Authors: Lynn Barnes
They shot the president. They killed John Thomas.
What if taking over Hardwicke had been the goal all along? What if Senza Nome had attacked the president
so that
the vice president would be sworn into office, so that the person in power had a child at this school?
They killed John Thomas. The same
day the president was shot, they killed John Thomas.
After that, Hardwicke had reason to bring in extra security, and justification for the additional security officers to be heavily armed.
Not just Hardwicke
, I thought. Hardwicke
didn’t do this.
I swallowed.
The headmaster did.
The headmaster was the one who would have made the call. The headmaster was the one who would have chosen the men to
bring in.
A Hardwicke student is killed.
I went through it, step by step.
The headmaster has an excuse to hire additional security, to see them heavily armed.
The president is shot.
I forced myself to go further, to take this line of thought to completion.
Once the president is shot, the vice president is imbued with the power of the presidency.
And the vice president’s daughter went to Hardwicke.
They want something. Anna is the leverage.
Then again, they’d said high-value targets, plural.
There are other students here who they can use for leverage, too.
Hardwicke
was
Washington.
I had to do something. Find a way to short out the cameras? Cut the power and the lights?
I forced myself to pull up one of the classroom feeds, forced myself to look at my classmates, lying facedown on the
floor.
If I cut the power, one of them is going to try something stupid.
If I cut the power, those guards are going to shoot.
I couldn’t risk that happening. I was an unarmed teenager trapped in a building with dozens of armed terrorists. There were snipers on the roof. Soon the terrorists would realize I was missing. Soon they’d be looking for me. The only thing I could do, the only thing
I could even
try
to do, was establish a line of communication with the outside world and tell them what I knew about the terrorists’ operation—where they were keeping the other students, how heavily the terrorists were armed, how many men they had, the fact that Dr. Clark was involved.
Information is power.
My paternal grandfather’s words stuck in my mind.
You can never know ahead of time which
pieces will be worth the most.
The more information the police—the FBI—
whoever
was in charge of this operation had, the better our chances of making it out of this alive. I had to find a way of getting a message out.
How?
My cell phone still wasn’t working.
They must be scrambling the signal somehow. But they have a way of calling out. They must.
The terrorists would want to present their demands.
They would want to open up a line of communication with the outside world. I just had to find it—and find a way to co-opt it.
If I were a working phone line, where would I be?
I stared down at the security footage in my lap. I thought about the rooms that weren’t on there.
The security station.
If I were committing a hostile takeover of Hardwicke, that would be my base of operations. If I could
make it up there, if I could distract the person manning it—
This is a bad idea.
I knew that, the way you know that people in horror movies shouldn’t go traipsing off into the woods.
But it was the only idea I had.
They’re going to catch me anyway. Even if I stay here, even if I find somewhere else to hide—they will find me. The question is whether or not I can get a message out before they
do.
I might not be Anna Hayden, but I was still a card they’d want in their hands. I’d already been kidnapped so someone could use me as leverage against Ivy once.
If you have to make an example of someone,
Dr. Clark had told one of the guards,
do try to make it someone disposable.
I’d have to take the risk that so long as they had me in their possession, they would want to keep me alive.
For better or worse, I had to try.
I studied the library camera feed long enough to know its blind spots. Crawling along the floor, slowly enough to avoid being caught by the motion sensors, I made it to the door. Next up was the hallway. I listened for footsteps and told myself it wasn’t any different from listening to a horse come closer, knowing that if you looked up, it might spook.
Now. Go now.
Avoiding the hallway
cameras was harder—impossible if I wanted to get more than a few feet.
I made it as far as the closest bathroom and slipped in.
Automatically, I scanned the room for hiding spots, for shelter. Unfortunately, the urinals offered neither. I tested the window to see if I could work it loose.
No such luck.
Watching the cameras and listening for footsteps again, I waited until it was clear, then
slipped back out into the hall.
I wasn’t exactly sure where the Hardwicke security offices were, but I knew they were in this building, and I knew they were on the top floor. If there was a way of calling the outside world, I was betting I’d find it there—probably under guard.
Farther down the hall, another bathroom.
Pressing my body back against the tile wall and riding out the rush of adrenaline,
I tapped at the screen of the tablet, scrolling through the feed until I got to the staircase. I tried to zoom in, but the maneuver didn’t take.
Instead, a message popped up.
ENACT PROGRAM?
Program? What were you doing, Emilia?
The prompt on the screen gave me two options: YES and NO. Before I could think too hard about what I was doing, I hit YES.
SELECT CAMERA TO CLONE.
There were three
stairwells in the main building.
If this works, I will worship the ground you walk on
, I told Emilia silently.
I will owe you favors for all time. I will be your friend, the way you were mine.
I couldn’t let myself remember Emilia standing up and stepping out into the aisle. Instead, I concentrated on the tablet. I hit what I hoped were the right commands, and then I cracked the door to the hallway
open and made my last dash to the stairs.
The door closed behind me.
Too loud.
This wasn’t going to work. It couldn’t. But I thought of John Thomas with a hole in his gut and Dr. Clark training a gun on Anna Hayden and the Secret Service agent lying dead on the library floor—
I made it up two flights of stairs before I’d processed the fact that I was running. When I heard the sound of someone
entering the stairwell below me, I made a split-second decision.
No time to listen. No time to check the tablet.
I stepped into the hall. I was out in the open. I was exposed. And the hallway was . . .
Empty.
There were snipers on the roof and guards patrolling the first two floors and armed gunmen at every exit, but the third floor was quiet.
Right up to the point when it wasn’t.
“As of
this moment, every child in this school is accounted for and alive.”
I recognized the headmaster’s voice the moment it broke the silence.
“That can remain true. We can reach a peaceful solution, but that solution will require your cooperation.”
It took me two seconds to pinpoint where the voice was coming from and another after that to realize that he wasn’t speaking to me.
“Here is what that
cooperation will look like. You will release Daniela Nicolae to our custody. As well, you will be provided with a list of others imprisoned by your and other governments without due process or trial. You will use your resources to secure their release worldwide.”
It was one thing to realize abstractly that the headmaster was the person in the position to have brought these men into our school.
It was one thing to
think
that the man who’d chided you on appropriate behavior could do something like this.
It was another thing altogether to hear him issuing demands.
Drawn like a moth to the flame, I crept toward the voice, hugging the wall.
“A sum of twenty million dollars will be transferred into an account we specify. This money is nothing to us but a gesture of goodwill, from Hardwicke
parents understandably concerned about the welfare of their children.”
Prisoners. Money.
The scope of the demands made my mouth go dry.
“Additionally, private requests will be fulfilled by a small number of Hardwicke parents.” The headmaster began reading a list of names, and all I could think was that once upon a time, the picture that had allowed me to tie together three of the players in
another conspiracy had hung in his office.
It never ends.
I felt hysteria bubbling up inside of me.
Terrorists and politicians and school officials, rogue Secret Service agents, and a White House physician who could be bought.
Every time I thought it was over, thought it could be over, I was wrong.
“Priya Bharani.”
The mention of Vivvie’s aunt brought my attention back to the present. She
was on the list of Hardwicke parents who would be required to fulfill a “private request.” So was Ivy.
“And William Keyes,” the headmaster finished.
Ivy
and
the kingmaker.
That made me a very high-value target. And the fact that Priya was on the list made Vivvie one as well.
They’ll be looking for me. They’ll be looking for Vivvie, if they haven’t found her already.
“Details on these requests
and instructions for your cooperation will follow.” Headmaster Raleigh let a single note of tension creep into his voice. I’d made it to the end of the hall. My back pressed against the wall, I leaned out just far enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of what awaited me around the corner.
Headmaster Raleigh was sitting in a chair in the middle of the hallway, facing a camera. There was a piece of
paper in his lap.
Behind the camera, there was a woman wearing a twinset and holding a gun.
“We are everywhere,” the headmaster read. “We are in your government, your law enforcement, your military. We teach your children.”
Mrs. Perkins.
I struggled to process what I’d seen—the woman, the gun.
The headmaster’s secretary?
“We know your secrets,” Headmaster Raleigh said, and now—only now—I could
hear the slight quiver in his voice as he delivered the words that someone else had scripted. “We do this for the common good. The time for waiting—”
A hand closed over my mouth, pulling me roughly back.
“—is over.”
I should have fought. I
did
fight, a moment too late. An arm wrapped around my body. I couldn’t breathe through the hand over my mouth, couldn’t scream. I struggled against my captor’s grip, but I was already immobilized.
Too late.
“Be still.”
I barely heard the words, but I felt the whisper, directly in my ear.
Henry.
The arm around my waist, the breath on my neck, the body I was
trapped against—
Henry’s.
I could feel his heart beating, as hard and fast as my own.
“Nicely done, Headmaster.” The sound of Mrs. Perkins’s voice served as a stark reminder that nothing—
nothing
—was as it had seemed. “Now it’s time we had a chat about our missing students.”
As Mrs. Perkins began to prod the headmaster for information, Henry sidestepped to face me, moving with an unearthly silence.
His eyes met mine and held them for one second,
two—then he removed his hand from my mouth. His index finger went to his lips, and he jerked his head toward the stairwell.
Quiet. This way.
I gave a curt nod to show that I understood. As we made our way back down the hall, he kept one hand on my arm, ready to pull me out of the line of fire at any moment.
Ready to step into the line of fire
himself.
I won’t let you do that for me
, I thought. After Ivy trading her life for mine, after Emilia giving herself up so we didn’t both get caught—no one else was taking a metaphorical bullet for me.
No one was taking a
literal
bullet for me, either.
As if he could sense my thoughts, Henry’s hand tightened over my arm as we made it to the stairwell. When the door closed behind us, he forced
himself to let loose of me.
“Are you certifiably insane?” he asked, his voice hushed but crisp. “What exactly did you think you were doing out there? They could have seen you! They could have
shot
you, Kendrick.”
“Mrs. Perkins,” I replied, my voice as low as his. “
Mrs. Perkins
could have shot me.”
Mrs. Perkins, who could have easily sent a text from Emilia’s phone when someone had turned it
into the office.
Mrs. Perkins, who might well have—at the headmaster’s instruction—put in the call for extra security herself.
Henry took up position between the door and the top of the stairs, tense and unable to know which direction the next threat would come from. “There are cameras,” he said. “They’ll see us. We should move.”
I held up the tablet. “We’re in the clear. For now.”
I didn’t
know whether we had minutes or seconds. I didn’t know what would happen when someone found us in the stairwell.
“How did you—” Henry started to say, then cut himself off. “Emilia.”
I nodded. “Emilia.”
I handed the tablet to Henry and let him scroll through the camera feeds. He stopped on one of the classroom cameras.
Men with guns. Students on the floor.
Wordlessly, Henry handed the tablet
back to me.
My heart jumped into my throat. I felt something inside me crumble.
Vivvie.
I lowered the tablet and closed my eyes.
They have Vivvie.
I’d wanted to believe that she’d run. I’d wanted to believe that she’d found a place to hide. I’d wanted her to be safe.