Cragbridge Hall, Volume 2: The Avatar Battle (17 page)

Derick selected his avatar, knowing the computer system would bring it to the room. “Here we go, Kong. Let’s see if we got what it takes.” After a brief wave of nausea, he stared out at the largest of the practice rooms. A gorilla, two squirrel monkeys, and a lion ran, swung, stretched, and pounced.

Derick just watched for a moment, taking in the scene, noticing their agility. They were good—really good. The lion crouched low to the ground and pounced, landing near the gorilla, who was in the middle of a backflip. He wouldn’t have expected any less, but to see it made him nervous and excited all over again.

“Hey, back off. I’m still warming up,” a boy’s voice said. Though he wasn’t in the same room, Derick could hear the boy’s voice over the audio system just as Rafa said. “You enjoy your time as the so-called king of the jungle, because that is the
only
time you are going to rule anything tonight.” The boy had a Southern drawl.

“You’re wrong,” a girl with a Latin accent responded. She had to be the lion. “I’ll be queen.”

A squirrel monkey leapt off a tree branch, flung itself into a backflip, and landed on a branch in the neighboring tree. It swung one-handed down two more branches, and then stuck a landing on the ground. It waved at Derick. “Hey, Tryout.” It was another girl’s voice. “So you call your gorilla Kong, huh? Not very original, but I guess it’ll do.”

“Yeah,” a third girl’s voice kicked in—probably the other monkey. “Sounds like Rafa hooked up the mic system quicker than you thought.”

Derick could feel his face reddening. He was grateful that didn’t come across on the avatar. “Yep. Busted. I’ll try to keep the talking to myself to a minimum.”

“Probably a good idea,” the first monkey added. At least he thought it was the first monkey.

“Okay, but I do have some really interesting conversations with myself,” Derick responded.

“I’m sure you do,” the Latina lion said.

“Good to hear you’ve got some spunk and confidence,” the gorilla with a Southern drawl added.

“I try,” Derick said.

“Well, we’ll see if your trying is good enough.” That had come from one of the monkeys, but Derick wasn’t sure he even wanted to try to keep track of who was saying what anymore.

Something about hearing their voices and the challenge ahead excited Derick. He didn’t feel as nervous. Plus, he had faced men with guns while he was in an avatar. He could do this.

“All right, everyone.” Derick heard Rafa’s voice—he was glad to hear a voice he knew for sure. He saw Rafa enter as a gorilla. “Good to see you’ve met our possible new guy. As we discussed, we’ll do something we haven’t done as avatars before so we don’t have an unfair advantage. I figured since we have six people, we’d split into two teams.”

“That would be fantastic if this guy made it,” one of the girls said. “We could play a lot more sports if we had three on three.”

“Don’t get ahead of the game, now,” the Southern drawl said.

Sports? Playing sports as animal avatars. Awesome!

Rafa lifted a ball. It was about the size of a volleyball, but red. “Handball.”

“Never played it,” the Latina responded.

“Is that even a real sport?” the Southern drawl asked.

“Yes, it is a real sport. It has been an event in the Olympics for over a hundred years,” Rafa explained. “And of course I chose something you hadn’t played before. That’s the idea—something new to make it a little more even.” Rafa’s gorilla tossed the ball from one hand to the other. “Here are the rules. You can only take three steps with the ball and then you have to either dribble or pass. Once you pick up your dribble you can’t dribble again until someone else has had the ball. You can use your body to block and defend, but you must be between the other player and the goal; you can’t pull from behind or push from the side. And finally, you have to throw at the goal from outside a curved line around the goal—about nineteen feet out.” Rafa motioned with his arm about how far out the arc would be. “You can jump from outside the line but you have to throw the ball before you touch the ground.”

Okay, it sounded like a mix of soccer and basketball. Cool.

“I’ll draw the lines and set up some makeshift goals while you switch avatars.” Rafa thumped his hairy chest. “Let’s go gorillas for this.”

“I was hopin’ for rhinos,” the Southern drawl said.

“It would be tough to play handball in a beast that has no hands,” a girl’s voice countered.

“Just go change,” Rafa said.

Derick couldn’t believe it. He was about to play an Olympic sport with a bunch of robot gorillas!

From the moment they started, it was a crazed blur. At one point a gorilla passed the ball to his teammate, who flipped on her hands, caught it with her feet, and then shot it into the goal. Such acrobatics made it very hard to defend. Some gorilla bodies banged against each other harder than Derick thought they should. They were using very expensive equipment.

“So, I don’t mean to be a stickler here,” Derick said, “but don’t we need to be careful with the avatars?”

“They are actually extremely durable,” Rafa explained after he stole the ball from the opposing team. He paused in his explanation long enough to pass the ball to Derick, who whipped it around to the girl on their team. He didn’t want to hold it too long. He knew the others were better than him. “They have to be. In order to interact with real gorillas, you have to be ready to bump bodies a little bit.”

Hearing the explanation, Derick bumped a gorilla out of the way to make himself open. Oh, that felt good. He could get used to being a beast.

“Oh, I like
this
kid,” the Southern boy said, coming back to bump into Derick.

Derick faked a shot, then passed the ball to the girl on his team. She leapt off the ground and flung the ball into the goal. Not bad. Derick felt the rush of having done something right.

“Maybe I
don’t
like this kid,” the Southern boy corrected.

After the game, Derick took his sensors off slowly, knowing that the others were probably discussing if they should let him in. Thanks to a nimble steal and shot by Rafa, Derick’s team came out on top, but it was him that was on trial, not his team. Please. He wanted this. He really wanted this. The girl on his team had even put her gorilla arm around him, and said, “Not bad, Tryout. I’ve seen better, but not bad.” He hadn’t known if he was being complimented or not, but either way he was pretty sure Carol would be jealous—even if this girl was a gorilla at the time.

Rafa entered the room. “Hey,
rapaz
, you did all right out there.”

“Thanks,” Derick said, “but you guys are a league above me.”

“Maybe a little, but we’re also older.”

“So did you decide?”

Rafa paused before answering. Pauses aren’t good. “Not yet. We’ll talk it over some more and let you know.”

It took a lot of restraint not to groan. They had taken long enough; what had they been talking about? Maybe he hadn’t been perfect out there, but he had done all right. He wanted an answer. Then he remembered everything with Muns. “Oh, and I need to catch you up on a few things. Do you have a few minutes?”

Rafa did. Derick made sure no one was within earshot and confirmed that Rafa had turned off the audio system. He didn’t want this ringing throughout the avatar lab if anyone was still practicing. He told Rafa about the attacks and the Council, but this time it was Derick’s turn not to use names. He told him that their restrictions were lifted so they could keep an eye out for anything strange and to protect themselves.

“Wait,” Rafa said. “Two were attacked? Was one of them Dr. Mackleprank?”

Derick didn’t answer. He just stood there trying not to react—not to give anything away.

“I’ve got to go,” Rafa said, and rushed out the door.

18

Assassination

The Gettysburg Address was short—much shorter than Abby realized. Like under five minutes short. Maybe even half that. The other speaker was quite the windbag, going on for hours it seemed, but Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States, got straight to the point.

Abby had watched the tall, gangly man working on his speech almost nonstop. He even made corrections and changes on the train as he went to give the speech. Maybe that was part of what made it great—he just kept making changes until he got it right.

She didn’t mind learning about the president. She couldn’t remember all the dates and names, but she liked him. She had seen his humble beginnings—the one-room cabin in Kentucky with a dirt floor. She saw him reading whenever he could, even at times when he was supposed to be working. She saw him as a lawyer in the courtroom during the day and telling story after story with his friends at night. She saw him failing in his first attempt at public office, then trying to get into Congress, attempting to get a position at the Land Office, and running for Senate. And she noticed that he had other entries showing other failures. He had maybe more than his share.

Finally, he was nominated to run for president. A rival called him “a two-face,” and Lincoln reacted by saying, “If I
had
two faces, do you think I would wear this one?” Abby loved it.

She saw Lincoln working on the campaign trail and eventually being elected president. He surrounded himself with cabinet members who thought differently than he did. He wasn’t a polished type of person like other politicians Abby had seen. He was just him. He stayed up through the night agonizing over the Civil War. He lobbied and pushed to free the slaves.

Abby typed a few notes with her rings. She had a history assignment on the sixteenth president due tomorrow, and she had to keep her grades up. She had a list of other events she had to watch. She scanned down the list of available events until she saw the assassination. She knew he had been shot at a theater. The event had an asterisk by it, which meant that if students felt the event was too violent, they didn’t have to watch it. Abby wasn’t sure.

She selected it, knowing she could stop the playback if it got too intense. She watched the president and his wife step into a theater booth about twelve feet above and off to the side of the stage. She was still surprised at how tall he was. He had to be well over six feet tall, towering over his wife. The play was already underway, but it soon paused, and the entire audience arose as the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” There had to be more than one thousand people, maybe closer to two thousand, packed into that small theater.

Abby fast-forwarded, watching Mrs. Lincoln and her husband holding hands. Cute.

The Bridge perspective switched and Abby saw a man—younger, maybe in his late twenties with a mustache and a slightly receding hairline—approaching the president’s box from the hallway behind. He handed a card to an usher there who let him pass.

Abby scanned her notes again—John Wilkes Booth. He was a well-known actor and had performed at the theater several times. No wonder the usher had let him pass.

Booth stepped through the first door and then barricaded it behind him with a stick. He looked through some sort of hole in the next door between him and the president. Abby wondered how the peephole got there.

Booth waited. Why?

Abby heard the raised voice of an actor on the stage. “You sockdologizing old man-trap!” The audience burst into laughter. Booth opened the second door and pointed a small revolver at the back of the president’s head.

Abby stopped the scene; she didn’t want to see it. Booth had waited for a funny line so the sound of laughter would cover up a gunshot, a shot that would kill the same man who had fought to keep the United States of America united, who had worked and pressed to free the slaves—a man who had fought for what he believed in.

She opened her notes and scanned page after page. It was amazing that historians years ago had been able to figure out the details of this terrible event without the Bridge. They couldn’t see it happen as Abby could, but they had pieced it together from accounts, evidence, and logic. They were like the Sherlocks of history. Booth had made the small peephole in the second doorway to the president’s box earlier that day. Again, he was no stranger to that theater. Historians had learned exactly how he did it—and even why.

Abby stopped. Ms. Entrese. She had been shot. She wasn’t dead, but someone else had shot her for standing up for what she felt was right. If Abby knew exactly how that strange man shot her with a tranquilizer, would it help anything? Would it help them find the man and capture him?

Abby closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. She had to finish this assignment. She moved her fingers to select the next event in history.

She couldn’t do it.

They caught Booth, the man who had assassinated Lincoln. Whoever had tranquilized Ms. Entrese was still out there somewhere. Grandpa said that the camera had malfunctioned somehow and didn’t record the actual attack. Could she figure out what had happened?

Abby stepped out of the Bridge booth and walked down to the art rooms. They were about the only place she knew she could find paper. She took several sheets back to her room. The assignment on Abraham Lincoln would have to wait.