Chapter Fourteen
I couldn’t move. I could only stare back at Gabe Cruz, a Gabe Cruz that was now an immortal Shadow Regime member, not a fighter against injustice. My insides twisted with the horror of it.
“It’s…it’s her!” George sputtered. He stood next to the light switch, armor shining and mouth gaping open. A black device with an antenna sticking out of the top nearly fell from his hand. “It’s Rita!”
It might be a good idea to move right about now.
I didn’t think about what I did next. I picked up my heavy backpack, Biology book lurching inside. I bellowed out a war cry—or maybe it was a scream—and ran right at George. His eyes widened. He backed away. Too late. I swung my backpack through the air, and a loud thump sounded through the air as the book hit his armor.
George fell back into a table with a crash, sending a monitor sliding back. “Urgh!”
I caught my balance and bolted out the door so fast my heavy backpack almost yanked my shoulder out. My shoes squeaked against the floor as lockers blurred past me. I didn’t look back.
“Gabe! You idiot!” George yelled from the computer room. “She was right there!”
I rounded the corner and nearly slid. No footfalls echoed behind me, but I took no chances. Not after that. I’d head to the office and call my parents and tell them to drive me far away from here.
The bell rang through the halls. I slid to a stop like I’d hit a brick wall. Doors flew open and chatter filled the halls around me.
Lunch. That meant people all around me. That meant safe.
I leaned against a locker and squeezed my eyes shut. I hadn’t just seen that. No, I hadn’t. All those clippings appeared in my mind like an evil slideshow. Everyone who stood up to A. Gist. Everyone who vanished. Then Gabe Cruz himself. He’d made the computers crash all along. He was one of them now.
“Oh,” I moaned, slamming my fist into the locker. I tried not to think about what this meant. But I couldn’t help it. Everything about the Shadow Regime, their conspiracy, and their secret web of control was so much worse than I could’ve imagined.
“Rita!” a voice called.
Penny.
I lifted my head from the cold of the locker to face her. She jogged at me, eyes wide. “You look sick. Did you see the video?”
That, and more. “Yes, I did!” I couldn’t help it. My voice sounded like a hysterical half-scream from a horror movie. Kids turned to stare at me as they passed, but I didn’t care. I grabbed Penny’s sleeve and pulled her closer, forcing my voice to level out. “They dragged him away, Penny. Into a portal.”
“What?” Penny’s mouth gaped open as the color drained from her face.
I hated to do this to her. “And the second file was some articles about people who stood up to the Shadow Regime. Tons of them. They all went missing. But that’s not the worst part!”
“Gabe Cruz…” Penny whispered, eyes wide, “Did they…did they kill—”
“It’s worse than that,” I babbled, barely hearing my own words. “I saw him! He was making the computers go down the whole time.”
“What? That doesn’t make sense. Why would Gabe do it?”
Here it came. The big, horrible revelation. “Because they turned him into one of them!”
Penny’s jaw dropped as she pulled away. She stood there, staring as if I’d hit her in the face. “But…but…”
“Rita!” another voice called out down the hall. Ryan ran towards us, weaving around the Chess Club. “Did you see the disc? What happened to that Gabe Cruz guy? Did you find out what Procedure Number Twenty-Eight was, by any chance?”
It all clicked in one horrifying moment. My insides twisted into a tighter knot, if that was even possible. I seriously thought I was going to puke. “It’s when they turn you into one of them!” I cried, sliding down the locker and to the floor. “That’s what they’re going to do to us!”
Now it was Ryan’s turn to stand there, stunned. He backed away at last and gagged. “N…no.”
“We need to get into the cafeteria.” Penny pulled on my shirt sleeve. “We have to stay around people. They won’t drag us away with other people around.”
Yes. The voice of reason. The halls started to clear as everyone scrambled to get to the lunch lines before they got too long. If we stayed out here when everyone left, we’d find ourselves on the other side of a portal. And after that…well, you get the picture. I really didn’t want to say it.
None of us grabbed lunch. My appetite was gone forever. Penny led us to a far table and pushed me down in the chair. Ryan joined me and grabbed the edge of the table so hard his knuckles turned white.
“Tell us what happened!” Penny sat opposite us and leaned forward.
I didn’t feel like reliving the experience in the computer lab, but I had no choice. I told Penny and Ryan all the horrifying details. Which was, well, all of them. Bile rose in my throat by time I finished.
Penny drew in a breath. “So we’re next.”
“W…where do they take you?” Ryan asked. His face had turned the color of paste again, by the way.
“I didn’t catch that,” I said. “It’s sure not anywhere nice.” I exhaled. At least they hadn’t taken Jerry yet. Had they threatened him with transformation if he didn’t cooperate? Or worse? No wonder he did what the Shadow Regime told him.
Ryan stood next to me, not letting go of the table. “We should run. W…we need to find a way out of town and go somewhere where they can’t find us. Anyone got money for plane tickets?”
“We can’t,” I said, rolling up my sleeve. “I have this tracker on me. Even if we go to Alaska, they can find us. I think we should stay here in school. Around people. They’re not going to kidnap us in the middle of class.” So running away was out. I scratched at my forearm, praying for the A to come off. All I managed to do was make my skin turn red around it. “What about after school, Penny? Got any ideas?” I didn’t mean to snap at her, but who cared in this situation?
Ryan sat back down. “Yeah, Penny. My mom’s not even home until d…dinnertime and she forgets I’m there. And we have detention after the school clears out. They’ll know we’re here even without Josh and Kristina telling them about it.”
Penny stared at him for a long time. For once, she didn’t have an answer.
A thought came to me. “Mr. Gorfel will be there. We know he’s probably not working for the Shadow Regime. They won’t show themselves to him. And he said he’d make our parents pick us up afterwards. He wants to tell them what bad kids we are, remember?”
“The man is sadistic,” Ryan added.
“Maybe you’re right,” Penny said.
“It’s better than joining the Shadow Regime,” I said. Even cleaning his entire classroom with a toothbrush beat that. And I’m including the tank of algae.
“B…but why would they want teenagers in their army?” Ryan asked. “Doesn’t make sense to me. They hate us.”
I remembered that night we did the toilet papering job. That meeting the Shadow Ones had in the park. A. Gist’s words swirled through my head. Tight control. That’s our motto when it comes to dealing with teens. And to think you were one a few months ago. God, he must have been talking to poor Gabe. And then at the Kool Spot, he said, we are immortal. We are ageless. “Gabe isn’t a teenager anymore, even if he looks like one,” I said. “He isn’t even human. Man, I’m going to throw up.”
Penny sighed. “They’re all immune to the rules they inflict on humans, then. This does explain things, though. Not only are they changing people, but they’re stopping us at the same time.”
I stared down at the table. “This is so much worse than I could’ve imagined. How are we supposed to avoid having our brains turned into cottage cheese? Call the military?”
“I can’t think of anything better than going to the detention, either,” Penn
y said. “Your parents are going to pick you up. And Mr. Gorfel will call your mom, Ryan.”
“Josh and Kristina still know, even if they didn’t tell A. Gist,” Ryan reminded us. “We still have them to worry about.”
“Better them than the Shadow Regime,” I said. “Compared to them, they’re not so bad. Even if they do want to kill us.”