Midnight on Strange Street, page 26
It was as though this memory of Zander had sparked his own, because even he seemed to know what to do. His memory was fainter, fuzzy at the edges, but it was strong enough for Lola to make out Dani, Bastian, and herself skating with Zander down Cedar Lane. Lola recognized the memory: It was the team’s very first practice, the day they’d decided to call themselves Sardines.
The glow enveloping the light beings gave a shaking pulse. Whispered words, spoken in a language Lola couldn’t understand, spun around her like wind.
Then the figure who had spoken to Lola stepped forward. It reached out, placing one of its three-fingered hands on Lola’s forehead.
Lola knew then that it was her time to share. Concentrating, she formed her practiced memories—the ones she cherished most.
See them, Lola pleaded. Please. Understand.
Then she allowed the images to take over: A rainy morning when she and Bastian had gathered in her bedroom to make paper boats, with Lola folding and Bastian painting the sails. The day on Hazard Hill when Dani had agreed to a free skate. The morning on Avery’s front porch when Avery had told Lola her thoughts felt like a color. Then Lola retrieved an old, untried memory of Zander, of the gift he’d given her two birthdays ago, when they’d been friends: sheets of floral-patterned folding paper.
The memories rushed from her like a shimmering wave.
The figure took a step back. Why would you wish to remain here, children? Should you stay, further pain is inevitable.
Another memory shook along the tether, exploding in vibrant color: an ordinary day on Hazard Hill, the Sardines laughing and sweeping along the dusty track with their boards. A free skate. Lola didn’t know if the memory was hers, or another Sardine’s. In the end, she realized, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the message: We want to stay here, no matter how hard it is. We want to stay here, with the people we love.
More whispers swept around Lola. Then the joined voices said, They’ve grown attached.
It was only an observation, yet Lola felt instinctively that something was wrong. Attachment was not a thing to be desired.
There is such evil, such ugliness, the voices continued. And yet, there is also beauty. Great capacity for love and happiness. These two extremes exist together, in a perplexing tension. It is incomprehensible to us…and to you, too, dear children.
Still, said the speaking figure. One thing is clear.
Light swept around their circle, touching the face of each Sardine—Avery, then Dani, Zander, then Bastian, and, last of all, Lola. She felt a tingling sensation in her head, as though she was being fed spoonfuls of electricity. The light beings were inside her mind.
The memories returned to Lola of Gil family dinners, complete with their fights, her shared birthday parties with Bastian, the long afternoons spent practicing right here, on Hazard Hill.
Yes, Lola told the light. I want to stay. I do.
The electric buzz subsided, and the light curled back into the blue column. Then the many figures began to slip away, stepping into the column, absorbed by its glow. One by one, they disappeared until only the first figure, the speaker, remained.
It is futile, the light being said, to work against such deep desires as these. And we would never eradicate a world where life-forms like you still exist. We will visit again, perhaps at a time when we can all better comprehend.
The figure stretched out its many arms, as though it were reaching for each of them, trying to show that it cared. Until then, we will protect you as best we can from afar.
A magnificent light burst from the column. Then the last figure was gone, vanished, and the column pulsed radiantly until, in a great whoosh, it shot into the sky.
Avery blinked, wondering if the world around her really was so dark, or if her eyes had been permanently changed. The column was gone, sucked into the storm clouds from which it had emerged. A roll of thunder swept overhead, and then, the very next second, rain sheeted down on the Sardines.
Beside Avery, Lola coughed, wiping at her eyes and pushing back soaked strands of hair from her loose braid. Avery didn’t hesitate. She threw herself on Lola, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.
“Y-you’re okay,” she sputtered through wet, chattering lips. “You’re okay, Lols. You’re okay.” Then a sudden fear seized Avery, and she pulled back. “You are okay, aren’t you?”
Lola smiled and wordlessly tugged up her T-shirt to show the place where Mr. Jensen’s bullet hole had once been. There, in its stead, was a faint blue circular scar.
The others gathered close, wrapping Lola into a group hug. Then they looked toward the sky. Avery wondered if, like her, the others were trying to figure out everything that had happened. Feather-soft words still circled her memory: We will protect you as best we can from afar.
Avery couldn’t say how long they had spent with the light beings. One moment, she was sure they’d only touched down for a minute. The next, she was convinced they’d been on the hill for hours. Maybe, she reflected, the important thing wasn’t the time, but the message.
“Lola,” she said. “You tethered us. You did it.”
Lola smiled. “No, we did it. Together.”
“Do you hear that?” said Dani, peering at the others through the rainfall.
Avery listened. Thunder crashed above, and the rain continued to patter. But she knew that Dani wasn’t talking about the storm. She listened harder, finally making out the sounds of…a crowd.
The Sardines were not alone.
In unison, the five of them turned toward the slope of Hazard Hill. People—adults and children alike—had gathered below. They were gaping and pointing. At them.
Avery took Lola’s hand in hers. The rain had drenched Avery’s clothes, but somehow she didn’t feel cold. She was on fire.
Well, she said to the others. We have to go down there eventually. Let’s do it together. Let’s show them we’re not afraid.
She felt a lavender thread unspool in her mind. Lola. She was tethering them together once more.
The Sardines joined hands. Then they walked downhill into the waiting crowd. Dozens of people had gathered, but none of them approached the Sardines. They only stared, whispered, and pointed.
The Sardines kept walking, following the path they had skated so many times before. Still, no one called out, and no one stood in their way. It was only as the Sardines rounded the final bend in the track that the lights flashed and the shouting started up. The crowd was much denser here, gathered so close together that they blocked the Sardines’ path. And right there, forming the front of the blockade, stood a dozen silver suits.
Avery’s breath caught, but not for long. It was startled out of her by a too-familiar voice shouting her name.
“Veemeister! Vee! Hey, honey, look here!”
A man was racing toward her, a video camera hoisted on his shoulder. Even through all the layers of plastic that covered his camera and clothes, Avery knew in an instant who it was.
“Look here!” Eric Miller called. “Come on, Vee! What did you experience?”
Avery faced her father.
He had turned his back on her in the principal’s office. He had canceled plans on her, again and again. He had lied. He had given her away. He had allowed bad people to take her and hook her up to machines. Now he stood before her with his camera and all the nerve in the world.
The blue light burned inside Avery, but she wasn’t angry anymore. Now she knew the truth.
With calm concentration, she focused her gaze on the lens of her father’s camera. There was a moment of silence. Then the lens shattered, little pieces of glass crumbling onto the muddied earth.
Avery didn’t wait to see Eric Miller’s reaction. Instead, she turned to her friends. The Sardines nodded to each other, the last of the starlight fading from their eyes.
Things will never be the same, Avery thought.
And the others thought back, in unison, No, they won’t.
Avery didn’t know what they were walking into. She only knew that they were walking on.
“Stop right there!”
The words pelted off Dani like the rain. She didn’t care that Mr. Carl Jensen himself was standing at the base of the hill, lit by a floodlight and flanked on both sides by his silver suits. His threats meant nothing now. Who did he think he was yelling at? Kids?
They weren’t kids.
They were the Sardines.
The silver suits barred their path, and Mr. Jensen shouted on. His navy suit was soaked through, beads of water stuck on his mustache and gathering on his wide-brimmed hat.
“Step away, they’re dangerous! They attacked me earlier!” he yelled at the crowd. Then, to the silver suits, “Stand your ground!”
With one mind, the Sardines stopped walking and faced their enemy. This was the man who had tracked and hunted them down, the father of their biggest bully—just a bigger bully himself. He had tried to kill Nando, nearly killed Lola, and he was a cheater, too; Dani hadn’t forgotten Zander’s confession. What made the richest man in Callaway want to cheat?
Together, the five of them pooled their fire, forming a single force. The force pushed gently into the crowd, sending bystanders shuffling back. Then it reached Mr. Jensen and held him firmly in place. It stilled the bodies of the silver suits, froze the entire crowd, as the Sardines passed them by.
“Look what they’re doing!” Mr. Jensen shouted, straining against his invisible bonds. “Do you see their power? Do you see the danger? Someone stop them before they get away!”
No one stopped the Sardines. They walked on to the finish line.
There, at the base of the hill, was a gold car. A man emerged from the driver’s side.
It was Nando.
A question rippled through the Sardines, filled with uncertainty:
Can we trust him?
Dani glanced at Zander, and together they shared with the others what Nando had told them about the DGE, and how he and Ira had gone rogue.
But, thought Dani, those could be more lies. Another trick.
No. Lola’s thought reached out to the others, firm with conviction. It’s not a trick. He’s my brother. I took a bullet for him, didn’t I?
With that, Lola released Avery’s hand and stepped ahead of the others.
“Lola,” Nando said, throwing his arms around her.
“Nando,” she said into her brother’s shirt. “Take us away from here.”
With that, the Sardines piled into the car.
Thunder rumbled all around, and the rain fell harder.
But there was something different about this rain. Through the still-open car door came the scent of roses and lemons, heavy and sweet.
We will protect you as best we can from afar.
Dani knew this new rain was their doing. She watched from inside the car as the crowd regained movement and wiped at their eyes, looking around in confusion, as though utterly unsure of how they had ended up there.
“What’s happening?” asked Nando as he slowly backed the car away, toward the desert road, headlights on.
“Their memories,” Dani said, knowing it to be true. Bastian had been right all along: Memory was what the light beings knew best. “The aliens are taking their memories away.”
The Sardines sat in Nando’s apartment, in a small living room with plaster walls and two worn leather couches. Minutes after they’d arrived, the woman in the gray pantsuit had shown up—Ira Mehta, Nando’s coworker and girlfriend. But, Nando explained, what the Sardines most needed to know was this: Ira, like Nando, was on their side.
“I just want to be safe,” Avery said. “Really safe.”
“I want to see Mom and Dad,” said Lola. “They must be so worried.”
Dani muttered, “Bet my parents don’t even know I’m gone.”
Zander said nothing at all. He could still feel tingling, electric waves running down his skin, the same sensation he’d felt as he’d watched the strange, memory-cleansing rain.
The true nature of the rain became clear when Ira showed up, soaked. She couldn’t recall any of the past day’s events, even though Bastian swore she’d been the one to give him a lemonade filled with the antidote to the DGE’s anti-power injection.
“Once I was cured,” Bastian explained, “it was like I could pass it on to Lola and Avery, because they were close by. The three of us were connected again. That’s how we escaped and found the others. That was because of you, Ira, remember? You told me Nando’s secret phrase: The door is always open.”
Ira frowned intently at Bastian, wringing out her hair. “I remember the plan,” she said. “The antidote and the code. I remember going to a clubhouse, leaving a note to warn you away from Hazard Hill. But your names, your faces, this day—” Ira touched her head. “There’s nothing.”
Now, though, Ira knew the Sardines’ secret for good.
And, of course, so did Nando.
“You’d better be the good guys,” Dani said. “If not—”
“They are!” cried Lola, turning to Nando, who sat by her side. “They have to be.”
Nando hugged Lola close and said, “We’re trying to be, anyway.”
“So what do you want from us now?”
All eyes turned to Zander. He’d surprised even himself by asking the question. A part of him felt he didn’t have the right to speak. He had stood on Hazard Hill with the Sardines, seen the light beings, and shared their memories with them. But none of that stuff made him a true Sardine. He could still remember the looks on the team’s faces when they’d first seen him hanging with Mitchell’s crowd. He could remember Dani’s expression when he’d told her the Grackles had cheated at Glow in the Park, and the look on Bastian’s face when Mitchell had spat on him at Glow Expo, and Zander had done nothing—just stood by and watched.
Maybe the Sardines were all outsiders; maybe they shared that bond. But Zander wondered if he would ever be one of them again.
“What do you want?” Zander asked Nando and Ira again. “Now that you know our secret, what’ll you do with it? Same as what Jensen’s people did? Connect us to wires? Perform experiments?”
That got an answer out of Nando. “No, nothing like that. We don’t want to use you. We want you to live normal, peaceful lives. We want to protect you. We want to be your friends.”
Beside Zander, Dani squinted. “Friends, huh?” She looked at Bastian and Lola. “Do you two want to be friends with your brother?”
Lola said nothing, only laid her head on Nando’s shoulder.
Bastian looked hesitant, but there was a glimmer of hope in his dark brown eyes. Zander guessed that’s how he felt, too: He wanted to believe that Nando was good. After the running, the sirens, the fights—Zander wanted to feel safe.
“So,” he said, “what do we do now?”
Nando looked to the television. The sound was muted, but on-screen, the local early morning news was airing. The weatherman was cheerily reporting on rain showers that would likely last all day. A news anchor began a story about a lost neighborhood cat.
There was no talk of Hazard Hill. There was nothing about strange columns of light or rain that smelled of flowers, not even about the fire that had raged there the night before. It was enough to make Zander wonder if the last twenty-four hours had only been in his head.
But when he looked at the Sardines, at Nando and Ira, he knew he hadn’t imagined a single second. All of it was real, and the seven of them in this room—maybe they were the only ones left who knew the full truth.
“I guess,” said Nando, gesturing to the very normal news, “life can go back to the way it was. If this rain does what we think it does, the DGE and Jensen might not even know who you are, or that Ira and I went rogue. If that’s the case, we can get them off your trail and out of Callaway. Make up false readings that will lead them away from you.”
“Then what?” asked Bastian. “We’re supposed to go back to life like none of this ever happened?”
“Well,” said Nando, “there are worse options, right?”
Yes, thought Zander. There were worse options. Options involving Gloworks, Inc. and a government organization intent on turning five kids into weapons for the war.
There were way worse options.
“I don’t think we’ll ever really be the same.” Lola spoke softly, looking around at the others. “But it’s what they wanted, don’t you think?”
Zander, like the other Sardines, knew who Lola meant by “they.” He remembered the light and the cooling breath that had filled his lungs on Hazard Hill, the many arms held out like a hundred embraces.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s what they wanted.”
Dani turned to the others, a cautious smile on her lips. “You all get that we did it, right? We convinced aliens not to blow up the whole world.”
“Not that the whole world will ever thank us,” said Avery. “Sooo ungrateful.”
“I just didn’t think our plan would actually work,” said Dani.
“Uh-huh.” Bastian crossed his arms. “You mean, you’re shocked that my plan worked.”
Dani thought about this, then shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Consider me impressed, Gil.”
Avery nudged Lola’s shoulder and said, “Let’s not forget who really saved the day. That was expert tethering, Lols.”
“It was nothing,” Lola replied, grinning.
All four of them exchanged glances, a happy triumph in their eyes. Zander sank into the couch, feeling suddenly alone. Maybe he’d shared a connection with the Sardines atop Hazard Hill, but he hadn’t shared the past year with them—all the meetings in Cedar House and nighttime games of sardines, the glowboard practices and the inside jokes.
Then he felt slight pressure on his wrist.
It was Dani.
“Zee,” she said. “We couldn’t have done it without you, either. The aliens said it had to be all five of us, or it wouldn’t work.”
“Yeah,” said Avery. “Face it: You’re stuck with the smelly Sardines, whether you like it or not.”
