Shattered Read online

  “Um, guys?” Callie murmured, anxiety in her voice. “You need to see this.” She held out her arm.

  Where the deep bleeding gash had been, it was now completely healed. No mark, no blood. Gone.

  Hal examined both her arms, making sure that we were looking at the right one. Both were perfect, completely unscathed.

  I scanned my scarf; it was still damp and bloodstained from her injury.

  “Weird, right?” Callie asked with a sickly smile. Her neck was covered in hives, which were working their way up her cheeks. We couldn’t even react because a second later, a door slammed shut, making us all jump. The Jeep headed toward the gate.

  Toward us.

  We darted behind the bushes for our bikes. I tried to pull mine up from the ground, but the handlebars slipped from my grip and landed against Callie’s back wheel.

  “There isn’t time,” Hal insisted, waving from behind the bushes. We ducked under the foliage.

  The Jeep came to a sudden halt about twenty yards away, just shy of the entrance gate. The guy with the bandana got out, fished in his pocket for a set of keys, and went to open the lock.

  Meanwhile, my heart pounded and my stomach lurched, especially since my entire left side was completely exposed, sticking out from the bushes. I peeked out at the gate. The driver was inspecting the broken chain. But instead of responding with alarm, he merely unthreaded both the chain and the padlock from the gate’s loop, threw them in the Jeep, and drove away, back toward the hangar.

  I grappled for my bike again. Finally, I untangled it. Callie and Hal got hold of their bikes, and it turned out Zoe had one, too. Had she followed us here?

  I stuffed the scarf inside my bag. We were just about to ride away, when a loud siren blared angrily from the hangar, as if someone had just escaped from prison.

  “What the hell is that?” Hal asked, covering his ears.

  Zoe gestured to the overhead lights flashing from the hangar’s roof. There was no question: they knew we’d broken in.

  And now they were coming after us.

  CHAPTER 25

  We sped away, back down the dirt road, cutting across a field with a well-worn trail, and then over a gravel-lined path. Aside from the blare of the siren, getting fainter with each pedal, there was only the sound of breathing as we struggled to get away.

  After several minutes en route, a loud popping sound came from somewhere behind me. I looked over my shoulder. Zoe was floundering on her bike. Her wheels were wavering from side to side over the gravel.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  She shook her head, trailing behind us at least three yards. “Not sure. I can’t keep up.”

  But there was no way that we could stop for a break. They would be in close pursuit. We kept pedaling.

  “And why the sirens?” Hal panted. “I can’t imagine they’d want to attract attention. I mean, call me crazy, but if I had someone chained up in my basement, I’d want to keep it on the down low.”

  “Maybe attention doesn’t matter to them. Maybe the police are on their side,” I said through my teeth, thinking about Chief Bragg and Officer Marciano.

  “Are we even close to town?” Callie asked, barely winded as she pedaled.

  Hal shook his head, completely at a loss. This detour seemed to be leading us farther away from anything even remotely familiar.

  About a mile later, Zoe announced that she was having trouble with her gears. We finally stopped to inspect her bike and discovered the source of the popping noise.

  Her tire was flat. A nail had punctured the rubber.

  “You can ride on my handlebars,” Callie told her.

  “Seriously?” Hal stifled a laugh.

  “Are you serious?” I asked him, surprised that he was even questioning it. “Because you’re obviously forgetting Super Callie, who got us through the chained gate and into that basement, opening two locks with her bare hands.”

  Callie grinned at me. “How about we take a break for a minute?” She wiped the sweat off her brow with the hem of her baby-doll dress, and then pointed to what appeared to be an abandoned barn up ahead. There were no cars around it, the gardens were all overgrown, and the path leading up to it was covered with tall grass and sprawling brush.

  “There’s no sense riding farther toward nothingness,” Zoe agreed, pulling a map from her back pocket.

  “Plus, I doubt those guys will find us now,” Callie added.

  “Okay,” Hal said, still a bit reluctant. “But only for a few minutes. I want to get back soon. I have a feeling it gets really dark out here with no streetlights.”

  We walked our bikes around to the front of the barn. It had definitely been abandoned. A splattering of graffiti adorned the kicked-in double doors, including a tag that read Voodoo Lives.

  Hal pointed to a busted padlock, still hanging from the door latch. “Are you sure you haven’t been here before?” he asked Callie.

  “Funny.” She rolled her eyes and pushed the door all the way open.

  We followed, wheeling our bikes into the barn.

  It had surely attracted a party crowd. Beer bottles and snack bags were strewn all over the floor, and the interior walls had been tagged as well. The words Pig, Tarot Tales, and Voodoo Dies (clever corollary of Voodoo Lives) were painted all over the crude barn walls.

  “Tarot,” Callie whispered, referring to the lobster card that Bea got at the hospital.

  “Coincidence?” Hal asked.

  “I honestly don’t know anymore.” I plunked down on one of the many bales of hay, put my head between my knees, and tried to breathe through the tunneling sensation inside my chest. Finally, after several moments, when I was able to regain my composure, I sat back up and narrowed my eyes at Zoe. Framed in the barn’s doorway, she had none of her usual armor from school—her camera or her saxophone—yet she looked completely guarded. “So, how did you get here again?” I asked her.

  “On Callie’s handlebars, remember?” she said evenly. “That was me on the bike with the blown-out tire.”

  “You know what she means.” Hal was very quiet, almost eerily so. “I think now would be a good enough time to explain yourself.”

  “According to you it’s a good enough time,” she said, still lingering by the entrance doors. “But from where I’m standing, not so much.”

  “Well, I’m with them,” Callie said. “And we need an explanation.”

  Zoe shook her head and folded her arms in front. “Believe me. It’s not the time.”

  “Then when?” Hal snapped, taking a seat beside me. “I mean, who do you even think you are?”

  “Did you follow us from school? Or were you already at the hangar when we arrived?” I continued, remembering when Hal thought he’d heard something outside the gate.

  “Look,” Zoe said, “I’ll know when the time is right. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry to shock you guys. But if you’d been through what I have, you’d be cautious, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Callie asked. “What have you been through?”

  “Not now,” she said again, her eyes almost boring into Callie’s. For a second, she looked so sad, I almost felt bad pushing her.

  Then, she was almost apologetic. “I can’t.”

  I suddenly stopped caring about what she was doing here. It was like she managed to make herself invisible, to fade a little. Two seconds ago, figuring out what she was doing had been priority number one. But now, I felt my questions slipping away. It was so strange. Zoe was not an immediate danger, but the guys chasing us were—and we needed to regroup before they found us.

  “Can someone please just tell me what the hell is going on here?” Callie asked, rubbing her temples in frustration. Later, she told me she experienced the same sudden shift in priorities—her own “these are not the droids you are looking for” moment.

  “Or what just happened?” I added.

  “Thornhill will probably be in even more danger now. They’ll defi
nitely know we went down there and saw him. I mean, we broke that lock, too.”

  “As if I couldn’t feel worse.” Callie sighed, pacing back and forth over a pile of candy wrappers. “They probably won’t even keep him there now. They’ll assume we’ll go to the authorities and blow the whistle about his whereabouts.”

  “If only we could trust the ‘authorities,’” Hal said.

  “And I saw Waverly,” I told them.

  “At the hangar?” Callie’s eyes grew wide.

  I nodded and looked at Zoe, a bit self-conscious to be revealing information in front of her. “When I went back to get the scarf, Waverly came in through a side door to talk to the guard.”

  “So, she’s definitely one of them.” Hal grabbed a water bottle from his bag and drank half of it. “Like there was any doubt, but at least now we know for sure.”

  “There’s something else, too,” I ventured, unable to get the image out of my mind. “Did anyone else happen to notice the necklace that Thornhill was wearing?”

  Both Callie and Hal shook their heads. Callie said, “I was too busy trying to calculate how to disengage him from all those machines so that any alarm would only be triggered once . . . not to mention the angle to best get him up the ladder, tied to his stretcher.”

  Zoe was back to playing with her hair, managing to hide her face.

  “It was oval-shaped and tarnished,” I told them. “I think it might’ve been a locket.”

  “On a guy?” Callie asked.

  “Plenty of men wear lockets, especially men in the service,” I explained. “They wear them because they’re away from their families, and they can put photos inside . . . to keep their loved ones close to their heart.”

  “Right,” Callie agreed. “But last I checked, Thornhill wasn’t in the service.”

  “No, but maybe he’s separated from his family,” Hal mused.

  “Well, he is being kept captive.” Callie tapped her chin in thought.

  “My point is that the photo we found in Amanda’s box . . . the one with the heads cut out—”

  “Whoa,” Hal said, interrupting me. “You don’t think those heads are in Thornhill’s alleged locket?”

  “It’s something to consider,” I said, nodding. “Maybe Thornhill’s more connected to Amanda’s disappearance than we thought.”

  “Which would explain how he knew she had an older sister,” Callie said. “As well as her real name.”

  “He was her vice principal with access to her records,” I reminded Callie. “He could’ve known just by looking at her file.” I paused a moment. “Of course, we couldn’t find them. Plus any file of Amanda’s would probably be false, given all the stories she told us. But still, somehow, he does seem to know about her.”

  “Wait, you don’t think Thornhill will tell those guards where to find us, do you?” Hal asked.

  I shook my head, remembering how adamant he’d been about letting those guys think that they were in charge. I shot him a withering look. “He’ll try to play dumb, like he didn’t know who we were, and say that he never even spoke to us.”

  “Yes, but what if they have it all on tape?” Hal asked.

  “Thornhill won’t rat us out,” Zoe said. The sound of her voice was such a shock, it took me a second to understand what she just said. Whatever feeling I’d had before, that mysterious forgetting about Zoe’s presence? That was gone now, the spell broken.

  “How do you know?” Callie asked.

  “Because I know him—obviously a lot better than any of you. He is on our side.”

  “Just like you know Amanda?” I scoffed a bit. “And that Amanda’s name is supposedly Ariel?”

  “Possibly,” Zoe said, completely inscrutable.

  “Care to explain?” Hal asked her.

  Zoe hiked up her sleeves, revealing a chunky beaded bracelet that I could’ve sworn I’d seen on Amanda. When she saw that I’d noticed, she rolled her sleeves back down.

  “Well?” Callie asked, her arms folded, trying to appear intimidating despite the ballet flats and baby-doll dress.

  “Thornhill was friends with my parents in another life.” Zoe shrugged. “When I was younger, like three or four, he’d come to our house sometimes, bring little presents to me and my sisters, and then he and my parents would go out on the back porch while we played with our new trinkets. His name was not Thornhill then. And he’d moved by the time I was in first grade. Seriously, it was really no big deal.”

  “News flash, but Thornhill having another life is a big deal,” I told her.

  “Plus, if it was really no big deal,” Hal continued, “then what are you even doing here?”

  “I’ve actually been following you for the past couple weeks.” She shrugged.

  “What?” I asked, feeling my stomach twist, but was somehow not completely surprised. We often had the sense we were being followed—why not Zoe?

  “It’s true.” She was again deadpan, as if trailing kids around in high school was as normal as varsity cheerleading tryouts.

  “But why?” Callie asked, shocked.

  “Because I’m looking for Amanda, too.”

  “Yes, but why are you looking for her?” I asked, my voice cold and inquisitorial.

  “Why are you?” Zoe volleyed back.

  “Amanda is our friend,” I said, an edge to my voice.

  Zoe toyed with the beaded bracelet, not even trying to hide it now. “Well, she’s my friend, too.”

  I shook my head, reminded once again of how little I knew about Amanda, and how many secrets—and secret friends—she obviously had.

  “How do we know that?” Callie asked.

  “What do you want me to say?” Zoe shrugged. “Amanda and I spent a lot of time together before she disappeared. You know she was a talented jazz pianist, right? We were a duo—we played at Arcadia.”

  “Um, what?” Callie’s lips parted in surprise.

  “Seriously, you should see her play,” Zoe said.

  “Amanda didn’t perform music—she liked it, but never said she could play,” Hal argued.

  “Well, you obviously don’t know her as well as you think you do,” Zoe retorted.

  A direct hit. I could see the pain in Hal’s eyes. He stood up from his hay bale, clearly jealous.

  “Well, I guess that sort of makes sense,” Callie said, pondering aloud. “That Amanda was into music, I mean. She was pretty much into—and good at—just about everything cultural, literary, and artistic.”

  “So, what do you know about her family?” I asked Zoe, curious to hear what kind of story Amanda had given her, in comparison to the various tales she’d told us.

  “I mentioned I knew her sister,” she corrected me. “Amanda and I lived in the same town for a while—Pinkerton—until she, her mother, and Robin moved away one day. Just like that. With absolutely no warning whatsoever. No one had any idea that they’d even been thinking about it. I just rode by on my bike one day, and saw the FOR RENT sign.”

  “Oh,” I said, completely startled that we were finally getting the truth, and that it was so different from what the three of us had been told. “So you knew Amanda pre-Orion.”

  “Oh, right,” Callie said.

  Hal took a deep breath, taken aback by the news as well. “And where was Amanda’s father?” he asked.

  “Dead was what they said,” Zoe answered. “But sometimes Amanda would say he was traveling, or otherwise out of the picture. I never met him, they didn’t really like to talk about him, and I’m not even sure that Amanda knew who he was. Anyway, Amanda’s sister, Robin, was older, but she was really great, always taking us places . . . to the park, to get ice cream, or for bike rides.”

  “And Amanda’s mother?” I asked.

  “She was great, too—super creative and uber-energetic—but she was always busy doing other things, so I barely ever saw her. It’s really sad that she died in that car accident.”

  “Thornhill said Robin’s in Washington, D.C.,” I said. “Do y
ou know why?”

  “And is Amanda with her?” Callie asked.

  “Enough questions,” Zoe said. “Now it’s my turn.”

  “You don’t make the rules,” Hal objected.

  “Oh, no?” Her eyebrow perked up. “Keep in mind that I wasn’t really planning to join your search. I was doing just fine on my own.”

  “So, why did you?” Callie asked.

  “I already told you; it’s my turn for questions. May I?” Zoe moved to snag Hal’s water bottle, he passed it, and she took a giant sip and then wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Where are you now in the search?”

  “We have a website that explains it all,” Hal said. “Look it up: theamandaproject.com.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “I know there’s more. You wouldn’t put everything on the site where anyone could see it.”

  “Well, don’t you think that if Amanda had wanted you to know the more privileged clues, she’d have given them to you herself?” Hal asked.

  “Who says she hasn’t?” Zoe arched an eyebrow.

  “Me,” Hal said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Maybe Amanda doesn’t trust you as much as you’d like to think she does,” I chimed in.

  “Funny”—Zoe paused for another sip—“that’s exactly what Amanda said you’d say.”

  “Excuse me?” I felt my eyes narrow.

  “There’s a lot about me that you don’t know,” she said.

  Her statement couldn’t have been truer: Zoe always seemed to be in the background of everything, almost invisible and yet everywhere at the same time. “Like what?” I asked, eager for an explanation.

  “Well, for starters,” she began, “unlike all of you, I didn’t agree to be Amanda’s guide . . . at least not right away.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “How many guides does one person actually need?” Callie squawked, holding her head in her hands.

  We were all sitting in a circle of hay bales now, sharing lunch leftovers—Cheez-Its, gummy worms, and my mother’s homemade granola.

  “Seriously, I barely even feel like I know her now,” Callie continued.