The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (24 page)

I heard Hal’s voice next. “Amanda, one day I will paint you the way I saw you in the woods that morning, a daisy chain in your hair.”

Nia quoted from a
poem I later learned she and Amanda both loved, “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath. “
Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances.
Amanda,” she said. “You are God’s lioness to me.”

I said, “Amanda, I love you like apple pie loves cheddar cheese.” I don’t know if she could have heard the word
cheese
as my voice broke. It was getting impossible not to cry.

Hal didn’t let
us stop calling out to her though. “Sunflowers,” he said.

“Stars,” said Callie.

“Words,” Nia answered.

“My dad,” I said.

And then we repeated those words:
Sunflowers, stars, words, my dad
, over and over, letting the magic of their importance, the love connected to them flow. I felt them raining down over me, softening, blocking the noise of the Official’s machine. They blanketed the noise
like snow, light as a feather pillow. I closed my eyes, my entire body relaxed and suddenly peaceful, like I was lying down in a field to watch clouds drift across a late-summer sky. I felt as if I’d fallen into a tank of extra-heavy water. Lifting my arm was an effort I could not summon the strength for. Not that I wanted to. I just wanted to live inside the warmth of the way the four of us felt
about Amanda forever.

And then I opened my eyes, sleepily, lazily, as if I were waking up from a long nap, not even sure right away where I was. I saw something. It was the Official. And suddenly I could read him again. He was afraid. His fear was a cloud gathering into a storm. He was scared because he was starting to think his plan
wasn’t
going to work.

Wait, no. He
knew
his plan wasn’t going
to work. I saw that information in the way his pupils were small, his breath coming fast, his shoulders raised a few inches higher than they had been before.

And he was right. His plan wasn’t going to work. Because the fact that I could read him so easily meant my power had come back. And if my power had come back, then maybe everyone’s had too. Had they?

I didn’t even get a chance to ask that
question aloud, because Callie suddenly burst through the straps on her chair. Our minds opened up to one another again, and I felt the resurgence of Callie’s strength, of her beautiful courage, and realized how much I’d missed it. There Hal was, shouting, “On your left!” to her before the guards came at her from that direction. There was Nia, freed by Callie from her seat, running over to the
disc, putting her hand on it until she knew what it was and how it worked. Then she squeezed her eyes shut, concentrated really hard, lifted her hand away and the disc shot off the wall and landed with a few short complaining bursts of sound on the floor. It vibrated a minute and then died.

Callie ran to Amanda, pushing the Official out of her path. She pushed over the machine between Amanda
and Heidi, and it fell with a crash. That didn’t stop it whirring and humming though—the sucking sounds were still there.

“She has to wake up,” Hal said. “She’ll lose more blood than she can afford to if she doesn’t disconnect from it immediately.”

I could see Callie didn’t quite know what to do. Did she shake Amanda? Go back to attacking the machine? Was it dangerous to pull Amanda off the
machine before it was turned off?

In the end, it wasn’t Callie who acted. It was all of us. It was all of our thoughts, all of us focusing our desire into one keen blade of need.

Wake up
, we all wished as hard as we could. Hal and I were still tied to our chairs, but it didn’t matter. As Amanda had shown us, our spirit transcended physical strength.
Come back, Amanda, please
.

I don’t believe
there has ever been anything I wanted more than to see Amanda open her eyes at that moment. I had lost so much: I’d lost my dad, I’d lost Amanda. My dad was never coming back. But Amanda was still here. Separated from us only by the thin skin of her eyelids.
Open your eyes
, I whispered.
Please, please come back
.

Amanda did open her eyes. She rose in her seat. She took a great, deep breath in,
her eyes growing wider, her forehead impassive, her jaw soft. Her face was as calm as someone sitting for a portrait—all her focus was in her eyes as she summoned up what seemed to be a great deal of strength. She pulled the IV needle out of her arm and stood, facing the Official, ready for a fight they both knew he would lose.

But then suddenly the Official had the syringe Amanda had used on
him clutched in his hand. And before we could move, he had grabbed Heidi, and held the syringe to her neck. He looked at us wildly, eyes flashing.

“Joy told me we could not bring you in without appealing to your sense of right and wrong,” the Official said. “So I’m betting I can bargain for Heidi’s life. You let me go, and she lives.”

Amanda’s mouth twitched slightly. She blinked, the calm of
her resolve shaken.

Because the Official was right. She couldn’t let him hurt Heidi.

Chapter 30

Just then,
the doors to the lab burst open and we all turned to see our parents running toward us frantically. Mr. Thornhill was at the front of the group, with Rosie, Mr. Bennett, Mrs. Leary, and my mom. Mrs. Rivera and Cisco came in next, and then there was a crowd of adults—Louise Potts, the woman with the cornrows who’d sold us the sunflower purse, and then, shockingly, Chief Bragg among those I recognized.

Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Callie brought the Official to his knees with two swift kicks, the syringe flying out of his reach and skittering away on the ground. The guards charged at Amanda, but before they could reach her, Thornhill had jumped into the fray.

It was amazing, watching Amanda and Thornhill fight side by side. I wasn’t sure I had the chronology right, but I think
they’d only ever had a few minutes together to spend as father and daughter—Thornhill had kept his identity secret from Amanda until the night she confronted him, just before he was attacked. They seemed so in sync with each other; they seemed to relish fighting the guards off. It was almost like they were dancing, their legs were flying in patterns, their arms reaching out in self-defense, their
heads down, occasionally sharing a look that meant, “I’ve got this one,” or “Nice move.”

It was a blur while the C33s—Amanda, Thornhill, Mr. Bennett, and people I could not see—subdued Maude and the guards. A C33 I didn’t recognize used a pair of clippers to release Hal and me from our chairs. We stood, just in time to see that Amanda and Thornhill were left alone fighting the Official. Nia,
Callie, Hal, and I made a circle around them, together with the other C33s, and we watched the Official fight. We could have helped, I guess, but it really seemed like their fight to finish. He held out a long time, but eventually, Thornhill pinned him on the ground.

“Who are you? What’s your name?” Thornhill growled. “I’ve looked everywhere and I can never find your name.”

“I’m air,” the Official
said. “You can’t name me. You can’t know who I am. I don’t belong to you.”

“No,” a voice spoke from behind the group and we all turned to see Brittney Bragg standing tall, seemingly frozen with one hand on Heidi’s wrist. She looked directly into the Official’s eyes. “Your name is Morton Clavermacle,” she told him. “Otherwise known as C33-2138.”

A collective gasp went up among the C33 adults
present. “
Little
Morton?” Mrs. Rivera gasped.

“I was
nice
to you,” Mrs. Leary breathed. “I held your hand when you had nightmares.”

I saw a flash of an image—the little boy, begging not to get a shot from the nurse.

“That was
him
,” Callie said, looking at all of us, and pointing at him. Well, I guess we were a bit less sympathetic now.

Just then, Chief Bragg stepped in and pulled the Official
up by his shoulder. “You’re right about one thing, buddy,” he said. “You don’t belong to Vice Principal Thornhill, or whoever this man really is. You belong to me now. You’re under arrest.” An officer, just arrived and looking around in confusion, pulled the Official’s hands behind his back and cuffed him.

Then our parents finally took a good hard look at us, too, and I realized how crazy all
of this must appear. We had a lot of explaining to do.

Our hair and clothes loose and disheveled, lab equipment smashed to pieces on the floor, papers blown onto every surface. Heidi was sobbing, her head in her hands. Mrs. Bragg was trying to comfort her, but her lipstick was smeared on her cheek and Heidi wouldn’t meet her eye. She seemed to really want her dad. Amanda’s hair was tangled and
her face was flushed. Where she’d pulled out her IV, a thin trickle of blood had drawn a line from the inside of her elbow down to her wrist.

I couldn’t stop shaking. My teeth. My hands. My shoulders. “Kids,” Thornhill said, putting a hand on my shoulder, touching Nia next, then working his way down to Callie, Hal. “You did it. It’s over.”

“It’s over?” Nia said, like someone had just told her
the whole thing had been a practical joke. Hal kicked at some broken glass on the floor. Callie pinched her nose at the bridge. I noticed for the first time that my legs were aching, that I hadn’t eaten since that tuna sandwich Dr. Joy left us.

Then my mom swallowed me up into the biggest embrace ever invented. I could feel her wet tears on my cheeks when she kissed me and I could smell her perfume
that reminded me of our old life together, back before everything changed and then changed again.

Over my mom’s shoulder I could see that Mr. Bennett had an arm around Hal. Callie and her mom were hugging like they would never stop. Mrs. Rivera was holding Nia’s face between her palms while Cisco hung off her like for once he was the adoring cheerleader and she was the star. Which, of course,
she was.

I saw Amanda standing between Thornhill and Rosie. Thornhill was looking at Amanda, shaking his head and kind of half-choking, half-laughing. Rosie had a smile across her face that could have powered the lights of Times Square. Amanda was smiling, too, that so-Amanda smile: her lips curved up into a bow, her gray-green eyes calm and knowing. And then she shook her head in disbelief,
and, looking at her dad and her sister like she never wanted to take her eyes off of them, she drew them both in and buried her head in their chests.

As soon as the hugging sessions had ended—and they went on for quite a while—the grown-ups began telling us how they found us and we told them what had just happened in the lab.

Apparently, the Official’s cover-up of our disappearance had nearly
gone as planned. Heidi started planting the story about how Nia, Callie, Hal, and I had run away from the field trip in a copycat version of Amanda’s disappearance, and everyone on the trip had believed it, with others coming forward to corroborate her story. Cisco had almost fallen under Heidi’s control himself. Listening to her story in conference with Mr. Fowler, he’d felt strangely unsettled,
but attributed the feeling to concern for his sister. It was only when Rosie called his cell and she’d heard him repeating Heidi’s story that she was able to break Heidi’s hold. “Cisco,” Rosie had shouted into his ear. “Get to the train station, pronto.”

Once he was two blocks from the Capitol, he came to his senses. Just as he and Rosie were hopping onto the next train back to Orion, he called
his mom and told her everything he knew. Rosie and Cisco reached Orion just in time for the emergency meeting of the C33 Underground Rescue.

(Claiming to be upset by the disappearance of her “friends,” Heidi announced that her mother had arranged for a private car to bring her back to Orion also—Mrs. Bragg got on the phone with Mr. Fowler to set it up, and that was when the Official whisked her
away to the pharmaceutical college.)

But back to the meeting of the C33 Underground Rescue: This was a group founded by Thornhill when he first came back to Orion, realizing that he could not rejoin his family until he was sure that Dr. Joy and the Official had been stopped. Working with Hal’s dad, they had located and spoken with as many of the former C33s as they could find, building a network
through which they could share information about what the Official and Dr. Joy were up to and protect themselves and their families.

Oh, and the boyfriend I was sure my mom had started seeing even though I didn’t think she was ready? He didn’t exist. My mom had been spending her nights working with Thornhill’s group, which had gone into overdrive after his abduction. After our trip to the airstrip,
which the former C33s had been aware of, the group had liberated Thornhill, and now he was back to lead the group. She’d been taking care of him at our house when I’d called earlier that day—it was his voice I’d heard in our kitchen.

The last person to be invited to the C33 Underground Rescue meeting was Cornelia. She almost fainted when her doorbell rang and it was Cisco Rivera on her porch,
asking her to go for a ride in his car. Hal was teasing her now about how her social status at school on Monday would shoot through the roof as soon as pictures of it went up onto Facebook. Pictures Cornelia herself probably leaked.

It had been a good thing she was there, though: using theamandaproject.com, she had collected reports of an unmarked black van careening off the Orion highway exit
about an hour after we’d disappeared from the capital. It had been spotted heading in the direction of the pharmaceutical college.

Cornelia’s updates had also clued in Mrs. Leary, who’d become a frequent theamandaproject.com contributor. She’d rushed up from Washington, bringing a fresh batch of her formula for eradicating genetic tampering.

They had been in the midst of planning how to get
to the pharmaceutical college—suggestions from the floor ranging from contacting the military to using poison gas—when Chief Bragg had walked into the room, accompanied by Louise Potts. “We’ve been infiltrated!” a nervous C33 shouted in the deafening silence that greeted his presence. For a second, a collective shudder passed through the room, as everyone pondered the thought that Louise had been
spying for the Braggs, Dr. Joy, and the Official all along.

But as it turned out, despite appearances to the contrary, Chief Bragg had not been working with the Official. Also, as he explained, he had never known the full story of what was going on with C33. Brittney had never explained it to him in detail. And now, his wife and daughter were in danger, and he was there to help.

All he’d known
about Brittney’s childhood, he’d explained, was that it had been very painful and that she was determined to make things better for Heidi and Evan, Heidi’s younger brother. So Heidi and Evan were given every possible luxury and never told “no.” As Chief Bragg valued peace in the home above all else, he’d shrugged off Brittney’s plans for a secret office inside their house and the strange boxes
she stored there. He’d suspected that something was off after Brittney arranged a cover-up for Heidi’s hit-and-run. He’d even told Officer Marciano to give Hal a hard time after Thornhill’s disappearance, based on school rumors Heidi had fed him about Hal painting Thornhill’s car and being seen many times in detention.

But when Brittney then arranged—and paid for—Bea Rossiter’s plastic surgery
and rehabilitation, he’d begun to quietly look into things and make some notes.

But he hadn’t been willing to act until one of his deputies flew into his office with the news that four Orion ninth graders had disappeared during a class trip to Washington, D.C., and his daughter was insisting they had run away. And then he hadn’t been able to reach Heidi on her cell. And Brittney was not picking
hers up either. Suddenly, he feared for their safety.

Checking to make sure his gun was in his holster and his radio was fully charged, he rushed out to his car and drove straight to Play It Again Sam’s. He recalled spotting Brittney coming out of Louise Potts’s store one afternoon, and though Chief Bragg was not up on fashion, he was pretty good at detective work. He knew that name had come
up in the Amanda disappearance so he looked up Louise. When he saw her Social Security number and realized it was a few digits off from his wife’s—he knew there must be a connection, so he went right to the store. And when he demanded some sort of explanation from Louise, she brought him to the meeting so he could learn firsthand what was what.

And that was how, with the assistance of all the
C33s they could gather at short notice, Chief Bragg, some undercover members of Orion’s finest, and our parents stormed the door of the lab.

“So now,” said Mrs. Leary, as Chief Bragg’s men carted the Official, Dr. Joy and the guards off to jail, “it’s time to end this.” She turned to Amanda. “There’s one more thing we still need to do to put this nightmare to bed.” She pulled a bottle of the
liquid solution she’d created and started pouring it out into little paper cups she’d found by the water cooler.

“You too,” said Chief Bragg, beckoning Heidi over. She was fully unattached from the machine now, smoothing down the front of her sweater, trying to regain her dignity.

“But Mom—” I heard her say under her breath.

Mrs. Bragg looked at her husband, saw that he was done making exceptions
on their daughter’s behalf and said to Heidi in a low voice, “I think you’d better drink it like the rest of them.” Her husband looked at her pointedly. “I will too,” she added.

And you know how medicine usually has a flavor, like cherry or bubblegum or grape, and you sometimes wonder why they even try to make it taste good, when, no matter how hard they try, it’s still disgusting?

After having
tasted Mrs. Leary’s concoction, I can now truly, one hundred percent appreciate the importance of adding cherry, bubblegum, and grape flavors to medicine, no matter how disgusting it tastes in combination with whatever grossness lies beneath.

Drinking Mrs. Leary’s concoction tasted like drinking the slimy water at the bottom of a flower vase that has been left out too long. Mixed with coffee
grounds. Mixed with dirt. Mixed with the stinkiest stinky cheese. And smelling it was almost as bad as drinking it. Something about that smell made you wonder—really wonder—if you would still be alive after putting whatever it was into your system.