The Girl Who Could Fly (16 page)

    After the events of the evening, no one had been able to sleep on level thirteen. As the music wafted down the dormitory hallway, kids sat up in their beds and listened in wonder.
“Dancing and playing in the light,
I am filled with passion and delight.”
    In her nightdress, Lily came out into the hallway as though in a trance. She was soon joined by the others.
    “Where is that coming from?”
    “It’s so beautiful.”
    “It’s the cricket,” Conrad stated plainly.
    “That tiny cricket’s making all that sound?”
    “They find them in the floorboards of opera houses.” Conrad shrugged and returned to his bed. He didn’t want to be with the others. He couldn’t look them in the face.
“My voice is free.
It rises and floats away from me—
I am unable to escape these walls.
My body will not float like my song’s plaintive calls.”
    Piper’s chest swelled and the power of the music banished any pain. Her body tingled and, emboldened with Herculean strength, she effortlessly pushed against the M.O.L.D., causing it to groan under the pressure.
     “It’s coming from the testing laboratory.”
    “How is that possible?” Dr. Hellion was applying her lipstick faster than she would have liked. Agent A. Agent had met her in the elevator and they were on their way to the fourth level.
    “We have agents standing by.”
    “This is the second disturbance in one night.” Dr. Hellion’s voice was almost irritated. “Before Piper McCloud showed up we went seven years without an incident. Seven long years and now we have two in one night.” She snapped her lipstick shut. “This stops now!”
“Only in my mind I float free as my song
And I fly to a home where I belong.
There, those who know my heart well
Sing, sing, sing with my song’s spell—”
    The sun was just about to rise in Lowland County, but Joe McCloud had not been able to sleep. Sitting on the windowsill of his bedroom, he gazed at the fast-fading stars in the morning sky. It was going to be a good, clear day.
    “Mr. McCloud, you’ll catch your death from that morning air.” Betty turned over, discovering Joe in his underwear on the open windowsill. The weather had turned cold, but Joe didn’t seem to notice.
     “Hmmm.” As usual, Joe didn’t have much to say, but Betty knew what he was thinking all the same.
    “She’ll be home soon enough.”
    “She’d sure have liked this sky,” Joe sighed.
“They snatched my voice,
Held me against my choice.
I forget all that was mine
Yet I reach to dream it one last time.”
    The cricket’s voice sang not for the ears but for the heart. His words resonated with a strength and truth that transfixed all nine children in the dormitory hallway, as the music permeated their very cells. In no time at all, the song hit at their core and a sharp pain stabbed them squarely in the chest. The drugs Letitia Hellion had pumped into them were neutralized—and all fears, both big and small, were forced out, leaving their mouths buzzing with the taste of freedom.
    “Piper was right,” Kimber chirped. “We’ve gotta get outta here.”
    “You got that right!” For once Smitty agreed with Kimber.
    “We’ll escape,” Nalen said forcefully, and Ahmed was silent.
    The singing affected Conrad too, but his heart was so crowded by meanness and madness that the beauty of the song was too painful to bear. He writhed in pain, his bed-sheets tangling around his legs. As much as he resisted, the song gnawed at the meanness and madness inside of him.
“I struggle to the last
But my light is fading fast,
A lone warrior waging a brutal fight
Against an endless night.”
    Dr. Hellion, Agent A. Agent, and a security team burst into the room where Piper was being held. As the door opened, the music crashed against them, battering their defenses.
    “Over there, Dr. Hellion.” Agent A. Agent pointed to where Sebastian sang.
“I fight for escape even if the notes of this song
Are the only part of me to leave.”
    Examining the cricket, Letitia Hellion came as close as she had come in a long time to feeling an emotion. As it started to bubble up inside of her, she firmly clamped down on it, and instead turned to Agent A. Agent. “Give me your shoe!”
    Agent A. Agent immediately complied.
“I rise up out of here,
Reaching for the things I hold dear.”
    The
voculus romalea microptera,
which was the name scientists had given to Sebastian, wait their whole lives to sing one song. When they start to sing that song, it often lasts days, and sometimes weeks, and they sing about everything they have heard and seen and learned in their lives. As Sebastian had only spent a few short months in the Vienna State Opera House before being captured and imprisoned inside I.N.S.A.N.E., the only thing he had experienced that was worth singing about was inspired by the time he had spent with Piper McCloud. But that was enough.
“I will not stay silent,
I shall not remain still.”
    In the laboratory, the glow created by the silver giraffe blinded the spiders that made cobwebs in the ceiling of his cell. In one great shake, the red rose shook off all of the black soot on its leaves and bloomed with rebel daring.
    In the dormitory hallway, the children cheered and cried, while Conrad screamed in pain as the meanness and madness was driven from him.
     Dr. Hellion snatched the offered shoe from Agent A. Agent and raised it high in the air.
    “Nooooo!” Piper shrieked.
    
“I sing. I sing to the end.”
    In one swift motion, Dr. Hellion hit hard and did not miss her mark. Sebastian’s voice was forever silenced.
    From that moment on, Piper would remember nothing.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

C
ONRAD HAD betrayed Piper, had betrayed them all. He’d cut a deal with Dr. Hellion and told her everything. It was the only logical choice available to him at that time.
    On the afternoon of the escape, when Dr. Hellion summoned Conrad to her office, he knew that she knew something. She knew he knew she knew.
    “Conrad, please sit down.”
    Conrad remained standing. Letitia Hellion’s fresh coat of lipstick glistened and she leaned back in her chair with an expression that was welcoming and conveyed warmth.
    “I know you are up to something. I know the others are involved too.” In the end, it had been Piper herself who had tipped Dr. Hellion off. The week before when Letitia had arrived at the dormitory to invite Piper for an evening stroll, she had found the girl mumbling about being tired, and she was unable to meet her eye. Piper’s sudden hatred for her was as transparent as a picture window, and so intense that the child wasn’t even able to pretend otherwise. This unexpected turn of events prompted Letitia to quickly return to her office and order a special security team to investigate the matter.
    It went without saying that Letitia Hellion’s greatest fear was that J. had, despite all her precautions, gotten to Piper. For weeks she’d sensed his presence and, knowing J. as she did, Letitia could expect him to be reckless, unpredictable, and willing to go to any extreme. There was a lot of history between the two, and that history had taught Letitia, in no uncertain terms, never to underestimate J. Indeed, he was the one person who posed a real threat to her plan, while at the same time being the very same person that the facility’s security could neither repel nor contain.
    To her very great relief, the security report had come back detailing secret midnight meetings on level thirteen, among many other things. Naturally, Letitia Hellion not only knew exactly what was going on, but how to deal with it.
    “It’s an escape, I presume.” Dr. Hellion watched Conrad closely, but he gave nothing away, and his features leveled into an inscrutable neutral expression.
    “You alone are smart enough to understand that it won’t work, which is why I’m talking to you. I assume the others don’t know the consequences they’ll face when caught? No, I wouldn’t have told them either. How can a child face torture, or having the very life squeezed out of their body and enduring a living death? With stakes so high, they probably wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I worry for the little ones the most, don’t you? Can Jasper survive it? Or Lily? They’re so young, and fragile, and under the circumstances it’ll be necessary to use extraordinary means.”
    Conrad wasn’t about to be enticed into joining the discussion until Dr. Hellion’s hand was laid bare and all her cards were on the table.
    “I’m not trying to scare you, Conrad, and I know that you understand that these are not empty threats. I realize that you don’t have all the information at your disposal to make the best decision for you personally, though.”
    Dr. Hellion retrieved three sheets of paper—her
pičce de résistance.
She tossed them in front of Conrad. “I spoke with your father this morning.”
    Conrad looked up, startled.
    “Such a nice man. I’ve been urging him for some time now to allow us to perform a new procedure that would greatly assist you. This morning he finally signed this release form.” Dr. Hellion flipped the page over and pointed to his father’s signature. “See? It is now at my sole discretion to determine whether to perform this wonderful new operation or not. It’s called a—”
    “Lobotomy?” Conrad’s mouth hung open as his eyes jumped ahead, speed-reading the form.
    “Well, that’s a dramatic way of putting it. It’s much more localized and specific. We believe that you are suffering from frontal lobe disease. Meaning the part of your brain that is responsible for your higher reasoning, planning, and problem solving is malfunctioning and causing you great distress. Therefore, it naturally follows that it must be removed.” Dr. Hellion paused. “It would really help you, Conrad, to think more clearly. To slow down and not be so . . . agitated. I think you’d be very happy with the results.”
    Conrad had no words. Her plan was brilliant, even he had to admit that, and the stakes compelling. If he tried to escape and was caught, his frontal lobe would be removed. Conrad knew Dr. Hellion well enough to know that she wasn’t bluffing. Undoubtedly, she already had the entire facility on high alert and lockdown, which meant escape was already impossible.
    And Conrad was desperate.
    Desperate times call for desperate measures. This left him with only one option and one question—
    “What’s in it for me?”
    After Conrad left that day, Letitia Hellion sat at her desk and carefully reapplied her lipstick. She performed this action each hour on the hour without fail. The name of her lipstick was Red Giggles, but Dr. Hellion had never giggled once while wearing it. This was probably because Letitia Hellion hadn’t felt anything, either physically or emotionally, for years, least of all like giggling. She gave masterful impressions of emotions, which she created by carefully contrived movements of her eyes or lips—simulating caring or happiness or understanding.
    Except for Conrad, no one had ever seen through Letitia’s pretense—but then people were so ridiculously easy to fool. Most of the time they saw what they wanted to see, which was precisely why she invested so much time and energy in constructing a perfect outward appearance. Exquisitely groomed hair, lipstick always in place, beautiful couture clothing, and an elegant posture all worked to cleverly distract people from actually seeing
her
—the real
her
underneath it all. The Letitia Hellion who once upon a time had felt waves of panic, nausea, and revulsion whenever she encountered anything abnormal or unusual, and who unequivocally decided long ago that the world was a much, much better place without such things.
    This pivotal decision became a simple equation to live by: normal = good and abnormal = bad; ergo, all abnormality must become normal or be destroyed.
     To this end, Dr. Letitia Hellion devoted her life’s work.
    The upside of her decision was undeniable; her frayed nerves became instantly soothed as the world divided into black and white, manageable and containable. At the same time, her banishment of the murky grayness of it all effectively buried any feeling she ever had. And it was precisely the lack of feeling that allowed her to calmly witness unspeakable torture in plants who had no voice, in animals who had no one to understand their cries, and in children who were too weak to fight back. Without feelings, she had subjugated her humanity to a monstrous and play-acted version of a real person.
    With her lipstick artfully painted across her delicate lips, Letitia pressed them together one last time, satisfied with the effect, and began preparations to deal with the escape.
    The morning after the attempted escape, Conrad had demanded to see Dr. Hellion, but she made him wait a full week before she finally granted him an audience, by which time he was trembling with rage.
    “We had a deal. You said that if I told you about the others that you’d release me. I told you everything. I handed them all to you on a silver platter and now you need to honor our agreement!!”
    “You are correct. That was the deal.” Dr. Hellion was working on her computer and could only give Conrad half of her attention. She had a lot of work to do and Conrad was no longer a top priority. She tossed him his release papers. “There is just one last detail to complete and you may go.”
    “What detail?” Conrad picked up the papers and quickly scanned through them.
    “On page three, I need an adult guardian’s signature, accepting legal responsibility for you from this point on.”
    “What?” This had not been discussed and Conrad was in no mood.
    “When you came here I became your legal guardian, and in order to be released from that position someone else must claim it. An eleven-year-old boy cannot be released on his own recognizance, it’s against the law. So I need a name.” Dr. Hellion waited. “Any name.”
    “I’ll have my father sign it when I return home.”
    “Unfortunately, you can’t be released without a signature. Under the circumstances, I’m prepared to accept a verbal commitment. To expedite the process, I have your father on line one and he will speak with you right now.”
    “My father?” Conrad was shocked. He hadn’t spoken with his father in over four years. At first when he’d arrived at the facility, he’d cleverly orchestrated ways to get to phones and call his father’s office in a desperate bid to get help. Each time some snot-nosed assistant would inform him that Senator Harrington was unable to take his call. Then one day a new assistant accused Conrad of maliciously playing some sort of prank, because everyone knew the senator had no son, but that he and his wife had just become the proud parents of a baby girl. And that was how Conrad learned that he had a sister, and he marked that the last day he ever tried to contact his father.
    “Conrad? As I said, your father is on line one.” Dr. Hellion wanted to get this over with. She didn’t like to waste her time or energy on a hopeless case.
    Conrad hated himself for getting excited, but he was. He yearned to hear his father’s voice. He picked up the phone with a quivering hand. “Hello? Father?”
    It was noon in Washington D.C. and Conrad Harrington II was about to be late for a very important lunch. He juggled files and the phone as he left his office.
    “Hey, sport, good to hear from you.”
    “Father, I—”
    “Dr. Hellion tells me that you’re doing one heck of a good job and your mother and I are proud of you.” Senator Harrington dashed for an elevator. “Keep up the good work.”
    Conrad recognized the tone in his father’s voice; it was the one he used to glad-hand his bigger campaign contributors. “Father, listen to me, I can come home now and I—”
    “Oh yes, Dr. Hellion mentioned something about that, sport. The thing is that your mother and I feel it’s a little bit too soon, especially as things are going so well for you there. Like I always say, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
    “No, Father, I
need
to come home now, I—”
    “Aw, Connie, it’s real great hearing your voice, sport. You sound fantastic. Let’s talk soon.”
    “No, no, don’t hang up. Wait, you need to understand that—”
    Conrad stopped talking when the dial tone buzzed in his ear. Still he couldn’t let go of the phone. After all that had happened, after everything he’d done, it had all come down to this phone call, and he’d hardly said more than a few words. He’d failed. He’d sold out Piper and the others too, and now he had been sold out.
    “Well, Conrad, I’m sorry that didn’t work out for you the way we’d hoped.”
    “You never had any intention of letting me go. You lied to me.”
    “No, Conrad, we were both lied to. Your father also retracted his approval for that cranial operation, which means that neither of us gets what we want. I don’t want you here any more than you want to stay. Frankly, I think you’re a bad influence and make everything more difficult for everyone. And as much as I’d like to help you, I can’t. My hands are tied.”
    It was a stalemate once again and they were back to where they’d started.
     Conrad should have known better than to negotiate with Dr. Hellion. What was he thinking? Maybe, just maybe, Piper had been right. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as he thought. . . .
    “Conrad?” There was nothing left to say and Dr. Hellion needed Conrad to get out of her office. He was a living, walking reminder of her failure, and no one wants that hanging around. “Is there anything else? Conrad?”
    “Huh? Oh.” Conrad was drawn back from his thoughts to find that he still had the phone in his hand. It took all his concentration and willpower to open his fingers and place it back in the cradle.
    Conrad left Dr. Hellion’s office in a daze, and he remained that way for over three weeks. In class Conrad gazed off blankly and did not answer questions, did not participate, did not argue that the theory of relativity was outdated and limited. At mealtimes he ate mechanically and without thought, and he went to bed at lights-out and didn’t work on his secret projects. His transformation was so startling that Professor Mumbleby even reported to Dr. Hellion that there might be opportunities to rehabilitate Conrad Harrington yet.
    During those weeks, only one thought dominated Conrad’s existence. He wrestled with it endlessly to try to understand it.
    
How was it that I failed? I thought of everything. I weighed every option, considered every aspect, I made all the right choices and still I didn’t come to the right answer. How is that possible?
    Finally it came to him. His mind—all-powerful, brilliantly calculating, analyzing, processing—didn’t have the answers. His mind, Conrad realized all at once in a luminous flash of understanding, had
information
, not
answers
. The answers, Conrad suddenly knew, came from somewhere else entirely.
    The revelation was so stunning that it immobilized Conrad completely.
    “Harrington, you got something wrong with your ears?” Nurse Tolle barked when Conrad failed to get out of bed. “That was the breakfast bell, boy, and if you don’t hustle, you’ll be on my list.”
    Conrad still didn’t move, didn’t respond. Later that day when a doctor was called for, Conrad remained unresponsive.
    “He’s in no danger,” the doctor whispered to Nurse Tolle. “He’s had a nervous breakdown. Just let him rest. He’ll snap out of it sooner or later.”
    Conrad wasn’t having a nervous breakdown and he didn’t care if they thought that he was. The problem was that Conrad couldn’t figure out where his answers were going to come from, and until he could he wasn’t sure how to go on living. His mind was the only thing he’d ever relied upon and no one had told him or even hinted that there could be another way. So how was he to find the answers if they weren’t in his mind? Where were they hiding? How could he get to them?
    Piper had known. Something in her had just known what to do and she wasn’t even that smart. Conrad wasn’t being mean, only factual. Piper simply didn’t have the same capacity for intellectual thought that he had and yet she knew things that he didn’t. How was that possible? Where were her answers coming from?