Keystone (31 page)

“Or two,” Zane adds.

“We’re never going to make it to the pond if it keeps doing that,” Robin snaps.

“What do you want me to do, Robs?” Zane snaps back. He jerks in the harness to look at her and the whole Ball shimmies. “Lemme just get on my tool belt and my glue gun and I’ll get right up there and fix it!”

“I’m getting inside it,” Garrett says, unfastening his harness.

“Me too,” I say, unbuckling mine.

“Might as well,” Zane sighs, wiggling out of his too. “Wouldn’t wanna miss out on a concussion.”

We all climb in; poking through the holes like the Free Ball is a big wormy apple. Deeta screams when the Ball plummets a few more feet. She lies on one of the pipes and wraps her arms and legs around it like a sloth. We all imitate her, but when the ball drops again, Deeta’s not the only one that shrieks. Clinging to the frame, the jerk shakes my bones and rattles my teeth.

“Anybody got a location on the Fury?” Robin shouts.

“Oh, don’t worry about them,” Zane’s voice vibrates as the Ball does another dip. We’re still pretty far up, but there’s a line of trees that we’ll have to get over if we’re going to make it to the pond on the other side. “They’ve got tons of time to catch up.”

I’m hanging on as tight as I can, but when the Ball brushes the top of the trees, the whole thing shakes and rolls all the way around once. I hang on and feel my hair pull away from my scalp as we roll upside down. The branches crack off and catch in the Ball’s frame as the thing bounces across the tree tops. Then I see a tree that sticks up higher than the rest, looming ahead.

“Holy…” Zaneen shouts as the tree trunk spears through one of the holes. We’re impaled on it and it drags the Ball to a tooth-jarring halt. Deeta pushes herself up on her pipe.

“We stopped,” she laughs.

“Don’t let go!” Garrett shouts to her. Just as she grabs hold of the pipe again, the Ball plummets, racing down the tree trunk. My stomach shoots up against my lungs. Thick branches snap off and fly up into the frame. One rips off a bar below and then, both the bar and branch sail past me. The center of the Ball becomes a hurricane stream with sticks and leaves shooting past me so fast I can’t see anyone else. Something jabs me in the cheek, something else in the ribs and in my thigh.

“Keep your head down!” Garrett shouts. I press my face to the pipe. The sound is nauseating, the crunch of the branches and Deeta’s screaming. Everyone else is silent, even Zaneen. I’m too scared to even pry my face off to see if they’re still hanging on.

I grip the pipe like a vice as the Ball finally catches with a sickening crunch. The whole frame vibrates so much that my entire body tingles and I almost let go. All the sound stops. A couple branches finish cracking off and fall, but they fall down instead of being pushed up now, and it takes a second before I hear them hit the ground. I open my eyes.

Garrett pulls himself right side up on a pipe across from me.

“You okay?” He reaches for me and doesn’t pull his hand away when I reach back.

“Yeah,” I say, but my muscles are rubber bands that have just been stretched around the Earth. My cheek stings. Garrett wipes blood off my hand, passes his palm over my cheek and the sting is replaced with an electrical tingle. He heals my cuts and moves away. Zane, Zaneen, and Robin cling to the pipes overhead.

“I think my wrist is broken,” Robin says. But she says it like she’s reporting the weather. Then she adds, “Where’s Deeta?”

“Here,” Deeta says. She’s below me, hanging out the bottom of the ball by just her hands. She lets go and falls the five feet left to the ground below. “Come on, you guys…we’ve got to get out of here!”

“Who thought Deets would be the voice of reason?” Zane says.

“Get your field up, Nali,” Garrett says as he swings his way down the pipes toward the bottom. He’s as fluid as a gymnast. “Field up and let yourself down.”

I try to do what he says, but I second-guess it, totally blow my field and slip on the pipes. I keep flailing and grabbing hold, scared I’m going to impale myself on a broken branch. My field keeps exploding and then reactivating just before I bust my face off, all while the rest of them are giggling like a tree full of monkeys. My field activates and pops, activates and pops, as I freak out the whole way down. When I finally drop out the bottom, I hit the ground with a plop that sends up a grand finale of laughter.

“You need help, Robbs?” Zane asks when things calm down. He swings off a pipe like Tarzan.

“Help yourself!” Robin sucks in a breath, not because she moves her messed-up wrist, but because watching Zane is like watching a drunken trapeze artist work without a net. He flings himself from pipe to pipe, narrowly grabbing them each time. Zaneen picks her way down and Robin, despite her wrist, shimmies down more gracefully with only one arm than I did with two.

“Which way do we go?” Deeta asks when we’re all standing at the bottom, looking around us at the thicket of trees. Garrett shushes her, holding up a finger. And I hear them.

Their engines growl. They pant. They grind their gears. The Fury are coming.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Zane groans. “When did they learn to track?”

“There’s at least six cars,” Garrett tips his head to the side, listening up into the trees. He turns in a circle. “But they’re coming from…” he points to the North. “And there,” he spins and points to the East. “There and there.” The West and the South.

“We’re surrounded?” Deeta chokes. “We’re going to die out here?”

No one answers right away and Zaneen gulps.

“Are we?” she whispers to Robin.

“No.” The word just pops out of me, strong and low and totally by surprise. I expect Zaneen to roll her eyes or snort or something, but she nods to me and I not only see the fear in her eyes, but also how my one word assurance is keeping it from engulfing her.

The funny thing is, I’m in overdrive myself, trying to mash down my own panic. All I can think of is the Addo and how he told me that the Alo have no balls for fighting. A quiver bounces between my vertebrae, caught in the track of my spine like a loose pinball. Maybe my Alo blood still trumps the Contego Impressioning, but there’s enough Contego in me to keep it at a low boil.

The Fury cars growl closer. Their tires bite at the dirt and tear over twigs. All I can think of is how we’re going to get away.

“Here,” a voice says. I spin on one heel to find the speaker.

There is a kid, with overalls and freckles, poking out of the ground about twenty feet away. Out of the ground. Everything below his waist is in a hole, like a stuck scarecrow or a zombie clawing his way out. We must’ve stumbled on this kid’s secret, underground hideout. But whatever he’s doing out here, he doesn’t even seem phased that the six of us showed up by crashing down a tree trunk on a massive pipe ball.

I take a step closer to him. Everything about the way he looks seems like he could live on any farm around here, except his eyes. His eyelids are just slits, with no eyelashes to hide the sparkling marbles beneath. My smile spreads across my face.

“Rescue,” Nok says, waving us to him.

The thick woods keep The Fury’s cars growling at a distance, but when I focus, I hear the passengers on foot, running toward us. They yell to each other,
That way! No, that way! Look how the Ball broke the trees! I’ll get the key! No, I will!

“Come!” Red-haired Nok motions to the hole he’s standing in and we run to him. Deeta reaches him first and skids to a halt. I plow into her. Nok sinks, disappearing into the ground, right before our eyes. I squint, but I still can’t quite see how the ground is swallowing him up. All I can make out is the confusing image of his farm-boy-body becoming less and less while the ground around him seems to become more and more. The edges move around him like fringe, a fringe made of real dirt and weeds. He tilts his head up and right before his freckled face disappears at our feet, he says, “Jump.”

Then he’s gone. The Fury shouts all around us. I still can’t see them through the trees, but the panic climbs up inside my skin and Deeta is frozen in front of me.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “That was the Veritas that was hiding us under the library!”

But Zaneen, not bothering with logic, reaches around me and gives Deeta a shove. She stumbles right onto the same spot where Nok just disappeared and drops down into the dirt, up to her waist. The magnet in me, the one that urges me to protect the Alo, pulls toward Deeta as her body slides away, but I hold myself back. I watch her suck in a big breath and squeeze her eyes shut before her head vanishes into the dirt. And I go straight into panic mode.

All I can think of is the Veritas tunnel we used to escape the library. How tight and small and strangling it felt inside it and then, I get shoved too.

I drop in and the last glimpse I get is of a shadow, stumbling from behind a tree trunk. I open my mouth to shout a warning to the others, but get a mouthful of dirt instead.

I fall into a wide-open space where four other rounded tunnels connect. I land on my rear and cough dirt. Deeta and Nok haul me out of the way. Zaneen and Zane shoot down through the ceiling almost immediately, in a rain of dirt and leaves and pebbles, wrapped in each other’s arms and locked in a kiss. They scramble to their feet and skitter apart, gaping at one another.

“Dang it! I thought you were Robin!” Zane snaps, spitting on the ground.

“I thought you were Garrett!” Zaneen says, jumping around and wiping her face as if it’s been doused with acid. It takes a few seconds before we all realize that no one else is coming through the hole.

We search the tunnel ceiling. There is no sound besides our breathing. The twisted flap we’ve dropped through isn’t moving.

“Come on, come on,” Zane whispers.

Overhead, there are no footsteps, no voices, and no engines. I hold my breath, trying to will Garrett to fall through.

The flap blasts open and I jump backwards. We’re all showered with dirt and the sound of a war moving over the top of us as Garrett and Robin drop through. They land with a horrible groan, Robin clutching her wrist close to her chest. Garrett has his arms around her, bent over and shielding her from the falling debris.

But someone else falls through with them too. A girl, probably a year or two younger than me, with dark purple hair, clings to Garrett’s back. I leap forward and pull her off him. Zane grabs her other arm, but the Fury girl stares at Nok and seems, momentarily, too stunned to move.

Nok jumps toward the ceiling, as if he’s propelled off a trampoline and grabs onto a long, brown plank overhead. He’s so fast, it’s hard to see what he’s doing, as he presses the entire left side of his body flat against the packed dirt roof. It’s only then that I see the dark prongs poking out of the dirt overhead. Nok’s feet find them like stepping-stones as he churns in a lightening fast circle, cranking the beam, clockwise, over our heads. The flap where we’d fallen through twists closed like the tied knot of a balloon. Once he’s gone the full way around, Nok gives the plank an extra push and spins another plank out from the wall so the two form an X on the ceiling. He drops back down to the ground, smacking the dust from the side of his overalls. The flap sags a little, as if the Fury are piling into it above us, but it doesn’t break open.

The purple haired girl gapes at Nok. He’s peeling off his entire freckled face and hair, which is bizarre enough, but when he drops his disguise on the ground, she begins whooping like she just won a gold medal.

“I…I found it! I have the Key! It’s mine!” she shouts up at the flap. Even though Zane and I still have hold of her, she throws her head back and laughs wildly, “It’s mine! It’s mine! Tell the Mastermind I found it! I get my palace…I found it!”

“They can’t hear you,” Garrett tells her. The girl gets even more wild-eyed as she looks around at all of us. Her head swings back and forth, but it seems like she doesn’t really
see
us.

“I can ask for anything now,” she giggles. “Anything. A plastic surgeon! New eyes for me and oh! A new nose and…and boobs! I want to be curvy! And I’ll have a flat stomach and my lips…oh! Not like those other girls that look like fish! No, mine’ll be perfect! And the men! All of them…all of them will want
me
…you and you…oh, you’ll want me once I get my prize! And my boyfriend…he’ll be so jealous!” She cackles at Zane and Garrett.