Masterminds (26 page)

Do I have the strongest reaction to Bartholomew Glen because I'm him?

That turns out to be my last waking thought.

“Eli!”

The voice reaches me through turbulent dreams—exploding trucks lighting up the night; Hector Amani,
gone; enemies in purple; Felix Hammerstrom chasing me in his Lexus, the front bumper nudging the backs of my knees as I run for my life. And then I'm down, the weight of the speeding car crunching me like an insect—

“Eli—wake up!”

It's Tori, leaning over and shaking my shoulder. The situation comes hurtling back—the escape, the train, the lifesaving Gatorade. Malik and Amber are just rousing from sleep. The train—never very fast—is slowing down. It's just after dawn, the sun still low in the sky. Through the open door of the boxcar, we can see signs of civilization—buildings, houses, power lines, roads.

“Is this a city?” Amber whispers.

“I don't think so,” Malik replies. “But it's bigger than anything we're used to. Crummier too.”

He's right. Some of the houses along the tracks are really ramshackle, and the fencing is torn and rusty. In Serenity, nothing is ever allowed to stay broken or even unpainted. That doesn't seem to be the case out here.

We roll past a faded sign:
Colorado City.

“Colorado!” I breathe, encouraged that we've come north. I have no clue where Pueblo is, but at least we're not heading east, away from McNally Academy and Randy.

Brakes screech as the train lurches to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. Stacks of lumber and pieces of equipment are scattered all around. Skids loaded with cargo are lined up along the track beside several forklift trucks.

“What's that stuff for?” Amber wonders.

The answer comes all too soon. A yard worker in coveralls and a hard hat leaps in the door of the boxcar, turning to signal an approaching forklift. He takes one look at the four of us and barks, “What are you kids doing here?”

Since we have no answer for that, the only course of action is flight. Tori is the first to react. She runs for the open door, which is suddenly blocked by a huge pallet of cargo carried by forklift arms.

The worker puts an iron grip on her wrist. With his free hand, he grabs a walkie-talkie from his belt. “Security to car thirty-six!”

Amber and I watch in horror, but Malik springs into battle. He snatches up a full Gatorade bottle and bounces it with deadly accuracy off the side of the man's jaw. The blow knocks him backward into the wall, and he releases Tori. The four of us make a break for freedom. With the doorway blocked by cargo, Tori squeezes through the gap to the right of the incoming load; Amber and I slip out
the opening on the left. The worker reaches for Malik, who drops to the floor and tries to roll under the arms of the forklift.

He almost makes it. The pallet descends and he's trapped beneath it, screaming for help.

Tori and I reach in and try to pull him out, but his legs are stuck as the wooden skid slowly comes down. In a matter of seconds, he'll be squashed.

Amber doesn't hesitate. She leaps into the cab of the forklift, dislodging the driver. The man is so shocked at being suddenly and aggressively attacked by a thirteen-year-old girl that he topples out the other side and sprawls onto the gravel. She slams the heel of her hand into the control and pushes it in the opposite direction. The load lifts off Malik and rises, striking the boxcar's ceiling. Malik scrambles free, Amber jumps down, and the four of us take off.

A pudgy uniformed security guard is running along the track in our direction. We look around desperately.

“There!” Tori exclaims, pointing to some trees.

There's a tall chain-link fence in the way, but luckily, the mesh has torn away from the post. We slither underneath and sprint for the woods. It's the last thing any of us need in our starved and exhausted state. Yet at this
point in our adventure, capture is not an option. If we're arrested here, the local police will start looking for our parents. Then it's only a matter of time before we're in the custody of the Purple People Eaters.

I risk a look back and see the security man helping the two workers bring the forklift's payload down from the boxcar's ceiling. I guess railway business is more important than four stowaway kids. But as soon as the cargo is where it's supposed to be, they might come after us again. We have to act fast.

Abruptly, the woods come to an end, and we blunder onto a busy street. Tires squeal and a big SUV lurches to a halt six inches from my chest. The driver leaps out from behind the wheel, white-faced. “Are you kids okay?”

“Sorry!” I blurt, and we hustle back onto the sidewalk. We've only been in this town a few minutes and already we've been caught, chased, and almost run over. Has our Serenity upbringing left us so clueless that we're doomed to blunder from near miss to near miss? How long before one of those close calls turns into a real disaster?

Right now, the odds of us making it in the outside world seem like a million to one.

The sights and sounds are overwhelming—car horns and the faces of so many people we don't know. The road
is filled with more vehicles than we've ever seen all in one place.

I struggle to make sense of where I am. It's not a big city, but both sides of the road are lined with stores and restaurants, and people are coming and going. This must be the downtown.

My eyes fall on an older car parked at the curb. It's painted yellow with a black-and-white checker pattern and a driver sitting inside. Something about it looks familiar but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Tori follows my gaze. “Is that a taxi?”

Of course! There are no taxis in Serenity, where an eight-minute walk would take you across town. But from books I've read and movies I've seen, taxis will drive you wherever you want to go. Like away from the train depot, for example. Or to McNally Academy.

We run for the car and pile into the backseat. “We have to go to Pueblo,” I tell the driver.

She peers at the four of us in the rearview mirror. “That's an hour's trip. Are you sure you kids can afford the ride?”

We begin digging in our pockets for the money we've been hoarding. It's a nerve-racking moment, since we have very little sense of what things cost beyond the borders of
our hometown. We produce our stash, fistfuls of crumpled bills, wadded up and spotted with dirt and blood. It would buy a lot at our general store, but everything in Serenity is so artificial that our life experience is basically worthless. Plus none of us has ever been in a taxi before, much less paid for one. For all we know, it's the most expensive thing you can do. We can't predict whether our money will be enough to take us to Pueblo, or even down the block.

Our driver opens wide eyes at the sight of our bills—ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. “For that,” she laughs, “I can take you to Bangor, Maine.”

“Just Pueblo, please,” I say politely.

For the first time, she turns around and looks at us over the seat. She sees what we've gotten used to: We are sunburned, scratched, bruised, disheveled, and filthy, not to mention red-eyed and exhausted. “What happened to you kids? Maybe we should stop at a hospital first!”

“No hospital!” I exclaim urgently. “We have to get to Pueblo—to McNally Academy!”

She stares at me for a moment, and then starts the car. “You rich private school kids!” she snorts. “The shenanigans you get into while you're spending Daddy's money.
You're going to be in big trouble when the teachers get a look at you!”

“Probably,” Tori agrees solemnly.

The taxi pulls away from the curb.

We've passed our first real-world test.

Pueblo looks run-down and neglected compared to Serenity, but the red-tile-roofed adobe brick buildings of McNally Academy are the nicest things we've seen so far. The campus is in the hill country a few miles outside of town, nestled among the high-desert pines.

The taxi leaves us, two hundred dollars poorer, on the school's main drive. It's chillier than Serenity, still morning. Students are everywhere, on their way to breakfast and morning classes.

“Whoa,” Amber whispers. “Did you ever think there were this many kids in the whole world?”

There are maybe a hundred of them scattered around. But when you're used to a place where there are only thirty—and zero unfamiliar faces—this counts as a mob scene.

“Get used to it,” Malik comments. “That's one thing they've got plenty of in the outside world—people.”

“We're only interested in one person,” I remind them. I notice that we're starting to attract attention, and not just because we're scratched and beaten up and our clothes are torn and dirty. McNally may seem crowded to us, but it's probably not a huge school. Chances are, the students all know each other, so newcomers stand out. If any teachers see us, they're going to ask questions. “Let's find Randy before the adults who run this place want to know what we're doing here.”

Still, we hang back. We don't talk to strangers; in Serenity, there
are
no strangers, if you don't count the Purple People Eaters. How would you approach someone you've never met before? The McNally kids are all in groups, chatting amiably. The fact that they
belong
only emphasizes the reality that we don't.

Malik is the first one to work up the guts. He targets a boy around our age walking alone. “Hey,” he calls, “you know a guy named Randy Hardaway?”

The boy stops and looks us over. “Yeah, I know Randy.” He obviously notices that we're a mess but decides not to ask about it. “Are you friends of his?”

I nod. “From his hometown. Can you point us to him?”

“This is kind of a surprise visit,” adds Tori.

“He's probably in his dorm room—Hayden thirty-three,” the kid tells us. “Randy skips breakfast and sleeps till five minutes before class. He's kind of famous for it.”

I can't help smiling. Some things never change.

He points out the right building and we hurry in that direction. The sign reads:

HAYDEN CENTER FOR STUDENT LIVING
BOYS ONLY

It doesn't seem to be a hard-and-fast rule, though. There are both boys and girls in the hall, milling around, calling for each other, shoving books into backpacks, and generally gearing up for a day of classes. A nervous glance flashes among the four of us. The hallway is crowded. At close range, under indoor lighting, our bedraggled state and our
otherness
will be even more painfully obvious.

At first, we just stand there, helpless. The corridor is wall-to-wall people, and moving through a crowd is something we have no experience with. It's Malik who finally figures it out, mostly because he's big enough to clear a path. The rest of us get behind him and follow in his wake.

The McNally kids stare at us as we pass, some of them
from mere inches away. A low murmur goes up in the hall. Who are we? Why are we here? An eerie dread takes hold of me and I begin to shiver in spite of the heat of my sunburned skin. In my mind, I'm thinking:
This is what it's like to be a clone in the real world—a strange curiosity, not quite human, not quite acceptable, possibly dangerous.

I tell myself no one could know that. We're the focal point because we're battered, ragged strangers, not because of the invisible history of our birth. But I can't escape a deep foreboding that people will be looking at us for those other reasons soon enough.

Malik stops dead, and the three of us bump into him from behind.

“Here it is,” he tells me. “Room thirty-three.”

He steps aside and I knock. The report of my knuckles on the wooden door echoes inside my head, reverberating from temple to temple. The kids in the hall gather around like this is the eighteenth hole of a championship golf tournament.

For the first few seconds, nothing happens. The silence is so total that it's almost as if these McNally kids realize that what they're witnessing is the most important moment in our lives.

There's a scrambling sound inside the room. The
knob turns, and the door is pulled wide.

Randy stands there, his hair unruly as always, goggling at me in openmouthed shock. Then his comfortably familiar features resolve into a delighted grin, and he steps aside to invite us in.

“Hey, I see you found my note.”

GORDON KORMAN
wrote his first book at age fourteen and since then has written more than eighty middle grade and teen novels. Favorites include the
New York Times
bestselling
The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers, Book One: The Medusa Plot
;
Ungifted
;
Pop
; and
Schooled
. Gordon lives with his family on Long Island, New York. You can visit him online at
www.gordonkorman.com
.

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