Justice (10 page)

‘Well,’ said Keyshawn, ‘then they would start a mass production of the suit and equip every Fulbright with one
as a standard issue.’

‘And what do you get out of that?’ asked M pointedly.

‘Bragging rights, I guess,’ he said absently as he gazed into his tablet. His brown eyes reflected the flashing lights from his screen, but they were searching for something deeper than the function of M’s suit. There was more hinging on his success than the prestige of equipping an army of Fulbrights. M recognized that faraway stare. She’d had it herself whenever she thought about her fallen father or her imprisoned mother. Keyshawn had skin in the game, so to speak. And the suits were his way out.

‘You loaded the Magblast into our suits,’ continued M, trying to parse out what other motives Keyshawn may have hidden, ‘but why didn’t you add the tracker in there, too?’

‘Because the suit can come off,’ he said.

‘And you want tabs on Fulbrights at all times.’

‘Geez, is everything a conspiracy with you, Freeman?’ asked Keyshawn. ‘You assume the tracker is meant to keep cadets under control, but really it’s designed to help you. If you were ever in trouble, we could find you.’

‘Am I going to need help on the base?’ asked M. ‘And are you going to help me?’

‘It’s not for the base; it’s for the field,’ said Keyshawn. ‘That’s where the real danger lies. But, technically speaking, if we lost contact with anyone in a place like the Maze, it would be very worrisome. We wouldn’t be able to pull back the walls or adjust the course based on their progress because we wouldn’t know where they were. And without that knowledge, a recruit could be crushed or mauled before we could extract them.’

‘Ouch,’ came a familiar, sharp-edged voice from behind M and Keyshawn. ‘Wouldn’t want new recruits to go splat during the training, now would we?’ Devon sharked through the door with Vivian in tow. ‘Look who I stumbled across in the hall. Figured I’d stop in to see how our VIP is doing. Rumor has it that you’re a natch with the Magblast, M. Too bad you’re still afraid of heights, though.’

‘Our time here is up,’ said Keyshawn in a very clinical tone. ‘Freeman is approved to continue. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prep for tomorrow.’

‘When are you going to make me one of those choice suits, Noles?’ asked Devon, her voice uncoiling like a loose whip. The extra suit hanging on the wall suddenly looked very suspicious. Like any good artist, M realized, Keyshawn wasn’t working on just one idea at a time. Her suit was one work in progress, but there were other ongoing experiments that she wasn’t a part of.

‘Once we’ve passed the beta stage,’ said Keyshawn, putting on a brave face against Devon’s unsaid accusations. ‘Until then, the suits are for test subjects only.’

‘Did you hear that, M?’ asked Devon. ‘You beat me to the dance again. Bet that makes you happy.’

‘Not really,’ said M coolly. ‘I’m good to go, Keyshawn?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming in.’

As M and Vivian made for the door, Devon spoke up again. ‘Hey, Ware, word of advice for you: don’t underestimate Freeman. Leaving her alone with Noles wasn’t a smart move. I’m sure you, of all people, should be able to feel Freeman’s Lawless background in your bones … or should I say, knees?’

‘I’m
shocked
to hear you, of all people, say that, Zoso,’ sniped Vivian with ease. ‘Or did you mean to get that haircut? As far as I’m concerned, Freeman is fine. She checks out, she follows orders, and most importantly, last I was told, she’s not your recruit. So save the dossier for someone who wants your opinion.’

Vivian’s barb wasn’t necessarily a resounding vote of confidence in her relationship with M, but it spoke volumes about her relationship with Devon. And apparently M and Vivian were on the same page there.

As they left, M wished again that it were easier to talk to Vivian. She had a feeling now that, under different circumstances, they might have been friends. But likable or not, Vivian still stood between M and her mother, which is to say she stood between M and potentially saving lives from another black hole. No, friends come and go, but the end of the world is forever. That’s why tonight M was going on a reconnaissance mission after lights-out. She needed to solve at least a few of her new mysteries by finding out exactly who her Fulbright directs really were.
There’s always a reason a team is put together
, she thought. Why were Ben, Vivian, Devon, and Keyshawn tapped for this mission?

Maybe their pasts could tell M more about her future. Because threat of Ronin or not, her time was running out.

CHAPTER 10

HUNTED AND GATHERED

As the walls dimmed, M visited her closet to put on her pajamas. Vivian had proven to have an uncanny ability to fall asleep at precisely the same time each night. Not only that, but she was a healthy sleeper. Tonight M hoped to use that to her advantage.

M shifted over to Vivian’s closet and tugged at her booby-trapped top drawer. The newly taped strand of hair broke soundlessly, and inside lay Vivian’s tablet, as well as her brush, tufted with blond hairs. M snatched up the tablet, turned it off, then set it back and closed the drawer, carefully replacing the broken tripwire with a new strand of Vivian’s own hair.

By the time M stepped out from behind the partition, Vivian was already snoring. Still, M was careful not to let the sleeves of her Fulbright suit show under the soft edges of her pajamas as she climbed into bed.

M forced herself to lie still, but her heart jumped against her chest and it was hard to keep her breathing calm. This
was a reckless and dangerous experiment she was about to try. Vivian had caught her the past few times. If someone else crossed her path tonight, she didn’t know if she could talk her way out of real trouble.

Looking at the closed door to the hallway, M began to review the long list of unknowns about the academy at night. Were there monitors roaming the halls like they had during the day? Students were supposed to report to their rooms at lights-out, but that didn’t mean the Fulbrights didn’t assign night patrols to ensure that all stayed safe, and more important, stayed put. Were there cameras? The only ones M had seen here were inside particular rooms, like the first Glass House or the infirmary – but those were cameras that they’d wanted her to see. The halls always seemed clear, but there was no way of knowing for sure.

She was going on a gut feeling. The gut feeling that said that the Fulbrights didn’t expect trouble from their cadets. There was bound to be heavy security elsewhere, but if they thought the dormitory level was sheltered and protected, and their cadets were perfectly disciplined, well, then when M slipped into the hallway, there should be nothing waiting for her except hundreds of closed doors.

A half hour passed. Then another. Finally, when Vivian’s breaths became deeper and her snores settled into one repeating tone, M silently slipped out of her bed, now dressed only in her uniform. As she pulled on her mask, the room brightened, and M froze, thinking she had been caught. She peered down at her slumbering roommate, who usually awoke at the slightest introduction of morning light, but Vivian continued to saw logs in her sleep. Peeling
back the mask revealed that the room was still dark. It was the mask that had made the space appear illuminated. M made a mental note to prepare for more surprises from the uniform. There was so much more to learn about this tech, and M felt suddenly justified for taking a nighttime stroll. It was time to take the suit on her own personal test run.

With her mask back on, the room lit up again, but this time M was expecting it. She could see everything as if it were daylight. With one last, deep breath, she opened the door and stepped into the empty hallway.

No alarms went off, which was always a good sign. But that was only the first challenge. Now she needed to find the computer room situated underneath the Glass House where she first met Ben. Knowing that the Glass City, as Keyshawn called it, sat right above the cadet section, M guessed that the control room, filled with flashing computers, had to be on this floor. She retraced her steps through the halls, passing door after door after door, looking for another apparent dead end like the ones that led to Mr Fence’s office and the stairwell. She couldn’t help but recall something Zara told her once.
Too much watching and not enough doing leads a Lawless student down a dead end
. But at the academy M had seen the Fulbright dead ends lead to hidden secrets.

When she reached the edge of her previously traveled routes, M took the next turn and found herself in an expansive hallway that looked like everywhere else she’d been in the academy. Yet she had never been this way before; she felt it in her bones. As she walked, the rows of doors echoed like a house of mirrors, twisting the single image into a relentlessly
repeating reflection without end … until she noticed an anomaly. There was a door missing along the wall, a break in the monotonous pattern. It wasn’t a dead end, but the blank wall raised a red flag. If something looked out of place at the academy, there was probably a reason.

Putting her ear against the wall, M listened carefully, trying to register any murmuring, shuffling, or even breaths, but whatever waited on the other side, it sounded empty. She found the hidden latch and the wall opened onto a computer lab. The place was a ghost town. She pulled off her mask and walked into the middle of the room. Above her, M could make out the smooth floor of a Glass House, but it was dark. The lights were out and she hoped they stayed that way.

Before sidling up to one of the smaller screens, M accessed her own mental database on Code’s old classes and wished that Merlyn was there to help her. Hacking into a system was one thing, but not having your own secure computer and attacking the system face-first through its own hardware was quite another. But Code’s class hadn’t been a waste of time. Almost on autopilot, she dove into the Fulbright system, flitting through password-protected security as easily as a bird flies between international borders.

First she pulled up Vivian Ware. Born in Des Moines and raised in Chicago, she was the only child of a single Fulbright parent. After years of private school, Vivian joined the Fulbright Academy to follow in her father’s footsteps. She accelerated through the ranks during her first year, but in her second year, something horrible happened. She met M. According to the file, after she failed to capture one M
Freeman and returned to the academy wounded, Vivian was assigned to be a desk jockey for the rest of her life. The administrative role did not come easily to her, though. Her temper flared over the simplest data-collection assignments. She claimed to see conspiracies in throwaway news reports, and when confronted about her overblown theories, Vivian refused to accept that she was mistaken. She began to break down, detached from her colleagues completely, and rarely talked to anyone. Instead she split her time between data mining and the gym, to build back the strength in her knee.

Then M found the single word that makes every Lawless student salivate:

Apparently Vivian had been given several psych evaluations during the past year. Each one suggested that she had renegade tendencies, fueled by a hard-nosed drive to accomplish her goals at any cost. Because of that, she had been tagged as a possible Ronin dismissal if her defiance led her to be deemed unfit for a nonfield Fulbright role. This was where Vivian’s report ended. There was no mention of her assignment as M’s roommate or her working with Ben, Keyshawn, and Devon. Maybe the files hadn’t been updated recently, but it felt to M like something was missing. Or being left out on purpose. She moved on to another record.

Benjamin Downing was born and raised in Brighton, England, as a picture-perfect Fulbright recruit. His parents were both Fulbrights, his test scores and field scores were off the charts, and he was at the top of his class. There was no dirt to dig up in his file at all, leading M to believe that he may be a little too good to be true.
Perfection is a special sort of weakness all its own,
she thought.
The higher your pedestal, the harder the fall … ergo the greater your fear of falling grows.

Again, there was no mention of M’s crew or any of the others who now reported to Ben. Surely his file would have reflected that sort of promotion.

‘Fool me once, shame on you,’ said M under her breath. ‘Fool me twice, shame on me. Something’s not right.’

She set her sights on Keyshawn Noles. An Atlanta native from a large family, Keyshawn was an oddity at the academy, which his file explicitly stated: neither of his parents were Fulbrights. In fact, no one from his family had ever been associated with the Fulbrights or the Lawless School. There was no history of his previous schooling, but as soon as Keyshawn joined the academy, he had been asked to pursue nothing other than his own scientific studies. ‘All brain, no brawn,’ M said to herself. ‘Ms Frank would eat you alive in the Box,’ she added, remembering the Lawless gym teacher.

A fringe cadet at best, Keyshawn shied away from other recruits and buried himself in his work. He had zero field skills and zero hand-to-hand fighting experience. As far as M could read, he wouldn’t know a con if it confessed itself right to his face.

So why was Captain Perfect teamed up with Miss
Unstable and Sir Scientific Weakling? There had to be a connection. Deep in thought, M typed in the next name with determination.
Devon Zoso.

‘That’s weird,’ said M. ‘Now, why would you be outside of the system, Devon?’ As she sat and waited for an answer to her own question, the silence of the room gave her the creeps. ‘Were they protecting you from Lawless, or did you do something crazy enough to require a clean slate?’ M stood up from the computer and put her mask back on. Every second away from her bed was a further risk she was taking, but then another question made her stop in her tracks. If the Fulbright files had information on cadets, perhaps there was information on the higher-ups as well. She quickly sat back down and typed in
John Doe
to see if these files went all the way to the top.

Not surprising. Cal had told her that Doe was a big secret around here. So she tried another name, her father’s:

As soon as she pressed enter, a piercing alarm sounded off, blasting in her ears. Shocked, M tumbled back from the computer, tripping over her chair, and bracing against the wall.

M burst out of the computer room and rushed down the hallway. Footsteps were gaining on her. She didn’t dare stop to look over her shoulder. Corner after corner, it seemed like her pursuers would be upon her at any moment, so in an act of desperation, M pushed against a random door. Luckily it gave way and she ducked inside as the footsteps clattered almost on top of her.

The room was crowded with six huge, unplugged medical machines that were part gurney, part tanning booth, part casket, all pushed against a wall. The rest of the place was filled with rows of oversized canisters, shaped like torpedoes, silently huddled together. The canisters all displayed a chemical formula, too long and involved to make sense to M.

But this strange collection of objects wasn’t what held her attention. It was the glass ceiling above her that froze her in place as she stared up into another floor. There was someone in the room, sleeping on a glass bed. Then the door to the cell above slowly opened and M shrank low to the ground, hiding herself in the shadows of the machinery.

Two sets of Fulbright boots stepped into the room above her. Suddenly her mask audio kicked in as the soldiers’ voices came through loud and clear over the sharp alarm.

‘She’s still here, safe and sound.’

‘You better hope that alarm is just a test. Why did you leave your post? You know this is a high-security prisoner.’

‘I swear I heard footsteps. Maybe someone is trying to break in from below?’

One Fulbright flashed a light down, and the room M was hiding in exploded in illumination. She crouched tighter in the shadows.

‘Nothing there but tech.’

‘I’d feel better if we checked the recruit trackers and made sure everyone is where they should be. I hear they have her daughter on the floor below, too. Training her, even.’

‘Okay, but you stay put outside. I’ll finish my rounds first, then go back to base to review the trackers. Our primary concern is this floor, this prisoner, not what’s happening beneath us.’

The two soldiers left the room and M could hear a set of footsteps march off into the distance above her. As she crawled out from under the machine, she let out the deep breath she had been holding the entire time the Fulbrights were hovering. Looking back up, she could see exactly who was above her, exactly who the Fulbrights were guarding – her mother, Beatrice Freeman.

M pulled off her mask and stared up at her sleeping mother. With the mask off, though, both rooms were pitch-black – and the blaring alarm was gone. She put the mask back on and the alarm raged at full blast again. ‘The alarm is in my mask, not down here,’ she said with a sigh of relief. Her mask must have flipped to the emergency channel automatically when the alarm had been tripped. But tripped by what?
Had entering her father’s name –
her
name – into the computer set it off?

Despite the chaos of the floor above, M’s mother didn’t stir. It was completely unlike Beatrice’s sleeping habits at home. This was a woman who woke up as soon as the birds chirped in the morning and would stir at the sound of footsteps on carpet. M walked underneath her mother and could barely believe it was actually her. Her hair was a mess, her shirt was wrinkled, and her shoes were badly scuffed … all inexcusable lapses in her mother’s eyes. Beatrice Freeman was always pressed and dressed for success. This slump of a person floating in the air above M – she looked like a lost cause.