CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Haunted Houses

  There it was. The house where everything changed and their adventure became an escape mission, then a survival mission, then a rescue mission. There was something about the house even before it all went bad that creeped Isaac out. The windows broken and dusty, the paint peeling, the burnt siding from some long-ago fire. Once he walked past this awful place where he and Sadina had been taken, where Kletter had been viciously murdered, he hoped they could all reset their future and forget Letti and Timon had ever mentioned evolution and extinction.

  Isaac wondered about Letti and Timon, if maybe they hadn’t been half-Crank when he met them. Then he wondered if Kletter’s body was still decaying somewhere. He picked up his pace and decided it best not to find out. He twisted the grass-braided bracelet around his wrist. Every day that passed, the bracelet got drier and drier. He hoped Sadina and the rest of the crew were doing okay. “You think they’re getting close to Alaska?” he asked the group.

  “Closer every day,” Old Man Frypan replied.

  “What do you think, Ms. Cowan? Think Minho threw Dominic overboard yet?” He liked the challenge of trying to make Cowan laugh.

  “No, I’m sure Dominic is on his best behavior, but Sadina,” Cowan coughed, “now she can be stubborn. I hope she and Minho don’t have any differences.”

  Isaac hadn’t even worried about that. Cowan was right, they were two strong personalities, but he’d count on Trish and Miyoko to keep them in line. He knew the islanders would stick together. “It may be hot out here, but at least we’re not seasick.” Isaac waited for Jackie to chime in, but she didn’t. She’d been awfully quiet the last mile or so. He turned to her. “Right, Jackie?”

  Her walk slowed.

  “Ithaac . . .”

  “Jackie?” He stopped, tried to catch her eyes, but her distant gaze was unfocused. She looked right through him. “What’s wrong, Jackie?” Isaac knew she was prone to nausea, but the path had been smooth and straight. “Do you need to throw up?”

  “If you gotta blow chunks, blow them over there.” Old Man Frypan pointed to a bush of clover weed. But Jackie wouldn’t make it that far. Her knees buckled, then her legs folded beneath her like an island hammock cut by a storm. Isaac rushed to her side and caught her weight in his arms, lowering her to the road. Newt fell from her shoulder and scampered off into the weeds.

  She reached for Cowan. “Myth Cowan.”

  Cowan took Jackie’s hand.

  “What’s going on?” Cowan asked. Jackie felt heavy, almost lifeless in Isaac’s arms.

  “I can’t feel my lipth, or my thongue, or my legth.”

  Jackie’s voice was slow and slurred. Isaac looked at her and then back toward the house, as if it held some kind of curse. It was probably haunted by Kletter’s spirit.

  “What’s happening?!” Isaac looked to Old Man Frypan, their most trusted source of wisdom, but his face didn’t hint at any answers. Isaac frantically searched her skin for a rash. Nothing. No sting marks. No rash.

  “We’ve got some bad luck going on around here,” Frypan said.

  Isaac, in a panic, looked up at Cowan. “I don’t get it, no rash, you’re still standing but she’s not?” He could feel the warmth radiating from Jackie’s skin. Whatever this was, they had to get to the Villa even more quickly.

  “Ithaac . . .”

  “It’s okay. We’re going to get you help. The Villa can’t be that far. I’m gonna carry you, okay?” With one big lift Isaac hoisted Jackie into his arms. “You’re okay.” He tried to reassure her with a forced smile but she wasn’t looking back at him.

  She was looking right through him.

  “Ithaac,” she slurred, “I can’t thee.”

  Isaac walked as fast as he could through the endless neighborhood, Jackie in his arms. His biceps burned, tendrils of flames leaking through his muscles, but he wouldn’t stop to rest until they found someone, anyone, who could help. He’d run if he knew where they were headed, but the uncertainty only aided to the panic in his chest.

  “The houses are getting bigger up here, we have to be close,” Frypan offered. They reached a mansion rimmed with circular columns in the front. Something moved.

  “There!” Cowan pointed at a person near the front door, but Isaac knew it could just be a wandering Crank. The knife Minho had given him was strapped to his boot, but his best Crank killer lay limp in his arms.

  “Please, help!” Cowan shouted; the figure ahead stopped and turned. As they walked closer, Isaac, sweating profusely, breathing with labored heaves of hot air, could see a woman with blonde hair. Despite his weak condition, he started to run, Jackie bouncing in his arms.

  “Stop! Don’t come any closer!” The stranger’s voice trembled and cracked, as if she weren’t used to talking so loudly, or talking to other people.

  “Please, we just need help.” Isaac slowed down, but he didn’t stop.

  “We’re scientists, not doctors. We’re not resetting bones and we sure as hell aren’t a Crank Palace. If she’s got the Flare, you take her there. Hear me?” The woman turned her back on them and opened the door to what Isaac hoped was the Villa.

  “Is this the Villa?” he asked in desperation. “Kletter told us about you.”

  The woman stilled. Then slowly turned back around. “Kletter? Is she with you?”

  “She’s not that far behind us.” Just a bit dead, but you don’t need to know that, he thought. Isaac made eye contact with Cowan and Old Man Frypan, hoping they understood.

  The woman looked each of them up and down and eyed Frypan as if she had never seen anyone so old. And maybe living out here among the half-Cranks, she hadn’t. What did Kletter mean to these people to change the stranger’s mind so quickly? “What’s wrong with the girl?” she asked.

  Isaac answered, wearily, almost to the absolute end of his strength. “We don’t know, she just started to slur her words, then lost feeling in her legs, and then sight. I think it was in that order. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.”

  The woman released a heavy sigh. “Okay, we’ll bring her in. But you all need to stay out here until I get clearance. We can’t compromise our lab.”

  “We don’t have the Flare,” Frypan said.

  “It’s not the Flare I’m worried about. It’s Evolution. Come on. Lay her down right here, in the doorway. In the next thirty minutes we’ll know if she’ll make it.”

  Evolution? Isaac wondered. What was that supposed to mean?

  “Wait,” Cowan spoke up, “I need help, too.” She pulled down her scarf and revealed the rash. The woman started shaking her head back and forth so vigorously Isaac thought it might pop off.

  She shouted at them, “Let me see all of your necks. Now!” She pointed vigorously at Isaac, then Frypan.

  “It’s only the ladies who are sick,” Frypan said as he lifted his chin and turned in a circle, as did Isaac, Jackie still in his arms. The woman walked completely around Frypan to look at his neck again.

  “You’re . . . tattooed . . .” She said it in a tone that was somewhere between worship and fear. Probably in disbelief that he could actually be a Glader of Old.

  It was Frypan’s turn to sigh. “Yes. I’m a subject from the original Maze trials.” Isaac had never heard him say it out loud like that, but perhaps the scientist would appreciate it being put so formally. More like a hero, Isaac wanted to add. A survivor. A legend.

  The woman again appeared conflicted. Honored one moment, horrified the next.

  Isaac couldn’t hold Jackie another second. “Can you help us or not?” he asked.

  The woman slowly nodded, obviously still stunned. “Come in. All of you. We’ll take the cellar entrance.”

  She led them down a gravel path that wrapped behind the building, finally to a door in the rear that was painted black, like the pupil of an eye.

  “Getting close?” she asked Carlos. Abandoned houses lined both sides of the crumbled street.

  “Yeah. Maybe twenty minutes.”

  “You keep saying that and then we walk another hour.” Sweat drenched her shirt.

  “If I keep saying that, then one of these times I’ll be right.” He smiled, always so genuine from him. “Give me a break, it’s been two years since I walked this path.”

  A heaviness hung inside Ximena’s chest. One she knew well and had learned not to cling to. Anxiety in and of itself was sometimes a premonition. She tried to focus on each of the passing houses and imagine what bright colors graced their walls when they were first built.

  “Lookie, Ximena.” Carlos picked something from the ground. A small bush of weeds. “Mariana loves these. Well, no, she actually hates them, but she’ll laugh if I bring her some.” He gave Ximena a single weed to investigate. “She grew these right after you were born.”

  “Me? Why?” She looked at the little pink flower on the end of the red clover, but she didn’t understand Carlos’ excitement and her face must have shown it.

  “Because your mom said she’d been drinking red clover tea before she got pregnant with you. So, Mariana ripped out and collected every last clover in the village, no matter what color it was.” Carlos chuckled. “Eventually she planted a whole garden’s worth of just clovers.” He continued gathering a bouquet of weeds for his wife.

  Ximena nodded. The whole village did a lot of weird things after she was born. “What’s clover tea taste like, anyway?”

  “Terrible. Exactly like a weed should taste. But if she wasn’t tending that garden or drying the clover, she was busy drinking the tea, day and night. Hot tea, iced tea, making tea cakes from it. She wants a child so badly. Doing something you hate for someone you love is, well, that’s unconditional love.”

  “She would’ve been a great mom,” Ximena agreed, before realizing she’d said it in the past tense. She hoped Carlos didn’t notice.

  “There’s still time.” He laughed. “I know to a teenager like you I must seem ancient, but we’re not that old yet.”

  Ximena looked at the house behind the patch of red clover and wondered if the woman who’d lived there before the Flare ever needed to drink fertility tea. Her eyes focused on an unusual deterioration pattern on the house. Burnt siding.

  “Do you see that?” she asked Carlos, but he was too busy trying to make weeds look like flowers. “The side of the house got burned. You think that’s from a fire or an explosion?” She walked closer to the melted siding of the dusty haunt.

  Carlos stopped picking. “I know you think people used to walk around throwing hand grenades every day. Probably not.”

  “I think they’re a revolutionary weapon of defense and more people had them than you think.” She was so focused on possible evidence of her favorite weapon from history that she didn’t pay attention to the ground below the burnt siding.

  Once she did look down—she couldn’t look away.

  “Carlos . . .” She had a hard time catching her next breath. The anxiety from before found its reason to spread. Her heart pounded all the way to her eardrums. “Carlos, quick!”

  She didn’t actually want him to look. He had a weak stomach, but she needed him to verify that she wasn’t just imagining the clothed skeleton at her feet.

  “Oh jeez, get away from it.” He waved her closer to him, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the bones. The knife sticking out of the pants pocket looked oddly familiar.

  “Wait, Carlos?” She bent closer to the dead body and reached into its pocket to free the knife.

  “Ximena you’ll get a disease. Come on.” Carlos said it as if he’d forgotten for a moment that she couldn’t catch the Flare; no one in their village could. And no disease was as great as the Flare.

  “This is from our village!” She held up the knife so that Carlos could see the embroidered outline of an eagle, with a circle around it, on the weapon’s sheath. The same design that Ximena’s mother sewed into everything. To symbolize truth. She traced the white and brown thread of the eagle’s head, sewn directly into the leather. “My mom’s design . . .”

  Carlos stepped forward and Ximena gave him the knife to see for himself. He looked at it with dismay, as if its blade had just popped his entire balloon of hope. “Oh, shit.” He suddenly looked like he was going to throw up.

  “What?”

  He took a deep breath and looked away from the body. “Does the left hand have a snake ring on the second finger?” He asked as if he already knew the answer was yes.

  It took Ximena a few moments to distinguish what was and wasn’t a part of the skeleton, but a shiny sterling silver ring reflected the sunlight. “A snake eating its own tail? What’s that mean?”

  Carlos avoided Ximena’s eyes. “. . . A symbol for the eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation. Or some such mumbo jumbo.”

  “No, I—what’s that mean as far as the person the ring belongs to? This former person. Who is it? Who was it?” Not anyone from Ximena’s village, she knew that much.

  “It’s . . . Kletter.” Carlos looked at her as if she was supposed to know who that was. Everyone who visited their village had three or four names. Birth names. Middle names. Surnames. Town names.

  “Did they work for the Villa with mom?”

  “It’s Annie Kletter.”

  Ximena’s shoulders tensed; all the air in her lungs whooshed out of her. “This is Annie?” She looked down in disbelief. Anger. Absent-minded Annie. Dead. Like a black jackrabbit in the desert, right here on the way to the Villa. Ximena would have rejoiced at the thought days ago but now it only made the anxiety in her chest grow to a monstrous size. “Mom and Mariana . . . they wouldn’t have just left her here. They would have given her a village burial. Why . . . why didn’t they?” She paced, gripping the knife in her hand.

  Carlos didn’t answer. He just held his bouquet of weeds.

  Ximena let the anger surge through her body to block the tears from coming. Not that she would have cried for Annie’s death, no. She was glad that woman was dead. Ellas estan muertas. But the tears she wouldn’t let come were for her mom and Mariana. Something was wrong. They wouldn’t have left someone they worked with for so many years behind. Her mom wouldn’t have let the animals feed on Annie’s dead flesh without any sign of ritual or prayer. “They wouldn’t have just left her here!”

  “Maybe they . . .”

  “There’s no reason. This close to the Villa?” She shook her head.

  “Maybe that’s why your mom and Mariana stayed behind for so many extra months. The lab needed extra hands.” Carlos turned back to the road. “Come on. They’re at the Villa. We’ll find answers. Maybe Kletter left for a different trip and they have no idea she’s . . . gone.”

  Ximena followed Carlos up the road.

  Her feet pounded the cracked pavement. She wanted answers. Justice. She hoped Carlos was right. She hoped for . . . Hope. But the anxiety in her chest said that Hope was a Devil, luring her to a false reality until both the lie and the truth killed her.

  A circular object in the road caught her attention. She bent down to pick up a grass-braided bracelet.

  “What’s that?” Carlos asked. “Is it fresh?”

  “Yeah,” she said as she wrapped the bracelet around the handle of Annie’s knife. “Might be a clue. Someone had to kill Annie Kletter and I want to know who.”

  The woman at the Villa had never told them her name. Isaac wished he’d asked as he sat impatiently in the quarantine room with Old Man Frypan. They were there to be ‘observed’ but it had started to feel more like a prison than a safe place to wait. Frypan sat quietly against the back of the glass pod. Isaac wanted to believe that Jackie would be okay. He wanted to believe that he’d see Sadina again and reunite Sadina with her mom and that Frypan would live to be a hundred years old. But the truth was rarely better than what you wished for.

  Isaac thought he couldn’t have been more emotionally drained until he looked down and realized his grass bracelet had broken off somewhere. Must’ve been when he was carrying Jackie. He rubbed his bare wrist. That was it.

  “Hey!” He knocked on the glass wall of his room and got another scientist’s attention. He had counted five total people since they’d stepped into the building. All of them wore black clothes under white lab coats. Seemed almost like a cult. Did all scientists do that? He tapped the glass again, and a man at the back wall of the lab looked up at him. “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Isaac shouted. Despite the guy looking right at him, he said nothing and returned to his work.

  “They’re not gonna level with you because they don’t think you’re on the same level as them.” Frypan sighed.

  “But she brought us all in because . . . we’re unique. We’re immune. Sadina and—”

  The old man interrupted him. “Ever wonder if the truth ain’t really the truth?”

  Isaac paused. “What do you mean? You don’t think we’re immune?”

  “Things change. Isn’t that what evolution means?” He closed his eyes and settled further against the glass wall. “When a stew gets too salty, you don’t throw it away. You’ve got to add a potato.”

  Isaac shook his head. “Seriously? What does that mean?” The mention of food made his stomach growl.

  “You can add a peeled potato and it’ll soak up the salt in the stew, but you gotta remember to take the potato out. And if you get clever and chop a potato up and leave it in, you can solve the problem that way too, but then you’ll end up with potato soup rather than a stew.”

  Isaac truly loved this man and his lessons. “Are you talking about the Evolution? With a capital E?”

  “I’m just saying that we’re in a salty situation, here.” He looked around the lab as if he were afraid the scientists wouldn’t like what he was saying. “We came in to help Cowan and Jackie, but we gotta make sure these two potatoes,” he pointed to himself and then to Isaac, “get the hell out of this pot as soon as we can.” His eyes motioned to a glass pod way in the corner of the lab, which had a black curtain hanging on the outside. Black curtains like black uniforms. Everything in this place had a sense of mystery, cloaked.