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Mr. Howe and A.J.
look at each other in the dark.
    “Hold on,” I ask both of them at once, “Even
if Clyne gets it open, and we find Thea, where can we go after
that? There’s slow pox everywhere. That’s what the alarm is, right?
All the wheenk-wheenk-wheenk. The whole place is locked
down. How can we really escape?”
    “You mean that tink-tink-tink noise?”
Mr. Howe says.
    “ Whit-whit-whit! ” Clyne chirps. “Sound
waves tympanically resonating separately for everyone! Brain-wave
security so sound is always unique and cannot be faked by
others!”
    “It’s a biohazard alarm, isn’t it?”
    “Is that what they told you?” Mr. Howe
asks.
    I nod. “They moved me to a more secure
area.”
    “Not because of slow pox,” Mr. Howe says.
“That’s not what that alarm is for.”
    “Then what is it?”
    Clyne, meanwhile, starts to hum. It sounds
like…music. Sort of. Screechy music. I’ve never heard Clyne
hum or whistle before, or anything.
    The humming gets louder. His eyes roll back
in his head. Then a large SCREECH rips from his throat, like
the hunting cry of a fierce giant bird, and all of us—Mr. Howe,
A.J., and me— involuntarily cover our heads and duck.
    Clyne leaps through the air, right at the
door, and I notice, for maybe the first time since I’ve known him,
how thick and sharp the claws on his feet are.
    “ TKAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! ”
    The door pops off its hinges like a
tiddlywink flipping through the air, and Clyne lands inside the
dark tunnel beyond it.
    After rising back to his feet, Mr. Howe turns
to me. His face is doing that sweating thing again. “No wonder he’s
always been so hard to catch.” Then he leans in closer to me. “They
didn’t move you because of slow pox. They moved you because of
intruders. They moved you because this base is no longer secure.
Let’s go.”
    He heads through the mangled doorway that
Clyne opened for us.
    “But why? What’s happening?”
    “ We’re the intruders,” Mr. Howe says.
“We broke in.”
    “But you work for them.”
    “Not anymore. Like I told you, I have begun
to see.”
    “He’s had that epiphany, son.”
    “But what epiphany?”
    Mr. Howe turns and shines the light on his
own face, so that it looks like kids sharing a flashlight telling
ghost stories during a sleepover. “What if I told you there was no
such thing as a slow pox epidemic?”
    For a moment, there’s only quiet in the
tunnel. We can’t even hear the distant alarms.
    “No such thing?” I ask, wondering what he
means. “But ever since you started this whole Danger Boy business,
you’ve told me —”
    “We told you what you needed to hear. But it
wasn’t the real truth about slow pox. We’ve kept the truth from
everyone. And A.J. helped me realize how tired I was of lying all
the time for a job. A.J. — and all that accidental time
travel.”
    “How do I know you’re telling me the truth
now?” Sometimes, you just can’t tell with grownups.
    “I realized…when I fell back in time, and saw
my…relative, Mr. Howard, that I didn’t want to wind up like that. I
didn’t want to history to judge me that way, to be part of any lies
that could keep messing thing up…for years and years after I’m
gone.”
    “And that, son,” A.J. tells me, watching my
face, “is an epiphany.”
    “Friends…new information,” Clyne says
slowly.
    The tunnel isn’t quiet anymore. Coming from
the other direction, where we’ve just been, we see lights — lots of
them — just before we hear the shouting.
    DARPA troops. Coming for us.
    They’ve found Mr. Howe’s shortcut.
    “And the fact we’ve been discovered” Mr. Howe
adds, “just might be another.”
    “Did I mention,” A.J. adds, “that not every
epiphany is a welcome one?”
     
     
     

Chapter Six
    Clyne: Wolves at Wolf House
    February 2020 C.E.
     
    And this was where you made the sacrifice for your
friends?
    “Yes.” My outlaw status is undergoing another
metamorphosis here on Earth Orange. Which