Justice (12 page)

But standing in the way was a shadowed figure leaning on a cane, which he clutched with an ashen gray hand. Wheezing, the man croaked with a British accent, ‘Both so close, eh? To winning. To losing. There’s a lesson here if you chose to learn it, I’d gather. For now, let’s call it a draw, shall we?’

M braced herself for the mystery man to cross the threshold into the Maze or for the light to reveal his face, but he simply hobbled out of sight with a
click-tap
from his cane and one shoe scuffing slightly behind the next. M stood and held out her hand to help Vivian up, but Vivian remained down.

‘What have you done?’ she whispered through her mask.

‘Me?’ said M, surprised at Vivian’s unmistakable trembling. ‘Hey, I just did what Keyshawn told me to do and caught you. Game over, I win. Now, who was that old geezer?’

‘John Doe,’ said Vivian, as if the name itself were cursed. ‘And now you’ve dragged me onto his radar.’

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ asked M. ‘Like, isn’t it your job to be noticed by the top brass?’

‘Not by him, not like this,’ was all Vivian said before the walls started to buckle. Quickly and violently, the Maze walls retreated to reveal the others, frozen in place around the room like statues locked in epic battle poses, stunned by the sudden dismissal of the tight quarters around them.

‘Did we win?’ asked Cal, who pulled at Ben’s jacket.

‘You cheated!’ yelled Devon.

‘Didn’t think you’d mind, Devon,’ said Jules. ‘Isn’t cheating your bread and butter?’

‘They couldn’t have cheated,’ called out Keyshawn. ‘It must be a glitch in the suits. Everyone, give ’em over. I’ll take a look at them while your directs take you for the day.’

No!
thought M. Keyshawn would definitely notice Merlyn’s handiwork. Underneath her mask, the blood drained from her face.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Devon asked, motioning toward Vivian on the ground.

Forcing herself to act natural, M quipped, ‘She doesn’t like getting beaten by a rookie.’ The others hadn’t seen Doe, and from the severity of Vivian’s reaction, M figured his presence and comments were best kept secret.

As the targets and chasers eased back into being directs and cadets, the crew begrudgingly handed its uniforms over to Keyshawn and left to do whatever it was the rest of the Fulbrights did during the day.

CHAPTER 12

GLITCH

Data, data, data. Piles of data. Spreadsheets about spreadsheets of data neatly tucked into a folder marked
DATA
. This was apparently how Vivian Ware spent her days, in a sea of information, fishing for clues that might uncover a Lawless crime. Emails, newspaper clippings, phone call transcripts, social media sites, or photos from public cameras, the data piled higher and higher around M as she helped comb through paper after paper. For the first time she wished she were back in Keyshawn’s lab, ducking under Magblast fire or even back in the Box, jumping off a speeding locomotive. Anything beat sitting at this desk and sieving through random reports.

‘Aren’t there computers to do this stuff now?’ M asked Vivian.

‘It’s our job to double-check the computer’s findings,’ she answered civilly, but the cut above her lip reminded M of everything that had just happened between them in the Maze. ‘Computers miss things all the time. And computers
can’t see the kind of crime we’re looking for.’

Leaning towers of paper from the FBI, CIA, MI6, Interpol, even old KGB files rose from M’s desk. She picked through pages on everything from missing paintings to bank robberies to jewelry heists to traffic violations and major contraband leads. ‘Lawless would have loved to have this much access to the good guys’ files. I guess it pays to be on the same team.’

‘Same team?’ laughed Vivian. ‘Freeman, Fulbrights work alone. These agencies, they only represent the law. We
are
the law.’

M didn’t like the sound of that one bit. ‘Wait, so you pull these reports without their permission?’

‘Ugh, we have to. They’re worse than the computers, as far as paying attention for Lawless discrepancies. We have to keep an eye on everything.’

But who keeps an eye on you?
thought M. She decided to steer the conversation back toward Vivian. ‘So this is what you do all day?’

‘Don’t look so excited,’ said Vivian. ‘It’s not all as glamorous as this.’

‘Well, not that it’s any of my business,’ said M, ‘but they should send you back out in the field. It felt like you pulled the muscles from my bones in the Maze. My shoulder and ribs are still angry at me for chasing you down.’

Vivian smiled, obviously pleased at her performance and to hear M admit that she still had what it took to take down an opponent. ‘In a few more weeks, I’ll be cleared for duty.’

‘A few more weeks, eh,’ said M. ‘That’s just enough time for you to finish being my babysitter. Coincidence?’

‘That’s the deal,’ said Vivian.

She doesn’t know
, thought M. According to her file, Vivian was never going back into the field.

‘And since we’re being honest,’ Vivian continued, ‘how did you all disappear at the same time in the Maze?’

‘Lucky, I guess,’ M lied.

She looked up to see Vivian giving her a determined stare. Vivian seemed to study M’s every word, searching each one for a sign of truth. ‘I don’t believe in luck.’

‘Maybe you just never had any,’ said M as she parsed through another binder of the world’s most mundane papers.

Several mind-numbing hours and thirty paper cuts later, M went back to reclaim her suit from Keyshawn. Vivian stayed behind to finish documenting some extra reports, which M guessed was code for ‘reports that M did incorrectly.’ Roaming the halls freely as herself, without a mask or uniform, made her feel incredibly out of sorts. It was like walking through a prison, only she wasn’t sure if she was one of the guards or one of the prisoners. Her entire time at the academy had been spent trying to see through everyone else’s motivations and agendas, instead of considering what
she
was doing here – and whether maybe she belonged.

The Lawless School had taught her that the Fulbrights were evil barbarians, but wasn’t the Lawless education actually training her to be evil? She thought back to the Black Museum, with its exhibits on criminals and their ghastly crimes. She remembered the hallowed halls of the Masters’ dorm, set up like a shrine to the school’s most infamous alumni, with portraits of truly bad people who had done
really bad things. And that’s not who M wanted to become.

But everything M had experienced with the Fulbrights proved them to be an overly aggressive group of vigilantes willing to go too far for justice. They’d kidnapped her mother, torched thousands of priceless paintings, spied on the spies of the world, and continuously threatened M and her friends. These were supposed to be the good guys, but they didn’t play that role at all. Morals weren’t part of their ‘good guy’ code. Their real goal was to defeat the Lawless School at any cost, no matter how deadly or destructive their actions.

Yet her father had been a Fulbright, a double agent, no less, and he had recruited M without her consent and without explaining the rules of this bizarre world. Running over everything in her mind, she should logically harbor a deep-seated mistrust of her father, who had withheld the truth from her and taken countless secrets to his grave. But he was her father. Good or bad, he had loved M and she had loved him. The same went for her mother. If her parents had kept the truth from her, there must have been a reason. The truth was probably uglier than she could imagine.

Keyshawn’s lab was much harder to find without her suit, but M was apparently the first one there. The four suits hung against the wall, empty skins under Keyshawn’s lock and key.

‘Oh hey, just finishing up here,’ said Keyshawn. ‘The suits were fine after all. Give me a second and I’ll get yours.’

‘Can I ask you a question first?’ asked M, willing to risk a hunch.

‘Sure,’ he answered with his back to her as he tapped something into his computer.

‘So, I know why I lied back in the Maze,’ said M. ‘But why are
you
lying about the glitch?’

Keyshawn looked up without facing M, as if he were searching the far wall for an answer, but ultimately he just shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I looked for a glitch, combed over every suit, but everything looks normal to me.’

M didn’t believe him. There was no way Keyshawn could search those suits without pinpointing Merlyn’s handiwork.

‘Wait. What did you lie about?’ asked Keyshawn as he took M’s suit down from the wall.

‘Why do you think the Maze drill ended?’ asked M.

‘Because you won,’ said Keyshawn.

‘Hardly. Vivian almost had me beat,’ admitted M, ‘when John Doe showed up. He was there, watching us. And why would that be? Why would Devon, Vivian, and Ben put up with us all? I think I know the answer. You’re grooming us for John Doe’s army, aren’t you?’

‘Every Fulbright is in John Doe’s army,’ said Keyshawn. ‘That’s nothing new.’

‘Oh no,’ replied M with confidence. ‘This is new. We’re training to be a whole different strand of Fulbrights, aren’t we? You gave us the shot. You gave us the tech. You gave us the Magblast. And you’ve kept us separate from the other Fulbright classes. We’re Doe’s very own black ops team. That’s why he’s watching us. That’s why you’re so nervous, isn’t it?’

‘Here’s your suit,’ Keyshawn snapped as he shoved the folded fabric into her hands. ‘Wear it in good health.’

She’d struck a nerve. She was on a hot streak for getting
under people’s skin today.

‘So you don’t deny it,’ said M smugly.

‘You know what your problem is, Freeman?’ said Keyshawn. ‘You think you’ve got this all figured out, but you don’t. How could you? It’s not done yet.’

‘What’s not done, Keyshawn?’ asked Merlyn, who walked into the room and nervously added, ‘Um, the suits, uh, did you fix the glitch?’

‘Oh, he fixed a lot of things, Merlyn,’ said M. ‘Didn’t you, “Keyshawn Noles it all”?’

Tucking the suit under her arm, M stormed out of the lab. There was no reason why Keyshawn should let her, of all people, in on his plan, but it irked her that he ended up being exactly what she thought he’d be: a dishonest, scientific snake in the grass. She hated being right about people all the time. Just once she’d love for someone to surprise her in a good way.

Surprises or not, tonight M was going AWOL with her mother, who had to be the key to whatever came next. Why else would Lawless be after her? Why else would the Fulbrights hold on to her? Even Zara had told her that her mother was a small-time crook before meeting her father. Hopefully Beatrice would lead M to the moon rock and together they could destroy it once and for all, just like her father had planned. That was the only assignment M needed to complete, as far as she cared.
Fox Lawless and his Masters want to cook up another plan to ruin the world, go ahead.
The Fulbrights could handle it. They’d gotten this far without her help, right?

M marched into the cafeteria and grabbed her allotted
meal, a drastic-looking purple blob with white stripes and puffy pink circles on the side. Before she could sit down, another student nudged her from behind.

‘Excuse you,’ he said. It was the hall monitor M had ditched during her first unaccompanied excursion.

‘Excuse me?’ she asked, flustered. ‘Are you seriously going to try to bully me? All I’m doing is eating my purple slop. Can I do it in peace?’

‘No, you can’t,’ said another Fulbright student, who stood up and smacked the tray back into M’s chest, smothering her with the hypercolored meal. ‘You’re not wanted here, you know. And you’re not safe.’

‘None of us are safe, since we’re all being trained for combat. So first, there’s that,’ M fired back. ‘And for your information, I’d rather be somewhere else, too. Just about anywhere else, actually. You don’t get to be the only one mad at this situation.’

As the rest of the tables emptied and stone-faced Fulbright students encircled her, M wished she had been more careful with her words. Why did she have to make such a scene everywhere she went? She was angry at a lot of things, but not at all these kids around her now. How could she dislike them? They were sheep following orders. They’d been trained to hate people like M, because to them, she looked like a wolf. She howled like a wolf, snarled like a wolf, and made a pack with other wolves. These kids were just doing their jobs and M was the only business in the room.

As the flock of Fulbrights was about to fall on its prey, the lights in the walls flickered. The aggro kids who had been ready to skin M alive stopped in their tracks and
looked around the room, confused. A change in routine was obviously rare enough around here to steal the show from M’s big breakdown.

‘Cadets, return to your rooms,’ a voice rang out over an intercom. ‘We are implementing an early lights-out tonight.’

The spell of anger and frustration broke as the cadets’ training took over and they left the dining area in an orderly fashion, bussing their tables as they went. M followed suit, cleaning up as much of her mess as she could before hustling back to her room.

She arrived to find that Vivian was gone, probably still tied up with paperwork. M couldn’t have asked for a better set of circumstances. After quickly changing her clothes and putting on her uniform, she spoke softly through the comm link. ‘Hey, guys, you there? I think our mission is a go.’