My jaw dropped faster than my hope. My legs turned to lead and ice spread through my veins. We were officially screwed. I wasn’t going home tonight, or ever, and it was all because of a stupid prank. Here stood the guy who’d taken my cousin from me. And now he was about to take my whole life from me, too. I wanted to fall to the floor and beat at it with my fists, screaming at the injustice of the world. Better yet, I wanted to beat at him with my fists.
A. Gist stood there with his arms folded smugly across the shiny gold buttons on his shirt. The portal continued to spin behind him. He’d probably stood there about a minute, watching us. Pleasant thought.
“Josh. Kristina,” he said with an air of satisfaction. “Great work. You’ll both have your stereo systems by the end of tomorrow.”
“What about our bikes?” Josh snarled. “Did you ever find them?”
I couldn’t help myself. If I had to disappear in a minute, I wanted to get every stab in that I could. No way was I going to keep my mouth shut. “He ran them both over!”
Both Penny and Ryan shrunk back next to me. Penny’s chin quivered. She was lost for words.
A. Gist stood for a moment while Josh and Kristina’s eyes widened. I think he enjoyed watching the shock on their faces. “I took both of your bikes back to the Shadow Home World, where they’re being fixed right now. You’ll have them back by the end of the week. Don’t worry about that.”
“Oh.” Josh wiped the sweat from his forehead. “But we’re in so much trouble. I had to hit a couple of teachers. Can’t you make them forget I did or something?”
“And they were shoving spiders at me!” Kristina rubbed her arms as if to brush something off.
A. Gist shrugged like it didn’t matter. After all, Josh and Kristina were just a couple of teenagers, there to be used like everyone else. “I never said anything about erasing anyone’s memories. Only my superiors can do it, and they’re not going to take the time to come out here and sort out something unimportant like this.”
“What?” Josh’s nose flared. “They’ll lock me up!”
“I told you to be careful.” A. Gist smiled again, enjoying Josh’s horror. Nice boss. “You did complete your task and you’ll get your rewards, but there’s nothing I can do to keep you from getting punished by your own people.”
“But you’ve got powers,” Kristina begged. “I thought you could just erase this mess. There’s got to be something you can do.”
“Well, I could take you both to the Shadow Home World and make you both one of us as well,” A. Gist said, “but I don’t want permanent minions as stupid as you. It would be a waste of time and energy.”
Josh made a long growling sound and stormed past me. He shoved George out of the way and joined Kristina out in the hall. The two of them raced down the hall and out of sight, scowling.
Dead silence fell until Ryan gulped audibly. It was time.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” A. Gist asked. “Bring them into the portal!”
Before I could jump out of the way, someone rammed into me from behind. Hard. I fell forward and tried to whirl around to face my attacker. The tall woman with the blue stripes in her hair scowled at me. “Move!” She shoved me forward again, so rough I almost went off my feet.
I scraped my shoes against the floor as the portal loomed larger in front of me. The blackness. The purple swirls. Panic exploded within me as she thought of what must be on the other side. “No!”
Ryan’s voice cut into my panic. “Rita! Get out of there!”
I had to do something, and fast. I had nothing to grab onto to stop myself from getting shoved in. A. Gist stood next to it, grinning wider and wider.
I threw back my elbows, trying to hit the tall woman behind me. They did, all right. In her armor. Pain surged my arms as she gave me another shove. The portal waited three feet away.
“In!” the tall woman yelled, seizing my arms from behind. Bright purple swirls spun madly right in front of me. Without thinking, I lifted my foot and raked it down the front of her leg.
The tall woman let out a yell and stopped.
I leapt to the side and backed into a nearby desk, taking a second to look at the office. Penny held onto the doorframe while George yanked on her arm. Gabe Cruz threw Ryan, kicking and screaming, to the floor.
“Hurry up!” A. Gist commanded. “That teacher’s going to wake up any minute.”
I had to help my friends. My legs carried me towards Penny, but a figure in blue jumped in front of me. The tall woman. I backed up and banged my leg into an office chair. Ouch. But the chair might work. I grabbed it and rolled it in front of me.
“Umph!” The woman collided with it and crashed to the floor. Perfect.
I whirled around. A. Gist stood between me and Penny, fists balled. I couldn’t move, not with him in the way.
“Let go!” he yelled. He stared at the doorway Penny held onto. The office door slammed—by itself—right onto her fingers. Penny shrieked in pain and let go, cradling her hand while George yanked her by the other arm to the portal.
“Leave her alone!” That tingle ran through my arms again, but I ignored it. I had to think, and fast. I jumped over the chair and swung at the side of George’s face. I’m not a violent person, but I didn’t have a choice. It hit his cheekbone and his jaw clamped shut.
Penny broke free and darted for the other side of the room. “Come on!”
Maybe we could make it. Maybe we could escape if we got Ryan free.
Gabe Cruz had Ryan in a headlock. Ryan tried to back towards the door. I started for him but stopped again.
“Ted!” the tall woman screamed from under the chair, kicking. “Monica! Get in here!”
Two more Shadow Ones ran into the office, a short man with spots of blue in his gray hair and a woman with jet-black, blue-streaked hair. They were back from locking Mr. Gorfel in his classroom. We were now outnumbered.
The tingle in my arms died. I looked around for something to use as a weapon, but saw nothing but an empty glass juice bottle on a nearby desk. That would have to work. I ran for it, took it, and whirled around to see not the two new Shadow Ones coming at me but A. Gist himself.
“You’re…going…whether…you…like…it…or…not!” he breathed, closing in.
I forgot that my adversary was bigger, stronger, and way more powerful than me. I forgot I was up against the immortal Ruler of Ageism. So I raised the Spanta bottle and swung it through the air.
Something like a small explosion followed. Glass shards flew through the air. A. Gist staggered back, hands to his face. I dropped the glass bottle, realizing that the bottom half was broke off. I’d hit it right across his face. If I wanted to escape, it had to be now.
“ARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!” A. Gist raised his hands at me.
Before I could move, an invisible wall slammed into me. Not kidding. I flew back off my feet and crashed into another desk. Pain surged through my butt and spots danced in my vision. All the breath escaped me. I couldn’t even react as the tall woman ran over and grabbed my arm. A. Gist stood feet away, hands back over his face, and just behind him I could see—
“Ryan!”
Ted and Gabe Cruz pulled him right into the portal. All the color had gone out of his face and his mouth gaped open in a silent scream.
And then he disappeared into it.
My throat locked up. I’d failed. Penny was gone, too, along with George and Monica. Both of my friends were no longer on Earth, and it was all my fault. I wanted to collapse to the floor and die.
“You!” A. Gist lowered his hands from his face and walked towards me. “You…”
He had a small cut on his cheek. And it oozed blood. Blue blood. My stomach rolled at the sight of it. Just as I felt I was about to vomit, the cut shrank and vanished, taking the blood with it. Whoa. Did the Shadow Regime people all have weird healing powers?
I tried to pull away, but the tall woman seized my other arm and wrenched it behind my back. A. Gist stopped two feet away, staring at me like he’d discovered life on another planet. His eyebrows rose. I didn’t like it at all.
“You…you are probably the bravest foe I’ve had in a while, Rita. Defying me. Going up against the two toughest kids in town. Risking your very life. You are unafraid to do what you have to do. I’m wondering very hard about you.”
I sure didn’t feel very brave right now, not with A. Gist two feet away from me and my friends already taken through the portal.
“But even if my suspicions about you are right,” A. Gist continued, smiling, “it does not matter. You will not escape Procedure Number Twenty-Eight. No one has ever escaped it under my watch.”
A. Gist backed towards the portal. The tall woman shoved me forward, keeping a death-grip on my arms. I couldn’t find the strength to resist now. I couldn’t abandon my friends. The purple swirled around like the mouth of a monster waiting to swallow me up.
But I had to go. I couldn’t abandon Penny and Ryan even if no one was shoving me through.
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited. The air around me grew tingly. My feet scraped against carpet, then pavement. But there was no pavement in the office, or inside the school, for that matter.
The tall woman stopped. I slowly opened my eyes.
And nearly died with shock.
I stood on a large concrete platform now. Ryan was feet from me, arms seized by Ted and Gabe Cruz. Penny stood just behind him, arms held by George and Monica. I nodded to them, sending them my it’s going to be OK nod. Though I knew it wasn’t, and the thought made me sick inside.
Their eyes darted around in horror, and it took me only a second to realize why.
We weren’t in Westonville anymore.
A dark purple sky stretched above us as far as I could see. No sun. No stars. No anything. Around us, a city of gray and blue buzzed with noise and activity. Long, winding paths weaved between storefronts, tall apartment buildings, and factories. Streetlights shined everywhere and antennas and satellite dishes stuck out of some of the rooftops. Lights glowed inside some low structures nearby that looked like offices.
Glowing billboards rose above the buildings everywhere. There seemed to be dozens of them. And they weren’t advertisements for fast food joints, either. Electric blue print read slogans like Teens: Tight Control. One Rule At a Time. Another read Victory is Near! And one even said, Join the War on Teens. It’s Not Like You Have A Choice. Yeah, it seriously said that.
There were also people, both men and women, milling around. Some walked. Others drove these silver scooters that all had a curly blue A on the side. I even saw a few that looked like teenagers, but no kids. Everyone had the discolored blue hair, marking them as Shadow Ones. A few patrolled around in armor uniforms and carried some scary-looking clubs, but most had on these boring blue outfits that looked like prison jumpsuits. In a way, I guess they were. As if that wasn’t bad enough, each uniform had a dark blue A on the front pocket. Did A. Gist have to put his logo on everything?
I also noticed something else. Nobody smiled, not even the guards.
And on the far side of the city, an enormous blue mansion stood on top of a hill, overlooking the city. Its four towers pointed into the sky. I could guess whose house it was.
I stood there, speechless. This was the world from my vision.
Another pair of feet hit the concrete behind me. I snapped my head around. A. Gist stood in front of the portal, smiling. Which, of course, wasn’t good.
On this side, the portal spun inside a metal ring. A computer monitor with a keyboard stood next to it. Bright blue type on the monitor read WESTONVILLE, SEPTEMBER 4, 3:45 PM. A. Gist turned and pressed a few buttons on the keyboard and the portal turned off. The swirling blackness vanished, leaving the metal ring hollow.
Our escape route was gone.
“Be sure to charge this thing later, Gabe,” A. Gist commanded. “It looks like the juice is really low after keeping the portal open for that long. I doubt it could even take us ten minutes back or forth. You should have brought them over here a little faster.”
“Yes, sir,” Gabe mumbled, staring down at his jackboots.
“But first we have another matter to attend to, of course,” A. Gist continued, facing me. “Welcome to the Shadow Home World. I would like to inform you three that you will be spending the rest of time here.”
A. Gist glared at Gabe out of the corner of his eye. “However, I wanted Procedure Number Twenty-Eight to be more of a…pleasant surprise. I don’t like my enemies to know ahead of time what it is. I prefer to tell them myself.”
I wanted to say it was just as horrible either way, but decided against it. The last thing I needed was for him to put us through it any faster.
“I was also hoping that you would all run home today,” A. Gist went on, switching his gaze between the three of us. “It’s so much easier to snatch people out of their own homes than out of public. But two certain people had to mess that up. I warned them not to show you the video, but they didn’t listen.” A horrible little smile crept onto his face.
I felt like someone had slapped me. No. It couldn’t be.
“Dan? Sean?” Ryan’s voice trembled as he struggled against his captors. “Y…you’re not going to do anything to them…are you?”
A. Gist folded his arms and grinned wider, showing two rows of teeth. My heart sank. “Oh, you’ll see both of them soon,” he said. “They should have shut up and not defied me. When they found Gabe’s videos, they started talking about warning you.”
“You knew?” Penny choked out.
“Oh, yes,” A. Gist told her. “Josh and Kristina made sure I knew everything Dan and Sean planned to do. It’s amazing how willing they were to work for me when I offered some simple gifts.”
Great. I should’ve known. Josh and Kristina had been right by us in the hall when Sean had told me about the disc. Of course they’d found out about it and told A. Gist. How could I have forgotten about it?
“Josh and Kristina were very useful to me.” A. Gist continued. “First of all, they helped me talk Jerry into putting the sign at the Kool Spot up. After they held him at knifepoint, it was quite easy for me to get him to bend to my will and hang up that sign. The more people fear teenagers, the easier it is to ostracize them.”
He paused as if to let it sink in. Jerry hadn’t told me about that part. The cousin I loved had willingly banned us?
“The two of them also kept me informed. Finally, they led me right to you,” A. Gist went on. “I’m afraid their usefulness has worn out, however. They’re both bound for a boot camp at last. I have no more use for such stupidity. That’s fine with me, because the three of you will more than make up for them. I prize intelligence and bravery in my servants.”
My insides coiled into a knot. “No!”
A. Gist took a step towards me, eyes shining with cruel victory. “You should’ve accepted what’s true, Rita. There’s nothing you can do against me or my rules. Soon, I’ll gain control over teenagers everywhere.”
I looked away—anything was better than a view of him gloating—only to see the Shadow Home World all around me. The gray and blue buildings looked more menacing than before and the dark purple sky showed no sign of light. Nausea rose up through me. Would I have to call this place home forever, taking orders from A. Gist himself? Yuck. Yuck! Billboards stared down at me from everywhere with their War on Teens messages. A question burned in my mind, the same one I had since that night it all started.
“Why do you hate us so much?” I asked. “Teenagers, I mean? Why do you dedicate your lives to making us miserable?”
“I have to admit that’s a very good question.” A. Gist scratched his chin. “I don’t actually hate any of you. I’m jus
t doing the job that was handed to me by my boss.” He looked around at his surroundings and then back to me. “We Shadow Ones wage war on teenagers because you’re the future of humanity. You always have been. When we succeed at oppressing you, we succeed at oppressing humanity, because you will grow up knowing nothing else and with no will to fight back. My boss will be very, very happy when we achieve this. It’ll pave the way for…greater things. And it will happen soon.”
“No. You won’t,” I croaked. This was way, way bigger than I thought. He was looking to control everyone. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen after he won, or who he worked for.
“Oh yes, we will,” A. Gist said, folding his arms. “One rule at a time. Our takeover is so gradual, your peers don’t even know what’s happening to them. Look at all the wonderful new laws popping up against you. The rules. The curfews. None of those were there when your parents were young.”
A pit seemed to open inside me. He was right. All the city curfews and driving laws and everything—my parents never had those. They were all new, a part of his campaign.
“This is ridiculous,” Penny said, trying to wrench out of George’s grip. “You’re just doing this because someone’s telling you to?”
A. Gist smiled, turned, and walked towards the edge of the concrete platform. He descended a few stairs leading down to one of those winding paths. “Bring them this way. Tera, don’t you dare let Rita run away.”
Tera, the tall woman, shoved me down the steps and didn’t seem to care if I tripped and died. The sound of shoes scraping against pavement followed as the Shadow Ones forced Penny and Ryan along behind us.
Now they paraded us through traffic with A. Gist marching in the lead, cape flowing. Scooters hummed past and Shadow Ones stared at us. And it could’ve just been me feeling sorry for myself, but it seemed like a lot of them gave me looks of sympathy. We got a lot of sad nods and headshakes. They knew what was going to happen to us, because the same thing had happened to them.
A pair of women in blue jumpsuits stood outside of a gray building with the glowing blue words A Systems Bank, chatting. Tera pushed me past them, and both of them fell silent like a funeral procession was going past. A woman with blond and blue hair met my gaze. She frowned and leaned towards her companion. I heard her words even after we’d passed. “Sad…when we bring in kids…lives are over…”
Geez, that made me feel better.
A. Gist walked faster now, past a cell phone booth labeled A. Mobile. Bad sign. Just ahead the walkway curved past a low gray building with narrow windows. We made our way around the curve, and at last I saw what lay ahead of us.
Let me tell you this: it wasn’t good.
Chain-link fence stretched across the pavement and behind the offices, blocking off a big open area. Barbed wire coiled and twisted on top. Straight ahead was a gate between two dark blue guard shacks. Two blue-armored guards, both men holding clubs, stood aside like soldiers as A. Gist approached. One pressed a button inside the guard shack and the gate started to slide open by itself. The squealing of metal on metal filled the air and a low groan escaped from my throat.
“We’re almost there,” A. Gist said without looking back. He sounded like a parent driving his child someplace fun. If “fun” meant the dentist.
The stony-faced guards looked straight ahead as we passed. Maybe they had to by order. I scraped my shoes against the pavement as I passed through the gate, trying to slow down. No use. Tera practically rammed into me, forcing me forward so much I had to catch my balance. When I stood back up a large, blue sign stared me in the face.
YOU ARE ENTERING SECTOR F
JUDICIAL DISTRICT
COURTHOUSE
MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISON
ARENA
CONVERSION CHAMBER
RECOVERY CENTER
We were on the edge of the city now, because the brown wasteland spread out past this area. No people milled around this area, and I didn’t blame them. A small courthouse made of blue and gray marble stood a short distance away. I had a feeling the trials it held weren’t exactly fair. Behind it loomed the prison, complete with four guard towers and spotlights. On the other side of me, a huge bowl made of blue marble and glass towered over us: the arena. I didn’t even want to know what happened in there.
Oh, and there was also no escape. Fence and barbed wire boxed in the Judicial District on all sides. Even we managed to break free, we had nowhere to go.
A. Gist’s voice cut into my thoughts. “That’s where we’re going!”
Just yards away a shiny, metallic dome waited for us. Four sinister glass towers boxed it in and pointed at the sky. A fifth tower jutted up from the top of the dome and rose above the others. Glass claws curled from the top of each tower.
Ryan gagged behind me and Penny let out a squeak. My heart hammered as I read another blue sign next to the glass door:
CONVERSION CHAMBER
PROCEDURE NO. 28
RESTRICTED ACCESS
A. Gist strode forward and opened the glass door. “Rita. Penny. Ryan.” He paused after each of our names. “Welcome to Procedure Number Twenty-Eight.”
Chapter Sixteen