Rogue (13 page)

“Did you feel anything?iggs cnyto di he asked. His frenzied eyes were scanning her face, his blue eye looking lighter in the bright white reflections all around them.

Lex drew back. “What do you mean?”

“When you Damned those people,” he said evenly, “did you feel anything?”

“I—I felt the burning—I mean, the Damning power—”

He gave her a disappointed look, then headed for the shore. “That’s not what I mean.”

“What
do
you mean?” Lex followed him onto the muddied grass. “Driggs. Look at me.”

When he did, she wished he hadn’t. He looked destroyed, so different from the lighthearted boy she normally knew. “Did you feel—” he started. “I don’t know. Like part of your soul had died? Like your crimes were beyond forgiveness? Like you were doing something so utterly, inconceivably wrong that you weren’t fully human anymore?”

Lex swallowed. In the beginning, she had, but the more her conviction grew—the more she convinced herself that she was doing the right thing—that twinge of remorse had started to fade. But it had to be in there still, somewhere—she was sure of it. “Kind of,
” she said. “Yes.”

The faintest hint of relief passed over his face. “Good.” He started walking back toward the car, but not before adding, “Otherwise I don’t know how you could live with yourself.
”

For the first time, as Lex watched him walk away and fade back into his ghostish form, she got the feeling that they weren’t just talking about her own crimes anymore.

***

The next twelve hours in the Stiff were decidedly less than pleasant. After several heated rounds of the License Plate Game, Pip decided to invent the Flick Ferbus in the Ear Game, which soon became the Ferbus Yells So Loud He Bursts Eardrums Game. Elysia yelled at him for yelling at Pip, causing Pandora to yell at everyone. “Shut the hell up or I’ll wrap this car right around a tree, and don’t you think for a
second
that I won’t!”

“But he’s flicking me!” said Ferbus.

Uncle Mort turned around in his seat. “Are we in preschool, Ferb? Is he breathing on you, too?”

“Actually, he is. And he
still
won’t give me credit for spotting the Alaska plate first.”

“Because you didn’t spot the Alaska plate first,” said Pip.

“PIP, I SWEAR ON ALL THAT IS HOLY I WILL POP YOUR EYEBALLS OUT OF YOUR HEAD AND EAT THEM WITH A SIDE OF YOUR LEFT—”

“Enough!” Uncle Mort yelled.

But Lex could deal with the chaos. What she couldn’t deal with was the silent treatment Driggs was giving her. This had never happened before. He’d never been so mad that he couldn’t speak. Hell, she couldn’t remember the last time he’d been mad at
all
.

In fact, he’d decided to switch places with Grotton and ride on top of the roof. Grotton now sat among them in the cabin of the car, stroking the place where his thumb used to be and grinning at the Juniors in a most unsettling manner.

Elysia was trying not to let it get to her, but after avoiding his gaze for minutes at time, then looking back to find that he was only staring at her harder, she snapped. “What?” she hissed at him. “What are you doing?”

He cocked his head to the side. “Estimating how high the blood would rise if it were drained out of all of you.” He held his hand up, level with the bottom of the window. “It’d come up to about here, I suspect.”

Elysia looked at him as if he’d said . . . exactly what he’d just said. “Driggs!” she said in a fervent whisper, pounding on the roof. “Please come back!”

Her pleas were met with silence.

E cwidE OF lysia cupped a hand next to her face to block the view of the leering Grotton. “What’s wrong with Driggs?” she asked Lex.

“I don’t know,” Lex said. “He flipped out over my whole Damning thing.”

“Psff, yeah, what’s his problem?” Ferbus said sarcastically. “Getting upset over the discovery that his girlfriend is a mass murderer? What an asshole.” He gave her a Look.

She ignored him and turned back to Elysia. “It just seems so unlike him, you know? I mean, he’s always gotten a little pissed when I’ve wanted to . . . bend the rules a little. But in the end he’s always been on my side.”

Elysia smiled and grabbed Lex’s hand. “He’ll come around. Besides—”

“Ugh, the children are emoting again,” Grotton said. “No wonder the boy wants to be left in peace.” He coyly raised an eyebrow at Lex and took a long, deep breath. “Though I do so love the stench of fear. It’s rather . . . intoxicating.”

Either Driggs couldn’t hear what Grotton was saying or he didn’t care, because he didn’t budge from his spot on the roof. Lex nodded a thanks at Elysia, pulled her hood up over her face, and turned to the window, while Grotton just kept on staring, running the tip of his tongue over his lips.

Some time after they crossed into Kansas, Pandora got off the highway.

“How close are we?” asked Pip as he and the rest of the Juniors woke up. It was around noon.

“Pretty close,” said Uncle Mort, craning his head to look at the sparse surroundings—nothing but endless fields under an endless sky. “Another few minutes.”

Lex frowned. Croak was in the middle of the Adirondack mountains, hidden from view. DeMyse was in the middle of a desert, miles away from anyone and disguised as a mirage. How could Necropolis be in the middle of a sea of cornfields, all out in the open like that?

The rest of the Juniors must have been thinking the same thing, because the questions started to bubble over. “Are we going to an airport?” Ferbus asked as Dora turned onto an even narrower road. “Are we taking a private jet to a secret remote location or something?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Bond,” Uncle Mort said. “A hoverbike will be waiting for each of you as well.” When Ferbus started to look even more hopeful, Uncle Mort rolled his eyes. “No airport. No hoverbikes.”

“So . . . is it underground?” Elysia asked. “A whole Grimsphere city secretly thriving right beneath these farms?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Then that.”

He pointed to a small park up ahead that contained nothing more than a few picnic benches, a little chapel, and a boxy stone marker with an aluminum pole sticking straight up out of it. The American flag at the top hung limply in the breezeless air. See- ing as how there was nothing but grass and corn in every other direction, the whole thing seemed a bit out of place.

“Park over there, Dora,” Uncle Mort said as she pulled onto the grass. “Find a nice place for the Stiff to . . . you know.”

“Rest in peace,” she said mournfully.

Lex and the Juniors exchanged worried glances. They weren’t coming back to the car?

Once Dora found a suitable spot, they piled out. Driggs floated off the roof, his still-wet hair looking as if it had been eaten by a vacuum cleaner.

“Hey,” Lex said.

He glanced at her, then looked away.

“Awesome,” Lex said to herself as they started walking. “Good talk.”

Uncle Mort led them to the stone marker. “‘The Geographic Center of the United States,’ ” Pip read off a metal plaque. “Really?”

< led theth="1em">Uncle Mort pulled out his compass and scanned the horizon. “The Grimsphere capital needed to be in a centralized location. Doesn’t get more centralized than this.”

“Um, Uncle Mort?”

“Yes, Lex?”

“This is not the Grimsphere capital. This is a crappy tourist attraction, one that doesn’t seem to have attracted even a single tourist.”

“Yet again, Lex, I humbly bow to your powers of observation.” Spotting something in the distance, he started walking away from the marker, still looking at the compass and counting his steps as he went. Shrugging, the Juniors followed.

After a moment he stopped and grinned. “There. Look straight ahead.”

The Juniors looked straight ahead. The Juniors saw nothing.

“It takes a few seconds,” he said. “You know, like one of those Magic Eye things. You have to let your eyes adjust and find it on their own.”

Lex stared at the area he was pointing at. All she saw were the spiky green ends of cornstalks;the giant blue sky.

And a solid wall of glass.

Gasping, Lex finally saw it. She saw the whole thing; the glass had reflected the blue of the sky so well that the structure had been completely camouflaged. Even its edges were softened, shrouded in some kind of mist, causing it to blend in seamlessly with the Kansan sky. But there it was, right in front of them.

A massive,
massive
tower.

The circular base of the building was huge—probably the size of a city block. But it was also mind-blowingly tall, narrowing as it reached the top and forming a gigantic cone-shaped spire with an apex so high it was lost in the clouds.

If the earth were a unicorn, they’d just found its horn.

“Nicknamed the Emerald City,” Uncle Mort told them, and as soon as he said it, Lex noticed that the glass did have a bit of a green tint.

“And in Kansas, too,” Grotton snorted. “Grims think they’re so terribly clever, don’t they?”

The Juniors took a few careful steps forward, still staring in disbelief. They waved at the structure, trying to make the glass register their reflections, but all it displayed was more grass, more sky—as if the Croakers were invisible. Or vampires.

“This is . . . impossible,” Ferbus said.

“Tip of the impossibility iceberg, my friend.” Uncle Mort waved them closer, stopping at some invisible boundary. “Now line up and stay still until I tell you to walk forward, all at the same time. You may hold hands if you like.”

“What’s going to happen when we walk forward?” Lex asked.

“We’ll be in Necropolis.” He grinned at her, counted to make sure everyone was there, then added, “And then we’ll get arrested. Go!”

“We’ll
what?
” the Juniors yelled. Not that they expected an answer. Uncle Mort strode forward and they followed regardless, because that’s just how things worked with Uncle Mort.

But three steps in, they were no longer capable of coherent thought. Before Lex could get one syllable out of her mouth, a door opened in the cone—which was very odd, seeing a hole materialize out of the illusion of solid earth and sky—and vomited forth a veritable SWAT team of masked, black-uniformed guards, all running at the intruders and pointing some very serious-looking weapons in their faces.

“YOU’RE UNDER ARREST!” a slight guard blared at them from behind the mask. The voice sounded amplified and staticky, as if it were coming through a megaphone.

Lex was practically soiling herself in terror, but Ferbus managed to eke out a zing f< lhe mer. “Didn’t quite catch that, what?”

“ON THE GROUND!” Megaphone yelled, even louder than before. “HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK!”

As they got on their knees, Lex looked up at Uncle Mort and gave him the dirtiest look she could muster. “What?” he said innocently. “I
did
warn you.”

Everyone was handcuffed. Except, Lex noticed, Grotton and Driggs, who had conveniently escaped by way of disappearing—or turning so transparent that no one could see them in all the confusion. Her jaw tightened, but she did her best not to show any emotion, not wanting to suggest to the guards that they’d missed a couple of their intruders.

Please be okay
, she thought.

They were taken through the main entrance. Inside, the foyer was so expansive that despite being rushed through by the guards, Lex had time to look around and get a feel for the place..The ceiling soared above their heads, several stories high, and light streamed in through the massive window-walls—which, impossibly, seemed to be made of one single pane of glass. Several flat-screen televisions were suspended throughout the room as well, all displaying the same woman.

“Good afternoon, Necropolitans! President Knell here with some wonderful news!” she said in a friendly drawl, a huge red smile plastered on her face. Her eyes were beady but shrewd, her nose so sharp it looked as though it had been cut with a laser. Lex couldn’t place her twangy accent—maybe Texan, maybe Midwestern, maybe old-timey gold prospector. She wore a set of green pearls around her neck and a smart suit jacket, its gray color perfectly matching that of her short, stylish hair. “The fugitives from Croak have been apprehended and are now in custody. So rest easy, Necropolis,” she said with an even bigger grin and a singsong voice. “We’ve taken them a-
li
-ive!”

“Well,” Lex said, “that’s not creepy at all.”

At opposite ends of the circular room were two escalators spiraling up the sides of the building like the twists of a soft-serve ice-cream cone: up on the left, down on the right. Grims briskly hopped on and off the moving steps, stopping only to stare at the commotion in the middle of the foyer.

And commotion was indeed what they were making. The Juniors clacked noisily across what was enough dark green marble to tile every bathroom in America. Ferbus was yelling as hard as he could into the ear of the megaphoned guard, while Bang’s teeth were tightly clamped around the arm of another.

Lex just went along quietly, looking down at the large symbol in the middle of the floor—a sort of Grimsphere crest featuring two crossed scythes. She’d resisted plenty of arrests by now in her criminal career, and she’d learned one lesson: It was rarely worth the effort.

Uncle Mort had reached the same conclusion, striding silently alongside the colossal ogreish guard who had pinned his arms behind his back. He even seemed to have a spring in his step. At the front desk, between the two escalators, he greeted the flustered receptionist with a smile. “Hey, Marlene!” he said, graciously bestowing upon her the Wink of Trust as he was yanked away. “Long time, no exchange of pleasantries!”

Fed up, the guard holding Uncle Mort socked him in the face with a fist the size of a boulder. That shut him up.

Or maybe it was the sudden appearance of Norwood, who sauntered out of the elevator and approached the group, his smile so wide it had to hurt. “Welcome to Necropolis, Croakers!” he said, arms open, eyes still crazed and darting.

“Crap,” Lex hissed to Uncle Mort. “We’re too late—he’s already here! He’s gotten to the president already!”