by J. A. Dauber
After about forty hours of this—although according to the suit’s internal clock it was more like forty-five minutes—the voice in my ear said, “All right. I think that’s enough, don’t you?”
I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t speak, I was breathing so hard. The suit does all the real work, yes, but you’re still moving around inside it. Even lifting five-pound weights for the better part of an hour can take it out of you.
“Good,” he said. “Keep practicing. I’ll be in touch.”
And before I could object or ask questions, the darkness descended once more and then the thrusters went on. I heard the rumble of machinery—the roof opening up, maybe, I don’t know for sure—and then I was moving, moving, until about five or ten minutes later everything blinked on and I found myself—according to the GPS—about a hundred miles from home.
It took me another half-hour or so to fly back to the ravine. I was smarting, frustrated, sore, but, somehow, unexpectedly, a little happy and maybe even proud of myself.
Which didn’t count for much when, two weeks later, he took over the suit again.
NOW. FRIDAY. 9:04 P.M.
Okay, I just tried shifting the rubble. It didn’t work. Something moved, but I’m worried the rest of it will come down on my head. And even though I assume the suit’s armor would hold, the thought about what might happen if I’m wrong is…gross.
I’m going to hold off. Breathe deep. Not focus on how much I am on the verge of totally freaking out right now. Think about something else. The story. Think it all through.
TWO MONTHS AGO
There I was, hurtling through midair. Once again. And once again, there was nothing I could do about it.
It was less terrifying this time, but much more infuriating. When the monitors went back on and I saw that Halloween mask again, I let him have it. I didn’t care if he bashed me against a wall until I was crushed to a pulp. I didn’t care if he raised my own right hand to my head, activated the missiles, and blew my head off. He was not going to do that to me again.
I’m realizing now that none of my threats included never getting back into the suit. I wonder what that says….
After I finished shouting, Mr. Jones sat there quietly for a few seconds. Then he put his hands on his mask, and for a second I thought he was going to take it off. But he just said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. It won’t happen anymore. We’re partners.”
“Well, uh, good,” I said. It was so sudden that I felt knocked off-balance.
“You need more practice, though,” he added, and then proceeded to put me through more drills, more live fire, more bizarre orders: Somersault in the air while throwing chunks of concrete at painted targets on the wall! Burrow under the ground floor of the fake building, pop out the other side, and nail two vehicles with the flamethrowers on each hand! Cut power while in midair, drop exactly one hundred feet, then let loose with the missiles at three drones flying patterns above, below, and beside me!
I was on the go for at least three hours. Long enough I almost didn’t notice that by the end he wasn’t giving much advice—just issuing the next order.
“All right, that’s good,” he said, finally, and walked out to where I’d landed, stinky and sweaty. “You’re a natural. And you’ve been working hard.” I sure had. Practicing every night, on my own, for hours and hours, and during the days when I told my mom and the school I was feeling “a little vulnerable.” Plus I’d been reading the manuals backward and forward, learning them better than I’d ever known any Spanish vocab words or algebraic equations. Much to the distress of my GPA. I was just waiting for him to be in touch.
And whatever anger or annoyance I had about the way he took me by surprise, his next words made it all disappear.
“I think you’re ready,” he said. “Get some rest. We’re hitting that central facility, the supply depot I told you about, tomorrow night.”
I half-expected that while I was jumping for joy—about fifteen feet high, with the suit—he would take over and send me flying out into the darkness, despite what he’d promised. But he didn’t.
“You’ve done good, Bailey,” he said as he turned to go. And then he stopped, and though I couldn’t see behind his mask, I thought maybe he was struggling to keep it together. Maybe there was even a tear or two in there. “Your dad is lucky to have a son like you.”
And then I was the one trying to keep it together.
Because it wasn’t just his words. He’d given me proof that he really trusted me: my GPS monitor had come to life as the training area door closed behind him. I knew, for the first time, where the headquarters was. I’d be able to come back on my own.
That night I flew home, not on a cloud, but through a bunch of them.
But here’s the thing. At some point later on, I wanted to talk to Mr. Jones. Face-to-face, or helmet-to-mask, I guess. So I went back to the warehouse.
It was gone. Just a big pit in the earth. I suspect he’d had the whole thing bulldozed within hours.
Mr. Jones, I’ve come to learn, is a very careful man.
* * *
I wondered how Mr. Jones would get in touch with me the next day. A self-disintegrating note in my locker, maybe? Or a tap on the shoulder from a janitor who’d turn out to have been a henchman under deep cover for years?
He just texted me. First thing in the morning. I came out of the shower and there it was. There was no name attached to the text, but it was obviously him. Nobody else I know has a number without an area code. Or would tell me to be in the air exactly thirteen miles south-southeast of my house at precisely 11:14 p.m.
I was so excited I almost forgot about Caroline’s band auditions.
I’m not sure if it was a band, technically speaking. I don’t know what you’d call it. Whatever it was, it was a cool idea. Caroline was calling it the mp3s, because it was kind of like a mix of a cover band and karaoke. Basically, she’d take classic rock songs and strip out the instrument tracks that someone wanted to play themselves. If she got a drummer, then that guy could take the Ringo part; a guitarist, Jimmy Page or whoever. Her end goal was to make a record of a bunch of classics with different kids on each track.
She’d been talking about it for a while. She was good with computers—not, like, hacker good, but a whole lot better than me. And this was a nice way to put it together with her love of music. I think she had come up with the idea when we were hanging out and was like, “We should do this together!” I thought it was a good idea, though with my lack of both musical talent and coding ability, I thought it was more of a good idea for her.
And I was hoping to back out of the auditions—especially now—but I got a text from Caroline that same morning, fifteen minutes after Mr. Jones’s. It was even bossier:
Dude. I have programmed all your favorite Beatles songs. Your John Lennon is not as terrible as you believe it to be. Show up and show the world that they are better than the Rolling Stones, once and for all. If you can.
This was a joke, kind of. We had been arguing about the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones forever. Caroline claimed that “Sympathy for the Devil” was the best song in rock history, and I told her that she was wrong, it was a toss-up between “Revolution” and “Golden Slumbers.” Each of us changed the particular songs every now and then, but the lines of battle, as my mom once put it, were the same.
So I dragged myself to the music room after last period that day. The look on Caroline’s face when I showed up—she was so surprised she dropped a few notes off the chorus of “Money for Nothing,” but even that couldn’t erase her smile.
That’s one thing I feel good about. At least there’s that.
After two or three guitarists took their turns—why everyone wants to play “Stairway to Heaven” when no one but Jimmy Page can do it justice is beyond me—Caroline waved me over.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Yo
u’re looking for…something up-tempo, right? That’s what you need. So…‘It Won’t Be Long’?”
“Deep cut,” I said, “but no. Something else. Not the Beatles.”
She raised both eyebrows.
I told her the name of the song, and in the three or four minutes it took her to do whatever digital stuff she did, she figured out—by ear—that incredible guitar riff, that constantly repeating progression, and worked out an arrangement she could play on the piano. Her musical chops…they’re intense.
It turns out that “Message in a Bottle” sounds really good on piano. As I sent Sting’s SOS out there to the world—really, to my dad—Caroline joined in singing the chorus and…it was great.
Of course, I wasn’t the one who needed the SOS. My dad was. I had the song totally backward. Story of my life.
* * *
Normally, the waves of applause—okay, a single freshman yelling “All RIGHT!”—for my performance would have kept me going for a day or two. But I had other things on my mind that night. Like a very particular rendezvous time.
Precisely 11:14. That’s what Mr. Jones had said.
At that point, I didn’t think the timing mattered so much.
I knew I was going to have to cut it close no matter what, since my mom didn’t go to bed until eleven, and I was supposed to be in bed then. I stayed under the covers until I heard her door close, then quietly, very, very quietly, peeked out every few minutes to see if the light under her door had gone dark. Finally it did. At 11:08.
I was in that guest room like a bat out of you-know-where. I slipped down the ladder and into the lab—11:11—and was in the suit and out of the ravine by 11:13, kicking the thrusters and scaring a nest of warblers out of their feathers. I just hoped the humans in the area thought a jet had flown too low.
I got there at 11:16. Precisely.
“You’re late,” the voice in my ear said.
“Two minutes,” I protested, flexing my fingers to make sure I still had control over the suit. I did. He was keeping his promise.
“These operations require surgical precision,” he said. “One hundred and twenty seconds are a lifetime in these matters—”
“Okay, sorry,” I responded. “I promise, it won’t happen again. Let’s go. I bet I can make the time up in the air.”
“You’ll have to,” he said.
On the way, there were all sorts of rules:
1. I had to travel fast enough to hit the supply facility at precisely 11:57, which Mr. Jones’s surveillance had indicated would be right during shift change.
2. But not too fast, because even though the suit was cloaked, the sound dampeners only worked up to a certain speed, and the guards might pick me up as I arrived.
3. I was to avoid physical interaction with the guards, but to cause as much property damage as I could on my way to the central computer room.
4. At the same time, I had to make sure the electrical grid wasn’t affected because sudden surges could wreck the precious hard drives.
5. But most of all, I had to get in and out within ten minutes. That was the approximate response time of the local authorities, and we wanted to keep Mayhem’s reappearance a secret. And, of course, the minute the Bloody Front saw Mayhem, they would start wiping the drives left and right.
And there were even more instructions. The hard drives will probably look like this. The guards will move like that. I knew it was important stuff, but I was only half-listening.
I was a guided missile, on a righteous mission to save my dad.
The monitor screens turned yellow. I was within radar range of the target. I activated the cloaks to avoid getting spotted by instruments, then flew higher to avoid visual detection, and then came in fast and direct, hitting the coordinates—a nondescript warehouse—at 11:56:56. A little faster and more direct than I intended…the suit cushioned some of the g-forces, but I felt my lips skin away from my teeth as I hit the warehouse roof hard.
Immediately, Mr. Jones groaned in my ear: “Didn’t I just tell you not to make physical contact until you saw the first guard?” he said. “The pressure sensors will trigger—”
But I wasn’t listening. Not to him, anyway. I was paying closer attention to the high-pitched beeping in my left ear that meant a silent alarm had been triggered inside somewhere. And then I was running for the roof door, which, I had noticed, had begun to crack open. I jammed it shut with enough force to mangle the frame, and the directional microphones picked up the sound of muffled cursing and bodies tumbling down steps. I figured I’d bought myself a few minutes.
Then the two automatic machine guns hidden in the shadows of the roof opened up on me, and the training I’d had—with Mr. Jones, by myself, in the air—all went away.
His voice was screaming in my ear, but I couldn’t listen. I just acted on instinct, leaping away from the gun I was facing down and landing right against the other.
The suit protects you against most temperature changes. You don’t feel cold when you’re flying, and, assuming its bodily integrity hasn’t been compromised, you could probably walk through a five-alarm fire without much more than a prickle of warmth. So even though a machine gun was aiming right into my back at full power, it felt like how I imagine a hot stone massage might feel: some pushing, rubbing, and a little heat. It was almost pleasant.
That made me feel better, more in control, so I turned around and ripped the still-firing gun out of the wall. And then, for good measure, I walked over to the other one and tied the two barrels together.
The resulting backfire and explosion were pretty satisfying—strike one against the Bloody Front!—until I realized something.
Mr. Jones had gone completely silent.
I tried calling his name, first softly, then louder, but he only spoke when I headed toward the door. “Don’t bother,” he said bitterly. “While you were playing around up there, they wiped all the data and escaped.” I started to say something, but he cut me off. “And not only did you fail your mission,” he continued, “but you got made. There are cameras on the roof, not just weapons. You could have disrupted them with a micro-electromagnetic pulse and preserved some anonymity. If you had listened. Now they know there’s someone else out there with the Mayhem armor.”
He paused. At the time, I thought it was because he was worried about me.
“I managed to break some of their encryptions and I’m monitoring their communications traffic,” he said. “They’re moving your father. Tonight. And it could be anywhere. We’re back to square one.” I heard him take a long, raggedy breath. “You’ve been headstrong, and you’ve been stupid, and it’s put your dad in greater danger.”
I tried to respond, but all that came out was this kind of coughing sniff. I was not going to cry. I was not going to give him another sign that I couldn’t handle the pressure. I promised myself that.
“Now get out of there,” he said, cold and detached. Like he didn’t even care anymore. “On top of everything else, you forgot to monitor the police bands. There are several cruisers on their way.”
So I got out of there. And on the way home, I didn’t keep my promise not to cry. Not even a little bit.
* * *
School was intolerable the next day. Just agony. I bet I would have given even Rebecca a nasty look if she’d come over and said hello. Of course, the odds of that were almost zero. Maybe not as infinitesimal as before the nose incident, but still really, really, really low.
But the odds of seeing Caroline? As Mrs. Rojanski in Math class said about quizzes, The probability is approaching one.
And there she was, right by my locker, wanting to play me one of the early auditions I’d missed. I couldn’t listen for more than a minute without thinking about my dad, about how I’d screwed things up…
I don’t know what my face looked like. It must have been pretty grim. Caroline’
s voice faded, like someone had turned the volume knob way, way down. “Bailey,” she said. “Bailey, what is it? What happened?” And then she whispered, “Is it about your dad?”
I wanted to tell her. I wanted to shout at her to go away. I wanted to just go fetal right there at her feet.
The right choice would have been to say something like, I’ll tell you. But not right now. Let’s make a plan to talk about this. Tonight or tomorrow. I just didn’t have the strength. So instead I told her that I wasn’t feeling good and had to get to class and I brushed by her to the men’s room, which was the one place I knew she couldn’t follow me. I hid in a stall until five seconds before the bell rang.
I needed the day to end. To get back in the air. To show him he could trust me. That I was good enough.
After sixth period, my schedule overlapped with Caroline’s again and I apologized. I did a good job, I guess. At least, good enough. She even smiled, and I think there was a joke or two, before she was off to French and I was off to Spanish. But it wasn’t…whole. There wasn’t time to make it whole. Even if I’d known how.
Eventually—finally—the last bell rang, and I was home. I got back in the suit, flew around, and waited. But there was no voice in my ear. Not that night, or the night after that, or the night after that. It got to the point where I almost wanted to see the monitors go dark, the boot jets to fire without me telling them to. There was nothing to keep me company but my own guilty conscience and the nauseating feeling that I’d done something terrible to my dad.
