The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (7 page)

“Is that saying what I think it’s saying?” said Hal.

“That they took photographs of models when they were kids, and cut up Brittney to look like those models as kids, then injected her with the models’ genetic materials so she’d grow up to look like them too?”

“That’s horrible,” Callie breathed.

“Read her talents,” I said, wondering how all that plastic surgery would
have affected someone that young.

Hal flipped to the front of Brittney’s file. Under talents, it listed: N/A.

“N/A,” Nia read out loud. “Non-applicable.”

“Look at her write-up,” Callie said, and all of our eyes scanned down the summary page of her file.

C33-4570 continues to struggle with issues of inferiority, low self-esteem, and self-hatred. With others, 4570 is aggressive, quick to anger.
As her treatments have been restricted to alteration of her exterior features, her brain development lags greatly behind the others. Dr. Ellen Schwartzman, a psychiatrist specializing in anorexia nervosa, was consulted after 4570 stopped eating between penultimate and ultimate treatments. After eight weeks treating 4750, Dr. Schwartzman violated her confidentiality agreement and attempted to abduct
4750 (see file #25-B). Dr. Schwartzman was removed and Dr. Joy attempted to address subject’s depression and anorexia through behavioral modification therapy, based on a demerit discipline system and days of solitary confinement. Subject has responded.

“Plastic surgery on a little kid—that’s so creepy,” Callie said. “I wonder what happened to Dr. Schwartzman?”

We collectively shuddered. But
we had to keep going.

“There was another kid listed in Max’s file,” Nia said. “The one they said he was well matched with. What kid is that?”

Again, Callie remembered the number. “C33-1780,” she said.

Hal found the file, opened it, closed it, and then handed it straight to me. “You might want to read this one yourself,” he said. The name in the file was “George.”

Chapter 8

C33-1780—George—Dad—had
undergone many treatments, therapies, tests, and surgeries. It was strange to read what I knew to be the essential facts of my dad’s character written out as “Talents,” but here they were: Support of Others, Consistency, Strength, Endurance, Affability, Getting Along in a Group. His write-up read as follows:

C33-1780 was designed to be fighter-follower soldier prototype to work in conjunction
with C33-2990, the fighter-leader prototype. As expected, 1780 and 2990 have created the kind of bond that would underscore a band-of-brothers commitment on the battlefield or in covert or POW military contexts. Typical of the “number two” personality 1780 exemplifies, he is an important force in the social fabric of the subjects, providing a sounding board for others as they react to the invigorating
and inspirational 2990. Recent experiments in training the tone-deaf 1780 in music to attempt to enhance his inherent empathetic abilities has failed. No enhanced auditory capacity, such as that displayed in C33-3496, was established.

Breathe. It took me a second to lift my eyes from the page. That was my dad. Tone deaf, but a great listener. Someone everyone felt they could talk to. Happy to
let other people call the shots, and always there for you. He never, ever gave up. I was trying not to cry before I closed the folder. I almost succeeded.

“How can I find my mom in here?” Nia said. “Callie, do you remember—”

But just then, Hal put a finger to his lips. “We’ve got to move
now
,” he whispered urgently. “Two guards are in the dormitory, heading this way.”

“Which way do we go?”
Callie asked, her eyes wide in panic.

Hal stopped for a moment, then pointed to the end of the room, farthest from the door we’d come through on our way in. “There’re stairs there,” he said—this was when having a psychic on the team was a real asset. “Let’s go.”

Trying to be quiet, we ran through the creepy hospital room and through a set of unlocked double doors. We flew down the set of stairs
that, as promised, were on the other side of the doors. I was just thinking about what a genius Hal was becoming with his hunches and premonitions saving our butts time after time, when the four of us skidded to a halt at the bottom of the steps. I guess the bright lights coming up the stairs should have tipped us off, but we weren’t thinking. And now we were completely in for it.

Because, while
upstairs, we’d just been wandering around a deserted lab and human-experiment chamber that had been defunct for twenty years, now we were in the basement, standing inside a fully operational laboratory.

I guess it should have occurred to us—what with the guards and all—that this facility might still be active. But we’d been so focused on the past that what we saw in front of us was a complete
and utter surprise.

The room was enormous—it must have been as big as all the rooms upstairs put together. It was so huge we couldn’t see the end of it beyond the hospital beds, lab stations, metal hoods that looked like huge versions of the one over the stove in our kitchen, lots of shiny equipment that I had no idea how to name, except to note that some of it was the size of a small car. Computers
were humming, readouts were flashing, machines were beeping. Men and women in white lab coats were poring over folders, piping things into bubbling test tubes, and sitting on tall stools pulled up to computer stations clustered around a set of monitors in the center of the room. Shockingly, no one happened to notice us in the two seconds we were standing there before Hal did a one-eighty on
one shoe and dragged us into a room with a glass door marked
REFRIGERATION
.

It was good that he found a way for us to hide so quickly. But note to self: You can only spend about seventy-eight seconds in a refrigerated chamber before you begin to turn into a human popsicle. It was freezing and dark. There was enough light coming through the glass door to make out that there were racks filled with
miniature test tubes, each one covered with a rubber seal. It was Nia who realized what the glass vials were.

“We have a situation here,” Nia said, pulling her hand away. “A blood situation.”

She was right. The vials here were just like the ones Callie and Hal had found in the Braggs’ secret home office. Except now we knew what the coded C33 numbers affixed to each vial meant. I know we should
have concentrated on getting out of there…but blood? There was just too much of it to ignore.

“And look at this,” said Hal. He touched a screen on the wall and activated a computer, which at first touch seemed to control the temperature of the room. As soon as it turned on, we saw a readout for current temperature, a temperature log, and statistics about humidity and barometric pressure. But
then, when Hal clicked
DATA
we saw the same database we’d been looking at on the Bennett computer just the day before.

Except now, when Hal clicked on a person’s name, he was connected only to a status on their blood collection.

“Okay, this is all fascinating,” Callie said. “But what’s the plan for getting out of here?”

“Maybe we just run?” Hal said.

“We were pretty darn lucky not to be seen
the first time,” Callie said. “Hal, can you try to see if anyone’s coming?”

“Let’s all hold hands to give him more power,” Nia suggested. Hal and Callie must have picked up her hands right away, because in a second she was looking around. “Zoe,” Nia said. That was when the other three noticed I wasn’t with them.

“Where’d she go?” Callie said.

They couldn’t see me because I was in the back of
the room, blending into the shadows. I was squinting at the racks of blood vials. I’d managed to find the one where my dad’s blood, Vial C33-1780 was stored.

You see, when we’d first stepped into this room, I’d had a thought. I’d always hated how we’d left my dad’s body behind in California. I wished I’d seen him laid out in a funeral home. Or at least had an urn of ashes to scatter. Anything
at all.

But now, I had something. Maybe it was a little creepy, but I didn’t care.

My fingers closed around the vial of my father’s blood. I reached for the pendant Amanda had given me and rubbed it between my fingers to soothe myself for a moment. I squeezed it and thought hard about my dad, trying to remember the exact color of his eyes, the little crinkles in the corners of his smile, the
sound of his laugh, how his shirt smelled when I hugged him . . . I could suddenly feel him all around me, and the tears started to come. I looked at the pendant in the dim light, and it came to me
.
Tears, blood, it’s all the same.
I realized I could slip the vial right into the pendant. A perfect fit. Had she somehow known that I would find his blood at some point? I felt weird taking it, but
knowing the vial fit into the pendant made me feel better. This place had stolen my dad’s childhood. And then they’d stolen his life. All I wanted to do was to get him out of there.

I stepped out of the dark and showed myself to my friends.

Callie had one arm hooked through Hal’s. I took four steps toward them and grabbed his other elbow. Nia locked arms with me. And we waited for Hal to see.

Only nothing came. I was watching him, wondering how I would know what he was thinking. I believe he would have shifted. His face would have changed. Something.

But he was perfectly still.

What finally broke the silence was the buzzing of Hal’s phone. “Sorry,” he mumbled like he’d been caught getting a text in class.

Nia let go of Callie’s and my arms. “Do you want to check it?” she asked sarcastically.

Almost as a reflex, Hal said, “What if it’s important?” glancing at the screen.

Nia rolled her eyes.

But the second Hal read the text, his face wrinkled and then it opened up. Before he even said a word, I knew we’d been offered a lifeline.

He showed us the text. I didn’t recognize the number.

44355512123        17:48:22                1K
GET OUT NOW. GUARDS CHANGING SHIFT
IN 60 SECONDS.
CAR WAITING.

I closed my eyes, trying to find a window when everyone working in the lab would be looking the other way. And I got it. I whispered “Now,” opened the door, and we hustled silently through the lab, staring straight ahead. Up the stairs we went, fast as we could without running, though somehow, by the time we got up to the hospital ward, our pace had accelerated to an all-out sprint.
We made it out the dormitory door, down the hall, into the ordinary classroom, through the window and then, still managing to duck around the corners of buildings and behind trees, we made it to the gate, around the garage, into the woods, and out to the road.

It wasn’t until we were leaning against a brick wall, waiting for a guard to turn his head that Hal caught his breath enough to say, “Isn’t
someone going to ask me who sent the text?”

“It wasn’t Amanda?” Callie asked.

“She was my guess too,” Nia answered.

“No,” said Hal. “Believe it or not, it came from my dad.”

It’s hard to imagine a moment where the sight of Hal’s mom’s minivan complete with its
MY HONOR ROLL STUDENT CAN KICK YOUR HONOR ROLL STUDENT’S BUTT
wouldn’t be completely mortifying for Hal.

This was the moment.

The
sliding door slid open and we piled in. He started pulling away before the door had closed. The van was fast and Mr. Bennett pushed it to its limit, taking corners on two wheels and running red lights without even blinking an eye. Who knew?

“Dad,
what
are you doing here?” Hal said.

Mr. Bennett’s face was pale and drawn and he looked nothing like the calm man we’d seen yesterday reading the paper
and relaxing on the patio. “Are you kids all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” said Hal. “We’re all fine. But I don’t get it—how did you know where we were?” You could literally see his brain straining to reconcile everything we’d just seen at the pharmaceutical college with the current reality: his dad, the minivan, the text. “Am I—” Hal started. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’re not in trouble,” Mr.
Bennett said, laughing in spite of the tension. “You guys—all of you—you’re brilliant, is what you are.”

“Come again?” Hal said.

“I’ll explain in a minute,” said Mr. Bennett, and he pursed his lips like he was about to begin. He did a massive screeching U-turn in the middle of the intersection of Astoria and Miller and took us back toward the college for a quarter mile, then turned left, driving
in silence now to a destination he did not name.

Chapter 9

“Brewster’s?”
Hal said, when we pulled into the parking lot of Orion’s best ice cream place. They make all their own flavors—sometimes they don’t even have the standard chocolate and vanilla—and I think they even invented the dirt sundae.

“Get sundaes,” Mr. Bennett said. “Or whatever you want. It’s the least I can do. And then we can talk.”

I hadn’t thought I could eat, but once I had a peppermint sundae
with hot fudge sauce and crumbled cookies in front of me, I realized I was ravenous. I was about a third of the way through it when Mr. Bennett, carefully licking his single-scoop mocha cone, started to talk.

“Look,” he said. “I—we—I think I speak for all your parents. We’re worried sick. When you became friends with Amanda, when she disappeared, when you found each other . . . I’ve been watching
you.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Hal said, holding up his hand. “You know about Amanda?”

“I’ve been working with Roger Thornhill,” Mr. Bennett explained, “for years. The work I’m doing is the reason our family moved to Orion—ahead of Thornhill, actually. My particular set of skills—do you guys know about this yet? How Dr. Joy looked for kids, even toddlers, with certain innate talents and then used
training and genetic therapies to enhance them?”

None of us were quite ready to answer this question. If Mr. Bennett was working with Thornhill, and was watching us…if he knew all about Dr. Joy . . . why hadn’t he stopped us? Why had he let us do all those dangerous things? There were so many times when we could have been hurt.

“It’s a little shocking, isn’t it, that your parents would knowingly
let you partake in any of this,” Mr. Bennett said, obviously understanding from our silence that he would need to backtrack. “What responsible parent—hey, what somewhat negligent parent—would ever allow his kid to walk into the kind of danger you have been exposed to?”

“The question did just cross my mind,” Hal said sourly.

“As well it should,” Mr. Bennett went on. “And all I can tell you is
that I am more worried than I ever imagined I could bear to be. But I am also impressed. I’ve been astounded, actually, by the things you four have been able to achieve. And now it is important that I give you whatever information I can to help you. Because Thornhill is convinced—and I believe he is right—that you four are the only ones who can help Amanda, and Amanda is the only one who can help
us all.”

I looked at Hal, staring dumbstruck at his dad. Callie’s mouth hung open as well. Only Nia was able to calmly ingest the news. She was all business now. “Okay, then,” she said, leaning forward. “You were telling us about Dr. Joy’s therapies. We read some of the files inside. And we know that you were in there. What happened to you?”

“As you know, I was one of those kids. Dr. Joy wanted
to turn my brain into a computer. As much as was possible, he expanded my capacity to store data and to analyze it.”

“That’s why you became an accountant?” Hal said.

“Accounting is easy for me.” Mr. Bennett smiled. “I can manage inflows and outflows for a multinational corporation with the earning capacity of a small country in my head. There aren’t too many people out there who can do that.”

“And that’s why you travel so much?” Hal asked. “Because Dr. Joy trained to you be a really excellent—” I think Hal was thinking about Thornhill, his talents as a soldier, his fierce fighting skills, his ability to strive heroically and sacrifice all for a cause he believed in. “You got trained to be a kind of genius
accountant
?”

Mr. Bennett laughed. “Well, that wasn’t exactly Dr. Joy’s aim.
But that’s what happened in the end. Accountants never starve during tax season. And it’s been a great cover for the work I’ve been doing for Thornhill. I’ve been helping him identify and protect as many former C33s and their families as we can possibly reach. I’ve been creating a database. But it’s not what you saw on Thornhill’s computer.”

“How’d you know what we were looking at?”

“Because
I have my laptop set up to view the home computer remotely.”

“And you didn’t make us stop?”

“I needed you to have that time. Because of your connection to Amanda, your talents . . . you guys are the only ones making any forward progress to find her, and she’s at the heart of any attempt to stop what’s going on. Why do you think I raked the lawn for you?” Mr. Bennett smiled.

“Yeah, okay,” Hal
said, shaking his head. “Wow.”

“I knew after what you found yesterday you’d go to the college, and trust me, I did everything I could to keep you safe. We have a network watching that place—and you guys. That’s how we knew about the guard shift and exactly how long you’d been inside. Anyway.” Mr. Bennett took a small, neat bite of his cone. “The material you were looking at is actually a copy
of the Official’s database. We managed to hack into it, although I’m sure that’s been updated since we downloaded it about a month ago.”

“So, wait,” Nia said. “What
was
that place back there? You lived there when you were a kid? With Amanda’s parents? And Zoe’s dad?”

“And your mom,” Mr. Bennett said gently.

“But I’ve visited the place where my mom grew up,” Nia said. “In Colombia.”

“Your mom
was the youngest of our group, only ten when we were released, so she was able to have a somewhat normal childhood after that. She was placed in Colombia because she was of Colombian heritage, but nothing more about her biological family is known. For her, her years in the program were fuzzy. A nightmare, really. She was not one of the fighters, the older kids who worked hard against what Dr. Joy
was trying to make us become.”

“So he performed experiments on you?” Hal said. “And it was legal?”

“That’s right,” Mr. Bennett said. “At the time, our government lived in fear of becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union. Dr. Joy pitched his research to a Congress desperate enough to endorse secret programs like his to give us a better chance against the Soviets.”

“So did it work?” Hal asked.
“Did you all turn out to be superheroes?”

Mr. Bennett laughed bitterly. “Hardly,” he said. “A few of us are quiet geniuses, like your mom, Callie, or have skills that we use in our work, like me. But most C33s are barely able to function in society. They’ve either worked very hard to reintegrate themselves or they’ve died, or they’re living entirely off the grid. I can’t tell you how many stories
of C33s end with them abandoning their car on the side of the road and just disappearing.”

“Whoa,” said Hal.

“You guys—you kids—have turned out to be the ones with the extra-human capabilities.”

“You mean—?” Hal began. “You know?”

Hal’s dad nodded. “There are others like you out there. I tracked down a family living in Alaska who has a seventeen-year-old who communicates with animals—we believe
Amanda already tracked him down before she came to Orion. His powers manifested during a window of time when we didn’t know where she was. Another child of a former C33 in Japan started programming multiplayer video games when he was eight—again, we think it likely Amanda was on the scene while on vacation with Amy. This guy doesn’t just program computers. He has some strange way of communicating
with machines and creating artificial intelligence in them. Now he’s eighteen and has gone underground, using his self-learning computers for a criminal franchise. We’re trying to track him—this kid is incredibly intelligent but naive to the danger he might be creating for himself.”

“A criminal franchise, huh?” Hal said. “I guess that makes all the lies I’ve told Mom in the last few weeks seem
like less of a big deal.”

Mr. Bennett cleared his throat. “You should never lie to your mother.” He sounded like he was making the statement in case Hal’s mom might have a surveillance video. Mr. Bennett might be a secret agent fighting the forces of evil, but that didn’t change one important fact: You never cross Mrs. Bennett.

“How you kids developed—that’s what Dr. Joy has always been after.”

“Really?” I said. “What about the whole soldier-prototype thing we read in the files?”

“Yes, initially, that was Joy’s plan. You know how every now and then, human beings emerge who are capable of great things—genius, you could say, but it goes beyond intelligence. Abraham Lincoln was a genius statesman. Martin Luther King Jr. a visionary and a born leader. Joan of Arc the perfect soldier—unflinching
in her commitment to her ideals, strong, able to endure, persistent. Beethoven . . . he composed his three greatest symphonic works when he was completely deaf. Can you imagine a world in which you could engineer that kind of power? That’s how Dr. Joy envisioned his program. At first.

“Then, as time went on, he grew more ambitious, pursuing the kinds of abilities you four have. He never achieved
this in the lab.”

“What finally made Dr. Joy stop?” Nia asked. “Before? When the original program disbanded?”

“Oh, he didn’t want to stop. But the Cold War was ending. Under Reagan, the focus was shifted to space-based missile defense. Joy’s funding was cut by the government and we were all released. But then we had to attempt to live normal lives after having been raised without families or
parents, all within the walls of one building. For years he followed us around the country. We’d see him sitting in his car in a parking lot outside our jobs or churches or homes. He was watching us, keeping tabs, working illegally. For a while I think he was put behind bars, back before . . . well, before Amanda.”

“It always comes back to Amanda, doesn’t it?” Callie said wistfully.

“Amanda,”
Mr. Bennett repeated. He sighed. “Yes. Amanda is an anomaly. By the time the program was disbanded, Max and Annie had fallen completely in love. For life. They were married within months of the program’s termination. Amanda is the only one who is a child of two C33s.”

“So what happened?” I asked. “Max left, right?”

“He had to,” Mr. Bennett explained. “You see, Max and Annie didn’t think they
could have kids. They assumed that all the damage that had been done to their bodies under Dr. Joy’s care would make it impossible. They had adopted Amanda’s older sister, Robin, and were seeking to adopt a second child, when to their very great surprise, Annie realized she was pregnant.”

“That’s an amazing story,” Callie said.

“Dr. Joy had been hanging around their lives for years at that point,”
Mr. Bennett went on. “He was out of prison. I don’t know what he was doing for money. I think he was sleeping in his car a lot of the time. He must have had an address, though, because in an act of extreme generosity, or extreme stupidity—I’ve tortured myself and I still don’t know which one I care to attribute it to—Max and Annie decided to share their joy with good old Uncle Joy, as he made
us call him, though we nicknamed him Uncle Joe after one of the most vile dictators of all time, Joseph Stalin. Anyway, Max and Annie sent Dr. Joy a birth announcement.”

“So?” said Nia. “What harm could that have done?”

“All the harm in the world,” Mr. Bennett said, shaking his head sadly. “Because Dr. Joy realized the potential in Amanda’s birth immediately. We believe he used the fact of it—her
direct biological link to two genetically modified former C33s—to make a pitch to the Official to get the facility up and running again.”

“The Official,” I said. “Who exactly is the Official?”

“That,” Mr. Bennett said, “is a very good question. Unfortunately, we don’t know. We haven’t found out his name—all records or memoranda we can get our hands on refer to him as the Official. We believe
this derives from his line of work. He has some ties to the federal government, ties that allowed him to direct all kinds of funding into restarting Dr. Joy’s research. We don’t believe it’s actually sanctioned, even in a top-secret capacity, by Congress, but we’re not sure. The way these things work—it’s complicated.”

“It’s depressing, is what it is,” Hal said.

Mr. Bennett smiled ruefully.
“Just after joining up with the Official, Dr. Joy made an enormous tactical error,” he went on. “You see, he’d always overestimated our loyalty to him. I think through some massive delusional fantasy, he convinced himself that he really was our uncle, that the gifts he was bestowing on us would make us grateful to him. So, rather than simply kidnapping Amanda in her infancy, Joy approached Max and
Annie and flat-out asked them to give him their baby.

“He showed up on their doorstep and told them of the great life he had in store for Amanda. First, there’d be the testing. She’d be scanned, quizzed, opened up, bled—all this as a baby. Then she’d be altered—of course. Then she’d be studied some more. And finally, she’d be launched into the world. She’d be a diplomat, a world traveler, rich
beyond belief, powerful, and good. This was Dr. Joy’s vision. Unbelievable as it sounds, he thought they’d be thrilled.

“Max and Annie’s response was to go into hiding. They split up as part of the disguise. Eventually, Max came here, to Orion, once he’d realized that to save his daughter, he was going to have to unite all the former C33s, or as many as he could gather. After Annie’s death, he’d
realized hiding was no longer an option. He was going to have to bring Dr. Joy and the Official down.”