The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (23 page)

He pulled the syringe
out of his arm and threw it across the room.

Mrs. Bragg was standing now, keeping one hand on Heidi’s arm, but stretching the rest of her body as much as she could toward the rest of us. “Something happened to Heidi!” she called out. “Dr. Joy, help me!”

The Official was fumbling for something in his pocket, and as Amanda got closer to him, the Official pulled out something in the shape of a
coin, small and silver. Palming it, he slapped it onto a wall where it stuck and began to emit vibrations. It wasn’t loud, but it made noise, uneven and high-pitched. Within seconds, I was in tremendous pain.

Chapter 29

Amanda, Callie,
Hal, Nia—they felt the pain coming from the Official’s metal disc also. It was emitting a sound that was causing us agony. Like dogs, we were attuned to the machine’s whistling. It wasn’t that it was loud. It was that it was perfectly calibrated to hurt us.

Amanda let go of the Official’s arm and bent her head down to her knees. Callie covered her ears. Hal squeezed his eyes closed. Nia blocked
her face with outstretched palms.

A smile crept across the Official’s face. His eyes were reenergized, hands shaking with excitement, his hair—which had been combed back before—was standing on end. He grabbed his two-way radio, “Maude,” he spoke into it as he was busily typing into the keyboard. “I’m bypassing the internal locking system now. Activate intruder protocol.”

“What about Heidi?”
Mrs. Bragg shouted across the room to him. “Get some help for Heidi!”

“Joy, what’s happening over there?” the Official barked. He gestured toward Mrs. Bragg with his chin. “Can you fix it?”

But Dr. Joy had stopped working on Heidi and the blood-exchange machine. He pointed to the little silver disc on the wall and looked at the Official curiously. “What is this device?” he asked. “You were keeping
a secret from me?”

“It’s immunity,” the Official boasted. “It’s like kryptonite. It prevents these kids from using their powers.”

“You made it?” Dr. Joy said.

“I had it made.”

“And I had no idea.”

Gray-faced and ashen from fighting the noise coming from the disc on the wall, Amanda lunged at the Official, stumbling. She actually was able to get his elbow into her hand, but her grip was weak.
The Official tossed off her one-handed grasp.

At that moment, the doors burst open and Maude came running in, followed by both guards we’d been seeing plus the third guard—the one we’d last seen at the Metro station in Washington.

The guard with the tattoo and his sleepy sidekick ran straight for Amanda, but she ducked behind a lab desk and ran for the back of the room. They followed her, knocking
over a tray of metal instruments, holding onto the edges of counters as they took corners going too fast.

Maude took Callie roughly by the arm. She tried to free herself. Ten minutes before, she would have been able to shake off Maude like she was nothing more than a cardigan sweater. But now, no matter how much she struggled, Maude was holding her too tightly. The Official was right—this woman
had no empathy.

The third guard came for me and I ducked behind a pillar. I’d be out of his line of sight for only a few seconds, but it would be enough. I saw a tall, draped, boothlike structure a few feet behind me, and I knew I could slip inside there. Or turn to one of the desks and assume the identity of a lab worker. All I needed was a white coat, and there one was. The name badge read
Kelly Black. I slipped my arms into it and stared down at the table, moving my hands as if I were decanting liquids into tubes. I concentrated on elevator music—an orchestrated version of “Windy,” by the Associations. I hummed in a way that was so calm and peaceful no one hearing it, thinking it, inhabiting it could not help but feel a cold, numbing gel descending between their eyes and their brain.

But it didn’t work. I felt the guard’s hand on my shoulder. He grabbed me at the waist, too, and yanked me over to the side of the lab where he shoved me unceremoniously into a rolling desk chair, gathered my hands together behind the chair’s back, and attached a new plastic strap around my wrists. Callie and Hal were already similarly tied. Nia was being subdued as I got my bearings.

Two guards
had Amanda by her arms. In her struggle, her hair had fallen into her face so I couldn’t see her eyes. Was that why I couldn’t read how she felt?

This wasn’t supposed to happen
, was all I could think. I longed for the comfort that might come just from sharing that thought with Amanda, Nia, Callie, and Hal, but it was not there. I could still hear my own thoughts, of course, but theirs were gone.
I felt not only like I’d gone deaf, but like I’d lost my friends. I hadn’t realized how used to our connection I’d become.

“Heidi?” Mrs. Bragg said. “Heidi, darling!” I looked over to see that Dr. Joy’s efforts at reviving the blood exchange machine had paid off. The lights were on again, and Heidi’s eyes were open.

The lights on the machine were blinking again. Mrs. Bragg seemed to have calmed
down.

“Is the machine prepped, Joy?” the Official asked. “Let’s get Heidi activated. Once she’s powered up and on the team we’ll be able to work on repairing whatever damage
she
”—he gestured to Amanda—“caused.” He looked at the guards holding Amanda and gestured toward the empty seat near Heidi’s. “Put her in the chair,” he ordered. Heidi was holding her temples also, clearly in the same kind
of pain we were.

Dr. Joy turned to the Official slowly. He looked at him a few good minutes before he nodded. I wouldn’t say he was moving like a spring chicken. And that wasn’t just because he was nearing eighty years old. There was something about the way he was moving that was—

Actually, I wasn’t sure I could say.

I had the feeling like a word was on the tip of my tongue.

“You’re still
letting him have Heidi?” Amanda called to Mrs. Bragg. In spite of the fact that the guards had her by the arms and were dragging her across the room, she spoke calmly and appeared to be completely poised, as if the guards holding her arms were simply members of the modern dance troupe of which she was the star. But when she looked at me penetratingly, I wondered what her look meant. Was there something
she wanted? Did she want us to do something? Amanda looked back to Mrs. Bragg. “You’re giving Heidi over to the people who didn’t bother to try to save her life?”

Again, I couldn’t complete the thought. I couldn’t come up with the word to describe what I was seeing—I could read Amanda right now no better than I’d been able to read Dr. Joy.

And that’s when I knew. I hadn’t just lost my ability
to hide. I’d lost my ability to read people. And where before I’d felt like I’d gone deaf, now I felt like I’d gone blind.

Amanda was tied securely in the chair now next to the weakened Heidi. Amanda had no hope of escaping the chair’s straps, but she had enough freedom of movement to prevent Dr. Joy from sticking her with the needle. “Be still!” Dr. Joy was harsh-whispering to Amanda. “If you
aren’t still, I’m going to stick you somewhere else.”

“Stick away, old man,” Amanda growled. “I’d rather bleed out onto the floor than let you suck my blood up into your precious little invention there.”

“Wait,” said Heidi, weakly, looking directly at her mom. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want this anymore.”

“Heidi—” Mrs. Bragg said. She looked at Dr. Joy. She looked at the Official. She
smiled her perplexed anchorwoman smile at Heidi.

“I said I don’t want to!” Heidi roared.

Mrs. Bragg started to undo Heidi’s arm straps, her hands shaking. She looked over at the Official. “I’m sorry,” she said to him. “But you promised none of this would happen against Heidi’s will.”

“Sit down,” the Official said to Mrs. Bragg.

“But . . .” Mrs. Bragg hovered, her hands still touching the straps.

“I said,
sit
,” the Official said. Mrs. Bragg sat. Maude was back at the chair in a flash, her hands tightening Heidi’s restraints where Mrs. Bragg had loosened them.

Heidi’s eyes opened wide. How many times had she faked the feelings she was having now in an effort to get her way? Tears formed. “Mom?” she said in disbelief.

Mrs. Bragg looked at her, clearly in pain. “I can’t fight these people,”
she said. “They’re more powerful than we are . . . that’s always been the point.”

Amanda was struggling so furiously now that she managed to dislodge one of her arms from the restraints.

“Can’t you sedate her?” the Official asked Joy.

“You promised she’d come willingly,” Dr. Joy grumbled as he shuffled toward a different part of the lab.

While they were waiting for Dr. Joy to return, the Official
walked over to Amanda, and said, “In your last moments of consciousness, I might as well tell you,” he said, “that you will live.” Even without my powers, I could see that the Official was still a little leery of Amanda. He was talking to her confidently, but he was careful to remain out of reach. If only I could read what he was thinking, to get into his head, to figure out more about his
fear—to see what he was really worried about—maybe I could shout out some kind of warning to Amanda.

But I had nothing to offer her. I was useless.

“In a few minutes, you will begin a new life,” he explained. “You will be just another regular high school student at Endeavor High. You won’t have any actual memories of what has happened to you today. You won’t remember your new friends here, the
loyalty you inspired in them, the powers you used to possess. With the exception of some persistent nightmares, you will have no sense of the destruction you have caused. It will all be wiped clean.”

I thought about the antidote to all Dr. Joy’s work—the bottle of liquid Mrs. Leary had been working on since Callie was born, the one bottle we’d given to Amanda to drink when the time was right.
Was this what it would do to her? Render her incurious, powerless, haunted, and in pain? All Mrs. Leary had told us was that she didn’t want us to drink it while the Official was after her—that without our powers, we could not save Amanda.

But she hadn’t known about the little silver disc that even now was emitting a sound so piercing it was hard for me to think. I felt like it was smashing my
thoughts. Interrupting them. Unraveling them.

And that’s when I figured out how the disc worked. Just as Dr. Joy was approaching Amanda with the sedative, just as the guards were holding her down so he could inject her with it, just as her body slumped into a pose that looked like she was sleeping in the most uncomfortable airplane seat ever invented, just as Dr. Joy easily slipped the IV line
into the raised vein on the inside of her elbow, I realized how the machine that looked no bigger than a silver coin was preventing us from using our powers.

It was doing the opposite of what I do. I could turn invisible because I could slip into the rhythms I could read in other people. I could move in a pattern that matched the pattern of their blinking. I could slip into a song that harmonized
with the music of their own minds, such that they couldn’t hear the new voice in the room—mine.

And this machine, this random, painful, noise-erupting machine was throwing off everything that came naturally to me, every logical conclusion to every song or thought that entered my head—and it must be doing that to each of us. The machine followed no pattern. It made no sense and so it was impossible
for our brains to assimilate, to get mastery of, to understand.

What the Official had invented was something that did not take away our powers. It simply stunted them, like white blood cells attacking virus cells and rendering them inert.

What we needed to do—I could see this now—was pound out our own rhythm, sing our own song, overwhelm the hasty cycling of the machine on and off at irregular
intervals. We needed to prove to it who we were.

Which would be easy because, thanks to Amanda, we knew who we were.

What Nia, Hal, Callie, and I had in common was that after becoming friends with Amanda, everything in our lives had changed. But maybe change wasn’t the right word. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that she revealed us to ourselves. She’d helped us escape our fears. She’d
helped us come out of hiding.

And now it was our turn to help her escape. Already I could see Amanda’s blood flowing into the IV from the needle in her arm. It was collecting in a reservoir on the side of Dr. Joy’s machine, rushing into it. The machine was starting to whir and make gurgling noises, beeps, electronic hums.

“We can still reach her,” I murmured to the others, trying to talk between
the irregular beating of the crushing sound. “But we need to stop listening to this place. Together, we can be more powerful than this machine. We can work together to make Amanda hear
us
more than she can hear
it
.”

Nia, Callie, and Hal looked at me like I was crazy, their eyes full of fear and pain.

“What should she hear us saying?” Hal finally gasped.

“I don’t know,” I said. I had vague thoughts
of saying her name over and over. Or all her names. Or her totem name. Or all our totems. None of these ideas felt right.

“The poem!” Nia said.

“What poem?” Callie asked.

By way of answering her, Nia began to recite, and as soon as we knew what she was saying, we all joined in:

Train up a child.

The torch has been passed.

Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend.

The names are
inscribed. They were taken from us.

We here shall have a new birth of freedom.

The eyes of the world are upon you.

Then Callie said, “Amanda, I know you were there that night on Crab Apple Hill. I don’t need to see you to believe anymore.”