind. I can see the hands holding the pages. I can see the white of the pages, the lines, the writing, but I can’t get it to stick inside my brain all at once,
you know?”

“Then I’m not seeing an obvious way for us to get out of here.” Callie pursed her lips.

“Sorry,” said Nia.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Hal said. “It’s crazy you can see those blueprints at all.”

“Our powers are getting stronger,” Callie said. “But I keep being surprised by the direction they’re taking.”

“I think the stronger part is coming from you, Callie,” I offered.

“From
me?” Callie said. “No way. My power is the lamest. I can’t see the past or the future or into people’s minds the way you guys can. All I can do is break down doors and lift stuff.”

“Oh, no,” Nia said. “Your power goes way beyond that. It’s like what your mom was saying—you can stand up to other people. And I think when we’re all touching, we are getting our strength from you. I think you’re the
one who is making all the rest of our powers grow.”

“Wow,” said Callie. I noticed a tiny hint of a smile attach itself to her lips.

“Rosie said each of our powers is something Amanda already has,” Hal said. “Like together, we make up a whole, and the whole is Amanda.”

“All that stuff about
come together
and her drawing us into a team,” said Callie. “That was about more than just our giving
each other moral support. It was because she knew we would make each other stronger. So now, we need to take these gifts and figure out how to help Amanda.”

“Hal, have you seen anything in the last few minutes?” Nia asked.

“Nope. Fresh out of visuals,” said Hal.

“Maybe if we all hold hands again?” Callie suggested. “That helped with Nia’s visions before.”

We all agreed and, standing in a circle
in the space between two of the beds, we took each other’s hands. I felt the familiar electric connection jump to life. And then something happened. With a hissing sound and a pop, the lights in the room went out.

“Was that us?” I looked around in the dark.

“Actually”—Nia’s voice was contrite, as if she were confessing to a burp—“it was me.”

“You turned out the lights in the building?” Callie
said. “How—?”

“I was able to see the blueprints again,” Nia explained. “I don’t know why, but they suddenly snapped into focus when we took hands. And when I was analyzing at them, I did this thing. I found the drawing of an electrical diagram, and then I isolated the circuit breaker for the building, and then when I looked at it, I focused really hard on the main switch and suddenly, it just,
well, exploded. My brain became some kind of corporeal soldering iron.”

“Whoa,” said Hal, capturing our collective reaction.

In our silence we began to notice that the building had become silent also—I guess machines had been thrumming away in the basement. In their place we heard running in the hall—footsteps and voices calling out, “Over here! Sector nine!”

Emergency lighting came on in the
room, a dim, red glow shining down at us from over the door and some strips along the walls. In awe at what had just happened, we dropped hands.

Then Hal’s eyes began to shine. He’d gotten another vision. I could tell.

“What did you see?” Nia whispered. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Amanda,” Hal said. “She’s here.”

That’s when the guards opened our door and shouted, “Get up! Move! Now!”

Chapter 27

The guards
entered the room at a jog, pushed Hal by the shoulder and took Nia roughly at her elbow. Callie and I were herded forward and we ran with the guards down the hall, past the entrance to the old dormitory, down a set of stairs, through another set of double doors and into the newly refurbished basement lab we’d found before.

Once inside, the guards delivered us to the Official, who was standing
in the center of the room on a raised platform that looked like it was a piece of the command module set from the
Starship Enterprise
. Maude was one step behind him. Even in the dim emergency lighting coming from bulbs over the doors and faint beading along the main paths of the floor, I could see that her lab coat was immaculate and her blond hair perfectly coiffed, as if she herself was made
of some synthetic rubbery material.

All the workers we’d seen buzzing around when we’d been here before were gone, and it looked like they’d left in a hurry. Papers and test tubes and other mad-scientist-type equipment were out on counters. I also noted ventilation hoods, gas jets, beakers and decanters of all sizes, centrifuges, refrigerators.

It wasn’t until the Official said, “There’s only
three kids here. What happened to the other one?” that I realized I must have hidden myself without realizing it. I was standing behind a pillar now, my whole body thrumming to the sound of the lab equipment, turning myself into something anyone looking would assume belonged in this room.

“Camo-girl. Right,” the Official muttered, as if to himself. Then his eyes met Maude’s. “Look for her—the
Costas kid. She’ll be where you least expect her.” I guess he’d attributed me with the brains to have hidden myself somewhere along the way—which, duh, would probably have been the smart thing to do. “She cannot have gone far. And in any case, the three here are enough to draw Amanda out of hiding.”

Maude beckoned to the guards and together they all stepped out into the hall, the doors swinging
closed with a mechanical clicking and grinding that told me the lock—like the one upstairs—would not be easy to break.

“Amanda!” the Official called out. “I know you’re here. I have your friends.”

Was
Amanda here? Turning to look, I caught a glimpse. She was inside the room where Hal, Callie, Nia, and I had hidden when we’d snuck into the pharmaceutical college before—the room labeled
GENETIC
SAMPLE STORAGE
, i.e. blood. Amanda’s face was in shadow but the emergency lighting caught the edge of her cheek, the slant of her nose.

“You’re too smart not to comprehend that you need me more than I need you,” the Official went on. “You see, it is possible for you to advance only so far on your own.”

At that, the door to the Genetic Sample Storage room opened, and Amanda called out, “Oh, I
need you, do I?” The Official jerked his head, his gaze landing on the shadowy version of Amanda. She stepped out of the room and was now walking down the center laboratory aisle.

“Remember,” Hal said in a low voice as she passed us. “He’s afraid of you.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” the Official scoffed.

Amanda stepped into the light at the center of the room now and I could see the ironic, half-cocked
smile. “
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
,” she said.

She furrowed her brows and looked into the Official’s eyes, almost as if she were seeking something on a distant horizon—a bird someone had told her was in flight, a landmark barely visible in the distance.

“You know,” she said, and her voice was strong and reassuring, mysterious, soft, deep, and impossibly clear. “You’re not
going to get away with what you’re trying to do.”

Callie, Hal, and Nia had gathered around her, letting her know that they were there to support her. The Official tried to stare back into her eyes, but he couldn’t quite do it. He looked away, then straightened up and looked at the guides, registering that he was alone in the room with us, as the guards and Maude were still outside. He laughed
that soulless, android laugh, and then Amanda’s mouth curved up into the approximation of a smile. She was ready to fight. “You see,” the Official said, “you are enjoying this, aren’t you?”

Amanda’s trace of a smile faded, and I could see that his comment had hit its mark. The Official must have seen this too, because he kept after it. “It must have been hard all those years, feeling yourself
growing in ways no one else was, being told by your mother not to think about it, to ignore what you knew you could do. Is that why you turned to these soul-searching teenage pursuits—the enigmatic loner routine, the costuming, the cataloging, the acquiring of arcane knowledge?”

Amanda grimaced, as if she were being made to eat a food she didn’t like.

“Why don’t you let go of the charade and
become who you were meant to be?” he said. “Imagine the feeling of accomplishment you would have when you finally unleash your potential? Just imagine how much more powerful you will be when you accept my help, when you let me direct you?”

“I don’t want you to direct me,” Amanda said calmly.

“If you remain out on your own, what will you become? An artist? A healer? You’re strangely artistic,
Joy tells me. Perhaps you will grow famous writing books? Making films? Perhaps you’ll be a painter and have work shown in museums?

“None of that can compare with what I can offer you. You know this. You know I can give you the chance to be truly great.”

“Great at what?” Amanda said. “Great at being your minion, doing whatever you tell me to?”

“There are countries where people are starving,”
the Official said. “Their leaders do nothing to help them. In six months there, you could reform their governments. With your vision, your understanding of past, present, and future, your strength, you could change the fate of millions.”

Amanda stood stock-still, seeming to listen.

“International crime is on the rise,” the Official continued. “Illegal arms dealers, drug traffickers, smugglers
work outside the jurisdiction of all major governments and the United Nations. Their money protects them. With your knowledge of languages, your facility with disguise, your ability to read people’s minds, to see into the future—you could infiltrate the high-security worlds in which these criminals manage to thrive.

“You would be important, a friend of world leaders, royalty, the people who build
the businesses that change the way we think. Imagine the life you would have—yachts and parties, jets, everything at your fingertips.

“At the end of your life—and trust me, if you join me, there will be teams of scientists looking into every possible way of extending it—you will be able to say you have made a mark in shifting the history of our planet, of the human race. Surely you understand
the logic of what I propose?”

I saw a rush of images flash before my eyes. There was something about these visions that didn’t look like what I saw with Nia and Hal’s. They were more muddy, almost sepia-toned, like an old photograph. I knew without knowing how I knew that I was now seeing what Amanda saw. Her future.

There she was in a backless, sequined dress the color of the tropical ocean
on a white sand beach, her hair long behind her, a glass of champagne in one hand, laughing as a gray-haired man in a soldier’s uniform decorated with many stripes and medals bowed down to her, lifting his glass to her in admiration.

I saw her in khaki fatigues, heavy boots, her hair pulled up into a soldier’s cap. She was standing on a rise in the desert, looking through field glasses into the
shimmering heat, a missile launcher balanced on one shoulder.

Then there Amanda was again on a crowded sidewalk in Paris—I could see the Eiffel Tower behind her. She was dressed in a business suit, pencil skirt, and high heels, carrying a briefcase, her large gray-green eyes made even larger by heavy black glasses. She stepped into a glass office building with a modern lobby, through a revolving
door. She swiped an ID card through a security turnstile, then headed for a door marked
NO EXIT. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.

It wasn’t the fancy clothes or the cool disguises. It was the power that I could feel her being tempted by. I knew why, too. Amanda and I had both lost parents. We lived on the run. We never felt safe. Sometimes it felt like the only way to be truly safe was to be the strongest
person in the room. Amanda could have that.

But Amanda didn’t want it. “I will not work for you,” she stated flatly.

“You know, sweetheart,” the Official said, almost sadly. “I don’t know what your warped little vision of the universe is, but the world is about power. And either you have it or you don’t.”

“You’re not proposing to give me power.” Amanda tossed her chin defiantly. “
There is no
subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself
.”

“Ah, Rousseau, of course,” the Official scoffed. “Volition, self-expression, free will—they’re overrated. Either you pull yourself up and over the edge of the mountaintop or you spend your life looking up at the bottoms of the shoes of the people who’ve managed to claw their way
up.” The Official pushed a button on a control console and one of the medical bays suddenly glowed with light. I guess there was a reserve power source beyond what Nia had found when she tapped into the building’s electrical grid.

I had to shield my eye against the glare at first, but as they adjusted, I saw what was inside the bay. Two exam chairs like you might see at the dentist’s office were
set up side by side, like twin beds. There was an old man standing between the two chairs, adjusting a machine that sent tubes and wires into position on both—he looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t see his face.

One of the chairs was empty, but the other was occupied. By none other than Heidi Bragg. She was reclining, and though her hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail, and her hands
folded in her lap, I could see she was scared. Her hands were clasped because they were trembling. Her shoulders were hunched up to her ears.

I could see why she would be scared, too. There were an awful lot of wires and tubes attached to her body, she was wearing an oxygen mask, there was an IV in her arm and electrodes on her wrists and temples. Brittney Bragg was standing right behind her,
a hand on her shoulder as if to steady her before some standard medical procedure.

What was Heidi doing here? What were the tubes and wires for? Why was her mother part of this—wouldn’t she want to fight to get Heidi away?

Then the old man controlling the machine turned and I realized I had seen him before. At the airstrip where Thornhill had been kept prisoner—I’d been hiding, following Hal,
Callie, and Nia, but I had seen him, a passenger in a Jeep.

I knew this man. I knew what he had done to all of our parents. I knew his name. This was Dr. Joy.

Despite being in his seventies, Dr. Joy looked vibrant and strong. His hair was thick and shockingly white, and his back was ramrod straight.

“Ah,” he said, opening his hands like he was welcoming us into his home. This man: I thought
of all the terrible things he had done to my dad. I thought of the little boy getting his blood drawn on the exam table—the one we’d seen in Nia’s vision. “The children,” Dr. Joy said now. “At last I have you with me.”

“I see you have recognized Dr. Joy,” the Official went on. “And I’m sure knowing that he has developed a new technology to assist in our project will not surprise you.”

With Hal
and Nia, Callie was still standing at the edge of the Official’s command center. She gently rubbed the railing, but left a soft dent in the metal. I felt the gesture as clearly as if she had rubbed my back. It sent a signal of strength coursing through all of us. Amanda squared her shoulders. I felt stronger too. But maybe not strong enough to face this man.

Dr. Joy took a step forward. “Children,”
he said. “I am not a monster. I had only the best intentions for your parents. I was a loving Uncle Joy.”

“Uncle
Joe
was what they called you,” Amanda interrupted him. “As in Uncle Joe Stalin. You destroyed many lives,” Amanda said.

“
I
didn’t destroy them,” Dr. Joy objected, his teeth flashing, his eyes bright. “The government did—when they terminated my program. Your parents were my babies,
my chicks in the incubator, and I hated—oh, how I hated—to be compelled to release them into the cold unknown when they were still only half-formed.”

“If you cared about us, you would destroy this lab.” Amanda stood firm, her back straight, her hands relaxed at her side. “You would trust us to be who we are.”

“Oh, I trust you,” Dr. Joy practically purred. “I trust what is inside you. Amanda,
your blood, your DNA, what you have grown into being—it is too beautiful to let it go to waste. You are my gift to the world. So please come nicely. If you don’t, you see, that machine—we are prepared to salvage our work.”

“What do you mean, salvage?” Amanda’s eyes began to scan the equipment, as if noticing it for the first time.

“I mean this,” the Official interrupted, his voice growing growly
with anger at being challenged. I could see that he was not accustomed to it. “If you took the blood flowing through your veins and examined it under a microscope, more than half of what you see came out of a test tube. You do not belong to yourself. You are a product of this lab. You are government property. You are not a person, but a collection of enhancements that we have spent far too much
money and time and energy bringing into the world to abandon now.