Ionic Attraction Read online

  “It will be ruled an accident. Hydrogen tank leak, a spark from the light switch, or some other electrical constituent.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s the way Mamont operates. His team caught on to him. They refused to believe in his ‘greater good’ rhetoric and rebelled. Which is why his new team is a group of teens chosen from the Young PhD program.”

  “Still not seeing the connection,” Zachary said.

  Mr. Parker rubbed his chin. “Young minds are easier to mold. The young are easily tainted by the cynicism of the world and can be convinced to fully embrace a cause, no matter how twisted. In short, they are better at following orders.”

  Zachary’s mouth tensed. His eyebrows drew together. “You don’t need us because teens can get close to teens. You need us because we’ll do your bidding without question.”

  “No, Zachary, he’s not looking for flunkies,” Jane jumped in. Her father’s bluntness always affected people that way. “ORDER exists to save lives. I need a team who can think for themselves on the fly. One who knows the risks. It will be extremely dangerous if we don’t stick to the plan. Mamont has no qualms about killing teenagers.”

  “You need a team?” Zachary sat up straight.

  “Do we get bulletproof vests?” Michael asked.

  “Do we need bulletproof vests?” Zachary blurted out. “What are we talking about? I’m not getting us into anything that might get my brothers killed.”

  “I don’t have a problem going in,” Nolan said. “Especially if it keeps you out of juvie. I think we have to do this, Zach.”

  “Ditto.” Michael leaned against Zachary’s shoulder. “Not up for debate, dude. Besides, bulletproof vests are cool.”

  Jane felt the need to jump in. “There are no bulletproof vests.”

  Zachary ignored her and looked back and forth between his brothers. “But—”

  “Your brothers will be stationed here at ORDER headquarters,” Jane said before he could argue further. “Michael’s expertise will be used to track the recon team and keep them supplied with information. Nolan’s skills will be used to design equipment that will keep the recon team safe and get them out in one piece.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re on the recon team.” Jane waited for a reaction but got none. “You’re going in.”

  “No way.” Nolan’s voice was tense, his brows drawn tight. “You’re not sending Zach in anywhere. You said yourself that it’s dangerous.”

  “That’s why LYDIA is going in with him,” Jane said. “And we’ll go through intense training to avoid the danger. We have a failsafe escape plan if things go wrong.”

  Zachary was silent for a moment. Then he flipped a palm up. “LYDIA is a computer. What will I do, strap her on my back?”

  “Your wrist, actually. We’ll be in constant contact. We’ll be able to see everything you do, and we have an extraction team ready in case it gets dangerous.” And it will get dangerous. But Extraction Plan A was strong, and Plan B was nearly complete. Jane had so many fail-safes built into her plan that there was no way Zachary could be harmed. In and out, undetected. That was the plan.

  “LYDIA is a watch?”

  “A watch like none you’ve ever seen before.” She grinned. “LYDIA was created for missions like this. The watch is under development but will be fully functional by the time we’re ready.”

  Zachary leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. He exhaled slowly, and the stress faded from his face. He turned to his brothers, but no one said a word. Several seconds later, they all turned and faced Jane. She couldn’t read their expressions, but her gut told her they had come to some unspoken decision.

  Mr. Parker patted the table and stood. “The clock is ticking, Mr. Keen. We need you and your brothers. You three have the perfect talents to complete my team. I would like you to sleep on it and give me an answer in the morning. Eight o’clock. Sharp.”

  Jane’s head nearly spun off her shoulders. Her eyes met her father’s and his thin, tired smile.

  “Yes, sir,” Zachary said. He glanced at Jane one last time, pushed back from the table, and led his brothers out the door.

  Mr. Parker tapped a screen on the table and the War Room door closed.

  “I see you changed your mind about Zachary,” Jane said.

  “No, I gave you what you wanted. I only hope I don’t regret it.” His words were sincere, not biting.

  “You won’t, Mr. Parker. Zachary will be the perfect balance for my team. You’ll see.”

  Chapter Seven

  Zach

  The dorm rooms in the Mastermind Complex were not what Zach had expected. He had imagined block walls, cramped bunks, and community showers. But what the brothers shared was an actual apartment, totally furnished, totally teched-out, and arranged like the spokes of a wheel. Hover-furniture. Three desks fully equipped with voice-controlled computers and holo projectors. A virtual reality gaming center. The perfectly round living room was in the center of the apartment, adjoined by a kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms, also perfectly round, jutting off in precise symmetry like crop circles. Zach jumped off the hover-sofa. “This place is amazing! LYDIA, turn up the lights, please.”

  My pleasure.

  The room instantly brightened.

  Zach flopped back onto the hover-sofa with a dull thump. “I don’t need to sleep on it. We’re in.”

  “The parental units might think otherwise.” Nolan waved his hand like a Jedi. “This is not the internship they’re looking for.”

  “Mom and Dad will be okay with us saving the world instead.” Mike looked up from his laptop. His pompadour flopped into his face. “They’re into noble causes.”

  “But not dangerous ones.” Nolan shifted on the gaming center couch, dangling one long leg over the edge. A hologram of some invention he was working on shone above the gaming table. Leave it to Nol to use the horsepower of the gaming center to design one of his high-tech gadgets. “But what choice do we have? Option B is back to juvie for Zach.”

  “That’s why we can’t freakin’ tell them,” Zach said. “Besides, once we find what we’re looking for, we can drop out of ORDER. You can stay with the internship, and I won’t have to worry about finishing my sentence because I’ll have proof that I’m innocent.”

  “LYDIA will give us the edge we need.” Mike frowned and rapped at his keyboard. “Her security is unbelievable. I can’t make a dent in the firewall from here. But once I have a real login, I know I can make the pretty lady sing.”

  “That’s a little weird, Mikey.” He laughed. Zach had really missed his brothers. Being with them again was awesome.

  “Figure of speech. It means LYDIA will tell me everything.”

  “I know what it means.”

  Mikey play-punched Zach in the shoulder. “With her firepower, it’s just a matter of asking the right questions to find the viper who set you up. As long as you buddy up to Jane and get me the right clearance.”

  “Yeah, well that’s the hard part of the plan,” Zach said. “I think I annoy her. She got a little flustered with me.”

  “That’s not how I took it,” Nolan said. “I got the impression that you annoy stone-face Parker. Jane, though…she was on your side.”

  “Speaking of the hovervator.” Mike’s face turned grim. He closed his laptop and looked Zach in the eye.

  “Who said anything about the hovervator?” Zach’s chest began to tense. He’d hoped his brothers had forgotten about it.

  “What happened in there, Zach?” Nolan powered down the holo.

  “Nothing. What are you talking about?”

  “Dude.” Mike drew a circle between the three of them with his finger. “Triplets? Bro Link? Don’t pull that crap on me. I was there. What happened?”

  “What are you talking about?” Zach started to fidget. />
  “Come on,” Nolan said. “I felt it, too. It’s like you had a flashback. What did they do to you in juvie?”

  Zach grimaced. It was time. He fell back on the hover-sofa and stared at the ceiling, choosing his words. “Some of the kids in that place were real trouble. Even the guards were afraid of them. I was an easy target when I first went in. They beat me up for the fun of it. I knew if I didn’t learn to fight, I’d be dead before my sentence was half over. So I started exercising when nobody was looking, and every chance I got, I went to the library and did research. Turns out self-defense is mostly physics. You use leverage to toss a person off-balance. A little force in the right place can buckle their joints. And I can throw more torque into a punch than I ever knew. When I finally started fighting back, I was shocked. And so were they.”

  “That explains how you can kick our butts when we wrestle now,” Mike said. “But it doesn’t explain the panic attack in the hovervator.”

  “One of the guards wasn’t afraid of the kids.” Zach’s anger burned at the memory. “They called him Ace. He controlled them. He used to watch while they beat me up. Never said a word until the day I knocked out three of them. Then he told me he had something more appropriate for people like me. That’s when he sent me to the Blackbody.”

  “You knocked out three at once?” Mike’s eyes were wide. “Proud to be your brother, dude.”

  “A black body?” Nolan ignored Mike and dropped his other leg off the edge of the gaming couch. “An object that totally absorbs incident radiation? That’s theoretical quantum physics. They have models, but the real thing doesn’t exist.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Zach said. “But they had this thing they called the Blackbody. It looked like a big box. I thought Ace was putting me in solitary confinement when he shoved me into it, but—” Zach closed his eyes. Memories of the Blackbody burned with an emptiness worse than death. When he opened his eyes, both brothers were sitting on the floor in front of him, waiting for him to continue. Zach moved off the sofa to the floor with them.

  “The Blackbody absorbed light. I mean like totally absorbed it. I could see out at first. Ace always had this disgusting grin when he watched. Then the Blackbody started clicking. It got louder and louder, and all of a sudden, Ace faded away. Everything faded.

  “Blackbodies absorb light,” Nolan said quietly. “They absorb everything.”

  Zach nodded. “I couldn’t see…anything. Not even the darkness. It was like I was inside a pool of absolutely nothing. It’s not dark, it’s not light, it’s like I don’t exist. I sat there in that…that nothing. Then I faded. Gone. Like, totally gone. Not even in another dimension. It was terrible—I couldn’t even feel.”

  “That explains why we never felt it,” Mike said.

  Nolan nodded. “It absorbed the Bro Link.”

  Zach took a deep breath. “Ace finally pulled me out, and it was like I was real again. I could feel and see, and the light burned, and I never, ever wanted to go back into that box. But he put me back. Over and over. I found out later, that’s how he broke kids. The last time, I told him he’d have to kill me before he’d get me back inside that thing.”

  Nolan touched Zach’s arm. “He never broke you.”

  “Came close.” Zach leaned his forehead against his brother’s.

  “So when the drones clicked onto the hovervator…” Mike’s face was red, his teeth clenched.

  Zach could feel his brother’s rage. “I was inside the Blackbody again.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “He just wanted to forget,” Nolan said. “I would, too.”

  “Maybe that Ace dude is the one who set you up.” Mike’s eyes narrowed. He flipped his pompadour out of his face and typed furiously on the keyboard.

  Zach shivered. “Maybe. He never gave me any reason to think so.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just Ace.”

  Mike tapped some more. “Found him.”

  “Where?”

  Mike’s eyes gleamed. “They mean it when they call the Quantum City Detention Center a minimum-security facility. I got into their mainframe in two tries. Pulled up the list of guards. Arnold Charles Endor. A-C-E. Ace. Seems he has a history with the Office of Internal Affairs. Charges of abuse to inmates.”

  “Got a picture?” Zach jumped onto Mike’s bed.

  Mike turned his laptop. A bald white man with mean eyes and a scar on his cheek stared out at Zach.

  “That’s him.” A clicking sound began to echo in Zach’s mind. All at once, he felt the Blackbody surrounding him, heard Ace laughing. His heart rate shot through the roof.

  Mike turned his laptop back and scrolled. “Charges were always dropped. Convenient. I don’t care if he set you up or not, I’m taking him down. Nobody messes with my brother.” He attacked the keyboard like a wild man.

  “Mikey, he’s a puppet.” Zach exhaled slowly, brought back by his brother’s voice. The Blackbody memory faded. “If we find the guy who set me up, we can take them both down.”

  “I don’t care. Puppet’s a jerk. He’s going down first.” Mike glanced up from the screen. The fury faded slowly from his face. “You sure a dude set you up? Why not a woman?”

  Zach shrugged. “Just assumed it was a guy. I don’t know any women that nasty. But I guess it could have been.”

  Mike nodded. “I need more firepower. I need access to LYDIA. Real access, not like a guest login. Zach, you really need to get cuddly with Jane.”

  “Like I said, I annoy her.” For just an instant, Zach wondered whether using her like that was the right thing. He’d been used by Ace and didn’t like it. “A shame. She’s cute.”

  “Just turn on the charm.” Nolan patted him on the shoulder. “Because tomorrow morning, you’re going to show her the real Zachary Keen.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Brilliant scientist.” Mike and Nolan held their fists out. “Who thinks she’s cute.”

  Jane’s eyes flashed through Zach’s mind. He reached out and bumped his brothers’ fists. “Beats the Blackbody.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jane

  Jane rushed across the Mastermind Complex lobby straight to the teleporter. A quick face scan and the port opened. “War Room, please.”

  The port closed behind her, and the familiar plasma rushed against her skin as the teleporter walls began to hum. Her head spun, and her legs felt as though she were walking on dry land for the first time after being out to sea. The time-space continuum warped and snapped shut around her. She stumbled a bit when it reopened and dumped her on the War Room floor, but by the time she reached her chair, the disorientation was gone.

  “Running late?” Dad frowned from the head of the War Room conference table.

  “Missed the bus.” Jane grinned. “Are they here yet?”

  Dad nodded toward the wall monitors. Jane glanced up and saw Zachary and his brothers sitting patiently in the lobby. She was almost shocked they came back after the way her father had treated Zachary.

  “It appears he is taking your offer,” her father grumbled. “Splendid. Simply wonderful.”

  Jane sighed. Sometimes her father’s sarcasm was hard to swallow.

  “Time to get started, Miss Lew.” He grunted and pressed the intercom. “Send them in.”

  The War Room door opened and Zachary walked in, followed by his brothers. He looked directly at Jane and smiled. It caught her off guard. In a nice way.

  “Good morning,” Zachary said.

  “Have a seat,” Mr. Parker said before Jane could respond. “I presume you’ve come to a decision.”

  “We have, sir,” Zachary said as he slid into his seat. “We’re ready to join ORDER.”

  “I expected as much.” Mr. Parker laced his fingers together. Jane wanted to slap him.
“Miss Lew, would you call the team in, please?

  “Of course, sir.” She took a breath and pressed the intercom. “Anna. Mina.”

  The door opened, and Jane’s closest confidantes walked leisurely into the room. Their gait was self-assured, and they carried an air of professionalism about them. Anna was tall, and the way her long ponytail flowed down her back made Jane mourn her own hair. Mina was petite like Jane. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair was pulled up in a bun, and the red temple bars of her glasses gave her the look of a scholar. Mina reminded Jane of Storm Reid, and Anna resembled a young Lucy Liu. Like Jane, they both wore fitted white lab coats. She nodded to her friends as they took their places beside her. Anna handed her a stack of folders held together by a rubber band.

  “I’d like you to meet the other members of ORDER,” Jane said. “Anna Ming and Williamina Jones, please meet Zachary, Michael, and Nolan Keen.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Anna said.

  “Pleasure,” Williamina said. “Please, call me Mina.”

  Jane surveyed the group for just an instant and was impressed by what she saw. “Anna is a cyber security expert. Mina is a theoretical physicist. With the addition of the Keen brothers, we now have the perfect balance of talent. Mina and Nolan, for their expertise in the field of Physics, Anna and Michael, Cyber Security Wiz and Hacker Extraordinaire—”

  “My field is geomagnetic attractive forces,” Zachary interrupted. “I use theoretical connections to build things.”

  “Yes.” Mr. Parker nodded toward Jane. “Complemented by Miss Lew’s uncanny ability to make connections where none seem to exist. And your cynicism will hopefully balance her inability to see ill intent.”

  Jane gasped. He father was a cynic, too, if he’d just take the time to see it. His first reaction to everyone was to think the worst. Just because she liked to see the good in people was no reason to make her sound incompetent in front of her whole team. Why couldn’t he just accept her for who she was and move on?

  Zachary’s gaze drifted toward Jane. He smiled at her and nodded. She smiled back at him, making certain her father saw it.