31
Conference
“OK, what the hell was that this morning?” Sam stopped pacing behind the couch and put her hands on her hips, glaring at everyone else as though daring them not to answer.
Rush and Sketch were playing HRT Alpha: Year One with something less than their usual enthusiasm. Daniel and Kaitlyn sat next to them, holding hands in silence, looking as though the world were about to end at any moment, which might be the truth of it, as far as Sam knew.
“We don’t know any more than you do,” Mackenzie finally answered when no one else did. She was running through a series of stretching exercises, but it wasn’t doing much to calm her nerves.
“Oh, I beg to differ,” Sam snapped. “We’ve all had individual sessions with Ammu that nobody else got to see. Maybe if we put it all together, things will make some kind of sense. So, spill. What did he say or do with each of you?”
Mackenzie just shrugged. “Mine wasn’t anything weird like this morning,” she said. “Really, it was a lot like Rush’s—which was yours, too, for that matter—and we were all there for that. I just fought this guy named Miller, and I dodged a lot of punches. That’s it. No crazy runes or chanting or holes in space.”
“You saw that?” Sketch blurted out, turning to look at Mackenzie over his shoulder.
“We all saw it,” Mackenzie said. “We might not all be talking about it, but we all saw it.” She glanced meaningfully at the back of Rush’s head, but Sketch wasn’t worried about who was talking and who wasn’t. The fact that he wasn’t the only one to see the weird thing between Sam’s hands was exciting in and of itself, and he turned back around, chewing the inside of his cheek thoughtfully.
“What about you, Gears?” Sam asked. “What did Ammu do with you?” They had been playing HRT Alpha ever since dinner—long enough to start using each other’s gamer tags out of habit—but they had chosen not to play downstairs by silent agreement, all of them feeling safer in the suite than they would have in the open space of the conference room.
“I don’t know. Mine was kind of weird,” Kaitlyn admitted. “Ammu was showing me things like blenders and stuff, and I was starting to see blueprints for them in my head. Then he threw in a picture of the gryphon thing, and I saw these symbols glowing in the air, like the stuff I drew on the floor.”
“OK,” Sam said. “So maybe the runes are some kind of blueprint for the gryphon.”
“You can’t build a gryphon like a blender,” Rush interjected, his voice thick with condescension.
“I’m not saying you can build it,” Sam snapped back. “I’m saying you can, I don’t know, call it or something.”
At the words ‘call it,’ Rush’s back stiffened, but he kept his thoughts on the subject to himself.
“Look,” Mackenzie said, “let’s say, just for a second, that calling gryphons through holes in the air doesn’t sound completely and totally crazy. And let’s even say, just for the same second, that it’s what we’re trying to do. That still doesn’t tell us why we’re doing it.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Kaitlyn agreed. “Why would they want us to do that? I mean, assuming we are, like you said.”
Everyone was silent for a while, the sounds of the game the only distraction.
“All we can know for sure,” Mackenzie finally continued, “is that this program is more directly related to Homeland Security than any of us realized. Which means two things: one, they have a good reason for asking us to do it, and, two, they aren’t going to tell us what it is. Period. All we can do is serve our country as best we can by trying to do what they tell us to do.”
“Really? Serve our country?” Sam asked, her voice derisive.
“What’s wrong with serving our country?” Daniel asked before Mackenzie could answer.
Sam sighed. “Nothing,” she allowed. “I’m not saying I don’t want to… I don’t know… help… or whatever. I just wouldn’t mind knowing what we’re helping with, exactly.”
“I wouldn’t either,” Mac admitted. “But it’s not going to happen. Homeland Security works on a strict need-to-know basis. And I promise you, they aren’t going to think we need to know.”
“We could ask,” Sam suggested.
“No.” Mac was already shaking her head. “Trust me. That would only make things worse. They’ll just get mad—maybe even scrap the program if they think we’re figuring things out. Whatever we do, we can’t look too curious about any of it, and we can’t let them know what little we know. Anything we manage to work out about what we’re really up to, we have to keep to ourselves. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Rush growled. “I’m going to that invitational no matter what, and nobody’s going to screw it up for me. You guys hear me? Don’t ask questions. Don’t let on you know anything’s up. Don’t make them mad. Everybody got it?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said.
“Roger that,” Mackenzie answered.
“OK,” Kaitlyn agreed.
“Sure thing, Rush,” Sketch chimed in.
Sam was the only one who didn’t reply. When Rush turned to stare at her, she finally nodded her consent, but she still didn’t look happy about it.