Justice (5 page)

M pushed farther, still counting and retracing her steps as if she were at home in the basement when she finally reached the last step. If she had really been back home, M would have been face-to-face with the far wall, with her feet sinking slightly over the cracked foundation that rooted up from the floor. That wall still held a collection of her father’s tools. Hacksaws, screwdrivers, paintbrushes, boxes of nails, a flashlight, and well-rusted gardening shears hinged on hooks, banished to the basement, waiting to be useful again.

Back in the Maze, M took another deep breath before stepping forward … straight into a solid wall. Her nose and chest took the brunt of the blow, but when she tried to step backward, there was another wall in place behind her. Frantically she lifted her arms to guide herself sideways, but was again met by unrelenting walls. She was trapped in the spot, held in a coffin-confined space. M crouched down and jumped up as high as she could, working her arms up to grab hold of any ledge she could find. Nothing was there, not even the low ceiling. She braced her arms and legs against the walls and began to scale the slippery, upward path as best she could, but a new ceiling capped her exit. Determined, M leapt back down to the ground hard, with all her strength, crashing through the Maze floor. The sudden breakthrough surprised her and she flexed her hands, scratching at tunnel walls that twisted and turned like an enclosed waterslide at midnight.

A light dawned from below and M tumbled out of the
tunnel into a blisteringly bright, open space. An unflinching floor caught her in a dazed heap, knocking the wind out of her on impact. Bruised and gasping for air, she tried to stand up and refocus her blurry eyes in the intense white light of the room. She stood, then fell back down, unsure of where she was now.

‘Made it, huh?’ came Vivian’s indifferent voice from the far corner of the room. ‘Noles, the subject has completed the mission. What’s her next step?’

Keyshawn’s response crackled through a speaker. ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘That’s a run for the record books! The others are nowhere near completion.’

‘Protocol, Noles,’ demanded Vivian as M’s lungs fought to breathe. ‘I don’t care about the others or about the records. Just tell me what I need to do next. This test was supposed to take all day and I don’t care to babysit.’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Keyshawn. ‘Her suit tells me that she could use some rest. Take her back to the rec room and let her lie down. I’ll come get her as soon as the others finish.’

‘Great,’ huffed Vivian in an annoyed tone. ‘Get up, Freeman. Time for some R and R.’

M held out her hand, expecting Vivian to help her up, but Vivian simply turned and walked out the door, leaving M alone, slouched on the floor and wondering if the Maze was really over or if this was another part of the wretched test.

Either way, M stood up and followed Vivian into what looked like a hospital waiting room. The well-worn chairs were a throwback, orange fabric and wood. They looked out of place against the glossy environment of the academy. If anything, these chairs belonged at the Lawless School,
and something about them instantly made M focus on her situation.

‘Hey, is there a bathroom around here?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, just outside on the right,’ said Vivian.

‘Thanks,’ said M with a smile. She turned right out of the rec room and made her way down the empty hall, seizing the opportunity to explore the Fulbright Academy without direct guidance. The doors on this level were all closed, but a few actually had windows, which M glanced through while walking past them, careful not to stop and stare.

Classes. The rooms were filled with Fulbright students, sometimes sitting at desks and taking notes, sometimes sparring with one another in hand-to-hand combat. The teachers all stood tall and rigid like generals.

M turned another corner only to come face-to-face with another roaming student, who barked out an order. ‘Pass, cadet.’

Great
, thought M,
a hall monitor
. She looked the boy up and down before smiling, shaking her head, and patting her uniform searching for a nonexistent pass. ‘Sorry, I’m in a hurry. I’m looking for Devon Zoso,’ she said smoothly. ‘Direct Downing sent me to fetch her.’

‘Direct Downing,’ repeated the monitor with a suspicious look. He pulled out a tablet and flicked through a list of names.

As she waited, a bell rung like a buzzer at a sports event, and the hallway filled with Fulbright cadets moving on to their next classes. Dressed in the proper attire this time, M took her opportunity and ducked into the flowing lines while the hall monitor had his head down.

‘Hey, cadet!’ she heard the boy call out from somewhere behind her. ‘Wherever you are, whoever you are, you better hope I don’t catch you again!’

M shrugged off his empty threat, marched with the crowd, and continued her search. She knew her mother wasn’t going to be down this corridor. There was no way the Fulbrights would keep their prisoners so close to their trainees. Though M was here, wasn’t she? But then, they thought of her as a cadet, which was a mistake.

Another buzzer rang out and the cadets neatly filed into their various classrooms, clearing the hallway for M again. Only, the hallway wasn’t entirely clear. Standing right in front of her was Vivian, shaking her head slowly from side to side. ‘You’re not as smart as they made you out to be.’

‘What makes you say that?’ asked M defiantly.

‘Well, for one, this tablet tells me everything about you,’ said Vivian. ‘Even when you have to go to the bathroom. Guess what? You didn’t.’

‘So why did you let me go?’ asked M.

‘I was bored,’ admitted Vivian. ‘I figured I’d see how far you’d take your little escapade. Maybe also see how accurate your tracker is.’

Ugh, the tracker
. M made a mental note to have Merlyn crack that as well.

‘But then you had to go and get that poor cadet in trouble,’ continued Vivian. ‘Plus, you implicated Downing, Zoso, and myself. Come, now, Freeman. What did we ever do to you?’

‘Do I really have to answer that?’ asked M, who couldn’t
believe she was actually feeling bad for duping that half-wit hall monitor.

‘Well, I hope whatever we did isn’t half as bad as what I have to do now,’ said Vivian as she made a quick swipe on her tablet.

M’s body immediately froze in place from the neck down. She felt like she was turning to stone. ‘What are you doing to me, Medusa?’

‘Tsk, tsk, Freeman,’ said Vivian carelessly. ‘I’m not doing anything to you. You did this to yourself.’

Suddenly M’s suit started to constrict around her, squeezing so tight that the air was forced out of her lungs. Her head rolled around on her neck as the crushing force weighed down on her, and her vision went red, then black.

Her dreams came swiftly, like thieves in the night through open windows. She dreamed of her father, of the ‘whole house’ games of hide-and-seek they used to play. But in her dream, her father was terribly well hidden. And as she combed through the house, searching in every closet, under every bed, she floated past familiar faces.

Her mother was seated in the room they called the once-living room, admiring a painting with a handsome, golden-hued wood frame embellished with sculpted angels and demons. M strained to see the painting, but the image was unfocused, almost like several different paintings on top of one another all at once. When she turned back, her mother had disappeared.

In the hallway, Jones knelt by the fireplace, dressed in the same disguise he’d worn at the Lawless School library.
He did not look toward M at all. Instead he was tearing out yellowed pages from an ancient book with determination. Then he tossed the pages into the fire, which sparked and licked intensely at each sheet. It seemed the most natural action in the world: fire burned the book’s paper because this paper was made to be burned. Smoke fogged the room, forcing M to move on.

Ms Watts was waiting in the kitchen, razor-sharp knife in hand, but instead of preparing a meal, she was carving out patterns in the walls, in the cabinets, and in the hardwood floor. M felt that she was seeing something that was not meant to be seen, as if Ms Watts were slicing away at reality itself, cutting through to something primordial, long buried, and never meant to be exposed. Then the carvings began to pulse and throb, and suddenly the kitchen was breathing with madness, with Ms Watts trapped in its cold heart.

M ran to the upper level, screaming for her father. The game wasn’t fun anymore. The game was sick, threatening, and unhinged. Cal stood at the top of the stairs, waving for M to hurry. Perhaps he had found her father? He pointed to an open door, and M saw Jules clinging to the doorknob, feet in the air behind her as her body throttled violently, like a rope in a tug-of-war over a black hole that ate away the room. M grabbed Jules and pulled her with all her might, screaming for Cal to help her, but Cal had vanished. When she turned back to Jules, M discovered that she wasn’t gripping her friend’s hand anymore, but the antique, ornate knob to a closed door.

She quickly shoved the door open, but Jules wasn’t there. In her place was Devon, deviously picking a locked
safe with a stream of light cracking through the seams in the steel. M rushed over and threw Devon down to keep her from seeing what was inside the safe as the latch flew open and radiance erupted into the room. But Devon fought back. Her hands, black with soot, pushed against M’s face, leaving fingerprints all over M’s cheeks and throat. They tumbled out of the white room and into a bathroom across the hall, where a masked Fulbright snatched Devon up and tossed her into a bathtub filled with water. As Devon struggled to breach the surface, the Fulbright faced M and yelled,
‘DON’T RUN!’

Terrified, M backed out of the room, then bolted downstairs and through the front door, trying to escape the Fulbright from the bathroom. But beyond the porch, Professor Bandit stood in the yard, poised with a shovel caked in wet mud. With his sharp shoes and pant cuffs stained with grass, Bandit scooped a mound of dirt back into a crudely dug, chilling hole of exposed earth. His stormy eyes met hers with a mixture of sadness, exhaustion, and apology. Whatever he was doing, he did not want to do it, but he did so out of obligation. As he returned to his task, the floorboards beneath M gave way and she tumbled through the deck into the basement.

The darkness consumed her. She quickly stood and ran her hands along the crumbling walls, trying to find her father’s flashlight, but it wasn’t where it should have been, by the other hanging tools. Then there was a click as a small light shined behind M and cast her shadow on the cracked hairline fault working up the wall.
‘Who’s there?’
asked M as she tried to see past the bouncing glow that moved
toward her. ‘
Who’s there?
’ she called again.

‘Who’s there?!’ M screamed aloud as she launched out of the orange chair and tackled a very surprised Merlyn.

‘M! It’s Merlyn!’ he hollered as she held him down. ‘Wake up and snap out of it before you really hurt me!’

‘I told you not to wake her up,’ said Cal with a snort. ‘You never wake someone who’s in a sleep that deep.’

‘Merlyn, geez!’ snapped M. ‘You freaked me out!’

‘I freaked you out?’ Merlyn replied incredulously. ‘If
I
freaked
you
out, then why am I the one scared for my life?’

M looked around the room to see Cal and Vivian regarding her, wide-eyed, as she pinned Merlyn to the floor with a fist raised in the air, ready to strike.

‘Now that’s the M I expected to see in the hallway,’ said Vivian.

Ignoring her roommate’s comment, M unclenched her fist and helped Merlyn back up. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t myself, I guess.’

‘No, that was the same M I remember,’ said a worn-out-looking Jules, leaning against the doorway as if her life depended upon it.

‘Finally,’ exhaled Cal. ‘We’ve been waiting forever for you to get through that Maze.’

‘Wait,’ said M. ‘How long have I been back here?’

As if in answer to her question, the white walls dimmed.

‘That’s the cue for lights-out, everyone,’ announced Keyshawn as he stormed into the room like an angry teacher annoyed by misbehaving students. ‘I wish I could say that this has been a great day for all of you, but it looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us. Get some sleep, and we’ll gather
back in the lab tomorrow.’

Devon drifted into the room soundlessly to collect Jules, as if she had been waiting just outside, while Keyshawn motioned for Merlyn to follow him.

‘Let’s go, Freeman,’ Vivian said as she stood up. ‘Or do I need to make you strike another pose?’

M got to her feet and turned to Cal. ‘What about you? Is your direct coming?’

‘I’m sure he’s on his way,’ said Cal. ‘He’s pretty reliable when he wants to be. You go and get some more rest. And have good dreams this time, okay?’

M smiled at the thought. Good dreams. What would that be like? ‘I’ll try,’ was all she said as she walked into the hallway after Vivian, following her up the first staircase M had seen since coming to the Fulbright Academy, which only led to another dimming path.

CHAPTER 5

MASK

Hours. That’s how long it had taken the others to complete their personal Mazes. M wondered how she could have gotten through her challenge so much faster than her friends. Sure, everyone experienced a different Maze, according to Keyshawn, but that hardly explained why Jules, the most fit person M had ever met, came out last and looking like she’d just run two triathlons.

Vivian remained her usual robotic self on the walk back. It had been a poor effort on M’s part to assume she could give Vivian the slip with a simple lie. Especially when her clothes were monitoring her every biorhythm. If M was going to make any headway with her direct, it was up to her to break the ice that surrounded Vivian.

‘So,’ M started when they were in their room, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever had to use that stonewalling technique on another Fulbright before, have you?’

‘First time for everything,’ answered Vivian, nonplussed. ‘Nifty suits Keyshawn tailored for you.’

‘Yeah, fits like a straitjacket,’ said M as she loosely swung her arms around, trying to lose the tiny pins-and-needles feeling at the tip of her fingers. ‘It hurt, you know. Could you seriously not do that again?’

‘Let’s make a deal. Don’t run away and I won’t stop you from running away,’ said Vivian.

‘That doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me,’ M said as she undid the back of her suit. It wasn’t clenching tightly around her at the moment, but still, she felt better with the magnetized latch open. Then in an effort to keep the chitchat civil despite her hurt pride, she switched conversational gears. ‘So, the Maze, huh? It’s sure something else.’

‘That’s what they say,’ answered Vivian absently.

Getting Vivian to talk was like pulling teeth, but since M had been put in a full-body sleeper hold for most of the day, she was anything but tired now.

‘But you’ve run it, right?’ she asked. ‘Like, it must be standard training around here.’

‘Standardish,’ said Vivian, disappearing behind a partition wall to prepare for bed.

M sat on her bunk, still dressed in her Fulbright suit. Looking at the black webbing and wires, she felt like an off-duty superhero who hadn’t changed back into her secret identity yet.

In a pair of light and airy pajamas, Vivian breezed across the floor and into bed. Her hair was neatly combed and draped loose around her shoulders. M was suddenly ashamed of her rugged wear and rat’s-nest hair in a way that she’d never been at the Lawless School.
Pretty
wasn’t something the students did there. No, there was always
another safe to crack or trophy to steal. Plus, coiffed hair and painted fingernails rarely survived the Box. Still, the allure of soft pajamas was a siren song to M. ‘Do I have a pair of pj’s, too?’

‘You’ll find everything you need in your closet,’ answered Vivian, who had picked up a book by her bedside.

M stood up clumsily and stepped behind the partition. Through her open closet door, she saw an empty hanger on the rack. Pausing, she stole a glance at Vivian’s closet to see her roommate’s lone Fulbright suit hung there, mask and all. The mask sat motionless and empty, and M couldn’t help thinking of the discarded mask she’d found months ago on the crash-landed plane to Lawless. The hollow eyes, the green webwork of wires – that mask had been a very unsettling sight. ‘Ugh, still a creep factor nine,’ she whispered to herself and shuddered.

Peeking from behind the partition, M saw that Vivian was engrossed in her book. Without a sound, she slipped over to her roommate’s chest of drawers. She needed to get her hands on Vivian’s tablet. That thing was M’s control board, and M didn’t like being controlled. Vivian had the tablet when she’d come back here, but not when she came out. It must be in the drawers, reasoned M.

But she froze as she was about to pull open the top drawer. Taped across all five drawers were tiny strands of blond hair: Vivian’s hair. This was an old and effective security trick. The hair was difficult to see if you weren’t looking for it. Once broken, it would prove that someone had gone through Vivian’s property. A trap like this had to be reset every day, assuming Vivian wanted to get
into her drawers, which meant using a new strand of hair each time.

‘Paranoid much?’ M whispered to herself, but then she realized that Vivian had a very good reason to be paranoid. She was M’s roommate, after all. M pieced together a scenario in which she swung for the fences tonight, breaking into Vivian’s dresser, cracking the tablet, and bolting to find her mom. But no, it was too much for right now. She needed a little more time to gather intel. When she had it, Vivian’s bombshell blond strands wouldn’t stand in her way.

M slid back over to her assigned set of drawers and found pajamas and a brush neatly displayed in the top drawer. So, following Vivian’s example, M quickly hung up her suit and changed. The new clothes were heavenly, but brushing her hair for the first time in what seemed like months yanked her back down to earth by the roots.

‘There,’ M said as she walked out from behind the partition. She presented herself as a model on the runway, hoping to get a smile out of Vivian. ‘Now I feel at least a little more human and a little less like a cyborg.’

Vivian looked up from her book, unfazed, and nodded. ‘Indeed. And please stay out of my personal things. I’ll give you a warning this time.’

‘How in the world did you know?’ asked M, looking behind her for a well-placed mirror that might have broadcasted her every move.

‘I didn’t know. I was just guessing. You’ve got to work on your poker face, Freeman.’

‘So,’ M continued casually, even though she was totally aggravated at herself for stumbling yet again, ‘are you
going to tell me why you haven’t been in the Maze?’

If she surprised Vivian with her question, her roommate hid it well. ‘Who says I haven’t?’

‘You say it,’ said M. ‘It’s written all over you. Avoiding the conversation, not answering questions, and that suit in your closet looks brand-new, while mine is already beaten down from a single run in the Maze. Now, are you going to tell me or are you going to make me guess?’

Vivian closed her book and sat up straight. She appeared to be keeping her composure, but M knew that there was a quiet pride behind Vivian’s steely eyes. And pride can be a dangerous thing when bruised, as her father used to tell her.

‘The Maze,’ responded Vivian, ‘is the Keyshawn Noles show, a carnival ride that’s virtually untested. He found it in a pile of other scrapped projects built by some Fulbright old-timer. Since he fixed it up, only a few recruits have been asked to run the course, and I wasn’t chosen for the program.’

‘But you put in for it, didn’t you?’ asked M with a smile.

‘Of course I did.’ Vivian yawned as if the conversation were boring her to sleep. ‘Even though Keyshawn is a divisive person at the academy, I like to try every test available to push me.’

‘Push you to what?’

‘To be the best.’

‘Wait, you’re telling me that Keyshawn, little old dorky Keyshawn, is divisive here?’ asked M. ‘He’s just a science nerd.’

‘There’s a saying around here,’ said Vivian. ‘Keyshawn Noles everything or Keyshawn Noles nothing. And only time will tell.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked M.

‘It means that your lab partner has some crazy ideas about how science works and he’s been given a short leash to prove his theories,’ said Vivian. ‘When his concepts work, they’re brilliant.’

‘And when they don’t?’

‘When they don’t,’ admitted Vivian, ‘bad things happen.’

‘And that’s why he’s on a short leash,’ concluded M. ‘And that’s one of the reasons we’re working with him now. Beta testing.’

‘It’s not for me to involve myself in your issues,’ Vivian told M coldly. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, it’s been a long day.’ Then, like flipping a switch, Vivian laid her head down and fell instantly asleep.

She’s like a robot powering down
, thought M as she watched her roommate slumber. Lying back in her own bed, M ran through her Fulbright experience so far, processing this new information. The thoughts scrambled in her head as she tried putting everything together, but the big picture was elusive.

She remembered her father’s video. It had been so strange to see him again, to hear him say her name one last time. She smiled at how nice it made her feel even though he was warning her. But what specifically was he trying to warn her about? Was he honestly telling her that the Fulbrights needed her help, or was that a ploy to get them to show her the video? Maybe he’d planted another message in the film somehow. She shut her eyes and replayed her father’s words and images over and over again.

Two things stood out immediately. The first was the
other voice outside of the booth, but that felt too random, too unrehearsed, and too out of her father’s control to have been a coded message. But one thing every filmmaker controls is the camera. So why did the video begin with her father out of the frame? Perhaps because he was showing her the bench … the bench covered with initials! Then M remembered her father’s closing words:
Always remember that you are greater than the sum of the parts your mother and I gave you
. It didn’t sound like something he would say at all. It was too clunky and more than a little hokey. M culled together all the initials from memory, which were linked with plus signs, then added up the
sum
… and decoded her father’s true statement.

Do as they say, not as they do.

Tracing the slight bump on her left wrist, where her tracker was buried inside her, M realized that she was already following her father’s secret instructions. She was playing along with the Fulbrights but hadn’t believed for a moment that she was one of them.

Periodically through the night, M got out of bed and paced around the room, looking for any sign that her activity was waking up sleeping beauty, but Vivian remained recklessly asleep. It was a small victory. Her roommate was confident in the power of the tracker and the suit, and that reliance was something M could exploit once Merlyn found a way to rewire their outfits. But where would they go once they had their freedom? M crawled back into bed and riffled through every fact and fable she had ever learned about the Fulbright Academy. And somehow, at some late hour, amid a swarm of schemes, M finally dozed off, too.

The next morning M climbed back into her suit and followed Vivian to a cafeteria that buzzed quietly with scripted activity. The students moved in concert, like honeybees diligently building their hive. The lines to receive food were straight and orderly, and there might as well have been assigned seating – once each student had his meal, he walked single file to the next open seat without hesitation. The calmness of it gave M the creeps. Mealtime at Lawless had been a free-for-all, so this well-behaved performance felt forced and unnatural. But what really gave her the creeps were the dagger stares that each Fulbright aimed directly at her and her friends.

Seated at their own table, Merlyn, Jules, and M were castaways on an abandoned island. An island surrounded by molten lava that wanted nothing more than to destroy that island and everything it stood for. Clearly they were not welcome here.

‘I feel like a gazelle locked in a lion’s cage,’ said Jules.

‘Ignore them,’ said Merlyn, pushing a fork through the gelatinous substance on his tray. ‘Pretend they’re jealous of our delicious-looking food.’

Their trays sat in front of them with a tidy smattering of unearthly-looking grub. On M’s tray, bright red pudding stayed firmly in its assigned section alongside a black-and-white-striped cake and green, licoricelike cords.

‘It’s not that the food is bad,’ continued Merlyn, ‘but the presentation is just bizarre! I mean, if you wanted to make the food of the future, can’t you just make it into a pill that we take with water?’

Shrugging, M crunched into the green cords, which turned out to be an incredibly rich version of pesto bacon. The cake was a buttery marble-rye French toast with a honey glaze, and the red pudding was apple-fried grits with melted cheese.

‘Ugh,’ muttered Jules in frustration. ‘I hate that this ugly stuff is so delicious. I can’t get used to my eyes and my taste buds disagreeing.’

‘Where’s Cal?’ asked Merlyn with a mouthful of cake.

‘Yeah, he’d have a lot to say about this stuff,’ added Jules, absently stirring her yellow pudding.

‘Guys,’ said M in a hushed voice, ‘we need to talk about yesterday.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Jules sternly. ‘Not my shining moment in the Maze.’

‘I’m not talking about the Maze,’ said M. ‘I’m talking about our suits. While you guys were still in there, I ran a quick recon, but Vivian was able to track me down. Not only that, she used the suit against me, just like we thought they would. She completely shut me down with the touch of a button.’

‘Geez,’ said Merlyn. ‘Keyshawn certainly didn’t intend for the suits to be used that way.’

‘Didn’t he, Merlyn?’ asked M. ‘Listen, yes, Keyshawn is a brainiac, but you need to pull him down off whatever pedestal you’ve put him on, because he’s not on our side – the same as all these cadets around us now that have an urge to arrest us. We need to outsmart his design or else we’re walking around in handcuffs for the rest of our lives.’