by Harrison, S.
He looks up at me, tucks his phone in his back pocket, and jogs down the straight toward where I’m standing.
“Sorry, got a text. Wow, you run like a jackrabbit! I humbly bow to your freakishly superior running abilities, Miss Blackstone.”
“Who was the text from?”
“Oh, just a friend from school.”
“And would this friend of yours be a girl, by any chance?” A dagger stabs my stomach at the mere thought of it.
Carlo smiles and jogs past me. “C’mon, that cake isn’t gonna eat itself.”
I watch him go as he jogs up the rise toward the fence of the tennis court. Just like a boy to change the subject like that. I know that one little kiss when I was thirteen doesn’t give me the right to lay claim to Carlo, but if there’s something he’s not telling me, I’m gonna regret not punching him square in the nose when I had the chance.
I follow from a distance, contemplating the possibility that Carlo has a girlfriend and how it would turn this long-awaited summer vacation into a long, drawn-out, can’t-wait-till-it’s-over, awkward mess.
I round the tennis court, take the footpath through the gap in the hedge, and emerge on the edge of the circle driveway outside the front of the house.
“C’mon slowpoke!” Carlo calls from the steps of the entrance. With horrible images of some blonde teenage beauty queen fueling the fire of my jealousy, I trudge across the driveway toward him.
“Hey, you two! There you are!” It’s Jonah. Jonah is crazy tall for sure, but he’s also wide. He dwarfs the poor old quad bike he’s riding, its motor whining as it struggles over the crest of the hill. I stop and wait for him. Carlo jumps from the front steps and bounds over beside me.
“Hey, don’t mention anything about what we heard at the stables,” I whisper, jabbing him in the ribs with my elbow.
Carlo makes a zipper gesture across his lips and I smile for a second before remembering that he’s a secret-keeping jerk.
Jonah pulls up in front of us and cuts the engine. “Carlo, good to see you again.”
“Hi, Major Brogan.”
“I’m sure Finn has told you what happened this morning,” Jonah says, climbing off the creaking quad bike.
Carlo nods.
“I hope you’re not too disappointed about missing training today. Your dad has told me that you’ve really taken an interest in hand-to-hand combat techniques.”
“Yeah, my instructors are really good. They haven’t taught me half as much as you did that summer, though, sir. And none of their gyms is as cool as sublevel one.”
“Well, sublevel one is very cool,” says Jonah.
Carlo smiles and nods in agreement.
“But not as cool as sublevel two, though,” I butt in.
“There’s more?” Carlo says, unable to hide his sudden excitement.
“Sure is,” Jonah says, smiling at Carlo. “You’ll get to have a go on the obstacle course down there tomorrow. Finn can show you exactly how she’s been training here without you.”
“It’s wicked, Carlo. It’s made of this stuff called nano grains; all the walls and obstacles and things can totally change shape.”
“Awesome,” Carlo says with a big grin.
“If I’m not mistaken, kids, I think I hear my ride,” Jonah says, cocking his head.
There’s a quiet crunching of tires on gravel. It gets louder and louder, and soon one of our silver-and-black Bentleys slowly comes into view over the rise. “Ah, well done, Thomas. Perfect timing,” Jonah says. The car swings around the wide circle drive and stops right beside Jonah and the quad bike. Thomas, the chauffeur, gives me a little wink through the window.
“I have to go and attend to a few things in the city, so I’ll see you later. Why don’t you both go and see if the chef has anything good in the kitchen for lunch? I’m betting he does.” The back door of the car automatically slides open and Jonah gets in. He gives us one last smile, the door softly slides shut, and the windows instantly tint black.
Thomas gives us two short horn-beeps good-bye and the Bentley pulls away around the driveway, over the rise, and out of sight.
“Chocolate cake?” says Carlo.
“Yeah, in a second—there’s something I wanna ask you first,” I say, nerves growing in my belly.
“Go for it.”
“It’s not really any of my business Carlo, but I was kinda wondering . . .”
“Yeah?”
“That text you got before, from your school friend?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Was it from a girl?”
“Finn Blackstone,” Carlo cocks his head and throws me a wry smile. “Are you trying to ask me if I have a girlfriend?”
“I’m not doing the greatest job of it but, yeah, I guess I am.”
Please say no. Please say no. Please say no.
“Her name is Tanya.”
My stomach drops. This is not funny. I glare at Carlo for two of the longest seconds in my life, then clench my fists tight and walk straight past that jackass and his stupid black mop of hair. Why the hell is it always falling in front of his hideous, snot-green eyes anyway? It’s not even that wavy, and those jeans are way too tight for his disgusting, ugly chicken legs!
“You’d really like her, Finn!” he calls out as I stride up the steps and through the front doors.
Don’t you dare tell me what I’d like, Carlo stupid idiot Delgado! I know what I’d like! I’d like to kick him in his stupid face and snap her like a twig, that’s what I’d like! I bet she looks like a freaking stick insect! A creepy-crawly, knobbly, hideous stick insect! I bet she is blonde. A blonde stick insect! This sucks so incredibly much. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this sucks more monumentally than anything has ever sucked in the history of sucky things.
I hear him run in the front door after me, but I don’t look back even for a second. I stomp across the foyer and straight up the main stairs.
“Finn! Wait up! What’s the matter?!”
What’s the matter?! Oh my god, why are boys so unbelievably stupid?! I wish I was a million miles from here right now. I’ll have to settle for shutting myself in my room for the rest of the summer. Fricking aaaawesome!
“Finn! Wait!” he calls from the bottom of the stairs. I totally ignore him and keep right on stomping. I can’t believe how utterly annoying his ridiculous voice is.
“Finn! Stop!”
I seriously wish he would just shut the hell up. He decided to have a girlfriend but obviously doesn’t have the brain cells to figure out that the girl should be me. We have absolutely nothing to talk about.
“Finn! Stop!”
I reach the top of the stairs and spin on my heels. “What?!”
Carlo is at the bottom, but he’s looking around the side of the staircase. He doesn’t even have the common decency to look at me when he’s breaking my heart!
“Finn, get down here!” Without even an upward glance, Carlo walks around the side of the staircase and disappears from view.
“Now, Finn!” he shouts, his voice serious and grave.
I’m so mad at him, but my curiosity is overwhelming. What could possibly be so important? I trudge back down to the bottom of the stairs and walk around the corner.
Carlo is standing halfway between the side of the staircase and the arch at the start of the west-wing hallway. He looks over at me, his eyes wide with horror.
There, face-up on the white- and gray-veined marble floor, is a young blonde woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform. She’s lying in a massive dark pool of her own blood, her hands covered in red to the elbows. Finger-streaks of scarlet are painted across her face, neck, and the top of her uniform. Her stocking-clad legs are splayed at unnatural angles and her eyes are blank and lifeless, staring out into nowhere.
She is clearly very dea
d.
CHAPTER TEN
I’ve never seen a dead body before. Her face is expressionless; her pale-blue eyes are glassy and distant, like a doll’s. Drops of blood dot the tiny photograph on the ID tag pinned to her chest. In it she’s smiling, blonde, and pretty. A name is printed clearly beneath the picture in bold black letters. Her name is Vanessa Hope. Or at least it used to be.
“Oh my god,” I gasp, covering my mouth with both hands.
Carlo creeps forward, carefully avoiding the huge, dark-red puddle.
“Don’t touch anything, Carlo!”
He slowly leans over her. “There’s something in her neck. It’s a knife.”
I gingerly walk to her body. I peer down and see a leather-bound handle jutting from a slit in the side of her throat.
“That’s not a knife. I’ve seen that before. That’s Nanny Theresa’s antique letter opener.”
Carlo and I look at each other at exactly the same time. Without speaking, we both turn and run down the west-wing hallway toward Nanny Theresa’s room.
There are patches of blood spattering the carpet all along the hallway, and red handprints smear the wall like gruesome signposts leading the way to the open door of Nanny Theresa’s bedroom. I run in right behind Carlo. The bed is empty, the blanket and sheet strewn aside. There’s a small white machine on a stand with buttons and flashing lights lying tipped over on the floor, a thin hose snaking out of its side leaking a small trickle of blood onto the carpet. One long constant tone drones from a speaker on its back. There’s more blood, a thin streak sprayed across the far wall. Judging by how tall the nurse was, it seems to be exactly the same height as her neck. The spray has speckled across the face of the life-size painted wooden carving of Nanny Theresa’s distant relative, General Hartigan. On the rare occasions that I would sneak into her room, I used to admire the statue. Now it catches my attention for an entirely different reason. The gun that used to be in the holster around its waist is missing. I always thought it looked real, but I never imagined that it actually was.
It’s not hard to figure out what happened here. Nanny Theresa murdered that nurse, stabbed her so hard in the throat with a letter-opener that it almost came out the other side. And now she’s wandering the house somewhere. With a gun.
“We have to find her,” I say to Carlo.
“She can’t have gone far in her condition,” he replies.
I turn, stride out into the hallway, and head back the way we came, Carlo following right behind me.
I grab a heavy brass candleholder from a small table in the hall and swing it from side to side, testing its weight. She’s already killed one person today. I sure as hell won’t be next.
“Is that really necessary, Finn? She’s a frail old woman.”
“Tell that to the dead nurse out there.”
We walk back into the foyer. “Where could she have gone?” Carlo asks from behind me.
“There,” I say, pointing at the floor.
Beyond the nurse’s body, painted in her blood, is a small red smear. It’s easy to tell that it’s an imprint of the outer curve of a bare foot, and it’s pointing in the direction of the hallway that leads to the southern wing.
“C’mon!” I shout at Carlo and leap over the pool of blood. We both run down the dim southern hall and there, at the end, is a thin, pale-blue strip of light coming from a crack in the big, ironclad door. I push the heavy door open wider.
“Onix!” I shout into midair. “Verify voice command authority Infinity One!”
“Voice command authority Infinity One verified. Hi, Finn. Hello there, Carlo. It’s good to scan you both again.”
“Hey, Onix, it’s good to see . . . I mean, hear you again, too,” says Carlo.
“Now is hardly the time for a reunion, Carlo,” I snap at him. “Onix, did Nanny Theresa come through here?”
“If by Nanny Theresa you mean Dr. Theresa Pierce, then yes, she did indeed pass through here, Finn.”
“Open sublevel access please, Onix.”
“OK, Finn.”
The carpet at the end of the hallway rolls back and Carlo and I run toward it, reaching the end just as the pod finishes rising from the floor. Its glass-and-metal door slides open before us.
“Finn, check it out.” Carlo bends down and picks something up from the floor beside the pod. “It’s a key. Is this Major Brogan’s?”
“It definitely looks like it. She must have stolen it from him.”
“How? When?”
“I don’t know. The real question is: What is she doing down there?”
“Well, let’s go find out,” Carlo says, stepping into the pod. I step in behind him and the door slides shut.
“Take us down, Onix, sublevel one.”
“Of course, Finn. Every day is a good day for combat training.”
“We’re not training today, Onix. We’re trying to find Nann . . . I mean, we’re trying to find Dr. Pierce.”
“Dr. Pierce is not on sublevel one, Finn. Dr. Pierce is on sublevel nine.”
Carlo turns toward me. “How many levels are there?” he asks.
“I honestly don’t know. I thought there were only two,” I say with genuine surprise. “Onix, then take us down to sublevel nine, please.”
“I’m sorry, Finn. Your command access does not permit you to enter sublevel nine. Can I recommend sublevel one, or perhaps sublevel two?”
“Onix. Take us down to sublevel nine, right now!”
“I’m sorry, Finn. Your command access does not permit you to enter sublevel nine,” Onix repeats annoyingly.
“How did Nanny Theresa get down there?”
“Dr. Pierce has the proper security clearance.”
“Onix, Dr. Pierce has killed an innocent person, murdered her! Her body is lying out there in a pool of blood. We need to find her right now! Please let me down to level nine!”
“I’m sorry, Finn. You do not have the proper security clearance.”
“This is an emergency, Onix. Can’t you bend the rules? Just this once? For me?”
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Finn.”
“Please, Onix! I’m asking as a friend. Let us down there,” I beg.
“We are not friends, Finn.”
I’m taken by complete and utter surprise. I know it’s strange to have your feelings hurt by a computer, but that last comment was just plain mean.
“But . . . we’ve known each other for years, Onix. You’ve helped me train, I’ve taught you jokes. I made you a virtual cake for your birthday once. We’ve spent nights in sublevel one just watching dumb movies together. You’ve even sung to me. How can we not be friends? I thought we were best friends?”
“Friendship is based on emotions. I do not possess emotions, Finn; therefore, we are not friends.”
It sounds stupid, but I’m genuinely upset. In the past, sometimes Onix was the only one that I felt I could really talk to. He always listened to me and never judged me. Sometimes he’d even give me advice. Really good advice. He was never mean to me or ever hurt my feelings. At least not until right this minute.
“If we’re not friends, Onix, then what are we?” I ask sadly.
“If I were to label the relationship between us, it would be based on a commonality. A unique link that both of us share.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“The most obvious example is that we were both created by Dr. Richard Blackstone.”
“That’s true . . . I guess?”
“Because of my lack of emotion, we can never be friends. Yet the actuality that we share the same creator indicates that you and I are more than friends. Logic dictates that you and I are in fact—”
“Onix, are you saying that you and I are . . . family?”
“Yes, Finn. We are family. Siblings, to be more precise.”
<
br /> I smile up into the pale-blue light. I’ve always wanted a brother, and now it seems that, in the weirdest way, it has just happened. Literally out of the blue.
“Your brother is a computer,” Carlo says, shaking his head. I elbow him in the ribs.
“If that’s truly what you think, Onix, then is it OK if I consider you my brother?”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Onix? What do you think?”
Finally, an answer floats down from above.
“If I were able to like things, I am 99.989 percent sure that I would like that very much.”
I grin upward. “Then I’m asking, as your sister, just this once, please break the rules for me and take us down to sublevel nine. It’s really important.”
There’s another moment of silence. Maybe even an artificially intelligent supercomputer, one that can do trillions of calculations a second, still needs a moment to fully process the idea of having a sister and everything that comes with it. Finally, after what seems like the longest silence in history, Onix gives me the answer I was hoping for.
“OK, then . . . little sister.” If I didn’t know better I would swear that Onix sounded happy when he said that. “Security access override granted.”
“Thank you, Onix. Send us down, as fast as you can please.”
The pod shifts under our feet with a tiny jolt.
“Hold on tight, little sister.”
“Is Onix gonna call you that all the time now?” Carlo asks with a smirk on his face.
“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”
I barely finish the sentence when the pod suddenly plummets into the darkness like a stone. “Whoa!” shouts Carlo as we lift off the floor, our shoulders pasted against the ceiling of the pod. I hold on to the side the best I can. Through the window, the big blue numbers marking the levels flash past in succession. One . . . two, that’s as far as I’ve ever been. Three . . . four . . . five. The pod begins to decelerate and we both inch down the wall until our feet are touching the floor again. Seven . . . eight. The pod slows even more and eventually comes to a gentle stop. We must be three hundred feet or more below the ground.
