Argh!
I felt my feet stumble but caught myself and kept sprinting.
Not the regional championship,
I thought.
The world championship.
“Victory, victory, victory!” I yelled senselessly, hoping I never had to explain to Wisty that this was what I occasionally chanted to myself when I was in competition, to psych myself up, to help me pretend to be the all-American boy I thought everybody wanted me to be.
It sounded pretty lame in the middle of an obstacle course of mad dogs, but it was working. Somehow I made it to the end of the hall with only a nip or two. I turned, gave Wisty a psychotic thumbs-up, then plowed through a doorway.
And stopped dead in my tracks.
It was pretty dark. And the room seemed empty. Was this the Matron’s idea of a trap? Good one, if it was. Way to go, Matron.
For a second I felt more vulnerable than ever before. I half expected a mad dog or wolf to shoot out of the dark and tear into my face.
It seemed like an eternity before my eyes adjusted, but I finally detected two troughlike shapes against a wall. The Matron hadn’t lied after all—amazing! I dashed over to them, sloppily filling my pails with sludgelike gruel and tepid water.
I was feeling so good, I dunked my face in the brackish liquid for a hearty slurp. The sensation of my head underwater gave me a rush of energy.
Clutching the pails to my chest, I sprinted out of the room, then down the hall toward my sister, who was jumping up and down like a manic cheerleader.
“Good hellhounds!” I heard her yell through the din of the barking devil dogs. “Sweet little hellhounds, let him through. Go, Whit, go!”
At that very moment, I felt the clamp of an animal’s jaws on my pants.
I crashed against a wall, but I kept my focus—
Victory, victory, victory!
—and surged forward through the growls and snarls.
Seeing Wisty’s face ahead supercharged me for the last few paces. I practically flew into her arms, and she hugged me hard.
“You’re awesome!” she gushed. “You did great, Whit.”
The Matron was striding toward us, holding her stun gun at eye level. “Foul!” she called out.
Foul?
Without warning, she hit me with a jolt.
I barely knew what had happened as I collapsed and the pails tumbled and rolled.
“Four minutes, six seconds!” the Matron shrieked. “No food. No water!”
She snatched the pails away as I drooled on the floor.
AS THE DAYS PASSED, my sister and I managed to stave off death by dehydration by locating a drip of what we hoped was rainwater or condensation just outside our ventilation-shaft window. By snaking a piece of wire for it to run along and then planting at the other end a crumpled paper cup we’d found, we got a few mouthfuls every three or four hours. It tasted like drywall dust, but it was a total lifesaver.
The whole thing was so backward. Last week a bad day was getting busted for exercising my right not to do trigonometry homework and having to face two hours after school with some of my best friends in detention.
This week, if only from the sheer boredom and depression of this place, I would have faced my trig textbook like it was
The Ultimate Book of Hot Cars.
Then one afternoon, I was lying on our mattress and thinking about Celia, hoping she would come back, even in another dream, when my sister exclaimed, “Whit! Whit! WHIT! Will you look at me, please? WHITFORD!”
Wisty’s voice brought me back to the totally screwed-up here and now. I kept my eyes closed, wanting to sink right back into my Celia thoughts.
“Whit!”
Her stupid drumstick whacked my leg. “Open your eyes right now!”
“Ow!
What
is so important?” I griped, sitting up and snatching away the drumstick with irritation. “The pizza’s here?”
My sister stood in front of me, holding out the journal. “
Look
at this!” she said, shaking the dusty book in my face.
I took the tome and examined the cover. Seemed the same to me.
“So what? It’s old, it’s musty, it’s useless.”
“Flip through the pages. Do it, Whit. Humor me.”
Then I saw the impossible. Suddenly the journal was filled with words, pictures, illustrations. And handwriting that looked like my father’s.
“Holy—” I stood up. “It’s the next book in the Percival Johnson series. That’s not supposed to come out until next year,” I said. “That’s interesting.
The Thunder Stealer
was one of my all-time favorite books.”
“What?”
Wisty said. “Are you seeing the same thing I am?”
I turned pages. “Holy crap.” I thumbed forward.
“The Ultimate Book of Hot Cars!”
“Hold on. I didn’t see that!” Wisty snatched the book back. “No, no, it’s got the
History of World Art
! And prints by my favorite artists, Pepe Pompano and Margie O’Greeffe. And it’s got all my favorite novels too!” She quickly riffled through the pages. “See?” She held the journal under my nose, its pages open. “Look, everything by my favorite writer, K. J. Meyers. And it’s got
The Blueprints of Bruno Genet
. And
The Firegirl Saga
. Right here!”
I looked. This time I saw
The Swimsuit Issue Deluxe Compendium.
“Whit… I think I get it,” Wisty said with a hushed kind of awe. “The book shows each of us what we want to see.” Then her eyes got huge and she stared at me. “It’s magic. That’s why Dad gave it to you.”
I took the journal back from Wisty. “Show me where Celia is,” I tried halfheartedly, but then actually held my breath like I was expecting something.
Nothing. Unless
The Ultimate Book of Hot Cars
was supposed to somehow take me to Celia.
“We have to figure out how all this works,” Wisty said tensely. “I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m starting to really believe in us. Our magic. We just have to practice, Whit. We have to work harder. Maybe you
are
a wizard. Maybe I
am
a witch.”
I HAD A REALLY GREAT TEACHER ONCE, Mrs. Solie, who told us she had the one true secret to happiness. She said it was all about seeing life as half full instead of half empty, no matter what happened to you. Actually, I was pretty okay with that. But what about when it’s .000001 full?
The days passed—and there were tests, tests, TESTS. Medical tests, physical-strength tests, intelligence tests, “normality” tests, patriotism tests, more medical tests.
One particular night, when I was barely awake and suffering absolutely horrendous hunger pains, they grabbed Whit from our cell and took him away.
“You can’t!” I screamed. “It’s not his time yet! I’ve been counting! It’s not time! He’s not eighteen!”
But the next thing I knew, the Matron was dragging me out of the room too, then pushing me down a long hall to a lone window.
She pointed outside, to a cement courtyard below. She was singsonging under her foul breath, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Whit… happy
death
day to you.”
My blood froze and my heart nearly stopped beating. In the courtyard was an old-fashioned gallows.
She continued into the second verse: “How dead are you now? How dead are you now?” and then broke into a hideous donkey bray.
A few seconds later, a troop of guards pushed Whit ahead of them out into the courtyard. His hands and feet were in cuffs, which made him stumble-walk.
I tried to swallow but couldn’t as I watched a guard put a black hood over Whit’s head.
“No!”
I shouted, pounding my fists against the glass. “No!” I pounded again, and blinked, and then suddenly…
I was falling.
THUNK!
GASPING AND BLINKING, I looked around the claustrophobic jail cell, adrenaline already zapping my brain awake.
I saw Whit blinking in sleepy surprise. Then he sat up and stared hard at me. At that moment I realized my butt and back were aching, and it all came together.
I had been floating in my sleep. The nightmare about the gallows had woken me up, and I had woken… in
midair.
Unfortunately, my bony little butt was not designed for crashing into a hard floor from a height of, oh, maybe four feet?
“Uh, Wisty,” Whit said, “you were floating. Up in the air.”
I just looked at him, so, so happy that he was alive, and
here,
not hanged.
Still shaken from the horrible dream, I felt cold sweat drying on the back of my neck. I looked above me as if I might see the wires and pulleys that had made it possible for me to float. There was nothing.
“Floating,” repeated Whit, sounding amazed, “in your sleep. And they think we don’t have any special powers in here.”
I wanted to deny it, but here I was, with a sore backside, and I had definitely felt myself dropping through the air. I got to my feet, standing in the space I’d been, um, floating in.
Experimentally, I waved my useless drumstick around. Nothing happened.
“My sister, the witch.” Whit laughed. “Why can’t you conjure up a double cheeseburger or something useful? A jumbo ice-cream sundae? A
stun gun?
”
I sighed and went to sit next to him on the mattress. “You’re laughing, Whit, but… this whole witch-and-wizard thing. The flames. The glowing. The gavel-stopping. Now the floating. I think we really are… magic.”
It felt like I was saying, “I guess I really
am
a supermodel.”
“That’s right, Detective Allgood,” Whit said. “And now we have to figure out how to focus our inner sorcerers to get us out of this dump.”
“Okay,” I said, tapping my drumstick gently on the floor. It was only a stupid drumstick, but I’d found that I felt better with it in my hand—maybe it helped me think, or something spirity like that.
“I could flame out and set the Matron on fire,” I suggested. “If I could figure out how to do it on purpose.”
“Great. And then we’ll have a burned-up giantess on our hands, plus a bunch of angry guards,” said Whit.
“Right. Maybe I could float out the air shaft,” I said, looking at the tiny, dark window above my head, then picturing myself dropping down it, many floors to the bottom, and getting pulverized by the turbine below.
“Maybe we can snap our fingers and a golden staircase will appear out of nowhere with angels singing and pointing the way to escape,” Whit said glumly. “Or maybe we’ll just grow wings and fly out of here.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Kids with wings. That’s likely.”
Wham!
Whit and I jumped about a foot in the air, then whirled toward the door. It had swung open and smacked the wall like a hard kick. We waited, both of us as tight as coiled springs.
One thing we’d learned: anything that came through that door wasn’t good.
“BREAKFAST IS SERVED! Poached eggs with bacon, fresh fruit, waffles, and syrup. Just
kidding,
kiddies.”
The Visitor appeared, dressed in black again, his icy green eyes glittering as if he had a fever. I thought that if he looked at me long enough, the blood would start to freeze in my veins.
He stepped farther into the room, examining everything like he was some anal-retentive crime-scene investigator, tapping on the walls, testing the strength of the wire-glassed window in the door.
“Keeping you here is a waste of time, space, and money,” he muttered, not bothering to look at us. “Waiting until you’re eighteen is arbitrary. You’re a drain on the taxpayers’ money… feeding you, housing you.”
“Um, I’m no economics expert, sir,” Whit said with a smile so fake it made
my
teeth hurt, “but even I know that it’s not costing the taxpayers more than a dime a day to keep us here.”
The Visitor glared at us from the entryway to the bathroom. “I thought that you’d learned not to talk back to me, idiot.” He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out an ancient toothbrush. “As punishment, you will scrub your bathroom with this cleaning utensil. When I return, it better be operating-room hygienic.” The Visitor wrote something down on a clipboard. “There’s no place in the New Order for your kind,” he muttered.
“Excuse me, sir”—I finally spoke up—“but what exactly
is
the New Order?”
The Visitor wheeled and stared at me. His black riding crop dangled menacingly from one arm.
Then he began to speak—all singsongy: “The New Order is a bright new future. It is a future that replaces the corrupting and illusory freedoms of so-called democracies and replaces them with a higher discipline. It has taken many, many years of planning, strategic political postings, scientific polling, demographic research, precise messaging, and carefully monitored elections.
“For this rare moment in human history, those who have values and principles are in a position to do what is best. And part of what is best, of course, is taking steps to eliminate the deviants, the criminals, and all those who threaten prosperity and the New Order way.”
He smoothed a hand over his slicked-back hair. “Like you two.”
“But… what’s
wrong
with us, sir?” I asked like I was the resident classroom dunce.
The Visitor’s icy eyes narrowed, and he stepped closer until I could faintly smell mothballs and hair syrup.
“You
know
what’s wrong with you. You’re a virus,” he hissed. “You two are the worst kind of deviants. Performance artists. Illusionists.”
My jaw almost dropped. “But we’re just kids!”
“Kids,” he spat, as if he were saying “pus-filled blister.” “Many, many,
many
children are unacceptable in the New Order.”
Right then I should have shut up, wiped my face clear of any expression, and stood quietly till he was gone.
Instead, I stamped my foot. “We. Are. Just.
Kids!
”
The last word was practically a shriek, and as the Visitor raised his riding crop over his head, a maniacal look of delight on his face…