CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Something has happened.

When I get back to Yellow Dorm Eight, close to 10:00 PM curfew—after running a few homework laps around the Arena Commons building stadium track—it seems like everyone has gathered in the first floor lounge. All the Candidates from our dorm are packed in, and the Dorm Leaders are there too.

“What’s going on?” I say, making my way through the crowd.

A girl I don’t know turns to me. “They found something. The Correctors were here, searching both the dormitory floors again, and looks like they found something. . . . They’re about to make some kind of announcement.”

I frown. At the same time a strange chill passes through me and takes up residence in my gut, with twisting knives. Why am I even nervous?

I look around to see if there’s anyone familiar. I notice Dawn and Hasmik toward the back and push my way toward them. Hasmik’s leaning against the back of one of the chairs, and dangling her hurt leg off the ground to relieve pressure on the ankle.

“You missed the excitement,” Dawn says leaning in to my ear. “The Correctors were all over our floor. They kicked us out and did the bed search. Girls underwear all over the place. . . . No idea what else.”

“Oh yeah?” I start to snort then frown instead and momentarily think about my bags and my bed—not that there’s anything that can be found there. . . .

Dorm Leader John Nicolard blows a whistle. Faces turn and the whispers and chatter in the lounge simmers down. In that moment we all turn to look, and there are two Atlantean Correctors walking down the stairs, with someone in tow, and behind them is a pair of armed guards.

They reach the bottom landing, and the person they are leading by the arms is pushed forward, so that he or she stumbles slightly, and there’s a flip of familiar relaxed blond-tinted hair, and oh no, oh dear lord, no!

It’s Laronda.

I feel cold. Super-bottomless-pit-cold, and at the same time it’s like someone had punched me in the gut. Next to me Dawn makes a sound that’s like a growl or an exclamation.

“Oh, no!” Hasmik breathes.

“Let go of me!” After a particularly rough shove from behind, Laronda struggles in the grip of the guards. She’s wearing nothing but a tank top and hastily pulled on leggings. Her sockless feet are jammed into sneakers. Her dark brown skinny arms are restrained behind her back and her face is terrified. I have never seen her look so lost—ever. “I didn’t do anything! Listen to me! I don’t know what that thing is—”

The crowd of Candidates parts to let them pass, and the Correctors are silent and impassive as they walk through the lobby, followed by their detainee, ignoring her pleas and protest. One of the Correctors is holding what looks like Laronda’s tattered old denim jacket.

“Laronda!” I say as she passes by, and my voice carries through the room.

Laronda turns back, trains her frightened face in my direction, and I can see her eyes are red with tears and her nose is puffy. “Gwen!” she exclaims, almost choking. “Oh my lord, Gwen! I am innocent, I didn’t do anything, I swear! Please tell them! Help me! Someone set me up!”

I make a move toward her, but the nearest guard puts his arm out before me to prevent me making any contact with her. “Please stay back,” he says gruffly, blocking me with his bulk.

“It has to be a terrible mistake!” I exclaim. My pulse is pounding in my temples. “She says she didn’t do anything! Where are you taking her?”

“Yeah, there’s no way this girl did anything wrong!” Behind me Dawn pushes forward to stand at my side. And Hasmik is right behind her.

One of the Correctors pauses suddenly and turns to look at us. “This Candidate was found to be in possession of one of the components missing from the shuttles,” he says in a chill and composed voice. “She is being detained until we can further determine the extent of her involvement.”

“Detained where?” Dorm Leader Gina Curtis says, stepping forward to stand next to us. She has a stern intense expression, and I’d hate to be the one who goes up against her.

“The correctional facility space is in Building Fifteen.” The Corrector never blinks as he replies to Gina. “All inquiries may be placed there tomorrow morning after 8:00 AM.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Other protesting voices rise in the lounge as teens crowd in closer.

“Please do not interfere,” the Corrector says. “Unless you would like to be detained also. Any further interference with this process now will result in your Disqualification.”

We pretty much fall silent at this. Everyone, all at once. So much for solidarity in the face of personal survival. . . .

The Corrector turns away, followed by the second one, and Laronda makes a sobbing noise as she is led outside.

I stand watching her being taken away, stunned with disbelief, and my emotions are in crazy horrible turmoil.

One of the Dorm Leaders blows the whistle. “All right, everyone, back upstairs to bed! We’ll deal with this tomorrow, now, curfew and lights out!”

* * *

I am not sure whether I get any sleep that night, because although I am exhausted, I lie in the darkness of the dormitory, wide-awake for hours, and filled with awful sickening adrenaline rushing through my system. I listen to my own pulse, to the small sleeping noises and bed creaks around me. And the unnerving silence of Laronda’s empty cot is there, right next to me.

“I am so sorry . . .” Hasmik mumbles in the dark several times on my other side, and I whisper back, “It’s okay . . . everything will be okay . . . somehow.”

I don’t know whom that’s supposed to convince or fool. Not me.

I finally fall into some kind of half-frenzied slumber with nightmares about falling shuttles and levitating pieces of orichalcum and lord knows what other evil junk.

When the 7:00 AM claxons alarms peal, I am pulled out of a B-movie level nightmare.

Everyone’s coming awake, and the usual lazy groans are subdued this morning, as we still ponder the events of the previous night. Frightened gossip moves in whispers and waves around the dormitory hall.

“She’s going to be Disqualified, of course,” a girl says, as she collects her clothes and toothbrush and heads to the bathroom. “But what else? Will they put her in jail or harm her?”

“What if they execute people?” another girl squeaks in terror. “Do Atlanteans have capital punishment?”

The sound of that starts another wave of cold fear in my gut. There’s got to be something that can be done to help Laronda!

Okay, I decide, as soon as I am dressed, I will go to that jail building where they’re holding her and see if I can talk sense to someone. Maybe I can find Aeson Kass! I can make him listen at least! He has to be there, right?

As I think this, and get showered and dressed, I see Claudia Grito giving me a snide look as she passes by me on her way downstairs.

Okay, did that bitch have anything to do with whatever happened to Laronda? The thought passes through me like a lightning bolt.

Dawn follows me downstairs as I start following Claudia. “Hey, don’t do anything stupid, now,” she mutters grimly. “Let’s go eat first, there’s nothing you can do now. Not before eight.”

I nod, and we head into the Cafeteria.

“I plan to skip the first part of class,” I tell Dawn.

“Yeah, I get it. Me too. I’ll go with you.”

* * *

We finish eating breakfast that tastes like straw, in a hurry. As we stop by the Common Area lobby to get our schedules scanned, I check the clock and it’s seven-forty.

“Let’s go,” I say.

Outside it’s an overcast cloudy morning, and I shiver slightly and wrap my bulky winter jacket around me. For once I did not forget to wear something warm over my T-shirt.

We head to Building Fifteen, which according to the campus map is on the other side of the airfield, three structures behind the Arena Commons Building.

There are few Candidates walking outside, just a few joggers and occasional patrolling guards. The sky is pale as milk and it’s starting to drizzle lightly as we pass the tall AC Building, and there’s Building Fifteen. It looks like a regular dorm, four floors, but there’s a four-color square logo on top.

At the doors, heightened security greets us. Two guards give us hard stares as we pass the glass doors. They scan our ID tokens before allowing us to enter the sterile lobby.

“What is your purpose for being here?” An officer asks us from behind a glass enclosure.

I glance at Dawn then back at him. “We’re here for Laronda Aimes. She was wrongfully arrested last night in our Dorm, and we want to talk to whoever is in charge of that.”

The guard, an older balding man, looks at us silently, then picks up an intercom handset. “Two Candidates here to discuss the detainee from Yellow Dorm Eight,” he tells whomever is on the other end. Then he turns back to us and says, “Names?”

“Gwen Lark and Dawn Williams.”

He relays our names, then listens. After a pause he looks at me and says. “Okay, you’re Gwen Lark?”

I nod.

“You can go in, but just you alone. The other young lady, you wait here.”

I frown, and Dawn gives me a strange look, then shrugs. “I’ll be here,” she says.

And on that note, the guard buzzes me inside through the second set of glass doors, and into the back office area that contains a small cube farm consisting of about a dozen cubicles separated with short partitions, and then a long corridor with closed doors.

I walk sullenly past several office workers and uniformed officers manning keyboards and special consoles and sitting at their cubicle desks. They stare at me briefly. Everyone’s wearing rainbow armbands on their grey uniform sleeves, which I’ve come to associate with Earth workers affiliated with Atlanteans. Not one of them has the metallic golden-blond hair.

The guard takes me past them and we enter the corridor, and walk all the way to the end, past at least twenty doors on both sides, until we come to a dead end and closed double doors.

An armed guard stands on duty at the doors.

My guard nods to him, and the second man stands aside. The guard who brought me over takes out a card and scans it at the optical reader on the wall. The lock bleeps and the status light turns from red to green.

The door opens.

“Proceed inside,” he tells me.

* * *

I take a deep breath and walk past the double doors.

The room I enter is huge. It is more than three times the size of Office 512 in the AC Building, and it contains a similar computer surveillance multi-screen center lining one of the walls. Rows of screens stretch wall to wall.

Along the perimeter of the other walls there is other tech equipment which I cannot really explain, because most of it is the strange shapeless lumps of Atlantean technology I’ve encountered before in the audio tests, except this is all on a grand scale.

In the middle of the room, a large table takes up most of the space, and it is covered with what looks like burned and charred pieces of metal, plastic, and orichalcum. . . . Basically, it is what remains of the first exploded shuttle. Some pieces are bulky and large, most are small shards and lumps fused together. Four Atlanteans are in the room, dressed in white lab coats, moving around the table and engaging various equipment around the perimeter.

The fifth is Aeson Kass.

He stands with his arms folded watching them work.

He looks particularly worn this morning, pale as if he hadn’t had any sleep. The hollows of his cheeks and jaw are darkened with a faint growth of stubble. His hair is slightly messy and even tousled on one side. And his eyes, dark lapis lazuli blue, are nevertheless traced with a fine perfect line of kohl that appears unsmudged and unblemished, as if it’s a natural part of his skin.

Maybe the eyeliner’s permanent, and has been tattooed onto his face? I wonder momentarily and stupidly out of left field.

He sees me in that moment and he frowns. “You? What are you doing here, Candidate Lark? What do you want?” His aggravated voice cuts like a knife.

I take a few steps into the room, and my heart is beating so loudly I can feel it in my temples. Breathe, Gwen, breathe. . . .

“Laronda Aimes is innocent,” I say. “Whatever you think she did, she did not do it. She is my friend, and she would never do anything as awful that might hurt other people—”

“Silence!” he blasts me in a hard, implacable voice. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing, I suggest you reconsider, now. You should not be here. This is none of your business, and by being here you put yourself under question.”

My jaw falls open. “What?” I say, and I am filled with outrage. “How does trying to help a friend implicate me? I am telling you, Laronda is completely innocent, and there is no way she is involved in anything stupid and awful that would ever hurt other people much less kill anyone, and undermine her being here in this RQC!”

“How well do you know your friend? You have known her for what, six days? The evidence stands against her.” He lets his arms drop, takes a step and another, and approaches me. He stops directly before me and I stare up at him, at the terrible hard gaze, in all its intensity, trained on me.

“I don’t need six days to know that she’s a good person,” I say softly, and my voice is breathless with anger. “There are just some things you know.”

“How?” he says, staring down at me. The sheer power in him, it is a mountain. . . . The force of his gaze is making my lungs close up, choking me with the oppressive weight of presence. “With your gut? Your intuition? Your amazing ability to read minds? How well do you really know this Laronda and her motives? How do you explain the shuttle navigation chip component found in the pocket of her jacket?”

“There has to be a good reason. She was set up! Someone planted this thing in her pocket to transfer blame onto her . . . it could be a random mistake, someone put it there by mistake, meaning to put it in someone else’s pocket, maybe? Or . . . or it could be—it’s got to be malicious—jealousy, rivalry, you name it! Someone trying to weed down the competition, the number of Candidates?” I speak hurriedly, scrambling for answers, because I sense that he is giving me this brief opportunity to speak, and I should be grateful. . . .

“Or it could be she is working for a terrorist group, and she has been given a specific task, and she has carried it out.” He pauses for a moment, to glance at the worktable and the Atlanteans in lab coats. And then his gaze returns to me. “Do you know that we found one of the component chips cleverly attached to the underside of a delivery truck yesterday? We intercepted it before it had a chance to leave the compound. And this second chip in your so-called friend’s pocket was likely about to be smuggled out in a similar fashion.”

“Have you caught whoever is responsible for the delivery truck thing?” I press on, hanging on to any option I can imagine. “Do you have actual proof Laronda was involved in that?”

Aeson considers me and for a moment I sense a tiny pause of hesitation. “Yes,” he says. “We have the persons involved with the truck incident in custody. Two Candidates from another dorm, and they will be Disqualified and prosecuted. Both were linked via surveillance and advanced DNA and resonance scanning to the deliberate attempt to move the chip component. They were also linked to not one but two of your extremist Earth terror groups, the Sunset Alliance and Terra Patria.”

I stare at him, mind racing, not knowing what else to say.

“Enough,” he says abruptly, steadily looking at me then suddenly blinking as though coming awake. “This is far more than you need to know. I should not be telling you any of this, but apparently I’ve had a very long night and it’s affecting my better judgment. And you—you are missing your first period class, for which you’ve just earned a demerit.”

“But what about Laronda? What’s going to happen to her?”

He exhales tiredly. Again, a pause as he considers whether to speak, and merely looks at me. “Nothing is going to happen to her. She was found to be clean, no primary DNA match, no resonance match. She had nothing to do with it and she is going to be released in half an hour after some minor questioning while the last portion of scanning is concluded—mostly a formality.”

“What? Oh!” I say in amazement, followed by anger. “Wait, why didn’t you just say so in the first place? I was going nuts here, and you could’ve just said you were letting her go! What is wrong with you?”

Okay, that last part? I think I’ve just said too much—even I get it. And my voice, holy crap, I’ve seriously raised my voice at him, at Command Pilot Aeson Kass, the guy who pretty much holds the fate of this whole RQC in his hands. . . .

Aeson’s lips part. I think I’ve managed to stun him sufficiently by my words, my insolent loud tone.

But in the next second, there’s a beeping sound, a regular repeating audio tone, and it starts coming from the back of the room, from one of the Atlantean machines.

Aeson turns in the direction of the sound.

One of the lab-coat scientists goes over to check, and then looks around and stares at Aeson and me.

He then approaches. There is a very peculiar look on his face. “There’s a match,” he says softly, almost hesitantly to Aeson. “Her voice—it just tripped the resonance scanner. She is a match.”

And he looks at me.

* * *