Rudy and William came around the corner. They saw the two agents and stopped.
“Sir, I apologize,” Zebulon told Rudy, “but your new lab rat is going to have to come with us. Petition through channels if you want him back, but we can’t make any promises.”
Rudy stared at him in surprise. “You—you know who I am.”
“Yes, sir, you’re a lab deputy, about to become a lab head, and we have plenty of respect for that. We’re willing to believe that you didn’t know the identity of this young felon. Now please stand back, and don’t tell us anything we don’t want to hear. Come on, kiddo.”
The first thing Martin saw when they hoisted him into the packet car was the glass candy dish he had given Mom. He turned and head-butted Abel.
“Where did you get that?” he howled. “It isn’t yours!”
Abel held him off. “Settle down, kid. We’ve got more than that to show you.”
Zebulon pushed past Martin. He flopped Chip’s silver pancake onto the tightly looped green carpet of the car. Then he slashed into the gel with a pocketknife.
“What are you doing?” cried Martin, writhing and kicking, while Abel held him back.
“A little bot surgery.” Zebulon plunged his fingers into the slice and rooted around on the circuit board. “There it is,” he announced as he withdrew a little gray chip. “Dr. Granville was right. It pops right off.”
Martin kicked him in the leg. “Murderer!” he wailed.
Zebulon jumped to his feet and brandished the chip. “The patient is resting comfy. But he’s not going to fool bots anymore. His days of being an Ursula are over.”
Before Martin could react, Zebulon yanked him past Chip’s rubbery pancake and pulled open an inner door.
“Check out your new home, kid. We’ve got our own television in here, and a show you won’t want to miss.”
The second room was smaller than the first. Painted an ugly gray and carpeted with the same pea green loops, it held no furniture beyond the modest television that hung from a bracket in the corner. The gray walls were battered, and metal rings protruded from them at various heights. Zebulon pushed Martin down into a sitting position and snapped his handcuffs into one of the rings.
“Now take a look at this,” he said as he stepped over Martin’s feet. “There’s a new game show on. It’s called Break Out, and the fun thing is, its contestants don’t know they’re on a show. They think they’re getting rescued, and their little band of buddies is trying to fight its way out of the complex.”
“It’s all people can talk about right now,” Abel said, stopping in the doorway. “Even though members of the band die every day, the audience loves the whole theme of hope. And there’s a couple of characters who’ve gotten really popular. Everybody says they’re so cute together.”
Zebulon clicked on the television. But he didn’t watch it. He was watching Martin’s face.
The set of the new show was dim and full of dramatic shadows. A soft light came from the walls themselves, checkerboards of large square plastic panels. Many of the squares were as dark as black glass, but others were backlit in gentle pastel colors, so slick and smooth that they reminded Martin of hard candy: cherry, green apple, orange, lemon, grape, blue raspberry. Their multihued light was faint, and it cast a changeable twilight on the faces of two people walking by.
The man’s voice was low and gruff. “Do you think we’ll make it out of here?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said tremulously. “But I’m not sorry. I’m not! I’m just glad to be here with you.”
The colored lights of the panels washed across their faces as they walked, one second crimson, the next second purple. It leant a surreal quality to them, as if they had never been part of real life, but had lived their lives as extras in a late-night movie. “Oh, Tris,” the man groaned. He stopped to wipe his eyes, and the woman clasped him in a fierce embrace. They kissed in a nimbus of golden light.
The broadcast stopped. The two people froze in midkiss. Zebulon stepped in front of the television set.
“Well, kid? What do you think?”
Martin could manage no more than a whisper. “They’re my . . . parents?”
Zebulon nodded. “And I think you care about what happens to them. So I think you’re going to tell us what we need to know. Who gave you that bot? What were you supposed to do with it?”
Rudy pushed his way into the inner room. Behind him, Martin glimpsed William’s frightened face.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Rudy said. “I can swear to that.”
“Sir! We’re going to have to ask you to leave,” Zebulon told him, but Rudy donned one of his charming smiles.
“You were listening in on my consultation with Dr. Granville,” he pointed out. “So you know I’m the one who said I knew what was going on. You’re in over your head, and I want to help you. I know Director Montgomery well.”
Abel glanced sidelong at Zebulon. Zebulon frowned at the carpet. “Okay, sir, we’re listening,” he said.
“That Alldog bot is a decoy. A fake. A trap.”
“For what purpose?”
Rudy’s smile grew broader. “To trap the two of you.”
Martin thought the agents would laugh at this, but they didn’t. Abel’s watery eyes grew solemn.
“Think it through,” Rudy said. “You know the Secretary likes to execute agents regularly. It deters anyone who might want to make trouble, and the Secretary views the deterrence of crime as part of an agent’s job. Now, it’s been a number of months since the last showcase execution, when Xantham went to his sticky end—”
“Yorick,” Abel interrupted in a quivering voice. “You’re forgetting about him.”
“Ah! Yorick. Quite right, thank you. But that was some time ago—”
“Five months.”
“—and the Secretary needs to maintain discipline. So he takes some no-name politician offline, wraps him up in a dog suit, and tosses him in the suburbs to be the toy of a random child. When odd things start happening, he pretends to know nothing about it, and an Agency investigation starts.”
“That’s what we were told. . . .”
“Now, your boss, Montgomery, is no fool. He needs to know if there’s something the Secretary doesn’t know, but he also knows the Secretary knows everything. So, to hedge his bets, he gives the job to his youngest, most inexperienced team.”
“Us,” muttered Zebulon. “Damn!”
“You’re expendable,” Rudy reminded him. “If you turn up something exciting, great. If you’re caught snooping behind the Secretary’s back, Montgomery hasn’t wasted too much manpower. As things stand, you can’t win. You’re chasing the perfect decoys: a kid who’s really just a kid—you know that already—and a dog who seems very important, but when his chips are down, turns out to be nothing but a fake.”
“I told you!” Abel said. His voice had gone high and thin. “I said somebody had bugged us. Remember? I’m the one who knew about the bugs.”
“Congratulations,” Zebulon sneered. “You ought to be an agent!”
Rudy held up a hand to stop the fight.
“But fortunately for you two, you ran into me,” he said. “I can save your lives. I can do even better than that. I can turn you into heroes.”
The eyes of the two agents locked onto Rudy’s face. “How?” prompted Zebulon.
“You can start negotiations between me and the Secretary of State,” Rudy said. “I’m ready to bring in the Wonder Babies.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Abel gawked, his little mouth hanging open. He looked more like a fish than ever. Zebulon kept his mouth shut and fought to keep the surprise out of his voice. “I’d appreciate it, sir, if you’d step back this way,” he said. “I need to consult my console about this.”
“Of course,” Rudy said, and they exited the room.
Martin was left to stare at the frozen kiss on the television set. He could barely swallow around the lump in his throat. Everythi
ng had gone wrong—horribly, completely wrong—for Cassie, for Mom and Dad . . . even for Chip. And he didn’t think things were looking too good for him, either.
The door slammed shut. The battered gray walls surrounded him. His prison was complete.
After a few minutes, the packet car began to move. Martin could feel its slow acceleration as it eased out of the green glass building. He imagined the mantis lady watching it go from behind her granite countertop, waving her elongated fingers good-bye. It rolled along at a modest speed for five minutes or so. Then it made a tight turn to the left. Unable to brace himself with his hands trapped behind his back, Martin slid over onto his side. His blanket helped push him upright again.
Now that the packet was on the main line, it picked up speed. Martin rocked back and forth. His head bumped against the wall. All he could see was Mom and Dad on the television screen. Even when he looked away, he could see them.
A little while later, the door opened, and Abel stuck his head in. “How are you doing in here?” he asked. Martin stared at him. It wasn’t so much the question as how Abel said it. He asked as if he actually cared.
“I’m okay,” Martin muttered.
“Listen, the judges have just convicted you of a bunch of things.”
“Judges?” Martin said. “What judges? What things? What did I do?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Abel said with a trace of impatience. “What matters is that it’s my duty to inform you: this conviction carries an automatic penalty of death.”
Martin glanced at his parents’ kiss. “A game show?” he asked.
Abel scuffed the toe of his shoe along the carpet. “I wish,” he said. “Unfortunately, the Secretary took an interest in your case. He says he has . . . um . . . something in mind.”
This news would have been bad enough, but the sympathy in Abel’s eyes made Martin’s stomach tingle. He wanted to say something brave. Maybe if he’d had Chip beside him, he would have. As it was, he found he couldn’t speak.
“So, can I get you a soda or something?” Abel asked.
Martin shifted against his handcuffs and wriggled his fingers. “Can’t drink it,” he said hoarsely.
“Oh yeah. Tell you what, we’ll lock those in the front.” Abel bent down and unhooked him from the wall, then unlatched the handcuffs and brought his arms around by his sides. “Oh, ‘scuse me, they’re sore, huh? Well this’ll help, anyway.”
Abel brought him a soda and opened it for him, and Martin took a sip. It tasted so normal that it made him feel a little better.
“What about my parents?” he asked. “We cooperated and all. Can you at least get them off the hook?”
“Afraid not,” Abel admitted. “We were just bluffing. We can’t change their conviction either.”
Abel went back to the controls, but he left the door open. William wandered in.
“I’m really sorry,” she said.
“Yeah,” Martin muttered.
He expected her to leave, but she didn’t. She stood in the little room and looked around. She stared at the still television picture for a second or two.
“Do you want company?” she asked. “We used to do this in the lab, you know—sit with the ones about to take a big test.”
Martin didn’t see what taking a test had to do with getting executed, but he nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
She sat down a couple of feet from him, with her back to the wall and her knees pulled up to her chest. “Rudy tried to get them to change your sentence,” she said. “He wouldn’t let it go. Dr. Granville even argued for you.”
Martin wanted to say something casual about that, but he didn’t feel casual, so he wound up saying nothing. He set down his soda can and twisted his fingers to poke at the handcuff catch. His blanket wrapped itself under the handcuffs and tried to pull them open, but it only succeeded in fraying its fabric.
“You know, if Chip was here, he’d get me right out of these,” he said. “Well, maybe not anymore.”
William looked at the handcuffs. “I think he still would.”
“I dunno,” Martin said unhappily. “He’s just a fake.”
William hesitated. She glanced toward the door. “I don’t get that,” she said in a low voice. “Think about what Rudy said before, in the office: ‘Who gives a bot a vacation?’ And then he said he had a plan.”
“What is it?” Martin whispered.
“I don’t know,” William murmured. “I can’t figure it out. I’m smarter than Rudy, but he has more life experience. It shouldn’t matter so much, but it does.”
She got up and pressed buttons on the television. The kiss ended. Martin’s parents spoke again, but the sound was too low now to hear them.
William sat down, and they watched for a while in silence. More people joined Mom and Dad, moving back and forth, collecting weapons and dragging supplies. How can they not know they’re on a game show? Martin thought sadly. They’re all wearing the same style of stretch pants and tops, just in different shades of green and tan.
“I haven’t found Theo,” he said. “I’ve been trying to spot her.”
“She’s not there. The agents picked up your parents before Theo left. Is that your mother? She’s very pretty.”
Martin stared at the people drifting by on the television set. How was it that he had never seen before how pretty Mom was, or how her slender figure radiated grace? How had he missed seeing the sadness and dignity stamped across Dad’s commonplace features? They had given Dad a better haircut, it was true, and his comfortable pot had melted away during the trials of the week. Mom didn’t ordinarily wear suchbody-hugging apparel. Could these cosmetic touches make such a difference?
How had Martin missed seeing how much in love his parents were? Or had they always been so much in love? Was it the television set that managed to produce this miraculous transformation? That same television, at home, had come between them. They were always looking at it instead of each other. Now it brought its fairy-tale touch to their every gesture. It turned their workaday marriage into magic.
Before you die, you’re a television star, Dad had said. He hadn’t known how right he was.
“I don’t think I wanna watch anymore,” Martin said. “It’s making me feel all sad.” So William got up and turned it off.
They sat in silence. Martin tried not to think about where they were headed. He thought about William instead. The orange foam dust still covered her T-shirt and jeans, and Dr. Granville’s park bench transport had whipped her brown hair into tangles. Martin liked that. She looked more ordinary now, less like a perfect supergirl.
“Who was Emilia?” he asked.
William frowned. “Why?”
“I just wondered. Rudy brought up Emilia, and that got you all upset.”
“Emilia and I were in the same study,” she said. “It was a superiority study, like Rudy’s days in the Wonder Baby trial. They say there were thirty of us to start with, but I only remember a few of them.”
“What happened to the other kids?” Martin asked. William didn’t answer.
“Since we were in the same study, we bunked in the same room and had the same classes. She was my best friend. I always loved her name, Emilia. It sounds so pretty. Don’t you think Emilia is a beautiful name?”
“I don’t know,” Martin said. “It’s a little frilly.”
“Emilia and I used to cheat on tests,” William said. “We were really good at it.”
“David and I cheated on tests,” Martin said. “We used to pass notes.”
William glanced at him. “You couldn’t learn our system. It was too complicated. It involved eye movements, eyelash flickers, and changes in hand position. You could stand right between us and not know what we were doing.”
“David and I stuck gum to candy wrappers and wrote in them with our fingernails.”
“That sounds disgusting.”
“I guess it was.”
They fell silent again. Too bad I can’t tell David about the Sec
retary, Martin thought with dreary pride. All he’s managed to do is tick off the principal.
“So the scientist guys didn’t know you were cheating?” he asked.
“Oh, they knew what was going on,” William replied. “They just couldn’t understand how we did it. They wasted several months studying our signals.”
She paused again. She takes a lot of big breaths, Martin thought. It’s like she’s running a marathon.
“But they got tired of that, and our study had gone over budget, so they put us in separate rooms and gave us a test. It covered everything we had studied, from chemistry to music theory.”
William spread her hands and looked at them. Then she laced her fingers together. “I knew Emilia couldn’t get a score as high as mine. I knew she wasn’t as smart as I was, though she was smarter than Rudy—much smarter than you,” and her glance carried resentment, as if Martin should have been the one in the other room. “I sat there and I cried. I sweated so much, my fingers slipped off the keys, and I thought my handheld was going to short out. I knew if I marked things wrong, that was the only way Emilia stood a chance. I had to miss answers on purpose.”
She clenched her hands together tightly, and Martin saw that they were shaking.
“But I didn’t do it. I did it the other way around. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I agonized over the problems I couldn’t solve until I got every single answer right.”
Martin waited, but she didn’t go on. “So what happened next?” he asked.
“Nothing,” William said. “I finished the test and came out of my room, and the scientists declared the study over. My designer hugged me and told me he’d always had faith in me, and I never saw Emilia again.”
“You mean—he killed her? That same guy who hugged you—he killed your best friend?”
“It’s for a good cause,” she protested in a miserable voice. “I’m the prototype. Superior. I’m supposed to advance the human race.”