Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (23 page)

A sudden serenity overcomes
Dr. Hamill. He looks at us, his eyes glistening under my gentle glow, and he
gives us a sad smile.

“It’s impossible not to love
my Missy.”

Yeah. You’re right about
that.

“The hard drive Joy took
from you,” I say. “It has project data.”

“It has everything on
Moreau,” Dr. Hamill says, “including full profiles on every test subject.”

With this final confession,
Dr. Hamill loses the last of his will to stay conscious. He slips into a deep
sleep — deep and, I bet, deeply troubled.

Sara throws up her
telepathic apathy field and we dart back to the elevator, where we wrestle
ourselves back into our civilian clothes. As we pass the reception desk on the
ground floor, the receptionist calls out to us.

“Did you have a nice visit?”
she says, but we’re unable to answer her. We don’t say a word until we’re back
at the bus stop, where we collapse onto the bench, wheezing like we’ve just run
a marathon.

“Oh, God, Carrie,” Sara
says, on the verge of tears.

“I know. I know.”

“I can’t believe Dr. Hamill
—”

“
I know,
” I say, more
harshly than I mean to.

We sit there for I don’t
know how long, trying to process everything, but it’s so much to take in.

“What do we do?” Sara says.
“I don’t even know where to start.”

“I do. We tell Missy. We
tell her everything.”

“We can’t,” Sara says. “not
after everything she’s been through. If we tell her that her father — Carrie,
it’ll destroy her.”

“I know, but we made a
promise: no secrets.”

“Carrie...”

“No secrets,” I insist. “Missy
deserves to know the truth, and we have no right to keep it from her.”

Sara, reluctantly, nods in
agreement. “When do we tell her?”

I check my phone. It’s
creeping up on seven o’clock. We’d be back in Kingsport within the hour.

“No time like the present,”
I say.

NINETEEN

Missy sits at the head of
her bed, clutching her pillow to her chest, her expression impossibly blank.
Department store mannequins look more lifelike. I expected crying, screaming, a
fifty-megaton ballistic freak-out, but no, instead we get to endure the
devastating sight of our friend getting sucked into a black hole of despair and
not even trying to fight back. It’s like we’ve snuffed out her soul.

“Oh,” she says. She sounds
so tiny and distant.

“Muppet, we are so sorry,”
Sara says. “We didn’t want to tell you, but we —”

“No. It’s okay. I’m glad you
did. Thank you.” She squeezes the pillow tighter. “Did he say...am I even
really his?”

“I don’t know,” Sara says.
“I think so? I mean, he said the, uh, genetic material was all, you know, taken
from people in for fertility treatment, and I don’t think you can implant just
any, uh, embryo into a woman. I think it has to be her own, you know...egg.”

God, this is so awkward,
Sara thinks at me.

“I think Sara’s right,” I
say. Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever if I’m telling the truth, but Missy
has been through enough for one night. Maybe, this once, a little lie is okay.
“You look like your parents,” I add, and that part is accurate; her features
are such a delicate blend of her mom and dad’s, you don’t notice any
similarities between her and either parent unless she’s standing next to one or
the other.

Look at me, finding the
silver lining in a dark cloud the size of Greenland. Go me.

“Do you need anything?” I
ask.

Missy shakes her head, then
says, “You should tell Stuart and Matt.”

“Are you sure you want us to
—?”

“No secrets. That’s what we
promised. No secrets.”

I was actually wondering
whether she really wanted
us
to tell the boys, but I shouldn’t be
surprised she’s not up to making such a bizarre confession.

“Okay,” I say, “if you want
us to.”

She nods.

We leave her sitting there,
hugging her pillow and staring into space, and my heart tears in two. I know
consciously there’s nothing we can do to cheer her up, not after this
bombshell, and nothing we can do to magically make this go away, but none of
that prevents me from feeling like a crappy excuse for a friend.

Once we’re outside, we take
out our phones. “Do you want to tell Matt or Stuart?” I say.

Sara grimaces. “Would you
hate me if I said I didn’t want to be the one to tell Stuart?”

“I can’t hate you because I
don’t blame you. Together on speakerphone?” Sara nods. “Okay, then. Let’s get
this over with.”

The call goes as well as
could be expected — which is to say, crawling naked over a mile of broken glass
and rusty nails before swan-diving into a pool of heavily-salted rubbing
alcohol would have been a more pleasant experience. Stuart reacts with anger,
shock, anger, disbelief, horror, anger, confusion, anger, pity, anger,
frustration, anger, helplessness, and did I mention anger? Sara and I spend
half our time on the phone talking him down. We should have seen it coming,
really. After Stuart lost his little brother he adopted Missy as his spiritual
little sister, and he’s as protective of her as any big brother-by-blood would
be, which means he overreacts to any direct threat to her happiness, safety,
and well-being. This time is no exception, although I can’t honestly say his
overreaction is unwarranted.

Stuart’s response is
downright tame compared to Matt’s. I never realized the F-bomb had so many
variations.

At first it throws me off. I
mean, I expected Matt to be furious but I didn’t expect a hurricane-force tirade.
Two minutes into his rant, it hits me: He’s recently become intimately familiar
with the searing sting of betrayal by one’s father. Half of this is probably
rage he has yet to vent at his own dad, so Sara and I let him purge. He
finishes purging about the time I reach my driveway.

“That was exhausting,” Sara
says.

“Yeah, but it’s done. The
easy part’s over with.”

Sara does a double-take. “
That
was the easy part?”

“The hard part will be
finding Buzzkill Joy,” I say.

The mood among the group the
next morning is somber and subdued. Many long hugs are exchanged in silence.
Even Malcolm, who doesn’t know Missy all that well but, thanks to the local
media, is aware what happened to Dr. Hamill, offers a comforting hug. Missy
accepts, but she takes no more comfort in his condolences than she found in
ours.

“Thank you for not making a
fuss over how bad Missy looks,” I say, pulling Malcolm aside. “Everyone in
school’s going to be pointing it out and asking questions all day long...”

“No, I understand,” Malcolm
says. “And I’d understand if you wanted to reschedule tomorrow night so you can
be there for her.”

Tomorrow night? Oh, right,
Malcolm was taking me out for my birthday.

He has a point, curse his
noble soul; Missy’s going through the roughest time of her life and needs her
friends.

I want to decline his offer.
I’m going through stuff, too. I deserve a little happiness.

Missy deserves it more.

“You’re sure you’re okay
with this?” I say.

“Absolutely. Your friend
needs you.”

“If I haven’t mentioned it
already? You’re a great boyfriend.”

“See you at the end of the
day,” Malcolm says before brazenly flouting school rules about PDAs and laying
a long, soft kiss on me.

Melt.

School ends, we walk into
town, set up shop in our quiet corner of Coffee E, and get down to serious
business, emphasis on serious; the atmosphere is tense, dark.

Dark, but not bleak. As we
sit with our drinks, Missy makes an unhappy noise like the growl of (I hate
myself for thinking this) an angry cat. Stuart asks her what’s wrong.

“My stitches itch like
crazy,” Missy says.

“Don’t scratch them,” Matt
says, deadpan, “or we’ll have to put you in the Cone of Shame.”

Missy glowers at him.

“C’mon, that was funny.”

“...Maybe a little funny,”
Missy says under her breath.

Matt made a joke. Missy was
receptive to said joke. These are good signs that all is not lost.

And now, for her next trick,
Carrie Hauser will rain on the parade.

“All right, people, we need
to figure out what’s going on with Buzzkill Joy,” I say, then we proceed to
recap the highlights (more like the lowlights) of the past several days. The
team agrees that Joy wasn’t the intended objective of the jailbreak; Minotaur
was a member of the Bestiary, while Archimedes is a valuable asset who’s been
snatched from custody before — they make sense, but Joy has no known
connections to any of them. She took advantage of an opportunity and that’s it.

Then it gets hazy. Instead
of doing what any sensible fugitive from a supermax penitentiary would do (such
as head for Mexico), Joy shows up at Boston U. looking for information on the
top-secret government-sponsored genetic engineering project that created her
and Missy — information she somehow knew Dr. Hamill had.

High on the list of questions
without answers: Why did she want that information? And how did Joy even know
about the project?

“Joy’s cunning and
street-smart, but she doesn’t strike me as having the brains necessary to hack
into a military computer system,” I say.

“Not that she’d have any
reason to try something like that. Dr. Hamill said no one outside the project
knew anything about it,” Sara adds. “Even the doctors hired to monitor the kids
were kept in the dark.”

I see the wheels turning in
Matt’s head. “The doctors may not have known the specifics of the project,” he
says, “but if they had to know
something
. How would they know to look
for anything unusual unless they were specifically told to look for anything
unusual?”

“That makes sense,” I say.
“Joy could have squeezed her own doctor for information and learned enough to
lead back to Dr. Hamill.”

“But that still doesn’t tell
us how she knew anything about the project in the first place,” Sara points
out.

“Hm, yeah,” Matt agrees.
“Look at Missy. She lived in the same house as the guy in charge of the thing
and she had no idea she was —”

Missy shrinks into her
chair.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,
Muppet.”

Missy shrugs. Jeez, Matt...

“If we rule out the remote
possibility Joy found out by dumb luck she was part of Project Moreau,” I say,
“that means someone told her about it.”

That leads to the reasonable
questions of who and why, but that only brings us right back down a dead end
road.

“We need the Protectorate’s
help,” Matt says, and if he’s saying we need to suck it up, stand aside, and
call in the big guns, you know it’s serious.

Unfortunately, Matt’s
sacrificing his pride for naught. “They’re not going to help us,” I say.

“Then we tell them what’s
going on and let them handle it.”

“They’re not going to help
us.”

“How do you know?” Stuart
says. “Have you even tried talking to them?”

“Yes, I have. Have you? Go
ahead, give it a shot.”

Stuart pulls out his phone
and dials Concorde’s number. He frowns, tries again. “The hell, man?”

Matt tries next and meets
with the same results. He then tries Natalie, while Sara calls Mindforce. I
know what they’re hearing: a rapid
neet neet neet
noise, like a
hyperactive busy signal.

“I tried Astrid too and it’s
the same thing,” I say. “I tried calling the Protectorate’s public number, but
it’s been blocked from my cell and my home phone. My e-mails are getting
bounced, too. We haven’t just been grounded, guys; we’ve been shut out.”

“But...this is...I
mean...what?” Matt fumbles. “But we have to talk to them!”

“I’m open to suggestions,” I
say, and Sara makes one so obvious, I’m kicking myself for not thinking of it.

“Their main office,” she
says. “We can talk to Miss Hannaford, get her to relay a message.”

We run out of the coffee
shop like we’re evacuating a burning building, and the only reason we don’t
sprint the whole way down to the Protectorate’s Main Street office is out of
consideration for Missy. She tends to bounce back quickly, but she’s not up for
anything strenuous quite yet.

Catherine springs from her
desk as soon as we enter the office, arms out to block us from slipping past
her.

“Catherine, we need to —”

That’s as far as I get. “I
am under orders to inform you the Hero Squad is no longer welcome on these
premises. I have been authorized to take whatever steps are necessary to remove
you if you do not leave willingly and quietly. This matter is not up for
discussion.”

That’s what she says with
her outside voice. Her inside voice is much chattier.

Guys, I’m sorry, but you all
have to leave, now,
Catherine says.

Catherine, we have a serious
problem,
I
say, but she’s not listening.

Carrie, I like you. I like
all you kids, which is why I am telling you as a friend: You need to back off.
The Squad’s become a bone of serious contention around here, and it’s causing a
lot of problems between Concorde and — well, everyone else. We need to sort
this mess out internally, but we can’t do that if you don’t give us some
breathing room.

But —!

Please don’t make this
harder on me than it already is,
Catherine says with an air of finality.
This is
out of my hands. I’m sorry.

We turn and shuffle out of
the office. Catherine closes the door behind us, avoiding any eye contact.

“I don’t believe this,” Matt
says. “Concorde’s actually blackballed us.”

“C’mon, man, we can’t give
up,” Stuart says.

“What are we supposed to do?
Barge back in there and scream at Miss Hannaford until she listens to us?”

“If we have to!”

“What good would it do,
Stuart? Seriously?” I say. “We have to face reality. We’re on our own.”

We’re on our own. Just what
we always wanted...and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.