The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled by Amanda Valentino, Cathleen Davitt Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

doors to peek into classrooms, we found thesedoors were locked.
    When Nia put her hand on a doorknob, a strange look came over her face. Was she mad? Scared? Upset?
    “I can feel some little kids,” she said. “This was the door to their quarters. They touched it hundreds of times, from the inside only. They used to stare at it all the time. They used to wonder what was on the other side of it. They wondered if the normal world, the world theyread about in books and saw in educational videos—they wondered if it was just outside this door. They weren’t allowed to leave.”
    Hal looked at Callie significantly.
    “You want me to—?” she said.
    He nodded. Callie stepped forward and put her hand on the door handle. There was a lever on top that you depressed with your thumb to disengage the lock. When Hal had tried it, the lever wouldn’t move.But when Callie tried, her face twisted for a second and suddenly, the door was open. And the door handle was hanging from a single screw.
    “Nice,” Hal said, high-fiving her. She blushed.
    “Guys?” Nia said, half-joking. “Focus here?”
    We were standing inside a long room lined with small iron beds that were rusting where their white paint had chipped away. Most of the mattresses were gone, buta few beds still had them, thin and forlorn, striped and stained.
    Nia looked around, her eyes huge. “Those kids . . . they must have slept here.”
    Callie drummed her fingers lightly on a bedstead. “What was this place?”
    I decided to check out the set of double doors at the end of the room. They had the same kind of locking handle as the one Callie had broken open, but this time, they weren’tlocked. I noticed a plastic panel with a speaker and a button mounted on the wall next to the door below a sign that read BUZZ FOR ENTRY .
    Hal stepped through the doors with me. “This was a school,” he said. In one corner of the large space there was a blackboard and some desks scattered in front of it. A very dusty-looking and long-faded rug was half rolled up in a corner. Low tables and child-sizechairs were grouped together in the middle of the room, the chairs turned upside down on the table as if the janitor were coming in to mop. Roll-down maps were bolted to a wall—the map of Europe was dated from the time when the Soviet Union still covered most of Eastern Europe.
    My dad loved history. When we were driving in the car or waiting in lines, he liked to tell me stories about how peopleused to live, or stories of great figures from times past. One of his favorite things to tell me about was the Cold War, which was going on in his youth—he was born in 1965. Back then, he said, everyone in the U.S. was terrified of being attacked by the Soviet Union. “The U.S. and the Soviet Union were the biggest powers in the world,” my dad had explained. “They wanted to fight, but the two countriescouldn’t go head to head because they both had so many nuclear weapons that even the smallest scuffle had the potential to turn into a nuclear catastrophe.” When he was in his twenties, the Soviet Union dissolved. All the countries they had colonized in Eastern Europe went back to being independent and the Cold War came to an end.
    There were shelves off to one side of the room lined with cardboardfile boxes. Some were labeled with subject names I recognized: Math, Language Arts, Chemical Science. Others seemed more unusual. What kind of studies were involved in something called “Metric Planning”? “Diplomatic Realities”? Or “Intelligence Maximization”?
    I pulled the lid off a box marked SLEEP STUDIES . Inside were four fat accordion files. I lifted one up and read on the front, SLEEP STUDY17: SIREN STUDY . I pulled out a sheet at random. It read across the top: MARCH 12: DAY 7, SIREN DECIBEL 35 . Below I read what looked like a lab report for a very bizarre experiment.
    Test Subjects: C33-4867, C33-2990, C33-1109, C33-9821
    Objective: To measure voluntary and involuntary