by Joe Shine
“I think that’s for you,” Blake told me.
I got up, went to the door, and opened it. Standing in the doorway was, I guess, his assistant. She was professionally dressed, had her blonde hair in a perfect, tight ponytail, and was holding a Dr Pepper for me. Cute assistant who delivers Dr Pepper on command? This dude lived the life. I took the can from her, cracked it open, and took a sip for the ages. Man, I’d missed that. Sah-weeeeet-ness. When I sat back down with Blake, I couldn’t stop smiling. He gave a friendly laugh.
“Better?” he asked.
“You have no idea.”
“I bet you’re right,” he admitted. “Cheers to you,” he said, raising his glass.
I raised my can.
“To the youngest graduate we’ve ever had,” he said, clinking his teacup against my can.
“Youngest?”
“By two hundred fifteen days,” he said, taking a sip before adding, “If you don’t sip after a toast, it’s bad luck.”
I quickly took a sip. Then it really hit me.
“Wait, I’m graduating?”
He nodded like a proud, caring father.
“Like getting out of here?”
He smiled. “Not just yet. We have a very special assignment for you. It will take a bit more specialized training, but yes, soon you’ll be out of here.”
“Hunter?!” I asked, way too excited. “You’re making me a Hunter?”
Being a Hunter was the best it got. We all dreamed of being one. Meant you were the best of the best of the best. And if what I was hearing was true, that sounded like me. Getting a cold Dr Pepper and being made a Hunter? This was turning into the best day ever.
“Oh, dear boy, no.” He nearly laughed.
Well, you don’t have to laugh about it.
“The Hunter ranks are full, and you’re far too young. No, we have something much more important and special for you.”
There is something more important, more special than being a Hunter? Go on.
“You’re still going to be a Shadow, but the cover you will have to assume is truly unique and requires, as I said, some additional training that’s not currently offered as part of our core curriculum. It also takes a little bit of natural talent, which . . .”
He polished off the last sip of this tea, put the empty cup on the table, picked up the tablet next to it, and pressed a few keys on it. A creepy video of me in my shower sprang to life on the screen, and even better, I was singing.
“. . . you have.”
“That is such an invasion of privacy,” I whispered, totally disgusted as I stared at the screen. At least I sounded good. Wait, please tell me the natural talent he’s talking about is my singing and not my, oh no, is this going where I think it’s going? Paging Dusty Spicewood, you’re wanted on set. (You know the game where you take the name of your first pet and combine it with the street you grew up on to get your porn name? My first pet was a mutt named Dusty and I grew up on Spicewood Drive. Yep, Dusty Spicewood.)
“And we know you can dance, too,” he added, bringing up another video of me and a group of third years goofing off dancing to some music in one of the hangars. “But”—he paused—“can you do them at the same time?”
Whew, that had quickly been heading toward a very unwelcome direction. Yeah, Dusty Spicewood was a great name, but well, yuck. Still didn’t mean I wasn’t beyond confused by all of this, so all that came out of my mouth was, “Uh.”
“Can you?” he asked again. “Sing and dance at the same time?”
Was he serious? How did this matter?
“I’m serious. This matters,” he said as if reading my mind, which maybe he could. I don’t know. This place was crazy.
“I mean, uh, I guess.”
“Well?”
“Like, sure, why not?” I never had, but . . . “How hard could it be?” I added.
“Good, because”—and he looked at me with all seriousness as he spoke—“we need you to join a boy band.”
Yeah, you heard that right.
Chapter 10
Introducing Bobby Sky
“Uh . . .” was all my brain could muster. No way I heard that right, right? But I know I did. I mean, what the—
“Excited?” he asked, totally reading me wrong.
That was a word, but not one I’d have used to describe what I was feeling. Shocked? Disgusted? A little pissed? Yeah, those were the more PG-rated words I’d have used.
Look, once you realize that waking up from this nightmare or escaping aren’t options, you don’t get to have too many fantasies at the FATE Center. You sort of give them up. But there was the slim chance that your cover could be something super awesome when you became a Shadow.
For example, there was a rumor—and we all believed it, probably because we were all so desperate—that one guy’s FIP was a billionaire recluse who lived on a lake in Italy. So the Shadow’s cover was to be a fellow billionaire who lived next door. He had his own tennis court and helicopter! Now, that was a cover. Of all the possible scenarios I could come up with once I got out of this place, being in a boy band was definitely not one of them. How do you land on that? On boy band? And did they know me? As in, what I looked like? When you saw me, the last thing you thought was boy band. Rock band, yes. Eighties hair cover band, sure, why not? Metal band, maybe. But boy band?!
It was insulting. Or ignorant. Or both.
I knew this wasn’t a joke. Nobody in this place had a sense of humor. Boss Man Blake was all serious. I’d just spent the better part of two years turning myself into a lethal killing machine so that I could . . . I couldn’t even finish the thought. Boy band? These things don’t just happen though, right? They’re started in a Disney factory or something. Merchandise first, talent later. How would this even work?
“So,” I began. Apparently I still wasn’t ready to form sentences, so I only managed to follow that with, “How?”
Decent question, I thought.
“Excellent question. With training. You’ll spend the next few months in this building learning to sing and dance at a professional level.”
I sneered. Had this clown even heard me sing or seen me dance? I didn’t need any training.
“Hutch, please. Don’t overestimate yourself.” Blake arched an eyebrow. “You’re an amateur with talent. We’re going to ensure you go pro, so to speak. In August you’ll go to a nationwide casting call in Chicago, where you will try out like a normal person.”
“But I’ll be more talented than the competition,” I said. “Right?”
Blake shook his head. “No, it will be rigged,” he answered bluntly. “Thanks to some incriminating pictures we have of one of the producers, you’ll get selected to be in the band.” He smirked. “Bob’s your uncle.”
“What? Who?”
He waved me off. “Figure of speech. Forget about it.” He fixed me with an intense stare.
“Why?” Apparently I could only form one-word questions now.
“So you can be linked to Ryo, one of the band members. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Good.” Blake seemed to relax again. “What better way to keep him safe than to be at his side at all times?” He leaned back, grinning and crossing his arms as if he’d made the point of the century.
Now I was confused. “But we’re not supposed to interact with them. Isn’t that, like, rule number one . . . and two and three?” It was like the first and second rules of Fight Club.
“I told you this is a special case. Of course, I cannot tell you what makes Ryo special, or what he does, but what I can tell you is that no amount of interaction with you could stop him from doing what earned him a Shadow in the first place. Trust me on this.”
I stopped trusting people a long time ago. It happens when you wake up strapped to a chair in a place you’re afraid
is going to kill you, and then said place spends the next two years actively trying to kill you. But, if you remember, I also drank the Kool-Aid. I’d fully accepted that I was in this for the long haul, with all the long-haul rules that had been drilled into my head. Now the rules were being ignored? And I’d have to be in a boy band. Would I have preferred a rock band? A solo act? Riverdancer? Yes, yes, and—okay, no—but boy band it was. They were cool in their own way, right? Don’t answer that.
“Your presence will not be an issue, I promise,” Blake said in the silence.
“So is it Rio like the city in Brazil?”
“No, it’s with a ‘y.’ R-Y-O. Ryo Enomoto. A Japanese national around whom the band is being formed. He is the real talent. The rest of you will be fillers around him.”
“So he’s the Harry to One Direction.”
“Sure,” he said. He clearly had no clue what I was talking about.
“What will the band be called? No Direction?” I joked.
“I can’t remember the name of it, but it is perfectly appropriate and eye-roll-inducing all at the same time.”
I tried to smile. “So, when do we begin?”
“That’s the spirit,” he said. He sounded genuinely excited. I’m glad someone was.
There was a knock on the door. He seemed to be expecting it, because he stood and waved for me to follow.
“Come on,” he said.
We went outside. Whoever had knocked had vanished. There were two wooden aardvark beach chairs set up for us in front of the simulated ocean. I know they’re not actually called aardvark chairs, but I know that’s close and can’t remember the real name, so aardvark it is. Can you name all the different PPK pistol variations? Exactly. We each have our own wealth of useless knowledge. Sitting between the aardvark chairs was a table with two pizza boxes on it.
Pizza. My mouth began to water.
“Not every day do we have someone graduating two years early,” he said, sitting down. “Let’s celebrate.”
I didn’t move. My eyes were on the boxes and nothing else. I hadn’t had pizza since I left home. I hoped there weren’t any veggies on them. Time couldn’t change how I felt about veggies on pizza. They ruin it. Blake flipped the top off the first one. Supreme. Disgusting. Then he flipped the top off the second.
Oh, dear pepperoni and cheese, how I’ve missed you . . .
I grabbed a slice of the good stuff and sat down next to Blake. He grabbed a slice of the supreme. We ate in silence while watching the “sunset” over the “horizon.” By the time I’d KO’d the pepperoni single-handedly and moved on to flicking off the veggies from the pieces of the supreme, the “stars” had come out. Nice touch.
Blake slapped his hands on his knees and stood up. “Well, I think it’s time for you to get some rest, Bobby.”
Bobby? Nobody had called me that since kindergarten. I hated that name.
“Hutch, call me Hutch,” I reminded him, but played it cool.
“Wrong. As of today, Hutch no longer exists. Hutch’s life is officially over. From here on out, you will be Bobby Sky.”
“Do I have a say in this?” I asked.
He smiled.
“Bobby Sky,” I said, trying it out. It sounded just as terrible coming from my own mouth.
“The one and only,” he chimed in. “Trust me, you’ll get used to it, Bobby.”
Bobby Sky? Was it too late to not be cool with all of this? Or had the pizza sealed it?
The pizza began to churn in my stomach. “So let me get this straight,” I started. “After using every dirty trick in the book to stop me from singing for fun, like breaking my arm, breaking friends’ arms, and torture while I could still feel it, you now need me to sing? You see the hilarity of that, right?”
“I see serendipity,” he said.
“Seren . . . who?”
“Oh, you’re funny,” he said, looking past me.
I twisted in the chair to follow his gaze. I could see his assistant, the one who’d brought me the Dr Pepper earlier, heading my way down the path. I turned back to Blake, but he was gone, already halfway up the steps to his cottage.
“Did your meeting go well, Bobby?” the assistant asked.
“Bobby? News travels fast,” I muttered. I stood up from the chair.
“It was going to be Bobby Blue, but I convinced him to change it to Sky.”
Bobby Blue?!?!
“Thanks, I guess?”
“See, it’s not as bad as you thought,” she offered as we walked toward the exit.
“It’s still pretty awful.”
The door to the elevator slid open. While we rode it down, I had to ask, “So, you know what goes on here?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re okay with it?”
She shrugged. “I try not to think about it too much. But whenever I do, I remind myself that you were all dead anyway, and that helps. This is better than being dead, right?”
“For some,” I said, knowing what many of my friends went through before they still died. Or lost their minds. Had that been better than the wildcard death that had been in store for them out in the real world? Debatable.
We got off on the seventh floor, and she led me to my new apartment.
Yeah, you read that right. Apartment.
Not the prison cell they’d called my room for the past two years. It was . . . adult. It had rooms, like actual rooms. I had a bedroom, living room, and even a kitchen room. Kitchenette? Whatever. Wait, was I supposed to cook my own meals now? They skipped over that one in my training. Sure, I could still cook a mean cereal, but that’s about it.
“Good luck, Bobby,” the assistant told me. “If you need something, use this,” she added, pointing at a small screen next to the door.
She was the first non-Shadow recruit I’d talked to since I got here and I wasn’t about to waste the chance. Yeah, she was older, but she was cute—so there was that, too.
“So, uh, wanna hang out?” I asked.
“Oh no, I have work to do,” she said politely. She headed for the exit.
“Where you from? How old are you?” I quickly blurted out.
She paused outside. “Why do you want to know?”
“Curious. What are you . . . what, twenty-four?”
“Oh, you’re adorable,” she said sweetly. She sounded as if she were talking about a kitten.
“Older?”
“Much. Is twenty-four your cutoff age?” she asked in the same syrupy voice.
“My cutoff age is however old you are, plus one day,” I added smoothly.
She smirked. “Get some rest, Bobby. Take a cold shower.”
“At least tell me your name.”
“Claire.”
“Well, there’s space for two in that cold shower, Claire.”
“You’re incorrigible.” But I heard her chuckle as she closed the door behind her.
A chink in the armor, I see. Victory.
I quickly explored my new place. The fridge and cabinets were stocked full of food. I had clothes—not just athletic ones but real ones, like jeans—in the closet. My bathroom was almost as big as my cell and it had a bathtub. I never took baths before all of this, but since I’d only had the option for a shower since I got to FATE, I was strangely excited by it. The best part by far though was the huge flat-screen TV. Were my favorite shows still on? Who’d won the Super Bowl?! The past two Super Bowls? So many questions! I plopped down on the couch and clicked the remote. I’d never had so many channel choices in my entire life, and it took me a good ten minutes just to find the sports options. While I was in a pizza coma, watching SportsCenter, there was a moment where it felt like the past two years hadn’t happened. Like I was sitting at home watching TV like a normal teen.
It felt nice.
Chapter 11
&
nbsp; Killer Dance Moves, Bro
Beepbeepbeep! Beepbeepbeep! Beepbeepbeep!
The sudden noise made me jump a little. I looked around. What time was it? And where was that dang noise coming from?! The small screen by the door was flashing in rhythm with the beeping that seemed to be coming from all over. As I stood up, I suddenly realized how tired I was. No sleep? I was an idiot. True, I didn’t need much anymore, but I needed some. Ugh, that was stupid of me.
I lurched off the couch and jabbed the screen, a little harder than I’d meant to, and cracked it. There goes my deposit. The alarm shut off though, which was the goal. A message appeared.
Class—8:00 a.m.—Rm 1979
My bleary eyes flashed to the bottom of the screen. It was 7:50 a.m. I had class in ten minutes? Ten minutes!? What type of class? I poked at the cracked screen, but it stayed blank. Was it singing? Dancing? Both? What was this strange feeling? Was I . . . nervous?
I stopped getting nervous a long time ago. Pretty much the same day those injections finally made me incapable of feeling any pain. Was this what real nervousness felt like? Why? Why now? I could kill someone from across the room with a spiral notebook spring, so why in the hell would singing or dancing make me nervous?
After throwing on some new (real) clothes, I hurried to the elevator and poked the call button. Second surprise of the morning: when the doors opened, the elevator wasn’t empty. Elin was standing in it.
“Hutch?” Elin asked, seeming just as shocked. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked right back.
“They came and got Clayton and me right after you left. We’re graduating.” She reached out of the elevator and hugged me as she said, “I’m so glad you’re alive. We weren’t sure what was going on.”
At first I didn’t react. We didn’t hug here. What had they done to Elin? But when in Rome . . .
“I’m fine, really,” I said as I ended the weird hug. “So this is where they bring you to graduate?” I knew—well, rumor had it, anyway—that graduates spent time in an apartment complex before they got linked to their FIP to get acclimated to the real world. So this was it, huh?
