Justice

CHAPTER 1

THE WRONG QUESTIONS

‘I always knew I had a purpose …’

M Freeman stirred at the sound of her own voice. It was distant, grainy, airborne, and it wasn’t coming from her.

‘I’m sure you do, Ms Freeman, but allow me to ask you a few questions first.’

The second voice jolted her to the core. ‘Watts?’ gasped M.

Her eyes flicked open and she whipped her head around, searching her new environment, but Lady Watts was not in the strange room. M was alone, but from the looks of the place, she wouldn’t be alone for long.

The room was unlike any space she had ever been in. It was entirely made of glass. Glass walls, glass ceiling, glass floor, glass furniture; it was all crystal clear and cold to the touch.

In fact M was sitting in a glass chair at a glass table. It was not a comfortable or cozy place. She tried to move her hands, but they wouldn’t listen. Instead they stayed firmly glued to the table in front of her.

M stared down at her unresponsive hands, then she looked past them, through the glass table and the glass floor into the room beneath her. It was a control room of some sort, crammed with oversized servers and people focused intently on screens, typing and speaking into their headsets. But even with all of the activity below, the only sound in her room was the soundtrack playing over an intercom system. It was a recording of her Lawless School interview.

M wasn’t sure if it was the lack of a horizon that made her stomach lurch and her head spin, or if it was hearing the sound of her own voice from several months ago. Several months ago when she was innocent, just a seminormal kid with a hardworking, single mother; a loving but deceased father; and a slightly wacky homeschool education.

But the Lawless School hadn’t changed
everything
. She still had a hardworking mother – only now she knew that her mother’s business was stealing works of art. And her father was still gone – but new and disturbing truths about his life and his death meant that he hadn’t been the person she’d thought he was. The schooling had been the only change she had voluntarily signed up for, sort of. She’d been so excited to attend her father’s alma mater. But she hadn’t expected the criminal masterminds of Lawless to pull back the curtain on every other aspect of her life.

The Lawless School felt far away now, like a distant dream, but the audio confirmed that it wasn’t. No, it hadn’t been a dream. It had been a nightmare.

‘An art historian can be a demanding job. Is your mother around much?’

That was Zara’s voice slithering into the room. Zara,
her roommate and guardian at Lawless. Zara, who she’d begun to think of as a friend. Zara, the girl who should not be trusted. Where was she now? She had been on the Lawless campus when disaster struck. When the Fulbright agents had unleashed a junior-sized black hole – with M’s unwitting help.

All signs pointed to an air-sucking ending for Zara. But M supposed if anyone could survive such a gravitational grab, it was probably her.

The prerecorded interview kept on playing over the intercom, which M finally pinpointed directly above her, just a set of tiny holes in the glass ceiling, showering her with ghostly voices from her past. As she listened, she began to hear the true meaning behind the Lawlessly slanted questions from Ms Watts.

‘If you found a wallet on a street near your house, what would you do?’

‘Can you tell me about a time that you have worked with a team to solve a problem?’

‘And if you were in this restaurant and you had to leave, how would you do so?’

M had known the interview was a test, but hearing it a second time, she noticed there was clarity about what the Lawless School had expected from her. And, boy, from her answers, she had really lived up to the hype.

Outthink the world. Build a team. And always have an escape route.

Ms Watts was definitely still alive. M didn’t know how she knew, but she knew. It’s next to impossible to get rid of vermin like that. Ms Watts could probably survive a
nuclear explosion and a zombie apocalypse … mostly because odds were that she would have been the one who sold the nuclear codes and unleashed the zombies. M had experienced Ms Watts’s diabolic sweet talk firsthand, and now she felt like a pawn that had been pushed to every corner of the chessboard – from South America to London to Germany and back, all in search of the
umbra mortis,
a doomsday weapon M never would have sought if she’d had all the facts. But finally M was free.

She tugged at her restraints. Well, free of Ms Watts, anyway. She may have escaped the woman’s velvet handcuffs, but these new handcuffs were made of glass.

M studied the room again. No doors. No visible ventilation or air ducts to crawl through. No obvious way out as far as she could tell. There looked to be an empty hallway that surrounded all four sides of the room, but beyond the hallway, everything was dark.

‘Ms Freeman, in this envelope is the ticket to your future. Or maybe not. I don’t know; that is, I have not been informed as to your acceptance or rejection to the Lawless School. I am only a point person chosen to ask you several questions and hand this to you. I have my own thoughts on the matter of your future, but I have been instructed to keep my thoughts to myself.’

The intercom erupted into a scramble of deafening white noise that made M cringe in her glass seat. This was the point in the interview in which Ms Watts had clicked her pen and the buzzing in the room had started. The woman had known
that their interview was being recorded and she didn’t want what she said next to be heard.

Now over the mind-twisting hiss of static, a booming voice echoed through the small room. ‘M Freeman, what were you told here?’

‘Not until you answer my questions first,’ M said calmly, though her heart was racing. ‘And show yourself, why don’t you? Let’s sit down and discuss this, Lawless to Fulbright.’

The recording ended and the room fell deathly silent.

‘What were you told?’ the disembodied voice repeated.

‘Where’s my mother?’ M asked. ‘And my friends Merlyn and Jules, what have you done with them? Answer me, and then maybe we’ll talk.’

‘What were you told?’

‘What’s the matter,’ M said, smirking, ‘afraid of a little girl in handcuffs?’ There was no doubt; she had learned a thing or two from Zara.

Suddenly bright white lights illuminated the hallway that wrapped around M’s interrogation room. Now she knew how a shadow box felt. A line of masked Fulbright soldiers marched into the hallway and stood at attention. She counted forty Fulbrights, each standing over six feet tall and facing M, forming a blockade of black suits that were coiled with glowing wires and green ember eyes. Behind them, M could see movement. Someone was hidden, walking behind the goon squad.

A seamless door slid open in the far glass wall and the row of Fulbrights there stepped aside. Into the room walked a boy with a military-grade haircut. He must have been close to M’s age but was a good foot taller than her. He was a rope
of muscles twisting under his black uniform and his clear blue eyes didn’t betray any emotion that M could read as he purposefully slipped off his gloves and walked toward the empty seat across from her. The door behind him slid shut with a
shush
that made it feel as if the air itself had been stolen from the room.

The boy sat down, staring deep into M’s eyes and waiting for her to say something. M’s eyes, though, were flittering over every inch of her silent captor. His suit held no information about him. It looked like every other suit worn by every other Fulbright who had attacked her in the past. There was no name, no rank, no badge to declare what this secret society was or where this boy belonged in its structure. Leaning back in his seat, the Fulbright put his hands casually on the table between them. He was wearing a strange, thin ring on one hand. It fit around his middle two fingers, but the top of the ring stretched the length of his fist, like a delicate set of brass knuckles.

The stare-down didn’t last much longer than a minute. Then the boy rapped his knuckles on the table. At the command, the entire mob of soldiers outside the room turned their backs on M.

‘You’re right,’ the boy said with a British accent. ‘We should do this a different way with you. You’ve earned that. My name’s Ben Downing and I’ll be your direct, assuming all goes well in this interview.’

‘Oh, that’s what you call this?’ asked M. ‘Feels more like an interrogation.’

‘You say tomato,’ Ben answered with a slight smile. ‘Believe me, if we were interrogating you, we’d know what
we wanted to know already. Now, you had questions. Fire away.’

‘My mother,’ M started.

‘Alive and well,’ finished Ben. ‘She’s in our protective custody.’

‘That’s a nice way to say it,’ said M, keeping eye contact with Ben. ‘Another person might call it holding her hostage.’

‘Hostage?’ Ben said with a small laugh. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got us pegged all wrong.
We
saved your mother’s life. Lady Watts had your place swept clean five minutes after you left for that school of hers. There was barely time to extract your mother before the Lawless losers made their house call.’

‘Merlyn and Jules, where are they?’ M asked.

Ben shrugged. ‘Eaves and Byrd are under surveillance in another Glass House.’

M looked around the room. ‘So that’s what you call this place … Real original. Why are you holding my friends?’

‘We’re not sure where their allegiances lie.’

‘Oh, but you know mine, right?’ snapped M.

‘Maybe
you
don’t know whose side you’re on.’ Ben smiled. ‘But we have it on good authority that you’re one of us.’

She recalled Devon Zoso’s comment back in the hangar at Lawless:
You’ve always been the weapon against the Lawless School!
But if M had been helping the Fulbrights against Lawless, it hadn’t been by choice. ‘How do you expect to get away with creating a black hole on Earth? What kind of monsters are you, anyway?’

‘Black hole? I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Ben.
‘You must be referring to the world’s largest sinkhole, which has recently opened up in a remote forest in Peru. It’s a media flash in the pan that filled a news feed between some actress’s new haircut and what fashion trends to expect this spring.’

‘You killed people, you know.’

‘We made the world a safer place,’ Ben said without emotion. ‘With your help. And now we’d like to help you in return.’

‘Help me what?’ asked M coldly. ‘Make the world a safer place with you?’

‘In time, maybe,’ said Ben, ‘but today we would like to help you figure a few things out. You’ve got a lot of questions, but you’re asking the
wrong
questions. Let’s start with your so-called friends. Do you know anything about Merlyn Eaves’s family?’

‘I know Merlyn,’ said M pointedly. ‘And I know I can trust him.’

‘The Eaves family,’ Ben continued, ‘have been behind numerous cyberattacks across the globe. They have shut down entire law enforcement divisions, intercepted emergency services communications, incited riots, and in more than a few instances, laid the groundwork for uprisings and riots with higher casualties than what you witnessed at the Lawless School.’

‘It doesn’t mean Merlyn wants the same thing,’ said M.

‘Well, we don’t know that, do we?’ claimed Ben. ‘And the Byrd family is a breeding ground for grifters. Miss Juliandra Byrd herself helped steal a set of rubies that were on loan to Sotheby’s from the British royal family.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’ M shrugged. ‘A kid’s got to eat. A thief’s got to steal.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Ben, ‘except two guards and an innocent bystander went missing during the heist. The insurance covered the jewels, but the people were never found and were presumed dead.’

‘I …’ started M, but she couldn’t think of what to say.

‘Lawless raises irredeemable thugs,’ Ben said. ‘But you’re a special case, aren’t you, Freeman? You didn’t know what you were in for with that pitiful excuse for a miseducation. And we know you didn’t mean to help Lady Watts track down her precious lethal weapon, either. You were just retracing your father’s footsteps. So no harm, no foul. Jonathan Wild’s fabled
umbra mortis
ended up in Fulbright hands at the end of the day. And we used it to wipe that school clean off the map.’

Ben sat in his chair with perfect poise, oozing the smug, relaxed attitude of someone who thinks he has the upper hand in an argument. M realized something then. Unlike Ms Watts, this kid didn’t know there was another moon rock – one half of the
umbra mortis
– still out there. And if he didn’t know, chances were the rest of his people didn’t, either. Which meant M had a secret. It was a small secret, but it empowered her to be bolder with the Fulbright, even in this glass room surrounded by other Fulbrights, deep inside what was probably the Fulbright hive.

‘How do you know what I did or didn’t mean to do?’ she asked. ‘How do you know the first thing about me?’

‘Simple,’ said Ben. ‘Your father told us.’

A double agent.
The phrase left a bad taste in her
mouth. M’s father had attended Lawless, but, if recent sources were to be believed, he had ended up working for the other team. And while M wasn’t exactly on Lawless’s side anymore, to align herself with the Fulbrights felt … wrong.