The Walls Have Eyes (13 page)

“No, sir.”

“Would you like to know how I got to be three times your age? By worrying when I didn't need to worry. Would you like to know how many assassination plots I've survived? Twenty-seven. One of them involved poisoned socks.”

“Um . . . yes, sir.”

“And would you like to know how many agents I've had to execute for involvement in those plots? Thirty-eight agents, Agent. Two agents from the L batch, eight agents from the O batch, six agents from the Q batch (the names those men had!), four agents from the S batch, ten agents from the V batch, one W, six Xs, and one Y. Did you by any chance know the man from the Y batch, Agent?”

Abel gulped. “Yorick. Yes, sir. I remember him.”

“Go on remembering him,” the Secretary advised. “It'll keep you out of trouble. And now, both of you, get out of the way.”

The agents moved back. Martin jumped. The Secretary was staring right at him. His gaze made Principal Thomasson's stare seem soppily sentimental.

“Young man! Do you by any chance have a name?”

“Yes . . . um . . . sir.”

Martin paused. The Secretary's eyes skewered him. Chip
cowered a few feet away, belly to the floor. The two agents watched him contemptuously out of the corners of their eyes:
It's not us on the hot seat anymore
.

“My name, sir.” He licked his lips. “It's Martin, sir. Martin . . . um . . . Glass.”

The fat eyelids opened wide. “You're the boy who escaped from a collector!”

Martin licked his lips again. “Yes, sir. I guess you could say that.”

The Secretary's stare turned elsewhere.

“Agent Zebulon, Agent Abel, you are relieved of your interrogation duties. I'm coming to take care of this in person. Lieutenant, stand watch over this young man and detain him safely. Don't let anyone but me or my personal security detail come within five feet of him. You have your orders. I'm on my way.”

The television on the soldier's chest flickered out. Like stars, the brass buttons returned one by one to their royal blue field.

Agent Zebulon continued to stand, deadpan, for a slow count of ten. Then his fist shot out and clipped Abel's ear.

“You
idiot
!” he yelled. “You freaking disgrace to your DNA! I can't believe I have to share your genes, you stupid pissant.”

Abel clutched his ear. “Ow!”

The soldier bot stiff-armed both agents out of the way. “Please step back from my detainee. If you wouldn't mind taking a seat, sir,” he said to Martin. “We have a long wait before us.”

Abel and Zebulon sank down onto a nearby bench and brooded, their empty hands open on their gray pinstripe knees. “The Secretary doesn't know about the bot,” Abel murmured. “What do you say we—”

“Chip, get over here,” Martin called sharply.

“Abel, shut your mouth! Seriously, do you have a death wish?”

Chip scuttled to Martin's side and put his head on Martin's knee. The agents watched him with identical disgusted looks and fell to brooding again.

Abel stirred. “Well, we could—”

“Shut up.”

“I know, but we could just—”

“Shut
up
!”

Martin noted the exchange with grim satisfaction.

“So, your walls have ears too, huh?” he said. “Even you guys. What about eyeballs? Do your walls have those?”

Abel cracked his knuckles. “Don't get smart. We're the eyeballs on your walls, kid.”

“Well, not now, you're not,” Martin said. “What did you losers do with my little sister?”

Zebulon propped his elbows on his knees and sank his chin onto his folded hands. “Where are your parents, kid?” he countered. “We're only asking because we care.”

That shot hit home. Martin's throat tightened at the thought of Mom. “Leave me alone,” he muttered.

“Hey, look, Abel, trouble,” Zebulon said, nudging his partner's foot with his. “What is it, bad food? Broken leg? Poison ivy? I bet we could help Mom and Dad, couldn't we?”

“We'd love to,” Abel said solemnly. “We live to serve.”

“You don't serve my parents,” Martin snapped. “You were gonna arrest them in the middle of the night!”

Zebulon's expression didn't change, but Abel drew back,
bewildered. “How did he know that? Is it because of his— Ow!” Zebulon had snapped his finger against Abel's temple.

“You came here to get help,” Zebulon decided after a pause. “Mom, or Dad? Mom?”

Martin hunched his shoulders. “Don't talk about my mom.”

“Mom, then. What happened? You can tell us.”

“You losers know what happened! You shut up about my mom!”

“We know, huh? Interesting.” Zebulon studied Martin keenly. “Mom's in trouble, and we're supposed to know about it. Now, see, Abel, that's what we call a clue.”

Martin bit his lip. “Just shut up,” he whispered.

“Oh, you think we're not playing nice?” Zebulon said. “Just wait till the Secretary of State gets here. You think it's some kind of prize to get the most powerful man in the nation out of bed? Think again.”

“Yeah, squirt,” Abel said. “Zebulon and I just arrest people. The Secretary of State makes an example out of them.”

Martin bent his head and petted Chip. I'm not scared, he told himself. I've faced down a collector before. But he remembered how scary that had been, and he knew he was kidding himself.

“But that's not as bad as the interrogation,” Zebulon pointed out. “The Secretary of State has the twelve Ursulas.”

“That's right.” Abel's voice was low. “The Ursulas. They look like women.”

“Like big tall women,” Zebulon said. “Like big tall
scary
women. But they're not.”

Martin thought about Dad in his best suit, waiting to face
Truth in the Mayor's packet car. Dad's eyes had been black with terror.

“The twelve Ursulas. Every one of them knows how to kill. In fact, that's about all they know how to do. The Secretary of State once had them kill a gorilla on a bet. You know what a gorilla is, right?”

“A hairy monster,” Martin muttered. “House-to-House Number Five.”

“The Ursulas killed him with their bare hands.”

“
Bare hands
,” Abel echoed, nodding. “They say the Ursulas can rip the heart out of your chest and hold it up in front of you, and you can watch it
beat
before you die.”

Martin pushed Chip's head from his lap and jumped to his feet.

“Okay, seriously, are you guys part of a comedy show, or what?” he said. “Because you guys would be a riot on television.”

The soldier bot laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Sir, please don't get excited.”

Zebulon grinned. “If you don't believe us,” he said, “ask Bravo-Bravo-Romeo here. Bravo, Romeo! Bravo! Come on, Abel, you moron, we might as well go write our report.”

The two agents strolled out of the room. “That's Bravo-Bravo-Romeo-
Tango
,” the soldier called after them.

Lieutenant Tango brought Martin a blanket from his knapsack. “I believe you'll need this to rest properly,” he said. “Do you need anything else?”

“I'm kinda hungry,” Martin muttered. “Do they have cookers here? Or could you bring me something from the cafeteria fridge?”

“The refrigerators are empty, and I'm afraid the cookers are nonstandard.”

“Oh . . . well, some water, then,” Martin suggested.

“The faucets aren't operating.”

In the end, the soldier brought Martin his mostly empty water bottle and a squashed energy bar.

Martin lay on his blanket on the floor tiles, blinking at the big lights overhead. His spirits were so low that he could barely think straight. He didn't know what to do. The thought of the smooth, sly Secretary headed his way made the pit of his stomach hurt, and the idea of Mom and Dad waiting for him to bring help made him miserable. As for the school, he couldn't even think about it. Cassie was only six years old. And now . . .

Cassie's supposed to be here, he thought. I left her right here in this room. The prototypes were supposed to take care of her. I trusted them, and they let me down. But Cassie trusted me. And I let something bad happen to my little sister.

He fell into a fitful sleep, and he dreamt.

He and Cassie were at the park together, and he was following her up the tall ladder at the slide to make sure she didn't fall. He was scolding her about it, telling her she was a baby for making him do it, but she was smiling anyway. All that mattered was that her big brother was there for her. It didn't matter how much he complained.

And then she was slipping down the big yellow slide, her little hands poised over the high slide rails to slow herself down if she went too fast. She was laughing out loud, and her tight golden ringlets bobbed around her head. She landed on
her feet in a spray of gravel and yelled for him to follow her. “Come on, come on!” she called, bouncing up and down in her white sneakers. “I want to go again.”

We aren't really at the park, he thought. Cassie's not really here. He knew it because of the misery that filled him.

“Martin's scared,” she sang. “Scared of the slide. Come on!” Her eyes were blue, the turquoise blue of a clear sunny sky, a little piece of sky inside the suburb.

This is just a memory, Martin thought, from a couple of months ago, when she lost her first tooth. I'm about to go down the slide, and she's too close to it, and my foot kicks her, and her loose tooth flies out. And I think she's gonna cry and run home and tell Mom, but she's so happy about the tooth that she doesn't.

As he thought these things, they happened just the way he remembered them. He loosed his hands, and he flew down the long fiberglass slide. He saw the uncertainty in Cassie's big blue eyes just before his foot connected with her. He saw her spin around and hit the gravel, and he braced himself for the tears. But her gap-toothed smile was radiant as she got to her knees and held the pearly little tooth in the air.

“I've got one for the tooth fairy! I've got one!”

Martin sat straight up on his bedroll and opened his eyes. “Chip!” he cried. “Wake up! They haven't got them!”

Chip scrambled to his feet while Martin hugged his knees to his chest and thought about what he had heard.
You got one,
the Secretary had said when he thought Martin was a Wonder Baby. But nobody would say that about the thousandth kid they caught, or be as excited as the Secretary had looked, either.
You got one,
meaning the first one, just like Cassie's tooth. The Wonder Babies had gotten away.

The joy Martin felt left him breathless. Cassie was safe. The gas masks and evacuation drills had worked.

Ears pricked, Chip was nosing him in the face, trying to figure out what he was talking about. But the walls had ears, and so did the military bot. Martin jumped to his feet.

“What are you doing?” Lieutenant Tango asked. “You can't leave. I have to detain you.”

Martin stopped to think. What were the Secretary's exact words? Exact words mattered to a bot.

Don't let anyone but me or my personal security detail come within five feet of him.

“You're too close to me,” Martin said. “The Secretary says only his security guys can get this close. Move back.”

Lieutenant Tango shook his head, but he took a step back. “You still have to stay here.”

“Or you'll—what? Shoot me?” Martin said. He started walking backward away from the soldier, holding his hands out wide. “You can't shoot me, the Secretary said I have to be safe. Hey, stay back, five feet away.”

The bot's blank face managed to convey helpless confusion. “But I have to detain you!”

“Tell you what,” Martin suggested, reaching out to guide himself through the doorway, “detain me while I walk.”

Lieutenant Tango halted abruptly. Chip skidded to a stop and barked. Martin turned around and looked up. A long way up.

A broad face was looking down at him. “You need to come with us,” it said.

Twelve women walked into the cafeteria and fanned out in a half circle around Martin. They were copies of one another; or rather, they were one woman, multiplied twelve times. They—or she—stood seven feet tall and were bulky to match, so that Martin felt like a preschooler beside them. They—the shes—wore navy blue military jumpsuits, a style of clothing that seemed like somebody's idea of a cruel joke, emphasizing just how out of shape they were. Their figures were the sort euphemistically described as pear-shaped, with a cellulite jiggle around the thighs.

The faces of the twelve women—one face multiplied twelve times—were the kind Martin saw with his mom at school meetings and immediately forgot. Their hair was cut into a particularly unfashionable pageboy, mostly blond with half an inch of brown roots. Their eyes were small and patient and half-buried in wrinkles, and their cheeks drooped into their jaws and pulled their cupid's-bow mouths into sad little lines. Martin wasn't sure they could smile even if they wanted to.

“The Ursulas!” Martin whispered.

Chip addressed them in bot, and then they addressed one another. They didn't vibrate—at least, not as far as Martin could tell—but they conveyed by tiny gestures and glances the idea of a conversation rapidly transmitted.

“You need to come with us, Martin Glass,” the first one said again, towering over him.

“Okay,” he said, conscious of how high his voice sounded after hers. “I just—well, I just gotta check this one thing.”

He turned to Lieutenant Tango. Next to the Ursulas, the soldier seemed silly and artificial, like an inflated action figure. “Is it true what the agents said about them?” Martin whispered. “About ripping people apart with their bare hands?”

The lead Ursula spoke up. “We generally dislocate or fracture the cervical vertebrae. Body fluids stain carpets and wall coverings.” Her expression was as bland and long-suffering as if she were complaining that she couldn't get her shirt collars white.