33
Cloak-and-Dagger
By mid-afternoon, they all ended up in the gaming room playing HRT Alpha: Year One to keep their minds off the strange events of the morning. Sketch had teamed up with Rush against Daniel, Kaitlyn, Mackenzie, and Sam, filling out both teams with bots to play five on five.
Grid has killed Bot 2. Tick-Tock has killed Bot 1. The south generator has been damaged.
“Why are our bots so stupid?” Sketch pouted.
“’Cause all bots are stupid,” Rush said. “If you didn’t want to play with bots, you should have played on the other team.”
“Yeah, but then I couldn’t play with you, though,” Sketch pointed out, and Rush laughed.
“Life is full of tough decisions. At least I’ve got one player I can count on, right?”
“Right!” Sketch agreed. Rush caught the boy’s proud grin out of the corner of one eye and smiled.
“Oh, get a room. Damn lovebirds, squawking up the channel.” Sam’s voice floated over their headsets, and Sketch giggled. Since they were just playing to hang out, Rush had set up the system to let both teams hear each other.
Rush has killed Tick-Tock.
“Poor Tick-Tock,” Rush taunted back. “Killed by a lovebird. How embarrassing for you.”
“Mwa-ha-haaaa,” Sketch crowed, doing his best impression of a maniacal, evil genius laugh, until he cut it short with a gurgling death gasp, still in character.
Grid killed Sketch, flashed on the screen, and they all laughed—even Daniel, who was so quiet over the air that Rush couldn’t help but think of Stryker.
“Rush?”
“Yeah, Sketch, what’s up? Want me to pick you up at the spawn?”
Rush killed Disco. Rush killed Gears.
“When do you think we’re gonna have to go back downstairs?”
“I dunno, man. Probably tomorrow.”
“I don’t like it down there.” Sketch’s voice was quiet now. He hadn’t fully understood the tension in the room that morning, but he had certainly felt it. The rune over Ammu’s chest had dimmed considerably, Rush’s armor had glowed with faint, red lines of agitation, and even Daniel’s usual cascade of color had been muted somehow, as though viewed through a hazy, gray fog.
“Me either,” Daniel admitted, which were the first actual words he had spoken over the comm link all afternoon.
“Can it, guys,” Rush warned them. “Let’s just play.”
Rush killed Tick-Tock. Rush killed Bot 1. The central generator has been repaired.
Grid killed Sketch. Rush killed Grid.
“I don’t think Ammu—” Sam started, but Rush cut her off mid-sentence.
“Everybody offline!” he barked. “Now!”
He ended the game, whipped off his headset, and leaped out of the chair. Sketch stared at Rush in terror, his armor’s usual blue markings all replaced by angry red slashes, its usual silver hue transformed into a deep, almost bronze gold.
Rush strode toward Sam in long, quick strides, but Mackenzie intercepted him and stood defiantly in his way, the great, golden bear staring him down.
“Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not going to hurt her,” Rush said, sounding exasperated rather than furious. “Come here. Everybody, come here. Huddle up.”
Sketch watched Rush for any signs of violence, but while his armor still glowed in the same ominous colors, he seemed relatively composed. Sketch moved toward him with the others, but he stayed behind Mackenzie, just to be on the safe side.
“We said we weren’t going to talk about that stuff,” Rush said in hushed tones once they were all together. “We agreed. And we have no idea what they might have done to these consoles. For all we know, they’re listening to everything we say on there.”
Sam hung her head, feeling stupid. She should have thought of that.
“Let’s just go talk upstairs,” Kaitlyn suggested.
“Yeah, cause they couldn’t possibly have bugged our suites,” Sam countered. She might have been caught unaware once, but she wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.
“She’s right,” Rush whispered. “We’re probably safe here in the middle of this huge room, but we can’t stay here. It would look suspicious if someone came in and we were all just standing around like this.”
“What about your workshop?” Daniel asked Kaitlyn, and everyone turned to him in surprise.
“Hey, that’d be good,” Kaitlyn agreed. “There’s no way they’d bother to bug it. Even I’ve only been out there the one time.”
“Like I said,” Rush growled, sounding even more frustrated, “we agreed not to talk about this stuff at all. We don’t need a place to do it. We need to stop doing it. I’m not messing up my invitational.”
“And I’m not letting this go,” Sam argued, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking her hips defiantly. “Yesterday, Ammu wanted us to open that thing. Today, he didn’t. I want to know why.”
“I hate to say it,” Mackenzie chimed in, “but I agree with Tick-Tock. We said we wouldn’t let Ammu or Christina know what we know. We never said we wouldn’t even try to figure it out.”
“Fine!” Rush relented, worried that either one of them might walk in at any moment. “Tonight. We’ll go to the workshop tonight.”
“What time?” Sam asked automatically.
“After curfew, Tick-Tock,” Rush declared. “Christina said she was going to be checking on us every night, but I haven’t seen her do it. Have you guys?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“OK. So maybe she’s not doing it, but then again, maybe she’s been listening in so she knows where we are. We’ll play it safe. Stay in the suites until 11:15, then meet up here—right here—and we’ll wait for a while. That way, if someone comes after us, we can say we wanted to play. We won’t get in a lot of trouble for that.
“If we’re in the clear, then we head for the workshop. In the meantime, nobody says another damn word about anything weird today. Everybody got it?”
“Yeah,” they all agreed.
“11:15,” Rush repeated, just for good measure. “Not before.”
• • •
By 11:17 p.m. they were all back down in the game center. Rush convinced them to fire up one quiet round of HRT Alpha, just in case anyone came looking for them. But no one came. When the match ended, they all signed off and gathered up in the center of the room.
“We should go out the back way,” Kaitlyn whispered. “The main doors all have alarms, but there’s an access panel between a janitor’s closet and a gardener’s shed in the back. The shed door isn’t on the main system.”
They all just stared at her.
“What?” she asked. “Didn’t you guys explore the place when you got here?”
“I thought I did,” Mackenzie said, grinning wryly. “Please. After you.”
Kaitlyn led the way out of the conference room toward a series of narrow hallways at the back of the building. Just as she had promised, a janitor’s closet offered up an access panel in the rear wall. They used a wrench from the closet to loosen the bolts and remove the panel. The resulting hole was an easy fit for Sketch and just barely large enough for Rush to squeeze through.
On the other side was a small shed that stood against the outside wall of the lodge. Gardening tools hung from metal pegs, neatly filling the top half of every wall, leaving the bottom half free for stacked bags of peat moss, weed killer, and fertilizer.
Rush went first, shoving a few bags out of the way and then standing up to make room for Kaitlyn. The shed was too small to hold more than two people comfortably, but Kaitlyn slid past him and opened the outside door without any hesitation at all—ignoring Rush, who threw one hand up in surprise and then dropped it lamely when nothing happened.
“I told you,” she said. “This door isn’t on the alarm system. I’m Gears, remember? This is my thing.”
“My mistake, your mechanicalness,” Rush apologized, throwing her an exaggerated bow. “After you.”
They all made their way outside and followed Kaitlyn down the path toward the maintenance garage.
“The garage has its own alarm system,” Kaitlyn whispered when they reached the normal-looking door at the far end of the building, “but I watched Ammu reset it when we left after our session, so I know the code. We just have to get in.”
She fished around in her pocket and pulled out an odd-looking tool set, chose a couple of small tools from it, pushed them into the lock, and started to fiddle around with them. For the second time that night, everyone just stared at her.
“Where the hell did you learn how to do that?” Sam finally asked.
“It’s really not that hard,” Gears whispered. “Little springs inside the lock push the pins down to keep it from turning. You just push the pins back up, keeping enough tension on them so they don’t fall back down again… and… voilà!”
The door opened and Kaitlyn slipped through it. She entered the security code into a beeping alarm pad, and the beeping stopped.
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked, popping her head back out to see why everyone was still outside.
“I think maybe your tag should be CIA,” Rush said.
“Nah,” Kaitlyn replied, giggling. “I like ‘Gears’!”
She disappeared into the garage again, and this time the others followed her.
• • •
The shop didn’t have any windows to give them away, so Kaitlyn turned on the overhead lights. “I officially call this meeting of the Cloak-and-Dagger Society to order!” she said grandly.
“Sure, okay,” Sam said, rolling her eyes.
“First order of business: why was Ammu acting so weird this morning?”
“Right?” Sam pounded both hands against the work table. “Like saying nothing happened yesterday.”
“And then acting relieved when it didn’t work today,” Mackenzie added.
“Maybe it’s dangerous?” Kaitlyn suggested.
“Maybe,” Mackenzie acknowledged, “but if that’s all it was, he would have been acting weird yesterday too.”
“So, what then?” Sam demanded.
“I think whoever’s watching us doesn’t know what’s going on,” Mackenzie said. “I don’t think they could see that thing yesterday.”
“How could they not see it?” Daniel muttered.
“I don’t know,” Mackenzie admitted, “but think about it. Why else would he stand in front of that one-way mirror and say it didn’t work?”
“Unless he didn’t see it himself,” Sam said, thinking out loud. “But then he just would have said it didn’t work. He wouldn’t have acted all weird about it.”
“Agreed,” Mackenzie responded. “I think he knows it worked, and obviously we know it worked—but whoever’s watching us, I think they don’t know it worked, and Ammu doesn’t want them to figure it out.”
“But why not?” Kaitlyn asked.
“I have no idea,” Mackenzie said, and everyone fell silent, pondering the question.
“Whoever we’re doing this for, ultimately,” Rush said finally, “wouldn’t Ammu want them to know it was working? I mean, that’s gotta make him look good, right?”
“Yeah,” Mackenzie agreed. “Something must have changed. But what?”
“I don’t know,” Rush said. “But that thing…” He paused, not sure he wanted to admit what he’d felt.
“What thing?” Sketch wanted to know.
“I’m pretty sure that thing yesterday was some kind of portal. I swear I could feel something on the other side, trying to come through.”
“I knew it!” Sam crowed.
“Keep your voice down,” Rush hissed. “But yeah, I think you and Grid were right. I think Ammu has us trying to… I don’t know… to call something here… from somewhere else… and I think it has to be that gryphon. But I have no idea why.”
“Maybe if we actually do it, we can figure that out,” Sam suggested.
“But Ammu doesn’t want us to anymore,” Kaitlyn protested.
“He doesn’t want us to do it in front of that mirror,” Sam countered. “But there’s no mirror here.”
“What? Now?” Rush glared at Sam. “You’re out of your mind.”
“I want to see it,” Sketch said quietly. He was tired of being the only one who could see things nobody else could see. If his friends could see the portal and the people behind the mirror couldn’t, maybe the gryphon would be like that too.
“Look, Sketch—” Rush began, but Kaitlyn interrupted him.
“I want to see it, too,” she said. “I mean, come on! It’s a miniature gryphon! Don’t you guys want to see a gryphon?”
Daniel shrugged. If Kaitlyn wanted to see a gryphon, he didn’t want to argue against her, but he wasn’t so sure about the idea himself.
“Grid,” Rush protested. “For God’s sake, help me out here. Please tell them we should not be trying to summon something we don’t know anything about—especially not all on our own in the middle of the night without any backup.”
“Look, I want to know what’s really going on,” Mac replied cautiously, “but I’m not the one who freaked out. What do you know that we don’t?”
Rush just glared at her, refusing to answer.
“Rush?” Kaitlyn tried. “We’ll listen to you, OK? If you tell us we shouldn’t do it, we won’t do it. But can you tell us why?”
“I don’t know,” Rush said reluctantly.
“Rush,” Mac prompted him again, leaving his name hanging in the air.
“Fine!” he said finally. “I felt it coming through, OK? There was definitely, absolutely, no-doubt-about-it something coming through that portal. Wouldn’t that have freaked you out?”
“Probably,” Mac admitted. “But Ammu keeps telling us to trust our unconscious minds, and the rest of us didn’t sense anything wrong. You’re the only one who felt it, whatever it was. So did it feel like something we wouldn’t want to bring here?”
For several long moments, Rush didn’t say a word. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. They all just watched him, waiting for an answer.
“No,” he finally admitted, sighing deeply. “If anything, it felt happy, like it really wanted to be here. It just freaked me out because I wasn’t expecting it.”
Not that I even belong here, he thought. Since I didn’t really take the stupid test, and you’re all crazy to listen to me at all, let alone hang on my every word. But even he had to admit that he had seen the portal—and that he had felt the thing on the other side, wanting to come through. Whatever was happening here, he was a part of it, whether he had expected to be or not.
“Then I say we try it,” Mac declared, and this time nobody, not even Rush, tried to say they shouldn’t.