I am overwhelmed with the number of responses I've gotten to this story. Thank you all so much! I hope you enjoy this next chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. A special thanks goes out to Pygmymeese for betaing!
Also, I'd like to note that I have put links on my profile to pictures of Alex's knife and his motorcycle if anyone is interested in checking them out!
~Alyssajoy
10:02 am
"Alright ladies and gentleman, please quiet down." The general din of the classroom slowly subsided as Mr. Williams took out an ominous looking stack of papers from his bag and let them fall to the table with a resounding thump. "As you all know, we have a test today on chapters five and six-" an audible groan swept through the students "-which I expect all of you are sufficiently ready for since I informed you of it last Monday," he continued, ignoring the interruption. A light chatter erupted after this remark as various students offered up a range of excuses as to why the test should be bumped back a day.
In the back row, Alex tried to block out the noise as he poured over his notes a final time, cramming in as much information as he could. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus states if a function f is continuous on the interval [a, b] and if F is a function whose derivative is f on the interval (a, b), then…I am so screwed. He gave a small groan, resisting the urge to repeatedly hit his head on his desk. There was no way he was even going to come close to passing this without a miracle.
"H-Hey, Alex?" He looked over to see Hope biting her lip hesitantly, not quite looking him in the eyes. "I forgot my pencil; do...do you have one I could borrow?"
His heart gave a little leap as her eyes flicked up momentarily to meet his before shyly darting away again. She'd sat next to him since the class started a month ago and this was the first time she'd ever spoken to him. Alex found himself silently thanking Mr. Williams for his strict pencil-only policy.
"I-I mean, if you don't…" she flushed pink, and he realized he had yet to answer her.
"No! No, I do," he said hurriedly, digging through his bag. Idiot! Don't just sit there and look at her like an imbecile… He stopped mentally beating himself long enough to hand it to her with a small smile, which she timidly returned.
Way to go, Alex. Real smooth. You used to take on corrupt billionaires and psychotic overlords, yet a girl leaves you floundering in that muggy swamp you call a brain. He inwardly snorted before sending another glance her way out of the corner of his eye. She's nervous, he thought, watching her twirl a strand of her dark brown hair with one hand while the other held his pencil in a white-knuckled grip. Wonder if that's because of the test or because of me?
"Notebooks and textbooks away, then we'll start the test." Alex reluctantly tore his gaze away to put away his notebook as Mr. Williams began passing out the tests. "You have until the end of class to finish the test, and you must show all of your work or you won't receive full credit."
Heavy sighs echoed through the room along with a few mumbled complaints, and Alex was tempted to join in as he looked over the mass of paper he'd been given. Of the ten pages of problems, he felt prepared for maybe the first one or two. After that, well, he might as well have been trying to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. For the second time in ten minutes, Alex found himself praying for some sort of miracle.
Unfortunately, a miracle is what he got.
Looking back on this moment, Alex realized that maybe he should have been content to just wallow in his however temporary misery and fail the test, or, if not that, to at least have been more specific in what sort of miracle he was looking for. A simple fainting spell, the fire sprinklers going off, the spontaneous combustion of all the test papers – any of these would have sufficed. But Alex Rider, as all the Riders, had the luck of the devil. And the devil specialized in his own type of miracles.
They were about twenty minutes into the test when it happened. Alex was sitting there, alternating between staring discreetly in Hope's direction and gazing blankly at his desk, all the while trying to ignore the increasingly infuriating sound of pencils scratching. He was about to just give up and lay his head down on his desk when his watch made an odd clicking noise.
And then, from somewhere inside that beautiful little timepiece, came a horrendous, blaring alarm. It was as if someone had taken an old fashioned alarm clock, held it up to microphone, recorded the noise, and then distorted the sound so much that it came out as nothing more than a high-pitched warble.
Alex nearly fell out of his chair in shock before quickly recovering himself and attempting to find a button – anything – to get the noise to stop.
"Alex Rider!"
He reluctantly looked up to find the whole class staring at him - those closest with hands over their ears - with something akin to shock, while Mr. Williams had begun to turn red around his ears with rage.
"Shut that off now!"
"I'm trying to, sir," Alex said, struggling to keep the bite out of his voice. Honestly, what did the man think he was trying to do? "I don't know what's wrong; it's never done this before!"
He could've sworn the man's eye twitched. "Well, I suggest you leave my classroom until you figure. It. Out."
"Yes, sir," Alex muttered. He spared a single glance in Hope's direction as he got up, only to see her looking at him with…was that amusement?...in her eyes.
The door to the classroom slammed shut behind him as Alex ran down the hallway, the sunshine blinding him momentarily when he burst through the double doors that led to the side of the school.
Smithers, he thought, taking off the watch to examine it closer, you and I need to have a friendly little chat. The alarm didn't show any signs of stopping, and he thought he was going to have to force open the back to take out the batteries when he noticed movement on the face of the watch. The small window that normally displayed the day of the week was now completely black with bright yellow letters scrolling through.
Obviously, Smithers expected him to have good eyesight.
He squinted down at it, catching the tail end of a word. …I..A..T..E..L..Y… The message started again, and he sighed as he read it in its entirety. Contact MI6 Immediately. "You have got to be kidding me," he muttered. But if it gets this bloody alarm to shut off… He glanced around to see curious faces peering out from windows of nearby classrooms and the decision was made for him.
With a martyred air, he pulled out his cellphone, briefly noting he had six missed calls, and dialed the number he'd been given for emergencies. Mrs. Jones picked up before it had a chance to fully ring.
"Alex, thank God we got a hold of you." He could barely hear her voice over the alarm. "…what is that awful noise?"
"Tell Smithers to shut the alarm off!"
"What?"
"I said, tell Smithers to shut the alarm OFF!" He said again, clearly enunciating each word so she could understand him over the noise.
There came the muffled sounds of someone moving around and talking from the other end of the phone, and a few seconds later the watch fell silent. The resounding quiet was so sudden and so sharp that it was almost deafening.
"Alex?" Mrs. Jones reappeared on the line.
"What the hell was that?" he snapped.
"I'm sorry, Alex, but we needed to get a hold of you."
He glanced over his shoulder to see that he still had an audience in various classroom windows, and with a sigh moved to an adjoining alley way that held the school's dumpsters. "You couldn't use a phone like a normal person?"
"We tried to," he thought he heard her sniff, "but you weren't answering."
"That's because I'm at school. You know, the thing normal kids do? Kids who don't have freakin' sirens in their watches!"
"Ah, sorry about that, old chap," Smithers chuckled from somewhere in the background, leading Alex to believe he was probably on speakerphone. "That happened to be quite louder than I planned…"
"Louder than you planned on?" he growled. "All of London cou-"
Mrs. Jones interrupted him. "We don't have time for this, Alex. You need to come to the Bank immediately; something has…happened."
Alex almost chuckled in disbelief as he felt himself slowly falling back into that emotionless pit he'd dug for himself when he was fourteen. It was the only way he could protect himself from the horrors he saw on the job. And now that he had almost climbed out of that pit of depression and despair, here they came again to fling him back down into the darkness.
He finally broke the silence. "You really have some nerve, Jones, calling me up like this." There was no anger in his voice, but no humor either. There was nothing. And that's what frightened him the most. "The answer is no."
"Alex, you don't understand-"
"No, I don't think you understand," he hissed. "You've already taken four years of my life, and that's all you're ever getting from me. I said no, and I mea-"
"Alex! Will you please be quiet and listen to me!" He was stunned into silence by the emotion he heard in her voice. It was barely there, but his training made it obvious to him. "This isn't about a mission. Look, I don't have time to explain it all right now, but…" She paused, as if trying to gather her thoughts. "…but we have reason to believe that you are in serious danger."
"What kind of danger?" his voice was calm but inside he felt himself slipping deeper.
"Last night, a man escaped from one of our high security facilities and the evidence shows he's coming for you."
The words "why me?" came out of his mouth, but all he could think was why can't I just be left alone?
She hesitated for a moment, as if she knew what he was really saying, but decided to answer the question anyway. "We have our suspicions, but none that I can voice over the phone. We need you to come to the Bank so we can figure out why this is happening and how we can best protect you."
As much as he tried to find a way around going back, he knew he didn't have a choice. This man could be anyone with any number of motives; there was no way he would be able to truly protect himself without MI6's help. "Yeah, alright," he said.
"Good." Mrs. Jones said. Alex noted the relief in her voice. "We've sent a car to pick you up. If you head to the front of the school it should be waiting for you."
He walked around to the front of the building and, sure enough, there sat a non-descript black car and two Suits that were his escorts. "I see them."
"Go ahead and go with them now; we'll take care of getting you excused from school."
He grunted in response before snapping the phone shut and sliding it into his back pocket. The Suit on the passenger's side stepped out as he approached, and Alex regarded him with limited interest. There was little to remember him by; it was why he had been chosen.
"Agent Rider?"
"I'm not an agent anymore," Alex snapped, feeling a headache coming on.
The man took this as an affirmative and opened that backseat door to let him in. Without sparing the Suit another glance, Alex slid inside, and when the door slammed behind him, he swore a little more of him died again inside.
As the car pulled away, he glanced back at the receding school and, not for the first – and certainly not the last – time, found himself wishing for normalcy. He'd come close to achieving a pseudo state of it in the last six months, hanging out with friends, making new ones, having school every day, but he couldn't deny a presence in the back of his mind that he'd never fully been able to suppress. It was his other side, locked into what he thought had had been an impenetrable prison; that Alex would only come out when he allowed it. But in one fell swoop, MI6 had come and unhinged everything. The stone walls of that prison had started to crumble, and it wasn't long before any and all illusion of progress was shattered.
It was decided, then, that as long as he was in their jurisdiction, he was never going to be left alone. And, as that was the case, the only reasonable course of action was to leave. When this was all over, he'd move to America with Jack; use an alias, change his hair color, anything to get away from this.
A muffled thump drew him away from his reverie, and, with a hint of chagrin, he realized that he had been staring at the back of the headrest in front of him for the last five minutes. With a glance out the window he saw that they were merging into the traffic headed towards downtown London.
Another thump came and then another; it sounded as if they were coming from the trunk of the car. The two Suits up front hadn't seemed to have heard, or if they had, they were decidedly ignoring it. Warning bells had already begun to ring in Alex's head, but with each successive thump paired with what could only be muffled yelling and the fact that they had just missed the turn they needed to take for the Bank, those bells had turned into a siren comparable to Smithers'. Something was very, very wrong.
You didn't check for ID's, did you?
Jones was on the phone with me and said they'd be there; there was no reason for me to be suspicious!
No reason to be suspicious? You've just been told that an escapee from maximum security is after you and you find no reason to be suspicious? You really are an idiot, you know that, Rider? After everything you've been through, suspicion should come the easiest to you.
There was no time for Alex to wonder at the fact that he'd just had an argument with and received a thorough dressing down from himself – that could be saved for a later date when he wasn't in a life-threatening situation. The driver must've read his mind, for a few seconds later the locks on the doors silently clicked into place. A stream of words foul enough to make the most veteran sailor blush ran through his head, but he forced himself to pretend like he hadn't noticed. The more of an idiot they thought he was, the better chance he had to get away.
"So, guys," he asked casually, "we're not going to the Bank?"
They were silent for a minute before the Suit who'd opened the door for him answered. "No. We've been instructed to take you to a secure location. Mr. Blunt thinks MI6 may have been infiltrated and decided it wasn't safe to meet there." This last statement received a sharp glare from the driver, but once again Alex played dumb and just nodded his head in understanding.
Looking out the window, he saw that they appeared to be heading into a warehouse district down by the river, and, if anything could be said about the tension that now lined his chauffers' shoulders, it could only mean that they were getting close to their destination.
He had to move. Now.
He quietly unbuckled his seatbelt and counted down in his head as they neared the next traffic light. As the car rolled to a stop, he let the momentum add extra force to his lunge toward the seat in front of him, where he firmly boxed the unsuspecting man on the ears.
The man roared in pain as his eardrums burst, promptly dropping something that had been balanced in his lap. Alex then twisted forward through the seats, ramming an elbow down towards the driver's temple. The man had seen it coming, though, and was already moving out of range of the blow while delivering a punch to Alex's unprotected face.
If he had not rolled with the punch, Alex knew he would've been out. Black dots momentarily dotted his vision and he could taste blood welling up inside his cheek as he slammed back into his seat. He looked up to see the man grab whatever his partner had dropped and aim it at him. Recognition sunk in as the man pulled the trigger, and he barely had time to let out a single swear before the Taser's probes smashed into his chest. A few painful seconds later and he was sprawled across the back seat, gasping for air. He could feel his muscles still twitching even as the electricity evaporated.
"You shouldn't have done that, Rider." The driver gave him a sadistic smile but Alex refused to rise to the bait. A look of annoyance flashed across the man's face. "Put these on," he snapped, tossing a pair of handcuffs into his lap. "And they better be tight."
Alex didn't move. A second burst of electricity wove its way through his body and he clenched his teeth against the pain. He refused to cry out, but it left him breathless nonetheless.
"Are you going to be a good boy or am I going to have to shock you a third time?"
The patronizing tone awakened a cold fury in him, but compliance was unavoidable at the moment. Without taking his eyes from the enemy, he snapped the cuffs around his wrists, wincing as the cold metal bit into his skin.
"Charlie, quit acting like a baby and watch the kid; I gotta drive."
The red-faced (now partially deaf) man pulled his head out from between his knees while aiming a slew of swears at his partner. "The kid %&*$# busted my ear drums!" he snatched the Taser from him. "Don't you dare call me a baby!"
The driver didn't respond, but rather turned his attention back to the traffic light. The whole scene had taken place in less than a minute and a half and it was another two until the light turned green.
Ignoring the steady gaze of hate the man in front of him was sending his way, Alex put his mind to the task at hand – namely figuring how such a simple wish to get out of a Maths test could go so horribly wrong.
I'll be getting the next one up as soon as possible. In the meantime, please take a minute to review and tell me what you thought! Thanks!
