The Invisible (20 page)

With a sick feeling, I get into the front seat. “Let’s go,” I say to Serge, staring at the empty, glazed faces of the seven remaining kids. “We can’t be here when the police come.”

Serge nods. “I sent the girl away. She thinks she’s coming back later to get her bike.”

“If she comes back soon, she can get arrested too,” I grunt.

“How was it in there? I assume you found the children.”

I nod. “I did. They were in the basement, below a drug lab,” I say. “They’d already taken Jasper. He wasn’t in the house.”

Serge shuts his eyes. Opens them again, two puffs of air released through his nose. “And William?”

“Gone. He must have told them what he knows. I think the Invisible know who I am now.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Jasper’s body is found the next day. He was killed with an injection of poison, his body placed outside the police station, a few carnations clasped in his small hands. They pinned a note to his chest before putting his body in a long, unzipped duffel bag and placing it on the front steps.

Poor little Jasper. $56 million. So much money, and yet it wasn’t enough to save him. We’ll be seeing more of your children soon, we’re afraid.

The Invisible

All of it’s on the evening news. I watch the broadcast in the kitchen with Lily, staring at the horror of Jasper’s narrow body being lifted onto a stretcher and covered with a sheet, my insides twisting at the sight of it.

The story about Jasper’s death is interrupted by breaking news about the other hostages being free, interviews with the other children, and panicked prognostications about where Will is. Some “experts” worry he’s joined Invisible’s cause, that he’s been brainwashed. Others are certain he’ll turn up as the next victim.

The story the kids came up with for their interviews is that the door was unlocked from the outside, and when they climbed the basement stairs, they found the two unconscious drug cooks in the house and nobody else. Reporters hang on their every word. Their parents hover beside them, their expressions pained in the bright lights with a mix of relief and horror at how close they’ve come to the unthinkable. Behind them, there is a vigil for Jasper going on, thousands of people gathered in a square downtown, holding candles inside paper cups. My parents are among the people at the vigil. They wanted me to come too, but I convinced them it would be less traumatic for me to stay home.

“This came for you.” Lily’s soft voice in my ear. She slides an envelope across the table. The return address is the Bedlam Ballet Corps Summer Audition Program.

I open it, not caring what it says. It’s clear from the first line that I’m in.

Dear Ms. Fleet:

We are pleased to inform you

It’s all I need to see. I’m in. If I do well this summer, I’ll get to enter the professional corps in the fall. It feels hollow. Like it’s happening to someone else. To the girl I used to be.

Because even though I’ve worked toward it my whole life for this letter, it seems vulgar to think about the future right now, when Jasper’s body is zipped into a bag. When Will is missing, and god knows what is happening to him. How can I plan my future when I know that they’re probably coming for me?

Slowly, methodically, I tear the letter into long strips. Then I tear the strips into shreds.

“Anthem,” Lily says, watching me tear up the letter and shooting me a concerned look. “I’m proud of you. And so are your parents.”

I nod. “Thanks,” I say, and keep tearing, the pieces getting smaller and smaller. I wonder vaguely what Ford is doing now. If he’s heard about Jasper. If he even cares. Since he sure as hell doesn’t care anymore what’s become of me.

The next morning, I walk out the lobby doors and head to school, unable to enjoy the palpable sense of relief on the streets now that most of the children are home and safe. When I turn onto Cathedral Way, two blocks from school, a dark-haired boy in a baseball cap is sitting on a stoop across the street from me. He wears black dress pants, shiny with wear, and a grubby white dress shirt under a dressy suit jacket, one sleeve of the jacket ripped from elbow to shoulder, lengthwise, as if it’s been cut. He’s got a KillBall hat pulled down low, and he’s looking down so I can’t see his face. There could be something familiar about him, I think, squinting in the bright afternoon.

I move closer to him, drawn by that initial spark of recognition. When he looks up, I’m so startled I jump. “Will!”

“Shhh, let’s walk,” he hisses as he jumps up and takes off down the sidewalk. I catch up to him and jam my hands in my pockets. They’re tingling with worry now. Everything about this spells trouble.

“Everyone’s looking for you,” I whisper as we move quickly down the sidewalk.

“I haven’t been able to face going home yet,” he says, his words rapid-fire, his breathing quick and labored, manic. “I slept in the park. I needed to talk to you. I think they’re watching me, Anthem. We have to be fast.”

“Okay.” I look around us as we move down the sidewalk and don’t see or hear anyone, just a few birds squawking in the trees. There’s a nasty yellow bruise on Will’s cheek, and the remnants of hair dye at his hairline, a blue-black color that must have been done in a hurry. His pale blue eyes are bloodshot, his expression hollowed and lost. “You changed your hair,” I say stupidly.

“They made me. They’re crazy.” Will stops abruptly so that I walk into him. I take a step back. Will looks terrified and helpless and lost. “I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice thick. “After it was clear they were going to kill Jasper, I had no choice. I could have been
next
. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” I whisper, a sickening dread spreading through my limbs. “Will, just tell me.”

“I—I—they wanted—there’s only one thing I had to trade! Only one thing he wanted bad enough. I didn’t want to tell them, but—”

Just then my phone buzzes loud in the pocket of my plaid skirt. I spin around, peering at each quiet townhouse in the spring morning, suddenly worried he’s right—we’re being watched. In the distance, apartment towers around us warp as if I’m seeing them in fun-house mirrors, their glass façades glittering against the too-bright sky as my panic spreads.

“Who is it on the phone?” I shout. I spin around, frantically searching for Invisible’s followers. But nobody’s there. I dig around my bag as the phone bleats.

But of course I already know who it is. Because Will told Invisible how to find the girl he’s been looking for.

“I’m so sorry!” he says again, then he takes off at a sprint, his arms flailing wildly, that strange black hair under the KillBall cap making him seem like a totally different person than the post-rehab Will I studied a few weeks ago at school.

I pull my phone from my pocket with shaking hands. But it’s just Zahra.

I take a rattling breath and pick it up. “Hello?”

But all I hear is a weirdly labored breathing. As if through a paper bag.

“Zahra? I can’t handle weird jokes right now, Z. I just saw Will! They released him after . . .”

“I released him.”

My blood turns to ice. It’s him. The voice no longer computer altered. A voice that is calm. Smug.

“Where is Zahra?” I spin in a slow circle, suddenly certain there’s a sniper’s gun trained on my head. But there’s nobody.

“I think it’s time we met,” he says, avoiding the question. “Don’t you?”

“Where is Zahra?” I ask again, frantically looking up at the top of every building. I see nothing, nobody.

“I have your friend,” he says evenly. “Come alone to the Shmuts and Company scrap metal yard if you want to see her again. You have one hour. Oh, and don’t bother with the mask. I know who you are now.”

And then the line goes dead.

A howl of rage erupts from deep inside me, bouncing off the townhouses, reverberating in my ears. I half expect the houses around me to crumble into piles of brick. I imagine smashing all their windows as I gulp sour-tasting air and look at the sky. No help there. Stupid helicopters still patrolling the city, and they’ve done nothing but make noise. One of them dips below the tree line over by the lake, a skittish mechanical dragonfly.

And then I bounce off my heels and lift off, my legs kicking out behind me, taking me back home. Because I need to get the gun. I’m not showing up there empty-handed.

As my feet fly over the sidewalk and I turn onto a busier street, I speed up, conscious of all the police, the helmeted riot cops still on alert, still looking for Invisible. They’re standing around, shifty with tension as their radios squawk. “The last hostage has been located. Attention, the last hostage has been located.”

I zoom past them, one thought like a drumbeat, over and over, as if I can telepathically communicate with Invisible:
You take my friend, I take your life.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I run all the way there, the barrel of the gun chafing against my ankle, shoved between my sock and boot. Extra ammo in the pocket of my denim jacket. As instructed, I left my mask at home.

As I run, I wonder what he wants from me. To help him kill people? Does he actually envision me cooperating on anything he proposes?

Or maybe he just wants to kill me himself. Keep it personal.

I run until my lungs burn and my eyes tear. My body craves speed; the faster I go, the more energy I seem to find to push through the knife-blade sizzle in my shins. My feet seldom make contact with the pavement.

Way out in South Bedlam, I move from the sidewalks to the center of the street. There are very few cars out here at the ragged edges of the city. I run past the factories at the city’s outer ring, past the bald sprawl of landfills and fallow fields. At last, up on top of a foothill, is the Shmuts and Company scrap metal yard. It is flanked on three sides by giant, skeletal cranes. A tall chain-link fence with a padlock the size of a Christmas ham bars my entrance. I’m so filled with fury that I wonder if I could just pull the padlock, snap it in two. But then I notice a section of the fence is loose where it attaches to the dirt, and I’m able to bend the fence upward. I have to strain to bend the chain link, but it yields to me. I slip beneath it, my heart hammering out a violent Morse code.

I move into the scrap yard between two hulking piles of smashed cars, curtains of shattered windshield glass hanging down the sides. There are shipping containers stacked high all around the yard, and flattened metal scraps from walls, from cars, from boats.

But no people. I stand stock-still in the center of it all. Nothing moves but the morning sun glittering off all the chrome and glass.

Nobody.

“I’m here,” I scream out. No echoes. The space is too open. The sound just ebbs away. “You wanted this, so come on out! Or did you bring me here to kill me from afar, you coward?”

All I can hear is the mad pulsing of blood in my brain. I keep turning in a circle, more frantic with each revolution I make, each second that ticks by with nobody here.

Then something catches my eye between two piles of burnt-out cars.

Something I really wasn’t expecting.

It’s a boy in a
wheelchair
. Pigeon toes. Stick-thin legs. Upper body wide and strong. Arms defined and sinewy in a black mesh muscle tee. With a head of brown curls, full red lips, an aquiline nose, and olive skin. And a pair of intelligent green eyes lined with black eyeliner. He’s young and vibrant, and almost preening. In a way that makes me think the word
glamorous
.

“Surprised?” he says. I think of the computer-altered voice on the videos. This could be a match. I look at his hands. Those are the hands I’ve been studying on video. The same bitten-to-the-quick fingernails.

It’s him. My thoughts spin, trying to catch up with what I’m seeing in front of me.

“But how do you . . .” I trail off, not sure what I’m even asking.

He smiles. Perfectly white, squared-off teeth. Orthodontically perfect, gleaming pearls. The teeth of a North Sider. “I have people help me do things. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to find muscle in this town. Or . . .” He pauses, looking at me sideways, kohl-lined eyes gleaming with the satisfaction of having lured me to him. “Maybe you wouldn’t.

“I was shot when I was around your age. A bullet hits your spinal cord and if you live, this is what happens.” He motions flamboyantly to his sparrow-thin legs, then shrugs as if to say
big deal, happens all the time
. “But enough about me. It’s you I want to talk about. Your impressive”—he looks like he’s gagging on the word—“
rescue
. Of my hostages.”

“How about we talk about Zahra?” I press my lips together and wait, the area around my ankle suddenly throbbing, the gun rubbing too tightly inside my boot, communicating through my skin. It takes everything I have, every ounce of energy to control the urge I have to beat Zahra’s whereabouts out of him with the handle of the gun.

“I know things about your family,” he continues, pushing the wheelchair closer to me, his hands (in red pleather half-gloves with Velcro fasteners at the wrists) gripping the wheels and shoving them forward, his body folding over his knees as he pushes. My heart stutters in my chest.
What kinds of things?
I want to ask, but I don’t dare give him the pleasure.

“When the Hansen kid told us it was
you
of all people, I couldn’t believe it. Anthem Fleet. Daughter of Harris and Helene, the golden couple of Bedlam real estate.”

I take a step back and he stops the chair. Something in his face, the way his eyes are trained on me, searching for what I am, feels invasive.

“What have you done with Zahra?” I ask again, trying to refocus him.

“I’m getting to that, supergirl. First, let’s talk about you. And what you can do for our cause.”

“Your cause is killing children,” I say coldly. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”