Justice (13 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Salane
‘Finally,’ Merlyn said, his voice tinny and nervous in her earbud. ‘M, we’ve been waiting for you. Everyone’s on the line. What’s the next move?’
‘Are you free to leave your dorms?’ asked M.
‘Keyshawn’s back in the lab, so I’m clear,’ said Merlyn.
‘Devon’s gone, so I’m good,’ said Jules.
‘Cal, you’re probably in the hardest situation,’ said M. ‘We can come get you, but you’ll have to be ready to book it.’
‘No, that’s the weird thing,’ responded Cal. ‘My guards deserted me when I was picking up my suit. I think this early lights-out thing is more than a technical difficulty. I’m out in the halls now.’
‘Merlyn, you’re sure we’ll be able to control these suits?’ asked M. ‘’Cause if not, then I’ll go this alone. It’s my mother out there.’
‘My modifications still work,’ said Merlyn. ‘I checked. Keyshawn didn’t catch the bypass.’
‘Guys, this feels like a setup; I’m not going to lie,’ admitted
M. ‘But I’ll take any opportunity they give me. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.’
‘You think we’re going to let you do this by yourself?’ said Jules. ‘She may be your mother, but you’re our friend.’
M smiled and was filled with a new confidence by the fact that whatever was waiting for her in the hallway, maybe even in her whole life, her friends would have her back. ‘Then let’s meet by the dining commons in five.’
Minutes later the whole crew had regrouped. Quietly, they drifted single file down the dimmed halls, looking in all directions, waiting for a guard to turn the corner or a door to burst open – waiting to be caught. But nothing of the sort happened. They were alone with the flickering lights, which were especially annoying with their masks on. The goggles were constantly trying to adjust for the flickering, and the flaring visual corrections made M’s eyes ache. ‘I feel like I’m at the world’s worst dance party,’ said Cal, covering his masked eyes for some relief against the exaggerated strobe-light effect.
Finally they reached the door M was looking for, but this time it was already open. M rushed inside with her Magblast at the ready. The room looked undisturbed, and just as creepy as it had been the previous night. The coffinlike machinery, the chemical tanks, they were all still in place.
‘You gonna tell us what that first-through-the-door tough-girl act is about?’ Jules asked M once they were all inside.
‘Someone else has been here,’ said M as she looked up to the Glass House. But it was empty. ‘That’s where my mother was last night.’
‘They moved her,’ said Cal. ‘It’s too dangerous to keep a prisoner in one place. I’ll bet they’re moving her around every few days, like a shell game. As soon as you think you know where she is, she’s not there. That’s what they did to me.’
Then Merlyn interrupted their conversation by running past them and over to the rows of cylindrical tanks. ‘Whoa, do you guys know what’s in these?’ He passed his hands carefully over the spigots.
‘Oxygen? Hydrogen? Helium?’ guessed Cal.
‘It’s
the gas
,’ said Merlyn, astonished. ‘The special Lawless brew. Guys, this is enough gas to hypnotize the whole academy.’
‘Then what are these?’ asked Jules, pointing to the casketlike contraptions.
‘Don’t know,’ said Merlyn. ‘Looks like an oxygen chamber or a sensory deprivation tank, maybe?’
‘Okay, guys, back to the issue at hand, please,’ said M, redirecting their attention to the glass ceiling above. ‘My mom’s up there somewhere. How do we break through the glass ceiling?’
‘Why not take the stairs?’ Cal asked. ‘Too old fashioned?’
M shook her head. ‘They’ll be watching the stairs.’
‘Anybody got a diamond?’ asked Jules.
‘I think I’ve got one better,’ said Merlyn with a smirk. He pulled out a stone that looked like a diamond to M. ‘WBN, my friends.’
‘What’s a pretty little rock like this going to do against reinforced glass like that?’ asked M.
‘Wurtzite boron nitride,’ said Merlyn, ‘will slice that
glass like butter. Observe.’ Then, standing on one of the large machines, he took the rock and scratched a circle in the glass.
‘Where did you get WBN?’ asked Jules.
‘Perks of being roommates with Keyshawn,’ answered Merlyn. ‘He has so much cool stuff in his room – you wouldn’t believe it. There. Now, Cal, would you do the honors?’
Cal jumped up and dislodged the glass disk with a gentle, precisely measured Magblast. Then he slid it over like it was a manhole cover. The whole group was impressed. ‘Guess I’m getting the hang of this thing.’
‘Okay, everyone,’ said M as she climbed. ‘The easy part’s over. We have no idea what’s up there, so be prepared for anything.’
Finding the exit from the Glass House wouldn’t have been easy if M hadn’t seen the guards come through it the night before. It definitely wasn’t a room designed with a quick exit in mind. Jules found the sliding panel and grabbed the wurtzite from Merlyn. Slicing down the seam, she unsealed the glass door and slid it open carefully. The hallway beyond shimmered endlessly, like a mirage. As they crept along, each wall looked into another empty room – all Glass Houses that reflected the Lawless crew and their movements. There wasn’t another soul in sight.
‘So far this actually seems pretty easy,’ said Cal.
‘She’s got to be here,’ said M. This was it. This was her big plan. But as they turned the first corner, then the second, then the third, they were met with consistently empty rooms. She started to doubt herself.
‘Maybe they moved everyone off this floor?’ suggested
Merlyn. ‘As a precaution because of the lighting issues below?’
‘Oh no, the lights are flickering. Guess this calls for a mass evacuation of high-security prisoners,’ mocked Cal. ‘No, I’m with M. Her mom’s here, but there’s something going on.’
Suddenly there was a distant boom that stopped the group in its tracks.
‘What was that?’ asked Jules.
M scanned the glass rooms until she found one in the distance that was very different from all of the others. The room was filled with an impenetrable darkness, a black cube nested in the midst of this glass city. ‘It’s a smoke bomb. But why would someone set it off in a sealed room?’
M ran up to the wall and tried to see inside, but the deep blackness blocked out even her mask-enhanced vision. Looking down, she saw the outside door had an etched handle. She motioned to the others that she was going in. Everyone braced and gripped their Magblasts tightly. She slowly touched the handle and then counted to herself. One … two … but on three, the door ripped open inward, pulled clean off its track, and the black smoke flooded into the hallway. She could barely make out the two masked Fulbrights in full uniform who stepped out into the growing darkness. It was over. They’d been caught. But instead of stopping to apprehend M, the Fulbrights shoved past them, launching out of the cloud of smoke and down the hall.
Alarms pounded over the loudspeakers, echoing shrilly through the air, as M sorted out what had just happened. It was obvious now. The smoke bomb, a man with the strength to rip the door off its track, and most important, the sight of
an old friend in a Fulbright uniform, like she’d seen on the plane to the Lawless School. M wasn’t the only one coming to save her mother.
Jones, the family butler, was here, too!
‘After them!’ screamed M over the mind-numbing noise. ‘That’s my mother! If we follow them, they’ll get us out of here!’
The crew hauled tail down the hall, following the false Fulbrights. M’s mother and Jones ran with determination; they must have known exactly where they were going. They sped past room after room until they reached an open hatch in the ceiling. M’s mother leapt up gracefully through the opening. Then before Jones followed, he threw a hockey puck–sized object that skated across the floor toward M.
‘Take cover!’ yelled M, but it was too late. Another blast went off, releasing an inky darkness that swelled around them. The gloom was incredibly dense; M couldn’t see anything. Stumbling forward, she finally found her way out the other side of the murky cloud, but the hatch was closed – clamped shut by the very same vault door they had faced back on the vertical course.
‘Come on!’ Cal yelled with aggravation as he stumbled into the light to see the familiar lock.
‘When are we ever going to come across a safe like this?’
Merlyn screeched sarcastically in a high-pitched voice.
‘How was I supposed to know we’d ever see something like this again?’ complained Cal. ‘Where’s the control box for this one?’
‘There,’ cried M, pointing. ‘Hurry up. They’re getting away.’
Merlyn worked his magic quickly, but M couldn’t stop counting the seconds tick off the clock. Who knew where that passageway led? They could end up in another labyrinth and have lost her mother forever.
In no time, Merlyn cracked the code and the vault door swung open, unleashing a blast of cold air. Behind them, a group of real Fulbrights burst into the hallway and pointed at the crew through the glass rooms.
‘Jump!’ she screamed. Then, leaping, she pulled herself up into an alien world. The ground was cold and hard, and the bright light of day shocked her mask’s visual system. Slowly everything came back into focus and M realized that she wasn’t inside the academy anymore. The sun hung broken just above the horizon as if the very clockwork of the Earth were jammed. The bright star beamed unfiltered light down upon the surrounding landscape, which was covered in snow and ice. Nearby there were several high-powered helicopters. M was standing on a tarmac. Then a giant unlatching sound rattled through her skull, and the world suddenly cracked open. No, it wasn’t the world – it was a humongous glass dome that enveloped the space, designed to keep the helicopters sheltered from the brutal elements outside. Wherever they were, it wasn’t a place people naturally called home.
As the dome slid down into the earth and the others climbed through the hatch, M heard an engine roar to life. The slow swoop of helicopter blades cut the air, faster and faster and faster until she could see one of the great machines begin to lift off the ground. Without thinking, she raced toward the copter and launched herself into the air,
grabbing hold of the landing skids. Her legs kicked against the ground and she pulled against the skids, trying feebly to tug or will the helicopter back down, but there was only one direction that this whirlybird was headed now. Up.
M clutched the skids and pulled herself up as the others watched helplessly below. The helicopter tilted forward and bounced against the bone-chilling wind, which whipped over the frozen scenery. As the machine jerked and jumped, M seized her opportunity to climb. Maybe she could still convince her mother to turn around and save the others. Her arms burned as she reached forward and tugged herself into a standing position. When she knocked against the window, she startled her mother, who had just pulled off her mask. Jones grabbed the controls and motioned violently toward M. Beatrice turned to face her daughter and M smiled with relief. They were finally face-to-face, closer than they had been even in the restaurant back in London.
‘Open up!’ yelled M over the coughing revolutions of the giant whirring blades above. ‘It’s me, Mom! It’s M! It’s M Freeman, your daughter!’
But then M saw herself in the glass door just as her mother must have seen her: the last remaining Fulbright, masked and clinging to the side of her getaway helicopter, while hammering against the window. Before her mother could react, M ripped her mask off. The chill of the air bit her exposed flesh, and her hair flipped wildly out of control. She stared into her mother’s eyes and screamed again, ‘It’s me! It’s me!’
Beatrice froze in place, watching her daughter hanging on for dear life. Time stopped as M let out a relieved, if
bitterly icy breath. She’d done it: she had found her mother and now they were escaping together. All Beatrice had to do was open the door and let M climb aboard. But then her mother’s eyes hardened with a look that M had never seen before. It was a mixture of disbelief, anger, and sadness.
‘It’s me, Mom,’ M repeated as the helicopter lifted higher and higher into the air.
Then, swiftly and violently, her mother kicked the door open with both legs. The blow knocked the door sharply into M, smacking her directly in the jaw. Her body went limp as the helicopter lifted effortlessly away, and M Freeman tumbled helplessly toward the ice-covered world below.
The helicopter lifted higher into the snowy sky as M toppled through the open air, end over end. It was like a nightmare, but her eyes were wide open, watching the blisteringly white ground swap places with the clouds and back again. It was a long way down.
Then her training kicked in. M clipped her arms and legs together to stop rolling uncontrollably through the sky. Aiming her straightened body like an arrow, she focused on the tarmac, which was sprinting toward her with an unforgiving force.
Better to crash-land closer to the others,
she thought. Once she was above her target, M pulled her mask back on, then spread her legs and arms wide apart to increase the air resistance, using her body as a makeshift parachute and catching the updraft to slow her fall. She went over the landing in her mind: feet first, knees slightly bent, find the softest patch of snow and roll forward on impact.
It was still going to hurt.
With her somewhat desperate plan in place, M closed her freezing eyes and thought about how the suit had pulled her bones back into place during her battle with Vivian. Would it be able to put all her pieces back together again after a fall like this one? She guessed not.
Next, M wished. She wished for wild inventions that could get her out of this situation, no matter how irrational. A time machine, an invisible jet, a jet pack, anything.
At the very least this suit should have a parachute,
thought M. And immediately she felt the back of her suit moving. No, not just moving – the suit was writhing against her back. And before she knew what was happening, she was jerked back up into the air so forcefully, she thought she might tear in half. A shadow dawned over her, and as M looked up, she was shocked to see her suit had produced an actual parachute at the very thought.
‘Keyshawn!’ she yelled with excitement. ‘I could kiss you, you mad scientist! Programmable matter! You made the suits out of programmable matter!’
But M’s sweet victory was about to be squashed. Even with the parachute, she was descending too rapidly to land safely. She began to swing her body in circles, trying to cut back and forth in the sky to collect as much air as possible and slow down her death dive. Still, the ground was rushing up from below to snatch her in its frozen jaws and gnash her into oblivion.
‘M!’ Merlyn’s fuzzed-out voice rang in her comm link. ‘M, fire your Magblast directly downward, now!’
M pointed her fist to the ground and blasted a furious shot that rippled the air and was met head-on by a second
blast from below. She was no longer falling but found herself wobbling in place high above the earth.
‘Good, now let’s stop the blast on my count,’ came Merlyn’s transmission. ‘Three … two … one!’
M cut her blast and resumed her descent, but this time her speed was completely manageable. She drifted down and landed softly on her feet, then toppled into the waiting arms of her crew.
‘How did you …?’ began M to Merlyn. ‘I could have been —’
‘A frozen pancake, yeah,’ interrupted Merlyn. ‘I guessed that if we set our blasts against each other, the end result would be like matching opposite poles of a magnet.’
‘You repelled me,’ said M. ‘Brilliant, Merlyn. That saved my neck.’
‘He couldn’t have done it without your parachute,’ said Jules. ‘Where in the world did that come from?’
‘Oh, that,’ said M, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘These suits are wired to do some outrageous tricks.’
‘Wait, are you telling me that these suits have parachutes?’ asked Cal.
‘Better!’ shouted Merlyn now that he got a closer look at M’s suit reconfiguring itself as the parachute twisted back into place. ‘This is programmable matter, isn’t it?’
‘Let’s discuss it later,’ said M. ‘We have company to deal with first.’ She motioned to a flock of Fulbrights racing through the snow toward them.
‘Do we need to get our stories straight?’ asked Jules.
‘No,’ said M. ‘I think they owe
us
some explanations.’
M stood up and finally saw the scope of the academy’s
complex, which spread miles in every direction. At least half a dozen other domes dotted the polar landscape in the distance, forming a massive circle on the ice. She could now envision the contours of the hallways snaking beneath her feet – the labyrinth that had driven her crazy earlier was even more massive than she’d guessed.
‘Stay close, everyone,’ M tried to say, but all sound in her mask had gone dead. She couldn’t even hear her own voice. She moved her lips and felt the words in her mouth, but a bleak silence filled her ears as the crew all stared at one another noiselessly.
Quickly the Fulbrights surrounded them. Holding batons, the agents looked like a SWAT team ready to break down doors and ransack secrets. The quiet held M and her friends in a suspension that was almost worse than being in the Glass House. In the Glass House M had at least been allowed to keep all five of her senses.
Then a surprising pop erupted in M’s ears, followed by a scratching buzz that bled into an adult’s voice, cutting through the static.
‘Put down your weapons now!’
Our entire suits are weapons
, thought M, but then she realized they must be referring to their Magblasts. She lifted her hands in the air slowly and removed her Magblast glove, showing the encircling Fulbrights that she was on their side, or at the very least, that she was obeying. The others followed her lead and the Fulbrights seemed satisfied because they lowered their batons.
‘Masks off!’
Again the crew complied with the order, baring their
unprotected faces to the viciously cold terrain. The wind stung their noses numb in no time while snowflakes landed frozen on their faces, but at least they could hear again. M’s teeth began to throb and even the water in her eyes felt iced over in the subzero temperatures. White smoke wafted with her every breath, like smoke signals in the morning air. A few more minutes like this and they would suffer frostbite, possibly even lose an ear. By the trajectory of the sun, M made an educated guess that they were stationed above the Arctic Circle. And she would have happily told the others, if she could get her teeth to stop chattering.
Despite her discomfort, she stood her ground in front of the Fulbrights. She was shivering, sure, but she shivered stoically until the Fulbright leader spoke.
‘Confirmed, it’s the Lawless team. What are our orders?’
M and the others stood with their arms limply up in the air, waiting for what would happen next. When the Fulbrights broke into motion, though, it was without any verbal acknowledgment of the crew’s fate. The agents remained silent as they put M and her friends in handcuffs. Then, hands secured behind them, the crew was marched back toward the open dome. Back toward the very facility they had just escaped.
As they stepped onto the tarmac, there was a hissing click of hydraulics, and the dome began to close around them like a giant mouth. The row of helicopters looked sharp and rigid, like black teeth against the glaring white outside, with a gap where the stolen helicopter used to be. The crew was led forward to a hidden set of bay doors in the floor, which spread slowly open. An oversized elevator rose up from the
ground, and M and her friends were forced inside.
The sunlight squinted as the bay doors above them slid shut and they were pulled back underground. M took deep breaths as she tried to keep calm and take stock of what had just unfolded. Her mother had escaped and left her to rot with the Fulbrights. The moon rock was still hidden, but Ms Watts had a better chance of finding it first purely because she was out there while M and her friends were trapped in this subterranean world. Not to mention that M’s face hurt bad where the helicopter door had smacked her. But what hurt her the most wasn’t the strike or the fall or her landing. It was her mother’s sudden betrayal.
The elevator arrived at the final destination and the door opened up to a large room filled with Fulbrights standing at attention.
‘Bring them in,’ commanded a hoarse voice with an English accent.
The Fulbrights in the elevator obliged, pushing the crew forward and through the throng of masked soldiers. At the front of the room sat Mr Fence and the gray man who M had glimpsed before in the shadows of the Maze: John Doe.
The most striking thing about Doe was his ashen skin tone. It looked as if the life had been washed out of him. His brownish-black eyes sunk into his gaunt face, and his long black hair, which was probably dyed, tumbled around his slumped shoulders. He seemed ancient and yet the thin skin that wrapped his features looked like it had been pulled taut.
‘Sit,’ commanded Doe, and everyone sat except for the
Lawless crew – they didn’t have chairs. The tribunal had begun and they were on the stand. ‘I want to know what happened.’
M spoke up first. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘It is, is it?’ he answered. ‘Then tell me why.’
‘My mother had been …’ M paused to find the perfect word, ‘…
held
here, and I needed to talk to her.’
‘What about?’
‘Family stuff,’ M said. ‘Anyway my friends offered to help, so we snuck out after curfew to the floor above ours, where my mother was … being held.’
‘And how did you know this?’ asked Doe.
‘Intuition,’ said M. ‘When we reached her room, someone else was already there. Two Fulbrights —’
‘Two people in Fulbright uniforms,’ corrected Mr Fence.
‘Er, yes, two people in Fulbright uniforms,’ M agreed, ‘jumped us as they were trying to escape. One of them was my mother.’
‘How did you know it was your mother if she was wearing a mask?’ asked Doe.
‘Honestly, when the Fulbrights —’
‘People in Fulbright uniforms,’ corrected Mr Fence again.
‘Right, when the
people in Fulbright uniforms
didn’t stop us, I knew that they weren’t real soldiers,’ said M. ‘I’m sure any soldier in this room would have held us for being in a restricted area. So we chased after them. And I just … I just had a feeling that it was her.’
‘And you were right,’ acknowledged John Doe. ‘Now, why didn’t your mother take you with her?’
‘She didn’t know it was me, sir,’ M lied. ‘I was wearing
my mask the whole time. There was no way she could have known it was me.’
‘And how did you end up so far from the dome?’
‘I jumped onto the helicopter, sir,’ said M. ‘I tried to … I tried to go with them.’
‘With them, eh?’ said Doe. ‘I appreciate your candor, Cadet Freeman.’ He nodded slowly before addressing the rest of the room. ‘Troops, you should be ashamed of yourselves. These cadets did more to stop the intruder and interrupt this escape than all of you combined.’
‘But, sir, all signs pointed us to the lower levels,’ said a Fulbright from the audience.
‘Then you were following the wrong signs,’ said Doe with a winded rattle in his raspy voice. ‘And these children followed the right ones.’
‘They stumbled into a crime scene,’ argued another Fulbright. ‘It was a total mistake.’
‘There are no mistakes in life,’ said Doe. ‘Everything follows a design in the end; believe me, it does.’ He held M in his stare and then smiled a disgustingly white smile. It looked as if his teeth were made of polished ivory. ‘And I’ll prove it,’ he continued. ‘Bring in the others.’
A door in the side of the room opened and in marched Ben, Keyshawn, Vivian, and Devon. They looked completely caught off guard by the situation.
‘Directs, you are here because you have failed to manage your cadets,’ said John Doe.
‘What!’ screamed Vivian. ‘We were under orders to prepare the next test for the recruits in Keyshawn’s lab. We
tried to leave when the alarm sounded, but were told to stay in place!’
Before she could continue, Ben nudged her hard in the back and motioned that she should keep her mouth shut.
‘But,’ continued Doe, ‘I would like to give you a second chance. Your cadets outperformed our entire Fulbright team tonight, therefore you must be doing something right with them.’
M noticed Ben’s eyes narrow in relief at hearing John Doe’s compliment.
‘So, Cadet Freeman,’ said Doe as he returned his attention to her. ‘You wanted to find your mother, did you?’
‘That was the plan,’ answered M.
‘Brilliant. Then you’ll have your chance,’ said Doe. ‘Along with your directs, you are tasked with capturing your mother and bringing her to justice. You must leave tonight. She has a head start, but we know where she’s going.’
‘And where is that?’ asked Cal, attracting his father’s glare.
‘That’s for us to know and for you to find out,’ chided Mr Fence, which caused a chilling hush in the room broken only by Doe himself.
‘Fulbrights, activated and dismissed for duty.’
With that the Fulbrights returned to a bustle of activity, one group escorting the Lawless crew and their directs out through the side door. But M was stunned to silence at the familiar wording of John Doe’s command. Could he possibly have gotten that from Professor Bandit? Or could Professor Bandit have picked it up from John Doe?
Either way, the similarity didn’t sit well with her.
