Masterminds (14 page)

A brave and clever response dies in my throat. My mouth is still not working.

Safe for the moment, we stare down at the factory floor.

I see the orange first. Cones—a lot of them. At least a few hundred—freestanding, stacked on pallets, and piled in a mound.

Okay,
I tell myself, still not thinking 100 percent clearly.
We broke into a traffic cone plant and found traffic cones. What did we expect?

“Were we wrong about this place?” breathes Tori.

Eli is shaking his head. Is the factory exactly what it's supposed to be?

Then my head clears and I realize what I
don't
see. Equipment. Machinery. What made all this? And out of what? There's no raw material either. I expand my view. Four high brick walls with very few windows; a concrete floor painted battleship gray. A forklift, several folding tables, a riding lawn mower; beside that, a small stepladder that would reach about 3 percent of the way to the ceiling. There's a lunchroom area in the far corner. A vast shelving unit, largely empty, except for the occasional
flashlight or coil of twine, and, for some reason, a lamp shade with no lamp. That's about it.

“No way,” I tell the other two. “This isn't a factory, it's a front for a factory. If they're making cones, they're doing it with a magic wand.”

Eli nods. “No machines.”

“And no plastic either,” I add. “How can you have a plastics factory without plastic?”

Tori's voice is shaky. “What do my parents do all day in this place?”

“This whole plant is a cover,” Eli concludes, stone-faced.

It's a big discovery, but our reaction is muted. Not shock. It's sort of a relief, I guess—relief that we're not crazy. Still, there's so much we don't know.

“But if it
is
a cover,” I ask, picturing my mother painstakingly assembling her bag lunch to come to this un-factory, “what are they covering?”

None of us has an answer for that.

Tori peers sideways through the angled grille of the grating. “That wall,” she says, “is too close.”

I'm confused. “Where would you like it to be?”

“This duct should end where the factory does.” She indicates the passage ahead of us. “But look—it goes on at
least another forty feet. Which means—”

Eli clues in. “There's something behind those bricks. A whole other part of the building.”

“And we're heading straight for it,” adds Tori.

We resume our caterpillar motion. I'm still in the lead, crawling carefully around other gratings. One of them is just a few feet in front of the mysterious wall. So we have a pretty good idea when we've left the open plant and entered the hidden section.

Thirty feet ahead of us, a square of light beckons. I'm guessing it's some kind of room, since it's brighter than the dim factory we've just come from.

A minute later I'm peering down at a regular office—a desk in front of a bank of TV monitors. Although the screens are lit and running, the chair is empty.

“What is it?” Tori whispers behind me.

I squeeze past the opening to give her and Eli a peek. “Some kind of security station. But nobody's there.”

Eli frowns through the grille. “Security for a factory that doesn't make anything?”

Tori gives it her practiced eye. “It's no more than a five- or six-foot drop to that desk. I'm going in.”

“I'm with you.” Eli pushes out the grating, angles it, and draws it up inside the duct.

“Wait,” I protest in a low voice. “That chair isn't there for decoration, you know. A butt goes in it, probably a purple one. What'll we do if the guy comes back?”

Neither of them considers my question worthy of an answer. Before I know it, Tori is through the opening and lowering herself toward the tabletop. When she drops, it's only a couple of feet to the desk. For Eli, who's taller, it's even less.

Once more I'm on the outside looking in—although, technically, I'm on the inside looking out. “Should I stay up here? You know, to help you guys back up? Yeah, that's probably a good idea . . .”

But then they start having a fit over what's on the monitors.

“What is it?” I crane my neck out of the ceiling, and before I know it, I'm falling again. Floundering, I grab the frame of the duct opening and jump down to the desk. It's not as clean a landing as theirs. I bounce off, hit the carpet, and roll. Not exactly Olympic gymnast stuff, but at least I don't knock myself unconscious.

There are eighteen screens, each one showing a live feed from some part of Serenity. There's the schoolyard, Dr. Bruder's office, the general store, and the restaurant. There's the park, and a close-up on the Serenity Cup.

“No wonder they don't lock the case,” Eli comments. “The instant someone lays a finger on that thing, they'll know.”

There are several views of town streets, as well as two shots of Old County Six—one to the west of Serenity and one to the east. One image seems to be out in an area of sagebrush. Spotlights illuminate a large helicopter parked on a concrete pad. There are two Purple People Eaters in the picture. One is Baron Vladimir von Horseteeth. The other I don't recognize—he might have been hired after Eli and Randy made the cards.

The reality sinks in for all three of us.

“They've got cameras everywhere!” I whisper. “They're spying on us!”

Eli draws a nervous breath. “It's a miracle we haven't been spotted sneaking out to the factory. Look—they've got one on the front door but nothing on the gate.”

“What about our route through town?” I wonder.

Tori's gaze moves methodically from screen to screen. You can almost see her putting together a picture of Serenity with the cameras superimposed on it. “Pure luck,” she concludes. “We haven't tripped any of their surveillance.”

“We have to retrace our steps exactly,” I add anxiously.
“In fact, we should probably start right now—”

“Not until we check out
that
,” says Eli.

He's pointing to an opening in the floor ringed by a wrought-iron railing. It's a tight spiral staircase winding down to another level.

“What about the guy from that chair?” I protest.

Tori sneaks a glance over the rail. “I don't see anybody. Let's go.”

I follow them, mostly because I'm too scared to stay in the room by myself. Even when we tiptoe, our footfalls on the iron steps reverberate with a gonglike sound.

Downstairs, we step off into what seems to be some kind of publishing office. A large printing press dominates the center of the room. Eli nudges a computer mouse, and the machine's large monitor comes out of hibernation. The display shows the front page of the
Pax
, dateline: tomorrow. The headline reads:

SERENITY VOTED #1 IN NEW MEXICO

FOR QUALITY OF LIFE

UNPRECEDENTED 14TH STRAIGHT YEAR

Eli snorts. “They ought to know how great it is. They're watching every inch of the place.”

There are always a few national and international news stories in the
Pax,
and now we know where they come from. The front pages from several well-known papers are up on two huge touch screens—the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and a few others. Some of the stories have been highlighted, others deselected in gray.

For example, in the
Los Angeles Times
,
Two Dead in Gang Shootout
has been nixed, but the piece directly above it,
Celebrity Flower Show Opens
, has been left intact. On the next screen, where the
Times
of London is displayed,
Terrorist Bombing Rocks Mayfair
has been cut. However,
Buckingham Palace to Get Spring Cleaning
is totally okay.

“This is how the
Pax
chooses what to print?” I whisper in awe. “By taking out any bad news?”

Eli nods. “They do it to the internet too. No Revolutionary War, just tea.”

“But we learn about wars too,” Tori reasons. “And crime.”

“Only as an example, to show how much better things are here,” Eli explains. “The Boston Tea Party was a rebellion. Think about the Essential Qualities—honesty, harmony, contentment. Nothing about questioning
authority, or fighting for your rights.”

“All the more reason we should get out of here before anybody catches us rebelling!” I beg.

Tori points toward the spiral staircase. “There's another level below us. Didn't you see it?”

“We're pushing our luck!”

But Eli and Tori are already tiptoeing that way.

I'm getting really scared, but I follow them to what seems to be the bottom floor. At least, this is where the steps end. It's a large circular conference room, dimly lit. The rounded walls are made almost entirely of whiteboard material. These are covered in photographs and note cards, hundreds—no, thousands of them, pinned up by small magnets.

Tori shines her light on a section of the wall.

The shock begins in the base of my spine and works its way northward until I hear a buzzing in my ears.

It's
me
.

My first baby pictures, toddler shots, photographs of me at every age, right up to this year's school portrait. Some of the prints and notes are faded, curled, and yellow with age. At the top of the board is a large label, spelled out in block capitals:

OSIRIS 11

HECTOR AMANI

BORN: 02/15/2003

Osiris?

It's my whole life, documented in detail—how much I weighed at birth. How long my mother was pregnant with me. There's a picture of her as a younger woman, feeding me in a high chair, and a high-angle shot of our classroom that seems to show me angling my test paper into Malik's field of vision. There must be hidden cameras at school!

More: my academic records, behavior charts, results of medical tests.
Brain Scan, 7/29/2005
; I had a brain scan? There are medical printouts and graphs I can't even begin to understand. Notes scribbled in my parents' handwriting, Mr. Frieden's, Dr. Bruder's, Mrs. Laska's . . .
stratospheric IQ . . . exceptional reasoning skills . . . emotionally immature . . . socially awkward . . . vulnerable to intimidation . . . Incident report: subject took extra brownie . . .
Extra brownie? Are they serious?

There are dozens of these reports, maybe hundreds.
Subject failed to reveal unfair advantage in recreational
test . . .
It's dated Serenity Day, 2011. Has everything I've ever done been under a microscope? And why are they calling me “subject”?

The beam swings away, and I'm left staring at the darkened wall. “Hey, I was reading that!”

“Oh my God!” exclaims Tori in a hoarse whisper. “It's me! And you, Eli!”

She pans the wall. Eleven Serenity kids are chronicled in vast collages of pictures, papers, and notes. Each display is just as thorough as mine. Amber is there as well. She's Osiris 6. And also Malik, Osiris 3. Eli has the top spot—Osiris 1, whatever that means. But there's no Randy, no Stanley Cole, no Melanie Brandt, no Fowler twins.

“How come not everybody's here?” I wonder.

Eli's voice is strangled as he quotes from Randy's letter. “Some of us are
special
.” He takes out his iPad and circles the room, meticulously photographing every whiteboard, and the long conference table, which is covered with papers.

I don't feel special. I feel violated, invaded, and extremely creeped out. I feel like I'm some kind of lab rat!

Tori is visibly upset. “Don't try to make sense of this! None of this makes any sense! I'm supposed to be Osiris
9! It's on notes signed by my own parents! What's an Osiris?”

I'm so gobsmacked that I've forgotten where I am and what I'm doing. At that moment, my mind is a boiling whirlwind of questions. One question, really:
Why?
Why have eleven kids been studied since the minute they were born?

That's when we hear footsteps gonging on the spiral staircase two flights up, and the fear returns in a skipped heartbeat. The purple butt that fits in the video station chair is on its way down.

I look around in desperation. A single door leads to the main factory area. Eli beats me to it, so he gets the bad news first: locked.

We can make out the jingling of keys now, and a gruff voice humming a tuneless melody. It's like all the worst-case scenarios rolled into one. In a few seconds, he'll be upon us, and we've got no escape.

Eli and I stand there, looking helplessly at each other. His eyes flicker toward the conference table—the only available hiding place. But it has a glass top, so the guard would have to be blind and stupid not to notice us hunkered down underneath it.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that my life is about
to change in a fundamental way, and not one I think I'm going to enjoy. My mind reels. Is there a way out of this—?

“Over here!” Tori hisses in a barely audible voice.

She's squatting at the wall beside an air-conditioning register. The grate is off, and she's motioning us into the duct.

I'm so frozen that Eli practically has to drag me. He crawls into the opening, pulling me after him. Tori scrambles in last, crushing my legs, and replaces the grille behind her. Through the grid, I see boots topped with purple cuffs on the tile of the conference room. That's how close it is. Another couple of seconds and we would have been too late. We're out and he's in, almost in the same instant.

We cower there, listening to him clearing his throat. We don't even breathe, much less move. If he hears us, we're cooked.

The boots issue a sharp report—
crack!
—with every step on the tile floor. I feel each one inside my skull, a series of jarring knocks against my brain. But—