“The Black Caps,” whispered Will. “The Knights.”
“The latest in a long line of strong men and women with weak minds,” said Dave. “For hundreds of years, the Old Ones have corrupted them with gifts of aphotic technology, ideas and inventions that make them worldly fortunes. That’s how they turn them against their own kind. And with every betrayal, the Other Team moves closer to breaking through and regaining control of Earth.”
The bright light and visions ended abruptly, withdrawing into the black dice. Dave stuck the cube back in his pocket and walked through the other side of the MRI machine.
“Okay, fine,” said Will. “But what do they want with me? I’m nobody. I’m just a kid. I have nothing to do with this—”
“That’s where you’re wrong, mate,” said Dave, leaning in. “Turns out they’ve got a bloody good reason that was in front of us this whole time.”
“Which is …?”
“You’re one of us,” said Dave. “What we call an Initiate. A member of the Hierarchy.”
Will’s mind froze. He couldn’t even respond.
“Think about it, Will. All those nasty bits sent across to take you out, all this relentless pursuit. There’s big doings in store for you before you’re home and hosed, my friend.”
“That’s why you’re here? To protect me because I’m an … an …”
“Initiate,” said Dave. “And the baddies know that once you’re in training, as your case officer I can only intervene a limited number of times—”
“Training? What training? I haven’t started any training—”
“Don’t be thick, mate. The Hierarchy doesn’t hand out Level Twelve security clearances like raffle tickets. You’ve started whether you know it or not—”
“Don’t I have any say in this?”
“Not anymore,” said Dave. “And as an Initiate, there’s two rules you need to mind. One, you’re now bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. Don’t even tell your pals about the Hierarchy, and beyond them, I wouldn’t trust another living soul at this point.”
Will glimpsed a flash of the avenging angel in Dave’s eye. “What’s the second rule?”
“Stay alive,” said Dave. “During your probationary period, I’m allowed to save your bacon nine times. And since we’re nearly halfway through your allocation, you’d best learn how to look after yourself, and fast.”
“But we’re not ‘nearly halfway,’ ” Will protested. “We’re only at three; that’s a third of the way—”
“Not anymore.” Dave held up four fingers and drew his long hybrid sidearm from its shoulder holster.
The lights went out.
BATTLEFIELD CONDITIONS
The computers and monitors in the lab and observation room went down with a dying thump. Kujawa hammered on the keyboard of his control panel.
“Another power failure?” asked Dr. Geist.
“Apparently so,” said Kujawa.
“Is everything backed up? We can’t lose this data.”
Robbins spoke into the mic. “Will? Will, can you hear me?”
Will opened his eyes. Only a dim gray glow from the window on the far side of the room penetrated the depths of the machine.
His body was pinned above the knees. Will choked back the impulse to flail around. He flexed and extended his feet, gripped the edges of the sled and dragged himself toward the opening. The pad on the sled bunched up beneath him, making progress nearly impossible. Within seconds he was drenched with sweat.
He heard a door swing open behind him on the other side of the machine. Not the one to the control room. A door he hadn’t noticed before.
Will closed his eyes and called up that grid into his mind’s eye. It fanned open and a sensory image of the room appeared all around him. He found the door, leading to a back staircase. He saw a tall, stooped figure standing on the threshold, holding a long tube in its hands. He heard a vacuum seal being broken.
Lyle.
When that familiar nauseating odor reached him, it became much harder to hold on to anything like calm or sanity. A bright light exploded as Dave fired toward the front of the machine. Another beam shot across the room …
… toward long thin forms skittering across the floor with the sickening patter of a thousand feet. Dave retreated and kept firing, but there were too many, more than a dozen, and they were moving too fast. The things leaped onto the sled, bodies coiling with squishy plops around Will’s ankles. He felt vicious rows of serrated teeth all along the length of their moist bodies. Will kicked frantically with his limited range of motion but he couldn’t shake them off.
He opened his eyes as they crawled into the cramped cavity of the tube and saw them in the dim light, sliding over his thighs and hips, inching toward his upper body. They looked like three-foot-long flat worms crossed with millipedes, and they were heading for his face.
Will sensed Lyle’s image pulse in the darkness beyond the door, sickness, pain, and rage radiating from his malignant form. Will “saw” him draw up and fire a thudding hammer blow from his twisted mind, aimed straight at his. If it landed, Will knew he’d have no chance; by the time these crawlies choked him, they’d be strangling a senseless shell.
Time slowed to a moment of nuclear focus. Will closed his eyes and searched with his mind for the largest nearby object he could find: Just outside the big picture window, he “saw” what looked like a tall, bare tree. Will hooked into it and yanked it toward him with all he had. There was a bright flash and a tremendous explosion of breaking glass as air pressure in the room plummeted. Wind and frigid cold reached his legs.
“We’ve got to get him out of there,” said Robbins in the darkness of the control room. She felt her way to the door.
At the moment Robbins opened the door from the observation room, a blinding flash of electricity arced across the length of the lab. A dark mass flew out of the storm toward the picture window and crashed through the glass, shattering it. A blast of snow and howling wind knocked Robbins back against the wall. At first she couldn’t make sense of this incongruent object thrusting into the room. Then she recognized its shape.
It was a telephone pole.
The shock of the explosion broke Lyle’s concentration. His killshot dissolved before it reached Will. Lyle turned and scurried down the stairs, but his creatures crawled closer, four of them slithering over Will’s chest, closing in on his face. Screaming with super-human effort, Will gripped the sides of the sled and pushed a blank mind picture at the back of the tube behind him. With a wrenching crack, the sled’s armature gave way.
The sled shot out of the machine and hurtled across the room. Will rolled off toward the ground, slapping the worms away as he fell. He landed, turned, and saw Dave standing his ground, a still figure in whirling snow. It was snowing inside. Dave fanned the hammer of his gun, blasting the last of the worms. They exploded, clots of green acid splattering the sides of the MRI machine.
The lights came back on in the lab, ceiling fixtures swinging in the wind. A telephone pole jutted through the picture window, trailing torn cables like broken puppet strings. Dave was gone.
Will saw Lillian Robbins on the ground, near where the sled had hit the wall, staring at him. Power kicked back into the pole and electrified the loose black cables dangling around it. They arced and danced on the ground, thrashing in Robbins’s direction, inches from striking her.
Will scrambled to his feet. Without thinking, he created a mind picture that reached out and grabbed the lines like an unseen hand gripping a cluster of venomous snakes. Manipulating the picture, he coiled the sizzling lines back around the downed pole, where they landed and sparked against a transformer box before shorting out and dying.
Robbins rose to her knees. Geist and Kujawa rushed into the lab and helped her to her feet. All three of them looked at Will. He was shivering in just his running shoes and shorts, thick snow swirling around him. Fried electrodes dropped off his torso like burned buttons.
?
??Are you … all right?” Robbins asked.
“I think so,” said Will. “What happened?”
“The power went out and that pole came … through the window,” said Geist.
“Freak gust of wind,” said Kujawa.
“Had to be,” said Geist, out of breath. “Macroburst, or a wind shear …”
“Some kind of electrical explosion,” said Kujawa.
They looked at him, and Will thought, briefly, about telling them, Well, when I’m about to die, apparently I can move things with my mind. He turned and saw the rest of the lab, much of it ravaged and smoking from the acidic explosions, including big sections of the MRI machine’s shell.
Then he remembered Dave’s warning about their confidentiality agreement.
“Rotten luck with the machines today, Doc,” said Will.
Kujawa nodded, speechless. No one spoke. Wind whipped around the room, and as his adrenaline subsided, the cold hit Will like an anvil. Kujawa hustled him into an empty ward and wrapped him in blankets while he checked his vitals. Will showed no serious ill effects and warmed quickly, although he felt weak and dizzy. But he knew the reason for that, and he wasn’t about to tell them about it.
A crowd gathered outside when the fire department showed up. Will heard them calling for a construction crane to remove the pole from the third floor. Will had just finished dressing when Lillian Robbins came back into the ward.
“I’ve paged your roommates,” said Robbins. “You can leave with them when they get here.”
“Okay,” said Will, tying his boots.
“Your parents are scheduled to arrive at four,” said Robbins, “but the storm’s diverted them north to Madison. Mr. McBride will drive them down in time for dinner. I’ve made a reservation in the faculty dining room. Mr. Rourke will join us as well.”
“I’d like to bring Brooke,” said Will. “If that’s all right.”
Robbins scrutinized him. “That would be fine.”
Will saw a look on Robbins’s face that he’d noticed before. Studying him, quizzical, deep in thought.
“Anything show up on the brain test?” asked Will. “I mean, before the whole lab blew up?”
“I’m not a neurologist. The doctors should go over this with you.”
Will felt a cold rush up his spine. “So you did see something.”
She studied him again. “Were you talking to yourself, Will?”
“Talking? Absolutely,” said Will. “Could you hear me?”
“Not clearly enough to know what you were saying.”
“You were right,” said Will. “That tube put the zap on my head, so I just kept blabbing, ‘You’re fine; you’re okay; don’t think about where you are.’ ”
“Were any voices … talking back to you?” she asked.
Will waited a beat before responding. “Did you hear any?”
“I didn’t hear anything.” She frowned and held his eyes. “We saw profound levels of activity in an area of your brain often identified with visual, aural, and sometimes even olfactory hallucinations.”
“So you heard me yakking nonstop,” said Will, trying to defuse her inquiry with a joke, “and thought I was helping a leprechaun look for his Lucky Charms.”
Robbins’s patience frayed. “Will, we have real cause for concern because you’ve been under such extraordinary stress. I’m told you’ve also had conflicts with some other students—”
Hearing that, Will realized how he could tell part of the story in a way she might be able to understand and respond to. “And I’m the new kid, so they think I’ll keep my mouth shut. I should just be happy to be here, right? Well, I won’t keep quiet about it any longer.”
“About what?”
Careful how you frame this.
“There’s a group of students here,” said Will. “Seniors. They belong to a kind of club, or secret society, and they goof it up with rituals and masks that make the whole thing seem harmless. They’re called the Knights of Charlemagne.”
He thought by her reaction that she might have heard the name before.
“But it’s not harmless,” said Will. “It’s a cover for abusing younger kids. New kids or weaker kids or ones who don’t fit in, and this goes way beyond bullying. They single these kids out and terrorize them.”
“If this is true,” asked Robbins, “why haven’t I heard about it before?”
“Because they’re smart about who they target,” said Will. “Because they shut them up with threats. The kids they go after are petrified. And I know for a fact one of them was Ronnie Murso. They might even have something to do with his disappearance.”
That lit an angry fire in Robbins’s eyes, but she worked to keep a handle on it. “I’ll take this straight to the headmaster. Do you have any names of the people responsible?”
“Lyle Ogilvy,” said Will.
“Anyone else?”
“Not that I’m sure about. But you can definitely start with him.”
Robbins kept quiet, calculating. “Do your roommates know about this?”
#45: COOPERATE WITH THE AUTHORITIES. BUT DON’T NAME FRIENDS.
Will heard voices in the hallway. It sounded like it might be Ajay and Nick. “I don’t want to get anybody else involved.”
“Dude, check out the freakin’ pole in the lab! That’s awesome!”
Yep, Nick.
“I’ll accept that answer on one condition,” said Robbins coldly. “Your parents will be staying as Mr. Rourke’s guests at Stone House. Take the rest of the day to collect your thoughts about what you’ve just told me. You’re going to give me every last detail you know about this by tonight. A complete and thorough account—”
“But—”
“Or I’ll have no choice but to immediately expel you from the Center. You’ll leave tomorrow. With your parents. For good.”
She stared straight at him, her violet eyes hard and unwavering. She wasn’t bluffing.
INSTANT MESSAGE
Robbins left the ward and moments later Nick and Ajay trundled in, regarding Will with more than a little awe.
“So are the rumors true, Will?” asked Ajay. “They’re saying you nearly got hit by that flying telephone pole!”
“Well, let’s just say I was in the room at the time,” said Will.
“Dude, no way, that had to be ill,” said Nick, giving Will a fist bump.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Will quietly, leading them out the door. “I told Robbins we’d meet her in the lobby. I want to look for something first.”
Will led them through the lab where the rescue crews were working and snuck out the door that led to the back stairs. They went down the empty, echoing stairwell to the second floor.
“What are we looking for?” asked Ajay.
“Evidence,” said Will.
“Of what?” asked Nick.
Will opened a utility closet, flicked on a light, and started searching. There were brooms, mops, and cleaning supplies on shelves. Stashed in a recycling bin, Will found what he was looking for: a long black mesh metal box the size of a baguette.
“Lyle tried to kill me,” said Will. He used a rag to lift out the box. “With what was in this.”
“Dude, oh my God … Lyle sicced his ferrets on you?!”
“Not ferrets,” said Will. “Worms, crossed with centipedes as long as this box, that bled acid. They crawled up my body when I was in the MRI machine.”
“I may vomit,” said Ajay, leaning against a wall.
“Did anybody else see ’em?” asked Nick.
“No. Not a word to anybody,” said Will as he slipped the box into a plastic trash bag. Nick slung it over his shoulder as they hurried down to the lobby.
They found Robbins huddled near the front doors with Eloni and a woman who looked like his female twin. Eloni introduced her as his cousin Tika.
“Eloni will drive you back to Greenwood,” said Robbins. “I want you in your quarters for the rest of the day, Will. I’ll pick you up myself
once your parents arrive. Call me immediately if anything else occurs to you.” She gave Will one last stern look.
The boys followed Eloni and Tika out to a dark blue Ford Flex, parked and idling outside. Snow was still falling heavily. They climbed in and Eloni took the wheel. No one spoke on the ride to Greenwood Hall. They parked in front; Eloni and Tika walked them inside.
Eloni stopped and knocked on Lyle’s door; Nick and Will exchanged an anxious look. When there was no answer, Eloni gave Tika an order in their native language. She went inside and opened the inner door. A moment later she came back and shook her head.
“Stay here,” said Eloni to her, and then to the boys, in a no-messing-around voice, he said, “Upstairs. Now.”
“You looking for Lyle, Eloni?” asked Nick.
“You could say that,” he said.
Once on the third floor, he followed them into the pod and checked each bedroom. Brooke’s and Elise’s rooms were empty.
“I’ll be just outside if you need me,” said Eloni, heading for the door. He closed the door, and his heavy footsteps padded into the hall.
“So the school’s put out an APB on Lyle?” asked Nick.
“I said just enough to get them interested,” said Will.
Ajay put an eye to the peephole and saw Eloni outside, arms folded, standing guard. “He’s planted,” said Ajay. “Like a potted palm.”
“We need to work fast,” said Will. “Have you seen Brooke or Elise?”
“Not since this morning,” said Nick.
“Robbins said she paged them when she called you guys, so they’re probably on their way. Try them again, Nick, just to be sure.”
Nick picked up the phone and asked the operator to page both girls.
“Ajay, is it safe to use our tablets?” asked Will.
“As safe as I can make them. I’ve got something else to show you as well.”
“Meet in your room,” said Will, heading for his. “Two minutes.”
As Will entered, his tablet turned on. His syn-app stood on-screen, waiting. He looked more lifelike now, fleshed out with detail, and even more unsettling.