MY BODY BOUNCED out of control, and when my eyes snapped open, it took me a moment to realize Deondre and Simon were pushing on the underside of the upper bunk mattress I’d been sleeping on.
“Wake up,” Simon said. “It’s time for breakfast.”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “Don’t you think about anything but food?”
“Heck, no. Why should I? Besides, the girls are already on their way down.”
“Jeeze,” I said, climbing down the ladder. “How long did I sleep?”
“It’s nine o’clock,” Deondre said.
“Ten hours?” I’d barely slept at all in the past week. How could I, with everything that’d happened? What little sleep I’d gotten was restless, filled with anxious dreams. But last night I’d fallen asleep before Deondre had even turned out the light, and if it hadn’t been for the fake earthquake the guys just gave me, I’d have woken up in the same position as when I’d dozed off. A chill rushed through me as I remembered why: Dad is alive.
He’d shared the vision with me. He’d heard the voice summoning us to the underground cavern, and he’d said, I’m coming. That meant he’d felt the same pull as I had and was following the call. I could barely believe it! I’d considered contacting my mom right away with the news that he was alive, but I knew I couldn’t. Dad had remained in hiding for a reason, the same reason I was now in hiding a continent away. We both brought danger to our family and friends and that needed to stop. But I hated being away from them, and now that I knew my dad was on his way to the Brazilian jungles, I was more anxious than ever to find my way there to meet him—and the presence behind the voice pulling us there. First, though, I had to help Ellie rescue her sister.
“Figured you needed the rest,” Deondre said as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “But it’s time to get moving. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I slipped on my shorts, then sat on the lower bed to put on my sneakers. “What about the charger?” I asked. The battery on the tablet had died right after I had the vision last night, and Simon realized he’d left the charger on the plane. Our plan wasn’t going anywhere until I could get my hands—and my brain—on a computer with an internet connection.
“We’ll get it after we eat,” Deondre said. “Ellie already got directions from Momma Magda. Let’s go.” He held open the door.
“By the way, you snore,” Simon said.
“I do not!” I said, moving toward the door. But when Deondre shrugged, I knew Simon was telling the truth. So now I snored? I remembered how Grandpa Mario’s snores just about rattled the whole family home in Venice, and I wondered if my doing it was another sign of my aging disease. “Was I loud?”
“Think of Darth Vader with a cold,” Simon said with a gentle poke on my shoulder.
“And a megaphone,” Deondre said, and we all laughed.
A couple of hours later Ellie, Deondre, and I were back in the girls’ room. Strawberry had insisted on being alone for a while in our other room. She’d taken a bag of the stuff she’d bought yesterday, plus a hot plate she’d borrowed from one of the other guests, and said she was going to “cook something up.” As for Simon, we’d left him at the pastry table downstairs, where he’d been in deep conversation with a pair of teenage street artists from the city of Cali, which was a few hundred miles away. They were here for the annual Parque Simon Bolivar rock festival happening that week. It was supposedly a huge deal, and in addition to flooding the area with music fans, it also attracted street artists who were invited to decorate the walls and signage surrounding the event. The two artists had complimented Simon on the original artwork on his T-shirt, and he’d beamed.
Ellie was sitting on the edge of the bed, while Deondre stood by me at the desk. He’d just returned from the store with the charger and the tablet was turned on. A USB cord connected it to a camera on a mini tripod on the far edge of the desk. We’d placed it on top of a stack of books, its lens peeking out between the curtains. The expensive camera had both low light and infrared modes. Plus, it was on a motorized gimbal, which allowed me to pan in multiple directions using the Spider. Right now it was centered on the front of the residence across the street, and the live feed filled the tablet screen. The view included the shop on one side of the residence, and the alley separating it from a rundown hotel on the other side. The cops’ car had left last night but was back again now, and a second car was parked behind it.
“That van is slowing down,” Deondre said as a windowless white van entered the scene.
“A van?” Ellie asked, sliding off the bed to take a look. Her eyes were anxious but also tired. I suspected she’d gotten very little sleep. After all, her sister—her only remaining blood relative—was across the street, or at least we hoped so. I’m sure a part of her had wanted to storm the place last night the moment she saw the federal police who’d obviously been part of the abduction. “It’s the same one,” Ellie said. “That’s the van they used when they grabbed us.” Her tone was steady. A good thing, because her role in our plan was going to be the most challenging of all.
I used the camera’s zoom feature to follow the van as it pulled into the alley and stopped. A woman exited from the passenger door, carrying a small suitcase. She stepped toward the building and out of view.
“Must be a side entrance,” Deondre said.
The driver got out and walked around to open the van’s side door, from where a pair of hands handed him a bundle of clothes on hangers. The driver took them, and the man inside the van exited with a bundle of his own. He closed the van door and followed the others into the building.
“What’s that all about?” Deondre asked.
“We’ll find out soon enough.” I reduced the size of the window with the camera feed, and started sorting through the dozens of Wi-Fi signals within range of the tablet. My mind slipped through the firewalls with ease, discarding one after another until I finally connected to the one belonging to the residence across the street.
Got you.
I whizzed through commands, and a moment later a dozen video feeds checkerboarded the screen. Two were from the exterior cameras in front of the residence and another was from the alley entrance. The rest were interior shots of rooms and hallways. Since the tablet was only ten inches wide, each window was pretty small. But it was still easy enough to notice movement, and when Ellie and Deondre leaned in to get a better look, I knew from their intakes of breath they had focused on the same feed as me. I enlarged the window to fill half the screen, and saw ten scared kids in a room on the third floor. They huddled among a tangle of dirty blankets and pillows. There was no furniture, and from the scatter of empty water bottles and soiled paper plates, it appeared they’d been there for a while. There were nine girls and one boy. Most were barely teenagers, and one was a young Asian girl about my age. Of the others, three were Caucasian and six were Latina one of whom was an exact copy of Ellie, bright blue eyes and all.
Ellie let out several sharp exhalations. “J-Jazzy,” she managed to say between breaths. She hugged herself, rocking back and forth, and Deondre wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She sniffled. “She’s even wearing the same shirt…” She looked at me, and her lips moved as if they were struggling to figure out what words to form. But nothing came out. She pulled out from under Deondre’s arm, leaned over, and wrapped me in a hug. I felt her tears on my neck and the joy in her heart. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Simon walked in, wearing a blotch of paint on his nose and a grin on his face. “Me and my new friends just restored the mural out front. Painted right over the top of the graffiti tags. It looks—” His eyes widened as he took in the view on the tablet. “Hey, that’s Jazz, right? Outstanding!”
“Sure is,” Deondre said, patting me on the back. “You did it, Alex. You promised you’d find her and you did it.”
“Yeah,” Simon said, smacking me on the shoulder. “That’s savage.”
I appreciated how they all felt, but I couldn’t take my mind off the other things I’d noticed on some of the other camera views. Rescuing Jazz would be far more difficult than any of us had imagined, and from the looks of it, far more urgent. I enlarged two of the other video feeds and positioned them beside the half-screen view of the kids.
“That’s a lot of firepower,” Deondre said, referring to a room on the first floor off the kitchen. Four nasty-looking guards were playing cards around a table. They each had a shoulder holster, and there were a couple of assault rifles leaning against the wall.
The second window I’d expanded on the tablet showed a larger room upstairs. It was sparsely furnished, with a long table against one wall, several foldout chairs, and a portable clothes rack. The two men from the van hung up the clothes they’d carried in, sorting through them as they removed the dry-cleaner garment covers.
“Those look like nice clothes,” Ellie said. “Like you’d see at a fashion show.”
“A fashion show for kids,” Deondre said.
The woman in the room looked like she was my mom’s age. She wore nice clothes, styled hair, and had a pretty face. But something about her bothered me. Maybe it was the way the two men with her snapped to attention whenever she said something. Or maybe it was the orderly way she was picking through the suitcase she’d been carrying. She pulled out things and arranged them with military precision, on the table pushed up against one of those mirrors with lights all around it like you’d see in a celebrity dressing room. I had a teenage sister so I recognized a lot of the items. There was makeup, brushes, hair clips, hairspray, and other stuff. There were a couple of fancy wigs. The woman nodded to the two men and they left the room.
A few moments later the door to the kids’ room opened on the other video stream, and Lieutenant Garcia strode in with the two men from the van. He barked something and the kids tensed. Jazz wrapped her arms around herself in the exact same way Ellie had done a few moments ago, and the sight of it caused Ellie to hiss.
“Can you turn on the sound?” Simon asked.
“There’s no audio,” I said. The guards prodded the kids to their feet. One of the older girls refused to budge from the corner where she sat. She crossed her arms and yelled something at Garcia. Her eyes were on fire. Garcia nodded to one of the guards, and the man reached down to grab her. But as soon as his hand touched her arm, she bit it. He lurched backward, and from the force he’d had to use to yank himself free, it was obvious she’d chomped down hard and tried to hold on. He cradled his bleeding hand and kicked her so hard it must have cracked her ribs.
Most of the kids cowered away. Not Jazz. She looked like she wanted to pounce on the guard and rip him apart with her bare hands. But instead she leaned down, comforted the girl, and helped her slowly to her feet.
Jazz wasn’t the only one angry at the guard. Garcia turned on the man and landed a lightning-fast punch that launched the guard into a wall. When he pushed back to his feet, he found Garcia’s pistol aimed at his face. He pleaded, holding his palms out, one still dripping with blood from the girl’s bite. Garcia blasted a barrage of words at him. Garcia pointed at the kids as he ranted, and his expression left no doubt he was furious about his property being damaged. The guard’s head nodded faster than a woodpecker’s attacking a tree, and finally Garcia lowered the pistol and shoved the man out the door. The kids lined up quickly and followed, the defiant girl pressing her hands against her side as Jazz helped her along.
I opened a new camera view. We saw them march down the hall and into the room with the clothes and makeup, where the guards lined them up along a wall like condemned prisoners facing an execution. The men took positions on either side of them, and the woman walked over to inspect them while Garcia looked on. She started with the young Asian girl, who quivered. The woman said something, and the girl opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue like she was at the doctor’s office. The woman gripped the girl’s chin and turned her head side to side. Apparently satisfied with what she saw, the woman issued an instruction and pointed to a folded stack of towels and washcloths on the floor. The little girl scurried over, grabbed one of each, and disappeared into the adjoining bathroom. The woman moved on to the next kid. Each was examined and then herded into a line to await their turn in the bathroom.
When it was Jazz’s turn for inspection, Ellie’s fingers clenched into fists.
“She won’t be there much longer,” Deondre said softly. “I promise.”
The entire scene was disgusting, but the part that bothered me most was how practiced the woman seemed to be at her task. It was like she’d done this many times before, and I wondered about the fate of all the children who’d come under her gaze in the past.
The woman grew angry when she got to the last kid in line. It was the Caucasian girl who had been kicked, and she was twisted to one side with both hands cupping her rib cage. Her face was pinched in pain, but the woman showed no compassion. She shoved the girl’s hands to one side and yanked up her shirt to reveal a purple bruise that wrapped around her side. When the woman probed the injury, the girl nearly doubled over. The woman’s head snapped around to face the guards, and any thoughts I’d had earlier that she was pretty vanished. Her reddened face was filled with rage. She had rattlesnake eyes, and I could imagine fangs hiding behind her snarling lips. She said something to Garcia, and as he replied, the guard who’d kicked the girl lowered his gaze. The woman marched over to the man, whose head bowed even lower. All eyes in the room were waiting for her verbal assault. But the woman seemed to relax, and even though the camera angle revealed only half her face, I saw her features soften.
The guard seemed to let out a breath in relief, and that was when the woman snatched the pistol from the man’s shoulder holster and blew the top of his head off.
There was a loud squeal behind me. Strawberry had returned and was watching with us. Ellie and Simon gasped, Deondre grunted, and I nearly peed my pants. Our eyes stayed glued to the screen, though. The woman turned on her heel, raised the weapon, and shot the injured girl in the forehead.
“No!” Ellie cried, her hands covering her mouth. The color drained from her face. Her eyes fluttered, her knees buckled, and she started to go down. Deondre caught her and eased her down beside him on the edge of the bed. They sat there for a moment, Deondre cradling her. She was conscious but badly shaken, probably imagining the same fate awaiting her sister. Deondre brushed her hair from her face.
“We’re going to save her,” he said. “Don’t doubt it for a second.”
Ellie pulled away. “But there are guards everywhere,” she said as the guards from the kitchen rushed up the stairs. “With guns. God, they just murdered that girl in cold blood.”
Strawberry sat on the bed and hugged Ellie from the other side. The two girls wept.
Simon hadn’t moved from my side. His face was frozen in shock, and when I reached out to touch him he jerked away. His eyes never left the screen.
Deondre looked from the screen to me and back again. I returned his look and then watched as the other men dragged the bodies out. The kids onscreen were huddled together in the corner, sobbing, and I was glad the little Asian girl was still in the bathroom.
“We’ve got to stop these bastards,” Deondre spat.
“H-how can we?” Simon asked.
I opened my mouth but no words came out. I knew from the start the gang was ruthless. They’d murdered Ellie’s parents in order to abduct her and her sister. But knowing it was one thing, seeing it was another, and my mind went back to the men I’d killed to save my family and friends.
And the smell of their slaughtered bodies.
I thought about how easily humankind had reverted back to its violent ways after barely dodging extinction less than a couple of years ago, when we were visited by the grid. My mind had connected to the alien presence that had surrounded our planet, and I’d absorbed the trillions of bits of data they’d assimilated to conclude that humans were a lost cause and needed to be destroyed. I’d almost died from the toll it had taken on my brain, but then my dad’s mind had connected with mine, and our combined thoughts and memories had somehow convinced the alien power to stop, or at least delay, mankind’s execution. I’d never really understood what the aliens had seen from us that had allowed them to determine there was still hope. After seeing the ease with which the woman on the screen had taken life, I wondered if the aliens had been right all along. Then I flashed on the visions I’d shared with Dad in the past few days, and shuddered at the realization I might get the answer to that question all too soon.
In the meantime, though, I had to stop what the woman and her guards had planned for those kids, and there was only one way to do it.
“We have to be willing to kill, too,” I said.
Everyone stared at me.
And then Deondre said, “No problem.”
Ellie looked horrified. But Strawberry nodded, retrieved a shoebox she’d placed on top of the dresser, and placed it on the desk.
“These will help.” She removed the lid to reveal six large, clear lightbulbs filled with amber-colored liquid. She pulled one out and rotated it. The liquid was thick and oily, but I could see the bulb’s interior filament had been removed. It’d been replaced by a thick strand of waxy-looking yarn with a deflated balloon zip-tied around its end, with the other end dangling six or seven inches out the top of the bulb like a fuse. The opening was sealed by some sort of clay, which I guessed made it leakproof.
“What the heck is that?” Simon asked.
“Homemade incendiary device,” she said casually. “But don’t be tempted to call it a Molotov cocktail because it’s much more than that.”
I’d used Molotov cocktails plenty of times in video games. They were nothing more than a bottle filled with gasoline and a rag hanging out of it. You lit one end and threw it. When the bottle broke, the gasoline ignited in a ball of flame. It burned itself out pretty quick, but it was still nasty.
Strawberry pointed to the balloon inside the bulb. “It took my brothers a zillion tries to perfect it, but the key is the secret mixture of powders inside the balloon.”
“You have brothers?” Ellie asked. We’d all thought Strawberry had been orphaned when her grandmother—Gammy—passed away.
“Well, foster brothers. Three of them. But we all called our foster mom Gammy, so that made us family, right? Anyway, they loved blowing things up in the field outside our home, and I wasn’t about to be left out.” She wiggled the nub of her missing little finger. “That’s how I got this. My brothers called it my badge of honor.”
Ellie stared at her friend as if she was crazy. Then she wiped her eyes, and I was glad to see the conversation had distracted her.
“What makes them better than a Molotov cocktail?” Deondre asked.
“Yeah,” Simon said, leaning in.
“A few things. First, the liquid isn’t just gasoline. It’s a combination of vegetable oil, kerosene, rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, which is acetone, and dissolved Styrofoam—all stuff you can find at a convenience store. But it’s the slow burning fuse”—she switched to a Southern accent like the one chefs used on TV cooking shows—“which I boiled in a mixture of stump remover and sugar and baked with a hair dryer for ten minutes…” She giggled before continuing in her regular voice. “…and the top-secret mixture of crushed powders in the balloon that make it special.”
“What powders?” Simon asked, licking his lips.
“What part of top secret don’t you understand?” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, whatever. Put it this way, all the things you need to make a powder that goes boom”—she splayed her fingers open to emphasize the word—“can be found at any home improvement store. A little stump remover, which happens to be one hundred percent potassium nitrate, some sulfur-based rose dust, and a lump of charcoal is all you need. Of course, adding ground up match heads never hurts.” She tossed the bulb a few inches in the air and caught it smoothly. “Once you light the fuse, you can either throw it like a baseball, or simply set it on the ground and run away. Either way, five seconds later it will explode into a fireball big enough to splatter every wall in this room with gooey flames that cling like napalm.”
Ellie’s shocked expression matched my own. “Who are you?” she asked. “And what did you do to my friend?”
“And can you make smoke bombs too?” I blurted out, my mind putting a plan together.
“Of course. And I make them spew smoke thicker than pea soup.” She held the bulb to her chest and mimicked a baseball pitcher’s stance before throwing a fastball, swiveling her neck from one side to the other as if checking base runners. “And by the way, even though I was the only girl in the house, I was still the best pitcher amongst us.”
I smiled.
“Again,” Ellie said, “who are you?”
Strawberry grinned. “Like my brother Jasper used to say”—she switched to a Southern twang—“I’m a badass country orphan with no money in my pocket, no place to go, and nuttin’ to lose.”
Deondre huffed. “Pretty much sums us all up, don’t it?” He reached to pick up one of the bulbs, but Ellie swatted his hand away.
“Those are dangerous!” she said. But while her attention was on Deondre, Simon snatched one out of the box.
“Nuttin’ to lose,” he said, mimicking Strawberry’s accent as he stared at the device.
I grabbed one, too, and when Deondre did the same, Ellie didn’t stop him this time. He held the bulb up as if making a toast, exchanging a look with Simon, Strawberry, and me. We raised our bulbs and in unison said, “Nuttin’ to lose.”
Ellie crossed her arms and shook her head. I know how she felt. The thought of using a lethal weapon against someone was a terrible pill to swallow. I’d been unable to do it at first, and it had cost Timmy his life. And when I’d later killed in order to save my family, it had cost me in other ways. Deeply. So I’d try to come up with a way of freeing Jazz and the others without the need to hurt anyone, but violence might be our only option because time was running out.
“We have to rescue them before nine o’clock tonight,” I said, placing the bulb back in the box. The others put theirs back as well.
“Why nine?” Simon asked.
“Because that’s when the auction begins.” I expanded one of the windows with a feed to a mostly vacant room on the ground floor. A small stage had been set up at one end. The wood-paneled wall behind it was faded, except for two rectangular sections where I guessed a couple of paintings or photos had hung. There was a podium with a microphone to one side, and where an audience would normally sit was a three-screen computer station set up on a table. A young guy with spiked hair and thick glasses chomped on a sandwich while he monitored the same not-so-closed circuit feeds I’d hacked into—and the same darknet website I’d discovered. There were a few scattered chairs behind him, and two cameras mounted on tripods facing the stage. Otherwise the room was empty, as if it had been sanitized to make sure nothing in it would give away its location.
“An auction?” Strawberry asked.
“An online auction,” I said.
When I’d infiltrated the wireless network and security feeds belonging to the building across the street, my mind had latched on to an outbound signal coming from the computer in front of the stage. It linked to a site on the darknet, and I’d learned what was in store for Jazz and the others. I’d held off telling the others but now they needed to know. I gave the command that opened the darknet website portal and expanded it on the screen.
The central pane on the webpage featured a shot of the empty stage with a countdown timer overlay that read: BIDDING BEGINS IN 9 HRS: 27 MIN. There were ten blank panes below that with a notice that read: PREVIEW PHOTOS AND VIDEOS AVAILABLE THREE HOURS PRIOR TO THE AUCTION. Each pane had a CURRENT BID window, all empty for now.
“Oh my God,” Strawberry said. “It’s like a livestock auction at a county fair.”