A World Without You(24)
“Told you,” Ryan says under his breath. Harold squeaks nervously.
“Told you what?” I ask Ryan, turning in my seat to face him.
“At breakfast,” Gwen says, her voice low, “he said—”
The office door opens fully, and Dr. Franklin leads two people inside: a white woman with dyed auburn hair frizzy at the ends and a heavyset Asian man. The man has a large, worn briefcase in tan leather that doesn’t match his black suit, and the woman carries a satchel that seems to be weighted heavily with papers.
“This is everyone?” the man asks Dr. Franklin. He nods.
The woman turns to us, holding her arm out, indicating that the Doctor can sit down with his students. It’s strange to see him treated like one of us.
“Hello, all,” the woman says warmly, a bright smile on her face. I give Gwen and Ryan a side-eyed glance. Gwen keeps rubbing her hands together, probably trying to hide the fire crackling under her skin. The Doctor reaches over, patting her back as if to assure her that all is well. Ryan’s jaw is hard, and I think he’s grinding his teeth.
“We hope to get to know each of you over the next few weeks,” the woman continues. Her voice is sticky sweet. I dislike her immediately.
“Why are you here?” Ryan asks aggressively. The Doctor shoots him a look.
“Right now, we’re just going to get to know you,” the woman says, a false smile plastered across her face.
“That’s not an answer,” Gwen says.
“Gwen.” Dr. Franklin’s voice holds a stern, disapproving note.
“We’re investigating what happened to Ms. Sofía Muniz,” the man says. He doesn’t move from his spot leaning against Dr. Franklin’s desk, and he barely glances at the group. “And we’re examining Berkshire Academy as a whole while we’re at it.” At this, he stares directly at the Doctor.
Rather than be intimidated, Dr. Franklin stands, reaches into his pocket, and hands the man a USB drive. “The files you requested. For some reason, the master files were all corrupt, and I wasn’t able to salvage them, but I had a separate backup here.”
“Thanks,” the man says, slipping the drive into his pocket. “I’ll review them later. They include both video and audio?”
The Doctor nods and takes his seat beside Gwen again.
My eyes dart to the camera on the Doc’s desk, and suddenly everything makes sense. The Berk is under investigation. The state doesn’t know what we really do here. To outsiders, it must seem as if Sofía really is dead and gone. And dead students mean government investigations. The Doctor couldn’t warn me, not really, but he tried. That’s why he called me into his office earlier today. He was warning me to pretend. We have to hide our powers and make these officials believe that Sofía is really gone.
I knew—of course I knew—that Sofía couldn’t be gone for long before people outside Berkshire took notice, and there’s only so much Dr. Franklin can do. He can’t pretend forever that Sofía’s okay when she’s clearly missing, and he probably couldn’t explain what actually happened to her. Still, does the government really need to come spy on us?
“My name is Amelia Rivers,” the woman continues brightly. “And this is Carl Minh. We’ll be talking to you individually later, but we just wanted to introduce ourselves since we’ll be around. And if you have anything to tell us, please feel free to flag us down.”
“Dr. Rivers and Mr. Minh will be staying here at Berkshire, on the sixth floor with the other staff members,” Dr. Franklin says, standing up. “And they’ll be sitting in on some of our sessions together. Please pretend like they’re not here; they’re just observing our methods and our classes. And when they ask you questions about what happened to Sofía, I want you to be honest. We have nothing to hide; no one’s to blame here.”
The camera light blinks on and off, on and off.
“We’ll be deciding that,” Mr. Minh says, dropping a small notepad into his briefcase and snapping it shut. “Just be honest, kids. As honest as you can be, anyway.” He casts a suspicious look among the group, then walks past the semicircle of chairs and toward the door. “Amelia?” he calls back over his shoulder, and his colleague hurries to follow him.
“This is bullshit,” Ryan says as soon as the door closes behind Mr. Minh.
“Ryan,” Dr. Franklin says in a cautioning voice.
“They’re from the government,” Gwen says. “That can’t be good.”
“Everyone knows Sofía’s”—Ryan stops suddenly, looking right at me—“death, it was no one’s fault.” But there’s doubt in his voice.
The Doctor stands. “Like the officials said, just be honest.” He moves to his desk, behind the camera.
I stare at the lens. That USB drive that the Doctor gave to Mr. Minh . . . he had said something about audio and video. The feed from all the cameras and tape recorders the Doctor uses must be on that USB.
My stomach drops. They’ll see our powers. None of us has ever made an effort to hide our powers at the Berk—the point of the academy was to train us how to use our powers, to understand and master them. At least one of us has used powers in practically every session with the Doctor. Even the regular education teachers are powered themselves, or are related to people with powers, and they were all vetted by the academy as safe. None of them blinked an eye when Gwen lost her temper and spontaneously combusted, or when Ryan turned his homework in by floating it across the room, or when I slipped in and out of history during history lessons. We only had to hide from the waitstaff, and if that didn’t work, I think Dr. Franklin or some of the other unit leaders had some failsafe methods to protect us, ways to make the staff forget anything they saw.