The peak, p.13
The Peak, page 13
I didn’t intend to find out.
I felt a presence right next to the bed. He was here. The bunk bed rocked slightly as he put a hand on one of the bedposts to steady himself. He leaned over the bottom bunk and peeled back the sheets, looking for me.
But I wasn’t there.
‘Hello,’ I said, watching him from the top bunk.
He jumped back, or tried to. But his feet were glued to the floor. He fell over backwards, and then his hands and his butt were stuck to the floor, too.
‘What the—’
‘Rapid-onset Pressure Adhesive,’ I said. ‘I borrowed it in my last Equipment class. Gives us some time to talk.’
Prakesh couldn’t see me, but I could see him, thanks to the graphene contact lenses I’d also borrowed. He was struggling valiantly in the puddle of glue—I admired him for not giving up. Next to him was a transparent plastic box filled with writhing, crawling shapes.
‘Filling my bed with spiders?’ I said. ‘Excellent prank. Respect.’
He glared up in my general direction. He still couldn’t see me. ‘When I get my hands on you—’
I took a breath. ‘I wanted to say again that I’m sorry.’
Prakesh fell silent. The other students snored all around us, oblivious to our voices. That music worked crazily well.
‘I get it now,’ I went on. ‘You’re not mad because I hit you in the head with a skateboard. You’re mad because your friend got expelled—Lisa, the one I tricked in the kitchen. You and her were close. Right?’
He kept glaring. But it wasn’t just anger in his expression now. There was grief, too.
‘At the time, I thought you guys were trying to kidnap a kid from the school. If I’d known what was really going on, I wouldn’t have interfered.’ I sighed. ‘If someone messed with my exam and got my best friend expelled . . . well, I’d want to fill their bed with spiders, too.’
Still he said nothing. I climbed down off the top bunk, shook the can of solvent and sprayed it on the floor. The glue softened, then cracked like wax. I held out a hand.
He hesitated for a long moment, then reached out. I helped him up, then sat on the bottom bunk.
He sat next to me and cleared his throat. ‘It seemed like such a good plan,’ he said.
‘At Coppins Crossing?’
‘Yeah. Mitchie came up with it. And, you know, she’s a genius. I was sure we’d pass.’
‘I guess even geniuses get surprised,’ I said.
‘When I got back here, I went looking for Lisa, so we could come up with a better plan for next time. But I couldn’t find her. I was worried she’d been hurt, so I checked on level 13, but she wasn’t there. Dr Clot said I should forget about her. I hacked the school database to find out what had happened—I’m a hacker; I got invited to the school after I stole the nuclear launch codes from the president of Pakistan as a prank.’
I remembered seeing Prakesh tapping frantically on his tablet at Coppins Crossing.
‘I found Lisa’s student file,’ Prakesh continued. ‘She’d been expelled. She’s back with her family. Her memories have been erased.’ He wiped his nose with his sleeve, and I realised he was crying. ‘If I ever see her again, she won’t even know who I am.’
His grief was so raw that I felt it, too. I couldn’t say anything to make it better, so I said nothing. I just rested a hand on his back while he wept.
Eventually he took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I’m sorry about the thing in the library,’ he said. ‘I guess I haven’t been very mature about this.’
‘I get it,’ I said. What he’d done was wrong, but I wasn’t angry anymore, not now that I understood the pain he’d been in. It can’t have been easy, seeing his friend vanish—and then having me appear, all smug and pleased with myself.
He dabbed at his eyes and stood. ‘Well. Not sure what to do with these now.’ He gestured at the box of crawling spiders.
‘I’ll take ‘em,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll put one in Vicki’s breakfast.’
Prakesh laughed, and so did I.
After he was gone, I took out the contact lenses and lay down on the bottom bunk in the dark. I was still way out of my depth at this school, but I had one less problem.
‘Hey,’ Torrent said in my ear.
I flinched. ‘Shouldn’t you be asleep?’
‘Your earpiece reacted to whatever you used as earplugs. It triggered an excess-moisture alert and woke me up.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ Torrent said. ‘I’m glad I got to hear all that. It was . . .’ He paused, searching for the words in a way that an AI wouldn’t need to do. It was a very human pause.
‘Spying isn’t just about sneaking around and lying to people,’ he said finally. ‘Sometimes it’s about telling the truth. Recruiting assets by making real connections with them and convincing them to do the right thing, even at great personal cost. Inspiring them.’ He paused again. ‘I think you might be good at it.’
I was touched. ‘Thanks, Torrent.’
‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Good night.’
I was much more relaxed now. Even without the music, I started to feel myself drifting off within minutes. When I was nearly asleep, a thought surfaced, and my eyes popped open.
The new organs would be delivered tomorrow. And I still didn’t know who the Swarm agent was.
But I’d just figured out their plan.
Ineed to talk to you,’ I whispered to Shiva.
‘I’m concentrating.’ Her bowstring twanged as she loosed an arrow. It sailed over the treetops, trailing fishing line, and thudded into a distant target—a drone, buzzing back and forth in the distance. She tugged on the fishing line, reeling the drone in.
‘It’s important.’ I kept my voice low. The rest of the class was spaced out in a long line across the snowy ridge. I’d edged towards Shiva so slowly that none of them had noticed—or at least, no-one appeared to have noticed. But pretending not to notice things was one of the first skills we’d been taught in Psychology.
‘You should be concentrating, too,’ Shiva said. ‘Haven’t you almost failed multiple times now?’
‘Why are you being difficult?’ I demanded. ‘Have I offended you somehow?’
Shiva had been lining up another shot, but now she lowered the bow. ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘Hit the target, and I’ll listen.’
‘This isn’t a game, Shiva.’
‘No, it’s not. This is a school for people who will someday have the fate of the world in their hands. It’s very, very serious. You stumbled into it by accident—’
‘So did you,’ I said.
‘And you’ve been falling short since you got here. Hit that target, and I’ll listen to you. Those are my terms.’
I could have reminded her that I’d saved Sal’s life. Instead I picked up my bow for the first time today. It wasn’t the wood-and-leather kind I’d seen in fantasy movies—it was made of carbon fibre and weighed almost nothing, with holes for my fingers to slip through. I went to nock the arrow.
‘Don’t!’ Shiva said quickly. ‘You’re holding it backwards.’
My eyes narrowed. Surely she was messing with me.
‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘It’s a recurve bow. The limbs curve away from you until the bow is strung. If you try to fire it that way around, the bow will snap and break your arm. Weren’t you listening to Lex?’
Shiva snatched it out of my hands and strung it. The bow bent backwards before my eyes, further than I would have thought possible.
She was right—I hadn’t been listening. I had been thinking about the organ delivery tonight.
Shiva handed the bow back. ‘There.’ The copper coin appeared in her hands. She rolled it as she watched.
I licked my finger and held it in the air, testing the wind. Then I nocked the arrow and pulled the string back as hard as I could. I closed one eye, aiming slightly above the target because of gravity and slightly to the right because of the wind. The bow trembled in my grip.
Finally I loosed the arrow. It shot into the distance, nowhere near the target.
‘That was so pathetic that I’m inclined to listen to you out of pity,’ Shiva said.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it. The point is this: we were wrong.’
‘About what?’
‘About everything. The Swarm agent didn’t steal those organs so they could assassinate someone before the replacements arrived. They stole them so they’d have to be replaced.’
I had her attention now. ‘What do they need twice as many organs for?’
‘They don’t. They need the airship the replacement organs are coming in.’
Her mouth fell open. ‘You think they’re planning to escape?’
‘To stow away,’ I said. ‘Think about it. The main thing Swarm wants is to find the Peak on a map, so they can blow it off the map. But students and staff are unconscious when they arrive. The Swarm agent has infiltrated the school, but it hasn’t helped—they don’t know where they are. That’s why they’ve been building robots and sending them out into the wilderness. But none of them can make the distance.’
Shiva nodded slowly. ‘You don’t realise how big the world is until you’re lost in it. I learned that in the rainforest.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘The robots would run out of batteries long before they reached any kind of town, and the Peak has drones patrolling the area.’ I pointed at the flying target I’d just missed with my arrow.
‘Hence the airship?’
‘Exactly. The Peak doesn’t use a helicopter or a plane to resupply, because satellites could pick up the heat signature from the engine. The airship just floats, because it’s full of hydrogen. I’m guessing the airship uses autopilot, since a human crew would ask inconvenient questions, like “Where are we going?” and “Why are we delivering human organs to a remote mountaintop?”‘
I remembered the guy who had knocked me out when I boarded the airship. Maybe he knocked himself out right after—or, more likely, he disembarked as soon as I was in the pod, leaving the airship to fly itself to the Peak.
‘But if there’s no crew . . .’ Shiva said slowly.
‘Then there’s no-one to stop the Swarm agent from boarding the ship and floating right out of here. Once they’re out of the disconnectivity field and spot a landmark they recognise, they’d be able to call their masters and tell them exactly where the Peak is.’
‘Have you told the principal this?’ Shiva demanded.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Firstly, she ordered me to mind my own business. Secondly, she suspects I am the Swarm agent. She’ll assume I’m trying to trick her.’
‘I’ll tell her, then,’ Shiva said. ‘She’ll believe me.’
‘Why?’ I asked, suddenly uneasy.
Shiva hesitated a moment too long, and then said, ‘I have a perfect record. I’m not a troublemaker like you. I’ll take the information to her.’ She glanced around at her classmates. ‘Don’t tell anyone else about this, OK? We don’t know who we can trust. Anyone could be the Swarm agent.’
Yes, I thought. They could. Alarm bells were going off in my head. I remembered what Mr Karl had said about Shiva last week: I saw her hanging around where Dr Clot keeps the spare organs earlier.
The Swarm robots had shot rockets at me and Sal, but they’d let Shiva fly right past. And when we first got to the cabin on the mountaintop, Shiva was the one who said someone should go out and look for the missing girl from the pods, but she hadn’t gone herself. Reg went instead—and was replaced.
According to Professor Vine, the missing girl had been ‘ditched’ when a transmitting device had been found on her. What if the device wasn’t hers? Shiva had been on the airship, too. What if she had planted the transmitter in the girl’s pod, hoping to recover it later?
A second ago, Shiva hadn’t said, We should tell the principal. She’d said, Have you told the principal? When the answer was no, she’d quickly volunteered to deliver the message herself, and told me to keep the information private. That was exactly what a Swarm agent would do.
Even Shiva’s story about why she’d been selected for the Peak didn’t add up. She was the only survivor of a horrific plane crash, and yet she’d been in good enough shape to stay alive in the rainforest alone for weeks? Wouldn’t a crash which killed everyone else on board have at least left her with broken bones?
Some people have trained their whole lives to be here, she’d told me. Like she’d been a spy before she even arrived.
I nodded slowly, my heart racing. ‘OK. You tell her. She’ll be on level 13—I overheard Dr Clot say she was meeting with Principal Sykes down there.’
This wasn’t true, but Shiva seemed to buy it. ‘OK.’
‘Let me know what the principal says.’
‘I will.’ Shiva glanced around again. ‘You should go shoot some targets. Act natural.’
I turned my back and walked towards my spot. It was hard not to break into a run. If Shiva was the Swarm agent, her next step would be to kill me. I was the only one who knew what she was planning. She could have an arrow pointed at my back right now. Sweat broke out across my brow, despite the cold.
From behind me, I heard the twang of a bowstring. I almost leapt out of my skin—but nothing hit me. When I turned around, I saw that Shiva was shooting at the flying target again.
She’d hit it. Dead centre.
Torrent spoke up. ‘You still think there’s a Swarm agent inside the Peak?’
‘It’s her,’ I said, quietly.
‘Who?’
‘Shiva. She’s the spy.’
‘ What? How do you figure that?’
‘I’ll explain everything in a second. Just let me get out of class.’
I glanced around. No-one was looking my way. I pressed one end of the bow to the ground and pushed.
Crack! Everyone whirled around. They saw the broken bow, and me clutching my arm.
‘Aargh,’ I moaned.
Lex approached. ‘What happened?’
‘My bow just snapped,’ I said. ‘I must have strung it backwards.’
‘Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it?’ Lex said matter-of- factly.
‘I think my arm is broken.’
‘Go see Dr Clot,’ Lex said. ‘I’m busy teaching the competent students.’
I grumbled my thanks and hurried away. Was Shiva suspicious? I didn’t dare look back to check.
As soon as I was out of sight, I broke into a sprint.
When I reached the principal’s office, her door was closed, despite what she’d said at assembly. I knocked frantically.
‘Principal Sykes! I need to talk to you!’
No answer.
I tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. I punched in today’s code on the keypad. After an angry beeping, the door stayed locked. I knocked again—
Then I smelled something. Spearmint.
I turned around. Dr Clot was standing right behind me, her hands in the pockets of her lab coat.
‘Dr Clot,’ I said. ‘You startled me.’
She said nothing, chewing her gum. Chomp, chomp.
‘I was looking for the principal,’ I went on. ‘I have to tell her something. Have you seen her?’
Still she didn’t reply. My skin crawled.
Finally, Dr Clot smiled, as though she’d made a decision. She said, ‘What do you need to tell Principal Sykes? I can pass on the message.’
Her voice sounded human—but was it? Or had she been replaced?
I backed away. ‘Thanks, but it can wait,’ I said.
‘It’s no trouble,’ Dr Clot said. Chomp, chomp.
‘Really, it’s OK.’ I looked at my watch, and then realised I wasn’t wearing one. ‘I’d better get going.’
‘Going where?’ Chomp, chomp.
‘To the dorm. See you!’ I turned and fled, not realising until I was out of sight that the dorm was in the opposite direction.
I hid in the broom cupboard on level 13—the one I’d searched for Shiva earlier. Even in here, I felt watched. So watched that I wasn’t thinking straight.
I sat on the floor between a bottle of bleach and the charging station for a robot vacuum. Tonight, the traitor would escape, and reveal to Swarm where the Peak was. Then Swarm would destroy the school: drop a warhead from a spy satellite and turn the whole mountain into a pile of rubble, killing everyone inside. But if the traitor was Shiva, I’d be dead long before that. She knew that I knew about her escape plan, so she’d take me off the board to stop me from interfering.
I had to get out of here.
I wouldn’t get far on foot, but I knew how to fly the Droppers. I could steal one, and fly it in a straight line until I reached the sea, then zoom along the coast until I found a city. Bail out, blend in. Steal some money and a passport, then find a way home.
It couldn’t be that easy, otherwise Shiva would have done it already. But I had to try.
Except . . .
I imagined the Peak as a pile of rubble. All its wonders, gone. My friends, dead.
To me, leaving a school behind was nothing new. I’d learned not to get attached to the place or the people. But this was different.
‘Torrent?’ I said. ‘Have you seen Vicki anywhere?’
I found her in the laundry room, where bedsheets churned in huge washing machines. The air was so hot and humid that I could hardly breathe.
I still struggled to believe that Vicki had been a spy this whole time, and that she’d only been posing as a student when she’d sat in front of me in Mr White’s class at Coppins Crossing. Part of me was convinced it had been real and that this was the act.
‘Sal likes you,’ I said. I had to yell over the roaring machines.
Vicki didn’t turn around. She had both hands on the railing, overlooking the sudsy chaos below.
‘And I think you like him, too,’ I went on. ‘That’s why you were so grumpy when you were sent to Coppins Crossing. You missed him.’
