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I blinked at him.
He stared at me, the white mask stark against the black. It was such a plain mask, nothing special about it. I’d seen it often in the last few days.
Was I dreaming? Hallucinating from the fever? No, He was right in front of me.
“I’m sorry you’re sick,” said the familiar altered voice, giving nothing away about his identity. It was tinny, mechanical, and sounded like several echoes of people talking at once.
Since he wore gloves, and covered himself all over, there were no physical characteristics, either.
I didn’t say anything. The boots he wore made it difficult to tell his true height. He was average-sized and there was no way to determine his age or even if he was a ‘he’.
“Don’t be upset,” he said. “I warned you things would get worse if you stuck around.”
“Where do you expect me to go?” I asked, suddenly alert. I held onto the marshmallow bag, wavering on my feet. I wanted to go collapse in bed and be done with Volto and everything else. I was so sick, tired of all these problems, but I held on, knowing this might be my only chance. “Why are you here?”
He pulled an iPhone in a pink case from his pocket. He turned it over, showing me the scratch marks.
“You took them,” I said. “And you came here to let me know? Why?”
“You were getting too close,” he said. “If you’d put your phones together, you might have discovered me. I couldn’t allow that.”
My eyes widened. He’d stolen my phone and erased data from the others’ because of the evidence somewhere buried inside them? “My phone didn’t have any evidence.”
“But yours was the easiest to get,” he said. “You figured it out fast. Good thing I was ready. It didn’t take long to get what I needed.”
“Why tell me it was you?”
“I want you to let them know it was me, and to stop trying to come after me. It won’t work.”
“What do you expect us to do? Let you take our phones and access our data and just let you get away with it?”
“The problem with technology is that it’s breakable and not as secure as you may think,” he said. “The stronger the lock, the more likely something valuable is behind it. Someone can always break it. You’d probably rather it was me than someone else.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“For you. You’re not really safe. You know that.”
“Why do you care?” I asked, pleading. “Why?”
“Because you don’t,” he said sharply. He stepped forward, making me take a step back. “Don’t you see what’s wrong? They claim to want to help, but they’ll take everyone down with them in the end. They’re all idiots, thinking they can operate undercover. They take innocent people like you and put you at the greatest risk, even harming you, forcing you to work with them…they’ll leave you behind one day.”
Kota was right. Volto was looking from the outside in, and seeing…I wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Things he didn’t like. Things he wanted to fix but was actually breaking. Things he didn’t understand. “Don’t do this,” I pleaded. “Leave us alone.”
“When they leave everyone else alone,” he said in a grumble, causing the distortion masking his voice to gain additional static. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t have gone to school today. You took longer to get sick than you should have—a stronger immune system than I had factored.”
Shock buzzed up my spine. “You…”
“If one of you got suspension, the others did, too,” he said. “I needed to make sure you sat still for a long period in the same space. I didn’t want anyone else to get sick.”
“But how?” I asked. “How would sitting in suspension get me sick?”
“You lot sat at the same desks each day,” he said. “I just made sure each desk was covered in the virus. It took this long to incubate; I was worried you all were resistant to the strain. Luckily, it worked.”
My cheeks burned. He could do that? Make us all sick for his own twisted plans? “How did you get me suspended?”
“There is no Vera,” he said. He reached into his pocket again, pulling out my iPhone. He pushed a button, looking at all the pictures and then turned it, showing me the screen.
It was the letter I’d mentioned to the boys, the one I’d seen on Ms. Wright’s desk. They had found out there wasn’t a Vera, but they had suspected perhaps Mr. Hendricks was behind it.
The picture focused on the name at the bottom, Vera O. Lottie. Letters were crossed out over the picture, and then the name rewritten, missing a few letters, to spell out Volto.
“I didn’t do that,” I said. I didn’t take that picture.”
“Luke did. With his phone. His data is on here now, along with everyone else’s. Thanks for that.”
“He knew it was you?” I asked.
“He suspected and started pulling a lot of things together. I had to stop his progress. He was taking credit, too, I know, for things I was doing.”
I swayed on my feet, putting a hand onto the counter, getting a little dizzy. “The masks at the house?”
“I did that. He took credit. So you would ground him. Whatever that means.”
Luke took credit when he hadn’t been behind the mask prank? I couldn’t believe it.
But had Kota phrased it oddly? Had he gone to Luke saying I was going to ground him if he had done it? Would he confess just to be grounded with me?
He had seemed to enjoy it.
Maybe Luke hadn’t even realized he was thwarting Volto trying to get our attention.
“Go,” he said. “Get some rest. You’ll get over your strep soon. Get to the doctor and get some antibiotics. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be there this week.”
I shook my head and stepped forward now, reaching to him. “Volto, you don’t have to do this. Why would you try to make me sick so I wouldn’t show up?”
He chuckled. “I’m liking this name. I think I’ll keep it.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why make me sick? You haven’t told me.”
“Hendricks is desperate, thanks to your Academy team. They’ve been pushing and pushing at him. Do you think he was going to just stand by? He’s not that stupid. So I made sure to stop it. I made some bad things happen, so he’d see what was going on. I started pointing out some of the bad things members of his own team had been up to, so everyone would see just how bad things had gotten.”
It hadn’t been Mr. Hendricks! He wasn’t the one throwing everyone under the bus. Volto had been doing it to show Mr. Hendricks things going on around him? “You can’t do that?” I said, tears at my eyes, disbelieving the mix-up. He didn’t understand what was going on at all. I didn’t even understand what he was up to or his reasons. “Why? Why would you?”
“Do you not see what they do to you?” he asked. “That teacher, the doctor, he should be in jail for forcing himself on you.”
“He’d never!” I spat more syllables, trying to correct him, but I was so overcome with shock and anger, I couldn’t get anything else out.
“They all do,” he said quietl
y. “It’s not normal. You don’t know it because you’re mentally unstable. You’ve had a rough life. I get that.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“You’re sick, Sang,” he said. “But I’m going to help you, whether you want me to or not.”
“Stop trying to help me!” I cried out.
“Hendricks was going to come after you!” he said, much more powerfully, the voice in his mask catching on high pitch sounds. He dropped his shoulders, his voice returning to normal. “He was looking for McCoy, wanting him to come kidnap you. Do you realize that? He never said it outright, but he kept toying with Mr. McCoy, suggesting but not directly saying.”
I shook my head. “He couldn’t.”
“I know McCoy’s being followed,” he said. “That doesn’t stop someone like Mr. Morris coming to get you, maybe tricking you, and leading you to Mr. McCoy. They almost did it when you were out shopping. They got close, but I showed you they were hunting for you.”
He had been there. He’d wanted me to chase him, so I’d know they were there.
He continued, “Today, he was going to try it again. Get you alone in his office, make sure the right people would keep your friends away, and have Mr. Morris drive off with you, telling Mr. Morris to do it or he’d get fired. Mr. Hendricks told him to take you to the school board building, and drop you off for a trial because you had to be escorted. Only he would drop you off with McCoy waiting nearby. Mr. Hendricks was going to wait until Mr. Morris was back, and then call the police on Mr. McCoy.” He touched his chest. “I stopped it.”
I shook my head over and over again. Would Mr. Hendricks really have done that? Was he that desperate to get away? “The boys were working on a plan,” I said. “They were trying…this weekend…”
“They didn’t know what he was planning,” Volto said. “They gave him access to some decoy information, but Hendricks doesn’t work from information he’s not sure about, not after they tried to trick him this last time with someone else pretending to be you. Anything that comes from an Academy source, he doesn’t trust anymore. He was going to get you and give you to McCoy to hang on to, and watch them scramble to find you. You’ve been pushing him too far. He’s getting orders from someone else to get out, and he’s trying.”
