Wild Thing (16 page)

But she also raised her hands up, ’coz she knew that was what you did when people pointed guns at you.

It all seemed to work, though, since even while all the shouting and running was still going on, the first soldier up the stairs didn't look like he'd planned to shoot her.

He'd actually looked kind of embarrassed.

He had an armband that said “FBI,” she noticed. 
Ohh: Eff-Bee-Eye!

The angry man got extra angry, though, going red in the face and talking about “slip shot operations” and lots of other stuff she didn't understand.  But Director Sanders just calmed him down while Keepie led her off to her room.

She thought he must be super angry with her, and got ready for something awful to happen.  She held his hand real tight, hoping that that might somehow keep him.  She couldn't bring herself to try all the stupid big-eyes and trembly-lip stuff, though, she was too upset….

But amazingly, when they reached her door, he lifted her chin to make her look at him, and smiled, and then
winked!
  Then he'd patted her on the head, opened her door, and tapped her on the bottom to scoot her inside.

'Consider yourself reprimanded, Sara,' he said, still smiling, as she turned around.  'But I should return and help calm down Mr Smith.'

And gently shut the door.

She wasn't going to be sent away!

She turned and slumped against the door, and her bones went all loose and she just slid down to the floor.  For some reason, then, she started crying for real.

She discussed it with Faith the next day.  The soldier part – not the getting into trouble part, or the crying.

'Which army do you think “FBI” is?  They must be goodies, since we're goodies here, an’ they talked to Uncle and the Professor.'

Faith didn't answer, just looked doubtful, so Sara explained more.  'FBI wasn't their names, ’cause they had littler name badges on their shirts.  Plus, they wouldn't all have the same name.  And Miss Nerida had said “The” FBI.'

Anyway, from everything she'd learned from her
secret investigations
, she told Faith, she was pretty sure they'd lock her in her room, ’cause probably they thought she'd want to know what was going on, and help.

But she didn't tell even Faith about her secret plan.

The day before Super Special Magic Danger Day she made sure to act all bored, and even pretended to be tired, complaining about the heat – until Keepie got worried and asked if she was “coming down with something” and checked her out magically.  She realized then that she shouldn't pretend quite so hard.  But none of them knew she'd already noticed how Mr Shanahan made all his security camera “sweeps” of the outside of the building take exactly one minute.

Which was a very important part of her plan.

Uncle had been surprised at her request for a watch – “so she could time herself running” – but thought it was a good idea.  A shopping drone had delivered it the next day.

As soon as she'd got it, she made sure to visit Mr Shanahan.  At first she'd thought he wasn't going to let her in at all this time.  Which would have been a disaster!  But in the end he did, for a little while, and she carefully noted when the security camera on the western wall started its sweep.

So now her plan was all ready.

She'd even come up with the idea of asking for all her favorite sweets and treats, and some grown-up movies to watch on the day when everything was supposed to be happening, and had to giggle at the way Keepie agreed so easily to it all.  She'd even talked him into letting her get
Death on Blood Mountain,
which the net said was only for kids who were at least fifteen!

She was glad she had, though, since it wasn't 'til almost the evening that she heard some kind of truck or something arriving; and then, maybe half an hour later,
two
helicopters, one after the other!

The trid had actually been a little bit creepy, and also a bit horrible, with the way all the blood would explode from their chests when the monster squeezed them; but it sure was exciting!  She'd watched it twice.

But when the helicopters arrived, she was pretty sure it was finally time to use her secret route.  So she put on her new watch, got her little flashlight and dragged three chairs into her bathroom, stacking one on the other so she could reach the secret trap door in the ceiling.

She climbed up on the chairs and pulled down the spare sheet which she'd put knots in and then tied up there, earlier.  Then climbed down from the chairs and put them away.  Then she lumped up some pillows and stuffed them under her blanket to make it look like she'd gotten bored and gone to bed early, just in case anyone checked on her.

Back in her bathroom, she climbed up her “rope,” and shimmied up into the tight and dusty space, pulling the knotted sheet up behind her and sliding the secret trap door shut, making it super dark.  The first thing she did then was tie a cloth around her face.  Not for a disguise: just to keep the dust out of her nose and mouth.  That's how bad it was.

She turned on her flashlight then and very carefully and extra, extra quietly, started making her way across the wooden beams toward the western wall, and the unused room with the window near the drainpipe.  Which was another trick she'd learned from Miss X.

After she'd climbed outside – first checking the second-hand of her watch – the hardest bit had been reaching the next window, from the drainpipe.  It sure had looked a lot closer, from the ground.  Her toes reached, but then she'd had to push free of the pipe and grab real quickly at the window frame to avoid falling, and it'd actually been pretty scary when her fingers had been scrabbling on the painted wood trying to get a grip.  But exciting!

As soon as she'd gotten both feet on the sill and both hands on the join part in the middle, she'd just hung there, panting, before remembering she only had a few seconds left before the camera would swing back and see her.

But the window slid down easily and she tumbled inside.  No one ever went into the dusty old office, and she'd unlocked the window and slid it up and down lots, two days earlier.

Out in the hallway, then, she listened.  She considered sneaking back to the corner and looking around it to see if anyone was on guard in the corridor outside her room, in case they were treating her like she was a
real
prisoner – but decided not to risk it, in case no one was guarding it after all.  That'd be pretty disappointing.

Instead she'd gone the other way, to the room with the chute where the bots tipped the dirty sheets and clothes in to slide down to the laundry room on the ground floor.  Luckily, the laundry room also had a small chimney thing that went further down, to both of the basement levels where some of the patients were kept.  Probably to bring the inmates' dirty stuff
up
to the laundry.  Uncle had said it was important for some of the inmates to be surrounded by living earth, and that was why they were kept underground.

She wasn't sure what living earth was, but it sounded pretty cool.

And so, perhaps twenty minutes after she'd set out, she was creeping once again through a tight and squeezy ceiling space, this time above the lower basement as she made her way toward Godsson's cell.  She was pretty sure it was his, because her flashlight showed a really strangely-glistening kind of wall at one point, near the middle, plus there were some kind of worrying groans.

They sounded like Godsson!

They were coming from his area, too.  It sounded kind of scratchy, though, like his voice was coming from a speaker.

Super extra carefully, she slowly made her way to it.  She even turned her light out when she got closer.  Which was how she saw a small glow in the darkness of the roof cavity.  Making her way to that, she looked down.

There were men in the corridor below her.  Their jackets said “FBI.”  Three other men were there too, but they were dressed just
weird
, with cloaks with feathers, and wearing beads ’n stuff.  It woke a dim memory that scratched and annoyed, but she couldn't work out what seemed so familiar.  One of the FBI men stood close by those three.  Probably three magicians, she decided.  She wondered if they were the battle mages?  They didn't look anything like as cool as she'd expected.  She wondered where her uncle was.

Sounds of Godsson, in torment, rose up again from below.

And with horror, she felt the Wrongness.  From the corner of her eye she saw Lily's smoothly-curving edges slip around the FBI man standing opposite Godsson's door, directly beneath her.  She could feel Her coiling over him, and could almost hear the familiar voice, whispering.  Encouraging.

Tricking.

She saw the man raise his gun, slowly, as if he'd fallen asleep.  She saw he wasn't pointing it at any
one
.  He was pointing it at the small glass window in Godsson's cell.

It was a very big gun.

Godsson screamed louder, horribly, and from the way the people who could see into his room reacted, even
they
looked worried.

For just a moment, she felt she saw a movement in the dark up in the ceiling cavity with her, in the dust: a familiar cruel, curving set of slicey edges in the tiny motes of dust that twisted and raced around the glistening wall.  Once she'd seen that, she saw several more, all braiding together like jellyfish tentacles draping invisibly down from… somewhere, to wrap and coil around the man below.

She saw his arm tense.

The ceiling here in the basement was just as thin as it was up on the higher floors.  Without thinking, she shoved both legs down, hard, feeling the stuff rip as she threw her weight onto it, thrilling as she plunged through, like a baby alligator smashing through its egg.  With a cry like HyperGirl flying into battle with Argon she dived down onto the man under attack.

Fingers out like talons already tensed to claw and shred and rend, to tear it from him, she imagined lasers like HyperGirl's shooting from her fingertips.  Then she was on him, feeling the Wrongness wrapped around him.  Growling, she tore into it, even biting at it as the man suddenly reacted, shooting.

All at once everything was shouting and confusion.  She held on desperately as the big FBI soldier spun round and around, trying to reach back to throw her off, but she dodged his arm and wriggled lower and screamed while she clung to his back and fought She who'd wrapped around him.

She
wasn't her sister, Sara realized in that moment.  That had all been a trick, and she cried at the pain of the betrayal and lashed out even harder, from the depths of her heart.  Someone was shouting about holding fire, Godsson screamed again, in pain or joy, she wasn't sure which this time, and other men were diving toward her.  The three strange-dressed men were doing spell-y things, she saw her uncle's face white in shock, and then she felt a sleepy blanket flow over her.

She struggled, as hard as she could, still tearing into the last wisps of the shocked thing now shriveling and vanishing beneath her fingers, then everything slowed right down, and she saw the ground swimming up to her in a dream.

Chapter 15 

Something stung in her nostrils.  Aching, she blinked and stretched-

Uh oh.

She was curled up in a leather chair in Director Sanders's office.  Her uncle was closing the lid on a small bottle as he moved back from her.  She sat up and saw Mr Shanahan and the three weird guys with the feathers and beads hanging off their animal skin coats.  And there was a really stiff-looking man in a dark suit with medals on it.  The same man who'd spoken to her uncle and the Professor the other night.

He still looked angry.

She was absolutely filthy, she saw, but her legs where she'd scratched them going through the ceiling were undamaged.  It made them look odd, with clean patches where her uncle must have healed her, then wiped the blood off.  Her eyes and face felt surprisingly clean, too, she decided, as she licked her lips.

Then froze. 
What if they decide to send me away?
  She fought down tears that suddenly welled up.

The men looked at one another, and she wondered what they were waiting for.  She looked at her uncle, letting him see how worried she was.

They must have been waiting for her uncle, ’cause at last he squeezed his eyes shut, pinched his nose, and spoke to her.  His voice was very calm.

She sat up extra straight; even put her hands together in her lap.

'Sara, what did you think you were doing?'

What did she
think
she was doing?  She
knew
what she'd been doing: saving Godsson, of course.  But in the moment before she blurted that out, she stopped herself; and grasped for an excuse instead.  'Um.  I just wanted to see what was happening.'

'But how did you get there?  We even had a guard outside your room.'

'You did?'

How good was
that
!
  But when she saw how the men reacted to her smile, she quickly made her expression all serious.

'And I had explicitly told you that you had to stay in your room.  You even said you-'

He blinked, slowly, interrupting himself.  'You had planned it all out.  You even left the trid playing, and made it look like you were asleep in your bed in case….  But how did you- oh.  Oh!'

Everyone looked at him, wondering what he'd just realized.

Remembering the trickiest part, climbing through the window, she hoped he wouldn't find out about that.  He'd be cross.  But strangely, he seemed to be almost smiling, now.

'How did you get out of your room?'

Somehow, the calm look in his eye made her think he already knew the answer somehow.  But if he did, why would he ask her?

'Um.'  She looked around.  'I-, um, there's a secret door in the ceiling in my bathroom.  I climbed up on some chairs and tied some rope up inside, then put the chairs back.'

They made her tell them every detail.  Climbing down the drainpipe.  Getting down to the basement….