Two Schools Out - Forever

131

"Geez, there's so much stuff here," Gasman whispered, reading over Nudge's shoulder.

Yeah-huh, no kidding, I thought. I hadn't expected nearly this amount of info on Itex. I wondered if they'd had any idea that this kid would be so successful at hacking in.

Nudge was scrolling through pages fast. I kept an eye on my watch, ready to hurry everyone on to part two of tonight's little charade.

"I wonder," Nudge said, suddenly stopping her typing and sitting very still. "I wonder if Jeb has been here. I feel something." Cripes, I thought. This is getting creepy.

"Why would Jeb have been here?" I snapped. "He has nothing to do with Itex."

"Max, I can feel his vibe. He was here. Maybe there is something on him, on us, in the Itex files." Her fingers started flying.

"What are you doing?" I whispered. "No ad-libbing-stick to the program."

Irritated, I quickly checked out the others. Gasman and Iggy were beneath a counter, and Gasman was looking up at something. Fang was standing guard by the door.

Angel and her unwanted flea-magnet were sitting very still, close to Fang. Angel's eyes were closed, I noticed with irritation. Nice time to take a nap. Just then her eyes popped open and she looked straight at me. I gave her a reassuring smile and turned back to Nudge.

"Oh, gosh," Nudge whispered as the screen suddenly filled again. "Look, look!"

Frowning, I watched as pages of documents tiled before us. On the top was a photograph of a baby. It was wearing a white hospital bracelet that said, "I'm a Girl! My name is Monique." The Monique part was handwritten.

"That's me, me as a baby," Nudge said excitedly.

I had no idea why she thought this, but whatever. She started scrolling through the pages and hit a huge patch of, like, blueprints or mechanical drawings, schematics, design plans. I looked closer and frowned. These were plans of how to recombine the baby's DNA, graft avian DNA into her stem cells.

"Max, Max, look at this," Nudge whispered, pointing. There, at the bottom of a long medical form, was the signature of Jeb Batchelder. "Oh, my gosh. Max-can you believe this? Fang?"

Fang came over silently and read over her shoulder. His eyes narrowed. I didn't understand-how could Jeb Batchelder be here in Itex's files? We were supposed to be finding out stuff about how evil Itex was-not about the scientists at the School.

Nudge clicked on a link, and a small media-player window popped up. It was labeled "Parents, two days post."

A fuzzy video clip of a black couple started playing. The woman was crying, and the man had a pained, frozen expression on his face, as if he'd just seen a horrible accident. The woman was saying, "My baby! Who would take my baby? Her name was Monique! If anyone knows where my baby is, please, please bring her back. She's my world!" The woman broke down sobbing and couldn't go on.

This wasn't the stuff we were supposed to be seeing. We were supposed to be looking at file after file about how Itex was polluting the planet, destroying natural resources, using child labor, and so on. Despite myself, I was intrigued by what Nudge was finding.

"That doesn't make sense," I said, after the video played. "We saw the medical consent form a few screens back."

Nudge sniffled and clicked back to the form. At the bottom were signatures of Monique's parents, authorizing someone named Roland ter Borcht to "treat" their baby.

But, now that we looked at them, the parent signatures looked exactly like Jeb Batchelder's.

I didn't know what to think. None of this agreed with what they had told me. What was real? Crying silently, Nudge continued to scroll through the file. Another photograph of the woman filled the screen. She looked older and incredibly sad. Stamped across the photo in red ink was the word "Terminated."

Suddenly Iggy pulled his head out from under the counter. He was holding some wires in one hand. "Someone's coming," he said.