Chapter 9
I awoke to a small, persistent beeping sound. I guess I had been subconsciously been trying to weave it into my dreams, because I had weird images in my head of giant trucks backing up. The rhythm of the beeping didn't fit, though, and the pitch was all wrong. I opened my eyes to discover that Toby was apparently already awake and had gone downstairs. The beeping was coming from my Prime belt.
"It's about time you woke up," I heard Wizzit's voice say.
"What time is it?" I asked, yawning.
"Time for you to be up and getting ready to attend your sister's graduation," he replied.
I groaned. I had stayed out at the lab, sifting through the aftermath of JB Swift's rampage there, until the wee small hours of the morning. I know Nicolai had discovered a few things of interest, but I hadn't found anything that seemed like it would help us find Lily. At last, tired and discouraged, I had teleported back home and gone to bed.
I showered and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. Everyone else was already at the table; my mother had made a big pot of congee, or rice soup, as well as lots of youtiao, a kind of fried breadstick. "Good morning, sleepyhead," Angie said. "Toby told us you've had a few late nights lately, so we let you sleep in."
I grinned at Toby for covering for me. "Thanks, mate." Then I looked more closely at what he was eating. He had a bowl of congee in front of him and was spooning a thick brown paste into it from a small jar in front of him. "You're putting Marmite on congee?" I exclaimed.
"It's not bad," he replied, his mouth full. He swallowed, then went on, "The congee's a bit bland by itself, but the Marmite perks it right up."
"You should try it, Trevor." That was from my father, who, to my horror, had apparently swirled several dollops of the foul-tasting stuff into his bowl as well. I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to banish the sight from my mind. Mike had been trying to get the rest of us Primes hooked on Marmite for years, but so far, Toby had been his only convert. Now I wondered whether I had wandered onto the set of some sort of body-snatchers movie, where my entire family had been transformed into Marmite-eating pod people.
Fortunately for my sanity, no one else seemed remotely interested in trying the Marmite. I saw Jerome reach across the table for the last youtiao. "Did you hear the news, big bro?" he asked me, tearing it in half. "Little sis here walked downstairs all by herself this morning, without any canes or anything."
"Really?" I feigned surprise. "Wow, that's good news. How are you feeling, little sis?"
Angie gave me a grin. "I feel great! My legs were a little wobbly when I first woke up from the . . ." She caught herself and glanced carefully around the table. ". . . you know, from sleeping, but they feel okay now."
"Just don't overdo it," I advised her. "You've probably lost some strength, and you won't get it all back in a day."
"Big sis is pretty freaked out," Nick said. "She kept rubbing her eyes and asking Angie if she was sure she felt okay."
I looked around the table. "Where is Older Sister?"
"She is in the den feeding my darling grandson," my mother said, coming out from the kitchen with another plate of youtiao. She was looking quite the happy matriarch, with all her grown children, child-in-law, and new grandchild all gathered under her roof.
"So, big bro," Nick said, "when do we get to meet this 'old friend' of yours? Did you invite her to graduation?"
"And is she cute?" Jerome added.
"She really is," Angie said. She glanced around smugly at the surprised looks she got. "What? I ran into her once with Trevor, and he . . . sort of introduced us." She winked at me. "Her name is Lily, and she is very presentable."
Everyone laughed at Angie's dead-on impression of my mother, even my mom. "But she couldn't come to graduation," I put in quickly. "She had to, um, go down to Port Columbus to catch a flight."
Thankfully, that seemed to end the questions about Lily. Joy returned a few minutes later, and although she kept giving me odd looks all through breakfast and later during the graduation ceremony, she didn't say anything to me.
Upon arriving at the auditorium where the ceremony was to be held, Angie was immediately swarmed by a gaggle of her girlfriends. I have no idea what she told them about being able to walk again, and frankly, I didn't much care. Like the bicycle that couldn't stand up, I was too tired.
Since I've been a Prime, I have gotten out of the habit of drinking anything containing caffeine. For one thing, Wizzit doesn't stock coffee or energy drinks at HQ; black tea is about as strong as it gets. For another, I normally don't need any sort of pick-me-up, since Wizzit keeps us on an extremely regular wake/sleep schedule, and with all the exercise I get, I generally sleep very well at HQ.
And then there's the fact that Wizzit treats caffeine just like any other drug or poison that might be found in the bloodstream, namely by filtering it out through the kidneys. After drinking coffee, one tends to wake up from healing comas with an uncomfortably full bladder. So no, I don't do the caffeine thing.
Still, I found myself wishing I had drunk a cup or two of coffee at breakfast. The few hours' sleep I had gotten -- minus who knew how long for a healing coma beforehand -- just hadn't been enough. I know I nodded off a time or two during graduation. Toby nudged me awake when Angie went up to receive her diploma, and I remember seeing one of her friends walking discreetly beside her, ready to support her if her legs started to give out, but I don't recall much of the ceremony besides that.
As soon as we got home, Joy grabbed my arm and pulled me into the den. "How did you know, Younger Brother?" she demanded in Mandarin as she closed the doors.
"How did I know what?" I asked innocently in the same language.
"How did you know Younger Sister would be able to walk again today? You were the one who got me to agree to wait until this evening to take her to the hospital, but now there is no need, because she is all better. How did you know?"
I looked at my older sister. She was pretty upset, and I could sympathize. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to do anything to enlighten her. "Lucky guess?" I said with an attempt at a grin.
Joy emitted a small scream of frustration. "Everything has gone all weird in the last six months," she said unhappily. "Do you know that Younger Sister told me last night she is not going to college? She says she has accepted a 'marketing internship' with an international cosmetics company. And Mother and Father do not care! I thought they would be very upset, but they are actually happy with what she is doing!"
So that was going to be Angie's cover story? A marketing intern? I mean, it wasn't quite as lame as an international Tae Kwon Do demonstration team, but still. "Older Sister," I began.
"I could not believe what I was hearing," Joy went on. "She says that of course she will not get paid much, but she will gain a lot of valuable experience. Because she will be doing some of her work in Asia, she will be able to use her Mandarin and Cantonese and Korean, and even brush up on her Thai. I said, what about your education? And she said there would be time for that after she finishes this internship. And Mother and Father were sitting there, smiling and nodding, as if it were the most wonderful thing in the world."
"Older Sister," I said again, more insistently this time.
Joy paid no attention. "It was bad enough when you blindsided everybody with all that talk about your international team, but at least everyone reacted normally then. Now, Mother and Father do not seem to care that Younger Sister is not getting a college education. And even when I talk to them about you now, they are all 'Maybe this Tae Kwon Do team will be a good experience for him.'" She shook her head. "I do not understand them any more. And then, when I --"
"Joy!" I said sharply. I took hold of her wrist and turned her to face me. "Stop talking and listen to me!"
She stopped and blinked at me, either because of my tone of voice or the fact that I had
actually used her name. "What?" she asked. She looked down at her wrist. Now, Joy's a third-degree black belt, so she knows how to break away from a wrist-grab, and I wasn't really holding her that tightly anyway. But she didn't try to free herself from my grip; she just looked. "What?" she said again.
I didn't really know what I was going to say next; I had mostly wanted just to stop this rant of hers. "Look," I said, switching to English, "Angie . . . she's going to be okay. This . . . this marketing internship she's doing -- it's going to work out all right. Really, it is. Trust me."
"You mean, you knew?" she said incredulously. "You knew all along that she was going to go into cosmetics?"
"Well, no, not exactly," I said. "I didn't know she was going to be a marketing intern . . . exactly."
"But you knew she wouldn't be going to college?"
"Yeah," I admitted. "I knew that. Just like I knew that her legs would be healed today."
Joy stared at me, looking more closely than she had before. I think that, up to now, she had been thinking of me as nothing but the slightly goofy, wayward younger brother that she had grown up with, and that she didn't have to pay too close attention to me because she had already figured me out. Now, though, she was taking a second, harder look, re-evaluating me.
"What's going on, Younger Brother?" she asked me softly. She sounded frightened.
I found that I couldn't make myself blow this off and say, "Nothing's going on, Older Sister." But of course, I couldn't tell her just what was going on, either. So I did my best to compromise. "I can't tell you," I said truthfully. "I'm not allowed to."
"But something is, right? Something's going on?" I didn't say anything, and she went on anxiously, "Are you in trouble? Do you need help?"
I smiled reassuringly and shook my head. "I'm not in any kind of trouble, and neither is Younger Sister. We're both fine. We're going to be fine." I thought for a moment, then added, "Look, Older Sister, I know you're worried about her, so I'm going to make you a promise. When she's out there doing this 'marketing intern' thing, I'm going to be watching out for her, okay? I'm going to do my level best to make sure that nothing happens to my baby sister. Toby will, too, and so will some other friends of mine."
"But how can you . . . ? I mean, with your team . . . ?"
"I'll see her a lot more than you might think."
She was staring hard at me now, as if she wanted to peer somehow into my brain and read what I was thinking. Finally, she swallowed nervously and asked, "Are you working for the government? Is -- is Younger Sister going to be working for the government?"
That made me smile, considering how "the government" had been at odds with the Primes in recent months. "I don't want to lie to you," I said, "but I also don't want to turn this into a guessing game, so I'm not going to answer that. I'll just say that if you knew what I was really doing -- what Younger Sister will be doing -- then you'd be as proud of us as Mom and Dad are."
"They know?"
"They do now, but please don't badger them about it. I told them a while ago -- I kind of had to -- probably about the same time that you noticed that things started 'going weird'."
That brought a smile out of her, if only a faint one. "And you really can't tell me what it is that you're doing?"
I smiled and shrugged. "I'm on an international Tae Kwon Do demonstration team; that's all I can say."
She let out a long, slow breath while she digested that. Finally, she nodded. "Okay, I guess I'll have to settle for that. But listen, Younger Brother, if you ever do need help, or if you need a safe place to stay, or . . . or anything, no questions asked . . ."
I took a step forward and put my arms around her. "Then I'll come talk to my beloved older sister."
"You'd better!"
Attack Doll 5: The End of Lily Lee Page 9
