Secret of the Sevens (16 page)

Twenty-nine

There are three other pledges? If this is supposed to be good news, why do my insides feel gutted? Why should I trust other pledges? Maybe it's selfish, but I don't want to share this Sevens thing with anyone else. Or maybe it's Laney I don't want to share.

Laney peeks inside the dark opening and lowers her voice. “I didn't see this coming.”

“I thought there might be others in the beginning, remember?” I remind her. “But when we never saw anyone at our tests, I assumed it was just you and me.”

She grabs my arm. “This is bad. Why haven't we run into them before?” Her jaw drops. “Maybe it's a trick. What if you were right and this was a joke a whole time? What if people are pranking us and they're waiting inside, all set to humiliate us?”

Before I can answer, Laney starts rambling. “No, it couldn't be. There's too much to this for it to be a joke. Unless”—she runs a hand through her hair—“it's some kind of insane genius that's been putting us through this. And now he's tired of the game and wants to murder us.” Her lips tremble. “Or maybe it's one of the surviving Sevens that's come back to kill more innocent people, like he did Mr. Singer.”

She shakes her head. “What am I saying? I don't believe that for a minute. They were innocent. It can't be, unless—” She's talking faster than a schizophrenic auctioneer.

“Laney—”

“But who else would be pledging? And why didn't we see them when we solved our clues and—”

Her head's going to explode if she keeps this up. “Laney! Relax. Take a breath.”

She rubs her palms together furiously. “Sorry. I'm just shocked. What do
you
think about this?”

I shrug. “There's nothing
to
think about.” My voice sounds calm, but my stomach's in knots. “We don't have a choice. We have to go ‘in the tunnel' to figure out what's going on.”

“You're right.” Laney takes a deep breath. “Let's do this.”

She climbs into the channel on her hands and knees, and I'm right behind her. We're on all fours now, traveling down a long rectangular chute with a light at the end coming through an opening on the left.

“I'll go first,” I whisper. “If it's something bad, I'll scream and you take off through the staircase door.”

She nudges me back. “No. I'm the one who wanted to join the Sevens in the first place. You kept warning me that you thought it was sketchy. I'll go first in case something's wrong and you wait here where it's safe.”

I wiggle in front of her. “I'm twice your weight and a foot taller. I'm going.”

“Oh for Pete's sake.” She glances at the opening at the end of the passage and crawls alongside me. “We've been partners through everything else. I guess we might as well see this through together.” She shoves me hard. “Unless I beat you to it!” She races away on all fours for the opening.

I regain my balance, dive forward, and grab her legs. “Like hell you will!”

Laney lunges head-first for the opening, but I pull her back. She grabs onto my shirt as I climb over her. We wrestle and twist around, rolling over each other and banging against the walls as we scoot forward, until we both end up falling through the hole together and landing on hard concrete.

“Owwww.”

I blink my eyes open, and what I see drives me to shove Laney behind my body. A pair of dark, angry eyes hovers above us.

“
Hijo de puta!
” he says.

I doubt my own eyes until Laney's voice confirms what I'm seeing. “Jose? Jose Aguilar?”

“You two
are pledging the Sevens?”

I'm about to ask him the same question when another face appears. Emily Dombrose bends over me, rolling her eyes. Why does every woman do that to me?

I push myself up, resting on my elbows, when a third body comes into focus.
Damn.
I'd recognize that voice and argyle sweater anywhere.

“Laney!” Kollin charges past me and drops to his knees.

Laney sits up and squeals, “Kollin?”

He flings his arms around her. “Why didn't you tell me? I had no idea you were involved in this.”

When Laney pulls back, she's wearing a ginormous grin. “Same reason you couldn't tell me. Our vow of secrecy.”

Kollin helps her up and pulls her into another hug.

Now I know what a pumpkin feels like when its insides are scraped clean.

I lift myself up. “Think you can you save the reunion for another day? The five of us have a lot to talk about.”

I barge between them and look around. We're gathered at the end of a narrow concrete tunnel. The hallway is lit only by a few staggered bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The space is chilly and reeks of something rancid.

Behind me, Kollin tells Laney, “I can't believe it. Where've you been all this time? Did you get clues and puzzles like us? The three of us worked as a team, so I never guessed there were other pledges.”

“Laney and I were a team too,” I grumble.

Emily crosses her arms. “So the Sevens gave you tests too?” she asks. “Like the message in the dedication plaque, and reading between the lines in the hidden case, and the pediment proverb?”

“Yep.” I nod toward the opening we just crawled from. “The secret room and this tunnel are part of our fourth test. For justice.”

The five of us gravitate into a circle. “It sounds like we got the same tests, but at different times,” Emily says.

“Do you think there are more pledges coming?” Kollin asks. “I mean, there's only five of us, and it's the Society of Seven.”

Emily shakes her head. “No, the note under the staircase said there were five pledges in all.”

Laney's face brightens with a strange smile. “It makes sense if you think about it,” she says. “Two of the original Sevens survived but were never found. Five of us plus two of them makes the Sevens complete.”

Jose lingers at the edge of our group, twitching like a cougar in a cage. He cocks his head back, his dark eyes targeting me. “So why did you vandalize the school?”

“That wasn't
us
,” Laney says. “It was probably Kane and the Pillars.” She glances at me and says, “We think they caught on that the Sevens are onto them, and now they're up to something.”

“So you know about Kane and the Pillars?” Kollin says.

“Yeah,” Laney says. “We took an underground tunnel from the library and spied on them one night. They were partying in the Executive Building. Kane was plying the Pillars with gifts and booze. He said something about selling the company and needing their support.”

“We took the tunnels to spy on them too,” Kollin says. “But we didn't see a party. We caught the end of a Board of Directors meeting one afternoon where Cameron Moore stood up and spoke on behalf of the Pillars. He said that, as representatives of the student body, the Pillars gave their full support to whatever proposals Kane suggested regarding the sale of our school. After the board members left, Kane gave each of the Pillars an envelope with cash. From the comments Nick Robinson made, it was
nice bank
.”

“It's obvious the Pillars are being bribed,” I say. “We think the Sevens are being resurrected to stop whatever they're up to.”

Jose shakes his head. “The Sevens were murderers. The two who lived escaped with all that money. Why would they care what happens to the school now?”

“Don't believe that story for a minute,” Laney says. “There was
never
any proof of any of that. I've read every article ever written on that night. The police went by circumstantial evidence and what Kane said he heard when he came upon the fire. And it's obvious what a lowlife he is. What
really
happened that night, no one knows.”

Laney's eyes ping-pong between the three of them. “We figured out from the clues that Singer suspected someone on the Board of murdering his wife, but he couldn't prove anything. We think he started the original Sevens to protect the school if anything happened to him too.”

Jose steps away from the group, kneading his hands as he thinks.

Kollin ignores him and asks Laney, “Do you have any idea who's sending us these messages?”

“Hey! Come here,” Jose calls out. He points at something a few feet down on the wall.

There's a message scrawled there:

KN S R NME.
D2R
->
@ D
†
N 2 C Y.

As we gather around it, our voices stutter and blend together, eventually sounding out the message simultaneously: “Kane is our enemy. Detour right at the crossing to see why.”

“Kane is our enemy.” Jose looks blank-faced at Laney. “Just like you said.”

“What crossing?” Emily asks.

“Check the map.” I pull our copy from my pocket, and Emily plucks a duplicate from her jacket.

Laney huddles next to me. Her finger travels the route we're supposed to take and it ends up right at the headmaster's residence.

Despite the fact that I'm stuck with Colon Le Douche in a rank, claustrophobic dungeon beneath a graveyard, I'm pumped over the best news I've had all year. “They're showing us how to get into Headmaster Boyle's house using a secret tunnel? I was hoping it was true.”

My imagination runs wild. I now have access to a tunnel that I can use anytime I want to prank the principal. Too bad I didn't know about this last January when Marcus and I built that giant snow penis on his front lawn. A getaway route could have saved me a month of washing desks.

Kollin holds his hand up. “I don't know about this. Breaking and entering is a little risky, even for you, Michaels. If we get caught or arrested, it'll cost me my scholarships. I need that money for law school. I've worked half my life for that.”

“It's too late to back out now,” Emily reminds him. “We took a vow.” She tugs on the bottom of his sweater. “C'mon, babe. We'll be careful. Our school needs us.”

Babe?
Did she just call him babe? The furrows between Laney's eyes tell me she caught that too.

Kollin massages his forehead. “You're right. Of course. But we've got to be careful.” He shoulders his way between Laney and me and starts down the tunnel. “And we better hurry. We haven't got a lot of time.”

The four of us follow him down the dimly lit corridor, panning our heads from side to side like windshield wipers. The limited light casts creepy gray shadows around us. It reminds me of my
Cyber Combat Zone
, except that it's smelly and damp and I'd shoot my teammate Kollin in a heartbeat.

The air reeks of a snakey odor, like the reptile building at the zoo. I search around me for the source, but all I see are the murky walls trapping me in this concrete catacomb.

Claustrophobia sets in and the sensation of being smothered in a dark grave begins to choke me from the inside out. My knees weaken. My neck grows clammy and blood starts to rush into my ears.

Jose and Kollin are leading the way like they're in charge, but I don't care. I need a minute to pull it together. I take the rear alone, until Laney's pace slows to match mine. She takes one look at me and her face softens. She threads her fingers through mine. It's gutsy, considered Le Douche is fifteen feet ahead of us.

When she squeezes my hand, my heartbeat settles some.

The five of us tread silently through the murky channel. Every now and then, I twist around to check we aren't being followed. I'm no chicken, but I'm also not as naive as these guys. After all, no one knows we're here. They'd never find our bodies.
Do dead bodies smell like snakes?

After a while, everyone slows down and I drop Laney's hand. I'm glad when she stays close by.

We approach our turn on the right.

“This must be the crossing,” Emily says.

We all veer down the dim corridor.

A few more yards and Emily squeezes Kollin's arm in front of me. I glance to see if Laney notices, but she's not next to me. She's stopped at the intersection behind us, staring at the wall on the left. I walk back to see what she's gawking at. There's a faded heart drawn just a few feet down from the crossing. Faint letters inside spell out:

AJ
loves
KB

Laney startles when I reach over her shoulder and touch it. “That must have been spray painted by one of the original Sevens. I doubt anyone else knew about this place.”

She doesn't respond, but Kollin does. “What are you two doing back there?”

Jose and Emily trail him to where Laney stands in a trance. They follow her eyes to the graffiti on the wall.

Emily bends closer to read the handwriting. “AJ loves KB.” She straightens up and turns to Kollin. “You think that was written by one of the original Sevens?”

“Must have been,” he says. “The only other people who knew about this tunnel were the guys who built it and Singer. Think about that. One of the original Sevens stood in this exact spot almost twenty years ago and wrote that. They were probably heading off to a secret meeting at Mr. Singer's or something.”

Delaney still hasn't moved from her original position.

“Lane?”

She doesn't answer me.

“You all right?”

“They were kids like us.” Her eyes are on the wall and far away at the same time. “They wrote English papers and dressed up for dances and fell in love.” Laney traces the heart with her finger. “Until someone killed them.”

Her hand drops like a heavy weight. “Singer School was their shot at something better. All they got is forgotten. Written off as murderers who got what they deserved.” Her eyes zero in on the wall. “They weren't, though. They were as innocent as us.”