“Detained where?” Dorm Leader Gina Curtis says, stepping forward to stand next to us. She has a stern intense expression, and I’d hate to be the one who goes up against her.
“The correctional facility space is in Building Fifteen.” The Corrector never blinks as he replies to Gina. “All inquiries may be placed there tomorrow morning after 8:00 AM.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” Other protesting voices rise in the lounge as teens crowd in closer.
“Please do not interfere,” the Corrector says. “Unless you would like to be detained also. Any further interference with this process now will result in your Disqualification.”
We pretty much fall silent at this. Everyone, all at once. So much for solidarity in the face of personal survival. . . .
The Corrector turns away, followed by the second one, and Laronda makes a sobbing noise as she is led outside.
I stand watching her being taken away, stunned with disbelief, and my emotions are in crazy horrible turmoil.
One of the Dorm Leaders blows the whistle. “All right, everyone, back upstairs to bed! We’ll deal with this tomorrow, now, curfew and lights out!”
I am not sure whether I get any sleep that night, because although I am exhausted, I lie in the darkness of the dormitory, wide-awake for hours, and filled with awful sickening adrenaline rushing through my system. I listen to my own pulse, to the small sleeping noises and bed creaks around me. And the unnerving silence of Laronda’s empty cot is there, right next to me.
“I am so sorry . . .” Hasmik mumbles in the dark several times on my other side, and I whisper back, “It’s okay . . . everything will be okay . . . somehow.”
I don’t know whom that’s supposed to convince or fool. Not me.
I finally fall into some kind of half-frenzied slumber with nightmares about falling shuttles and levitating pieces of orichalcum and lord knows what other evil junk.
When the 7:00 AM claxons alarms peal, I am pulled out of a B-movie level nightmare.
Everyone’s coming awake, and the usual lazy groans are subdued this morning, as we still ponder the events of the previous night. Frightened gossip moves in whispers and waves around the dormitory hall.
“She’s going to be Disqualified, of course,” a girl says, as she collects her clothes and toothbrush and heads to the bathroom. “But what else? Will they put her in jail or physically harm her?”
“What if they execute people?” another girl squeaks in terror. “Do Atlanteans have capital punishment?”
The sound of that starts another wave of cold fear in my gut. There’s got to be something that can be done to help Laronda!
Okay, I decide, as soon as I am dressed, I will go to that jail building where they’re holding her and see if I can talk sense to someone. Maybe I can find Aeson Kass! I can make him listen at least! He has to be there, right?
As I think this, and get showered and dressed, I see Claudia Grito giving me a snide look as she passes by me on her way downstairs.
Okay, did that bitch have anything to do with whatever happened to Laronda? The thought passes through me like a lightning bolt.
Dawn follows me downstairs as I start following Claudia. “Hey, don’t do anything stupid, now,” she mutters grimly. “Let’s go eat first, there’s nothing you can do now. Not before eight.”
I nod, and we head into the Cafeteria.
“I plan to skip the first part of class,” I tell Dawn.
“Yeah, I get it. Me too. I’ll go with you.”
We finish eating breakfast that tastes like straw, in a hurry. As we stop by the Common Area lobby to get our schedules scanned, I check the clock and it’s seven-forty.
“Let’s go,” I say.
Outside it’s an overcast cloudy morning, and I shiver slightly and wrap my bulky winter jacket around me. For once I did not forget to wear something warm over my T-shirt.
We head to Building Fifteen, which according to the campus map is on the other side of the airfield, three structures behind the Arena Commons Building.
There are few Candidates walking outside, just a few joggers and occasional patrolling guards. The sky is pale as milk and it’s starting to drizzle lightly as we pass the tall AC Building, and there’s Building Fifteen. It looks like a regular dorm, four floors, but there’s a four-color square logo on top.
At the doors, heightened security greets us. Two guards give us hard stares as we pass the glass doors. They scan our ID tokens before allowing us to enter the sterile lobby.
“What is your purpose for being here?” An officer asks us from behind a glass enclosure.
I glance at Dawn then back at him. “We’re here for Laronda Aimes. She was wrongfully arrested last night in our Dorm, and we want to talk to whoever is in charge of that.”
The guard, an older balding man, looks at us silently, then picks up an intercom handset. “Two Candidates here to discuss the detainee from Yellow Dorm Eight,” he tells whomever is on the other end. Then he turns back to us and says, “Names?”
“Gwen Lark and Dawn Williams.”
He relays our names, then listens. After a pause he looks at me and says, “Okay, you’re Gwen Lark?”
I nod.
“You can go in, but just you alone. The other young lady, you wait here.”
I frown, and Dawn gives me a strange look, then shrugs. “I’ll be here,” she says.
And on that note, the guard buzzes me inside through the second set of glass doors, and into the back office area that contains a small cube farm consisting of about a dozen cubicles separated with short partitions, and then a long corridor with closed doors.
I walk sullenly past several office workers and uniformed officers manning keyboards and special consoles and sitting at their cubicle desks. They stare at me briefly. Everyone’s wearing rainbow armbands on their grey uniform sleeves, which I’ve come to associate with Earth workers affiliated with Atlanteans. Not one of them has the metallic golden-blond hair.
The guard takes me past them and we enter the corridor, and walk all the way to the end, past at least twenty doors on both sides, until we come to a dead end and closed double doors.
An armed guard stands on duty at the doors.
My guard nods to him, and the second man stands aside. The guard who brought me over takes out a card and scans it at the optical reader on the wall. The lock bleeps and the status light turns from red to green.
The door opens.
“Proceed inside,” he tells me.
I take a deep breath and walk past the double doors.
The room I enter is huge. It is more than three times the size of Office 512 in the AC Building, and it contains a similar computer surveillance multi-screen center lining one of the walls. Rows of screens stretch wall to wall.
Along the perimeter of the other walls there is other tech equipment that I cannot really explain, because most of it is the strange shapeless lumps of Atlantean technology I’ve encountered before in the audio tests, except this is all on a grand scale.
In the middle of the room, a large table takes up most of the space, and it is covered with what looks like burned and charred pieces of metal, plastic, and orichalcum. . . . Basically, it is what remains of the first exploded shuttle. Some pieces are bulky and large, most are small shards and lumps fused together. Four Atlanteans are in the room, dressed in white lab coats, moving around the table and engaging various equipment around the perimeter.
The fifth is Aeson Kass.
He stands with his arms folded watching them work.
He looks particularly worn this morning, pale as if he hadn’t had any sleep. The hollows of his cheeks and jaw are darkened with a faint growth of stubble. His hair is slightly messy and even tousled on one side. And his eyes, dark lapis lazuli blue, are nevertheless traced with a fine perfect line of kohl that appears unsmudged and unblemished, as if it’s a natural part of his skin.
Maybe the eyeliner’s permanent, and has been tattooed onto his face? I w
onder momentarily and stupidly out of left field.
He sees me in that moment and he frowns. “You? What are you doing here, Candidate Lark? What do you want?” His aggravated voice cuts like a knife.
I take a few steps into the room, and my heart is beating so loudly I can feel it in my temples. Breathe, Gwen, breathe. . . .
“Laronda Aimes is innocent,” I say. “Whatever you think she did, she did not do it. She is my friend, and she would never do anything as awful that might hurt other people—”
“Silence!” he blasts me in a hard, implacable voice. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing, I suggest you reconsider, now. You should not be here. This is none of your business, and by being here you put yourself under question.”
My jaw falls open. “What?” I say, and I am filled with outrage. “How does trying to help a friend implicate me? I am telling you, Laronda is completely innocent, and there is no way she is involved in anything stupid and awful that would ever hurt other people much less kill anyone, and undermine her being here in this RQC!”
“How well do you know your friend? You have known her for what, six days? The evidence stands against her.” He lets his arms drop, takes a step and another, and approaches me. He stops directly before me and I stare up at him, at the terrible hard gaze, in all its intensity, trained on me.
“I don’t need six days to know that she’s a good person,” I say softly, and my voice is breathless with anger. “There are just some things you know.”
“How?” he says, staring down at me. The sheer power in him, it is a mountain. . . . The force of his gaze is making my lungs close up, choking me with the oppressive weight of presence. “With your gut? Your intuition? Your amazing ability to read minds? How well do you really know this Laronda and her motives? How do you explain the shuttle navigation chip component found in the pocket of her jacket?”
“There has to be a good reason. She was set up! Someone planted this thing in her pocket to transfer blame onto her . . . it could be a random mistake, someone put it there by mistake, meaning to put it in someone else’s pocket, maybe? Or . . . or it could be—it’s got to be malicious—jealousy, rivalry, you name it! Someone trying to weed down the competition, the number of Candidates?” I speak hurriedly, scrambling for answers, because I sense that he is giving me this brief opportunity to speak, and I should be grateful. . . .
“Or it could be she is working for a terrorist group, and she has been given a specific task, and she has carried it out.” He pauses for a moment, to glance at the worktable and the Atlanteans in lab coats. And then his gaze returns to me. “Do you know that we found one of the component chips cleverly attached to the underside of a delivery truck yesterday? We intercepted it before it had a chance to leave the compound. And this second chip in your so-called friend’s pocket was likely about to be smuggled out in a similar fashion.”
“Have you caught whoever is responsible for the delivery truck thing?” I press on, hanging on to any option I can imagine. “Do you have actual proof Laronda was involved in that?”
Aeson considers me and for a moment I sense a tiny pause of hesitation. “Yes,” he says. “We have the persons involved with the truck incident in custody. Two Candidates from another dorm, and they will be Disqualified and prosecuted. Both were linked via surveillance and advanced DNA and resonance scanning to the deliberate attempt to move the chip component. They were also linked to not one but two of your extremist Earth terror groups, the Sunset Alliance and Terra Patria.”
I stare at him, mind racing, not knowing what else to say.
“Enough,” he says abruptly, steadily looking at me then suddenly blinking as though coming awake. “This is far more than you need to know. I should not be telling you any of this, but apparently I’ve had a very long night and it’s affecting my better judgment. And you—you are missing your first period class, for which you’ve just earned a demerit.”
“But what about Laronda? What’s going to happen to her?”
He exhales tiredly. Again, a pause as he considers whether to speak, and merely looks at me. “Nothing is going to happen to her. She was found to be clean, no primary DNA match, no resonance match. She had nothing to do with it and she is going to be released in half an hour after some minor questioning while the last portion of scanning is concluded—mostly a formality.”
“What? Oh!” I say in amazement, followed by anger. “Wait, why didn’t you just say so in the first place? I was going nuts here, and you could’ve just said you were letting her go! What is wrong with you?”
Okay, that last part? I think I’ve just said too much—even I get it. And my voice, holy crap, I’ve seriously raised my voice at him, at Command Pilot Aeson Kass, the guy who pretty much holds the fate of this whole RQC in his hands. . . .
Aeson’s lips part. I think I’ve managed to stun him sufficiently by my words, my insolent loud tone.
But in the next second, there’s a beeping sound, a regular repeating audio tone, and it starts coming from the back of the room, from one of the Atlantean machines.
Aeson turns in the direction of the sound.
One of the lab-coat scientists goes over to check, and then looks around and stares at Aeson and me.
He then approaches. There is a very peculiar look on his face. “There’s a match,” he says softly, almost hesitantly to Aeson. “Her voice—it just tripped the resonance scanner. She is a match.”
And he looks at me.
Chapter 25
“What?” Aeson Kass speaks in a hard voice of amazement. Once again, he’s been stunned. “Check again! And then re-check the calibration—” And then he continues the rest of the sentence in an angry torrent of Atlantean language.
Meanwhile, I am standing there in absolute confusion, and also filled with a sudden sense of inevitability.
My voice. . . .
Okay. . . . They’ve just found out something having to do with my voice. Which means, they have a means of knowing that I had something to do with the second shuttle landing? And maybe more? No, that’s impossible, how can they?
But I have no time to think because in the next instant I feel the heavy pressure of his fingers on my upper arm, painful even through the thickness of my jacket. And now I am being propelled forward with great force. Aeson Kass holds me in an iron vise and all three of us walk to the back of the room, while the other Atlanteans gather closer.
“What?” I manage to mutter. “What is happening?”
But he does not look at me, does not answer, merely pushes me roughly before a large piece of equipment that at present is beeping every other second.
The Atlantean scientist leans forward to adjust something on a console and along the lumpy metallic surface with multicolored lights. But Aeson moves him out of the way and takes over the equipment console. He presses things I have no way of describing—buttons, indentations, touch-surface maybe? And then he coldly turns to me.
“Sing the tones that you hear, now.”
“What? Why?”
“Sing!”
I hear a series of short notes. I take a breath and sing back what I hear. In the otherwise silent room, my voice suddenly sounds reedy and wimpy.
As soon as I am done, the equipment begins to beep once again.
Aeson frowns. He then does something to the machine, which resets the alarm.
“Again!” he says.
The machine plays notes. I echo them.
The machine beep alarm goes off, unmistakably in response to my voice.
There is a pause.
Aeson then resets the alarm and slowly turns to look at me.
“Candidate Lark,” he says in a dead voice, and his face, his eyes—they are terrifying. “You are under arrest for conspiracy, possible terrorist action, and murder.”
In the next few minutes I am taken into custody by security guards—after being handed over by the Atlanteans, after having Aeson Kass give me no other glance as he turns his back on me, his b
earing hard like stone, and his expression cold as I have never seen it before.
My hands shake as I am led out through the double doors and into the long hallway. Somewhere in the middle of the hallway, the guards pause, and a door is opened.
I am shoved inside, and it’s a small holding cell, with bright overhead lights, a small square table and two hard chairs. A surveillance camera points at me from each of the four corners.
The door closes upon me and I am left alone.
For the first five minutes I stand motionless, gasping for air. My hands—my whole body—I am shaking. Fine tremors fill me, and a numbing cold settles inside my gut.
I put my hands over my mouth and press hard, feeling the inside of my lips against my teeth, while emotions fill me to bursting, and the pressure behind my eyes rises, forcing tears.
I am rocked by a mix of anger, terror, an impossible sense of injustice, and behind all things, perfect despair.
Yes, I can explain everything to them, or at least, try. I can tell them exactly what happened that night, what I did. How I sang like crazy and landed his shuttle by pure luck and accident. And how I saved him, dragged him out of that wreck, through the smoke and flames. . . .
But they’re not going to believe me, are they? They are going to interpret everything I say as clever deception, just to cover up something else nefarious on my part.
He is not going to believe me.
He already has a certain misconception of me, or at least what I think is a misconception. Whatever it is, he thinks very little of me and my stupid big mouth.
And oh, lord, what rotten coincidence! With Laronda being my friend, and even our beds being right next to each other, everything is now pointing at me as the culprit. Sure, how easy to think that I planted that damned chip in her pocket! And that all along I’ve been playing a clever little game, pretending to be earnest and whatever else they think I am—
I take a deep shuddering breath.
[Atlantis Grail 01.0] Qualify Page 32
