Masterminds (20 page)

“But—this is—crazy—” I'm panting now; I can't seem to get any words out. How am I going to convince them if I can't even talk? But if I pause to catch my breath, I'll fall behind again. . . .

I keep riding. If I let them go, I'll never get the chance to influence them. Yet every second is taking us farther from Serenity. The glimmer of town is long gone.

The fatigue is getting to me. It's worse than the end of a water polo match, because I've got a headache, and I'm starting to feel sick to my stomach. I know I'm still a couple of pounds off my goal weight, but how am I so out of shape?

There's a commotion up ahead. I look away from Tori in time to see Hector topple off his bike onto the soft shoulder. I squint through the blinding pressure behind
my eyes as Malik jumps off and makes for his fallen friend. Before he can get there, he doubles over in sudden distress and throws up. Beside me, Tori does the same. Her bicycle hits the pavement, and she sits down in the middle of the highway, gagging. I retch, barely managing to hold on to my own dinner. My head is pounding so hard that I'm having trouble focusing on where I am and why I'm straddling a bike. What's going on?

Eli staggers toward us, holding the top of his head like it's about to fly off. “Get out of the road!” he rasps, white-faced. “Hide the bikes!”

“Why?” I groan. It's obvious that something horrible is happening to all of us at the same time, but how will
hiding
help?

“I've had this before!” Eli croaks, dragging my Schwinn off the pavement into high brush. “It'll be here soon!”

“
What
'll be here soon?” Tori breathes.

That's when we notice it, faint, but unmistakable in the silent night—the distant rotor blades of a helicopter.

Malik hears it, too, and his alarm gives him the strength to lift his head up. “Purples!”

“We'll never outrun a chopper!” Hector moans.

Eli spins around, frantically scanning the darkness.
“There!” He points to an oddly shaped rock formation with a generous overhang. “Get under that!”

“Why?” I demand. “They're coming to help us!”

“They're coming to arrest us!” Malik counters.

“But they're on our side!” I plead.

“Think!” Eli commands. “How do you feel? The headache; the sick stomach—we all have it. There must be some kind of invisible barrier around town, and we just hit it!”

I obey, not because I agree, but because my splitting head makes it impossible to think straight. I feel rather than see myself bumbling through the brush along with the others, heading for the shelter of that rock. If we weren't so debilitated and in such pain, we'd make great comedy, teetering along on unsteady legs like baby giraffes learning how to walk.

“The bikes too!” Eli chokes. “Take the bikes!”

The effort to turn around and go back for his bicycle drops Hector to the ground again. In a Herculean feat of strength, Malik ends up dragging two bikes plus Hector. Eli tries to help Tori and me, but nobody is much help to anybody. We're just too sick. I finally give in and throw up too. I taste acid in my throat.

We can see the lights of the chopper now, and the roar
of the engine is growing louder. A cone-shaped search beam sweeps over the ground. Weakened as we are, it spurs us into action. Wildly, we cram ourselves and our gear under the overhang, and hunker there, trembling with fear and discomfort. For a long, terrifying moment, the light flickers all around us.

Malik has a death grip on my arm, and I whimper, “Let me signal them!”

Tori sounds exhausted. “For God's sake, Amber, haven't you figured it out yet? Serenity is a prison and we just climbed over the wall!”

“It's not true!” I blubber. “It can't be true!” But the evidence is right in front of me. It's rocking all of us, like it rocked Eli before. I struggle to focus my reeling mind on one point in Eli's story. “Okay, if it's happening to everybody, and it's happening to Eli again, why didn't it happen to Randy?”

“Because Randy wasn't one of the prisoners,” Eli shoots back. “And we are. Even you, Amber.”

Crouched beside me, Malik utters a single moan, and passes out, his head lolling onto Hector. My arm is free. I can run out into the beacon and get us all rescued.

I hesitate. Even though they're not making sense, I have no better explanation for our current state. Tori and
Eli talked about two main ideas in Randy's note: First, some of us are special, but not Randy; and second, that's why Eli got sick and Randy didn't.

As we huddle in agony beneath the overhang, the note doesn't seem like such a joke anymore. I can't accept everything they're telling me—especially not with my brain on fire. But it's enough to prevent me from running out and waving down the chopper.

A moment later, the searchlight is gone, and the road is dark again. The engine noise diminishes as the craft moves away.

“They're giving up?” Hector asks through gritted teeth.

Eli shakes his head, wincing at the motion. “Probably just continuing the search. The invisible barrier must be a circle around the whole town.”

“What are we going to do?” Hector rasps.

Malik is awake again. “I'm not going back. I say we push on. If this is a barrier, it has to end somewhere.”

Tori is appalled. “You mean
ride
? I'm not sure I can stand!”

“Even if we were strong enough to go on,” Eli reasons, his face pinched, “we don't know what the barrier will do to us. Farther on it might kill you.”

“We could go back,” I suggest. “No one has to know we were gone.”

“There's a helicopter up there!” Malik argues, holding his head. “We're as easy to spot riding in as riding out!”

“Well, don't blame me!” I snap. “Whose stupid idea was this anyway?”

Tori is distraught. “We can't go on, we can't go back, and we definitely can't stay here! Can anybody think of another option?”

And then something happens—the last thing any of us expect. A woman's voice, not that far away, calls: “Eli . . . !”

We all freeze.

“Who's that?” Hector hisses.

The call comes again. “Eli, are you there . . . ?”

We hear another motor, this one much quieter, and the crunching of tires on the pavement. A car?

We peer out from our hiding place to Old County Six. A dark pickup truck with headlights off is moving slowly east. Every hundred yards or so, it stops, and the woman at the wheel calls for Eli.

Eli begins to step into the open, but Malik grabs him in a hammerlock. “What are you, crazy? Check out the Surety crest on the door. That's a Purple truck!”

The pickup comes to a halt maybe fifty feet away, and the driver calls again. “Eli . . .” This time her face appears in the window.

“It's Mrs. Delaney!” I hiss. “What's she doing here?”

“Her husband's Surety,” Malik growls. “Stay down!”

But Eli moves toward the truck in a shambling run. She jumps out of the driver's door and grabs him just as he's about to collapse. “Get in the car. I'll take you home.”

“I'm not alone,” he manages to say.

That's when she spots the rest of us under the overhang. “I'll take all of you. Put your bikes in the back. Hurry!”

Doing most of the work herself, she hustles us and our stuff into the truck. Without her, I don't think we could have managed it. The agony brought on by the barrier is doing more damage every minute, beating us into the ground.

Malik pauses, holding on to the door of the crew cab. “We're not going back. Take us past this force field, or whatever it is, and we'll be out of your hair.”

“It doesn't work that way, Malik,” our water polo coach pleads. “The effects get worse before they get better. Your only choice is to go home.”

We stare at her a moment, but who would know better
than her? Her husband is a Purple People Eater.

I'm aware of a new pain—one that's just as bad as the pain of this so-called barrier. There's been a lot of crazy talk about Serenity from the other kids. But this is the first time I've heard an adult—a school employee, the wife of a Surety officer—confirm that all is not as it seems in our ideal community.

Eli is bitter. “We have no home. Mrs. Delaney, how much do you know about us?”

“Only what my husband's told me—that some of the kids are part of a study, and that you're not supposed to leave.”

“It's worse than that,” Eli breathes. “A lot worse.”

She's visibly upset. “I knew it was you when Bryan got the call to respond to a perimeter breach. And I also knew I was the only one who could save you. But I'm taking a big risk. If I'm caught, my husband could lose his job, and I could lose my marriage.”

Malik jumps on that. “If you turn us in, we'll say the whole thing was your idea.”

“Malik!” Tori is horrified. “She's
helping
us!”

He's amazingly cool and steady, despite the waves of pain and nausea. “Then let her help us not get busted.”

Mrs. Delaney glares at him, but mostly, she seems
torn. “I don't know
what
the right thing to do is here.”

“The right thing is we sneak back home and get up in the morning like this never happened,” Malik insists. “You've got just as much to lose as we do.”

She puts the engine in gear. “All right,” she sighs. “We'll try it your way.”

“
Can
we go back?” Hector asks worriedly. “Don't our parents already know?”

“There are false alarms sometimes. The Surety doesn't notify anyone until they rule that out. When the search comes up empty, they'll stand down. You've got to admit that's a better result than any of us deserve.” Mrs. Delaney gives Malik a look that would bore a hole into anyone with a thinner skin.

She steps lightly on the gas and we begin to roll, still without headlights, back toward town. We can hear the helicopter, but it's more distant. Through the windshield, we can see the search beam over Old County Six to the west of town.

We haven't gone very far before we begin to feel better—no more nausea; no more headaches. It happens to all of us at virtually the same moment. If there's any doubt that our illness was caused by some kind of unseen barrier, it's gone now. Gone, too, is my belief that Serenity
is the place we've always been told it is. My own mother, as our teacher, is one of the main perpetrators of this giant lie. Randy was right all along: something screwy
is
going on in Serenity. Except that the word
screwy
doesn't even begin to describe it. What possible justification could there ever be for people to imprison their own kids with an invisible fence?

“I'm such an idiot!” I mutter.

“No, you're not,” Tori says quietly. “You just didn't know.”

I'm not consoled. “You tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen.”

Hector turns to her. “Because you were
happy
.”

“I'm not happy anymore,” I choke.

“Just wait,” Malik promises. “You haven't heard the good part yet.”

“Enough.” Mrs. Delaney pulls onto the shoulder. “This is where everybody gets off. Take your bikes and go home.”

“Mrs. Delaney,” Eli begins, “I don't know how we can ever thank you—”

“You can't,” she interrupts, almost coldly. “This never happened, so there's nothing to be grateful for. I'll keep your secret just this once, because it's my secret too. But
I'm
not
on your side. I'm not on anyone's side, and I intend to keep it that way.”

The instant the bikes are unloaded, she drives off without another word.

I face the others, conflicting emotions swirling in my brain, now that the agony has subsided. Heartbreak, embarrassment, fear. Mostly, I feel stupid. I made endless lists, thinking I was in control of my life. And all the while, I didn't have a clue what was going on in the world around me.

And I still don't. “Tell me everything,” I urge.

“Not tonight,” replies Eli, keeping an anxious eye on the western sky. “Tomorrow. I promise.”

I want to argue, but he's right. A helicopter can cover ground a lot faster than a bicycle, and if we're caught, this new reality will be gone before I even understand what it is. Nothing is more important than getting home undetected.

We scatter and I ride up to my door, stash my bike in the garage, and slip into the house. All is quiet; my parents are still asleep. Mrs. Delaney may not be on our side, but she sure was a lifesaver tonight.

The transition from the chaos of the invisible barrier to the familiarity of my much-loved home and my French
provincial bedroom is like electric shock therapy. My upright piano; my ballet barre; the color-coded bulletin board where I track my activities. Everything is in perfect order, from my frilly pajamas to my canopy bed.

I refuse to look at it. Everything I thought I understood has just been upended. You might as well repeal the law of gravity, too, so I can't trust that my next step won't send me hurtling off into space.

What is this place where I've spent my whole life? Who are these people who've always been here?

Scariest of all: If I don't know them, do I really know myself?

My mother is the only ballet teacher in Happy Valley, and she has only one student: Laska. Since there aren't any other dancers around, Amber can never be in a real ballet. So every now and then, Mom holds a recital.

I look forward to these recitals with the kind of dread most kids reserve for having their teeth drilled when the dentist from Taos comes to town. About twenty people pack into my living room to see her do pirouettes and grand jetés and a bunch of other stuff with French names. It's about as happening as watching grass die. The only entertainment value is making fun of Amber in a tutu, which never works, since Laska hasn't got the brains to be embarrassed by being seen in a tutu.