Criminal Destiny (6 page)

“We'll catch you,” I promise.

Malik casts me a look that plainly says nobody's going to be able to catch anybody. But he's holding out his arms. For Amber, jumping is a bad option, but also the only one there is.

She's at least twenty feet up when she kicks toward us.

The cop stops pulling. “Don't do it, kid!”

It's too late. Amber lets go. It's almost a swan dive. We scramble to guess the point of impact, because she's going to snap her neck if we don't catch her. I have an awful flashback to my last sight of poor Hector, clinging to the back of the cone truck right before it plunged off the road and down into the steep valley.

Please don't let us lose anybody else.

Despite her toughness, Amber is screaming all the way. We all know we'll be crushed like bugs if she lands on us, but
she'll
be crushed if we just let her drop. We reach up, and suddenly she's there, coming down between us. We each get a hand on her before the force of her fall slams the four of us into the refuse of the Dumpster.

“Amber!” Tori is frantic. “Are you okay?”

“I—I think so.” Amber sits up in the trash, moving all her limbs, taking stock of herself.

“I'm alive,” croaks Malik. “No thanks to Laska.”

“Kid?” comes an anxious voice from above. It's the cop, and he's more worried than mad.

It's a good news/bad news kind of thing. It's good that nobody's hurt. But then he disappears, which can only mean one thing.

He's coming after us.

I should kill Amber for putting us through this.

But right now I'm too busy running for my life.

One by one, we climb out of the Dumpster and drop to the pavement. We're covered in coffee grounds and pizza grease, and my nose is bleeding. But under the circumstances, we're lucky.

We dash down the alley to the next street, and find an even narrower alley off of there. We hug the wall, peering out just in time to see the police cruiser pass by on the main road, our cop hunched over the wheel, looking from side to side.

Thanks so much, Laska. We don't have enough trouble with Project Osiris on the hunt for us. We need the law breathing down our necks. If that cop catches us, it won't
be just Amber who's in trouble. He'll arrest all four of us this time. I wonder if there's such a crime as aiding and abetting a moron.

“We've got to get out of here,” Amber says urgently.

“You think?” I ask sarcastically.

Eli's not so sure. “Maybe it makes more sense to lie low.”

Laska shakes her head. “His car has a police radio in it. I heard it while we were driving to the medical building—all these cops telling each other what to watch for. He could have every officer in Denver on the lookout for four kids.”

It's not good. If the Purples hear about four runaways, it's not going to take them long to put two and two together. Either they'll find us first, or the cops will, and we'll be sitting ducks in a cell when Serenity's goon squad comes to drag us back to Happy Valley. We can try to explain what's happened. But Laska's already proven how believable our clone story is out here in the real world.

“We could separate, and meet back when the heat's off,” Tori suggests.

“No way!” I exclaim. “Two stupids don't make a smart. We almost got ourselves killed getting Laska back. We're not going to break up on purpose.”

“We need to stick together,” Eli agrees. “But we also need
to be miles away from where they're going to be searching for us. How do people get around a city?”

“We had the Purples' car,” I remind him, “but that wasn't good enough for you.”

“We had to ditch it,” Eli defends the decision. “The Purples were following us by air.”

“People take buses,” Tori reasons, “and trains—”

“Those things are full of passengers,” Eli cuts in. “Someone is bound to remember four kids and where they got off.”

“What about a taxi?” Amber suggests.

“Even worse,” Eli replies seriously. “The driver could be listening to the radio and hear about the search. At best he'd know exactly where he dropped us. At worst, we could be still in the car when it happens.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” I ask belligerently. “Flap our arms and fly?”

While we stand there, looking helplessly at each other, a police car cruises by on the street at the opposite end of our alley. I can tell we're all wondering the same thing—is that the same cop, or has he sounded the alarm, and we're already being surrounded?

“What we need,” Tori muses, “is a ride from someone who doesn't know he's giving us a ride.”

“Oh, right!” I explode. “Like there's somebody that blind or that stupid!”

We hear a loud grinding sound as a truck gears down to come to a halt. For a moment, it fills the opening at the end of the lane before stopping just past it. The driver jumps out, and disappears into a small luncheonette.

Suddenly, as if drawn by some invisible magnet, Tori is scampering toward it.

“What are you doing?” I hiss. One girl trying to get me killed per day is my limit.

Urgently, she motions us over to join her. It's a medium-size dump truck with a cherry-picker attachment on the back. The sign on the cab door reads:
McHenry's Tree Service, LLC.
The bed is overflowing with leafy branches and twigs.

“So what?” I challenge in a whisper.

“Don't you get it?” Tori insists. “In Serenity, that company from Taos used to come to trim the branches away from roofs and power lines. Did they dump the cuttings in the center of town? No. They took them somewhere else.” She regards us meaningfully. “We want to go somewhere else.”

“You mean we stow away in there?” Eli asks.

My jaw must be stuck out at least three inches. “I refuse.”

“What's the matter?” Amber challenges. “Are you afraid of a few sticks?”

“Not the sticks.” My face feels hot. “The bugs.”

She's thunderstruck. “Wait—you're afraid of bugs?
You?”

“Not
afraid
. I just don't like them. The Dumpster was bad enough with those flies. Who knows what's living in all these trees!”

“Listen, Malik,” Eli begins. “We're all doing stuff we don't like—”

A police siren cuts the air. I scramble up the side of that truck so fast I probably leave a smoke trail. I vault over the edge of the bed and disappear into the leafy branches. I hear the rustling and snapping of the others piling in beside me.

As I burrow lower into the dense green cuttings, twigs scratch at my face and arms. There are thicker branches too, and I roll onto one, nearly skewering myself, shish-kebab style. My head collides with something hard.

“Ow!” Amber's voice.

I hope it hurts.

“Is everybody here?” Tori asks.

“Do you mean us, or the caterpillars?” I reply. They're everywhere—worms with fur coats. The garbage was
miserable, but at least it wasn't
alive.
My skin is crawling.

The sirens are all around us now; no one is disputing whether or not we did the right thing. We lie low, not that we have a lot of choice. It feels like forever, but it's probably only ten more minutes.

The door of the cab slams, and the truck starts up again. And then we're away. Every motion of the heavy vehicle inflicts more bruises, more scratches, and more itchy discomfort. It's stop and start for a while, and then we accelerate to a steady speed.

“I think we're on a highway,” Amber calls.

With great effort, I crawl/swim/climb to the “surface” and peer over the side of the truck. Tori guessed right. The tall buildings of Denver's core are behind us; we're leaving town, not exactly safe, but at least we're putting some distance between ourselves and the police search.

I burrow back down and report to the others.

“How do we know when to get off?” Amber asks.

“That's easy,” says Tori. “When we stop.”

“Let's hope this isn't an express to Massachusetts,” I grumble.

Tori laughs. “I don't know much about Massachusetts, but I'm pretty sure they've got their own branches. They don't need to truck them in from Colorado.”

It's an uncomfortable ride, but no one is complaining, not even me. The farther we get from downtown Denver, the greater our sense of hope that we might have avoided the disaster that very nearly put an end to our brief shot at freedom.

After several more minutes, the truck slows, and we can tell we're off the highway.

“Get ready,” Tori advises. “The next time we stop, we should make a run for it.”

The McHenry's truck makes several turns, but never actually halts. At last, we feel the momentary sense of braking, and emerge from our hiding place, ready to leap for it. All at once, we're backing up, our vehicle emitting a series of warning beeps.

“What's going on?” demands Amber.

Finally, we stop. That is to say, the truck does. The bed is tilting, so we are too. Behind us—quickly becoming below us—a loud electric grinding begins, the kind of noise where you feel the vibration in your teeth below the gum line. Eventually, the bed rises so high that the contents—and that includes us—begin to slide. The back flap lifts on a hydraulic motor, and the branches start to pour out. The grinding becomes a whole lot louder, and a cloud of dust is thrown back at us, stinging our eyes and making breathing
difficult. Through it, we can see a huge metal hopper and, inside it, the whirling cutting blades of a wood chipper.

“Get out! Get out!
Now!”
I scream.

We try to move in the opposite direction, but it's like trying to run straight up. We're part of the load, and the load is being drawn inexorably into the maw of the machine.

I crawl to the side of the truck bed, and clamp both arms over the top. Eli tries to do the same, but the slope is pulling him down too quickly.

I throw out a leg, accidentally kicking him in the stomach. “Grab hold!”

He latches onto my foot, locking it into his armpit. Tori comes up behind me and throws her arms around my neck. That's three of us accounted for. Where's Laska?

I spot her. She's clenching a thick branch sliding down the center of the payload, screaming in terror. In desperation, Eli reaches out for her with his free hand. He misses Amber, but gets just enough of the branch to stop its descent. God only knows how he stays attached to me and still hangs onto the branch and Amber. But the bed is close to full vertical at this point, and the choice has become starkly simple: we hold on, or we get sliced and diced.

I'm yelling my head off in agony and exertion. My grip on the side of the truck is what's keeping everybody from
falling. Amber's howling, Tori's weeping. You can barely hear any of it over the shriek of the cutting blades.

I don't know how it happens. One minute, I'm clamped to the side; the next, I'm not. We're skidding along the dumper, still attached to one another, but heading down toward the lethal blades. We're going to die and all I can think is it's my fault.

In the noise and chaos, we never hear the hydraulic motor that closes the truck's back flap. The next thing I know, Amber yelps in pain, as the three of us fall on top of her, crushing her against the metal barrier that has just saved our lives.

The bed is coming down again, lowering to horizontal. My heartbeat, though, is anything but normal. We were so close to being dead. If the back flap had stayed open a split second longer . . .

We're clones who came from nothing and no one, and we would have been gone as if we'd never existed.

Somehow, we manage to climb over the side and jump to the ground and roll. When I try to get up again, my legs have turned to rubber.

Eli is the first to make it to his feet. “Move!” he hisses. “Before we get run over by our own escape truck!”

We manage to get up and stagger clear. That's when the
driver of the truck spots us for the first time.

“Hey, what are you kids doing here? This is a restricted area!”

“Sorry,” Tori calls, during a pretty good job of sounding off-hand, considering what we've just been through. “We were looking for a place to play soccer.”

“What—here? One of these machines could take your arm off and chop it into hamburger!”

“Yeah, right,” I say bitterly. “Like
that
could ever happen.”

There's a gate in the barbed-wire fence where trucks come and go. Newly energized, we sprint for it.

I don't want to kill Laska anymore. When you're on the run, there are enough ways to die.

And we just narrowly escaped one of the worst.

Malik proves that a point can be interesting and gross at the same time.

“If we went into that wood chipper, what would have happened when the cops tried to take DNA samples of the goo that was left of us? We'd be a perfect match for four criminals who are supposed to be locked up in jail.”

Amber rolls her eyes. “At least the caterpillars didn't get you.”

He glares at her. “Big talk from the person who got us into this mess. You'd better hurry, Laska. There are still a few people in Denver who don't know that we're clones.”

Amber's tight-lipped. “Okay, that was a mistake. But it was a chance worth taking. If it had worked, Osiris would be out of business, and we wouldn't be sneaking around
and looking over our shoulders.”

I'm not so sure how I feel about putting Osiris “out of business.” That would mean my parents would end up in jail for being a part of it. I obviously hate what they did to me, but I can't bring myself to hate them. I know they loved me. They would have cried if I'd gone into that chopping machine—and not just because their experiment was down the drain.

We've been walking about twenty minutes, watching the dusk creep over the open fields.

Eli says what we've all been thinking, but haven't had the guts to say out loud: “It's getting dark. We're going to have to find a place to sleep.”

“Oh, no problem,” Malik says sarcastically. “We'll just check into one of these five-star hotels and order up room service.”

“It doesn't have to be a hotel,” Eli persists. “We just need shelter and a place to rest.”

Amber squints and points. “I see some lights over there.”

After another few minutes, we come to a neighborhood. There are tree-lined streets, and neat brick and adobe homes. It's the closest thing to Serenity we've seen since leaving, with a couple of major differences. First, all of
Serenity would fit into a few blocks here, minus the plastics factory, of course. And second, in Serenity, every home had a tree house, and a pool. These houses are smaller, and not quite as well kept. When poor Hector dented his garage door trying to teach himself to ride a bike, the damage was fixed by nightfall. Things aren't as perfect in the real world. Here every house has something at least a little bit wrong with it—a missing bulb, a loose curbstone, uncut grass, an oil-stained driveway, or a pile of folded newspapers on the front stoop.

Amber notices that too, despite the fading light. “What kind of person orders newspapers and just leaves them on the porch?”

Eli looks thoughtful. “Maybe they got really busy, so they haven't had time to read.”

Malik is doubtful. “Too busy to see them? They probably trip over them every time they go in and out of the house.”

“No, then the papers would be all ripped up,” I muse. “It's almost like there's nobody living here.” I know it must sound crazy that it takes so long to dawn on me. But we're four kids who never left Serenity, even overnight. “Vacation!” I exclaim.

Malik looks mildly interested. “What about it?”

“That's why the papers are piling up! The people are on vacation! This house is empty!”

Amber is getting excited. “So we can find a way in, and hole up while we figure out what we should do next.”

Malik breaks into a big grin. “First dibs on the TV.”

“First dibs on the shower,” I chime in.

Eli looks worried. “I'd really love to avoid breaking and entering.”

“I admire you for that,” says Malik with a smile. “Tell you what—you sleep on the street. I'm looking forward to a nice warm bed.”

“Come on, Malik. This is somebody's home. How about respect for other people's property?”

“How about respect for DNA?” he shoots back. “The guy I'm cloned from—you think he'd have a problem with breaking into this house? He'd probably steal everything that wasn't nailed down too. But I'm not going to do that because I'm too nice. You're welcome.”

Amber rolls her eyes. “Shut up, Malik. I'm not thrilled about breaking in either. But sometimes you have to balance the bad thing you do for the good result you need. We need to get out of the open where we can be spotted. We need a real night's sleep. We need to eat something. Everything we need is inside that door.”

Eli is unconvinced. “I can just imagine the people we're cloned from using excuses like that to justify what they do.”

Sometimes it's easier to picture Eli as an exact genetic copy of a Good Samaritan than a criminal.

“We're not them,” I soothe. “We're us. And we're just trying to survive. If people see four kids sleeping outside in some park, what do you think they'll do? Call the cops.”

Eli nods reluctantly. “Fine. How do we get in?”

“Let's wait for it to get a little darker,” I advise. “If this place is anything like Serenity, everybody minds everyone else's business. We'll wait till nobody can see what we're doing, and go in from the back.”

We slip through the gate into the yard, and into a metal tool shed. The floor practically crawls with ants and beetles, and I hear a whimper from Malik. (For a big, tough guy, he's such a wimp about insects.) I pick up four flashlights. We can't use the lights of the house because we don't want the neighbors to know anybody's in there.

Once the sun is down, it gets dark pretty fast. It's time to make our move.

“So what happens now?” asked Malik. “Heave a rock through the back slider?”

I don't even answer him. I'm concentrating on the house, searching for a way in. I notice the upstairs windows
first. It must be an artist thing—something about those windows is vaguely unbalanced. The sash sits a tiny bit higher in the one on the left. It's barely a quarter-inch difference, but to me it's glaringly obvious.

The window isn't open—there's no gap. But I'm willing to bet—if Serenity kids bet, which, of course, we don't—that it's closed but not locked. That's why it's slightly higher; there's no latch forcing it down.

So if I can get up there . . .

All at once, I see the path. It's as clear as if someone marked it in chaser lights: shinny up the drainpipe, sidestep to the roof of the screen porch, and then it should be handhold one, handhold two, handhold three—and you're in.

As I'm climbing, I try not to think about where this strange skill set comes from. My dad used to be a rock climber, but of course he's not really related to me. I'm probably cloned from a cat burglar—and a good one, too, to qualify for the Osiris experiment. (Which is obviously nothing to be proud of. Still, it could be a lot worse. One of the guys is a copy of the Crossword Killer.)

I was right. The sash raises easily. I shoot the others a triumphant grin. They seem amazed. I'm the opposite. As unsure of myself as I can sometimes be, I had total confidence in the way up and the way in. Go figure.

Once I crawl inside, it hits me: we are now officially criminals, just like the people who supplied our DNA. True, we've broken laws before in the course of our run for freedom. This feels different. We chose a house, and we busted in. I understand why we did it. It was even partly my idea. But I can't escape the sense that a corner has been turned.

You think too much, Torific. Do what you have to do.

I switch on my flashlight and take a quick look around. I'm in the bedroom of a girl about my age, all frills and pastel colors. It's a stab at my heart. This could have been my room before I traded dust ruffles and stuffed animals for art supplies and a studio in the attic. When I thought my parents were my real parents, and thanked my lucky stars that I lived in the town ranked number one in the country in almost every category. It's not that long ago, but it might as well be a different century.

I'd never go back to that ignorance. But I don't doubt that I was happy.

I shake myself, and hurry down to the back slider to let the others in. Our lights play over the living room. It's a modest house, nowhere near the luxury we were accustomed to in Serenity. But after what we've suffered in the past few days, it's like coming into port in a raging storm.

Malik follows his flashlight into the kitchen, and is soon
rummaging around the fridge.

Eli is disapproving. “Bad enough we break into their house. We shouldn't be stealing their food.”

“Who are these people?” Malik demands. “Don't they eat?”

“They're on vacation,” Amber supplies. “They're not going to leave food to spoil while they're away.”

Malik has moved on to the freezer. “Jackpot!” he exclaims reverently. “Microwave pizza! Who's hungry?”

The simple answer—everybody. (Nearly getting killed gives you an appetite.)

We stuff ourselves with pizza and a box of Fig Newtons we find in the pantry. Malik chugs an entire bottle of Dr Pepper and opens one of Coke. Eli looks like every bite is choking him.

“Cheer up, boy scout,” Malik advises, mouth full. “Hating your pizza isn't going to make it any less stolen.”

“We're just doing what we have to,” Amber argues, “to survive.”

Malik takes a giant swig of his second drink. “How many chances did we ever get to eat as much junk food as we want without some hidden camera recording us, and Project Osiris making notes? Like pigging out makes you a criminal.” He utters a long, rolling belch.

“There ought to be a law against
that
,” I say.

Afterward, I stack up the plates and begin washing them off in the sink. Malik starts to say something, but I freeze him with a fierce look. “Bad enough we broke in and ate their food. I don't want these poor people to come home and find a big mess in their house.”

“You're a saint,” he agrees. “You must have been cloned from Joan of Arc.”

We learn a few things about our “hosts” from the mail on their kitchen counter. They are the Campanella family, and the Denver suburb they live in is called Mountain View. One of the parents seems to be a teacher, since there's a bulletin from the Colorado Education Association. There's a magazine called
Sports Illustrated
, so somebody must a sports fan. Another,
TV Guide
, lists every show you can watch on television that week. I can't helping thinking how much thinner it would be if they published it for Serenity, where there's only one channel.

“Well, we know one thing about the Campanellas,” Malik crows, holding up a large envelope covered with printed messages and a lot of exclamation points. “They're dumb. This says they might have won ten million dollars, and they didn't even bother to open it.” He rips into the side with his index finger.

Eli is horrified. “That's somebody's mail!”

“And they're welcome to it,” Malik agrees readily. “It's the ten million bucks I want.” He sorts through the contents, his brow darkening. “There's no money in here!”

“They
might
have won ten million dollars,” Amber reminds him. “They also might not have.”

“The outside world stinks. All they do is get people's hopes up.” He crumples the envelope into a ball and tosses it back onto the counter. “I'm going to grab a shower.”

There are two bathrooms upstairs. The boys take one, and Amber and I take the other. It's only after we're clean that we realize how much our clothes aren't. We're still in our Serenity Day outfits from the night of our escape, and they're totally ripe. They've been wandering through the desert, riding in a boxcar, running from the Purples, and rolling in a Dumpster. And they're sap-, leaf-, and blood-spotted from our ride in the tree service truck.

“Well,” Amber reasons, “you can't keep a low profile when you stink to high heaven.”

Even Eli reluctantly agrees. Like it or not, we're going to have to “borrow” some clothes.

The Campanellas are a family of five and, between them, they have sweatshirts and jeans to fit everybody. The dad is a fair match for Malik, but the teenage son is
quite a bit bigger than Eli, who looks skinny and lost in a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. I have the same problem with the younger daughter's stuff (she's at least a size and a half larger than me). Amber can make do with the older daughter's, although the clothes are tight, which has her worrying about her goal weight for a change.

“Right,” Malik says sarcastically. “Because being a fugitive is fattening.”

We also take backpacks from the kids, and an extra outfit each. By the process of first dibs, Malik ends up with a sparkly pink princess knapsack.

I can't hold back a smirk, and Amber practically giggles, which doesn't happen very often. “It looks good on you,” she manages. “Very manly.”

He glares at her. “You're talking to someone who's out ten mil, so watch it.”

Eli leaves a note for the Campanellas:
We're very sorry about taking your things. We'll pay you back someday.

“A little short on details,” I observe.

“We can't very well tell them who we are and where to find us. And we can't leave them any money. We're going to need every cent we've got and more.”

Malik is sprawled out on the bed beside the princess backpack, flipping channels on the TV. Suddenly, he sits
bolt upright. “Guys—get over here!”

There on the screen is a picture of the rear façade of a four-story building and the alley below. It doesn't take us long to realize that we're looking at the Medical Arts building in downtown Denver—the window we climbed out of, and the Dumpster we landed in.

“. . . the young girl, who appeared to be in a disturbed condition, was being taken for psychological evaluation when three other young people engineered her escape. They rappelled down the side of this building using a fire hose and disappeared into the city. Police are investigating the sighting of four youths in a municipal services yard in Mountain View, but caution that they have not yet confirmed that these two incidents are related.
”