Slivers

4. Consider the Source

4. Consider the Source

Mina

When Mom dropped the letter on the table next to my cereal bowl on Friday morning, the summons to an additional counseling session at the end of the day, my first complete thought was, Well, that was more efficient than usual.

“What did you do?” she asked, not scolding, almost conversational.

Things had gotten better between us over the past few months, especially since the nonaggression pact. With both her Council and the Splinter Council recognizing the Network as an independent political entity, she wasn’t under pressure anymore to disguise, disband, or otherwise interfere with us, and…

And none of us were innocent of negotiating with Splinters now.

The pact was temporary, I kept telling myself. Not a surrender, not an alliance, just a brief change of priorities. It would not end with me accommodating Splinter interests as a puppet human official and coming home to one of them at night. It couldn’t.

But the longer it lasted, the harder it was to see my mother as the enemy, as anything but someone who had played the same game we were all playing and lost spectacularly.

Maybe it had been her fault. Maybe she had made some critical error, or broken under pressure that I could have taken. I hoped so. It meant we had a better shot. But even if hers had been the single worst strategy in the history of humanity’s defense, it never should have been necessary in the first place. They should never have been here to ruin her life.

That didn’t mean it was easy, forgiving her for all the time she’d tried to keep me in the dark, told me that I was crazy, that my father was still here, and after how hard I’d fought her and how much I’d had to hide, I knew she didn’t trust me.

The ice between us had taken eight years to accumulate and harden. I knew we weren’t anywhere close to melting it all away, especially when I compared us with the easy affection between Ben and his mom, but we were trying.

That had to count for something.

“Nothing you’d disapprove of,” I told her.

Something in my voice or posture must have given away more tension than school bureaucracy could cause me.

Her eyes narrowed seriously on the letter. “Should I be concerned?”

I chewed my next mouthful of Cocoa Puffs slowly. Yes, I wanted to say, yes, you should be concerned. You should be concerned that Mr. Montresor is probably a Sliver recruiter who suspects me of suspecting him and may well be calling me into his office to kill me. I know I am.

But Mom’s recent tendency to side with me over Dad probably wouldn’t hold if she was afraid for my life. She’d tell him, and he’d send someone in, and he’d either find out my guess about Montresor was wrong, damaging my credibility, or find out I was right and handle him without me, and without concern for recovering his victims.

I swallowed.

“I can manage.”

Ben and I sent the rest of the Network a Need-to-Know Newsletter announcement when I showed him the summons on our walk to school, and by the time of the appointment, every single member had volunteered to see me to the office door.

Having all of us so close together, a single loose-end-free target, a small army more than a Network, made me nervous as it always did, but I didn’t argue for another arrangement.

Many of the best things we’d accomplished had been done this way.

The door opened at my first knock.

Mr. Montresor pushed his glasses up his nose, gave my full escort a single, sweeping glance, and smiled.

“Ah,” he said. “You have figured it out. Then this won’t be a complete waste of time.”

He stood back to usher us into his office’s waiting room.

Ben and I swapped a glance confirming our shared confusion, and a few of the others did the same behind us, before I stepped through the door first, one hand on the mace in the sturdy new shoulder bag Ben had given me.

The waiting room was empty except for the usual chairs and bulletin board and, for some reason, a pair of brand new, full-sized garden spades leaning against the wall. Hanging from the bulletin board was the tear-off calendar Mr. Montresor usually kept on his desk. Under the frightened kitten in the party hat, instead of the number of days remaining before my legal adulthood or that of some other delinquent, there was a cheap digital clock with most of the cardboard packaging still attached, counting down the seconds until something else.

Whatever it was, there were two hours, seventeen minutes, and fifty-six seconds left before it.

When the others had cautiously filled in the space around me, Mr. Montresor closed the door behind us and clapped his hands.

“Welcome, Network! That is still what you like to be called, right?” He looked around at us for reassurance, the way the thirty-six-year-old counselor always did after using a popular turn of phrase he thought might be getting slightly out of date.

Someone behind me must have nodded, because after a few seconds, Mr. Montresor clapped his hands again and exclaimed, “Great! I’m Ezra, by the way. I don’t get to tell many people that, so you might as well know. I’ll understand if you’re more comfortable with my gracious host’s name, of course. It’s not a bad one, actually. Philip Montresor. I’m almost fond of it. Well, based on your response here…”

He looked around again at the full eight of us.

“I assume you already know how I’ve recently been putting some of your less self-actualized classmates to better use. Congratulations. The problem is, I’ve got a pretty big project to get done in the next couple hours, and I can’t have you guys getting in the way, so just in case you turned out to be as on top of things as always, I put together another little project to help you keep yourselves busy.”

Mr. Montresor grabbed the two shovels from their place along the wall and held them out to us. Ben and I took one each, left-handed, our right hands still armed and out of sight.

“I’ve buried someone you know alive. Your project is to find the grave while the oxygen holds out. Listen closely, here are the clues.”

Courtney had gotten out half a word of outrage with her hitherto mentor before this but stopped to listen. The rest of us stifled our brewing outbursts.

“Your friend’s coffin is in a marked, legal grave within the town limits. The name on the headstone is Johnathan E. Norwood.”

“Which cemetery?” Haley asked. Prospero had two.

Mr. Montresor shook his head. “Can’t tell you that. Might make you confident enough to leave someone out of the search party to bother me.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Can’t tell you that either.”

“Then how do we know you buried anyone?” asked Greg.

“You don’t,” said Mr. Montresor. “But you’d feel pretty silly if I did and you didn’t go looking, wouldn’t you?”

I pointed to the makeshift calendar clock. “And that?”

Mr. Montresor glanced at it as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh, that! I was just messing around with some figures on how long a person can survive without brain damage per cubic foot of air. Don’t mind me. I probably got it wrong.”

He looked back at us.

“That’s all you get, by the way. You should probably move.”

In the moment we spent standing there, sizing him up, debating whether it would be faster to run or stay and try to force him to tell us where exactly we were running to, he jumped straight up in the air with surprising dexterity, latched his fingers onto the sturdily bolted mesh air vent, and pressed his head through it, like yogurt through a sieve.

The Network converged on him.

Ben leapt forward and grabbed onto his legs, Haley and I took flamethrowers to his exposed middle, where his shirt had come untucked in the jump. With every second, there was less of him on our side and more in the air duct, and the insignificant parts we burned away in the meantime didn’t wait to regrow before retreating to safety.

When the last of Mr. Montresor was out of sight, dropping Ben to the floor in a pile of his slightly singed clothes, we didn’t need to debate. There would be no quick way to extract him even if we didn’t have to worry about being caught damaging more school property, in broad daylight and only slightly after hours this time.

“Who has a car?” I asked.

Kevin and Courtney raised their hands.

I handed Aldo my shovel.

“Aldo, Courtney, Greg, Julie, you take the active cemetery. Ben, Kevin, Haley and I will take the historical one.”

Courtney started to argue. I wasn’t about to waste seconds explaining.

“Go. Now. And stay in touch. We’ll call in soon.”

Courtney and Aldo both nodded, each trying to do so more significantly than the other, and we made our dash for the parking lot.

Before we’d finished sliding the door of Kevin’s latest borrowed van closed behind us, Ben had his phone to his ear. It shouldn’t have taken hearing his mother’s voice answering and his own relieved fit of hyperventilation for me to understand why.

“No, Mom, I’m fine,” he had to reassure her. “Yeah, I’ve just been running. I just wanted to let you know I might be having dinner at Mina’s again. I’ll keep you posted. Yes, I’m sure I’m fine. I love you, Mom.”

The thought of checking on my own mother flicked across my mind. Briefly. It was either her in the coffin, or it wasn’t. We’d know within a few hours, and either way, calling her wouldn’t make us any more likely to find whoever it was alive. If it was anybody.

Haley’s hand hovered over her phone too, but like me, she had other things on her mind.

“You think the grave’s in the historical cemetery,” she said to me.

“What makes you say that?”

“You would’ve gone with whichever group you thought would find it.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But suppose both locations were equally likely?”

“Then you would have sent either Ben or Kevin to the other one. You’re betting we’re going to need all the muscle on our side. You’re sure enough to make it worth leaving Aldo to wrangle Greg, Julie, and Courtney for the day.”

Haley was getting quite remarkable.

“I wouldn’t let Courtney hear you calling them all the muscle,” I said and smiled by way of acknowledgement.

If I was wrong, and the theatrical allure and practical seclusion of the neglected historical cemetery had not determined the Slivers’ decision, I hoped Greg and Courtney would be up to the digging. And if anything went awry, I hoped Aldo would be able to keep order and take care of the others. If not, he would at least bring me the most trustworthy and detailed possible account of whatever happened.

If I was right, however, between Ben and Kevin’s physical strength and Haley’s knowledge of the cemetery grounds, I was confident in my selections.

“Link up,” I reminded them as we left the van to look out at the hilly, wooded cemetery, which seemed to have expanded impossibly since the last time I’d seen it.

From the answers of the other team, still on the road when we called in, there had been no new disasters so far.

“There’s a clearing full of graves behind that thicket,” Haley pointed to a vein of trees, the vein of trees Robbie had made us chase our own imaginations through on Halloween, I realized. If this was a trap, that was where the ambush would be waiting. “Most of the rest is sort of a grid. Sort of.”

“Okay, I’ll take that—”

No, that was the feeling talking. I stopped and started over.

“Ben, you take the shovel up to search the section behind the trees, so we won’t look suspicious until the last possible moment. I’ll start on the near side of the trees and work toward the parking lot. Haley, start at the parking lot, work toward me, and be ready to get rid of any passersby. Kevin, start about two thirds of the way up the hill and work toward Haley. Let’s go.”

The downpour of the last few days had faded to a thick mist. The hills and ditches of the cemetery had made it into one enormous mud puddle, washing out any clear signs of recent disturbance. My jeans were soaked up to the knees, and I lost the feeling in my fingers within the first few minutes of searching, crouching down to wipe the grime off the faded, ice-cold headstones.

Haley, Kevin, and I had each begun our second row when the other team reached the farther cemetery.

“Mina,” Aldo checked in. “We’re here. Do you want us to prioritize any particular area? Johnathan E. Norwood sounds like it might be an older name, so I was thinking—”

“I want you to handle it, Aldo,” I answered.

“Right. Okay,” he said. “So, Greg and Julie at the far—”

“Greg and Julie at opposite ends,” Courtney cut him off. “If you want to get anything done. Four vertical strips, we’ll each work left to right.”

There was a scrape of metal on concrete and a restrained sound of protest that meant she’d pulled the shovel out of Aldo’s hands.

“Mina?” Aldo asked for verification in a voice I knew was supposed to sound businesslike and indifferent.

“That sounds fine,” I answered.

I spent the next fifty-seven minutes thinking about whether it would make Aldo feel better or worse if I assured him that it probably wouldn’t matter much what his team did, so long as they all came back alive, and trying not to think about the most likely person to be sharing Johnathan E. Norwood’s grave or how much oxygen was really in it.

Not counting my Splinter-dad (since if the Slivers ever went after him, I was sure they’d have bigger things in mind than a little diversion for us), there were twelve parents and two siblings left unaccounted for among the eight of us.

Courtney’s older brother, not nearly far enough away at UCSF, so easy for the world to lose track of for hours.

Julie’s tiny, sheltered little brother, Zach.

Then there was Ms. Craven, if she was really on our side.

Mr. Finn didn’t have any classes after lunch today to miss him.

The Old Man.

I hadn’t formed a satisfactory theory on either topic when I was finally pulled away from rubbing my numb fingers and newly tattered sleeve across the engraved name of a Johnathan F Noland by Ben’s exclamation of, “It’s here!”

My frozen, soaking legs tingled and shook precariously when I forced my full weight back onto them. I stumbled twice on my run up the hill.

“We’ve found it,” I repeated into my Bluetooth. “Leave the active cemetery and see if there’s anything suspicious still going on at the school, but keep a safe distance. We’ll keep you informed.”

Ben had already made a significant dent in the grave when the rest of us caught up with him, and when he started shaking too hard to make the dirt go exactly where he meant it to, Kevin had to pry the shovel out of his hands to take his turn.

Thud.

The interjection of that sound beneath us, before Kevin had even started digging, removed any slight chance there might have been that Ben would actually stop to rest just because of a little thing like being shovel-less.

It was muffled but unmistakable.

Thud, thud, thud.

It hadn’t been a bluff. We were getting close, and whoever was in there had heard us coming.

Whoever was in there was alive.

Ben, Haley, and I nearly knocked heads jumping in the grave after Kevin to scoop out whatever we could with our hands. The mud splattered and coated everything with the cakey, clinging texture of papier-mâché. Haley’s green lace cardigan—a favorite, if I’d heard correctly in passing—was as black as my bulk-bought work clothes by the time the shovel finally struck wood. Not the polished hardwood of the caskets from the funeral home but a warped board of untreated pine.

The blade of the cheap shovel in Kevin’s hands and most of the fingernails on mine bent backward as we pried the lid away from the rest of the hastily assembled, waterlogged box.

Mr. Montresor hadn’t lied. Technically.

The panicked but eternally slurred voice that sputtered to us through the six inches of murky rainwater that had collected in the coffin was one I did know, but not one I’d ever hoped to hear again.

“Jailbait! I almost thought you’d given up!”