"Masterminds" by Gordon Korman, Chapters 20–27

The lights of Serenity fall away behind me and I’m under the canopy of the heavens, too, which makes it easier to keep my quarry in sight.

If we weren’t so debilitated and in such pain, we’d make great comedy, teetering along on unsteady legs like baby giraffes learning how to walk.

In a Herculean feat of strength, Malik ends up dragging two bikes plus Hector.

Crouched beside me, Malik utters a single moan, and passes out, his head lolling onto Hector.

A moment later, the searchlight is gone, and the road is dark again. The engine noise diminishes as the craft moves away.

Tori is distraught. “We can’t go on, we can’t go back, and we definitely can’t stay here! Can anybody think of another option?”

My own mother, as our teacher, is one of the main perpetrators of this giant lie.

I face the others, conflicting emotions swirling in my brain, now that the agony has subsided.

Everything I thought I understood has just been upended. You might as well repeal the law of gravity, too, so I can’t trust that my next step won’t send me hurtling off into space.

“Our ‘parents’!” she seethes. “They’re not going to get away with this!”

He’s limping as we straggle out of the park.

I try to seem abashed. “Sorry.”

People are outside, decorating their houses with streamers and bunting.

But in reality, these are our parents and neighbors, people we’ve seen in bathing suits and in line at the store buying Metamucil. I fell for it harder than most of the kids and I’m not proud of that. It only strengthens my resolve. I won’t be their stooge anymore.

Even Malik is a subdued version of his usual Zeus-hurling-thunderbolts self.

“Eat something, honey,” my mother exhorts.

I have it on the highest authority—Dad’s—that this year’s Serenity Day extravaganza will last exactly twenty-three minutes.

“They’ll never catch us now!” Amber exults.

The cab resonates with the crack of Malik’s hoe against the dish.

How could we be so crazy as to believe that we could knock out a sophisticated high-tech barrier system with gardening tools? Even now, through the waves of nausea and torture, I hear the whack, whack, whack of Malik relentlessly pummeling the dish, never giving up, although the hoe in his hand is inadequate to get the job done.

He fights valiantly on.

I look up just in time to see the cone truck bashing through the line of posts and sailing over the precipice.

Thorns pierce into my skin, but I hang on through the barrage of pain.

As the overhead foliage thickens into a canopy, the light of the moon and stars is lost, and I’m stumbling blind.

I always thought Serenity was the lamest backwater on the face of the earth. Now I know that compared with what’s around Serenity, the town itself is New York or Paris or Tokyo or one of those huge cities you read about.

It’s boulders and buttes and crags that have to be scrambled over or squeezed between.

We wait forever, but at least we’re not walking anymore. I’m pretty sure the track is still in regular use, because the top of the rail is shiny. Still, it’s a long, nervous vigil.

The liquid tankers are sealed, and the grain hoppers are only accessible from the top.

Eli hops up on it, but the motion of the train throws off his precarious balance, and he has to jump down again.

Despite the whole-body throb of my wounds, the exhaustion of twenty-four hours on the run, the numbing lack of sleep, the ravenous hunger, and the paralyzing fear over what might lie ahead, I feel a deep satisfaction for that.

“Nobody who saw us getting on the train would accuse us of having any minds at all. Not to mention we screwed up our escape so badly we almost got ourselves killed. And”—his voice drops in volume—“we did get one of us killed.”
He reaches for a bottle of Gatorade, but we can see the desolation in his frantic gulping.

He’s a psychotic killer with nine innocent people on his conscience.

“When I picture a criminal mastermind,” Tori ventures, “it’s always a little, you know, romantic. Like an intricately planned scheme to break into the Louvre and steal the Mona Lisa. But Bartholomew Glen is just—sick.”

We lapse into a melancholy silence, listening to the endless rumble of the train.

The voice reaches me through turbulent dreams—exploding trucks lighting up the night; Hector Amani, gone; enemies in purple; Felix Hammerstrom chasing me in his Lexus, the front bumper nudging the backs of my knees as I run for my life.

Some of the houses along the tracks are really ramshackle, and the fencing is torn and rusty.

She sees what we’ve gotten used to: We are sunburned, scratched, bruised, disheveled, and filthy, not to mention red-eyed and exhausted.

The McNally kids are all in groups, chatting amiably.

At close range, under indoor lighting, our bedraggled state and our otherness will be even more painfully obvious.

We’re the focal point because we’re battered, ragged strangers, not because of the invisible history of our birth. But I can’t escape a deep foreboding that people will be looking at us for those other reasons soon enough.