I could see that Max’s words truly hurt Bill. As much as I hated to admit it, Bill obviously still had feelings for the girl. He was just too good of a guy to bring it up, knowing how it would hurt me.
I didn’t care how much Max vouched for the girl and how much Bill liked her. Eva had sided one too many times with Elisha, and she was the reason I was in hiding in the first place. “Eva killed those people at the mall, not me. Remember who you’re trying to save.”
My words acted like a slap in Max’s face. I didn’t mean them to, but they did regardless.
He kept quiet after that. I wanted to say something to him. We had been through so much together, but I knew that, anything other than “yes, I’ll save Eva with you” wouldn’t make him feel any better.
Finally Max said, “I won’t interfere in taking down Elisha. I just want you guys to know my intentions.”
Jill leaned into him, showing her support. She had kept quiet the whole argument. Jill hated Eva as much as I did, but for once she took the higher road, respecting Max’s feelings over her own prejudices.
Wow. Jill had acted more mature than I had. But then again, Jill hadn’t been tortured by Eva either.
Turner ran in at that moment and it took me a second to recognize him. He looked frazzled and rushed. “We found something,” he announced directly to me. He ignored everyone else in the room. “Get out of bed and come to the surveillance room. John will show you the way.”
John, another guard, entered the room with a small wave of the hand.
Gramps stormed out of the room like he had been a tornado that touched down briefly only to rise back up into the sky.
I raised my eyebrow in curiosity, “I guess we better follow him.”
The giant group of us followed John down the hall to a large conference room with plenty of chairs surrounding a large oval table. Turner and Roberta were at the back of the room, sitting down already and waiting for us all to get situated. Not many decorations adorned the walls, just a few holo-paintings and an obnoxious yellow paint job that made the room overly bright.
When everyone was ready and staring at Gramps, he hit a button on the table. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the onslaught of holo-footage playing in front of us, inches from our faces. There were hundreds of different shots of what looked like an airport.
Jason was the first to take it all in, his reporter’s eyes used to seeing massive amounts of footage at once, “What are we looking for here?” he asked, trying to see the connection Gramps was trying to show us.
Turner stood up and pointed to the piece of footage closest to him. “There. Getting on the holo-jet to New York.”
Dad.
A Franklin clone, pretending to be a child flying alone, was being escorted on a holo-jet at L.A.X. airport.
That’s when I saw them.
Every single piece of holo-footage in front of us had a Franklin clone boarding a holo-jet on hundreds of different flights. All leaving LAX. All going to cities around the world: Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Cairo, Rio, the list went on and on.
I didn’t know what that meant, but it couldn’t be good. “Why?”
Roberta spoke. “We don’t know. We have analysts searching right now for any reason why Elisha would be sending the clones away. Maybe for protection? Maybe to have eyes in every major country? We just don’t know yet.”
“I think I might know.” Jason’s face had turned white.
Gramps turned his full attention on Jason. He pretty much pretended I was the only one worth talking to when my friends were around, but Jason appeared to be an exception at the moment.
“May I?” Jason asked Turner, nodding at the holo-footage.
Gramps nodded and Jason used a remote device to change what we were seeing. Now there were just as many holo-images of headlines in a bunch of different languages. I couldn’t read any of them, but apparently Roberta and Turner knew how to translate enough of them to make their faces go just as white as Jason’s.
“What already?!” Jill couldn’t take the suspense.
I had to agree with her.
Jason explained, “The one thread all these articles have in common is the word Missing. Remember when the army base down in San Diego reported that their soldiers were gone?”
Oh crap.
“And they turned up in the Sepulveda Dam as dead soldiers,” I concluded.
Jason motioned to the thousands of headlines. “These are all reports of the same thing happening all over the world. Smaller bases that barely make the headlines since no one cares about military any more. No one has a need to, wars ended almost three hundred years ago when Age-pro made people re-think dying senselessly. Who wants to fight a war when they can live forever?”
Nancy piped in with alarm in her voice. “So you’re saying Elisha’s killed all these soldiers all over the world to build an army?”
Gramps sighed heavily. “And she just sent her generals on holo-jets to go lead them.”
That sunk in.
“How do we stop her?” It was Bill who spoke. He said it so bravely it made me proud of him.
“I’m not sure if we can,” Turner answered, sitting down in utter shock.
Elisha had planned well and we had missed it entirely. We were so focused on her obsession with me that we overlooked the big picture.
Then I thought of something. “What about the world leaders? You control them right? Can’t you make them put their armies together and stop her?”
Roberta and Turner both stared at me like I had shocked them to their core.
Oh yeah.
They didn’t know I knew what they’d done.
“I figured it out through a memory Isabelle showed me,” I explained.
Gramps was the first to recover. “Isabelle showed you her memories? When did this happen?” His tone was one of hurt rather than the hatred for Isabelle I had expected from him.
“Last night. She said that one minute the U.N. hated you and the next they did whatever you said. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out, knowing what I know about you.” It was true.
Turner cleared his throat and by doing so cleared his head. “Yes, they’re all dead and I control them. They’re in lock down right now because I was afraid Elisha was going to try to take one of them over and turn the world against itself. But she knows she doesn’t have the reach or the resources to control all of them, so she’s bet on brute force instead.”
Ryan joined in the conversation. “And since her armies are already dead, the more Elisha kills, the more men join her army.”
“She wants it to be a slaughter,” Nancy finished Ryan’s thought.
“When did the flights leave? Can we stop them from landing?” I asked, not holding my breath.
Roberta shook her head. “These were from early morning. All the flights landed before we saw this footage. We have to assume the clones are with their respective armies by now.”
“So what can we do?” I was at a loss. I hated to think that we were going to lose, but it certainly felt that way.
Turner seemed just as defeated as everyone else in the room, but he brought a slight sliver of hope when he said, “We still have two things that Elisha wants: You and Fortski’s formula. Maybe we can come to some sort of arrangement.”
“Having Fortski would be better,” Jason pointed out.
“Well, we don’t have him,” Turner grumbled. “Harry’s got him, and considering the fact that I wasn’t able to track down Harry for the past two-hundred years, our prospects are rather low for finding him.”
“I told you, I was with Isabelle last night. She said I could contact her, I’ll just tell her…” I started.
Gramps cut me off sharply, “You can’t trust a word that girl says. Isabelle’s setting you up so she can take you again. She’ll betray you without blinking an eye.” He was mad. Really mad.
I found it strange since technically he was the one who betrayed her, but if I was an observer just coming off the
street I’d swear he was the dumpee in this situation. Maybe Isabelle’s faking her own death, regardless of whether or not Turner actually wanted to kill her, was too much for him. It didn’t make much sense to me, but then again my grandparents’ logic was pretty unfathomable.
“She seemed pretty trustworthy. She showed me things that would compromise her position with Harry…”
Cut off again. “Isabelle’s personality is exactly like her power: she insinuates herself into your heart, then she squeezes it until you die.”
Okay.
Two hundred years later and this guy was seriously pissed.
I just couldn’t understand why. I saw the holo-footage. He’d wanted her dead. He didn’t even seem to care about it at the time. He talked about her to Harry like Isabelle was just an experiment that had gone wrong. Why all the emotion? Was it because he thought she’d made a fool of him? It seemed way more personal than that. At this point it didn’t matter. I couldn’t coddle Turner’s hurt feelings. I went for the assertive stance.
“Well, we have to do something and Isabelle is our only option at this point. We’ll just have to be on our guard in case she turns on us.” I didn’t leave much room for argument.
Gramps hesitated, but it was Roberta who agreed first. “Contact her. Tell her we’ll make a trade. The formula for Fortski. Elisha doesn’t know Fortski even made a sample so she’ll want Fortski himself.”
“Speaking of Fortski…” Ryan stood up. “I’d like to take a look at those last few drops of his formula if we’re going to give it up, just in case Forstki can’t re-create it.”
Turner nodded to Ryan. “I’ll have you escorted to the labs.”
I still didn’t think we’d be able to stop Elisha from bloodshed, but we had to do something to at least try and stall her until we could come up with something brilliant.
Yeah, right.
The meeting was apparently over and I felt far worse than I had when it started. Ryan kissed me goodbye, then a handful of guards led him down a hallway towards the lab. Jason and Nancy stayed in the conference room to brainstorm on how they were going to spin a story to get me out of trouble with the public. Max and Jill went off to their room to do who-knows-what (well, I kind of knew what, but eeww). Gramps and Grams left to plot and scheme without me. That just left Bill and me.
I sighed a big sigh of relief. Bill. My big teddy bear. (A teddy bear that was completely ripped, but a teddy bear all the same.) His goofy smile greeted me and I couldn’t resist: I leaned into him for the hug I knew I needed. With his strong arms wrapped around me, it made me want to believe that we were all going to be okay.
I pulled away with a smile to match his. “Let’s try and find something to eat. I’m starving.”
“There’s a kitchen down the hall,” Bill said, leading the way. “I’d say we go to one of the cafés for the public, but you’d probably get tarred and feathered,” he said it lightly to tease me, but the fact was that’s exactly what would happen.
“I’m sure Turner stocks his kitchen with lots of goodies. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who skimps,” I observed. After all, look at the architectural structure we were in. Elaborate and over the top, certainly not cheap.
Bill rubbed his hands together greedily. “Oh there are definitely some goodies. I was kind of bored last night and snuck in for a midnight snack.”
I felt a pang of guilt at poor Bill being all by himself last night, but he didn’t seem upset by it so I decided not to be, either. I was just glad I was able to finally have one-on-one time with one of my best friends.
We entered a ridiculously huge kitchen and found that it was completely empty. Ten long rows of stainless steel tables spread across the room with pots and pans dangling above them from the ceiling. There were probably twenty refrigerators and at least that many oven ranges. It was an onslaught of silver to my eyes.
“This fridge is the prize.” Bill had a jump to his step from actual giddiness. It was really nice to see him like he used to be, a fun loving easy-going guy. Despite everything I had put him through, he still was the same old Bill.
Bill opened the said fridge and he wasn’t kidding. Every sweet imaginable was stocked in this refrigerator. From elaborately decorated cupcakes, to brownies, to five inch chocolate cookies, to lemon bars: you name it, it was in there.
“Oh yeah,” I gushed. I knew gorging on sugar would most likely give me a stomach ache, but in that moment it was so worth it! I grabbed the densest chocolate chunk brownie I could find and a strawberry shortcake cupcake (strawberries were at least a fruit!), while Bill cut himself a slice of blackberry pie and loaded it with freshly whipped whip cream. He grabbed a couple of forks from a nearby drawer full of silverware, but I was using my hands for this one. It was probably the best brownie I had ever eaten in my life. Maybe it was because I was starving, I have no idea, but it was like eating the richest most decadent chocolate on the planet. I’m pretty sure my eyes rolled back in my head from the sheer enjoyment of it.
Bill laughed at me, but when he took a bite of his pie, I could tell he felt the same way. “See?” he said, “Jackpot.”
After three quarters of the brownie was nice and settled in my tummy and I had moved on to the ridiculously tasty strawberry shortcake cupcake, Bill held out his hand for me to join him on top of the metal table next to us. We both sat with our feet dangling off the edge, eating our newfound treasures in bliss.
Bill finished his bite then asked, “How you holding up through all this?”
I wiped the excess frosting off my mouth. “I’m all right. What can I do, right?” I couldn’t elaborate much more than that. Bill knew everything that had happened, if I thought about it too much I’d go insane.
“What do you think about Max saving Eva?” he asked tentatively.
Here we go.
Apparently, the look on my face made Bill feel like this wasn’t a line of questioning I was up for, because he immediately took another bite of his pie and mumbled, “Forget it.”
I took a few seconds to regroup. I knew that my friend was seriously hurting over this, so I swallowed my hatred for the girl. “It’s just hard for me, Bill. She really hates me and when Eva hates someone, she tries to murder them.”
“I’m not making excuses for her. I’m not even saying I forgive her for what she’s done to you. I just… I just saw something different in her… that’s all.” Bill wasn’t meeting my eyes. That was really difficult for him to say.
I tried to make Bill smile. “She’s only five months old, she has a lot of growing up to do.”
Bill made eye contact with me and we both started laughing. It felt so good just to let it out and just be normal for once. The fact that Eva actually was only five months old only expounded how crazy our lives were.
“Jill used to be evil too, but we gave her a chance,” Bill said after we had stopped laughing.
“True,” I admitted. “Look, Bill, let me think about it for a while. I’m not going to stop Max from saving her, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just not sure I’m going to participate in trying to rescue someone who doesn’t really want to be rescued.”
“Agreed,” he paused, “And thanks.”
“Sure. Now can we just pig out and pretend like we’re in your house and not in the grandparents’ lair.”
We both laughed and Bill pulled out a perfectly decorated chocolate cake. “Hands?” He smiled.
“Definitely,” I answered.
We both dug into the thick, soft cake, grabbing handfuls of chocolate-y goodness and stuffing it in our mouths.
Um, yum.
That’s when Bill pelted me with a slop of chocolate frosting, right in the face.
Okay, he was asking for it.
And the food fight of the century commenced. I threw anything I could get my hands on in that fridge, and Bill did the same, until we were both dying of laughter and covered head to toe in cake and frosting goop.
“I needed that,” I admitt
ed. Even though I was sure some of the maple syrup was not going to come out of my hair any time soon, just horsing around with Bill made me feel like sudden doom wasn’t lurking over my head. Even if it was just for a few minutes, it was worth it.
Bill pulled me in, wrapping his arm around me and scuffing my frosting/syrup’d head affectionately. “Me too,” he agreed.
Roberta walked in and I immediately felt like I was about to be grounded for life. But to my surprise she actually smiled at the mess and our current state of grossness. “You two should probably shower. Chelsan, it’s time to contact Isabelle. Geoffrey and I will be in the conference room when you’re ready.” She left without waiting for an answer.
Nothing like the gong of reality to break us out of our good mood. Bill gave me one last squeeze of affection and we headed off to our rooms to shower.
Five shampoo rinses later, all existence of the food fight was erased from my person. There were fresh clothes folded perfectly at the foot of my bed and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Grams had picked out items I’d actually wear. The woman was paying attention, I guess. I pulled on the tight black-T and blue jeans and saw a brand new pair of red Chucks waiting for me at the door. After I was all laced up I sat down on my bed and concentrated on leaving my body.
I felt like a pro at this point. I jumped right out and knew exactly which string to follow until I flew inside Isabelle’s head.
I decided to stay in her memory hallway, figuring it would be the easiest for her to reach. Isabelle was new to this whole astral projection thing and I wanted it to be as simple as possible for her.
“Isabelle!” I called out.
As I waited, I was tempted to peak behind a couple of her memory doors. Before I had a chance, though, Isabelle popped into existence.
“Chelsan, what is it?” Isabelle had a worried expression on her face, apparently visits from me warranted concern. Not a shock there.
“Gramps wants a trade. Fortski for the formula. If you haven’t already, tell Harry about the serum. We need Forstki to bargain with Elisha. We think she has some pretty nasty plans in play.” I told her everything we knew about the clones and armies. Turner would kill me if he knew I’d spilled everything, but I had to trust my own instincts and not give in to Turner’s paranoia. My instincts had kept me alive this long.
The Riser Saga Page 90
