Spell Robbers (17 page)

Ben found Peter and Sasha in the dining room eating lunch. When they saw him walk in, they waved him over. He trudged to their table and collapsed into one of the chairs.

“Do you want to go get some food?” Peter asked.

Ben shook his head. “Not hungry.”

“Okay,” Sasha said. “Then talk. Tell us. What have you been doing?”

Ben shook his head again. “I’m not supposed to.”

“But you’re in?” Sasha asked. “You’re in with the Dread Cloaks?”

“Yes.”

“I have to say.” Sasha looked over her shoulder. “After everything that everyone says about him, I had my doubts about Ronin.”

“He just wants what I want,” Ben said.

“What’s that?” Peter asked.

“A piece of his life back.”

Sasha and Peter both went quiet after that, and suddenly the food on their plates seemed more interesting to them than Ben. He thought about leaving it that way. Just letting the silence grow. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t understand him. Why they didn’t feel the same way.

“I went and saw my mom again,” Ben said.

Sasha put down her fork, straightened her neck, and took a long and measured breath.

“Why would you keep doing that to yourself?” Peter asked.

Ben had wanted sympathy from them. He’d wanted understanding. “Don’t you guys miss them?” he asked.

“Of course,” Peter said. “But this is where I belong. This is where they accept me.”

“What about you, Sasha?” Ben asked. “Do you miss them?”

The last time a question about Sasha’s detachment had come up, she’d gotten pretty upset. But Ben was angry, and he didn’t care if he upset her. She
should
be upset about it. Ben thought people should be more upset about a lot of things in the League, and if they were, maybe things would be different.

Sasha took a long drink of water from her cup. “Look, Ben. I really don’t want to talk about this, okay?”

“Why?” Ben asked.

“I just don’t. You … you can’t change the past.”

“No one’s talking about the past,” Ben said. “I’m asking if you miss them right now.”

Sasha looked down at her lap.

“Do you?” Ben asked.

“Come on, Ben,” Peter said. “That’s enough.”

But it didn’t feel like enough. “Can’t you even admit it to yourself?”

Sasha looked up at him. She wasn’t mad like he was expecting. She was crying. He had hurt her. “To myself, all the time. Never to anyone else.”

Suddenly, all the anger that had propped him up fell away, and Ben’s resolve collapsed under his shame. “Sasha, I’m —”

She shook her head. “Don’t. Just don’t.” She got up, threw her napkin on the table, and walked out of the dining room holding a hand over her mouth.

Ben fell forward, elbows on the table, covering his face with both hands. Why had he done that? Why was he taking out his anger and frustration on his friends?

“She’s been really worried about you,” Peter said.

That only made Ben feel worse.

LATER
that night, as Ben lay in bed, the echoes of what he’d said to Sasha sounded over and over in his head. He stared at the ceiling, thinking about her tears, and how she’d looked walking away from the table. He would apologize in the morning, before he went back to Poole.

“I’m up to Class Two actuations,” Peter said.

Ben looked over. His friend was awake, too. “That’s awesome.”

“Sasha helped me. We’ve been training a lot the past couple of days.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“The thing is —” Peter paused, and in the dark, his hesitation seemed longer than it probably was. “If they told me I could go back tomorrow, I wouldn’t. If they offered to reattach me, I’d say no.”

Ben rolled to face him. “Are you serious?”

Peter stayed on his back, looking up. “I’m serious. So I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re doing this for me at all, don’t. But do what you have to do for yourself. I’m behind you on that.”

Ben had thought about this before, wondered if leaving the League would mean leaving Peter behind. Ben didn’t like that thought, but it was Peter’s choice. “Thanks for having my back,” he said.

“Sasha has your back, too. You should know that.”

“Thanks.” The guilt about what he’d said to her returned. “Has she ever talked to
you
about her family? What her life was like before she came to the League?”

“No.”

“I wonder why she won’t talk about it.”

Peter yawned. “Just … just let it go.” He was silent after that, and snoring not long after.

With everyone asleep, it was time for Ben to execute a new part of the job. Ronin wanted plans for the League’s prison cells to hold Poole, if needed. Ben didn’t know where to find those, but he knew where to look. He climbed out of bed, grabbed his boots, and slipped across the room in his socks. He looked back to see if anyone had woken up or noticed him, and it didn’t seem like they had. So he went up the stairs.

The building hallways were still lit, even though everyone had gone home. Ben pulled on his boots and laced them up. He knew agents patrolled the building at night, keeping watch. He hoped he wouldn’t bump into one of them, but if he did, it wouldn’t be a big deal. He was a recruit. He belonged there. Maybe he had insomnia, and maybe a walk or some fresh air helped him get to sleep.

Ben turned in the direction of a room he knew about, but had never been inside before. It was the file room where they kept all the dossiers and League records, and if there were schematics for the prison cells anywhere in the building, that’s where they’d be.

He made it there without running into anyone, and peeked around the corner. The hallway was empty. He scurried to the door and tried the handle, even though he expected it to be locked. It was. But he’d seen Polly do this, so he thought maybe he could, too.

He listened for the sounds of anyone approaching, and got down on his knees. Like the others in the building, it was an old-fashioned lock. He focused on the cylinder where the key slid in, its shape, and with his Locus in hand, he tried a simple actuation to rotate it.

It jiggled, but something stopped it, like Ben had inserted the wrong key.

He didn’t have any idea what the inside of the lock looked like. He hadn’t studied them the way Polly had, so he couldn’t visualize which parts to move.

He heard distant footsteps.

They seemed to be getting louder. Coming toward him.

Ben suppressed the panic that rose with each footfall. He couldn’t actuate if he panicked. He turned his attention back to the lock. He thought he could probably force it, with a strong enough actuation. But he worried the guard would be able sense it, and besides, then the lock would be broken and the League would know someone had been in the file room.

The footsteps were pretty close now. In the next hallway. Ben had seconds, tops.

He remembered a time when he’d accidentally locked himself and his mom out of the bathroom, and he had to go, bad. His mom had slipped a credit card into the crack by the handle and pushed that metal sliding bar in, opening the door.

Ben didn’t have a credit card. But this door had one of those metal sliding bars, like the other doors in the building. He tried to remember what they looked like, felt like, then closed his eyes to visualize this one. Ben felt the shape and the size of the metal in his mind as if with his fingers.

The footsteps were just around the corner. It was hard to ignore them and concentrate, but Ben held his Locus and actuated a motion that pushed the bar in.

The door popped open.

Ben flew inside the room and closed the door behind him. Then he held his breath and listened.

The footsteps sounded like they were in the hallway now. They came closer, right up to the door, and kept going.

Ben let out his breath and turned to face the room. Rows of filing cabinets stood in formation from one wall to the other. A desk near the door to Ben’s left bore a lamp. He switched it on, hoping it wasn’t bright enough to attract attention if the guard walked by again, and started down the aisles.

The labels on the cabinets didn’t make any sense. Just numbers and letters and periods. But Ben figured schematics would be pretty big, so he went to the filing cabinet with wide, flat drawers and started digging through them. The first few drawers were full of maps: road maps, topographical maps, even what looked like a map of the city’s sewer system. The next drawers had blueprints for all kinds of structures. Then Ben opened a drawer that seemed closer to what he was after, with technical diagrams and designs with complicated labels like,
Interferometer Arrangement for Two Mirrors in Quantum Superposition
. Ben plowed through the rest of them, scanning as fast as he could, until he found what Ronin wanted.

Actuation Suppression Cell
.

He smiled to himself and whipped the plans out of the drawer. To hide them, he rolled them up tight and stuck them down his pant leg, then headed for the door. On his way there, one of the cabinets caught his eye. It had an actual label.

He wondered if Sasha would be in there, but only doubted for a moment whether he should look. He opened the drawer and flipped along the tabbed files to the L’s until he came to
LAMBERT, SASHA
. He pulled her file and opened it up.

There was her picture, the same black hair, but instead of a blue streak, she had a red one. Beneath that he found her basic information:
EYE COLOR. HEIGHT. WEIGHT
. But many of the other lines had been left blank. No place of birth. No names of parents. Not even a date of birth. In the space marked
DETACHMENT DATE
, someone had written in:
PENDING
.

Ben was stunned. According to this, Sasha had never been detached. She had lied to them. But why had the League left her attached? And why did she get so upset whenever Ben brought it up? She had nothing to be upset about. She could still go home.

Ben heard footsteps out in the hallway, the guard returning. He shoved the file back in the drawer, leaped to the desk, and managed to kill the lamp just before the footsteps passed in front of the door.

Several moments of silence passed before Ben opened the door, just a crack, and peered out. No one there, and no one coming that he could hear. He made sure the door was relocked, and then slipped out into the hallway. Minutes later, he was in bed.

But thoughts of Sasha still kept him awake, and the next morning, he sought her out. He wanted to talk to her before Ronin returned and they left again.

He found her eating breakfast in the dining room, and grabbed the seat next to her.

“You weren’t ever detached,” he whispered.

Her back stiffened. “What? How did you —?”

“That’s not important. I just want to know why you lied to me. And if you’re not detached, why are you still here?”

Sasha set her spoon down slowly, staring at it, like it might try to escape her hand. “Look. This
really
isn’t any of your business.”

“I thought we were friends.” Ben had to clear his throat. “You know what this means to me.”

“We
are
friends.” Sasha looked at him for several moments, and then leaned closer. “Of course we’re friends. I’m sorry, it’s not that I ever meant to lie to you…. Look, there are other kinds of detachment, okay? It doesn’t have to be quantum to be real.”

“What do you mean? Other kinds, like what?”

“Like —”

“Ready, kid?” Ronin walked into the room, flanked by Agent Spear and Agent Taggart.

Sasha leaned back and looked away as Ronin took a seat next to Ben, across from her.

“I’ve already eaten,” Ronin said. “The food is better than I remember. But still not great. You want something before we go?”

Ben shook his head.

Sasha gave him a darting smile and rose from her chair. “Be safe, okay? We’ll talk more when you get back.” She left the room.

Ben looked at Agent Spear. “Have you seen Peter?”

“Not this morning,” Agent Spear said.

“Do I have time to go find him and say good-bye?” Ben asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Agent Taggart said. “Mr. Weathersky wants you both back with Poole as soon as possible.”

Ben nodded.

Agent Spear put an envelope on the table. “There you go. Mr. Weathersky signed it this morning.”

Ronin looked down. “What’s this?”

“False orders for a League raid,” Agent Taggart said. “Something to build Poole’s confidence in Ben.”

Ronin nodded and stood. “Perfect. Let’s go, kid. I don’t like being here any longer than I have to be.” He looked at Agent Spear and Agent Taggart. “Some offense intended.”

Ben picked up the envelope. “Did Mr. Weathersky say anything else?”

“Good luck,” Agent Spear said. “And good work. That goes for me, too, son.”

“Thanks,” Ben said.

He followed Ronin out back to his car, and they drove away without any of the send-off they’d been given the last time. Ben left the League headquarters feeling like he’d disappointed and hurt the people there he cared about.

“You okay?” Ronin asked.

“Yeah,” Ben said. He reached down his pants.

“Whoa,” Ronin said. “What are you —?”

Ben pulled out the rolled-up plans. “Here. The actuation suppression cell.”

“You did it?” Ronin took the plans, tapped the dash with them, and then tossed them into the backseat. “I’m impressed, kid.”

Ben opened up the envelope and read the raid order. It was perfect. “We just have to change the date on this, and we’re all set.”

Ronin drove them to a twenty-four-hour copy center. They bought some time on a computer and scanned in the raid order. From there, it was a pretty simple thing to erase the old date, and put in a new one, two days away. Then they erased Mr. Weathersky’s signature, and printed a brand-new raid order.

“You’re up, kid,” Ronin said.

Ben took the original order, with the signature, and laid it side by side with the new order. He’d done the same thing with his mom’s signature, but that had also taken a lot of practice. He grabbed a pen and some scratch paper. He filled up two sheets before he thought it looked passable. Ronin agreed, so Ben tried on the new order.

He sat back, eyes jumping back and forth between the real signature and his forgery. It looked good.

“I think you got it on the first try,” Ronin said.

“Yeah?”

“Looks good to me. Let’s go with it.”

They shredded everything but the new order, and got back in the car. Ronin drove them out to Mercer Beach the same way Poole had brought them. In the daylight, the abandoned neighborhoods and strip malls around the refinery looked even worse.

“Which house are we going to use?” Ben asked.

“Not sure yet,” Ronin said. “But the plan is the same. Poole will bring Hughes in a convoy right through here. Argus will give us some cover. Lykos and Meg will create a distraction with Polly, while you and I strike from the inside and get Hughes and the augmenter out of there.”

“Right.”

“After I drop you off, I’m going to meet up with the rest of the crew to finalize details of the ambush.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“No.”

Ben ran his thumb along the edge of the envelope. He didn’t like the thought of going back to Poole alone.

“You’ll be all right, kid. The time to worry about a paranoid man is when you confront his fears, not when you confirm them. Just remember why you’re doing this.”

Ben didn’t need to remember. His reasons clung to the back of everything he had done so far, and everything he was about to do. He stayed silent for the rest of the ride, and Ronin dropped him off at the edge of the parking lot.

Ben walked across the wide expanse of broken pavement. Flaking paint still hung on in places where the parking stalls had been, but weeds and grass now worked to claim them. A breeze ripe with refinery stench wrinkled his nose. It took several minutes for Ben to reach the amusement park’s entrance. As he approached, a couple of Dread Cloaks appeared from inside the old ticket booths.