AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Taylor?” Isabela called out as she closed the door behind her and shoved Linda onto the couch.
No response. Her friend was gone. Somehow, the Foundation had whisked her away in the space of a few minutes.
She rounded on Dr. Linda. “Where did they take her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know how they took her.” Linda looked bewildered and exhausted, her frizzy hair a mess. “What are you two trying to accomplish?”
Isabela snapped her fingers in Linda’s face. “I ask questions, not you.” She glared at Linda until the woman gave a meek nod. “Where were you going just now?”
“Thanks to your ruse, I was going to meet Nine—”
Isabela’s nostrils flared. “No point in lying, estúpido. Everyone knows you are a Foundation spy. They’ve known for weeks, only keeping you around to see what you might give away. Soon you will be arrested.”
“I—the Foundation made—”
Isabela took a menacing step forward. “Where were you going?”
“To meet with—I suppose you would call him my handler. I don’t know his name. He’s who I give the information to. He likely wants to know what happened here tonight.”
“Where were you to meet him?”
Linda handed Isabela an address scratched onto a torn corner of a crossword puzzle. Isabela wiggled her fingers.
“Car keys, too.”
There were other ways to infiltrate the Foundation besides letting them recruit you. Isabela wasn’t about to let Taylor go on this mission all by herself.
Fifteen minutes later, Isabela drove Dr. Linda’s hybrid hatchback through the faculty parking lot towards the Peacekeeper checkpoint at the Academy’s exit. Besides the car keys and the address, Isabela had also swiped Linda’s ID card and satellite phone. She left the psychiatrist gagged and tied up on her bed. By the time anyone found her, Isabela would be long gone.
She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her skin wrinkled and pale, her hair a bushy gray rat’s nest.
“I am a smart lady,” Isabela said, mimicking Dr. Linda’s pretentious way of enunciating. “Tell me about your earliest memory. That is enough for today. Freud. Zoloft. Nocturnal emission.”
Good enough, she decided.
Isabela pulled up to the gate. A Peacekeeper emerged from the booth, stern and middle-aged, not one of the ones Isabela had encountered in her previous forays off campus.
“ID,” he said flatly.
Isabela handed him Linda’s ID and he swiped it through a card reader. She waited, tapping her foot anxiously against the floor. The Peacekeeper turned the tablet around so the screen faced her, an image of an eye there overlaid with a blue graph matrix.
“Retinal scan,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” Isabela replied. That was new. Her heartbeat picked up. Did her shape-shifting accurately copy that level of detail? She’d never thought to find out.
“Can’t sleep again, huh?” The Peacekeeper said conversationally as her eye was scanned.
So Linda had made late-night excursions from the Academy before. What would she say?
“If the crosswords do not work, I find long drives soothe the overactive mind,” Isabela said as properly as she could manage.
“More of a sudoku guy myself,” the Peacekeeper replied.
His tablet beeped. Not a good beep. It was the kind of sound a computer made when an error popped up.
“Inexact match,” the Peacekeeper said with a sigh.
“Maybe I blinked,” Isabela replied.
“Thing can be tricky,” he said, handing back her ID. “Whatever. Could have you here until sunup waiting for the tech to work.”
He reached for a button behind him and opened up the gate. Isabela gave him a warm smile, then drove through. Never underestimate the power of a middle-aged white woman to escape scrutiny.
Isabela drove into the night. She put the address she’d taken from Dr. Linda into the car’s GPS. Then, she found a dance music station on the car radio and rolled down the windows. Yes, this was a potentially dangerous situation and yes, she was currently disguised as an old woman with a very crappy car—that didn’t mean she couldn’t exert a little style as she cruised south on the mostly abandoned coastal highways south of the Academy.
It didn’t hit her until the wind blew through her hair how much she had missed these excursions off campus and the freedom that came with them. She used to do this all the time before the administration got wise, sometimes by herself and sometimes with her former boy toy Lofton, stealing an identity and a car, then driving south to San Francisco to party for a night.
This was serious, Isabela reminded herself.
Still, now that she knew how the Academy’s “upgraded” security protocols worked, she would have to sneak out more often.
The address Dr. Linda had was for a surf shop in Sausalito. The quaint shoreline town was quiet as Isabela drove through its hillsides, hardly any other cars on the road. In the distance, through a thin sheet of fog, Isabela could see the inviting glow of the Golden Gate Bridge. She’d been here before but never stopped, breezing through on her way to San Francisco. It was only an hour south of the Academy. So the Foundation thought they could set up that close without trouble.
The dinky surf shop was in a strip mall close to the shore, sandwiched between an organic juice bar and a skate park. The parking lot was empty. Isabela pulled in and waited, turning the station to some dull classical crap before she did. She tried to look as uptight and nervous as possible, just in case Linda’s Foundation contact was already here and watching from nearby.
She didn’t have to wait long. A bloodred muscle car soon prowled into the lot, its engine like a jungle cat. Even if it hadn’t been dark, the car’s windows were tinted, so Isabela had no way of discerning who was inside.
“Nice car,” she murmured as the Camaro pulled alongside Linda’s crappy ride.
Isabela sat behind the wheel and waited, not sure what the protocol was for her psychiatrist’s clandestine meetings with members of an international conspiracy.
After about a minute of stalemate, the passenger door to the other car was shoved open by the driver. An invitation.
Isabela got out and shuffled to the Camaro, doing her best to look stooped and nervous.
“Linda, you know I don’t like to be kept waiting,” a man chided as Isabela climbed awkwardly into the bucket seat. “You come to me. I don’t go to you.”
The Camaro driver was in his thirties, dark-haired and stubbly, with thick lashes that made it look like he was wearing eyeliner and a face just a bit too angular to be actu
ally handsome, although he probably would’ve argued that point. Isabela knew his type. He reminded her of a certain drug dealer back in Rio who used to haunt the clubs and hit on underage girls. He wore an expensive leather jacket. His car smelled like coconut air freshener and cigarettes.
“Sorry,” Isabela said quietly. “Difficult night.”
The man snorted. “Oh, was it difficult for you? You call me up in a panic, tell me we need to get the Cook girl out tonight and then—what did you do? Did you pull strings and call in favors to make that happen? Was that you? Or was it me?”
“You,” Isabela replied.
“Right. And, lucky for you, that operation was successful. So, congratulations. You finally did something halfway useful.”
After weeks of planning, Taylor was in. Isabela suppressed a smile.
“I have to ask, Linda—”
The man half turned so he was facing Isabela directly, angling his head so she was forced to look in his eyes.
“Were you compromised? You said on the phone—Cook knows you’re working for us. Does anyone else? How big a mess did you make there tonight?”
Isabela pretended to consider his question. “I was careful.”
“It’s okay,” the man said in a way meant to sound soothing but that Isabela could tell meant it definitely would not be okay. “If you messed up, we can protect you.”
“Oh, really? Will you spirit me away? Will you make me therapist of all the children you’ve stolen?”
The driver looked at her funny. “Don’t get mouthy, Linda.”
“What happens if I’m found out, hmm?” She pointed at a bulge in the man’s jacket that was clearly a concealed weapon. “That? You dump me in a ditch somewhere?”
“I—”
“And what happens if you’re compromised, cabrão?”
Isabela waited a split second to see the alarm dawn on the man’s face. She loved that moment. Then, with her telekinesis, she looped his seat belt around his neck and pulled tight.
“Gah—!” The driver clawed at his neck with one hand and reached for his gun with the other. Isabela’s hand shot out, grabbed his thumb and twisted until she heard a pop.
