Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (12 page)

“It’s okay honey,” she said with kindness. “We’re almost there.”

Atop my head and along my ears, I could feel the slight tickle of cobwebs hanging from the walls. Though I’m invulnerable, but spiders still freak me out. I slowed my breath and contained my reaction. One wrong twitch and I could seriously hurt someone or collapse the hallway.

“Press the center of your palms,” Camuto told us.

I relayed the message to the others. A chorus of snaps echoed around us. Suddenly our suits lit up with a purplish glow.

“Cool!” Esteban sounded like he had opened a new toy on Christmas.

Sasha was on the brink of hyperventilating. Esteban could teleport her if he knew the layout of where we were going. “Alright then,” I said trying not to sound anxious. “Let’s get there already.”

About fifty feet later we exited the tunnel and entered the hidden room. Its construction was different from that of the rest of the compound. I touched the gray wall with the pads of my gloves. Smooth, probably concrete on top and a hard metal layer underneath it. Remarkably, it didn’t smell like cleaner like the rest of the compound. It could use a good scrubbing.

The high ceiling and simple architecture reminded me of a nuclear war bunker I’d seen in a movie. A dozen hunter green stall-sized lockers lined the far wall. At its end was a black vault with a round, silver handle and spokes. The thing was large enough to be included in a bank.

What’s inside of it?

We stood before the dark brown wooden table at the room’s center. There were eleven chairs with rounded backs stationed at even intervals around it. This must be where the Collective held its meetings before its split.
Eleven.
One for everyone but King, who never joined them after the Carrington event. He wouldn’t have come near this place except to burn it.

They encouraged the five of us to sit – me, Sasha, Rhapsody, Mom, and Esteban. She pointed me to the table’s largest chair at its rectangular head.
“There.
I insist.”

I did as she told me. Sasha sat at my right, Mom on my left. Rhapsody forced Esteban to sit between her and Mom. Bolted to the floor, the chairs had black padding and rotated ninety degrees. I didn’t fight the temptation to twist back and forth in it. Both Sasha and Mom nudged my legs with their feet to get me to stop doing it.

Nobody talked at first. The enormity of what we were about to do pressed upon us.

My chest tightened around my heart and the room started spinning like a top. Closing my eyes, I laid my head on the table and focused on my breathing. One, then two hands rubbed my back. Another stroked my face. I couldn’t tell who it belonged to, nor did I care. The pain and nausea intensified. I wouldn’t throw it up, but my breakfast rumbled around in my stomach.

Slowly my world returned to normal. Sweat from my face had pooled on the table. I sat up, hoping whatever I had done besides the sweat hadn’t been too embarrassing. Sasha had been one of those rubbing my back. Rhapsody, who stood to my left, was the other. Mom hadn’t moved, except to fold her hands in her lap and look away from me.

Once I signaled to her that I’d returned to normal, Courtney keyed the combination to the safe and whirled it open. “Zero-five-zero-five-two-zero-one-four. We change it once a quarter year. Come on and take a look inside.”

“May 5, 2014. Shouldn’t be too hard to remember,” Esteban said, getting up from his chair.

That was the date Reject High exploded. I knew that because I helped cause it.

“Keep the combination out of the front of your mind,” Camuto warned us as we assembled at the safe. “Those thoughts are readily accessed with scarlet emeralds.”

On the inside wall nearest to us were stacks of paper money in metal cages. When I say stacks, I mean neatly organized,
six feet tall piles
of green and white paper. Below them were drawers of gold and silver bullion coins.

Mom’s eyes bugged out of her head. “Lord, have mercy,” she said. “How’d you get all of this?”

Rhapsody reached into one of the cages and touched it. “No way that’s real.”

Courtney laughed.
“Totally real.
You don’t live this long to go broke. Close to a million in newly-mined cash, and we stock up on non-government issued gold and silver for whenever the economy goes in the tank again.”

Past the cages hung suits of body armor. Camuto grabbed one off of the wall and laid it in my hands. “This one is probably closer to your size now,” she said.

“I used to hate buying clothes and shoes for you,” Mom said, flashing her wonderful smile. “Seems like every month you grew at least an inch and your foot went up a size or two.”

My feet had gotten bigger.
Was I growing? Was that a side effect of the aquamarine, too?
I slung the new suit over my shoulder. “How do you clean them?”

“Use the glass chamber upstairs for heavy use,” Camuto said. “Otherwise, rinse with water.”

We went through the entire collection of items inside of the safe – new Geiger counter wristwatches, updated cell phones with custom SIM cards, and a couple thousand dollars in cash. Mom held her hand out for the money, but I palmed the wad of one hundred dollar bills instead, telling her, “I’ve got it.”

The last thing Courtney entrusted to us was a black velvet bag. Inside it was a handful of aquamarine prisms. “This is what we harvested from the explosion site,” she told us. “It’s enough to sustain David for a while, which is why he’ll be after this, too.”

Such a thing was too dangerous to leave down here unguarded. I slipped it into the inside pocket of my new bodysuit. “I’ll babysit them for a while, then. You don’t have to tell me where the aquamarine is. I already know.”

Esteban’s eyes bugged. “You
know?
Where is it?”

I answered him. “Underneath the old Unit Two reactor on Three Mile Island.”

Mom held a hand at her breast. “Three Mile Island? In Pennsylvania? I remember the meltdown. It happened when I was young. Dee and I watched the television coverage.”

That’s right. For years, Mom and Aunt Dee lived in a small town outside of Philadelphia. When they got together, besides fighting over how to handle Grandma Barbara’s house, it’s all they talked about. They’d reminisce over the good old days and places with really weird names, like “Ishkabibble’s” and “The Spectrum.”

“I’m guessing you put it there to mask its radioactive signature?” Sasha asked Camuto. “And only someone who could survive the residual radiation could get it, like Jason? But then, how did you get it down there without getting poisoned?”

Camuto ignored her question.
How did they get it down there?
“David will be have people watching airline flight manifests and radar, so you’ll have to take the long way.”

Mom’s brow furrowed. “What’s the long way?”

Esteban quickly shook his head. “No chance I can teleport all of us that far.”

“That’s not the long way,” Courtney said. “That’s the
really
long way.”

“Forget the long way,” I said. “Rhapsody will fly with me. We’ll go invisible. She can ghost us down, get the aquamarine, and bring it back here or take it to Orizaba. Easy.”

It seemed like a good plan on the surface, until people started shooting holes in it. Rhapsody took the first swing. “No, Rhapsody will not fly with you. You get sick in the air, like you just did, and I’m toast.”

Sasha bobbed her head, saying, “She’s right. It’s too dangerous. Besides, we
all
go.”

“It’s ten a.m.,” Camuto said, checking her bulky Geiger counter watch. “He gave you seventy-two hours from last night? One way is almost a two-day train trip by itself. With changeovers, it’ll be close.”

“On a train for two days?” Esteban asked incredulously. “He won’t give us an extension if we’ve got it?”

“This is not an essay,” Sasha said. “King’s not the give-a-last-minute-extension type.”

I thought about the plan and how it could work. After Three Mile Island, I’d hit the air with the provenance aquamarine. By then it wouldn’t matter if I was on the grid or not. I’d trade it for Debra. When she was safe and King thought he’d won, I’d have to kill him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

a first

Camuto bought six business-class tickets from the Walsh train station with stops in Chicago and Pittsburgh before pulling into Harrisburg on Tuesday afternoon –
twelve hours late
for the deadline. When I asked her about it, she patted me on the shoulder and said, “It’s handled.”

Before, I would have drilled her with question after question. For now, I let it stand.

Courtney handed each of us a regular-looking backpack. She separated Rhapsody’s and mine from the rest, personally handing them to us. They were black canvas, but the others were hunter green. Ours had thicker compartments than the others. What was in them?

“They’re different in other ways,” she said. “They have material similar to your suit and will withstand supersonic speeds. There’s another suit in yours, too.”

“Why the new suit?” I maneuvered around in the brand new one I'd put on a few minutes ago. “This one I’ve got on fits. It’s even a little loose in the body.”

When she grinned, I noticed the smile lines around her mouth. “You can’t tell? The aquamarine counteracts the heliodor. Your body is aging faster and growing.”

I wasn’t 5’2¾” anymore? Score! I hated being short. “Why is that a bad thing?”

“Your blood metabolizes high-proton radiation until your body is eighteen years old. Regardless of how many birthdays you celebrate.”

I'd forgotten about that. In addition to slowly killing me, the aquamarine inched me closer to a long, agonizing battle with bone cancer the longer I wore it. Great.

Camuto doled out printed tickets to the others behind me. After analyzing my blood, I’m sure she had an estimate on about how much longer I had to live. Unless it was under seventy-two hours, that information was worthless until after the mission. I wouldn’t ask her.

She turned to me last and handed me a folded sheet of paper with color printing and a laminated card. “Here,” she said. “By the time he thinks of checking the trains, we’ll be there.”

The laminated card was my North High School ID for the 2014-2015 school year. Since I missed school picture day and had cut class the past two years, they’d used my yearbook photo from middle school. I’d never cared about that until now, when Rhapsody and Sasha were giggling and pointing at me. Sasha commented. “Nice pic, Babe. I didn’t know
American Gangster
shot a sequel.”

It did look like a mug-shot, but there was a good reason. Mom had been sick from her chemotherapy treatments and the sound of her vomiting had kept me up all night. Ray had made me attend school the next day because he’s evil, and I was a zombie in every class. Days like that were all I remember of seventh grade. The second half of the year was a hazy blur of rage blackouts and therapy sessions with Susan trying to figure out how to fix my brain.

I flipped the ID over, examining it. “How did you even get this?”

Sasha squirmed a little. “Miss Burbank, our homeroom teacher, I told her I was your girlfriend and I’d see you before Debra or Ray. She handed it over.”

Mom floated over to us and snatched the ID from my hand. “You couldn’t have smiled, Boogie, just a little bit?”

The image of her, thin, frail, with wisps of hair peeking out of her patterned headscarf and her vomiting everywhere came to mind. “Nothing to be happy about that day,” I said.

I’m glad they left it at that. Camuto called for our attention. “There’s another feature on the suit you need to know about. Press the plate on the back side of one of your gloves.”

I tried it. The suit’s armor and the material beneath it became transparent. Our regular clothes were visible, or in Esteban’s case, underclothes. Covering his crotch with his hands, he touched his glove again and the condition reversed itself. His armor was visible. He teleported out, I assumed, to put on some other clothing. This handy trick would save us from having to duck for cover somewhere and suit up.

Courtney bit her lip to keep from laughing at him. “Everything about your suit depends on a battery that lasts forty-eight hours. It’s solar-powered. When we’re on the train, we’re going to have to get creative to charge them.”

Rhapsody asked a good question. “What about the provenance crystals? We’re leaving them here? Unguarded?”

“We’ve thought of that,” Courtney said. “They won’t be unguarded.”

Camuto drove the Collective’s black van to the Walsh train station. The quaint building marked the edge of the rural town. Other than corn, wheat, and produce fields, not another thing was around for miles.

Our backpacks slung over our shoulders, we waited for the eleven a.m. train to come. When it did, we piled into the first class car. Mom took the window seat and I sat to her left, across from Rhapsody and Esteban. Courtney and Sasha were behind me and Camuto across from them.

Resting against the cushy blue leather felt like sitting on a pile of textured pillows. A person would think that with all of Ray’s money I’d have had at least one high-class experience. The closest thing I remembered was getting a hotel upgrade once when our room got screwed up. I hated that about my life – he got the best of everything while Debra, Zachary and I scraped by for average stuff.
Is this what it’s like to be him?
I’d never had it this good, so I’d relish it for as long as I could.

The train had barely lurched forward when I located the meal menu placard. Fortunately, we would be able to make a reservation for lunch. There was nothing on the menu that I didn’t want to eat. Burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, barbecue, pulled pork, pizza – even the salads looked good. The sides were just as plentiful: macaroni and cheese, greens, potato salad, and more. There were desserts, all kinds of cakes and cheesecakes and pies.

Courtney leaned around my seat. “Order regular portions – one for you and her,” she said, referring to my mother. “Eat both and rest. You won’t need to use your powers.  And whatever you do, stay inside the train. King can pick up your radioactive signature in open air.”

“What about the room assignments?” I asked.

“We each have a bed of our own.” She pointed out mine on a map of the sleeping car.

That would work out for the best. From the looks of it, Rhapsody was still mad at me for kissing Sasha. I still don’t know how she figured that out. It could be simple, like I’d forgotten to wipe off lip gloss, or maybe she was messing with my head and didn’t know until I told her. Sasha might want me in her room. Mom wouldn’t want me bunking with either girl. In a way, it made sense. On the other hand, against the backdrop of an immortal psychopath conquering the world, teenage sex wasn’t a concern. Heliodor made me sterile, anyway.

I did eat lunch, both mine and Mom’s. I ordered a double cheeseburger, two orders of French fries, a chocolate milkshake, a Sprite and apple pie. Mom got a Philly cheesesteak, potato chips, iced tea and a slice of key lime pie. I plowed through, devouring everything in sight. Every once in a while when I swallowed Mom licked her lips and watched me. Creepy, to say the least. No creepier than sharing a stomach with someone, I suppose.

“That wasn’t a real Philly cheesesteak,” she said of my sandwich. “Not greasy enough. Your Aunt Dee and I, when we had them, the paper bag would break from all the grease.”

I wiped my mouth. “Sounds kind of gross, Mom.”

She laughed. “That’s because you’ve never had one. Try it sometime.”

After lunch, I stifled a belch the best I could and surveyed the train’s map. Our rooms were in the car ahead of us. I sensed a dizzy spell coming, so I tossed my backpack over my shoulder and staggered forward. Soon I felt a presence at my elbow.

“C’mon,” Mom said. She put her arm around me for support.

Together, we ventured into the next car. She located room number thirty-four, and helped me inside, turning down the bed right before I collapsed on it. I blinked and breathed deeply. Way more intense, this attack lasted longer than the previous ones. Was someone squeezing my heart in a vice? Then came flashing white lights, throbbing on the sides of my head and ringing in my ears. When Mom sang a church song trying to comfort me I cursed at her to stop. I apologized, I think, or maybe not. Some time passed.

Then I was alone. Keeping my eyes open became a chore. I fell asleep.

The tinny rattle of the train’s wheels against the tracks awakened me. I groaned and covered my face with the damp pillow underneath my wrist. Someone sat at the foot of the bed. I could tell by the weight on the covers near my calves.

“Hey sunshine.” Sasha crawled on top of the covers and lay next to me. “You’ve been out for a while.”

“How long?” I asked, muffled by the pillow at my mouth.

She checked her Geiger counter watch. “It’s almost five.”

What? I’d been out that long? Well, Courtney did tell me to rest up.

“I’m worried about you.” She stopped for a minute like she was choking up. “We all are.”

I rolled over to face her. “Just needed a nap. I’m good.”

“That’s not what your mom said.”

I wondered what that conversation had been like. What had she said? I decided not to ask. Knowing Sasha, she’d tell me whether I asked or not.

“She told anyone who would listen how sick you were and that you were talking out of your head. Courtney came in here. She said your temperature almost hit one hundred and four and your heartbeat was erratic. What’s going on with you?”

Should I tell her the truth? Sasha was the smartest person I knew. Eventually she’d figure it out. “It’s the aquamarine on my necklace,” I told her. “It’s making me sick.”

She propped her head up with her hand. “Why don’t you take it off? A temperature that high could make your organs start to fail if it doesn’t go down.”

“If I do that, my Mom will die.”

“If you don’t, then you, she, and Debra will die.”

Debra.
I had to deliver the aquamarine in two days, or he’d kill her for real this time. She thought the answer was simple and it was stupid of me not to take it off. But she had never lost a parent to a crippling disease. Neither had Courtney, or Camuto, or Hughes. They had no clue what I was going through with this. The only one who did wasn’t talking to me because of the stupid things I'd said and done. I wished she’d cool off already.

With a finger, Sasha drew small circles in the white cover sheet. “I have to say this,” she said, her eyes never lifting from the bed covers. “I loved being your girlfriend, so I never wanted to break up. But I’m here for you as a friend, Jason. Always.”