The Paladin Prophecy (39 page)

“Monsters?” asked Elise skeptically. “That’s laying it on a bit thick.”

“I want to believe you, Will,” said Brooke, wide-eyed and a little shaky. “Do you have any proof of all this?”

“Show them,” said Will to Ajay.

Ajay played back Nando’s phone call on his tablet for them. When it ended, Brooke and Elise looked stunned. No one in the group said anything for a moment. Wood crackled in the fire.

“So basically,” said Elise slowly, as if intrigued by the idea, “everything we know … is wrong.”

“One question, Will,” said Brooke. “Why are they coming after you?”

Will shook his head. “I think that my parents must have known, considering how much we moved around.” He told them how they had ordered him to stay under the radar, how he’d always pulled back in school and in athletics. “Then I aced that test,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for that, my parents might still …”

Brooke scooted over and took his hand. “Whatever’s going on,” she said softly, “I’m really glad you told us. And we’re
all
going to help you.”

Will’s chest tightened; his eyes burned. Elise sat on the other side of him and patted his shoulder. There wasn’t much of his game face left now.

“So it’s all connected,” said Ajay, on his feet, pacing. “The Knights, the locker room, the tunnels to the Crag, and what happened to you back home. Now if we can just find out the reason for all of it.”

Will looked at Elise and when their eyes met, he could swear that he heard her thinking something. Almost as if she’d “pushed” a thought into
his
head.

Ronnie knew about this
.

“I’ll tell you what
I
think,” said Nick, pacing and agitated. “I think that the bastards who did all this to you are in for a prime-time
ass-
kicking—”

“Take it easy, Tarzan,” said Brooke.

Ajay knelt beside Will to look at the bird. “May I examine this later, Will?”

Will nodded. Ajay folded the bird into the towel and picked it up.

“I need to talk to Elise,” Will whispered to Ajay.

“Brooke, come to my room, please,” said Ajay. “I want to show you something. You, too, Nick.”

“What?” snapped Nick, still pacing.

“I need your help,” said Ajay. “In
here
.”

Will caught Ajay’s eye and nodded thanks. As soon as they left, Will sat in front of Elise.

“Tell me,” said Will gently. “What did Ronnie know?”

Elise’s eyes widened. “How did you …?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I’m right, aren’t I? Ronnie knew something about this and he told you.”

Elise put her hands on her temples and rubbed hard, like she was fighting off a migraine. Her fine black hair hung down over her eyes.

“They picked on him relentlessly,” she said. “Todd and Lyle and the rest of them. He was so shy, whining about how homesick he was all the time. We’d decided he was hopeless,
V
for ‘victim’ stamped on his forehead like a license plate. Then he started crushing on me.
Way
beyond awkward. He played the
flute
. He wrote poems, for crying out loud.”

“He wrote them to you?”

She put on a tough face. “ ‘How do you measure the distance traveled by a smile?’ Gag me with a deer rifle, do I seem like the kind of girl who likes
poems
?”

He saw the answer behind the protest in her troubled eyes. “Yeah, you must have hated that.”

“
Please
. We knew he was brilliant, in a dorkus malorkus sort of way. And funny and self-deprecating, and that was … unexpected. He didn’t find his confidence until he started his project in the labs. They even stopped picking on him then. But he never told us what he was working on.”

“Not even you?”

“Why would he tell
me
? It wasn’t like we were
seriously
hooked up. I mean, we spent some time together, and I—” She saw he wasn’t buying it. “Okay, so we got tight. Then something changed a month before end of term. He just cut me off.”

“Why?”

Her jade eyes blazed with pain and anger. “I don’t know. I
tried
to find out. About him or me or what was wrong or
any of it
. And I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this or not, but I’m kind of skilled at finding out what people are feeling.”

Will gulped. “I can see that.”

“But I couldn’t read the faintest signal from Ronnie. Instead of this cute warm goof, an iron curtain came down. And I had told him things about myself … stuff I’d never told anybody. I
trusted
him, and I couldn’t get a
hello
.”

Will had to tread carefully. One wrong word might shut her down again. “So what did Ronnie know, Elise?”

Elise shot a fierce, penetrating stare at him. Will tried to open his mind, let her look inside him if she needed to, show her that he trusted her.

“The last day of term,” she said, “we’re packing to leave for the summer. Ronnie stops me in the quad with this … sweet, openhearted look he used to have for me, so I know it’s
him
and his guard is down and … I caught a glimpse inside.”

She looked away. Will tried to keep eye contact. “What did you see?”

“Something that scared him. Something he’d seen in the labs. Something deep and dark and terrifying that he couldn’t handle.”

“Did he tell you what it was?”

Elise shook her head. “He just hugged me and said that if anything ever happened to him, he’d find a way to tell me … so I’d understand. And then he whispered a question in my ear: ‘Are you awake?’ ”

“Awake?” The word sent a shock through Will; he’d been hearing it a
lot
lately. “What did he mean?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

She looked away, deeply wounded but too proud to cry. Will racked his brain, trying to think what to do. But this wasn’t a
thinking
problem. Then he remembered: #87: MEN WANT COMPANY. WOMEN WANT EMPATHY.

“Did you ever tell Ronnie how you really felt about him?” he asked quietly.

“Of course I didn’t,” she said, twisting her hair.

“And that’s what you’re mad at yourself about.”

“Isn’t that painfully obvious?”

“Kind of.”

“Well it’s
kind of
a stupid question.”

“I guess we all have a game face, don’t we?” asked Will.

Elise’s eyes went soft. She mimed pulling out a knife, then stabbed herself and fell over. Will laughed. A moment later, so did she. Will stood and held out a hand. When he pulled her up, they came face to face.

And suddenly Will couldn’t move. A prism of light from her dazzling eyes shot through him as if he were made of glass. She could have told him, in that moment, to rob a bank or jump off a building and he’d have done it without thinking. He couldn’t break away, and in that moment he didn’t want to.

“I think I might know how Ronnie planned to tell you,” he said. “Come on.”

He took her by the hand and led her to Ajay’s room. When they entered, Brooke looked up from the desk and saw them holding hands. Elise didn’t notice, but Will felt like he’d been caught pickpocketing. He let go. Brooke quickly looked away.

Nick had set up chairs for everyone. Elise sat beside Ajay in front of the animated mountain image on the enlarged screen. In the half hour since they’d started, the syn-apps had climbed all the way to the top of the rocks onto a narrow ledge above the tallest waterfall. The figures waved to Will and Elise as they came closer.

“What is this?” asked Elise.

“This image was on a flash drive Ronnie hid in his room,” said Will. “I found it this morning.”

“I hacked our syn-apps into it,” said Ajay. “We think Ronnie hid something in the file; the syn-apps have been trying to uncover it. Zoom in.”

The point of view zoomed in on the ledge where the two figures stood.

“Go on now,” said Ajay to the figures. “Follow the path.”

The two syn-apps worked around the corner. As they made the turn, the image opened into a peaceful green glade. Sprays of colorful wildflowers dotted long grass swaying in the breeze. A still pond sat in front of a pagoda-like structure built into the face of a sheer rock wall.

“What is this place supposed to be?” asked Elise.

“I’ve been telling ’em all along,” said Nick. “They’re in
Shangri-la
.”

The figures walked across a bamboo bridge that spanned the pond, where sparkling, jewel-like white and golden koi swam lazily. They climbed the stairs toward the pagoda’s imposing double doors. The doors opened and two human figures in long white coats stepped out before them. The doors closed.

“Who are those guys?” asked Will.

“They look like doctors,” said Brooke.

“So go inside,” said Elise.

“Let’s try,” said Will. Then, to their doubles, “Enter.”

But as the syn-apps advanced, the doctors locked arms and blocked the doors. Each time they moved, the doctors moved in their way.

“Losers,” said Nick. “Do I need to jump in there and kick their butts
for
you? Let me get my munchkin—”

“Sit down and shut up,” said Brooke.

“Read his passage from the yearbook again,” said Ajay.

Will picked up the book from the desk: “ ‘Embrace paradox. Look for patterns. Beethoven holds the key but doesn’t know it yet. Hiding inside your Shangri-la you might find the Gates of Hell.’ ”

“Ronnie wrote that,” said Elise.

“Yes,” said Will.

“We think he built all of this,” Ajay said. “That it’s like one of his games.”

“It’s more than a game.” Elise leaned closer to the screen. “This was how he saw the world: a maze of interlocking mysteries. If you solve this puzzle, you unlock the next one and eventually reach the heart of things.”

“Where he hid what he wanted to tell you,” said Will.

“Maybe,” said Elise, studying the passage in the yearbook.

“So this is his version of an extremely elaborate password,” said Brooke.

“I keep telling you,” said Nick, biting a nail. “Type in Shangri
-la
.”

“Your contribution has been duly noted,” said Ajay.

Elise looked up sharply. “Tell them to hug those two figures on the porch.”

“That’s limp,” said Nick.

“Do you want my help or not?” said Elise.

Ajay and Will looked at each other, shrugged, then both said, “Hug them.”

Their syn-apps looked at each other, shrugged, then walked toward the figures at the door with their arms outstretched. The figures in white looked at each other, then stepped forward and allowed themselves to be hugged by the syn-apps.

The doors behind the doctors immediately swung open. The figures in white stepped back, bowed, and faded away.

“Embrace the ‘pair-o-docs,’ ” said Will.

“Now you’re starting to get it,” said Elise.

“ROTFLMAO,” said Nick, his jaw hanging open.

“You are
not
rolling on the floor laughing your ass off,” said Ajay.

“I am on the inside.”

“Tell them to go in,” said Elise.

They did and their doubles walked into the building. The walls faded away and the small figures entered a vast empty gray space. Near them, a sharp circle of blinding white light snapped on from high overhead. More circular beams appeared, polka-dotting the space with a rainbow of colors as far as they could see.

The syn-apps stepped into the first white circle. Without warning, all of the floor untouched by light dropped away. Only the colored circles remained. The circles were now the tops of tall round columns that rose out of a bottomless void.

“Uh,” said Will, unnerved. “What happens if our syn-apps die?”

“My guess is that if we die, we’ll lose access to the program,” said Ajay.

“Ronnie probably rigged it to self-destruct,” said Elise. “To protect whatever he hid in here. We have one shot at this.”

“What did he write next?” said Brooke, picking up the yearbook.

“Hope it wasn’t ‘Plunge to a meaningless death,’ ” said Nick.

“ ‘Look for patterns,’ ” read Brooke.

“What patterns?” asked Nick.

The circles began blinking on and off, one color at a time. Each of the seven colors corresponded to a single loud tone that repeated with each blink, until the whole space filled with cacophonous music. The syn-apps covered their ears.

“How does this work?” asked Ajay. “What should we do?”

Elise closed her eyes and listened closely. “It’s a Phrygian scale. The fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale.”

“How do you know that?” asked Nick.

“Because I
told
him about it,” said Elise, scowling. “You need to jump to the color that corresponds to the next note in the scale.” Elise struggled to concentrate; the music was nearly deafening.

“Blue,” she said.

The two syn-apps hopped from their column to the closest blue circle. As they landed, every other blue column crumbled and fell out of sight. The “blue” notes disappeared with them, slightly simplifying the music.

“What’s next?” asked Ajay.

Elise concentrated, then said, “Purple.”

The syn-apps jumped to a purple circle, and the rest of the purple columns collapsed. Then all the columns, including the one they were standing on, began rising up and down like titanic pistons, making further leaps infinitely more dangerous.

“Now red,” said Elise.

The syn-apps waited until the nearest red column rumbled up out of the darkness, timing their jump to land on it as it rocketed past them. The rest of the red columns disintegrated.

In addition to rising and falling, the columns began moving horizontally, sweeping rapidly from side to side. The syn-apps struggled to stay on top, clinging to each other as their red column whipped around.

“It’s like some kind of insane carousel,” said Brooke.

“What’s next?” asked Will.

Three colors remained: orange, yellow, and green. “Orange,” said Elise. “Will” and “Ajay” had to wait longer for an orange column to pass, and then made the leap together. Will landed cleanly, but Ajay stubbed a foot on the edge and nearly fell backward. Will grabbed his belt and hauled him to safety as the pillar whirled around.