Michael Vey

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE / MERCURY INK

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Simon Pulse/Mercury Ink hardcover edition August 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Richard Paul Evans

  MERCURY INK is a trademark of Mercury Radio Arts, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Simon Pulse and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  The text of this book was set in Berling LT Std.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This book has been cataloged with the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5650-3

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5822-4 (eBook)

  To Michael

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Chopsticks and Spiders

  Chapter 2: The Beginning

  Chapter 3: The Armpit

  Chapter 4: The Cheerleader

  Chapter 5: Hiding the Evidence

  Chapter 6: The Morning After

  Chapter 7: The Cheerleader’s Story

  Chapter 8: The Multimeter

  Chapter 9: A New Crowd

  Chapter 10: A Suspicious Coincidence

  Chapter 11: Birthday Wishes

  Chapter 12: The First Meeting

  Chapter 13: Spiders

  Chapter 14: A Change of Plans

  Chapter 15: The Man Who Wore Sunglasses at Night

  Chapter 16: Gone

  Chapter 17: Lieutenant Lloyd

  Part Two

  Chapter 18: Kidnapped

  Chapter 19: Taylor’s Arrival

  Chapter 20: A Surprise Visit

  Chapter 21: Dr. Hatch and the Twin

  Part Three

  Chapter 22: The Revelation

  Chapter 23: Clyde

  Chapter 24: Jack

  Chapter 25: Tara

  Chapter 26: Harry Winston

  Chapter 27: Hitching a Ride

  Chapter 28: Road Trip

  Chapter 29: According to Plan

  Chapter 30: Chickens and Eagles

  Chapter 31: The Road

  Chapter 32: Another Simple Request

  Chapter 33: The Lesson

  Chapter 34: Purgatory

  Chapter 35: Breaking into Prison

  Chapter 36: A New Glow

  Chapter 37: Discovery

  Chapter 38: Michael’s Induction

  Part Four

  Chapter 39: Initial Findings

  Chapter 40: A Talk

  Chapter 41: Ostin’s Plan

  Chapter 42: The Attempt

  Chapter 43: Relocation

  Chapter 44: The Contract and a “Simple” Demonstration of Loyalty

  Chapter 45: Cell 25

  Chapter 46: Lack of Trust

  Chapter 47: The Escape

  Chapter 48: Overload the Circuit

  PART ONE

  1

  Chopsticks and Spiders

  “Have you found the last two?” The voice on the phone was angry and coarse, like the sound of car tires over broken glass.

  “Not yet,” the well-dressed man on the other end of the phone replied. “Not yet. But we believe we’re close—and they still don’t know that we’re hunting them.”

  “You believe you’re close?”

  “They’re two children among a billion—finding them is like finding a lost chopstick in China.”

  “Is that what you want me to tell the board?”

  “Remind the board that I’ve already found fifteen of the seventeen children. I’ve put out a million-dollar bounty on the last two, we’ve got spiders crawling the Web, and we have a whole team of investigators scanning global records for their whereabouts. It’s just a matter of time before we find them—or they step into one of our traps.”

  “Time isn’t on our side,” the voice returned sharply. “Those kids are already too old. You know how difficult they are to turn at this age.”

  “I know better than anyone,” the well-dressed man said, tapping his ruby-capped pen on his desk. “But I have my ways. And if they don’t turn, there’s always Cell 25.”

  There was a long pause, then the voice on the phone replied darkly, “Yes. There’s always Cell 25.”

  2

  The Beginning

  It’s not like I was looking for trouble. I didn’t have to. At my height it just always found me.

  My name is Michael Vey, and the story I’m about to tell you is strange. Very strange. It’s my story.

  If you passed me walking home from school you probably wouldn’t even notice me. That’s because I’m just a kid like you. I go to school like you. I get bullied like you. Unlike you, I live in Idaho. Don’t ask me what state Idaho is in—news flash—Idaho is a state. The fact that most people don’t know where Idaho is, is exactly why my mother and I moved here—so people wouldn’t find us. But that’s part of my story.

  Besides living in Idaho, I’m different from you in other ways. For one, I have Tourette’s syndrome. You probably know less about Tourette’s syndrome than you do Idaho. Usually when you see someone on TV pretending to have Tourette’s syndrome, they’re shouting swear words or barking like a dog. Most of us with Tourette’s don’t do that. I mostly just blink my eyes a lot. If I’m really anxious, I’ll also clear my throat or make a gulping noise. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes kids make fun of me. It’s no picnic having Tourette’s, but there are worse things that can happen to you—like having your dad die of a heart attack when you’re eight. Believe me, that’s much worse. I’m still not over that. Maybe I never will be.

  There’s something else you don’t know about me. It’s my secret. Something that scares people more than you would believe. That secret is the reason we moved to Idaho in the first place. But, again, that’s part of my story. So I might as well tell it to you.

  3

  The Armpit

  Mr. Dallstrom’s office is as good a place to begin as any. Or as bad a place. Mr. Dallstrom is the principal of Meridian High School, where I go to school. If you ask me, ninth grade is the armpit of life. And there I was in the very stinkiest part of that armpit—the principal’s office. I was sitting in Mr. Dallstrom’s office, blinking like crazy.

  You could guess that I’m not fond of Mr. Dallstrom, which would be stating the obvious, like saying, “Breathing is important” or “Rice Krispies squares are the greatest food ever invented.” No one at Meridian was fond of Mr. Dallstrom except Ms. Duncan, who directed the Glee Club. She had a picture of Mr. Dallstrom on her desk, which she sometimes stared at with soft, googly eyes. Every time Mr. Dallstrom came over the PA system, she would furiously whack her baton on a music stand to quiet us. Then, after he’d said his piece, she would get all red-faced and sweaty, and remind us of how lucky we were to be led through the treacherous wilderness of high school by such a manly and steadfast defender of public education.

  Mr. Dallstrom is a bald, thin scarecrow of a man with a poochy stomach. Think of a pregnant Abraham Lincoln with no beard and a yellow toupee instead of a top hat and you get the picture.
He also looks like he’s a hundred years old. At least.

  When I was in fifth grade our teacher told us that “the easiest way to remember the difference between PRINCIPLE (an underlying law or ethic), and PRINCIPAL (the chief administrator of a school), is that the principal is your PAL.” Believe me, Mr. Dallstrom did not put the PAL in principal.

  It was the second time that month I’d been called to his office for something someone else did to me. Mr. Dallstrom was big on punishing the victim.

  “I believe this is the second time you’ve been in my office this month,” Mr. Dallstrom said to me, his eyes half closed. “Is that right, Mr. Vey?”

  That was the other thing about Mr. Dallstrom—he liked to ask questions that he already knew the answer to. I was never sure if I was supposed to answer him or not. I mean, he knew the answer, and I knew the answer, so what was the point? Bottom line, it was the second time I’d been locked in my locker by Jack Vranes and his friends that month. This time they put me in upside down and I nearly passed out before the custodian unlocked my locker and dragged me down to Mr. Dallstrom’s office.

  Jack Vranes was, like, seventeen and still in ninth grade. He’d been held back so many times, he had a driver’s license, a car, a mustache, and a tattoo. He sometimes called himself Jackal, which is a pretty accurate description, since both he and the animal prey on smaller mammals. Jack had biceps the size of ripe Florida oranges and wasn’t afraid to use them. Actually, he loved to use them. He and his gang, Mitchell and Wade, watched ultimate fighting, and Jack took Brazilian jujitsu lessons at a gym not far from the school. His dream in life was to fight in the Octagon, where he could pound people and get paid for it.

  “Is that right?” Dallstrom repeated, still staring at me. I ticked almost a dozen times, then said, “But, sir, it wasn’t my fault. They shoved me inside my locker upside down.” He wasn’t looking very moved by my plight, so I continued. “There were three of them and they’re a lot bigger than me. A lot bigger.”

  My hope for sympathy was met by Mr. Dallstrom’s infamous “stare o’ death.” Really, you’d have to see it to understand. Last quarter, when we were studying Greek mythology and we got to the part about Medusa—a Gorgon woman who could turn people to stone by looking into their eyes—I figured out where Mr. Dallstrom had come from. Maybe it had something to do with my Tourette’s, but I blurted out, “That must be Mr. Dallstrom’s great-great-great-great-grandmother.”

  Everyone had laughed. Everyone except for Mr. Dallstrom, who had picked that precise moment to slip into our class. I spent a week in after-school detention, which wasn’t all bad because at least I was safe from Jack and his posse, who somehow never got sent to detention no matter how many kids they stuffed into the lunchroom garbage cans or locked in their lockers. Anyway, that had officially put me on Mr. Dallstrom’s troublemaker list.

  “Mr. Vey, you cannot be stuffed into a locker without your consent,” Mr. Dallstrom said, which may be the dumbest thing ever said in a school. “You should have resisted.” That’s like blaming someone who was struck by lightning for getting in the way.

  “But I tried, sir.”

  “Obviously not hard enough.” He took out a pen. “Who are these boys who allegedly stuffed you into your locker?” Mr. Dallstrom cocked his head to one side, his pen wagging impatiently in front of him. I stared at the pen in its hypnotic trajectory.

  “I’m waiting, Mr. Vey. Their names?”

  There was no way I was going to tell him. First, he already knew who had done it. Everyone knew Jack had put more kids than textbooks into lockers. Second, ratting out Jack was the shortest route to death. I just looked at Mr. Dallstrom, my eyes blinking like crazy.

  “Stop twitching and answer my question.”

  “I can’t tell you,” I finally said.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Pick one, I thought. “I forgot who did it.”

  Mr. Dallstrom continued staring at me through those half-closed eyes of his. “Did you now?” He stopped wagging his pen and set it on the desk. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Vey. Now you’ll have to take their punishment as well. Four weeks in after-school detention. I believe you know where detention is held.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s in the lunchroom.”

  “Good. Then you’ll have no trouble finding your way there.”

  Like I said, Mr. Dallstrom excelled at punishing the victim. He signed a tardy excuse note and handed it to me. “Give that to your teacher. You can go back to your class now, Mr. Vey.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, not entirely certain what I was thanking him for. I walked out of his office and slowly down the long, empty corridor to biology. The hallway was lined with posters made by the Basketball Boosters’ Club with messages like GO WARRIORS, SINK THE VIKINGS—that sort of thing—rendered in bright poster paints.

  I got my backpack from my locker, then went to class.

  My biology teacher, Mr. Poulsen, a short, balding man with thick eyebrows and a massive comb-over, was in the middle of lecturing and stopped mid-sentence at my entrance. “Glad you decided to join us, Mr. Vey.”

  “Sorry. I was at the principal’s office. Mr. Dallstrom said to give this to you.” I handed him my note. He took the paper without looking at it. “Sit down. We’re reviewing for tomorrow’s test.”

  Every eye in the class followed me as I walked to my desk. I sat in the second row from the back, just behind my best friend, Ostin Liss, who is one of the smartest kids in the universe. Ostin’s name looks European or something, but it isn’t. His mother named him that because he was born in Austin, Texas. It was his private curse that she had spelled it wrong. I suspect that Ostin was adopted, because I couldn’t figure out how someone that smart could come from someone who couldn’t spell the name of the city she lived in. But even if Ostin’s mom wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, I liked her a lot. She spoke with a Texan accent and called everyone “honey,” which may sound annoying but it wasn’t. She was always nice and kept a supply of red licorice in their pantry just because she knew I liked it and my mother didn’t buy candy.

  Ostin never got shoved into his locker, probably because he was wider than it—not that Jack and his friends left him alone. They didn’t. In fact he had suffered the ultimate humiliation from Jack and his friends. He’d been pantsed in public.

  “How’d it go with Dallstrom?” Ostin whispered.

  I shook my head. “Brutal.”

  As I sat down, Taylor Ridley, who sat in the desk to my left, turned and smiled at me. Taylor is a cheerleader and one of the prettiest girls at Meridian. Heck, she’s one of the prettiest girls in any high school anywhere in the world. She has a face that could be on the cover of a beauty magazine, long, light brown hair and big brown eyes the color of maple syrup. Since I’m being completely honest here, I’ll admit that I had a crush on her from the second I first saw her. It took me less than a day to realize that so did everyone else at Meridian.

  Taylor was always nice to me. At first I hoped she was nice because she liked me, but really she’s just one of those people who is nice to everyone. Nice or not, it didn’t matter. She was way out of my league. Like a thousand miles out of my league. So I never told anyone about my secret crush—not even Ostin, who I told everything. Some dreams are just too embarrassing to share.

  Anyway, whenever Taylor looked at me, it made my tics go wild. Stress does that to people with Tourette’s. I forced myself not to blink as I sat down and pulled my biology book out of my backpack. That’s the thing about my tics. If I try real hard, I can delay them, but I can’t make them go away. It’s like having a bad itch. You can ignore it for a little while, but it’s going to build up until you scratch. I’ve learned tricks to hide my tics. Like sometimes I’ll drop a pencil on the ground, then when I bend down to get it, I’ll blink or grimace like crazy. I’m sure the kids around me think I’m really clumsy because sometimes I’ll drop my pencil four or five times in one class. Anyway, between Mr. Dallstrom
and Jack and Taylor, I was blinking like an old neon sign.

  Poulsen started up again. “Okay, class, we were talking about electricity and the body. ‘I sing the body electric,’ said the poet Whitman. Who, pray tell, can explain what role electricity plays in the body?”

  He panned the room with his dusty gaze, clearly disappointed with the lack of participation. “You better know this, people. It’s on your test tomorrow.”

  “Electricity runs our heart,” the girl with massive braces in the front row said.

  “Correct,” he said. “And what else?”

  Taylor raised her hand. “It signals all of our nerves and thoughts.”

  “That’s right, Miss Ridley. And where does this electricity come from?” He looked around the room. “Where does the electricity come from? Come on, people.” It was dangerous when no one was answering because that’s when he started hunting out those least likely to answer correctly. “How about you, Mr. Morris?”

  “Uh, batteries?”

  The class laughed.

  “Brilliant,” Poulsen said, shaking his head. “Batteries. Okay, Mr. Morris, perhaps it’s time you changed your batteries, because clearly they are running down. Where does electricity come from, Mr. Vey?”

  I swallowed. “Electrolytes?” I said.

  “That would be true, Mr. Vey, if you were an electric eel.”

  Everyone laughed again. Taylor glanced over at me sympathetically. I dropped my pencil on the floor.

  Ostin raised his hand.

  “Mr. Liss,” Poulsen said. “Enlighten us.”

  Ostin straightened himself up in his chair like he was about to deliver a lecture, which he was.

  “The human body generates an electrical current through chemical concentrations in the nerves in a process called bioelectrogenesis. Whenever a nerve signal is sent, potassium ions flood out of nerve cells and sodium ions flood in. Both of these ions have slightly different charges and so the difference in ionic concentrations inside and outside the nerve cell creates a charge which our bodies process as electricity.”