At last, we approach the building. It looks different from our first visit. Higher.
“Ready, you guys?” whispers Tori, all business.
I don’t think I’ll ever be ready, and Eli and Hector are scared witless. But a strange calm seems to set in with Tori the closer we get to crunch time.
Step 1. Time the Purples. A circuit of the building takes the golf cart twenty-one minutes. To be safe, we allow ourselves eighteen for the first stage of our climb.
The instant the patrol disappears out of sight, we steal along the wall and position ourselves directly under the lower section of roof that we chose from the aerial photographs. It’s still easily twenty feet up, maybe more.
Step 2. Cowboy time. I tie a wide noose at the end of the rope, take aim, and hurl the loop at the roof. The first few tries aren’t high enough, but then I get the range. The snare disappears over the edge, only to miss its target and fall back down at my feet.
I’m shooting for a hook-shaped vent pipe we spotted on the kite pictures. It’s just a few inches in from the eave, but from twenty feet down and blocked by the angle of the roof, I’m working blind.
“Eight minutes,” Tori supplies the time check.
“Think you can do better?” I growl.
“I’d be more on target,” she replies honestly. “But I don’t have the strength to throw high enough.”
It’s a little more Happy Valley honesty than I’m in the mood for.
The nylon cord is growing heavy in my hands. It’s like I’m carrying an anvil. I start to sweat. My shoulders ache.
“Twelve minutes,” Tori chimes.
Okay, now I’m worried. Remember, it’s not enough just to hook the pipe. Four people have to climb the rope and pull it out of sight before the Purples come around again.
“We don’t have much time!” Hector intones urgently.
I glare at him, and the tiny pause is just the rest my tired arm needs. On the next throw, the rope doesn’t come back. I pull it taut and it holds.
“Fifteen minutes,” Hector updates us.
Tori hoists herself off the ground and climbs with ease, “walking” along the bricks. I have to admit she’s good—better than I’ll probably be. At the top, she swings a leg over the eave and disappears from sight. A second later, she’s leaning out, calling for the next climber.
It’s Eli, shinnying madly up the rope, propelled by fear rather than athleticism. He doesn’t earn many style points, but he gets up almost as quickly. After him comes Hector. With no chain link to shish kebab himself on, the shrimp does okay—at least until he reaches the top, where he struggles to get his foot over the ledge.
“Hurry, Hector! We’re at eighteen minutes!” Tori hisses.
To underscore this point, we hear the hum of the golf cart in the distance, growing louder. Oh no! The Purples are making it in record time.
Eli and Tori reach down and haul Hector in like fishermen landing a prize tarpon. Then they pull up the rope. Tori rasps a single syllable: “Hide!”
There’s nowhere to go. The bushes are too far away and the patrol is too close. The golf cart’s wheels churn against the ground. They’re about to turn the corner. And what will they find? Me, serving myself up on a silver platter.
I don’t know what makes me do it. I just do. I lie flat on the grass against the foot of the building and try to melt into the ground.
There is absolutely no cover. If the Purples glance in my direction, I’m hosed.
The flashlight beams appear first, crisscrossing the compound the way they always do. Here comes the golf cart, less than ten feet away. Their faces are as clear as their pictures on the cards—General Confusion and Alexander the Grape. A cone of light shoots straight at me, sweeps across my shoulders, lights up my nose . . .
. . . and moves on! I lie there, frozen with fear, waiting for the patrol to come back and scoop me up. Instead, they drive past. I’m a statue. I don’t even breathe as the cart rolls off into the night.
Finally, a voice from above: “Clear.”
I barely hear Eli over the pounding of my heart in my ears. Why didn’t they see me? I was right there, like, in a spotlight. It must honestly be true that you don’t notice what you’re not expecting to see.
Down comes the rope and I climb up to join the others. I make pretty short work of it, too, riding an adrenaline rush that could just as easily have taken me to the moon.
It’s time for Step 3, which is no small thing for a guy who didn’t expect to survive Step 2. We pull up the rope again, and I take aim at the main roof. It’s a trickier throw this time, practically vertical, since I can’t stand back for a better angle without tumbling off the level I’m already on. Amazingly, I make it on the third try, and we prepare for our final ascent. It’s only another twenty feet, but it feels like a mile in the sky.
“Don’t think about how far down the ground is,” Tori advises. “Remember, if you slip, you’ll just fall back to where we are now.”
“Or this is where we’ll bounce,” I mutter, “on our way to being dashed to pieces at the bottom.”
“Sounds like something your dad might say,” Hector jabs at me.
I’m too stressed out to be insulted.
Tori goes first, her strong hands working the cord as her sneakers scamper lightly up the husk of the building. I’m amazed at how athletic she is. Then again, when the only things you ever try are badminton, water polo, and croquet, who knows what hidden talents could be lurking just beneath the surface.
She’s almost at the top when it happens. With barely a sound, the noose slips off its purchase on the roof. For a terrible instant, I see the loose rope above us, unhinged from the factory. Then it’s falling, and so is Tori.
She thrashes around desperately as she lets go of the useless rope. I hold out both arms, which is stupid—she’s eighteen feet up, so catching her isn’t an option. Or maybe that’s my secret plan—if I get crushed, I won’t have to face the prospect of getting down off the building carrying a dead body.
I hear twin gasps from Eli and Hector and brace for impact.
Tori’s flailing right hand catches the small ledge at the bottom of a window. Grimacing with effort, she holds on, digging the rubber toes of her sneakers into the space between the bricks.
She’ll never make it, I think to myself. But somehow, she does, sticking to the wall as if by Velcro. The rope lands at my feet.
I pick it up and start flinging it at the roof, hoping to hook something quickly, to give Tori an easy way up. Or down. At this point, I don’t care about our mission; I just don’t want anybody dead. Again and again, the snare misses its target and tumbles back to my level.
“Look!” Eli whispers.
It’s Tori—moving on the wall! She stretches with her left hand and jams it between bricks, finding just enough leverage to hoist her feet to the window ledge. From there, she can reach the eaves. She heaves herself up with both arms and rolls over onto the roof. I experience a twinge of fear as she disappears from sight. Then she’s back in view, on her feet and signaling me to toss her the rope. She catches it and loops it around a sturdy pipe.
One by one, we clamber up the wall and huddle together at the top, exhausted and speechless.
“You okay?” I breathe.
She manages a weak nod. “Thanks, Malik.” At that, she looks better than Eli and Hector, who are grim, pale, and hyperventilating. I don’t have a mirror, but I’m sure I’m worse. I can barely keep myself from shaking.
We’re on the roof of the Serenity Plastics Works—the highest point of our universe for our entire lives. Every time you look up, there it is.
Eli puts it into words. “This must be how it felt to stand on the summit of Mount Everest for the first time.”
“If there is a Mount Everest,” I remind him. “We learned about it in school, so it might be total baloney.”
From our perch, Serenity seems every bit the tiny Podunk I’ve always known it to be. Take away a few s
treetlights and you wouldn’t even know there’s a town.
The seesawing beams of the patrol pass below us, and we retreat from the edge of the roof. Our shoes crunch on the gravelly surface.
Besides the smokestacks, the largest feature up here is the massive air-conditioning unit, located near the center of the roof. We head for it, wending our way around various pipes and vents. We have to find the trapdoor we saw in the aerial photograph.
There it is, in the shadow of the big compressor. I grab the handle and pull. It won’t budge.
Tori takes a flat butter knife from her pocket, and slips the blade into the crack between the square door and the frame, feeling for the latch. “I’ve been practicing on our door at home.” She makes a face. “It isn’t quite the same.” She twists harder, and we hear the snap. When she withdraws the knife, half the blade is missing.
She looks so crestfallen that it begins to sink in that nobody thought to bring any other equipment to gain access to the building. This is classic—we’ve risked our necks and come so far, and it turns out that our entire plan hinges on a butter knife?
“That’s all we have to get inside?” I exclaim, barely able to keep myself from shouting. “That?”
Even in the gloom I can see her redden. “I learned on the locks in my house—”
“And it never occurred to you that all locks aren’t the same as the ones in a place where nobody locks anything?” I scoop up a fistful of gravel, squeezing until the pain of my hand matches the agony in my gut. I rear back and let fly with maximum frustration and rage. A few pebbles strike the corner of the air-conditioning unit with a rat-a-tat sound.
“Cut it out!” Eli hisses. “What if the patrol hears us?”
“They’re forty feet below us.”
“It was pretty loud,” Hector ventures.
Tori jumps up excitedly. “You’re right! It was loud!”
“So?” I sputter.
“So it was loud because the metal is hollow! The air-conditioning is a duct system through the whole building!”
“And I care about this because . . . ?”
“Don’t you see?” she exclaims. “The trapdoor isn’t the only way into the factory! The air ducts go in too! And we go in with them!”
14
HECTOR AMANI
I know what people sometimes think of me: too young. Too small. Too clumsy. Too chicken.
Well, I may be some of those other things, but I’m not chicken. When Malik removes the access panel to the ventilation system, he practically loses his dinner at the prospect of going down that narrow, dark shaft. He doesn’t think I know he has claustrophobia—or maybe it’s just the fact that he has a big behind and he doesn’t like to get it squeezed into tight places.
Tori takes a small flashlight out of her pocket and shines it into the opening. The shaft heads straight down about seven or eight feet before splitting off in different directions. “Somebody will have to stay on the roof to lower the others down by rope.”
“I’ll do it,” Malik volunteers immediately.
“Fine,” I tell him. “I’ll go in.”
“You?” Malik brays a laugh. “You can’t even ride a bike!”
Eli looks skeptical. “I don’t know, Hector. Maybe you’d be better off staying up here just in case Malik needs any—uh—help.”
“It’s going to be a tight squeeze in the ducts, and I’m the smallest.”
The plan is set. Malik waits up top to get us in and out, and the rest of us tackle the factory.
I squeeze that cord until my hands burn as Malik lowers me into the ventilation system, leering at me all the way down. He knows how scared I am, and I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of being right. The others didn’t pick me to be part of this group; I had to sneak my way in. But now that I’m here, I’m going to prove that I can get the job done as well as anybody. Even if we don’t understand exactly what that job is supposed to be.
I feel a mixture of triumph and dread when my feet touch the bottom. I drop to my knees and crawl along the passage to my left. The instant I’m surrounded by tin, the isolation is total, and I’d give anything for one last glimpse of Malik’s trademark smirk.
Eli lands next, and quickly folds himself out of the way to make room for Tori. We’re like a long caterpillar, with me at the head and Tori bringing up the rear, wriggling along the channel. We seem to be on a level course. I get the sense that the ductwork must be directly under the building ceiling, but it’s impossible to be sure. All we can see in Tori’s flashlight beam is the dull silver tunnel.
Then my groping hand strikes a different texture—not the dusty smoothness of the tin, but a rough metal grid. My weight knocks it loose, and it’s falling. At the last second, I reach out and grab it, and suddenly, I’m falling too.
Terror blurs my vision, but I do glimpse a vast factory floor in the gloom of half-light. Part of me understands this information is useless to me. In a matter of a few violent seconds, I’ll be on that floor, broken and dead.
Illogically, my last thought is not of my parents. It’s of Malik, who’s going to miss me, even though he might not admit it.
Strong hands grab my ankles, and Eli is yanking me back into the duct. I bring the grate up with me and fit it into place.
I try to quaver “Thanks!” but no sound comes out. I scramble past the opening and Eli and Tori inch up and peer through the grille.
Eli whistles. “Man, Hector! You could have died!”
A brave and clever response dies in my throat. My mouth is still not working.
Safe for the moment, we stare down at the factory floor.
I see the orange first. Cones—a lot of them. At least a few hundred—freestanding, stacked on pallets, and piled in a mound.
Okay, I tell myself, still not thinking 100 percent clearly. We broke into a traffic cone plant and found traffic cones. What did we expect?
“Were we wrong about this place?” breathes Tori.
Eli is shaking his head. Is the factory exactly what it’s supposed to be?
Then my head clears and I realize what I don’t see. Equipment. Machinery. What made all this? And out of what? There’s no raw material either. I expand my view. Four high brick walls with very few windows; a concrete floor painted battleship gray. A forklift, several folding tables, a riding lawn mower; beside that, a small stepladder that would reach about 3 percent of the way to the ceiling. There’s a lunchroom area in the far corner. A vast shelving unit, largely empty, except for the occasional flashlight or coil of twine, and, for some reason, a lamp shade with no lamp. That’s about it.
“No way,” I tell the other two. “This isn’t a factory, it’s a front for a factory. If they’re making cones, they’re doing it with a magic wand.”
Eli nods. “No machines.”
“And no plastic either,” I add. “How can you have a plastics factory without plastic?”
Tori’s voice is shaky. “What do my parents do all day in this place?”
“This whole plant is a cover,” Eli concludes, stone-faced.
It’s a big discovery, but our reaction is muted. Not shock. It’s sort of a relief, I guess—relief that we’re not crazy. Still, there’s so much we don’t know.
“But if it is a cover,” I ask, picturing my mother painstakingly assembling her bag lunch to come to this un-factory, “what are they covering?”
None of us has an answer for that.
Tori peers sideways through the angled grille of the grating. “That wall,” she says, “is too close.”
I’m confused. “Where would you like it to be?”
“This duct should end where the factory does.” She indicates the passage ahead of us. “But look—it goes on at least another forty feet. Which means—”
Eli clues in. “There’s something behind those bricks. A whole other part of the building.”
“And we’re heading straight for it,” adds Tori.
We resume our caterpillar motion. I’m
still in the lead, crawling carefully around other gratings. One of them is just a few feet in front of the mysterious wall. So we have a pretty good idea when we’ve left the open plant and entered the hidden section.
Thirty feet ahead of us, a square of light beckons. I’m guessing it’s some kind of room, since it’s brighter than the dim factory we’ve just come from.
A minute later I’m peering down at a regular office—a desk in front of a bank of TV monitors. Although the screens are lit and running, the chair is empty.
“What is it?” Tori whispers behind me.
I squeeze past the opening to give her and Eli a peek. “Some kind of security station. But nobody’s there.”
Eli frowns through the grille. “Security for a factory that doesn’t make anything?”
Tori gives it her practiced eye. “It’s no more than a five- or six-foot drop to that desk. I’m going in.”
“I’m with you.” Eli pushes out the grating, angles it, and draws it up inside the duct.
“Wait,” I protest in a low voice. “That chair isn’t there for decoration, you know. A butt goes in it, probably a purple one. What’ll we do if the guy comes back?”
Neither of them considers my question worthy of an answer. Before I know it, Tori is through the opening and lowering herself toward the tabletop. When she drops, it’s only a couple of feet to the desk. For Eli, who’s taller, it’s even less.
Once more I’m on the outside looking in—although, technically, I’m on the inside looking out. “Should I stay up here? You know, to help you guys back up? Yeah, that’s probably a good idea . . .”
But then they start having a fit over what’s on the monitors.
“What is it?” I crane my neck out of the ceiling, and before I know it, I’m falling again. Floundering, I grab the frame of the duct opening and jump down to the desk. It’s not as clean a landing as theirs. I bounce off, hit the carpet, and roll. Not exactly Olympic gymnast stuff, but at least I don’t knock myself unconscious.
There are eighteen screens, each one showing a live feed from some part of Serenity. There’s the schoolyard, Dr. Bruder’s office, the general store, and the restaurant. There’s the park, and a close-up on the Serenity Cup.