The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (19 page)

“There’s something I think we should do,” Rosie said. “Anything we have, any physical evidence of what’s going on here, could put us in danger. You want to be careful not to have any of it with you. It could be used against you. Or it could get into the wrong hands.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Whose hands?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just know that my father was very clear about that before they took him, and he told me to be sure to tell you too.”

Nia pulled the envelopes out of her pocket. “How about these?” she said.

“Rip them up,” said Rosie. “Toss them into the water.”

Nia did as Rosie told her to and the flakes of ripped paper were picked up by the wind and swirled high up into the air
before they drifted, randomly, gracefully, down to the gray water, like snow.

“Anything else?” she said.

Nia held up the red and blue key cards. “We still don’t know what these are,” she said. “We forgot to ask.”

“Keep them,” Rosie suggested. “But somewhere safe.” Nia stuffed them down into her boot.

I rubbed the pendant in my pocket.

Was I imagining it, or was Rosie looking at me? Did she
know?

I started to put parts of my dad’s stories—the ones he and Amanda’s mom would go over in our kitchen back in Pinkerton—together with what we’d seen in the lab. In one of my dad’s stories he talked about how kids got woken up in the mornings with classical music blaring, so that the first thought of their day would be light-filled harmony, but it only left them all feeling sick. In contrast,
as a kid I got woken up in the mornings with a cream cheese–bacon omelet—my favorite.

Amanda’s mom had laughed about the use of stopwatches timing what they ate.

My dad had reminded her about how, for one whole year, they’d never eaten the same food twice—one week it was all curry, another all pancakes, working their way through every culture’s foods. My dad was so scarred by this he used to
let us eat mac and cheese from the box every single night if we asked for it.

Suddenly, I felt a pang of understanding, for what my happy, goofy dad had gone through. Flash cards instead of family, the rows of beds instead of rooms where you could close a door, weekly check-ins with the nurse instead of spontaneous conversations with a parent who actually cared about you.

It wasn’t fair. Any
of it.

And this was my chance to help to make it stop.

I pulled the pendant from my pocket, removed the vial, and held it up to the light. The sun shone through it, turning the almost black color of the blood a vibrant scarlet with lights of orange. “This is my father,” I said. I turned to the others. “He loved me.” I squeezed my eyes shut, but the tears poured down anyway. “And this is all
that’s left of him.”

The others nodded, and it wasn’t a fake kind of “we feel your pain” nod. Because I could see in each of their faces that they were experiencing the feelings I was having, that they had managed to absorb what I knew.

The story of my dad was part of them now. . . . I was not alone in my pain. That knowledge gave me the strength to extend the vial over the side of the bridge,
remove the seal, and peel my fingers away one by one to let the vial fall into the surf, where it hit and bobbed for a second before the water enveloped it. I watched it sink below the surface.

I didn’t say good-bye out loud. But I squeezed my eyes shut and thought it. I pictured his face in my mind, smiling at me, knowing that I was carrying him inside me.

Callie, Hal, and Nia reached out for
me, wrapping their arms around me. I felt the current pass from each of them, through me and back out again. But instead of jumping away from it as I had the first few times, I relaxed into it.

This was what we had now. Each other.

Chapter 23

We walked across
the rest of the bridge in silence. On the other side, we saw a kiosk selling drinks and Washington, D.C., T-shirts, maps, and postcards, and Callie moved toward it.

She stopped in front of the rack of postcards as if she were thinking very carefully about which one she wanted to buy. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket, and lined it up in front of a postcard of the Museum of American
History. She pressed a few buttons on her phone, then held it up to show Hal, Nia, and then me.

“Brilliant,” said Nia, getting Callie’s idea right away.

The photograph in the phone made it look like Callie herself had taken a picture of the Museum of American History.

Nia picked up a postcard packet—twelve postcards bound together in an accordion fold:
Monuments in Bloom: 12 Must-See Attractions
in Cherry Blossom Season
. “This should do it,” she said. I lined up my camera and started to take pictures.

Callie and Hal continued to scan the racks of postcards for more shots taken while the cherry trees were in bloom. The spinner racks were set up in a row in front of the kiosk, and we worked our way around to the back. Which is lucky, because it gave us somewhere to hide when Hal grabbed
my arm, pulling me back. He glared at Nia and then Callie and they froze as well. Rosie, seeing our near-instantaneous stillness, shifted so she couldn’t be seen.

Through a space in the racks, I saw what Hal must have known was coming—one of the guards, heading right for us. Between two rows of postcards, I caught the glint of the metal snaps on his shiny jacket, the pleats on his black pants.
He was walking purposefully, like he already knew where to find us. In just a few seconds he would have us.

Except that, when he was only five steps away, Rosie dashed out from behind the postcard kiosks. Before we could do anything to stop her, she took off at a sprint. The guard recognized her and took off after her.

It all happened so fast, it was over before we could do anything to stop
her. Rosie must have known that we wouldn’t have let her sacrifice herself to save us.

Nia’s face had gone from olive to gray. Hal pushed his hair off his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Callie put a hand on his shoulder and he kind of leaned into her for strength.

We made our way along the mall, passing the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the World War II Memorial. As
we were getting ready to cross 17th Street, we heard police sirens in the distance, in the direction that Rosie had sprinted. A shudder passed through my body, thinking that those sirens might be connected to her, or to Amanda, or to both. I thought about how their mother had died. An accident that was the result of being chased. Nowhere felt safe anymore.

By the time we reconnected with the
group, we were late. The buses were already loaded and Mr. Fowler was standing at the open doorway, checking his watch and looking panicked. We took the last few dozen yards at a jog.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said to us in a huff. “I almost had a heart attack here. We will not be able to even
go
on History Club field trips any longer if students behave as inconsiderately as you four have.
You have my number—you did not think to call? If not for Heidi Bragg letting me know how routinely irresponsible you four are, I would have alerted the police.
And
you’ve almost made us miss our tour of the Capitol. Mr. Thornhill worked very hard to secure tickets to a viewing of the Senate chamber, and I would hate for your carelessness to ruin that for the rest of the group.”

I barely heard
him. I didn’t even care that we were getting yelled at, it was so good to be safe inside the bus reunited with Cisco and our group.

“Let’s go,” he shouted to the driver as soon as we had boarded the bus. It smelled like old lunches and air freshener.

“Sorry, Mr. Fowler,” Callie said, hanging her head. I could see that she was smiling. But her smile turned to a thin-lipped look of resolution.
Yes, we were safe here on the bus. But what about Rosie? And what about Amanda?

At the Capitol, there was a security check-in just inside the doors. There were a number of students ahead of us—and Heidi had a lot of jewelry to unload—but after waiting for a while we got to the front of the line. I laid my camera carefully in the plastic tray to slide it through the X-ray machine and got in line
behind Callie. Hal had a guitar pick, house keys, and his duct tape wallet and duct tape phone. Nia tossed in a giant green plastic ring, a pocket-size edition of
The Death of Ivan Ilych
, a lipstick, a much-chewed pencil stub, an expensive-looking green leather wallet, and a hair clip. Callie had almost nothing in her pockets, but the security guy emptied her backpack of a water bottle, lip gloss,
a copy of
Lucky
magazine, some loose change and dollar bills, a pen shaped like a candy cane, and a pack of bubble gum. The guard picked up my camera, rotated it in his hands, and asked me to take a picture to prove it wasn’t some kind of explosive.

“Smile,” I said, framing his pimply face—his hair was so light you couldn’t even describe the stuff on his upper lip as peach fuzz.

But for a second,
as I was focusing in, the foreground of my picture went blurry and I could see only what lay deeper in the shot. And that’s when I noticed a kindly-looking man watching from a few steps away, his hands folded together as if he was struggling to stay still. He was staring straight at my camera lens, which was weird—was he watching us? But what was even weirder was that I recognized him, though
it took me a second to remember from where. All I could remember was that I’d had a good feeling about him. It was an association with my dad, with grown-ups I liked.

As soon as I pressed down on the shutter—he must have heard the noise—he flinched slightly, like someone who is so modest he doesn’t like to think his picture is being taken.

I’d seen him recently.

And then it hit me. He was the
kindly businessman who’d picked up the scavenger hunt sheet when we’d dropped it on the way to the Vietnam Memorial. Where we’d come as close to getting caught by the Official’s guards as we had all day. How did this man get here, to the Capitol? Was it a coincidence? He wasn’t some kind of a senator or something, was he?

I felt like maybe his being here was a good thing. A sign that things were
about to turn around for us. He wasn’t my dad, but he sure looked like a dad. That had to be good news, right?

Callie must have noticed him at the same time I did. When I lowered the camera, I saw that she’d already taken a few steps in his direction, addressing him with a casual, happy grin. “Hey,” she said. “Remember us?”

The man smiled, the same slightly skeptical but intrigued smile he’d
given us on the sidewalk. I remembered how likable this man was. He nodded. “You were working on the scavenger hunt, right?”

Callie nodded brightly. I glanced at Hal and Nia. They were both watching intently, and I could see the same kind of hope in them that I was feeling. I remembered Rosie saying we were safe with the school group. Maybe this man had something to do with our safety. He seemed
so comfortable and relaxed, and in control of everything.

“Do you work here?” Callie asked, her smile trusting. All of us were ready to believe. I look back and wonder at this—how this man had made us feel we could trust him.

The man laughed, and for the first time, I felt a shudder of doubt. I think a door opened inside my brain, a tiny crack of an opening. I didn’t want to change my mind about
someone just because he had a laugh that wasn’t very nice. But then again, the way people laugh says a lot about them. There are people out there who laugh at things that aren’t funny. It doesn’t make them evil, it just means they might not have much of a sense of humor.

“I don’t work in this building,” he said. “I’m just visiting it, like I assume you are. But I do work for the government.”

I was starting to trust him again, to forget the suspicious way he’d laughed.

Callie relaxed as well. “You work for the government?” she said. “That’s cool. What do you do?”

And then the man seemed to almost wink as he said, “Oh, me? I’m just another of many officials.” Or maybe it wasn’t a wink. Maybe it was a blink. Maybe he was narrowing his eyes. I don’t know exactly what happened to his
face, except it changed. Dramatically. And suddenly, he wasn’t nice anymore. He wasn’t an amused businessman helping a group of kids.

I knew then. We all knew. He wasn’t just one of many government officials.

He was
the
government official. The Official.

Chapter 24

Again, I remembered
what Amanda had taught me. Be cool. Stay still.

I started collecting my things from the bin that had passed through the scanner, moving as slowly as if I had just stood up from sunbathing on the beach. Forcing myself to yawn, which is contagious, I hoped my deliberate calm would travel Hal, Callie, and Nia’s way as well. It did. It was as if the deep breaths I was taking were slowing them also.

Callie glanced nervously toward our class, as if she were making sure they wouldn’t leave without us, but then, after she sensed me staring at her, she sighed.

“Uh . . .” said Hal to the Official. “We have to get back to our group.”

How was it possible for someone to seem so trustworthy and then transform into someone totally awful? How had it happened just in the course of a laugh? And how
had I missed it? I’d believed him. I was generally so good at reading people—too good. But with him, I had failed. Utterly. Like Amanda, he was someone I could not read.

When I turned back to the group, I saw Heidi. She was staring at the Official in a way I had never seen her stare before. Her eyebrows were angled, her jaw tight, her mouth pulled back in expectation.

“Look at Heidi,” I said
under my breath to the others. I hid behind my camera, taking a picture to capture her expression. “See the way she’s looking at that man.”

“She knows him,” said Callie.

I swung the camera back toward the Official in time to see him returning Heidi’s gaze. Right as I pressed the shutter, he winked at her.

Just then, Mr. Fowler introduced a woman named Jackie, who was going to serve as a tour
guide. She led us away from the security check-in and to the starting point of the tour, which was a spot directly under the Capitol’s rotunda. The man who we now believed to be the Official watched us go.

There are a lot of interesting facts to be learned about the U.S. Capitol, and Jackie mentioned many of them. For example, the dome we were standing under? In the center of it, your voice was
trapped, but if you stood anywhere under its perimeter, your voice would travel across it, such that even a whisper at the northern tip of it would be audible to someone standing at the edge that was due south.

Jackie mentioned that the Capitol contains 16.5 acres of floor space. There are 540 rooms, 658 windows, and 850 doorways. The chambers where the House and the Senate originally met are
like little museums now. One is filled with statues, and the other is filled with the desks senators used to sit in. You can see the ink wells the senators used to dip their pens in.

There are trains underground linking congressmen’s office buildings and the Capitol so that when it’s time to vote, they can rush over. There are special elevators and conference rooms as well. There was so much
to learn about which laws were made, and when and how all of it was done—right under this roof.

Impressive stuff, and I forced myself to pay attention. It was the only way to keep from screaming or running away. The Official! Here in the Capitol Building! I started snapping pictures with my camera, shots of people’s sneakers looking dusty and worn on the shining marble floors, eagles carved into
the tops of pillars, their talons vicious and menacing, light pouring through a window that was taller than me, the shadows cast by crenellated cornice work that always reminded me of baby teeth.

What got my attention at the end of the tour was when Jackie led us up a flight of stairs into a hallway on the third floor and then stopped at a set of double doors. “You all are very lucky today,”
she said. “Not every school group gets to see our government in action, but today the Senate is in session and you all will have the opportunity to take a peek.”

I thought we’d see congressmen and -women banging their fists on their desks, shouting to be heard. Or maybe it would be more like the Republican Senate in the
Star Wars
movies, where space-dwelling creatures of all stripes board a little
speedboat-like mini-spaceship to be transported to the middle of the Senate orb to speak. I thought at least there would be people in the room, even if it wasn’t totally packed the way it is for the State of the Union, when they set the justices of the Supreme Court up on folding chairs in the front row, like they were moms and dads crammed into a classroom on the day of the first-grade class
play.

I wasn’t prepared for the fact that the only senator in the entire room was giving a speech to no one but a television camera set up a few feet from his face. He was talking as if the room were full, but as we filed through the double doors and into seats in the viewing gallery that stretched around the top of the chamber, I realized that no one was listening, not even the pages holding
his briefcase nor the guy dusting the carvings in the back of the room.

“That’s C-SPAN,” Jackie whispered to us, sotto voce. “You all know the C-SPAN channel?”

Yeah
, I thought. Like the shopping channel, it was one to flip past.

It took a lot of concentration to figure out what the senator was actually speaking about, but finally I worked it out. There was an amendment that had been proposed
to a bill that was up for consideration. In the amendment there was a paragraph. In that paragraph there was a sentence. And in that sentence there was a phrase . . . a phrase this guy didn’t like. Because it used the word “it” instead of saying “the programs now and continuing.”

As soon as I figured that out, I slunk down in my seat and let my mind wander. The Senate looks like an old-fashioned
school room. There’s an antique wooden desk set up for every senator, but where the teacher would sit there is an elevated dais that looks like the spot a judge might sit in if this were a courtroom. No one was there, of course, except a young woman in a suit who looked like a secretary, stacking papers. Occasionally someone would walk through the room and push in the chairs that were randomly
pushed back from the senators’ last departure.

“I think there might be a vote coming up, so hold on,” Jackie said. “You’ll see all the senators rush into the room for that.”

But something even more “exciting” happened first. The Official entered the viewing gallery and strode purposefully toward us. He had the same “Who me?” innocent, happy-go-lucky expression on his face, but he clearly wasn’t
happy, as I’d originally thought. He was gloating. I had the sudden intuition that if things stopped going his way at any point, we’d see an entirely different kind of expression cross his face, and it wouldn’t remind me in any way of anything I’d known with my dad.

I exchanged panicked glances with Nia, who had spotted the Official as well. He leaned over to whisper something in Jackie’s ear
and she clapped her hands together like a child on Christmas in one of those movies where it always snows and Santa is real.

“Students,” Jackie said, looking to Mr. Fowler, beaming at him, beaming back at the Official. “I have some really remarkable news. This gentleman here has arranged for four lucky students to have a personal look at the Senate floor.”

“I’ll escort them down myself and vouch
for their, uh”—did anyone but me notice the Official pause?—“safety.”

“Would you like me to select the students for you?” Mr. Fowler suggested. “There are some real civics buffs in our midst like Allie K. over there, and it would be an honor—”

The Official cut him off. He pointed—where else?—at Callie, Hal, Nia, and me. “How about those four,” he said. “They look like impressive scholars of
American history.” Was he laughing? I couldn’t help but notice that he was looking at us like we should be laughing along with him, enjoying this process, like this was all some kind of great inside joke. I also noticed the tattoo-faced guard had entered the viewing gallery, blocking the door that was our only way out.

I don’t know what we would have done if the Official hadn’t bent down to whisper,
“If you care about Amanda’s safety you’ll come with me without a struggle.” Maybe we would have tried to run? Maybe we would have asked Mr. Fowler for help? Turned to Cisco? Maybe we just could have screamed?

But we believed the Official that we were saving Amanda by doing what he said, so we stood without protest and followed him out of the viewing gallery. Nia didn’t even so much as glance
in Cisco’s direction as she left.

Following the Official out into the hall and down a flight of stairs, I couldn’t help but notice the neat corners of the shoulders of his suit jacket, the trim hair at the back of his neck. He looked like someone who never missed a detail. The shabby briefcase he’d carried when we’d first seen him was gone, and I wondered if that had been part of a disguise—I
knew from Amanda that sometimes all it takes is one detail to make yourself come across as entirely different from who you really are.

I also couldn’t help but notice the guards. Tattoo-Face followed about ten paces behind, and Falls-Asleep-at-Desk was ten paces ahead.

The Official didn’t threaten us, or even check that we were following. He seemed brisk and busy, smiling at strangers we passed,
as if he was accepting their congratulations for participating in Take Your Lame and Surly Teenage Appendage to Work Day.

Sometimes he even smiled at us.

We didn’t smile back.

I don’t think I could have smiled if someone was holding a gun to my head. I felt like I had sandbags tied to my ankles. With every step I felt the dread sink lower into my gut. Was this the end? Was this when we all
got tied to a hospital bed in a basement prison, like Thornhill?

I was sure we would never see our class again. I was sure I wouldn’t see my family. I looked at the other guides. Did they understand how bad this was?

They must have. Hal and Callie were holding hands. Nia gave me a strained look that showed a lot more fear than she’s usually willing to reveal. We had to think of a way to escape.
If only we could talk without the Official hearing. If only we knew what was coming—I remembered the van Hal said he’d seen when we almost got caught at the Vietnam Memorial. Was that waiting for us now? Mr. Fowler wasn’t the brightest bulb in the firmament, but wouldn’t he at least recognize that we were missing?

I remembered with dismay all the tunnels Jackie had told us about, linking the
congressional office buildings. We could travel quite a ways before anyone even knew we were missing.

Then the Official opened a door and we followed him into the floor of the Senate chamber. Just as he had promised, we were standing on the dark blue carpeting, facing the dark paneled walls, looking down over the curved rows of polished wooden desks, up to the dais. We could see kids in gray
pants and skirts placing a red carnation on every senator’s seat. When I looked up, there in the gallery was my class, with Mr. Fowler waving down at us madly and everyone else looking bored. The senator who had been speaking into the C-SPAN camera was leaving as we came in.

But then he turned to face us and all the joviality in his expression was gone. “Don’t move or say a word,” he said to
us.

The woman stacking papers up on the dais turned to look at him sharply and I wondered for a second if we were saved. Maybe he’d forgotten she was there? Maybe she’d rescue us? Then I saw who she was. Blond, beautiful. I remembered her from the Riveras’ porch. Nia, Callie, and Hal had been inside and I’d been watching from afar. Cisco had opened the door and the woman had introduced herself
as Waverly Valentino, Amanda’s aunt. Cisco hadn’t believed her, and it turned out that he was right.

Now, I could see the woman was watching the four of us, an I-told-you-so smile spreading on her lips. The Official gave one glance in her direction, then he turned and I had a feeling he was about to deliver some bad news, when the befuddled senator reentered and passed within a few feet of us.

Like watching someone draw a curtain across a lit window at night, the Official changed his expression by muting certain features and turning others on. I once read that psychologists in the 1950s analyzed the thousands of micro movements humans are capable of making with their faces, coming up with a catalog of the combinations that we use to communicate to the world. We cannot consciously control
those movements, but it seemed that the Official could. He was so dexterous he could turn his face into a mask. Gone was the evil android, gone was the gloating bad guy, gone was the kindly grown-up. Instead, we were faced with someone who did indeed seem like a government official—officious, impersonal, bland.

“Forget something?” he called out to the senator.

The man held up a hand in a kind
of salute and kept shuffling along. “Glasses,” he finally said, seeing what he’d been missing on a desk.

I had a flash of a thought. Maybe there was something we could do to get his attention without the Official realizing we were signaling for help. Every idea I had felt impossible—like writing a note and sticking it into his pocket. There wasn’t enough time.

The Official seemed to have read
my mind. Under his breath, he said, “He’s completely useless to you. It’s stunning that in our age of television someone that old still appears on top of things in a reelection campaign.”