The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (20 page)

Then he gestured for us to move forward to a row of chairs that had been set up right behind where the television camera had been taping before. The chairs were squeezed up close to each other, and because I
was still so scared, I was grateful to be pressed right up against Nia and Hal.

I was getting used to the electric tingle that criss-crossed my body whenever the four of us were touching, and now it felt kind of comforting. It reminded me that we were stronger when we were together. Maybe we still had the power to resist?

“I want to explain things to you,” the Official said once we were seated.
He spoke with a bored equanimity. That could have been part of his disguise—no one could hear us from the gallery but if he seemed to be berating or threatening us, Mr. Fowler might have noticed. (Well, he might have if he were anyone but Mr. Fowler.) In any case, this was an altogether new iteration of the Official’s many faces, and it would have been calming if we weren’t all aware of the sinister
intentions his bored
pro forma
speech was meant to disguise.

“The bottom line is that you have no more outs,” he said. “I know you’re thinking that if you’ve been able to keep from getting caught this long, you have a chance of escape now. So let me tell you now: I haven’t
wanted
to bring you in until just this moment. I’ve been watching you. I saw you kids cleaning Amanda’s graffiti off the
vice principal’s car, and I watched you, Zoe, as you watched them.”

“We’re not afraid of you,” Nia spat out.

“Well, good for you, Miss Rivera,” said the Official, and it sounded like he was talking to a three-year-old who’d just learned how to use the potty. “Though you probably should be,” he said, chuckling at his own joke. And then he was back to being a kind, disinterested grown-up concerned
only about our safety. “The problem with teenagers today is they think they’re immortal. They think nothing bad can ever happen to them. That’s why they end up in gruesome car accidents, or jumping off trestle bridges where they’re not supposed to swim.”

“We’re not doing any of those things,” Nia said. “We’re not the ones making the danger. You are.”

The Official shrugged. “It’s up to you,”
he said. “If you want to keep running, I’ll keep chasing, but you won’t ever be out of my sights. Don’t think there are things I will do and things I won’t do. Your parents can’t help you. By involving yourselves in all of this, you’ve already put your brothers and sisters in danger. Surely, you don’t want to put them at any greater risk?”

Hal could not mask the spasm of regret and fear that
crossed his face. I could tell that he was thinking of Cornelia—wishing that he’d never gotten her involved. He’d told her about their dad, about the stuff we’d found at the college, about the C33 program as far as we’d understood it. Why hadn’t he anticipated the danger though, told her to go underground? To stick close by their dad? Anything.

I felt the electricity intensify as all of us considered
the risk we’d exposed our families to—I was thinking of Iris and Pen, how both my parents had sacrificed so much to keep us safe, and how I’d thrown it all away.

“Though frankly,” the Official went on, speaking almost to himself now, “the closer you get to Amanda, the closer I get to Amanda, so I’d almost just as soon have you on the run as have you in my control.”

“You said you already had
her,” I said.

“Did I?” the Official mused. “Well, the important thing is that I’ll have her soon. She’ll come running after you. I want you only because having you in custody will lure Amanda.” The Official yawned. “But I promised Joy I’d deliver you all to him in one piece. He wants you to participate in his research. And frankly, once we bring in Amanda, locking you all away for the rest of
your lives as human lab rats is fine with me.”

“It won’t work,” Hal said. “There are too many good people fighting against it.”

The Official fixed Hal with a stony stare. I could feel Hal shrink back down to a nub of fear.

I felt the fear too, creeping into my body like some sort of fast-moving frost. I was trying not to panic, to not beg. But I didn’t know how long I could hold out.

Just
then, I started to hear a shrill ringing noise. For a second I thought it was coming from inside my head. My mind was so filled with fear and adrenaline, and questions—it made sense that it would just start ringing. What was going on?

Chapter 25

The noise wasn’t
my imagination. The kids distributing carnations looked up, laid down their flowers, and filed quickly out of the room. Above us, I could see that our class was standing. As Jackie intoned in her nasal voice about “orderly lines” and “no talking” and “proceeding to the nearest marked exit,” Mr. Fowler was counting heads, making sure that everyone was where he could see them.

I can’t believe it
took my brain that long to process the idea that this was a fire drill. A fire drill? In Congress? Who knew?

Before Mr. Fowler had a chance to finish his count and then remember that we four were downstairs, the Official called up to him. “Mr. Fowler,” he said, projecting his voice with the confidence of someone running for president. He had to talk in between bleats of the alarm. “I have your
students here, and in the interest of safety, I will personally escort them to the school group’s rendezvous position on the Capitol lawn.”

Looking simultaneously scared, distracted, and grateful, Mr. Fowler nodded, and began to wave his arms in front of his body, as if he could speed the pace at which the rest of our class was filing out of the gallery and through the double doors into the hall.
Mr. Fowler looked back down one more time, as if wondering if it was really a good idea to leave four of his students alone with a strange man whose name he didn’t even know. At that point, the Official laid a heavy hand on Callie’s shoulder, and smiled his safest, most “Hey, I
love
kids” smile. By the time Callie had shrugged his hand off her body, Mr. Fowler had turned around and was gone.

“Oh, don’t,” the Official said in response to Callie’s gesture, his voice languid and draw out as if he were deeply bored.

“Aren’t you afraid there might be an actual fire?” Callie said.

The Official just smiled, confirming for me that this alarm was no coincidence. Just then, the woman who I still thought of as Waverly Valentino had come down from the podium and was standing at the Official’s
side. “Maude Cooper,” he said, by way of introduction. “A former C33. Did you read about her?”

“No,” Hal said.

“While so many C33s were given enhanced empathetic capability, Maude was given less. She would make an excellent prison guard or executioner. Joy had intended her as a mole—she would infiltrate secret organizations without ever being swayed by the relationships she formed while there.
As you can see, some of the C33s have proved quite useful instead of being troublesome. She’ll escort you to your next destination.”

“Right this way,” Maude said, gesturing for us to move ahead of her.

The hallways of the Capitol building were filled with people leaving it: secretaries in sneakers and pantyhose, important-looking women in bright red suits and enormous pearls, young men reading
blue-backed memos as they walked, their wing-tip shoes treading the paths they knew so well they didn’t have to look up, a cafeteria worker in black-and-white-checked pants and a chef’s jacket.

We turned a corner into a corridor where the river of people slowed to just a trickle, and then we passed through a door and down a staircase where we were alone. It went down several levels into what
must have been a basement. There were lockers running the length of the hallway, break rooms, utility rooms, an enormous kitchen—I could smell food cooking—the same steamy smell you get in the hallway outside the cafeteria at school. The alarm was still ringing as Maude opened yet another door, which led through a dining room where tables were set with white tablecloths and fancy napkins. Lunch was
long over and the tables looked like they were set up for the next day.

“Is this the senators’ dining room?” Callie asked. Nia could not help but look interested. Even with her life in danger, any opportunity to learn could engage her mind and distract her.

“It is,” Maude said, no trace of kindness in her voice. Not too far from the dining room’s front doors was the train that led through tunnels
under the Capitol, connecting congressmen and -women to their offices, the dining rooms, and the floors of both chambers whenever a vote was called.

The trains didn’t look like trains. They were more like the kind of trolleys you ride around in at amusement parks—open on the sides with an awning over the top, benches that sit three across.

I wondered if the trains were even running, given that
a fire drill was in progress, a question that was quickly answered when Maude beckoned for us to walk down onto the tracks in front of the train and head into the tunnel.

“What if the fire drill ends and the trains start running again?” Nia asked. “What happens then?”

“You’d better hurry,” Maude said, “or else we’re going to find out.”

“Fire drills don’t last forever,” I told her. “Mr. Fowler’s
going to notice when we’re not there. He’ll call the police.”

“We fully expect him to,” Maude said. “And when the police come, our team will give them all the evidence they need to determine that you four used the cover of the fire drill to run away. Heidi will assure them—and I’m sure she won’t be the only one—about how strange you’ve been acting recently. The police will be sure to discover
evidence of how each of you were secretly a friend of Amanda Valentino, how her disappearance stunt inspired you all to try the same thing. You four show all the trouble signs. You’re malcontents and you’ve been using your friendship to concoct this running-away plan.”

“My parents will hire a private detective,” Nia said. “They’ll be all over this. My mom will camp out at the Washington police
headquarters, making sure the cops are doing everything in their power to find me.”

We were getting to the end of the tunnel where we could see a pinpoint of light.

“And the Washington police will come up empty every time,” Maude said. “Because you won’t be here.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. Since my dad died, I’ve lived in a lot of places. It seemed that every time I’d get used to one,
I’d be forced to leave it. So the feeling of being dragged somewhere against my will is something I was used to. What I wasn’t used to was the feeling that this might be the last time I ever went anywhere new. The way Maude’s tone had changed as she told us we were leaving Washington, I wondered if that feeling meant we were going to have to get ready to die.

Eventually we picked our way down
the tracks to the end of the tunnel. We were in the basement of the Senate office building now, and because this building was not in the midst of a fire drill, Maude rushed us past janitors and men and women in suits. We turned down a few more hallways and up another set of stairs. One flight up, a hallway, then another flight down. I wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse us, disorient
any sense of direction so that if we did try to escape we wouldn’t know how to get back.

It didn’t matter. With one guard walking in front of our little quartet and another behind it, we weren’t trying to run.

We ended up in a parking garage, walking to an unmarked van. The license plate read 2Q2Q10. Hal took a sharp breath in. I knew what he was seeing—the inside. We all saw it, too, when they
opened the back doors and unceremoniously shoved us inside. It was there that we were handcuffed with the kind of plastic straps my mom uses to anchor bookshelves to wall mounts. There were benches along the sides of the stripped-out van and we were pushed down onto them. Each of us had an ankle strap attached to bolts in the floor, but we otherwise weren’t secured to the bench in any way.

“My
mother will be outraged when she finds out about this. You’ll be locked up forever when she’s done with you,” Nia hissed at Maude. Maude smiled.

“For once in your life you’ll find yourself in a place where you are outside your mother’s control. I would think you’d be happy about that.”

Nia glared at her. “Nothing about the current situation makes me happy.” And then Maude shut the door.

And
it was dark. Very, very dark.

The thing about riding in a van sitting on benches with your hands tied together and an ankle strapped to the floor is that you get very uncomfortable very fast. And then you stay uncomfortable. Every time the van went over a bump, I tried to brace myself on the seat, but still, we all were sliding, careening, and smashing into each other and the walls of the van.

Within minutes of being cuffed, I could feel the sharp edge of the plastic tie on my skin. I couldn’t imagine how intense it felt for Callie and Hal. Nia and I, at least, were wearing boots.

Eventually the van must have moved onto a highway because the ride got smoother. I wasn’t jerking around as much and the pain in my wrists, arms, and ankle subsided. A bit.

“So I guess we failed the scavenger
hunt,” Hal said. He and I were sharing a bench with Callie and Nia across from us.

I couldn’t help it. The laughter came bubbling up. At least laughing was the only thing that I’d done in the last forty-five minutes that didn’t hurt. “I guess so,” I snorted.

“But we tried,” Callie said, laughing as well. The whole situation—it was absurd.

Nia was laughing too. She tried to talk anyway. “And
no one else had to work on their scavenger hunt while being chased—” It took her three tries to get the rest of her thought out. “Being chased—” she repeated, but still she couldn’t do it. “Being chased by—the Official’s goons.”

I was laughing so hard at this point that I think a few tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried wiping them away with the backs of my tied-up hands. It was too tricky an
angle, so I had to let the tears just flow.

When we’d all laughed ourselves out and were ready again to pay attention to the throbbing parts of our bodies, Callie said “What do you think is going to happen to us?”

Even though they couldn’t see me in the dark, I shook my head.

“Wish I knew,” said Hal.

We were quiet then for a little while. I don’t think anyone had the heart to say anything
more.

Until suddenly, out of the darkness, I heard Nia’s voice: “Train up a child.”

It took me a second to remember what she was quoting from. Then I did—it was the line from JFK’s inaugural address that we’d excerpted on our scavenger hunt sheet.

“The torch has been passed,” Hal said.

“Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend,” I added.

“We here shall have a new birth of freedom,”
Nia remembered.

“The names were inscribed,” Callie said.

“They were taken from us,” I added.

“The eyes of the world are upon you,” said Hal.

And, as with all of Amanda’s clues, I didn’t know if it was about something real, if it was a secret code, if it was a message sent directly into our souls, or if it was all three at one time. I did know one thing for sure—she had been the one to paint
those letters with the highlighting that could only be seen through a camera’s lens. These words were her message to us.

And strangely, what those words told me was that whatever the Official was doing, whatever had happened to our parents, we were going to put an end to it. We were going to destroy the Official’s plans.

The crazy thing? Even tied up in a van, slipping around on a bench, my
arms aching, my back seizing up, my face streaked with tears—I still believed in Amanda. I believed that if Amanda said we were going to take the Official down, we were.

I believed in Amanda because she believed in me. And I believed in her. I knew that what made Amanda who she was wasn’t the result of any genetic tampering inflicted on her parents by Dr. Joy. It wasn’t special powers, or secret
skills. It was her essence, her personality, the look in her eyes. It was the way she transformed everything she touched into a work of art. Her notebooks, her clothing, even her years living on the run had been stamped by her as her own. Her metaphors could not be flattened. Her voice could not be silenced. She could take a city of stone monuments to great leaders and wartime loss and transform
them into a poem that brought a little part of her personality into this horrible van. I recited her poem now, in my head, over and over. It was all I had to hold on to, but it was just enough.

Train up a child.

The torch has been passed.

Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend.

The names are inscribed. They were taken from us.

We here shall have a new birth of freedom.

The
eyes of the world are upon you.