Criminal Destiny

by Gordon Korman

  Tori sighs. “No smoke in here, anyway.”

  It occurs to the four of us at the same time. The conference room! Our evidence!

  The realization jolts us into sudden, frantic action, but the truth is we don’t know how to find the room we’re looking for. We’ve been there before via the roof, not the main entrance.

  We scramble around throwing open doors, revealing mostly bathrooms and storage closets. That’s when I remember—there was definitely a door from the conference room leading directly onto the factory floor.

  We snake our way through the stacked cones to the only exit on the north side. Malik throws the door wide and stale smoke comes billowing out. We pull our collars up over our noses and run inside, waving our arms to try to disperse the clouds. I jam a traffic cone under the door to keep it propped open.

  As the smoke escapes into the soaring factory space, shapes become more distinct and we get our first glimpse of the wreckage of Osiris headquarters.

  “Look what they’ve done,” Amber chokes. “Those evil, rotten—”

  “They cloned criminals, Laska,” Malik growls. “What’s worse than that? Torching the evidence is nothing in comparison.”

  The whiteboards that had documented the lives of eleven clones, complete with pictures and notes, are nothing but a pile of ash. The heat of the fire melted the glass of the table, which sags in the middle, forming what looks like a giant fruit bowl. Metal filing cabinets are blackened and crumpled like juice boxes. I open one and find its handle still a little warm to the touch. Its contents are dust that flies into my face, making me cough.

  “Our evidence!” Tori exclaims in agony. “Now we’ll never be able to prove what’s been done to us!”

  I get down on my hands and knees and start sifting through the mess, heedless of the fact that gray grit is beginning to cover me from head to toe. It’s everywhere, stinging my eyes, up my nose, even in my mouth, and I spit ash that reminds me of burnt toast.

  “You’re wasting your time, Frieden,” Malik groans. “There’s nothing left bigger than a postage stamp. Your dad sure knows how to cover his tracks.”

  “Why is it only my dad?” Maybe it’s because our one chance has literally gone up in smoke, but this really gets to me. “Your parents were in it up to their necks! Everybody’s were!”

  Malik doesn’t back down. “Yeah, but it takes a special kind of sicko to dream up Project Osiris! None of our folks did that. Just Felix Frieden—or should I say Hammerstrom?”

  “Look”—Tori steps between us—“we’re all upset—”

  I barely hear her. “First off, my father didn’t invent Osiris on his own. Tamara Dunleavy was with him at the beginning. And second, who started it isn’t as important as who did it, and that was every adult in town!”

  “At least my dad’s a doctor!” he returns. “He helps people!”

  “By filling them full of pills to make them forget the truth of this place!”

  Malik towers menacingly over me. “On whose orders? Your old man’s, that’s who!”

  “Guys—” Tori pleads.

  “My old man’s a scientist!” I sputter. “This began as an experiment—” I can’t believe I’m defending Felix Frieden, who has to be every bit as bad as the criminals he cloned to create us. But I’m too mad to back down. I get right in Malik’s face. For a second, I’m pretty sure I’m about to get punched out by the guy who took down a gang of teenagers in a McDonald’s parking lot. He’s even got his fists up, ready to let fly. I can practically taste the blood mingling with the smoke and ash.

  At the last second, Malik transfers his rage from me to a vase lying broken between us on the floor. He rears back his foot and kicks it across the room. The pieces go flying in all directions, along with the stems of dead flowers.

  We see it at the same time—a single sheet of paper, singed at the edges. I bend down and pick it up, cradling it in my hands.

  “How did it survive the fire?” Malik asks, his anger turning to wonder.

  The page is damp, the ink blotchy and running. “The vase must have fallen on it when they were torching the place. And the water from the flowers kept it from burning up.”

  “It’s the only thing left,” Amber mourns. “And it’s ruined.”

  “For all we know, it’s somebody’s laundry list, anyway,” Malik puts in sadly. “If you see anything about bow ties, that’s my dad. As if a dumb bow tie makes you any less a sicko,” he adds with a sheepish look at me.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry too,” I tell him.

  Amber peers at the soggy paper. “It is a list, you know. You can tell by the way the ink blotches are spaced.”

  “Who cares?” Malik laments. “We’ll never be able to read it. We came all this way, and for what? Happy Valley wins. We may be the masterminds, but they’re the ones who are always a step ahead.”

  Tori is wearing a look that I’ve learned to recognize—the one where she’s concentrating so hard you should be able to hear the gears turning. “The freezer!” she exclaims suddenly.

  We stare at her.

  “It’s an old artist’s trick,” she explains. “If you spill something on a painting, you put it in a deep freeze. It stops the water from soaking into the paper and solidifies the picture. If we can freeze-dry the moisture out of this, maybe it’ll reveal what’s there.”

  “But where are we going to find a freezer in a plastics factory?” asks Malik.

  Amber laughs in his face. “We’re in Serenity, dummy, and we’ve got the whole town to ourselves. Pick a house, any house.”

  18

  TORI PRITEL

  Home.

  I never thought I’d see it again. And now that I’m here, I feel like an intruder, a burglar. (Which I technically am, I guess.)

  In all the time I lived in Serenity, my parents never locked our front door even once. But now that they’re abandoning ship, they sealed the house up tight. It’s almost like a message to me: Keep out. You don’t live here anymore.

  Obviously, I realize I escaped from this place. Nobody banished me. Still, the idea that I’m a trespasser in the Pritel home—my home—makes me really, really sad.

  We have to break in through the stained-glass panel in the door—the one Mom and Dad said they were so proud of. I made it for their fifteenth anniversary. It took me almost a month; it takes Malik half a second to put the pointed hat of a garden gnome through it. It’s a lot easier to destroy things than to create them. As an artist, I’ve always been on the “create” side, but I can’t help but appreciate the speed and directness of Team Destruction. After all, Project Osiris was more than fourteen years in the making, and we busted it up in a single wild night.

  We chose my house because of my studio in the attic. If we’re going to have any chance of bringing out what it says on the mysterious list from the Plastics Works, this is obviously the place to be. I have gallery lighting, not to mention magnifying lamps with special viewing lenses. If that won’t do it, nothing will. One thing about living in an experiment—there was always plenty of money for the very best stuff.

  Right now, though, the paper is in our Sub-Zero freezer, next to Steve’s (my dad’s) favorite steaks, and our homemade ice pops in the shape of the Serenity Cup. We used to eat them on our porch after the fireworks on Serenity Day. That didn’t happen this year, for obvious reasons. I wonder why my parents didn’t throw them out. Maybe they were secretly hoping I’d change my mind and come home. I have to admit I still long for that front porch and the comfort of their company and knowing I’m part of a family. At this point, though, that wouldn’t mean much. A Popsicle is just a piece of ice, and my only blood relative is behind bars somewhere, serving a well-deserved prison term.

  The Sub-Zero freezer is turned to the coldest possible setting. While we wait for the paper to chill out, we raid our former houses in search of clothes that fit us better than the stuff we took from the Campanellas. Mr. Campanella’s jeans have been hanging lower and lower on Malik’s
waist as life on the run stretches them out, and he’s beyond psyched to ditch the princess backpack for a normal black one. I know Amber is anxious to get into a T-shirt that fits. She’s so nuts about her goal weight that any tightness is like an alarm bell in her head. Me, I’m just thrilled to jettison the pink and sequins. Way too flashy.

  My clothes are here, but—am I crazy, or is everything in the wrong place? I check all the drawers with the same result. Nothing is missing, but the contents have been slightly rearranged. I experience a chill as I picture my parents going through all my stuff, looking for clues to where we might be.

  They love me; they love me not. (Or at least their loyalty to Project Osiris comes first.)

  Upstairs in the attic studio, there’s evidence of the same kind of search, only here, something really is missing—the photographs we snapped of the eleven whiteboards from the conference room.

  I tell the others when we gather back at my house. They confirm that their rooms have been ransacked too, although nothing seems to have been taken except my box of pictures.

  Amber is alarmed. “Those pictures were proof of Project Osiris!”

  Eli thinks it over. “Not really. I mean, you could make out the names and see the pictures, I guess. But the writing was too small to read. I don’t think there was any hard evidence we could take to the police.”

  “And even if we tried, our parents could just deny it,” Malik adds. “You know, say we made the boards ourselves.”

  He’s right. We haven’t lost anything that would do us any good.

  We’re all pretty hungry, so I boil hot dogs and open a couple of tins of soup—the extent of my talents as a chef.

  Malik makes fun of me when he sees me loading the dishwasher. “Who’s going to know?”

  “I’ll know,” I reply, tight-lipped.

  Malik sets a pastry box down on the table. “My mom’s peanut butter cookies. They have to be a little stale, but that’s still better than what anyone else bakes.” You can hear the nostalgia in his tone. “Hector used to inhale these things. Too bad the shrimp can’t be here to hog the whole batch.”

  That’s our lunch: hot dogs with bread instead of buns, vegetable soup, Hector’s favorite cookies, and Serenity Cup ice pops. The milk has gone sour, so we drink water.

  Eli’s brought his iPad and we amuse ourselves by looking stuff up on Serenity’s fake internet. It’s hard not to laugh while he quotes endless statistics on how many hundreds of thousands of traffic cones the Plastics Works churned out last month, or reads the highlights of President Roosevelt’s speech at the founding of Serenity in 1937 (which never happened, since there never was a town here until Project Osiris created it in 1999). He passes the tablet on to Malik, who finds extensive sports coverage of water polo matches all around the country, with no mention of football, baseball, basketball, or hockey, which Serenity considers too competitive and violent. When it’s my turn, I list all the awards our town has supposedly won over the years—America’s Ideal Community, Best Quality of Life, Top Schools, Lowest Unemployment, Safest City, Purest Air Quality, and on and on. By the time I get to Least Traffic Congestion, the others are rolling on the floor. Traffic—in a place with hardly any cars and not so much as a single stoplight!

  It’s awful, but it feels good to laugh. I almost forgot what that’s like. And maybe the fact that we can laugh means there’s hope for us. We aren’t the people they told us we were, but this could be a glimpse of the people we’ll one day be. If we can think for ourselves, and learn, and even have a little fun occasionally, there’s a chance that we can leave the past behind. We are Project Osiris, but Project Osiris isn’t all we are.

  There’s an expression we’ve heard in the outside world: “Get a life.” That’s what we have to do.

  Malik shakes his head. “All those brilliant scientists, and not one of them figured out that we were going to get older and start to question the load of baloney they were feeding us.”

  Amber takes the tablet next, accesses the online dictionary, and looks up clone.

  ENTRY NOT FOUND.

  “There’s a word we weren’t allowed to learn,” she drawls, deadpan. “I wonder why?”

  For some reason, the whole thing isn’t very funny anymore. There were a lot of words we weren’t supposed to know—murder, for example. But the fact that the name of the very thing we are was forbidden to us—well, that says a lot about our lives.

  Eli fidgets uncomfortably in his chair. “You think that paper’s frozen enough yet?”

  We’re all glad to change the subject.

  I open the freezer door and take out the large Ziploc bag. The plastic is fogged up, which I know is a good sign. That means the moisture has come off the page.

  We gather around the table as I open the zipper and gingerly draw the paper out.

  The ink is still mottled, but the blotches have shrunk to the point where definite letters are now visible. It’s not readable, exactly. Yet if we look at it under different light, and go word by word . . .

  “Follow me!” I exclaim, and lead the way up the stairs to the attic. In my studio, I clip the document onto my drafting desk, swivel the magnifying lamp over it, and peer through the lens.

  It’s the same mess, only larger and brighter. But with my artist’s eye, I can envision the lines as they were being formed, and painstakingly put it together, letter by letter.

  The others are crowded so closely behind me that the combined effect of their breathing on the back of my neck sends shivers clear down to my heels. I shoo them away and return my attention to the list.

  And it is a list. A list of names. The first couple of lines are smeared beyond reading, but I can make out a lot of the rest of it:

  Gus Alabaster

  Brother Juan Antonio Lanterna

  Archibald Barrett, MD

  Mickey Seven

  Q. Sinjin Lee . . .

  The wet page might have creased here, because the next line is just a smudge. But I’m able to make out the rest of the list:

  Yvonne-Marie Delacroix

  Farouk al Fayed

  C. J. Rackoff

  Without looking away from the magnifying lamp, I pull over a notebook and scribble down everything I’ve managed to pull off the paper.

  Malik frowns over my shoulder. “That’s it? A bunch of strangers?”

  “Just because we don’t recognize the names doesn’t mean they aren’t important,” I tell him. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”

  “Maybe they’re the Purple People Eaters,” Amber suggests. “They aren’t really named things like Rump L. Stiltskin and Baron Vladimir von Horseteeth.”

  Malik shakes his head. “No way. There are no female Purples, and there are at least three girls on this list.”

  “These could be our parents,” I suggest. “We already know at least their last names are fake.”

  Eli has another theory. “We have seven names, but there are four more that we can’t read. That adds up to eleven, which is a very familiar number. Eleven of us—eleven clones.”

  The earth stands still as we digest this. When we learned about Project Osiris, we lost our sense of where we came from. Not from our parents; not from any parents. We were left with a murky idea of a splotch of DNA from an anonymous criminal rotting in an anonymous prison somewhere over the rainbow.

  But—my heart begins to beat double-speed—these are real names. Real people . . .

  Malik is amazed. “Are you saying that’s—us?”

  Amber clues in. “Not us. The people we’re cloned from. Like Bartholomew Glen.”

  “He’s not on the list,” I observe.

  “I’ll bet he is,” says Eli, looking unhappy. “He must be one of the smudges.”

  Poor Eli. I think he believes he’s the one cloned from the Crossword Killer. I guess it’s possible, but Eli Frieden is not the murderer type. He’s sensitive and gentle and smart. I’d never say it out loud, but I’m kind of leaning toward Malik for Bartholomew Gle
n—except that, for a tough guy, he practically faints when you serve him a medium-rare hamburger. And anyway, isn’t the whole point of Osiris to prove that we’re not destined to be exactly the same as the people we’re cloned from?

  Malik has a practical question. “How are we going to find out?”

  “The same way we did with Glen,” Eli reasons. “As soon as we connected a name from the factory with a criminal mastermind, we knew we had a DNA donor. If these seven turn out to be criminals . . .”

  I swallow hard. I’m not sure I want to know.

  No, scratch that. I obviously do. But I’m terrified of what I’m about to find out.

  19

  AMBER LASKA

  GUS ALABASTER (1948– ) is a powerful organized crime figure who ran west and northwest Chicago for twenty-two years before his arrest in 2001 on federal tax evasion charges. His control over O’Hare airport gave him national and international reach. Considered by the FBI to be “the most successful gangster in American history,” Alabaster was almost as accomplished as a media darling as he was as a mobster . . .

  We’re back at the factory, where we can rely on the internet being the real thing. At Tori’s house, there was no such person as Gus Alabaster when we researched him on Eli’s iPad. But here—not in the burnt-out conference room, but in the offices above it—the name alone generates over 200,000 hits.

  This is my first time here—I was late to the plan to escape Serenity. Don’t think I’m not ashamed of that. I used to be this awful place’s biggest fan. If not for the others, I never would have seen past the honesty, harmony, and contentment. I was too busy thanking my lucky stars for being born in this wonderful community.

  . . . Alabaster was often seen in the company of celebrities, sports heroes, fashion models, political figures, and even royalty, chauffeured around Chicago in his signature white Rolls Royce.

  Federal, state, and local police charged Alabaster with 147 counts of crimes ranging from armed robbery to racketeering to conspiracy to commit murder. The nimble gangster was cleared every time, which only added to his legend. In the end, though, tax evasion proved to be the charge Alabaster could not beat. The swashbuckling mob boss could not explain how someone who did not earn enough to pay any income tax could own six houses, fourteen cars, two yachts, and a private jet . . .