Confused, I search the room. This feels all wrong. Warning bells are ringing. This is not me. Pia Wang, Lisa Life, Alpha Dockery, and Enya Sleepwell can take their mandates and their causes and forget me. I’m not who they think I am. I turn to look at the Whistleblower, but he, too, is gone.
I know it’s going to happen before it happens. The double doors are pushed open. Lulu stands in the doorway.
“The Whistleblowers are here,” she shouts, panicked.
Then, as the sirens take over, there is no more silence.
FIFTY-EIGHT
ALPHA GRABS ME. I feel her nails dig deep into my skin.
“Come with me,” she says firmly.
“My granddad,” I say to her, feeling breathless already. “I have to get my granddad.”
“He’ll be fine,” she says dismissively, leading me down from the stage.
“No. He comes, too.” I stop walking.
She tries to tug me again but can see I’m not moving until we sort this out.
“All right. I’ll tell Lulu to bring him to us.” She quickly barks orders at Lulu, who looks on the verge of collapse, but instead pushes her way through the panicking crowd to get to Granddad, whom I still can’t see. I don’t have much faith in Lulu at this point. I think she will be more concerned about saving her own skin than my granddad’s. I can see his cap in the moving crowd. Everyone is trying to make a way to the door, trying to escape.
“Granddad!” I call. He doesn’t hear me.
I start to panic. I pick up the microphone that only moments ago I couldn’t think of a word to say into and shout into it, but it has already been turned off.
“I have to find him.”
“Lulu will get him.” Alpha grabs me by the arm and pulls.
“Forgive me if I don’t have much faith in Lulu,” I snap. “Did you tell the Whistleblowers I was here?” I shout. “Was this a trap to catch Carrick?”
“What?! Why would I do that?” she asks, so alarmed and disgusted that I believe her.
“Lulu thought I was speaking here today. Did you advertise this?”
She looks guilty. “I might have mentioned it to a few people, but I certainly didn’t advertise it.”
“Damn it!” I shout, pulling my arm away from her. “You used me!”
“Let me explain,” she says, changing her body language. She appears panicky. “Come with me and I’ll explain.”
“Where are we going?”
She doesn’t answer—she just moves more quickly. The room is in utter chaos. There are those who want to leave, and those who are strong and firm in their stance and stay where they’re seated, arms folded in defiance.
The speaker from the F.A.B. institution tries to get Alpha’s attention. She runs along the side of the stage, chasing after us. “You said I would be protected!” she says, panicking, as Alpha ignores her and pulls me away with her.
As we reach the back of the room, I hear the whistles, and my heart pounds with the memory of Angelina Tinder and my own experience ringing in my ears. It makes me freeze on the spot, and it has that effect on most people. Caught. The room starts to go silent at the sound. Freeze. Panic. Alpha gets me moving again, pulling me in the opposite direction.
“Granddad,” I say, a sob catching in my throat. I see the red vests swarming into the room, I see a baton swing in the air, and I hear people scream. Alpha pulls me through another door, and we leave the mayhem behind.
“Jesus.” Alpha pants as we start to run now. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
We run faster. She leads me down a corridor and into an elevator. We go down another floor. When we come out, the ceilings are low, the hallways narrow. This part of the house is not so plush. It’s more like a bunker.
“This way.” We can no longer walk side by side in the narrow hallway, so I follow her, her looking back regularly to make sure I’m still there.
“The Guild likes to keep an eye on us, and, more important, lets us know that it’s keeping an eye on us. It sends one or two Whistleblowers. They sit in the back row, listen, and keep an eye on things. This isn’t an illegal gathering. They know about my cause. Usually there’s nothing to worry about,” she says.
“Usually,” I say bitterly. “But you told people I was coming. That I was speaking. And I’ll bet Crevan has introduced a new law against this. He’s going to say you were holding a rally. That I was speaking at a rally.”
She looks at me and swallows. Her look of fear doesn’t do anything to comfort me. “But we’re not doing anything wrong. We’re just sharing our stories. We’re allowed to do that.”
That wasn’t the vibe that I was picking up on as I was encouraged to walk to the stage. It changed from story sharing to a different kind of energy. “The rules have changed,” I say. “Crevan is changing everything now.”
Crevan is scared. He feels his power slipping away. Perhaps he’s heard about the secret committee investigating him, perhaps not, but either way there is enough rising opposition to the Guild among the public and now among the government to make him panic. And on top of that, if I’m right, he’s going to extreme measures to silence the Guild guards and Mr. Berry, if he gets his hands on him. He is panicking.
Alpha stops in the middle of a hallway and lifts a section of the dado rail and inserts a PIN code. “I can assure you, Celestine, that I did not alert them to your presence. I may have told a few people that you’d be here, but I’m not ready to announce you as a friend of the foundation yet.”
“Good,” I snap. “Because, right at this moment, I certainly am not a friend of the foundation; and if you think you’ll be allowed to homeschool me from now on, you better think again. I’m sure this is the last time you and I will ever be allowed in the same room together. I’m surprised they let you in the first place.”
“Like I said, the Guild encourages counseling of the Flawed. They felt that I would be a positive force in your life. That I could stop you from speaking out against them.”
I snort.
“I’ll tell them you were going to share your sob story and persuade them not to make mistakes, that life as a Flawed is miserable, that you weren’t going to glamorize it.”
“I wasn’t going to glamorize it.”
She looks at me in surprise. There’s a beep, and a door that I hadn’t noticed before suddenly opens.
“A secret door?”
“Not secret, just not as clearly marked,” she says defensively, with a sly smile.
Once inside, I find myself in an office. Walnut desk, shelves filled to the brim with books. Leather chairs with gold buttons. Photographs in gold frames covering every inch of the wall. “You’ll be safe here. They don’t know about this room,” she says quickly. “I have to go back and talk to the Whistleblowers, sort this mess out, but I’ll be back with your granddad. Stay here till I return.”
The door closes behind her, and I’m left in the room alone.
FIFTY-NINE
I BEGIN BY looking at the photographs. The same man is in all of them with different people. All formal business photographs of handshakes. Alpha is in some, standing alongside him, and I don’t know who any of the people in the photographs are. I see Alpha and this man in a frame on the desk, and I guess it’s her husband. I don’t know anybody else, but then the more I study the people in the photos, the more I recognize them as being with world leaders. Important men and women whom I see on the news on the rare times I watch the news. And I do recognize one man: Judge Crevan.
Alpha, her husband, Judge Crevan, and his wife. At a garden party, the ladies in summer floral dresses, all with a glass of champagne in their hands, all four of them looking like they’re in the middle of a big laugh, as though somebody had just said something funny. The best of friends. Again, I question Alpha’s motivations. Have I allowed her to sweep me away from the Whistleblowers, thinking she was helping me, and am now a sitting duck?
Another wall reveals a series of framed qualifications and accolades for a Professor
Lambert. I hear a cough behind me and I turn around. Expecting to see a Whistleblower, instead I find a man in a crumpled shirt and jeans standing at yet another door that appeared from nowhere.
“Yes, yes, another secret door. She’s got quite the little rat maze going on down here.” He chuckles. “Bill,” he says, holding out his hand.
He wavers a little as he does this, loses his balance.
As I step closer, I can smell alcohol on his breath. He has gray stubble on his face and looks as though he’s gone a few days sleeping in the same clothes.
“You’re Alpha’s husband,” I say, recognizing him from the photographs.
He chuckles again. “Do you know, there was once a time when she was my wife? Anyway. There was once a time when lots of things were a lot of things. So you’re the one. The One.” He widens his eyes in mock-worship. “She’s been talking about you a great deal.” He studies me and then goes around to his desk and searches through the drawers. It takes him some time, enough for me to study him and the room he has come from. It looks like a kitchen, which no doubt has another door into another room. Why would they have another home buried beneath? In the last drawer he checks, I hear the clink of bottles.
He looks at me in mock-surprise. “Fancy that. Want a drink?”
“We’re not allowed to drink,” I say firmly, noting the branding on his temple.
“Ah, yes.” He chuckles again, and then he whispers, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“The Whistleblowers are upstairs,” I say, astonished by his behavior.
“Oh, yes, the scary whistlers.” He whistles, imitating their sound, and chuckles. “I’m not afraid of them. Are you?” He pours the whiskey into a glass tumbler on a silver tray by the desk and sits down in the leather chair behind the desk. He sinks low.
“I’m afraid of what they’ll do to my granddad.”
“Don’t worry about your granddad. He’s a pro. He’s currently hiding in our morning parlor.” He presses a button under the desk, and the framed photographs disappear to reveal a dozen screens of CCTV images. “Fourth one down, third one in.”
I move closer to the screens and find the room he’s talking about.
“I don’t see anything.”
“See? Told you he was a pro. That bookcase opens; a small, little room; hope he’s not claustrophobic. But he’ll be safe. They won’t find him in there.”
I look at the other screens and see mayhem. People have been lined up; others who rose up against the Whistleblowers are on the ground and have been wounded. Some are being marched out of the building and into vans outside. On one screen I see Alpha standing aside and giving a Whistleblower in charge a firm talking-to.
“Most of them won’t be charged with anything,” he says calmly. “It’s just to scare you all, break it up. And it worked.”
I nod, relieved that Granddad is okay but hoping he’ll be able to hold on until they’re gone.
“What about your tests?” I ask him, curious to know how he gets away with being in his state when he’s Flawed. “Won’t your Whistleblower find traces of alcohol?”
“Us geniuses always pass with flying colors, isn’t that so?” He smiles. “Mathematics is your thing, isn’t it?”
“I hope so.” I don’t know what my job possibilities will be now, now that I’m Flawed. I will never be allowed to rise to any position of power, most likely not as manager, and definitely never any higher.
“You hope.” He makes a face. “No, don’t use hope. Use your mathematics to get out of this so-called problem.”
I frown. He has definitely drunk too much. “I don’t think math can solve any of my problems now.”
“One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’” He looks at me, eyes bright. The quote does more for him than it does for me obviously.
I shrug. “I guess.”
“You guess? Mathematicians don’t guess!” he says dramatically, sitting up. “They make an orderly list, they eliminate possibilities, they use direct reasoning. Never guess, my dear. Are you familiar with George Pólya?”
“Of course.”
“I bought a book of his once. I liked his philosophies. You know he said there are four principles to solving a problem. First, you have to understand the problem. After understanding it, you make a plan, then you carry out the plan, then you look back on your work. If this technique fails, which, of course, it often does, Pólya advised, if you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: Find it.”
I smile.
“Thought you’d like that one.”
“You’re a friend of Judge Crevan’s,” I say.
“I am?” he says, surprised. “Where did you hear that nasty rumor from?”
“The photographs.”
“Oh that.” He waves his hand dismissively. “I can safely say I see none of those people anymore. Apart from her, of course.” He looks at the photo of him and Alpha on the beach, both sun-kissed, him cleanly shaven, looking years younger. “And she probably wishes she was one of them. Does Judge Crevan even have friends, might I ask?”
I like him. “Did you work for the Guild?”
“The Guild? No.” He shakes his head. “The government? Yes. Which the Guild works for, too, I might add, though I think they both forget that fact.” He smiles at me. “She says you don’t ask enough questions. I see you’re getting over that part of it. But be careful, sometimes it’s best not to know, because even when you know, it doesn’t matter anyway. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is often a responsibility nobody wants.” He closes his eyes and lazily leans back in the chair, which tilts under his weight and looks like he’ll fall backward. “She and I don’t agree on that point, of course. Obviously. She always wants to be in the know. She’s got this crusade. I don’t know. Keeps her busy.”
“You don’t believe in her foundation?”
“Foundations are rather wobbly, wouldn’t you agree?” He opens one eye and raises an eyebrow. “If you and I are down here and the rest of them are scrambling around upstairs.” He buries his face in the tumbler again, and the caramel liquid disappears. I actually wish I could join him, from the look of serenity that washes over his face when he’s swallowed it all, but then I think of how Logan forced the beer down my throat and I’m quickly over it.
“He tried to take my house and fortune, you know,” he says. “Crevan. He’s trying to find a way to freeze the assets of the Flawed, take them to fund the Guild. Like they do with criminals. Only we’re not criminals, are we, Celestine?”
I shake my head.
“Good. You remember that. It’s easy to forget sometimes. Though criminals get better treatment than us. As soon as they serve their time, they’re out. We’re like this forever.” This he says without humor. “Did you know Crevan has been paid over one hundred million since the beginning of the Guild? Taxpayers’ money, too. If the public knew that, I think it would be Crevan they boo and hiss in the courtyard and not us. Now, that’s a crime.”
I shake my head, shocked at his earnings.
We leave a silence. I think of the holiday home I stayed in, the yacht we partied on, the elaborate parties, the endless food and drink. I feel sick that it was funded by his crusade to better his own life. Has it been for justice, as he says, or for money?
“So what is she having you do, then?”
I note that he never says Alpha’s name. “I don’t know. She wanted me to come here. She was about to make me speak, but then the Whistleblowers arrived. Thankfully. Didn’t think I’d ever hear myself say that.”
“Not a fan of speeches?”
“Not when I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“They’re the very people who usually love them,” he says, and we laugh again. “Actions speak louder than words, remember that. Not everyone is made for podiums and microphones. I suggest you find a partner, a Flawed one, that’
s best, easier, yes. You can live by the same rules, nice and balanced, two Flawed make perfect. Fall in love. Settle down. Make babies. Cherish them. Live your life.”
“I can’t have a family with a Flawed person.”
“Of course you can; they just say that you may not.”
“That doesn’t sound like an easy life. I thought you said not to cause trouble.”
“Did I say that?” He looks at me again.
I think about it, and then I shake my head.
“No. Indeed. I said actions speak louder than words. Don’t talk about it. Do it. All of them upstairs, her included, though I love her, all they do is talk. You do. That’s why they found you. Will cling to you. Will make you do for them. No. You do for you.” He stands up and comes around the desk to me. He takes my hand and bows theatrically. “Ms. North, a pleasure. You are even more beautiful in the flesh than they describe in the daily rags.”
I smile. “Take care of yourself,” I say gently. “They’ll test you tonight.”
“Indeed, they always do, but there are ways around them. You’ll find that out. Who’s your Whistleblower?”
“Mary May.”
“Oooh.” He winces. “Can’t say I envy you. No way around her. My life shuddered forward again the day she left here. Rattling along like a rusted ghost train, but at least it’s moving. Like I say, look to your strengths, look to your heroes for guidance. I’m a scientist. That helps me.” He salutes and makes his way back to the hidden door. “Don’t tell her that you saw me.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t. It will worry her. She never knows what I’m going to say. Good luck.” He opens the door and, as if remembering something, turns around. I try to see past him into the other room, and when I look in, I freeze in terror.