She collapses in my grasp.
“Go,” Nok says, pointing us down one of the tunnels.
“Without you?” Garrett asks. I have the same prickly feeling in my bones, the one that says, Protect, but Nok plants himself on the ground beside the unconscious woman. He begins drawing in the dirt with a stone.
“What’s he doing?” Zaneen asks.
“Who knows?” Zane says. “Veritas do all kinds of weird crap.”
Nok makes lines and scriggles, dots, shapes and scrapes and then he drops the stone and moves his hands over the drawings, like he’s pulling a bed sheet over the dirt. The letters rise gently off the ground, in the colors of soil, water and grass, linking together and popping softly like bubble gum in front of me. I don’t know why it surprises me that Nok knows I am a Tralate, but it does.
M-A-N-K-I-N-D
I-P-R-O-T-E-C-T-T-O-O
Y-O-U-V-I-S-I-O-N-N-O-T-C-H-O-I-C-E
F-E-A-R-C-H-O-I-C-E
W-E-C-H-O-S-E-N-O-F-E-A-R
The feeling of having to protect Nok disappears as if released from an open palm. Maybe he doesn’t want us to take the girl because it would mean more tromping around in his tunnels. Whatever the reason is, I try not to let it stick in my head. I just think, thank you, I’ll try and Nok smiles.
“Rings,” he says, pointing to his own chest. Then he waves a hand down one of the tunnels. “Outside.”
“Was that two whole words?” Garrett grins at the little Veritas. “Maybe Mark and Brandon are right. You trying to steal my girl, Nok?”
Zaneen groans from behind us.
“Where does this one lead?” Zane says, peering down the twisting tunnel.
“Back,” Nok shrugs. He flutters his fingers at us. “Go.”
No one wants to leave, but Nok refuses to come with us. We finally start down the tunnel and turn two corners before we hear the avalanche behind us, sealing off the tunnel. It means that Nok is sealed off too.
We walk and walk and walk, in silence at first. Everyone seems to be wondering the same thing I am and I know it for sure once they all start talking and asking each other if we’ve done the right thing. I don’t have a clue. We just keep walking. Jeez, we walk. Garrett and Robin walk behind us, him cradling Robin’s hand in his palms until she says, “God, you’re good.”
“It must’ve just been sprained,” Garrett says. “That’s the fastest healing I’ve ever done.”
I remember when he healed my own broken arm and how his touch felt like Indigo, the color spreading up my arm. I can’t help feeling a little jealous, wondering if Robin feels his beautiful healing color melting up her arm too.
She bends it around a few times to test it. “Good as new,” she says before catching up to Zane, a few steps ahead. Garrett stops, waiting for me.
We walk close to one another, the static playing between us like two antennae trying to get a signal. No one else seems to notice. Instead, the conversation spirals in a confused circle, the same questions asked over and over again, without any of us able to answer them. What’s got them so motivated? Who’s the Mastermind? Why is The Fury calling a Tralate ‘The Key’? Did she confuse The Key with Nalena’s Grandfather’s Memory? Does the Fury even have the Memory? Is Nok really a Tralate? How did they know about Nok at all?
Garrett and I stay particularly quiet when they talk about the Vision. There’s an itch inside me to tell, to just have it out in the open and be honest with these new friends, but Garrett isn’t telling and I remember what Addo told me about keeping it quiet.
There’s a momentary lapse in the conversation, while everyone turns it over and then the same questions start back up again, until we come to the end of the tunnel and there’s a ladder, mounted to the wall. We climb it and pop up like prairie dogs into a broken dryer, climbing out to stand in the Hotel Celare’s laundry room that is connected to the gym.
“This is monumental,” Zane says, standing in front of the long row of washing machines. I realize that Zane is still talking about the Fury’s attack and not how we walked for miles through incredibly hollowed out, underground tunnels that aren’t even part of the city sewer, and then just climbed a ladder, right into a hotel appliance.
“I thought he was sending us to see the Addo?” I say. Garrett turns from his conversation with Zane.
“We are,” he says. “The Veritas never reveal their direct tunnels unless they have to. Added security. No one knows all the ways in and out, but them.”
We go out of the laundry room and into the gym, past the ellipticals and the open mat where Zane trained me last night, to the very back of the room. There are rows of treadmills, facing flat screen TVs at the front, but we follow Garrett toward the back wall. There are no doors, no exits, no nothing. Just a long wall, covered with a mural of sweaty athletes, behind the treadmills. Garrett goes to the furthest corner and I’m wondering if one of the treadmills will flip up or fall into the carpet to reveal the access to the underground bunker where Addo’s hiding.
Instead, Garrett turns back, smiles right at me and passes his hand through the wall. He pulls it out and runs his hand against the decorated wall again and suddenly, his hand is missing to the wrist. Then the elbow, and then he winks at me and he’s gone.
“Cool,” Zane says. “Double wall.”
It’s not until Zane pulls me along with him that I even see it. There’s a recessed place in the corner that is completely invisible until I lean against it and look sideways. There is a door that would look just like a continuation of the wall, if it wasn’t open. I step into a narrow, crazy-colored corridor.
Robin swings the door shut behind us and there is the sound of rods passing through the door from the ceiling to the floor and from between the walls. It makes me feel a little claustrophobic, all of us scrunched together in this narrow hall as the mechanisms slide and lock in place. The colors are so vibrant and crazy that it makes me feel a little dizzy and disoriented.
“Just don’t ever touch this,” Robin wraps her fingers around my jaw and nudges my head up. There’s a tiny, black trapeze hanging high up beside the entrance door that we just came through. Hard to see in the whirlwind colors, I’d have to jump to grab it. “Unless you want to be buried alive in here. It collapses the entrance down to the bunker, the whole thing, so if you happen to grab it while there are people on the stairs, guess what? No more people on the stairs.”
“I won’t touch it,” I say. I’d say anything to get out of the hallway and not go blind.
Garrett opens a second door at the end of the hall. This one leads down a set of stairs, with dark gray walls on either side. It would be Heaven, compared to the colored room, except that my eyes are still swirling and blinded by the colors we just left behind. Against the gray walls, it’s almost worse, with every blink still exploding in a blotch of color. Twice I trip going down the stairs and nearly crush Zane. The second time, Zaneen grabs my elbow to steady me on the step.
“You alright?” she says and her voice is so sincere, I nearly miss catching her when she stumbles and crashes into me.
“I’m good.” I smile, pushing her gently back onto her step. “Thanks.”
Garrett raps his knuckles on the wall as we go down and it sounds like bongo drums. My eyes finally adjust at the bottom, on the gray door that the Addo swings open with a startling hoot.
“Come in, come in!” he bellows in a baritone, waving an arm in welcoming circles. “Welcome to the bunker!”
The bunker is a rounded hole of a room, small and darkish with a hard dirt floor and real, live, fat green leaves sprouted across the ceiling as thick as carpet and some growing, bright and green, off tree roots that poke out of the walls. Sean is sitting at a splintery gray wood table to the left. He lifts his mug to us in greeting.
There are three doors that bow a little inward on the curved wall just beyond Sean, and an empty gold couch on the opposite wall, only a few feet away. To the right is the strangest kitchen I’ve ever seen. Knotted tree roots po
ke through the walls and twist beneath the lengths of counter top, holding the counters up. There is a clump at the far end that frame an ancient refrigerator and the cupboards and shelves nestle between the gnarled roots and leaves, one with teacups hanging from an off-shooting branch. Addo grabs his tea mug off a ledge of twisted roots that stick out of the wall near the door.
“It’s nearly a table.” He chuckles as he closes the door behind us. The Addo continues to rattle on, as if we’ve been down in the bunker a million times already. “Beautiful things, Manga trees, they grow upside down and they thrive in the dark. Just have to be sure the leaves don’t drop in your tea. Those buggers will close up your throat in seconds.”
He glances at the leaf that was hanging over his mug on the knuckled shelf.
“I guess I’ll just dump this to be sure,” he giggles, but before he moves to the sink, he closes the door and shoves a knob across it. I hear a metallic scrape inside, bolts moving up and down and sideways all at once, just like the door at the top of the stairs. Addo turns back to us with a giggle and a shrug and says, “So, who wants a cookie?”
“I’ll take one,” Zane says. Addo shuffles over to the sink, dumps his tea and gets a new mug along with a glass jar of cookies off a gnarled shelf.
“We were ambushed at Big Dog’s Junkyard,” Robin says and it’s like our cue to spread into the room. Zaneen and Robin take the couch with Zane sitting at Robin’s feet, while Deeta and I sit on either side of Sean. Garrett leans against the wall beside my chair.
“So I heard,” Addo says as he circles the room, offering the jar of cookies. Nok comes out of the third bowed door across the room. He looks like he’s emerging from a nap, not from taking care of an unconscious Fury chick. Nok crosses the room to the kitchen, keeping his eyes down. He pulls out a pot and unloads vegetables from the fridge to the chopping block on the counter. Addo takes the last chair at the table and shoves the jar in front of Deeta with a wink. “Have some. They’re spectacular. No nuts.”
Deeta giggles and takes two and then Addo reaches in and takes four before pushing the jar to me. I just shake my head.
“So, what took you to the junkyard today?” Addo asks as he takes a huge bite of his cookie. “Find anything…exciting?”
I pull the crumpled picture and business card from my pocket and push it over to the Addo. He picks it up, squinting to see the faces.
“Garrett and I found these when we were at the storage shed,” I say. “They were behind a picture of Roger my mom always had hung on the wall. Zane knew the guy on the right, Clint, the owner of Big Dog’s, and since it was his business card too, that’s where we went.”
Addo puts the photo on the table and slides it across, so all the people are facing me. He stares at the photo, a thoughtful rumble deep in his throat.
“I don’t recognize most of them. These weren’t kids from my Cura, besides your mom and, eventually, your…” He catches himself and clears his throat, starting again. “Roger. So what happened at the junkyard? Come up with anything interesting?”
“Besides an ambush?” Zane says. “Clint had Nalena’s grandfather’s car and we took it to get out of there. Clint hid it for Roger after, well, you know…”
Zane takes a bite of his cookie so he doesn’t have to say anymore. Something sharp turns inside me. Somewhere, my mother and grandfather are chasing Roger through the afterlife to retrieve the Memory I can’t find for them. Addo sighs, shaking his head. “At least it was used for a good getaway this time.”
“The Fury were more focused than we’ve ever seen them,” Robin says. “And there were more of them than ever too. They chased us to the Farm and we used the Free Ball to escape.”
“We had to blow Gpop’s barn,” Zane says. “The sensors went off, but I don’t know if the gases ever activated. Have you heard if anybody found a snoozing pile of Fury out there?”
“Haven’t heard,” Addo shakes his head. “But the Fury’s been keeping everyone busy.”
“The girl that came through the Veritas tunnel with us…you know about the girl, right?” I ask.
“Purple hair? That one?” he says.
“There’s others?” I drop my jaw, wondering, but Addo just shrugs and takes a bite of another cookie.
“The girl said there’s a Mastermind,” Garrett continues. “She said he promised her surgery and a palace and men…in exchange for The Key.”
“Oh he did, did he?” The Addo says, tapping his dunked cookie over his mug of tea. “So we know that he’s a he.”
“Do you know who it could be?” Robin asks.
“No idea,” Addo says. “Just that he’s a cocky little Mastermind if he’s going around making promises like that. It must be how he’s motivating the Fury to follow him. They’d follow anyone who promised them a nose job and a bag of cash. Except someone who couldn’t make good on their promises.”
“So the Mastermind has to have money,” Sean says.
“Or,” Addo pauses mid-chew, “he could just be exceptional at weaving strings of promises that will never catch up with him.”
“There’s more,” I say. “The girl said they were looking for The Key, but she wasn’t talking about my grandfather’s Memory. She meant a Veritas or…”
“No, no,” Zane stops me. “She said who The Key was didn’t really matter. But The Key that the Fury is searching for is a Tralate. She was just juiced that Nok might be both.”
“Which is absolute cuckoo sauce,” the Addo says. “If you say Nok is a Tralate, you might as well say gasoline is a car. A Veritas can send a Tralate a message, but a Veritas cannot translate specific messages sent by others. Hence the need for the Tralate, you see? A Tralate can receive and translate messages from everybody.”
“But if the Fury is looking for a Tralate, it means that they might have our Key after all,” Garrett says and Sean looks over my head at his brother, finishing his train of thought, “But they aren’t able to read it.”
“And that,” The Addo raises up his third cookie to salute us, “is the question of the hour, kids.”
Chapter 14
“SO WHO’S THE TRALATE?” ROBIN says. Her eyes are on the Addo, but it still feels like everyone is staring at me.
“Could be a Mox,” Sean says, the second before I open my mouth. He shoots me a goofy grin. “It’s entirely possible that another Mox went haywire and promised The Fury all kinds of kittens and unicorns.”
“Another?” Zane perks up from his floor seat.
“What’s a Mox?” I ask.
“Like me,” Sean says, his fingertips on his chest. Zane, Robin, Zaneen and Deeta’s mouths drop open. “I’m a Mox. It’s the name for those in training to become an Addo.”
“Congrats, brother!” Zane says. Deeta leans over and hugs Sean.
“When were you going to tell us?” Robin asks. “When the Fury were carrying you off?”
Sean shrugs. “As far as anyone else knows, I’m Simple. This way, I’ve got a chance at getting trained and adopting a Cura before the Fury take a crack at me.”
“It’s a good plan,” Garrett says. The way he leans against the wall, it’s almost a sigh, as if he’s resigned to accepting his brother’s plan, but is still worried about it.
“But what were you saying about The Fury’s Key being a Mox?” Robin asks.
“If the Fury got a hold of the other Addo’s thumb drives, they could definitely have an idea of who some of the Moxes were,” Addo says. “And a Mox would have some pull, as far as making promises.”
“But The Fury doesn’t trust anyone,” Zaneen says. Zane nods.
“Unless they think they can manipulate ‘em,” he says. “The Fury are always looking for new meat with money or connections or a hot, new body to slobber on. If The Fury recruits somebody, it’s because the recruit has something to offer.”
“New recruits are encouraged to share everything they have in order to make friends,” Sean adds. Since he’s Garrett’s carbon copy, it’s fun to see Garrett�
��s face making expressions like a professor.
“Friends,” Robin snorts from her spot on the couch. “There aren’t any friends in The Fury. There are alliances that only last until you run out of what they want.”
“An unfortunate truth,” The Addo says, waving the last cookie from his stack.
That’s when I see her. It’s just her eye, her tiny eye between the door and frame, and the wisp of her pigtail, planted on the top of her head. But she’s looking at me. Iris is looking at me, without screaming.
I grin at her and she doesn’t shut the door, so I lean across the table and snatch the last cookie from Addo’s hand, before it makes it to his mouth.
“They’re good aren’t they?” Addo says with a nod, like I’ve finally come around. Garrett follows my gaze, spots Iris, and says, “Hi pumpkin,” but then the door wafts shut and her little eye is gone.
“Hi sweet pea,” Zane winks at Garrett.
“Not tonight, dumpling,” Garrett winks back. “I was talking to my sister.”
“Oh,” Zane wiggles around to look at the closed door. “Iris is here?”
“That’s her room, Dipstick,” Zaneen says. “Where do you think I’ve been hanging out when I’m not home?”
“A dark hole in someone’s basement?” Zane says and then, looking around, he says, “Oh, that is where you’ve been.”
They start sniping at each other and then Robin tells them to shut up and the Addo dips his tea ball, explaining how Mrs. Reese is out serving as a filter, meeting up with members of the other Curas, trying to decipher who’s who and what’s what. Zaneen asks if there are more cookies and Nok stirs something that starts to make the entire room smell delicious and everyone forgets about Iris. Except me.
I move from my chair, past the Addo. Sean gives me a little grin as I move closer to the closed door, but he goes back to the conversation. I slide down the wall and sit in the space between the first two bowed doors. I think about slipping the cookie underneath to Iris, but I don’t want to slide it across the dirt floor. I think of knocking, but I don’t know if she’d answer and I don’t want to do anything that will scare her. I’m just about to give up when the door opens a crack.
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