Michael’s face slackened with relief. He stepped through the rubble and jumped.
Bri caught him and hauled him up as though he was as light as a feather, even though he was easily twice her weight. Gray nodded at me to go next. That was when I realized A.J. was missing.
I looked around. The helicopter’s propellers whipped my hair, making my skin sting as the course strands slapped across my cheeks.
“Where’s A.J.?” I yelled, but my voice was lost.
I turned to go after him, but Graysen pushed me toward the hole in the wall.
“Go!” he shouted.
I was about to refuse, when A.J. emerged from a pile of splintered wood and plaster. He was covered in dust and clutching a shaking dog in his arms.
A.J. ducked around a pair of cops who weren’t buying his illusion. They grabbed for him, just barely missing.
A.J. tossed the dog to Bri and then jumped through the wall himself. I went to the opening in the wall, knowing Gray wouldn’t let me be the last one. I kept hold over our illusions as I glanced down at the street below. I’d never before realized quite how high eight stories was.
The helicopter hovered as close as it could get to the building, but that still left a good six-foot gap between the wall and the chopper.
Swallowing, I got a few-step running start and jumped.
Bri’s titanium hand closed around mine and lifted me right into a leather seat. A few seconds later, Graysen was in the empty seat beside me.
The Mag cops were clambering at the hole in the wall, and a few of them looked ready to jump out after us. Michael wouldn’t be able to Whisper to them with all the noise from the helicopter, and there wasn’t room for one more person to squeeze into this confined space.
I grabbed the headset hanging over the armrest and put it on in time to hear Smith’s voice.
“Everyone buckle up,” he ordered.
Then, the helicopter pulled away from the building. As a last-second thought, I switched our illusions. I gave all of us shirts that had UnAllied propaganda written in bold, unmistakable lettering across the front. With any luck, the police would assume the escapees were a bunch of UnAllied, and the authorities wouldn’t start asking questions we wouldn’t be able to answer.
As the helicopter rose into the air, I caught sight of the courtroom through the hole in the wall. The cops had a few dozen people lined up and in handcuffs. My eyes swept across the line once. Twice. A hollow feeling opened up inside me when I didn’t see Valencia among them.
The helicopter rose higher, leaving behind the courthouse and the disastrous failure of a trial.
CHAPTER 5
Smith flew us to the airport, which was apparently the closest location where we could land a helicopter without drawing unwanted attention or accidentally crushing someone.
I illusioned all of us to look like airport personnel. Michael Whispered to the actual airport personnel before they could question the presence of an unregistered, unauthorized helicopter setting down on the middle of the tarmac.
I got out of the chopper somewhat reluctantly. The ride from the courthouse to the airport had been the smoothest part of our entire ordeal, and I wasn’t looking forward to actually dealing with the fallout from this mess.
But Graysen had a deep cut across his shoulder and an egg-sized lump on the back of his head. His hair was sticky with blood, and even though the cut didn’t seem deep, we needed to clean him up and make sure he didn’t need to go to the hospital.
“Come here, little one,” A.J. cooed to the dog, who was quaking and panting. “Come to Papa.”
A.J. scooped up the poor, terrified creature.
“That was awesome.” Bri swung herself out of the chopper and landed on the tarmac in a crouch. Her yellow sundress was torn and pocked through with bullet holes, but her curled hair was still intact…unlike my hair, which looked like it had just come out the wrong end of a car wash.
It was a true marker of the situation that A.J. didn’t even comment on my disheveled appearance.
“Can we get out of here?” Smith asked, slouching into the helicopter’s shadow. “I’d rather not be standing out in the open where the authorities could find us without even trying.”
“On it,” Yutika announced, pulling out her sketchpad and beginning to draw.
A few seconds later, a tiny paper van was balanced on the tarmac in front of us. We all took a few steps back as the paper transformed into metal. The two-dimensional van grew and stretched.
The dog in A.J.’s arms let out a shrill whine as the van expanded from toy-sized to actual-sized. Metal groaned and scraped into place, replacing the flimsy paper. I smelled new rubber tires. A soft purr came from the running engine.
In less than a minute, we were clambering in.
The van’s interior was lit with a soft purple glow, giving it a dance club vibe. Bri let out a startled yelp as our seats began to vibrate.
“Um, what?” Graysen asked.
“Massaging seats,” Yutika said, reclining back and closing her eyes. Her entire body wiggled from the force of the massager. “Duh.”
“Now, if only you could have the car give me a manicure while it massages me,” A.J. said. “Then I’d really be impressed.”
“I could probably make that happen,” Yutika said. “After my massage.”
“You should take your cell batteries out,” Smith told us. “The Alliance could be using your phones to track us.”
Bri gave Smith an incredulous look.
“With everything else going on, I highly doubt the Alliance is worried about us at the moment,” she pointed out.
I rubbed my head, which had started to pound.
“What now?” Yutika asked, echoing my thoughts.
“We go home,” I said.
The prospect of unraveling this nightmare seemed less daunting when we could do it from the safety and comfort of our own house.
✽✽✽
We abandoned the van halfway home to appease Smith’s worries. The license plates were fake, so there wasn’t any chance of anyone tracing the car back to us. After that, we used a combination of public transportation and a new van Yutika created to get home.
Even if someone had been trying, they wouldn’t have been able to keep track of us by the time we made it to our quiet street in Back Bay.
All of my friends thought Smith was the reason we were always beyond cautious. But the truth was that, in some ways, I was even more paranoid than him.
Back when we’d been just the Six and I was the unofficial leader of our little group, I’d been obsessed with their safety. They had chosen to follow me, and it was up to me to make sure we all stayed in one piece.
It hadn’t taken long for my colleagues to become my friends. Before I knew it, they were family. That feeling had only grown stronger since Gray came back into my life and our group became the Seven.
In my world, nothing mattered more than protecting family.
I’d seen what Ma and Grandma Tashi went through to get what was left of our family out of Atlanta. They’d been picking up the pieces since, raising me and my orphaned cousins.
I’d made a silent promise to myself that I would never lose another family member. Whether their last name was Hansley or they were one of the Seven made no difference.
Michael, who had taken over driving duties, steered the van right through the illusion of a brick wall Ma had put in place years ago. As a Level 8 Inanimate Illusionist, Ma could handle the kinds of illusions I had no control over. I could only create illusions that were connected to living beings.
With animate illusions, there was more of an interplay between the person or animal under illusion and the surrounding environment. I had to constantly shift my magic, tapping it into place here and bending it there, so everything looked real.
Inanimate illusions were different. Ma had once explained to me that it wasn’t about altering an object’s appearance. Instead, she changed the way the human eye perceive
d it.
Since inanimate illusions were more of a set it and forget it kind of situation, Ma could hold her illusions over a greater distance than I could, even though my magic was more powerful.
The brick wall illusion hid the narrow garage behind our house.
I hated involving Ma in our work and putting her at risk, especially after everything she’d already been through. But she hadn’t given me a choice.
Overprotectiveness ran strong in the Hansley line. It was the reason why my cousins and I were still alive.
No one spoke as we got out of the car. My friends and I stumbled into the living room, covered in dust and shell-shocked. I kicked off my heels and went to get the first aid kit, while the others sank down onto the well-loved furniture. The air held a faint trace of the vanilla bean candle Bri had been burning last night. The rainbow lights strung across the wall added an extra layer of coziness to my favorite room in the house.
Maybe second favorite…now that I had Gray back in my bed.
“What the hell happened back there?” Yutika asked, collapsing back onto one of the bean bag chairs.
“What do you think happened?” Bri asked. “The UnAllied blew a freaking hole into the courtroom wall.”
Graysen shook his head. “The UnAllied took advantage of the situation, but it wasn’t them.” He winced a little when he peeled back his bloody collar. “I was looking right at Valencia and some of her groupies when the wall blew in, and they seemed genuinely shocked.”
“It was obviously Remwald’s doing,” Yutika said. “He probably got one of his MagLab Alchemists to make that explosion and distract everyone while he escaped.”
I thought back to the strange, unfocused look in Remwald’s eyes as he left the courtroom. He hadn’t been running. In fact, it had seemed like he was fighting against his own body.
I tried to puzzle through that as I gently wiped the dried blood off the back of Graysen’s neck with a wet paper towel. Turning to Smith, I asked, “Can you check out the cameras in the jail and see what Remwald was up to before the trial?”
If he’d orchestrated an escape, he would have taken a phone call or had a visitor…something.
We’d all risked too much for the sake of bringing Remwald and Valencia to justice to simply let them get away.
Smith didn’t answer. His earbuds were in, his hood was pulled up, and he was glancing between two laptop screens. Even though his hands were folded in his lap and his eyes were closed, the screens flickered too fast for me to catch more than a glimpse of anything Smith was looking at.
I knew better than to interrupt him while he was doing his Techie thing. I focused on the cuts all across Graysen’s back, until Smith’s “Got it” had all of us stilling in anticipation.
“I went over the jail cameras and visitor logs from the last week,” he explained as he typed on one of the keyboards. “Remwald and Valencia were both held in isolation and weren’t allowed to see anyone other than their lawyers.”
My hopes sank.
“But,” Smith raised a finger, “apparently, rules don’t apply to the rich. Or at least, exceptions are made for people who can pay. Remwald had a visitor yesterday afternoon who wasn’t a lawyer.”
Smith flicked his hand, and the blank wall across from the couch turned into a projection of the image on his screen. I watched a recording of a woman in a business suit as she pressed a wad of bills into a guard’s hand. The guard nodded and opened the barred door.
“That looks like quite a bribe,” Yutika observed, as the guard stuffed the wad of cash into his pocket.
“I know her,” Graysen said, leaning forward and squinting at the image. “She was on the Alliance’s Board of Peaceful Resolutions with Remwald.”
“Jenny Yang,” Smith said, reading off his screen. “Level 7 Static.”
I didn’t know much about Statics, except that they could manipulate electrical energy.
Smith twitched his finger, and the video sped forward. It was choppy, but I could clearly see Remwald and Jenny Yang talking to each other through the jail phones on either side of the plexiglass shield that separated them.
“Any way to get sound?” Graysen asked.
Smith shook his head. “But I’m running a program that will read their lips and transcribe their conversation.”
“They have programs like that?” Bri asked. “Nifty.”
“No,” Smith replied without looking up from his screen. “I just made one.”
“You’re a little scary,” Yutika told him. “You know that, right?” The expression on her face was one of pure appreciation.
We all shut up as words began to scrawl across the wall.
“If anything happens to me, find the others,” A.J. read in a pretty impressive imitation of Remwald’s voice. “Use what they know to put the pieces together.”
Jenny Yang bowed her head in assent.
“Good,” A.J. continued in Remwald’s voice. “Now, destroy all of my memories about this except the ones that involve what I told you. I want to be able to pick up the pieces if my lawyers can get the charges dropped against me, but in the likely event that I die, you need to put everything together. This mission is too important to fail.”
Remwald leaned his forehead against the plexiglass. Jenny Yang pressed her fingertips to the glass and closed her eyes.
“Is she short-circuiting his brain?” Bri asked.
“Statics can affect memory retention by manipulating the brain’s electricity,” Graysen said, like he was reciting a paragraph from a book. “She’s powerful enough that she probably can take away a fraction of someone’s memories while leaving the rest.”
Jenny Yang tapped the glass once and then left the jail without so much as a goodbye.
“That was odd,” Yutika said.
“Time to pay Jenny a visit?” Bri asked.
Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do right then, I nodded.
Not only would Michael be able to get Jenny to translate that cryptic conversation, but she might also be able to lead us straight to Remwald.
“There’s something very important we need to do first,” A.J. said.
“What could be more important than finding Remwald?” Bri demanded.
A.J. looked down at the little dog. The dog peered back, his tail sweeping back and forth across the floor.
“Our first order of business is to give him a name,” A.J. declared. “He’s also going to need an outfit change, toys, bowls, pee-pee pad—” he ticked each item off on his fingers.
“Pee-pee pad?” Graysen raised an eyebrow.
“Well, unless Kaira is going to illusion all of us every time we need to walk him, I just thought that would be the more prudent option.” A.J. huffed.
By the time he’d finished talking, Yutika had produced a plush toy duck, a bone, and a little fenced-in area filled with real grass.
The dog, who seemed to have recovered from our ordeal faster than the rest of us, gave a happy wag of his tail and trotted into his pen.
“Won’t we have to give him up to the police as evidence, or something?” Bri asked.
“The poor thing has been tortured enough,” A.J. replied, with more than a hint of possessiveness. “He deserves a family that will shower him with love and affection.”
“Are you nominating us?” Graysen asked, his eyes twinkling in amusement.
“Psh.” Yutika scoffed. “We can barely keep ourselves alive and out of police custody. We have no business taking care of a helpless animal.”
“Kaira,” A.J. whined. “Tell Yutika she’s being cruel and unusual.”
I held back a laugh at the sincerity on his face.
As my friends continued to quibble and tease each other, tenderness bloomed in my chest.
I would maim, kill, or die for any one of them without a second thought. Ma and Grandma had drilled into my head the motto that family was everything. And the Seven were family.
“Can we keep Precious?” A.J. asked, lacing
his hands together and holding them out to me. “Please?!”
“If the dog stays, we’re not calling it Precious,” Michael said.
“I’m not your mom,” I told A.J., who was still giving me a beseeching look.
“No, and thank the moon and stars for that,” he said, his expression darkening a little.
“If it turns out the dog doesn’t belong to Remwald and someone comes looking for him,” I said, thinking of the Super Mag girl who had defended him, “you’re giving him back.”
A.J. swallowed visibly and then nodded.
“Any objections?” I asked the rest of the group.
There were a few shrugs and smiles.
“As long as we don’t invite in any cats,” Michael said.
“What’s wrong with cats?” Yutika asked.
“I had a bad experience,” he replied.
“Ooh, what happened?” Bri demanded.
Michael gave her a flat look. “I had a bad experience.”
I hid my chuckle behind a cough. To think that someone as big and tough-looking as Michael might be afraid of a fluffy cat was more than a little intriguing.
We had an unspoken rule among us that we didn’t dig deeper into each other’s private lives than we wanted to divulge. Sometimes, though, it was difficult to stave off the curiosity.
“Okay then,” I told A.J., who still had his hands held out in supplication.
“Woohoo!” A.J. did a little dance. The dog wagged his tail.
“We can now commence with the name suggestions,” A.J. announced, plopping the dog in the center of the coffee table where we could all see him.
“How about Buddy?” Graysen suggested.
A.J. rolled his eyes. “Straight guys have no imagination.”
“How about Patches?” Michael said.
“What did I say about straight guys?” A.J. pointed an accusatory finger at the two boys.
Gray and Michael exchanged a puzzled shrug.
A.J. hmmed in thought. “He’s a regal pup, so he’ll be needing a name that can rise to the occasion.” After a few seconds, he snapped his fingers. “Sir Zachary, it is.”
“As in Zachary Quinto, the retired actor?” Bri snorted.
Mags & Nats 3-Book Box Set Page 36
