Part 21 (2/2)

I close my eyes, and a memory floods the blackness. Right now, Alpha has a gun pointed at my temple.

”I'd give you the same warning,” Alpha tells me, ”but it seems we're a bit late for that.”

And then a door clicks closed.

I sprint down the hall, past the advanced chem lab where I'm locked in with Alpha, and into the biology lab next door. There's yelling in the next room. A scream from me. I think Alpha just held my hand in front of a Bunsen burner. I'm going to throw up. I put both hands on my stomach and bend over. And then the door to the chem lab opens and shuts as Headmaster Vaughn enters, and less than a minute later there's a shot that echoes throughout the entire floor.

Alpha is dead.

Again.

And I do throw up. I retch into a trash can next to the teacher's desk. I shouldn't have thrown in the towel after only one week of the counseling the government arranged for me. I'm not over this.

Shouts come from the hallway. The SWAT team is here. I only have about thirty seconds to make a move, and I'm blowing them!

I remember what they taught me, right here on this campus: how to compartmentalize. I close my eyes and isolate this day. This one day in my history. I allow myself to linger, to revisit, to continue feeling, for just a few more seconds. Then I visualize a filing cabinet. One of the big, gray metal ones. I mentally slide open the top drawer and slip this day inside. Then I shut it.

I open my eyes. We're back in business, and I'm about to cause an explosion next door. I slink to the window and open it, to try to minimize the- BOOM!.

I slam to the floor and put my hands over my head. The walls shake. Several of the stools fly across the room. Microscopes dance on the shelves and crash to the ground. Then there's silence.

I push myself up. The walls are swirling in front of me, and I wobble to the side. But I have to do this.

I climb out the window and swing myself into the one next door. The old me is lying unconscious in the hallway. Abe is beside me, yelling. A SWAT guy kneels down next to me. Headmaster Vaughn is in a crumpled heap by the trash can. And the notebook is smoldering right beside him. The notebook that details every mission Alpha sold and for how much.

I leap into the room, scoop up the notebook, then climb back out the window and into the next room.

”Evacuate the building!” SWAT yells from the hallway.

Not good.

I poke my head out the window. I'm three floors up. I can't project yet because SWAT has to find the notebook. And I can't very well leave it in this room because that would lead to questions no one could answer. I turn my head to the right. There's a drainpipe.

That will have to do. I'm out the window again. I grab onto the pipe. It creaks and snaps and pops away from the wall.

No!

I slide down as fast as I can. The pipe bends. No, no, no! I'm level with the second-floor windows. I peer into a lecture hall. Then the pipe breaks away from the wall. I tuck myself into a ball and crash into the bushes below. I land with a thud and groan. I roll my ankles and wrists a few times. Tenderness but no pain. I don't think anything is broken.

There's shouting from above and screaming echoing across campus. I crouch low in the bushes, open the notebook, and flip through. There's an XP entry a few pages in: XP.

150.00.

A hundred and fifty grand. I memorize the date. There's another one after a few more pages. And then one more. And that's all I see. Three. Only three.

I don't have time to double-check. I ditch the notebook in the bushes, below the chem lab window, and I run off across campus.

No one pays me any attention. Everything is in chaos. Students run screaming to their dorms. Teachers try to usher everyone away from the buildings. I run toward the back corner of campus and squeeze myself through the fence. Then I grab the duffel bag and unzip it. I have to dig for the mission ledger. It's sandwiched behind a wad of cash and a dress that was in style more than a hundred years ago.

I repeat the XP dates out loud, then trace my finger down each of the pages as I look for them. I find all three and put little check marks next to them. And then I close the bag, project to the present-to June-and run toward the bus station.

Everything feels surreal, like I've just woken up and I'm remembering a dream. It's not until I'm on a bus, halfway back to Boston, that I even realize I got on a bus.

We pull into South Station, and I think about hopping in a cab, but instead I opt for the subway. It's more anonymous, and anonymity keeps me safe. I have to catch two trains, but soon I'm climbing the steps at Copley Square. The Boston Public Library is right across the street. I look both ways before I run across Boylston on a ”Don't Walk” and in through the front doors.

I head for the computers and put the duffel bag on the empty seat next to me. Breathe. Breathe. I take a minute. Two minutes. I close my eyes and focus on my breath. It's what my training tells me to do. The only way I can think of to ground myself.

When I open my eyes, I feel only marginally better, but I'm not shaking anymore. I grab the mission ledger and find the first check mark. I type ”511 Tenth Street NW, DC, April 14, 1865” into the search engine and chew on my bottom lip as I hit Enter, because that date sounds very familiar. When the results come up, I feel like I've been punched in the throat.

The Lincoln a.s.sa.s.sination.

XP had a hand in the Lincoln a.s.sa.s.sination.

I sit back in my chair. Five minutes ago, I was hot, sweaty, and jumpy from all the adrenaline. Now I feel like I'm sitting in a freezer. My hands tremble.

Eagle Industries a.s.sa.s.sinated two presidents? I want to know the answer to this question, but I'm also beginning to understand the term ”ignorance is bliss.”

I put Lincoln to the side for a minute and go on to the next mission. 426 Marlborough Street right here in Boston on August 25, 1962. I type it in.

Nothing comes up. A few real estate links, a few present-day, city government PDFs, but nothing like Lincoln. Nothing obvious. That's weird. I delete the street address and just type in the date and the city. The first page of results is for a Red SoxIndians game, so maybe that's something? Fenway isn't that far away from Marlborough. But I keep scrolling. Page after page.

And then I get a really funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. On page five, there's an encyclopedia entry for the Boston Strangler. I click on it. A bunch of women were killed beginning in August of 1962. Is that related? Every instinct in my body is telling me this isn't about a baseball game. This has something to do with a serial killer.

And I don't like it. Not one little bit.

I keep reading and scroll down to the few paragraphs on the murders themselves. Fourteen single women, murdered in and around Boston, from 1962 to 1964. Each of them had willingly let the murderer into her house, only to be s.e.xually a.s.saulted and strangled, most often using her own nylon stockings. I shudder.

In October of 1964, a suspect was arrested. His name was Albert DeSalvo. He was convicted but, later, doubts began to swirl. It's now thought that the murders were the work of a number of killers, probably an original and one or more copycats.

I shudder again. Copycat killers. Those people are even more messed up than regular serial killers.

I look over the names and descriptions of the victims. They're all women who lived alone, but that's all they have in common. The youngest was 19. The oldest was 85. They're different races, different ethnicities, different socioeconomic backgrounds. We spent only a semester at Peel studying FBI profiling techniques, but even I could tell you this is likely not the work of only one person.

Is XP . . . a serial killer? Is it a side hobby? What is this?

I move on to the last mission, and I pause. Because I know the address. A first grader could tell you the address.

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The White House.

And then I look at the date. I know it, too. Ariel just told me about it.

October 27, 1962. Right smack in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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