The Icarus Project (24 page)

Safe? Hardly. The lab was the least safe place in the whole station. My stomach rolled over. How had my plan turned into such a mess? In trying to save Charlie, I had made the situation worse for him. Now he was going to be more trapped, more studied than ever. A wave of fear
shuddered through me. I thought I was helping. I thought I was doing the right thing.

“We know about the Icarus Project,” I blurted out, playing my last card.

Randal shot me a stern look. “Your daughter is resourceful.”

“What’s the Icarus Project?” Dad asked.

“It’s nothing, just a name that Jake came up with for his film of the mission expedition,” Randal said quickly. He was sneaky, pinning the name on Jake. He shot me a devious glance. “Let’s not jeopardize all that we’ve worked for. This is an important opportunity for
your father,
Maya. You don’t want to ruin this for him, do you?”

The conversation was over. Charlie was taken away.

My stomach ached. Technically, my brilliant plan had backfired.

Within an hour of Karen and Dad discovering what Kyle and I had done, Charlie was back in the lab behind a pane of glass. Only this time, the room was heated, and he had a cot to sit on. He was being observed. Jake, who was no help at all once the adults showed up, had set up a camera on a tripod and was recording Charlie’s every move.

The next day, Karen reassembled the pair of wings. All the feathers had been gathered up and spread out on one of the metal tables. Dad photographed them from every possible angle. Next, wearing gloves and using tweezers,
the two of them examined the feathers one by one and clump by clump, cataloging the spectacular wings. Even in pieces, they were magnificent. They weren’t the wings of an exotic bird but of a boy. I thought about telling Dad about Charlie’s mimicking behavior, but I decided not to, especially with Katsu around.

I approached the table, but Dad was giving me the silent treatment. Actually, he was pretending to be hard at work, but he wouldn’t look at me, and when I asked how it was going, I got no response. Karen gave me a weak smile.

“I’m really sorry, Dad.”

No response.

I walked over to the window that looked into Charlie’s room. In it, Katsu was pacing. They were watching each other closely. Katsu adjusted his glasses. He was cautious, his movements calculated. He wandered the room in slow loops, the way a shark would circle its prey. Charlie had a bright-eyed look on his face. The scientist wore a self-satisfied smirk, like he knew I was watching him. He put his silver case on the table and lifted the lid. The implements gleamed.

I had walked right into Dr. Victory’s trap. He wanted his samples and now he was going to get them, thanks to me and my brilliant plan to free Charlie. I thawed out his specimen for him. I had made it easier. Now Katsu didn’t even need to drill down into the ice.

He had won. Victory.

Katsu took a strange-looking piece of equipment out of his silver case. It looked like the kind of metal guns that the earring store had used when I got my ears pierced. I pulled on my earlobe, remembering the sharp pain as the gun shot the metal stud into my lobe. Was he going to pierce Charlie’s ear?

“What is that thing?” I asked. My hands were pressed to the glass. Katsu took a small piece of plastic and loaded it into the gun. “Is it a tranquilizer?” I asked.

Karen looked up and then went back to her work. “No. That’s a tagging gun.”

“What’s Katsu going to do with a tagging gun?” I asked, but knew the answer as soon as I said it.

“It has a GPS system in it. From what Katsu tells me,” Karen said.

“Dad! He can’t tag Charlie. Tagging is done to animals out in the wild, not to people,” I said, my fists clenched.

Dad sighed. He probably sensed I wasn’t going to accept silence anymore. “I know. But try telling that to Katsu and Randal.”

“You can’t let them do it.”

“I can’t stop them, either.” Dad continued to pull the feathers apart with the thin metal tweezers.

Katsu held the gun in one hand and slowly, gingerly approached Charlie. Almost as if he heard my thoughts, his glance turned my way and a satisfied smile filled his face. I had given him Charlie on a platter.

Katsu took Charlie’s head in his hand. Poor kid didn’t even flinch. He let Katsu walk right up to him and touch his face. I hated Katsu. I hated science, and the cold metal table and the ugly cement floor. The computers and machines buzzed in the background, and I hated them, too. Katsu turned Charlie’s head to the side and tagged him on his ear. I winced when the gun snapped and the tag went on. Charlie didn’t seem to feel the pain of the metal point that drove through his flesh. But I felt it. I knew what it meant. It meant that Charlie was being claimed, tagged like an animal to probe and study.

The plastic dangled from the cartilage on the edge of Charlie’s ear. It looked ridiculous. To Katsu, Charlie was just another specimen. Katsu didn’t see a boy; he saw walking, talking DNA.

“I thought scientists were supposed to be good,” I said.

“Not all of them,” Dad said. “Scientists are people. Sometimes people do bad things or things that look bad from the outside.”

“Is Katsu bad?”

“Yes,” Karen whispered. My dad sighed in agreement.

“What about Randal?” I asked.

“Randal’s not a bad man. He just lets his ambitions get the better of him. He made a bad deal, and now he has to honor it.”

The truth began to sink in. Thawing Charlie out hadn’t changed anything. I thought that if he was real and living,
they would treat him differently, but instead they were treating him like an animal. But he was more than that. I thought about the Icarus Project. Randal had named his expedition after a boy from mythology, one who had escaped captivity by wearing a pair of wings made by his father. Charlie was Randal’s mythical boy, and he wasn’t about to let him go free.

I turned my back to the glass, unable to watch any more tests. “Dad. What is Charlie?”

“I don’t know.” He didn’t look up.

“You must have some idea. I think he’s special. He’s a person.”

“A
person
doesn’t wake up from being frozen in the ice.” Dad set down his tweezers and waved me over.

“Has Randal told you what his plans are? Is Katsu going to take Charlie away?”

“No, I think Katsu just wants to take some tissue samples—blood samples, hair samples. Things like that. He’ll take the samples back to his lab and study them.”

“You mean clone him.” I sat on the stool next to him.

“No, Charlie won’t be cloned. It’s illegal to clone human beings.” He rubbed my back, but it was little comfort.

“You just said that Charlie isn’t human.”

To that, Dad didn’t have a response.

I woke early the next morning, hoping for a
chance to see Charlie before more testing began. The hallway was deserted. The doorknob to the lab twisted easily in my hand. The room was eerily quiet. No one was inside yet. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. As I crept into the room, I saw that a stool was overturned. A trash can had spilled its wadded-up paper guts all over the floor.

The glass of the observation room reflected my face back at me. Charlie’s room was dark. My throat felt dry.

“Charlie!” I darted to his room and flicked on the light. The door had been left wide open. Blankets were bunched up on the bed, leaving an empty white dent in the sheets where he had slept. One of Kyle’s comic books was splayed out on the floor. I lifted it up, noticing a torn page. My heart pounded.

Charlie was gone.

I ran out of the lab and down the hall. My mind raced. I had to find him. I grabbed my coat, hat, and gloves and dressed as quickly as I could.

As I was putting on my coat, Kyle walked up behind
me. I turned and saw him just as he was shoving a piece of toast in his mouth. “What’s going on?” he mumbled.

“He’s gone, that’s what.”

He stopped chewing. “Who?”

“Charlie, of course! The lab’s deserted!” I was so frantic that I could barely zip my coat.

“How do you know?”

“His room is empty and I found this on the floor.” I handed Kyle the torn comic book.

“I gave him this.” There were toast crumbs on Kyle’s chin that he didn’t bother brushing off. “I said he could have it because he liked it so much.”

“That was the only thing left in his room,” I said. The torn edge hung by a thread.

“He wouldn’t have left it.” Kyle gritted his teeth.

“I know. I think they took him away.”

“They can’t do that!” Kyle grabbed his coat and followed me out the door. “Where are we going?”

“The comm!” I yelled over my shoulder as the cold air hit me in the face.

The comm room was crowded and noisy. West and Randal were there, hunched over a map that had been spread out on the table. Katsu and Jake stood nearby. My eyes locked with Dad’s and he rushed over to me. “I’m sorry.” He pulled me in for a hug. “I know Charlie was your friend.”

Was?
There was no
was
about it.

“Charlie
is
our friend,” I corrected him.

The room went silent.

“What have you guys done with him?” Kyle’s voice cracked.

“We didn’t do anything. At least not all of us.” Karen brushed Kyle’s hair out of his face.

Dad put his hand on my arm. His fingernails had been bitten down to the quick. “Charlie’s disappeared.”

“What do you mean he’s disappeared?” My anger rose.

The room was too quiet. Everyone stared at us. I wished someone would just say something.

Kyle stared holes into his mother. “Charlie didn’t just disappear,” he said.

Karen’s eyes were filled with worry. “When I went into the lab this morning to take over for the night shift, Charlie wasn’t in his room. I thought that he might be in the bathroom, but he wasn’t. I looked everywhere. But I couldn’t find him.”

“Karen came and got me, and we notified Randal,” Dad said.

“You guys had him locked up,” Kyle said. “That means someone had to let him out of the cell.”

Karen frowned. “It wasn’t a cell. It was for his own protection.”

“Good job protecting him,” I snapped.

“That’s enough. It’s not our fault that Ivan took him,” Dad said.

“Ivan took Charlie?” I yelled. I looked around the room. With all the excitement, I hadn’t realized that everyone was there except for two people: Ivan and Charlie. I would have expected it from Katsu, but not Ivan.

Dad ran his hands through his hair and sighed. Obviously, they knew more than they were telling us, and once Dad slipped, they had to tell us everything.

“Ivan’s gone, too,” Karen said. “We aren’t sure exactly what happened, but we suspect that Ivan is behind it all.”

Randal stepped forward. “I believe that Ivan has taken Charlie with him to Russia.”

“He was pretty desperate to get off the station the past few days,” Justice said.

I remembered the scene Ivan made in the hangar. The Arctic had not agreed with him.

Katsu cleared his throat. “Ivan has broken his word to all of us. He has no honor. I want to assure you all that I had nothing to do with his deception.”