Ell Donsaii 13: DNA (22 page)

Concern writ large in her voice, Ell said, “I know kid, we’ve been able to watch what happened on Osprey’s record. Um, you should barely whisper when you speak to us. We think they don’t know about the ports in your ears and on the backs of your teeth, or about the HUD in your contacts. We don’t want them to figure that out by hearing you talking to us”

“
Why
are they doing…
this
?!” Zage said, his whispery voice trembling.

“Um, probably for… a thing called ransom. They’ll threaten to keep you unless we pay them a lot of money.”

“Oh, no!” Zage didn’t say anything for a second, then in a puzzled tone he said, “Why wouldn’t they steal some
rich
kid?
You
guys wouldn’t be able to pay them very much!”

Ell didn’t say anything for a second, as if she were thinking. Then, “We, um, have more money than a lot of people.” She paused, then pointed out, “Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to send you to that special school or pay Amy to help take care of you... Is Amy okay?”

Zage turned to look at Amy, “She’s asleep… I think they did something to her…”

“They probably drugged her,” Ell said. “She’s breathing, so she probably isn’t hurt too bad.”

“Do you want me to take the blanket off so you can look at her?” Zage said with some trepidation. He didn’t think he
should
be uncovering somebody who was naked, but he didn’t think his mom could tell much about whether or how she’d been injured while she was covered with a blanket.

“Maybe in a little while if she doesn’t seem like she’s waking up.”

Zage glanced over at Amy, “Should I… uh … try to put her clothes on her while she’s still asleep… so she’s not embarrassed when she wakes up?”

“I think,” Ell said, sounding like she was trying to stifle a laugh, “that she might be looking at the record from your AI someday. That might be even more embarrassing. Just look the other way when she needs to get dressed.”

Zage thought for a moment, “I’ll at least straighten her blanket,” he said, doing so carefully. Then he said, “Osprey says he can’t get a GPS signal so he doesn’t know where I am. Do the police know where we are?”

His mom sounded unhappy when she responded, “No, no one’s been able to figure it out yet. We thought we’d get it when they moved you from the van to the house but you weren’t outside long enough to acquire the satellites.” Her voice gained some resolve, “But we’re
going
to find you. Don’t you worry.”

“Will you… be able to pay enough to make them happy if the police can’t find us?” Zage asked, frightened yet embarrassed. His voice had started trembling again. He didn’t want his mom getting upset because he was scared.

He didn’t want to sound like a little kid, even if he was.

“Yeah,” she said, “we’ll be able to pay them enough, don’t worry about that.”

Zage thought she still sounded worried though. “Is there anything I should be doing right now?”

There was a pause, as if his mom had been surprised by the question. Then she said, “I think you should explore the room they’ve got you in. I’ll be watching through your contacts. Maybe, between the two of us, we can somehow figure out where you are. Or, how you might be able to escape.”

Glad of something positive to focus on, Zage said, “Okay,” and walked over to the door. He jiggled the handle and twisted the knob, looking at the row of new appearing deadbolts above and below it. “I think these are new locks.”

“Yeah,” his mom said, “knock gently on the door. See if it sounds hollow.”

“Hollow?”

“Yeah, a lot of the doors inside buildings are cheaply made with hollow cores. You could kick your way through one of those, but,” she said unhappily, “I doubt they would have installed a row of locks in a hollow core door.”

Zage reached up and knocked gently on it. “It sounds solid to me.”

“Yeah,” his mom said, “try thumping it hard once so we can be sure.”

“Thumping it?”

“Bang on it with your fist, pretty hard, but just once.”

Zage did. “What do you think?”

“It’s solid.” Zage thought his mother was trying not to sound too bummed about it. She said, “Try knocking gently on the wall next to it.”

“The wall?” Zage said, reaching out and gently knocking on the wall near the door. “They don’t make hollow walls, do they?”

“Actually,
most
walls are hollow. They have this stuff called sheet rock on each side. It’s not really the kind of hard rock you might think. It’s pretty easy to break through.”

Zage said, “I think this one sounds like it’s solid though.”

“Yeah. Try knocking about four inches to one side of where you just rapped on it. You might have been thumping right over a stud.”

A stud?
Zage thought. In his favorite topic, biology, a stud was a male animal used to get female animals pregnant. He couldn’t imagine what one would be doing inside of a wall. With a mental picture of a big burly rat hiding in the wall, Zage knocked about four inches to the side of where he’d started. “It
does
sound hollow here.”

“I think you’re right,” his mother said. “So it’s important that you know that, if you had to, you’d be able to just punch and kick your way through the wall in an area where it sounds hollow like that. That’s only for emergencies though. If you started doing that right now, those men’d hear you doing it. Once they realized how dumb it was to put you in a room where you could get through the wall, they’d do something to make it so you couldn’t.”

Zage frowned, “Mom, why would they keep studs in the wall?”

There was a moment of silence, then evidently his mother understood what he was thinking. He could tell she was suppressing a laugh when she said, “Um, not a male animal. A wall stud is a piece of wood that the sheet rock’s nailed to.”

“Oh… So how do we get through the wall without kicking it down?”

“Let’s keep exploring the room. If you find something hard, you can probably just scratch at the sheet rock until it cuts its way through it. That’d take a while and it’ll still make
some
noise, but not as much as kicking a hole in it.”

Zage made his way around the room, checking the walls, looking in all the drawers, looking under the dresser and under the bed. The drawers had a few more sets of clothes in them. Zage found some underwear that might fit Amy and took it over to put it on the bed next to her. There were also some short stubby toothbrushes and small tubes of toothpaste. A door in the corner revealed a small closet that contained some coat hangers, a couple rolls of toilet paper, a trashcan, and a blanket.

The trashcan was one of the metal ones with a lid that went up when you stepped on a pedal. It was lined with a heavy plastic bag. His mother had him lift the bag out and look under it “Good,” she said, “there’s some extra bags in the bottom in case you need them.”

“What would I need plastic bags for?”

“I can’t think of anything right now, but they’re surprisingly useful. It’s good to know they’re there.”

The back and right walls of the room were made of something his mother called “concrete block.”

She told him he wouldn’t be able to punch his way through
those
walls.

She said, “Let’s go back to the left rear corner of the room, beneath the shelves.”

Zage went back to the corner and squatted down. There was a set of shelves in the corner, mounted on the wall. Someone had screwed a couple of metal rails to the wall. The rails had metal brackets sticking out from them that were holding up the wooden shelves. The shelves were empty except for a few ancient paperback books on each. “What did you want to look at back here?” Zage asked.

“Tap on the wall there. See if it’s hollow.” When Zage started to tap on it right below one of the metal rails, she said, “Not there. The rails will be screwed to the studs. Try the area right between the rails.”

Zage tapped there. “It sounds hollow, now what?”

“Hmmm,” his mother said, “step back so I can look at those shelves from a little bigger distance.” A moment later, she said, “Gaze all around the room one more time.”

Zage did, wondering what in the world a wider viewpoint of the shelves would be good for.

His mother said, “Okay, take the chair over into the corner, climb up onto it and move the two books off of that narrow top shelf to the shelf below it.” Once he’d done that, she said, “Lift the empty shelf off the brackets that are holding it up.”

Zage did, feeling a little surprised to realize that the shelf was only sitting on the brackets rather than being fastened to them. “What do I do with the shelf?”

“See if it’ll fit in that drawer underneath all the clothes.”

Zage climbed down and went over to the small chest of drawers. Pulling open the drawer that had the clothes, he pulled them forward and found that the shelf did fit inside the drawer. He pushed the clothes back over it. “Like that?”

“Yeah.”

Curiously, Zage said, “What good did that do?”

“Oh, well, hopefully you’ll see in a minute. Climb back up on the chair and see if you can get the brackets that held the shelf off their rails. Usually, all you have to do is push up on them and they pop out of their little slots.”

Zage did it, feeling a little surprised when the brackets came loose. He did have to bump one of them with the base of his palm before it would come loose. “Now what?”

“For now, hide the brackets in the drawer with the shelf. Then, you’ll do the same thing to move the remaining shelves up and apart a little bit so it’s not so obvious that one of the shelves is missing.”

Zage started to work, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what his mother was trying to accomplish. Not having figured it out, after a bit, he said, “So all this was to get a shelf hidden away in the drawer?”

“Well, if you’ll think about it, you could use that shelf as a club if you had to. But a board like that’d be pretty clumsy. If you decide you need a club, that wooden rod the coat hangers are hanging on in the closet would make a better one.”

“Oh. Should I hide it in the drawer too?”

“No, I’d just leave it in the closet. It’s pretty accessible there.”

“No it isn’t! I can’t reach it without bringing the chair over!”

“Oh… sorry.” His mom sounded a little embarrassed. “I’d forgotten you couldn’t reach it. Yeah, you should get it down. But don’t put it in the drawer, Leave it standing in the corner of the closet. It’ll be easier to get to and won’t be such a suspicious place if they see it there.”

“What should I do with the coat hangers?” Zage asked. He’d finished rearranging the shelves, so he picked up the chair and took it over to the closet.

“I’d leave some of them lying on the floor of the closet and put some of them in the top drawer of the dresser."

Zage got the five hangers down, leaving three on the floor of the closet and carrying two of them over to put in the drawer. Going back, he lifted the wooden closet rod down out of its holder and leaned it up next to the door inside the closet. "Now what?"

"Okay, now take one of the shelf brackets back over to the corner of the room and we’ll see if you can use it to scrape a hole through the sheet rock."

His mother had him use the bracket to mark out a rectangular hole between the studs that the shelves were on. Then he started rubbing hard along one of the marks he’d made, surprised to see that underneath the paint was some cardboard and beneath that some powdery white material, “What
is
this white stuff, Mom?”

“Gypsum. It’s the ‘rock’ in ‘sheet rock.’ As you can see, it’s pretty soft rock.”

“Um, this is making a big mess. If those guys come back in here, they’re going to see it right away.”

“Oh, back out into the main part of the room and let me get a look at it.”

Zage did so.

“You’re right. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be easy to see back in the corner of the room on the other side of the bed. But if even you can see it, being taller, they’ll see it right away… Look around the room again, let’s see if we get any ideas.”

Zage did.

“The table! It looks like it folds up. Let’s see if you can fold it and lean it against the wall over the hole you’re making."

Zage had never seen a folding table, so his mom had to explain to him how to do it. As soon as she started to explain it, though, it seemed obvious and he quickly finished unhinging it. He carried it over and leaned it against the wall under the shelves where it turned out to nicely cover the hole he’d started to make. "Shall I keep working on the hole?"

His mother didn’t say anything for a moment, then she said, “I'm worried because scraping at the wall makes quite a bit of noise. We don’t want them to come check on what you’re doing. Maybe when Amy’s awake, she can create some kind of distraction."

"Okay, what
should
I do?"

"Are you tired? Do you want to take a nap?"

"Mom! You
know
I don’t take naps!" Then Zage felt a little embarrassed, afraid he sounded like a whiny little kid.