The Whisper Read Online Free PDF Page B

allowed himself to be chosen only in order to be with Ellie again….
    Gorman waited for the freighter door to open. The soldiers had given Mika and Ellie clean uniforms so they wouldn’t have to tell Gorman about the fire and get blamed for it.
    Gorman watched the twins walk through the Pod Fighters.
    “Ellie does look calmer,” he mused. “Even though I canceled her trip home. That’s good, really good.”
    He watched Ellie talk to a man by the elevator.
    “She’s asking if she can take Mika to meet the monkey.”
    “Yes,” Gorman replied. “Let them go. But only for an hour, and then put them in their enclosure. And send four men with them.”
    He watched Ellie’s face light up as she was told the good news, then he swept the twins away, unaware that control of his army was about to pass into their hands.
    Ellie sensed Puck waiting for her.
    Because she’d been with Mika for the past few hours, the monkey had been left alone. Like them, he was stored in a maximum-security enclosure, with white floors and walls and bulletproof glass. Gorman had given the monkey to her as a pet, as one of his calculated acts of weapon management, but Puck was more than a pet: He was a Northern Government secret; he was proof that The Animal Plague never happened. Puck would never see daylight as long as Mal Gorman sat at the top of that fortress.
    As the elevator began to rise, with Mika and Ellie in it, Puck stood up on the branch of his white plastic tree. Then he dropped to the floor and scampered toward the glass so he could watch the door beyond his enclosure.
    He would have to wait longer than usual for her to arrive. Mika and Ellie were being escorted via a long route to avoid the dormitory levels. Implanted children were being carried to their beds, cocooned in their Creeper Nets. Mal Gorman wouldn’t want his precious Chosen Ones to see this. Mika andEllie didn’t want to see it, but they saw it anyway, in their minds and through the concrete walls.
    When the guard opened that last, heavy door, they saw Puck at the glass, with his small, brown hands pressed against it.
    “Hello!” Ellie cried.
    She ran forward and crouched down, placing her hands on the other side, but when Mika joined her, Puck startled and scampered away.
    “He’s difficult with strangers,” Ellie said. “He bites. But he’ll be fine with you when he realizes who you are.”
    “He’s so beautiful,” Mika whispered.
    The monkey watched him with hurt, suspicious eyes. Mika wanted to smile and cry. To see a live Black-capped Capuchin monkey was astonishing to a boy born behind The Wall. But to see it in a white box, feeling trapped, lonely, and confused, was heartbreaking too.
    I know
, Ellie thought.
We have a lot in common
.
    “Stay here with him. I need to get something.”
    Ellie left for a moment and Mika crouched down and placed his right hand on the glass. Puck scampered farther away and sat in the corner, next to the trunk of his tree. But by the time Ellie returned, Puck was sitting on a branch close to the glass, with his eyebrows fidgeting.
    “I told you,” Ellie said. “He’s beginning to realize who you are.”
    She held up a bag of letter tiles so the monkey could see it.
    Puck leaped excitedly through the branches of the tree. She opened the door and they joined him in his cage.
    It took a while for the monkey to calm down. After he’dgreeted Ellie, he spent a few minutes pulling Mika’s hair and eyelashes and searching through his pockets for things to fiddle with. But Mika carried only one object — a holopic of mountain lions that had belonged to Ellie before she was taken. The corners were curled and the image was cracked. When Puck grew bored with it, Mika handed it to his sister. She looked at it and blinked, then put it in her pocket.
    Then the game began.
    At least it looked like a game.
    The children sat on the floor with their legs crossed, and Ellie shook out the bag of letter tiles. Then Puck helped turn them