Cornerstone 02 - Keystone

by Misty Provencher

  I’m still clinging to the edge of being okay, until I try to take a deep breath and can’t. My ribs are too squeezed and I can’t catch a whole breath.

  The panic blows out my field and I try to dig my fingernails into my composure. I’m not going to lose it in this tunnel. I’m not. I bite down on my lip to redirect my thoughts, but my voice still comes out all jagged as I shout, “Sean?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “It’s just a little further,” Garrett’s voice is an unwelcome anchor. As much as I want to be calm, I need to make it happen for myself. I think I’d be okay if he could just be the one freaking out, but instead, he says, “Almost there.”

  And I lose it. I totally fail.

  “We’re not,” I say. The walls are too close. The fear rises up in my throat and I fight it back down, but it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. I won’t open my eyes in case I’m not. I’m afraid I’ll be staring at another collapsed end of the tunnel.

  Suddenly, hands wrap around my wrists and I’m dragged through the hole. I flop out, onto a concrete floor, and open my eyes on Sean’s dress shoes.

  “Sounded like you were bugging out in there.” Sean says as he hauls me up. “We’ve got to tell Nok to make his tunnels a little bigger. That one should be called the Veritas girdle.”

  It would’ve made me laugh, if I wasn’t sucking in as much stale air as I could get inside me, while standing in somebody’s creepy basement. The concrete floor and cinder block walls are lit by only a single naked bulb, hovering over what looks to be the foot of a staircase, at the opposite end of the room.

  Garrett comes through the hole, rolling onto his back so he can reach up through the opening and grabbing onto some pipes overhead. He pulls himself out, and lands with both feet on the floor like he does this every day.

  “You okay?” he asks and I just nod, pushing my hair out of my face. I’m an idiot.

  “So, where we at, boss?” Sean asks his brother.

  “It’s a condemned house,” Garrett says. “In the sub behind the library.”

  It can’t be the same one. Once we climb the steps from the basement, we’re standing in the dark, empty living room of an old, vacant house. The wood floor is cold beneath my bare feet. I look out the dusty windows and I instantly know where I’m at. This is the abandoned mansion I used to pass on my way through the woods to the library. It sits at the very farthest, back corner of the subdivision. The air inside it smells like it’s been lying around on the floor for years.

  Garrett pulls a phone from his pocket and texts something.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says once he slips the phone back into his pocket. We go to the window ledge that faces the wooded side of the house, instead of the orange-stickered front door. Garrett tugs open the window. It’s a dark night and the glow of the streetlights barely lights this side of the house. Garrett goes first, throwing a leg out and jumping down near the tree line.

  “Now you,” Sean says.

  “I’m the Contego,” I say. “And why do I feel like I’m glued to you, anyway?”

  “Because I’m special now,” Sean grins.

  “Special how?”

  “I’ll tell you once we’re out.”

  Garrett whistles for us to hurry up and the hot smell of smoke is already wafting through the trees from the library.

  “Ladies first,” Sean roots himself beside the window frame. I shoot him the I’ll kill you when I have a minute look before I slip out the window. I have no problem landing on the grass beside Garrett, but then Sean jumps right out and lands right on top of me. We both go down in a grunting heap.

  “Smooth.” Garrett chuckles, but he puts out a hand to each of us. I untangle from Sean and get to my feet.

  “Okay, so tell me why I feel like your Siamese twin?” I say.

  “Because I’m a new Addo,” Sean says with a goofy grin.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Totally,” Sean’s grin gets wider. “Addo made a concession, due to the circumstances.”

  “Because you’re a total gifted genius,” Garrett says. “But let’s talk about this later. We’ve got a ride to catch, and we need to get to where we’re supposed to be.”

  Sean hesitates. “What about Mom and Iris? Are they coming through here? What if they need help?”

  “I don’t know which way they came through, but they could already be at the meeting point,” Garrett says. “You know what Dad always said. Keep moving.”

  “I know, I know…” Sean stands there, rubbing his neck. “But you really think Dad would’ve left them behind?”

  “Yes,” Garrett says. He’s all casual and calm, but I see how he keeps glancing back up at the window we came out of too, as if any second the rest of his family might pop through.

  My own legs are quaking to move. The library smog filters through the trees and all I can think of is that we’re not far enough from The Fury. They could come charging through the woods at any second. Garrett knocks Sean on the shoulder.

  “You know how Mom works. She’s fine, so let’s just get to our ride. She’s going to flip out if we’re not there.” Garrett glances at my feet. “You want a piggy back, Nalena?”

  “No,” I say, rubbing one bare foot down the opposite calf. “How far do we have to go to get our ride?”

  “Two streets down,” Garrett says and I nod. I’d walk on live wires to get further away from the library. When Garrett turns and starts off at a jog, we follow.

  The dented mini bus that lurches up to the curb looks like a death trap. And the guy driving it looks like a crazy-haired sock puppet in a black leather jacket. His head is a dark pile of spiral locks, like unraveled yarn. But, with the sirens exploding from all directions and my feet chewed up from running over the pebbles on the sidewalks, I still scramble through the side door of the van the minute Garrett opens it.

  The driver pushes up his mirrored sunglasses with one finger, grinning while he chomps a glob of gum. Sunglasses. During a crescent moon. Everything about the guy makes it hard to feel okay about sitting in the back seat of his rickety bus.

  The driver turns in his seat and says, “Hey.”

  “How’s it going?” Sean says as he slides the door shut. The driver shrugs.

  “Usual, I guess.” the driver says. He does a thumb jab toward his own face as he says, “Since nobody’s doing intros…Shred.”

  But he doesn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he turns around and jerks the gearshift into drive.

  “You’ve got any other pick-ups?” Garrett asks.

  “One,” Shred says. He flashes a grin in the rearview, his lips pulled back to show all his teeth. Garrett knocks my knee with his.

  “Here,” he says and slips his dress-shoed foot beneath my bare feet. “So you don’t have to keep them on the floor.”

  I smile at him, stacking my feet on top of his.

  Once we reach the main road, the van only putters along and Shred keeps pulling off onto the shoulder to let the wailing police cars race by.

  “Why are we going so slow?” I whisper to Garrett. Shred eyes me from the rearview and he’s the one that answers first.

  “Let me ask you somethin’. Who goes fast at the scene of a crime, ‘sides the criminals that wanna get away? Think about it, little girl. Normal people just gawk along, waitin’ to be blown up too or creamed by one of the fire trucks. The only ones who don’t wanna know what happened are the ones that already know. And The Fury ain’t gonna be lookin’ for some old bus with engine trouble to be the getaway car.” He lets out a psht from the corner of his mouth. “Whoa! And there’s our next pick up.”

  He jerks us onto the shoulder as another emergency vehicle comes screaming out of nowhere. Garrett is trained on the bushes outside. I focus too, but my field explodes as the branches shake.

  Mrs. Reese steps out of the leaves, clutching Iris’s hand, and my field pops. Addo plows out right behind her, flanked by Mark and Brandon, whose eyes are each working
over the opposite ends of the street.

  Mrs. Reese takes the front passenger seat with Iris in her lap. Iris uses her favorite stuffed bear, Mr. Boodles, to shield her eyes from me. I guess that even the Memory couldn’t erase what she saw Roger do. And how I didn’t stop it.

  Garrett and I move back to the farthest bench so that everyone else can pile in. Brandon jumps in beside Garrett and I slump a little so that Sean and Addo block me from Iris’s view.

  “Thanks for the lift, Sherman,” Addo says, tapping Shred on the shoulder.

  “All just the tom-jobbery, Old Doe,” Shred says, pulling back onto the road. “Freddie Mercury’s calling in all kinds of favors. Even from the plain old Simples, like me.”

  “Well, the good news is that everyone made it out,” Mrs. Reese says as we sail past the library and everybody, besides Shred, seems to exhale. “Your father too, Sherman. Freddie’s fine.”

  “Always is,” Shred says.

  All the trees placed along the winding drive obscure the library, but I can still see the sparks of all the emergency vehicle’s lights flashing. The smoke fills up the street like a dusty fog for a mile. I only relax when I can’t see the library or hear the sirens anymore.

  Garrett bumps my knee with his and smiles when I look at him.

  Mrs. Reese twists in her seat so she can see the backbenches. Iris lies against her in a silent mound.

  “Brandon, Mark,” Mrs. Reese says, “what happened out there?”

  The boys straighten up on their seats.

  “It happened too fast to get any kind of a warning to you, Mom,” Mark says. “We were sitting up in the trees, keeping look out, and there was nothing going on and then all of a sudden, this van came flying’ in from the street.”

  “Red mini van, Ford. No license plates,” Brandon adds.

  “How did you miss a whole van coming?” Garrett asks.

  “I dunno,” Mark snaps. “Maybe if you did the perimeter once in a while, you’d do a better job.”

  “We were where we should be,” Brandon adds. “The van didn’t make a sound and it just came out of nowhere and gassed it on and ran straight into the library. And then the whole thing exploded.”

  “Kaboom,” Mark says.

  “So they’re using bombs now,” Shred says, grinning so widely that his glasses scoot up the bridge of his nose on their own. “Coo.”

  Mark’s head flips up. “Whose side are you on?”

  Shred just laughs. “I’m as Switzerland as they come, little dude. That’s what happens when you have a kid at sixteen and you don’t get the sign until seventeen. You automatically opt-out from the good ship Ianua. So, I got my popcorn, but I’m sittin’ this one out on the sidelines.”

  “Simple,” Mark grunts. “Figures.”

  “Rather be Simple than dead.”

  “Sounds Selfish...” Mark fires back, but Mrs. Reese cuts him off.

  “I don’t want to hear anymore of that out of you, Mark. Sherman is one of us,” she says. “The Simple are no different from us, you know that. Sign or no sign, we’re all human beings.”

  Shred flashes Mark a told-you-so grin and Mark grumbles something under his breath.

  The rest of the drive is quiet and Garrett doesn’t mention The Key, so I don’t either. We finally pull into the drive of the Hotel Celare. Of course I know the place. It’s a huge, white building that looks like a castle fortress from the road. Everyone at Simon Valley knows this place. It’s a big status thing to belong to the hotel’s gym and the kids with money always scramble to book a room at “The Celare” for their after-prom parties.

  Shred drives past the front doors and around the back of the hotel. He pulls the van into a lighted service entrance garage. The door rolls down behind us. The floors and walls are all cement. There are no buttons to lift the garage door and only wood steps that lead up to a closed, metal door at the top. High above the door, bolted into the cement, is a round, black disk of a wide camera eye. Shred’s bucket seat sqwerks as he turns around to peer at us.

  “Hotel Ianua,” he announces. “Everybody out.”

  Chapter 8

  MRS. REESE HOLDS IRIS’S HAND up the wooden steps and the Addo trails behind them. Sean herds Mark and Brandon ahead of him and Garrett and I take up the rear. At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Reese pivots toward the black disk high above our heads. Before she can raise her hand to her forehead, a buzzer on the door sounds, and Mrs. Reese pushes the door open.

  We step into a narrow, carpeted hallway. It feels like heaven under my feet.

  “How many rooms do we have?” Mark asks as we all trail after Mrs. Reese. “I want my own.”

  “We’re sleeping in the courtyard rooms,” Mrs. Reese says.

  “Courtyard? No way!” Brandon says.

  “Don’t we have to check in?” I ask.

  “No, Freddie Marcourt owns the hotel,” Garrett says. “He was the Samoan guy at the Totus. The one with the tattoos up his arms? He’s a Contego architect and he owns hotels all over the world that he’s customized for each Cura. In case of an emergency.”

  And we’re walking down the hall of one of his hotels right now. I try not to pay much attention to how hard it is to swallow.

  “Like a safe house for the mob,” Brandon calls over his shoulder.

  “Oh no, it’s a hundred times safer than that,” Sean says. He turns and walks backwards, bouncing as he does it. “The design is so genius, the public probably has no idea what the Courtyard suites can do. The Courtyard consists of all the luxury suites, more like whole apartments, that rim a central greenhouse courtyard. There are fruit trees and artistically designed vegetable patches and even a free flowing waterfall that allow for sustainability if there is a small community that should need to live off it.

  “The Courtyard rooms have the ability of being sealed off from the rest of the hotel and once it’s sealed, it’s impenetrable. Freddie’s hotels are more solid than the strong holds for our Presidents. There are security cameras and lock systems and all kinds of safeguards for preserving the Ianua in case of a grand-scale emergency,” Sean stumbles, bounces backward, but doesn’t fall. But he does keep talking. “It’s absolutely incredible. Even more incredible, this one’s Freddie’s newest model, which means it’s state-of-the-art. But it’s never seen a full scale attack since it’s been built.”

  “And hopefully it won’t now,” the Addo says. The constriction in my throat relaxes.

  Mrs. Reese pauses beside the darkened double glass doors that have GYM printed on them in gold letters. A shadow inside catches my eye and my field explodes around me, but then the lights flick on and Freddie and Nok walk toward us. There’s not a scratch, or a smudge, on either of them.

  “Thank God, they made it,” Mrs. Reese murmurs and kisses the top of Iris’s head.

  “How did they get here?” I ask.

  “Another Veritas tunnel,” Sean says and I shiver thinking of the tight little hole we climbed through. I roll my shoulders.

  “See how it works, Nali?” Mark pipes up. He’s smiling like I’ve won a prize. “They go one way, we go another. We were the bait car.”

  “We were used.” Brandon throws a hand dramatically on his forehead.

  “We were useful,” Mrs. Reese says. “We’d rather have them go after us as a larger target and be able to protect the Addo, rather than have them try for one of the Veritas. And the Fury almost always chooses the target that seems easiest to hit.”

  “It’s true,” the Addo says, shuffling in his sandals like they’re tap shoes.

  “They may not have even known it was a Veritas’ place under the library,” Sean says, but Garrett and Mrs. Reese and Addo all shake their heads and answer at the same time, “They knew.”

  Freddie unlocks one of the gym doors from the inside.

  “Good to see you,” he tells Mrs. Reese. “Everything go okay?”

  “Flawless,” Mrs. Reese says.

  “Almost flawless,” Garrett pipes up and we all turn t
o look at him. “The Fury were yelling when they came in. They were looking for the Key.”

  “The Key?” Freddie frowns. “Are you sure you heard it right? What did they say exactly?”

  “They were shouting We need the key! Find the key! Stuff like that,” I say. Garrett nods.

  “They could be trying to throw us off,” Sean adds.

  “Possible,” the Addo says. “But doubtful. Maybe this new development has something to do with the Fury’s sudden ability to be an actual threat.”

  “Maybe Roger actually hid it from them too,” Sean says.

  The Addo tips his head, side to side, as if he’s thinking. “Possible,” he says.Iris sniffles while she keeps her face pressed to her mom’s hip, blocking us all out, and when Mrs. Reese moves, Iris switches to the other side and quickly buries her forehead again. Freddie’s eyes take it all in.

  “We should get everyone settled and revisit this a little later,” he says. Mrs. Reese nods. “I want Nok and the Addo in the safest location possible, so I was thinking you and Iris would stay with them, for added protection. We’ll put the kids in the courtyard. What do you think?”

  “But there will still be access to the gym?” Mrs. Reese asks.

  “Oh no,” Freddie explains, “it’s closed down to the public for ‘maintenance and updates’ until further notice.”

  “Ahhh,” Addo says to Nok, “Looks like we’re roomies again.”

  The tiny Veritas just nods once.

  “Nok can show you the way down if you don’t remember,” he says. Mrs. Reese steps into the gym with Iris still clinging to her and the Addo follows behind them. She pauses a few steps away to turn back to us.

  “There’s already a watch outside. We’re not in the rotation tonight, but we’ll be in it tomorrow,” she says. Her eyes rest on Mark and Brandon first. “So make sure you don’t get into your rooms and goof off all night. We all need to be well rested and alert tomorrow.”