Free The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled by Amanda Valentino, Cathleen Davitt Bell Page A

drawn and he looked nothing like the calm man we’d seen yesterday reading the paperand relaxing on the patio. “Are you kids all right?” he asked.
    “I’m fine,” said Hal. “We’re all fine. But I don’t get it—how did you know where we were?” You could literally see his brain straining to reconcile everything we’d just seen at the pharmaceutical college with the current reality: his dad, the minivan, the text. “Am I—” Hal started. “Am I in trouble?”
    “You’re not in trouble,” Mr.Bennett said, laughing in spite of the tension. “You guys—all of you—you’re brilliant, is what you are.”
    “Come again?” Hal said.
    “I’ll explain in a minute,” said Mr. Bennett, and he pursed his lips like he was about to begin. He did a massive screeching U-turn in the middle of the intersection of Astoria and Miller and took us back toward the college for a quarter mile, then turned left, drivingin silence now to a destination he did not name.

Chapter 9
    “Brewster’s?”Hal said, when we pulled into the parking lot of Orion’s best ice cream place. They make all their own flavors—sometimes they don’t even have the standard chocolate and vanilla—and I think they even invented the dirt sundae.
    “Get sundaes,” Mr. Bennett said. “Or whatever you want. It’s the least I can do. And then we can talk.”
    I hadn’t thought I could eat, but once I had a peppermint sundaewith hot fudge sauce and crumbled cookies in front of me, I realized I was ravenous. I was about a third of the way through it when Mr. Bennett, carefully licking his single-scoop mocha cone, started to talk.
    “Look,” he said. “I—we—I think I speak for all your parents. We’re worried sick. When you became friends with Amanda, when she disappeared, when you found each other . . . I’ve been watchingyou.”
    “Wait, wait, wait,” Hal said, holding up his hand. “You know about Amanda?”
    “I’ve been working with Roger Thornhill,” Mr. Bennett explained, “for years. The work I’m doing is the reason our family moved to Orion—ahead of Thornhill, actually. My particular set of skills—do you guys know about this yet? How Dr. Joy looked for kids, even toddlers, with certain innate talents and then usedtraining and genetic therapies to enhance them?”
    None of us were quite ready to answer this question. If Mr. Bennett was working with Thornhill, and was watching us…if he knew all about Dr. Joy . . . why hadn’t he stopped us? Why had he let us do all those dangerous things? There were so many times when we could have been hurt.
    “It’s a little shocking, isn’t it, that your parents would knowinglylet you partake in any of this,” Mr. Bennett said, obviously understanding from our silence that he would need to backtrack. “What responsible parent—hey, what somewhat negligent parent—would ever allow his kid to walk into the kind of danger you have been exposed to?”
    “The question did just cross my mind,” Hal said sourly.
    “As well it should,” Mr. Bennett went on. “And all I can tell you isthat I am more worried than I ever imagined I could bear to be. But I am also impressed. I’ve been astounded, actually, by the things you four have been able to achieve. And now it is important that I give you whatever information I can to help you. Because Thornhill is convinced—and I believe he is right—that you four are the only ones who can help Amanda, and Amanda is the only one who can helpus all.”
    I looked at Hal, staring dumbstruck at his dad. Callie’s mouth hung open as well. Only Nia was able to calmly ingest the news. She was all business now. “Okay, then,” she said, leaning forward. “You were telling us about Dr. Joy’s therapies. We read some of the files inside. And we know that you were in there. What happened to you?”
    “As you know, I was one of those kids. Dr. Joy wantedto turn my brain into a computer. As much as was possible, he expanded my capacity to