“Ssarg?” I said, and immediately got it. “Oh. Grass.”
“Humor him,” Aly murmured. “He’s just that way with directions, trivia, you name it. World-class memory.”
“Just about the only thing I don’t remember is how I ended up here,” Cass said. “I was in a parking lot, and then I was here. Hey, tell me the name of the town where you live, Jack. And then name any other place in the United States.”
“Belleville, Indiana,” I offered. “And…um, Nantucket, Massachusetts.”
Cass stood stock-still for about thirty seconds. “Belleville. Take Route Thirty east to Fort Wayne; Route Sixty-nine north to Route Eighty all the way across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to the George Washington Bridge to the Cross Bronx; the Hutch to the Merritt, swinging down to Ninety-five via Route One at Milford; One Ninety-five in Rhode Island, Four Ninety-five to the Cape, and Six to One-thirty-two to the ferry in Hyannis.”
“Which shipping channel does the ferry take?” Marco asked.
“Ynnuf ton,” Cass drawled.
I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. “He’s right. I used to follow the route on a map on our vacations. That’s freaky.”
“The ceresacrum takes your biggest talent and makes it awesome,” Aly said. “The treatments allow G7W to do its thing.”
“What’s your big talent?” I asked. “Something to do with movies?”
“That’s just a hobby with her,” Cass said. “Often very gniyonna.”
“I sent cute kitten photos to the members of the National Security Council,” Aly said with a laugh. “Which doesn’t seem like much, except I hacked into their system to do it. Through a military-grade firewall and the highest level of encryption. I was bored after finishing my homework. It seemed like a fun project.”
“Did you go to jail?” I asked.
“I was nine years old.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know I was doing anything illegal. They didn’t arrest me, they hired me. To strengthen their system. And…” Her face darkened. “Also to do some other stuff. I was their youngest employee ever.”
“What other stuff?” I asked.
She ignored the question and jerked a thumb over toward Marco. “Believe it or not, Slacker Boy over here is good at something, too.”
Marco was staring at the basketball court at the other end of the quad, near the main building. He bounced his basketball twice, rocking on his feet. “The blindfold, please.”
Aly took a bandanna from Marco’s rear pocket and tied it across his eyes. Slowly he reared back with the basketball.
The court was half a football field away. It was like trying to hit an airplane with a snowball. Marco crouched, then let go with a loud grunt. The ball shot high into the air. Scary high.
Marco pulled off the blindfold and watched as the ball came down like a cannon shot. It ripped the net as it dropped through the hoop.
“Three points,” Aly said.
“Dang,” Marco said disappointedly. “It grazed the rim.”
My jaw nearly hit the ground. “I did not see that.”
Cass had photo recall and could speak backward at will. Aly was a hacker genius and movie expert. Marco was Michael Jordan on steroids, without the steroids.
I was chopped liver.
I sat in my room, glumly putting on a pair of khaki pants and a button-down KI-logo shirt. I didn’t have a talent. I was eh in school and sports. I could use computers but didn’t really know how they worked. I could set up a fake volcano to launch a plastic toy. Maybe that was my talent. Dumb contraptions. Maybe I’d be able to launch an SUV using palm trees.
I was the opposite of the Select. I was the Discard Pile. Not good at anything. Maybe my lambda mark was just premature aging. I was a mistake.
And now I was supposed to go to a dinner honoring me. Were they expecting me to show off, the way Cass and Marco had?
“Ready?” Aly called out from the hallway, knocking on the door.
I opened it. She was wearing a striped knit shirt and a black leather skirt. Her wrists were full of cool, jangly jewelry that matched her pink hair, and she was wearing some makeup. “You look emosewa,” I said.
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” she said.
She was smiling brightly, like we were about to go to the prom or something, which made me feel really uncomfortable. “I was…making a joke,” I said, “about Cass’s backward speak. Not that you don’t look it—emosewa. Er, awesome. You know.”
“Quit while you’re ahead, McKinley.” Aly took my arm as we walked down the hall.
“Heeeere comes the bride…” Marco sang, emerging from his room.
Aly sneered. “Maturity is not part of Marco’s talent profile.”
We picked up Cass from his room, and Professor Bhegad met us outside our dorm. “Everyone is excited to meet you, Jack. Come.”
As he walked, his massive key chain banged against his hip like tiny cymbals. He pointed out the various buildings—a library with enormous windows, a state-of-the-art gym, a museum. People joined us as we walked, all wearing clothes that showed a KI insignia over the left breast pocket. Marco seemed to have a different secret handshake for each of them. Like he’d known them his whole life.
Strange voices called out to me: “Hey, Jack, how are you feeling?”… “Book club meets on Tuesdays!”… “yoga”… “spinning class”… “surfing club”…
Before we went into the dining hall, Marco stopped short. “Yo, P. Beg, I want to show Jack the media room.”
“It’s Professor Bhegad,” the old man said. “And I don’t think we have the time. The chef has prepared—”
“One minute, that’s all,” Marco insisted.
As Bhegad continued to protest, Marco pulled a plastic card from the protective pouch that hung from a big key ring on the professor’s belt. He quickly ran to a Colonial-style brick building, threw open the door, and announced, “Welcome to utter coolness.”
Although the building looked old, the inside was amazing—long and rectangular, with a lofted area and a glass ceiling high above. Everywhere I looked there were consoles and monitors, game devices and arcade machines. The beeps and sound effects made it seem like some strange forest full of squeaking electronic rodents.
“Nerd Heaven,” Cass continued. “Including board games and jigsaw puzzles.”
“We’re getting a foosball table on Friday,” Aly said with relish. “And we’re having a Preston Sturges festival. Hail the Conquering Hero Saturday night.”
We? I could never, ever think of myself and the Karai Institute as we.
“Dinnertime!” Bhegad said, heading back to the door. “Oh dear, where did that access card go?”
“I gave it back to you, P. Beg,” Marco said.
Now Bhegad was looking around the floor in frustration. “Achh. I’ve had this problem ever since I turned sixty. Honestly, I just lose everything! Ah, well, it will turn up. We mustn’t be late. We have a surprise for you, Jack. Come.”
As Professor Bhegad headed for the door, Cass and Aly followed. I turned to go with them.
Behind me, I felt Marco slipping something flat and rectangular into my pocket.
CHAPTER TEN
SECRET MESSAGE
MARCO HADN’T SAID a word. Hadn’t even looked at me.
What was I doing with the card key? I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be caught with it. Was this Marco’s plan—to get me in trouble? Why?
I tried to look at him, to get some sort of indication. He was sitting across a crowded table from me, stuffing food into his mouth and carrying on a conversation with some young female staff member whose name tag said Ginger.
The banquet table was enormous, running the length of a vast octagonal room. Chairs were packed close together, and it seemed like the entire Karai Institute was here—fat old men with ZZ Top beards, hipsters in narrow glasses, all kinds of people. Many sported intertwining-snake KI tattoos on their arms. They all seemed to know each other well, their laughter and co
nversation hovering like a cloud of sound.
The place was called the Comestibule. Professor Bhegad said it meant “cafeteria,” and he didn’t answer me when I asked why they didn’t call it a cafeteria. Its walls, paneled with blond wood, rose dizzyingly upward to a kind of steeple. All around us were portraits of stern-faced scientists, who seemed to be staring at me like I owed them money.
A great chandelier, made of curled glass tubes that resembled Medusa’s head of snakes, flooded the room with LED light. Across the rafters hung a banner that stretched nearly the length of the room:
WELCOME TO YOUR KARAI INSTITUTE HOME, JACK!
Professor Bhegad had made a big deal about the chef preparing quail for dinner. The thought of it made me sick.
Cass leaned over to me and mumbled a long stream of words that made absolutely no sense. “Dude, stop it,” I said. “I can’t do that backward-speaking thing.”
As Cass stared at me, looking annoyed, Marco’s voice boomed out toward a passing waitress. “Excuse me, you got any more food? There isn’t much meat on these things.”
“If you eat one more quail, sir, you’ll fly away,” the girl answered.
“Take mine,” I said.
Marco reached across and vacuumed my plate away.
I kept expecting people to ask me about my Big Talent, but no one did. Fortunately, they all seemed pretty normal. Friendly.
A clinking sound rang out, and Professor Bhegad was on his feet. “Ladies and gentlemen and Scholars of Karai! Our Comestibule is a place of great joy today. We have saved a young life and we continue our adventure with renewed strength and hope. Tonight and over the next few weeks you will all have a chance to meet our newest young genius, Jack McKinley!”
“Speech! Speech!” Marco yelled through the applause.
My heart was ping-ponging. I still couldn’t get used to this. Weeks? Here?
I felt an elbow in my side. “Hey, wake up, dude,” Aly muttered. “You’re getting a standing O.”
All around the table, people were rising to their feet and applauding. Staring directly at me. All except Cass, who was doodling on a napkin.
“Stand up!” Aly said.
My chair was heavy and hard to push back. I felt like a dorkus maximus. I waved awkwardly and sat again.
“That was inspiring,” Marco said, his mouth full of quail.
As I sat, I noticed a paper napkin and a pen lying on my chair. “Is this yours?” I asked Cass.
His eyes widened. He glanced up at the Medusa chandelier. I looked into the crazy swirl of glass tendrils, but I couldn’t tell what he was acting so weird about.
Not weird. Scared, maybe. His face was tense and his fingers had the tremors.
I flipped the napkin over and saw a scribbled note. A bunch of numbers.
“The banner is cool!” Cass blurted out. “‘Welcome to your Karai Institute home, Jack!’ Man, I never had something this fancy. I’d remember those words forever. Wow. ‘Welcome to your Karai Institute home, Jack!’”
He was trying to tell me something. I glanced at the note and figured I needed to read it in private. “I—I think I’ll wash my hands,” I said, pushing my chair back.
The men’s room was outside the dining room, across a small hallway with a view of the kitchen. I bolted inside, ran into an open stall, and latched it shut. Carefully I spread the napkin on the wall and looked at the message.
They looked like Lotto numbers. What did they mean? Could it be some kind of code? Maybe an alphabet-number substitution thing. Like A = 1 and B = 2.
Nope. Didn’t work. Some of the numbers were greater than twenty-six, and there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet.
I sat back with a sigh. What was it Cass had been telling me? The banner is cool…I’d remember those words forever. He’d read it aloud. Twice.
Weird.
I wrote the banner’s message across the top of the napkin: WELCOME TO YOUR KARAI INSTITUTE HOME, JACK.
Staring at it, I wondered if he meant it was connected to the code. I started numbering each of the letters in the banner message.
The first number on Cass’s coded message was 6. That mapped to the M in the banner message.
I went one by one with each of his digits: 6, 27, 2, 8, 23, 20, 30, 15, 13, 4, 11, 21, 13, 5, 11, 30, 8, 28, 16, 2, 31, 15, 6, 1, 7, 13, 25, 20, 15, 1, 17, 10.
MEETINMARCOS
ROOMTHREE
AMWERUNAWAY.
Meet in Marco’s room. Three A.M. we run away.
I took a deep breath. Then I ripped up the napkin and flushed it into oblivion.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THREE A.M.
AS MY BEDROOM door clicked open, I snapped awake. I didn’t know what time it was. My brain had been dipping in and out of sleep for hours. The night had spooked me. I didn’t trust the smiling, squeaky-clean faces at dinner. Or Professor Bhegad.
“It’s Marco,” came a whisper. “Time to get up.”
The little glowing clock on my bed table read 2:56. My foggy brain was awakening. Three A.M. we run away.
“You’re early,” I mumbled.
Marco stepped inside. His backpack was slung across his shoulder. “Just wanted to be sure you got up. I’m kind of a control freak. But you probably figured that out. Come on before it’s too late. Aly disabled the bugs.”
I turned to face him. “The what?”
Marco gestured toward the banner with the KI symbol. “Wake up and smell the coffee, Jethro. They’ve got a recording device in that banner. And in a few other places, too. Just sound, out of respect for privacy, I guess. The cameras are on the outside of the building. Now come on. Don’t make me carry you out of here.”
I was on my feet. I hadn’t changed out of my clothes since dinner, so all I had to do was slip my feet into my Chucks.
Marco flung the door open. Conan was slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, snoring. “Aly hacked into the medical-supply security and liberated some sleeping pills,” Marco explained as we walked toward his room. “Horse strength for Conan. Not that he really needed it. Sleep is his natural state.”
Marco’s room was the second door to the right. Cass and Aly were already waiting inside, looking grim and worried. The little smiles that had always been plastered on their faces were gone.
“We owe you an explanation,” Aly said, talking very quickly. “You think we’re idiots. Children of the Corn zombies. We had to act enthusiastic. We’re under surveillance, indoors and out, twenty-four seven. I’ve been trying to hack into the system since day one. The encryption makes the US government look like amateurs, but I finally did it.”
“So…everything you’ve been telling me…about how happy you are here, how much you like this place…” I said.
“Lies,” Cass said. “At dinner I wanted to whisper the plan to you, but that chandelier is full of unidirectional mikes. Then I tried to talk to you in Backward, but you outed me. Sorry about the code. It was my only choice. If I had my way, we would all be talking in code, just for the fun of it. Naem I tahw wonk uoy fi.”
“I’m adjusting to the idea that you’re all normal. Don’t spoil it.” I smiled. “So I was right—they’re evil; they’re fooling us.”
“We’ll talk later, bro,” Marco said. “We have to move, before they notice the system is down.”
“I replaced their live feed with a recording,” Aly explained. “It’s showing an hour-long endless loop of what happened from about one A.M. to two A.M. If they’re listening to Marco’s room now, they’re hearing him snore, all curled up with his toy sheep, Daisy.”
“Leave Daisy out of this,” Marco grumbled.
Cass was peering out the window. “At two o’clock, they switch to only one guard on duty outside. We’ve been watching him for the last week, and he always sneaks off for a snack by five after three—at the latest. M&M’s and Diet Dr Pepper. He’s like clockwork.”
“That’s it?” I said. “Just one guard? For such a high-tech place?”
&
nbsp; “It’s because of the high-tech security they don’t need so many guards,” Marco said. “You get past the guards, and the electric eye zaps you anyway.”
I must have turned green, because Aly immediately added, “They disabled it when you escaped, Jack.”
“They knew?” I said. “But—but no one stopped me!”
“Until…?” Marco said.
“This monkey appeared in the middle of nowhere,” I murmured, “with a set of keys…”
“Led you to a clearing in the woods, right?” Marco said. “A big chopper just waiting, with ol’ Sweet Cheeks in the pilot seat? Same thing happened to me. They let you go, Jack, and then manipulated your return. To teach you a lesson. Wear you down. That’s the way they operate.”
I felt as if I were emerging from a fog. For the first time since I got here, I was actually hearing things that made sense. “What about all that junk about the superpowers? How’d you make that basket from three miles away, Marco—invisible ropes?”
“He really did that,” Aly said, gently taking my arm. “Look, I think the G7W marker is real. With each treatment, we get smarter, stronger, more whatever we are. That’s what I think their goal is, Jack—to make some race of superpeople, not save us from death. They want us supercharged so we can help in their crazy missions. After this Atlantis thing, who knows what’s next? Maybe finding the abominable snowman.”
“Aly’s supposed to be having her treatment right now,” Cass said. “She went in at eleven o’clock and is supposed to stay hooked up to machines all night. But when the docs left, she rewired the hospital monitors so it seems like she’s still there.”
Aly smiled. “And look at me. Skipped the treatment and I feel great! Body feels good, mind is sharp. Ask me to recite the opening lines of Star Wars Five.”
“When we bust out of here, I’m heading for the NBA draft,” Marco said.
Cass had taken twelve sheets of loose-leaf paper from under the rug and carefully taped them together. On the combined sheets was a map drawn in exacting pencil strokes. A miniature replica of the campus was at the bottom, each building labeled. At the top right was a cloud of dense trees with a dotted-line path ending at a clearing. Cass had drawn a key and a monkey on the path, and a helicopter at the end of it. “How do you know all this?” I asked.