The Impossible Race: Cragbridge Hall, Volume 3 (25 page)

In an instant, the field was gone and Abby stood in her home. “At times they look like this,” Grandpa said, though she could no longer see him. He wasn’t walking beside her anymore. She saw her old living room: the screens on the wall and the couch and lamps in the corner. There was a painting of a beautiful harbor on the wall. A rush of homesickness fell over her. “Look around,” Grandpa said. “Feel it. Remember.”

Abby reached out and touched the screen. It showed picture after picture of her, her parents, and Derick. Many included Grandpa as well. She took a deep breath. She hoped her parents and her grandpa would be back soon. Back to help her. She didn’t want to do this on her own anymore. And Derick. She had to keep him with her.

“This is where you learned a lot about yourself. Where you learned to keep trying.” She saw herself in several spots of the room, one after the other. She sat on the couch struggling with math homework; then she came down the stairs and paused to tie her running shoes before leaving through the front door; and then she paced, teared up, and rushed up the stairs after receiving her rejection message from Cragbridge Hall. Of course, her grandpa had switched that.

“But sooner rather than later, it was time to move on,” Grandpa’s voice explained. The room went gray and a light shone on the doorway. Abby followed it, and as she did, she stepped out of her old living room and into the halls at Cragbridge Hall. “Your endless possibilities looked like this. Do you remember walking the halls on your first day here? Go ahead.”

Abby began to walk, taking in the virtual environment that was so familiar to her. She knew some of the people who passed by, but others were almost as if they weren’t complete; their faces were blurred or completely blank. Perhaps Grandpa hadn’t finished his work. She couldn’t blame him. If she stopped to think of all the work he had done to lead her to the secrets, she wondered how he’d ever have had the time. She knew he had a great work ethic, but he accomplished more than anyone else she knew.

An announcement through the halls indicated it was time for first period. Abby turned from one hall to another to get to her class. She sat in her desk. She could feel the real plastic desk beneath her.

“You faced some difficulties at this time in your past, didn’t you?” On the screen at the front of the room, Abby saw glimpses of the trials she went through in her first few months at Cragbridge Hall: Jacqueline kicking her out of her room, her father and her parents being kidnapped, trying to find the secret, and leaping onto the
Titanic
as it sunk. It had been the hardest time of her life up to that point. How had her grandfather put all these images together?

“But life continued,” Grandpa said. “And it didn’t get any easier.”

Another bell rang and Abby got up to leave with the crowd of students. She thought of other challenges she had faced since the
Titanic
: seeing those she loved tranquilized, crossing into the past and onto the flaming
Hindenburg
to save her family.

As she stepped out into the hallway, it changed. There were no longer classrooms on either side, but a dark corridor in dim torchlight. “And you face challenges now,” Grandpa said.

Flapping.

Abby turned to see a stymphalian bird gliding toward her through the black. It seemed just as real and mean as the one that had shot her with a metallic feather a few days ago in the labyrinth. She ran. With the bird right behind her, she darted and turned through the maze. She took a flight of stairs two at a time and then hid around a corner. The bird couldn’t turn that sharply and passed her. Abby sprinted farther away.

How had Grandpa engineered this? It was so personal; it included her own experiences. She thought of how the Mold itself had been formed to be a journey from her home, through her school, and now into part of the labyrinth.

Abby moved ahead through more twists and turns. She had no idea where she was supposed to go. She hoped she wasn’t about to face the minotaur. After another corner, the labyrinth gave way to grass and an open sky. Relief swept over Abby as she stepped out into the sunshine.

But that same relief disappeared as the ground rumbled. Abby turned to see two massive creatures—a Giganotosaurus snapped at an Argentinosaurus. Abby looked back at the maze, but knew that wasn’t where she was supposed to go. She couldn’t go backward to understand her grandfather’s message. Plus, she didn’t want to face the metal-beaked bird again. She saw an opening on the other side of the dinosaur battle.

She sighed. It was never easy.

Abby raced toward the opening, the fighting dinosaurs biting and swinging their tails at each other in front of her. Abby veered to circle around them, but at one point, the Argentinosaurus backed up quickly and nearly stepped on Abby.

After crossing by the dinosaurs, there was a wall with an opening. Abby walked in only to be greeted with an image of the girl from the future and a man fallen with the Ash. And then the bright light. She heard Derick scream.

She would rather face the bird or the dinosaurs than see that.

“And now, how will it turn out?” Grandpa asked, his voice coming through the visor. “What should you do?”

Three paths opened in front of her. “You must make choices,” Grandpa said. “And see what the future brings.” She had walked through her past. Now it was all about the future.

Apparently Abby had to try one of the passages. Knowing that her grandfather often would test and try her didn’t make the decision easy. She picked the hall on the right.

Abby walked forward and around a corner into a dead end. There a screen portrayed Jacqueline and her team on stage in the school auditorium. “Congratulations on winning the Race,” Landon said in his blue blazer. “Please press your fingers to the box.” Jacqueline’s team did and the box opened. She retrieved the key and held it up in front of a cheering crowd. The message explaining what the key did and how it allowed those who controlled the Bridge to actually time travel would have been automatically sent.

The scene changed and Jacqueline shared the secret online and spoke with the news. Then hundreds of soldiers and government people in suits and uniforms arrived at the Cragbridge Hall gates. They showed badges and forms. They passed security. They dismissed the administration. And the children left. The school was no longer operational. Were they going to use it to experiment, to train soldiers? Abby didn’t know.

Was her grandpa saying this would happen? Was she seeing the future now?

Abby didn’t want to look anymore. She wanted to pick a different path. She turned to run back the way she had come, but the hall was no longer there. The way she had come had been replaced with a wall and another screen. When—how—had the wall moved?

On the screen, Abby saw Muns in a bed, unconscious. And then his eyelids popped open. He struggled to his feet and left his bed, assistants speaking to him as he tried to leave his room. He grabbed onto the corner of a desk to steady himself. Someone handed him a collection of keys. He got on his rings and began speaking with several people, the government agents and administrators that had taken over the school. Muns was behind it all. He had bribed and worked until his people were in all the right places. And now he was ready to change time. Muns smiled wide. “I will need some assistance at the Bridge.”

Abby turned, looking for a way out. A third wall and screen had blocked her path, pressed against the other two. She was trapped, entirely closed in! She saw a coffin—black, glossy, and cold. Her parents stood by it, awake, tears streaming down their faces. Grandfather stood next to them, his chin quivering. And Abby. She saw herself, clutching her mom’s waist and sobbing uncontrollably. The Crash stood behind them. Rafa’s hair completely hid his face. Carol was curled in a ball on the ground, and Anjum and Jess looked on from behind.

She didn’t need to look in the coffin. Trapped inside the Mold, Abby’s breaths became short and her mind foggy. She had to get out of there. She didn’t want this future. She couldn’t even
stand
to see it, to think about it. She whirled in every direction, but only saw her worst worries portrayed on the screens, her greatest fears coming to life. She was completely walled in. She had nowhere to go.

Abby wanted to scream. Why had she chosen this hall? Why was her grandfather doing this to her?

“This is the future,” Grandpa said simply. “And you are trapped in it. There is nothing you can do.”

Abby looked at the walls again. How could she have known that her choices would lead to this?

“There is nothing you can do,” Grandpa repeated, “unless you choose not to believe it.”

Abby had to calm herself and repeat what her grandpa had just said. Choose not to believe it? What did that mean?

Abby looked at the screens and her fears again. How would not believing what she was seeing, denying her own fears, help her? She saw herself sobbing next to the coffin. How could choosing not to believe that her brother was going to die get her out of this trap? It wouldn’t change the fact that she was walled in.

But she had to try.

Abby closed her eyes and willed the walls away. When she opened them, she saw her brother’s coffin, the school fallen, and Muns awake and with the keys. Nothing had changed.

It didn’t matter what she believed. Her grandfather had trapped her with his crazy experiment. She saw her nightmares, but was also stuck in the Mold. Abby wondered how they would get her out of here. Would they have to cut through the plastic walls? Would she have to explain why she was here?

She saw the images of her failure one more time, and couldn’t take it anymore. She ripped the visor from her head, and nearly flung it to the ground. But she stopped, completely taken by surprise. When the visor was away from her eyes, she saw something she didn’t expect—open space. No walls. She wasn’t boxed in. She looked back behind to see the path she had come down. It was real, but it gave way to a wide open area. Through the visor, she’d seen walls that weren’t really there.

Abby stepped beyond where the walls had been.

“Very good,” she heard her grandfather’s voice from the visor. “You chose to see things differently. The images I showed you were from your own mind,” Grandpa explained. “This visor is special. I equipped it with some of the same technology as the Chair. As you answered my questions earlier, I had a program design this challenge based on your memories. And you filled in the images. These were your fears of the future. You can decide to let them box you in, to make you feel helpless, or you can remove them from your view and see your endless possibilities.”

Abby put the visor back on. She stared back at the open field, wide trees, a brilliant sun, and her grandfather.

“You see,” Grandpa said, walking through the tall grass, “one of my great worries about looking into the future is that you may actually believe what you see. What if your worries are correct? Will you wall yourself in? Will you be helpless?”

Grandpa lifted his cane and hung it around his wrist. “No matter what you see in the future, I refuse to believe that it is certain, that it is set, that it cannot be changed. Perhaps it is showing you what will happen if you continue on the same path you are on, but what if you change that path? What if you improve more from what you would have done? Does it not stand to reason that the future will change too?” Grandpa brushed his hand along the top of the blades of grass.

“Though we cannot change the tragedies of the past, we can work to make our best future. And if you use the Bridge to look into the future and see something that does not look favorable, it is not destined. I do not believe our futures are written in stone.”

Abby watched her grandfather fading away in the tall grass. “Now, if you must look into the future, take what I have given you and go to the Bridge in the basement. But remember: the future is not destined. We can always make it better.”

The Antidote

Abby moved her robot along the edge of the hallway, its large wheels rolling quietly across the tile. She hadn’t had time to go to the basement to try to see the future. Anjum had called an emergency meeting and had told them they had to practice during every available hour before and after school. And with security increases, it was near-impossible to sneak into the basement at night. She had also received the good news from the med unit that Coach Horne had opened his eyes for a moment and Coach Adonavich had shown signs of coming to. Though that was great to hear, it was also a reminder that Muns might be fully awake. And Abby couldn’t get to the basement to check.

This was no longer robot practice. It was the real event.

Abby glanced at the other windows showing in her visor. She could see what the other robots on the team could see. She didn’t know why she kept checking them. She couldn’t tell what was going on anyway. She had to focus on her one part of the challenge. She had to get this right. They needed to do well at this event if they were going to be able to come back and win. Otherwise, Anjum might just kick her off the team and she wouldn’t be able to look out for any bigger problems. Or worse, her whole team could be eliminated from the challenge.