I risk a look back and see the security man helping the two workers bring the forklift’s payload down from the boxcar’s ceiling. I guess railway business is more important than four stowaway kids. But as soon as the cargo is where it’s supposed to be, they might come after us again. We have to act fast.
Abruptly, the woods come to an end, and we blunder onto a busy street. Tires squeal and a big SUV lurches to a halt six inches from my chest. The driver leaps out from behind the wheel, white-faced. “Are you kids okay?”
“Sorry!” I blurt, and we hustle back onto the sidewalk. We’ve only been in this town a few minutes and already we’ve been caught, chased, and almost run over. Has our Serenity upbringing left us so clueless that we’re doomed to blunder from near miss to near miss? How long before one of those close calls turns into a real disaster?
Right now, the odds of us making it in the outside world seem like a million to one.
The sights and sounds are overwhelming—car horns and the faces of so many people we don’t know. The road is filled with more vehicles than we’ve ever seen all in one place.
I struggle to make sense of where I am. It’s not a big city, but both sides of the road are lined with stores and restaurants, and people are coming and going. This must be the downtown.
My eyes fall on an older car parked at the curb. It’s painted yellow with a black-and-white checker pattern and a driver sitting inside. Something about it looks familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Tori follows my gaze. “Is that a taxi?”
Of course! There are no taxis in Serenity, where an eight-minute walk would take you across town. But from books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, taxis will drive you wherever you want to go. Like away from the train depot, for example. Or to McNally Academy.
We run for the car and pile into the backseat. “We have to go to Pueblo,” I tell the driver.
She peers at the four of us in the rearview mirror. “That’s an hour’s trip. Are you sure you kids can afford the ride?”
We begin digging in our pockets for the money we’ve been hoarding. It’s a nerve-racking moment, since we have very little sense of what things cost beyond the borders of our hometown. We produce our stash, fistfuls of crumpled bills, wadded up and spotted with dirt and blood. It would buy a lot at our general store, but everything in Serenity is so artificial that our life experience is basically worthless. Plus none of us has ever been in a taxi before, much less paid for one. For all we know, it’s the most expensive thing you can do. We can’t predict whether our money will be enough to take us to Pueblo, or even down the block.
Our driver opens wide eyes at the sight of our bills—ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. “For that,” she laughs, “I can take you to Bangor, Maine.”
“Just Pueblo, please,” I say politely.
For the first time, she turns around and looks at us over the seat. She sees what we’ve gotten used to: We are sunburned, scratched, bruised, disheveled, and filthy, not to mention red-eyed and exhausted. “What happened to you kids? Maybe we should stop at a hospital first!”
“No hospital!” I exclaim urgently. “We have to get to Pueblo—to McNally Academy!”
She stares at me for a moment, and then starts the car. “You rich private school kids!” she snorts. “The shenanigans you get into while you’re spending Daddy’s money. You’re going to be in big trouble when the teachers get a look at you!”
“Probably,” Tori agrees solemnly.
The taxi pulls away from the curb.
We’ve passed our first real-world test.
Pueblo looks run-down and neglected compared to Serenity, but the red-tile-roofed adobe brick buildings of McNally Academy are the nicest things we’ve seen so far. The campus is in the hill country a few miles outside of town, nestled among the high-desert pines.
The taxi leaves us, two hundred dollars poorer, on the school’s main drive. It’s chillier than Serenity, still morning. Students are everywhere, on their way to breakfast and morning classes.
“Whoa,” Amber whispers. “Did you ever think there were this many kids in the whole world?”
There are maybe a hundred of them scattered around. But when you’re used to a place where there are only thirty—and zero unfamiliar faces—this counts as a mob scene.
“Get used to it,” Malik comments. “That’s one thing they’ve got plenty of in the outside world—people.”
“We’re only interested in one person,” I remind them. I notice that we’re starting to attract attention, and not just because we’re scratched and beaten up and our clothes are torn and dirty. McNally may seem crowded to us, but it’s probably not a huge school. Chances are, the students all know each other, so newcomers stand out. If any teachers see us, they’re going to ask questions. “Let’s find Randy before the adults who run this place want to know what we’re doing here.”
Still, we hang back. We don’t talk to strangers; in Serenity, there are no strangers, if you don’t count the Purple People Eaters. How would you approach someone you’ve never met before? The McNally kids are all in groups, chatting amiably. The fact that they belong only emphasizes the reality that we don’t.
Malik is the first one to work up the guts. He targets a boy around our age walking alone. “Hey,” he calls, “you know a guy named Randy Hardaway?”
The boy stops and looks us over. “Yeah, I know Randy.” He obviously notices that we’re a mess but decides not to ask about it. “Are you friends of his?”
I nod. “From his hometown. Can you point us to him?”
“This is kind of a surprise visit,” adds Tori.
“He’s probably in his dorm room—Hayden thirty-three,” the kid tells us. “Randy skips breakfast and sleeps till five minutes before class. He’s kind of famous for it.”
I can’t help smiling. Some things never change.
He points out the right building and we hurry in that direction. The sign reads:
HAYDEN CENTER FOR STUDENT LIVING
BOYS ONLY
It doesn’t seem to be a hard-and-fast rule, though. There are both boys and girls in the hall, milling around, calling for each other, shoving books into backpacks, and generally gearing up for a day of classes. A nervous glance flashes among the four of us. The hallway is crowded. At close range, under indoor lighting, our bedraggled state and our otherness will be even more painfully obvious.
At first, we just stand there, helpless. The corridor is wall-to-wall people, and moving through a crowd is something we have no experience with. It’s Malik who finally figures it out, mostly because he’s big enough to clear a path. The rest of us get behind him and follow in his wake.
The McNally kids stare at us as we pass, some of them from mere inches away. A low murmur goes up in the hall. Who are we? Why are we here? An eerie dread takes hold of me and I begin to shiver in spite of the heat of my sunburned skin. In my mind, I’m thinking: This is what it’s like to be a clone in the real world—a strange curiosity, not quite human, not quite acceptable, possibly dangerous.
I tell myself no one could know that. We’re the focal point because we’re battered, ragged strangers, not because of the invisible history of our birth. But I can’t escape a deep foreboding that people will be looking at us for those other reasons soon enough.
Malik stops dead, and the three of us bump into him from behind.
“Here it is,” he tells me. “Room thirty-three.”
He steps aside and I knock. The report of my knuckles on the wooden door echoes inside my head, reverberating from temple to temple. The kids in the hall gather around like this is the eighteenth hole of a championship golf tournament.
For the first few seconds, nothing happens. The silence is so total that it’s almost as if these McNally kids realize that what they’re witnessing is the most important moment in our lives.
There’s a scrambling sound inside the room. The knob turns, and the door is pulled wide.
/> Randy stands there, his hair unruly as always, goggling at me in openmouthed shock. Then his comfortably familiar features resolve into a delighted grin, and he steps aside to invite us in.
“Hey, I see you found my note.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GORDON KORMAN wrote his first book at age fourteen and since then has written more than eighty middle grade and teen novels. Favorites include the New York Times bestselling The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers, Book One: The Medusa Plot; Ungifted; Pop; and Schooled. Gordon lives with his family on Long Island, New York. You can visit him online at www.gordonkorman.com.
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CREDITS
COVER ART © 2015 BY KEVIN KEELE
COVER DESIGN BY RAY SHAPPELL
COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
MASTERMINDS. Copyright © 2015 by Gordon Korman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Korman, Gordon.
Masterminds / Gordon Korman. — First edition.
pagescm
Summary: “A group of kids discover they were cloned from the DNA of some of the greatest criminal masterminds in history for a sociological experiment”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-229996-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-06-239113-1 (int.)
EPub Edition © December 2014 ISBN 9780062300010
[1. Cloning—Fiction. 2. Experiments—Fiction. 3. Criminals—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K8369Mas2015
2014026839
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
1415161718PC/RRDH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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Gordon Korman, Masterminds
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