Taken Read online

  “An Edwardian Christmas Celebration”

  I remembered that December 21 was a cold day at my housing development, The Highlands, an estate community in Martin County, Florida.

  I remembered that I began the day by helping Victoria with her morning chores. That was something I liked to do whenever no one else was around. My parents—that is, my father and my ex-stepmother—had recently divorced, but they still both lived in the house. It was a tense situation. I didn’t blame them for spending most of their time away, and that worked just fine for me. I preferred to be with Victoria and Albert.

  The first thing Victoria asked me every day was, “Did you sleep well, Miss Charity?”

  This was not a casual question, and she already knew the answer to it. I’d suffered for years from night terrors. To the kids at my school, to my parents, to practically everybody, I probably seemed a confident kid. But I was a sniveling coward at nighttime. I lived in fear of going to bed. I had horrible dreams that I thought were real. I woke up every night convinced that I was trapped in a cave, and that some monster was in there with me.

  Only Victoria knew about this.

  She had walked past my room one night and seen me sitting up in terror, drenched with sweat and gasping for air. She sat with me, saying little prayers and talking in a soothing voice until I fell back asleep. When I woke up later, she was still sitting there. And after that night, for three years, whenever I opened my eyes, she had been sitting there. I didn’t know when she slept herself. But she was always in the kitchen, smiling and happy, when I came down for breakfast.

  That’s why I loved her so much. And that’s why I tried to start each day by helping her do the dishes, even though it was against RDS regulations.

  Anyway, Albert had disappeared after breakfast, and he had not returned. Just as Victoria and I had finished cleaning, we heard a loud buzzing sound, like a swarm of giant bumblebees. She rolled her eyes and smiled. “That’s got to be Albert. Right?” She dried her hands and ducked into my bedroom, returning with a leather coat for me. “Here, Miss. You might catch cold outside.”

  Victoria then grabbed a gray cape and pulled it on over her black skirt and white blouse (her maid’s outfit). I zipped my jacket up over my plaid Amsterdam Academy school jumper (my student’s outfit). Then we hurried through the marble foyer and pushed open the red oak, stained-glass door.

  Our front lawn was large even by Highlands standards, about twenty square meters. It was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence that ran from the helipad in our backyard to the cobblestone street in front.

  Albert, dressed in his black suit, white shirt, and black tie (his butler’s outfit), was crouched down on the left side of the flagstone walkway. He was tinkering with one of my father’s toys, a Granville 440C drone helicopter. It was plastered, like all my father’s toys, with University of Miami Hurricanes logos.

  The 440C flew by remote control. It was similar to my father’s real helicopter, including the Miami logos, except that it was one-fourth the size and it had no seats. It did have some neat capabilities, though, including a one-million-candlepower searchlight, a mounted vidcam with night vision, and a rescue bucket that could be lowered to pick up a package or, as the brochure pointed out, “to rescue a drowning kitten.”

  Albert turned and acknowledged us, muttering, “Miss Charity.”

  Albert was a big man—broad-shouldered, with a military bearing and a military-style shaved head. His first four layers of derma were light-colored, although there was a hint of African ancestry in the features of his face and in his general muscularness. Genetically, he was somewhat of a puzzle to me. He worked as our English butler, but he was probably of Caribbean origin.

  Victoria, on the other hand, was clearly of Mexican origin. I didn’t have to speculate about that. She once revealed to me, although it was against regulations, that she grew up in Mexico City. She was small and thin, but not at all frail. Her derma had a rosy brown tint, while her hair and eyes were lusciously dark. Patience and I agreed she was the most beautiful woman we had ever seen in person. She was Mexican, with an English name, but she worked as our French maid.

  Victoria and Albert were both employed by the Royal Domestic Service, RDS—the largest and most prestigious company in the service industry. (I wrote a satschool paper about RDS, too.)

  In the RDS hierarchy, Victoria was classified as a “one hundred percent employee.” This meant that she lived with us around the clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, except for the occasional emergency. One hundred percent employees got paid at the highest rate. Albert was classified as a “full-time employee.” This meant that he was entitled to take days off, up to five per month. Albert usually took all five days. Depending on which of Patience’s rumors you chose to believe, he spent that time either taking care of a house he owned somewhere or competing in professional chess tournaments.

  Albert was working on attaching a metal box to the underside of the Granville 440C. He pointed at it and told me, “Ms. Meyers wants it to snow at your celebration today.”

  I commented, “Too bad we’re in Florida.”

  He held up a securephone. “I just checked the weather alert; there’s a chance of a thunderstorm later.”

  “That I’ll believe.” Then I asked him, “What’s in the box? Fake snowflakes?”

  He rapped his knuckles against the metal box, which had a hinged top. “That’s right. They’re soap flakes. But when scattered by the drone’s rotor blades, they’ll flutter down just like snow.”

  Victoria smiled. “I would like to see that. I have never seen snow.”

  I told her, “Then you should come over to the Square.”

  “Me? No. I have no business being there today.”

  “You could say I forgot my lunch and that you were bringing it to me.”

  “Oh no. That would not be true.”

  “Okay. How about if I really forget it?”

  “Miss Charity! I am not going to let you forget your lunch.”

  She was far too honest. I gave up. “Okay.”

  Just then, Albert pressed a button on a black control module. The rotors of the drone slowly came to life. He told us, “Step back, please. I have to log some flying time for the drone.”

  Victoria and I stood together on the flagstones and watched as the Granville revved up and then, with the push of another button, rose three meters into the air.

  Albert stood with us, holding the controller in one hand and a thin metal vidscreen in the other. He held out the vidscreen to Victoria. “Here. You can watch on this. You can see what the Square looks like.”

  Victoria took the screen and turned it for both of us to see. Albert pushed another button and, suddenly, we were looking at the tops of our own heads on-screen, captured by the vidcam affixed to the drone.

  The little helicopter rose higher and the vidscreen picture rose with it, showing all of our one-thousand-square-meter estate home with its red Spanish tiles, its ozone-screened pool and patio, its helipad, and the airstrip just beyond us to the south.

  The drone shot up to a height of thirty meters and turned at a right angle. Then it darted off eastward, down our street, cruising over other estate homes—some with red tile roofs, some with green—until it reached the turrets of the guardhouse and banked left. In the distance, we could see the northern boundary of The Highlands, the St. Lucie Canal. The drone banked again, cruising over a row of homes with yacht moorings behind them, until it finally arrived at the Square.

  The Square, which is officially called The Highlands Community Square, is part of a commercial area that occupies the entire west side of the development.

  Victoria smiled happily at the sight of a dozen fake Christmas trees arranged in a circle around one very large real tree, a Scotch pine that had been trucked in right after Thanksgiving.

  Albert let the drone hover there for a moment while Victoria took it all in. He told us, “This is where I’ll press the eject button and the so
ap flakes will start flying out.”

  Victoria oohed like it had really happened.

  I was more reserved.

  Much more.

  I dreaded the thought of another Mickie Meyers special being shot with me and my “friends,” as Mickie called them. The fact was, I had only one friend at school, and that was Patience. Mickie kept showing up in our classroom, though, with her crew, and shooting us doing a bizarre array of activities. We hated it. (But her audience must have liked it. Her ratings were and are always high.)

  We had just recovered from a bogus “Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving Feast” with all-authentic foods during which the Dugan sisters, who are bulimic, actually took a break to vomit. The video feast ended with a heartwarming speech by Mickie about people from different backgrounds coexisting in peace and harmony. The actual feast ended with Patience Patterson overhearing a snide remark by Sierra Vasquez, becoming enraged, and pushing Sierra’s face into a cranberry pie. Patience would not tell me what Sierra had said, but it must have been pretty bad.

  Albert finally guided the drone homeward, back to the front yard, and landed it.

  I called over to him, “Do you know when my ex-stepmother is getting here?”

  Albert killed the drone’s motor with a final button push. “Any time now, Miss Charity.”

  Victoria handed him back the vidscreen. She started walking toward the house, calling, “I’ll get your backpack, Miss. It’s almost time to go.”

  Albert locked the rotor blades of the drone by hand. Then he clicked open both doors of the garage, revealing my father’s massive Mercedes 700D and our Yamaha 220 golf cart.

  Although you were allowed to drive cars in The Highlands, most people used electric carts like our Yamaha to get around. Albert drove me to school in it every day. For a while, I insisted on walking the relatively short distance to the Square, but that meant that Albert had to walk with me with his Glock semi-automatic machine gun strapped behind his suit coat. Then he had to walk home. It was too much to ask. When we drove in the golf cart, he could at least store the Glock in the center console.

  Well-trained, muscular butlers with semi-automatic weapons were the last line of defense against thieves, kidnappers, and other evildoers at The Highlands. The earlier lines of defense included the guards on patrol, the electric fences, the security cameras, and, of course, the GTDs.

  The Highlands was considered to be one of the securest developments in the United States. There was a waiting list of people willing to pay millions in currency to be among the 120 families who lived there.

  Patience’s father, Roy Patterson, was the top-selling realtor in Martin County. I had heard him offer my parents “cash on the barrelhead right here and right now,” as he put it, for our estate house, but Mickie kept saying no. She is currently vidding a series called Living with Divorce. Once she has wrapped that project up, I expect her to move on. But you never know. She is relentless. And for the time being, I remain trapped in her world, a reluctant performer in her latest video reality series.

  A sudden movement near my feet pulled me out of my thoughts and back to the ambulance. The dark boy was fidgeting around.

  I watched him for a moment and realized that he had to go to the bathroom. After the bedpan incident, I had been extremely reluctant to drink anything. The dark boy had placed a bottle of Smart Water on the shelf next to my vidscreen, but I had not touched it. For all I knew, it was filled with drugs, or even poison.

  The dark boy had a similar bottle on the floor next to him, which he sipped from regularly while staring at that screen. Those sips must have caught up with him, because he closed the two-way, stood up, and threw open the ambulance door. He looked out to the left and right. I figured he was trying to find someone to take his place. He turned toward me and made a face somewhere between the menacing snarl of a kidnapper and the pained expression of someone with a bursting bladder. Then he hopped out and slammed the door behind him.

  My first thought was to try to escape. Could I throw open the door and make a run for it? My second thought, though, was about my training. The words came back to me verbatim: “An escape attempt is counterproductive. It may enrage the kidnappers. It may disrupt the ransom process, which is likely to be proceeding smoothly.”

  So I cleared my mind of escape thoughts. Instead, I reached over and activated my vidscreen. All output and input remained disabled. I scanned the titles of my files and spotted one that reminded me of Victoria and Albert. I needed to think about them for a while, so I clicked on it. Here is what it said:

  The Royal Domestic Service, by Charity Meyers

  Mrs. Veck, Grades 7–8

  May 29, 2035

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the second most common career in the United States (after farmer) was domestic servant. Then this career disappeared almost completely due to new job opportunities and new household appliances introduced after World War II.

  In the middle of the twenty-first century, however, the cycle has come around again, and domestic servant is once more a common career choice. Estate homes in particular require the presence of live-in help. To quote Mr. Roy Patterson of Patterson Realty, “Selling an estate home without servants’ quarters is like trying to sell one without a currency vault. You just can’t do it.” The largest and most successful domestic servant company in the United States is Royal Domestic Service, or RDS.

  My paper then included a link to a Royal Domestic Service brochure, which read: “RDS provides full-time, live-in servants for a variety of lifestyles.” The brochure showed pictures of young, smiling RDS employees and descriptions of three types of plans (the comments in parentheses are mine).

  For large families, the Great-House Plan provides four full-time servants:

  • A butler (named something serious, like Edward or William)

  • A maid (named something attractive, like Emily or Jasmine)

  • A cook (named something French, like Henri or Louis)

  • A chauffeur (named something practical, like James or John)

  For small families, the Estate Plan provides two full-time servants:

  • A maid/cook (ours is named Victoria)

  • A butler/chauffeur (ours is named Albert)

  For individuals, the Townhouse Plan provides one full-time servant:

  • A maid/cook (see above for name choices)

  For the Estate Plan (my family’s plan), the brochure went on to explain:

  An RDS maid is not a cleaning woman, and an RDS butler is not a gardener. The maid cooks meals and attends to the children and to the lady of the house. The butler serves meals and attends to cars and to the gentleman of the house. The maid hires and supervises all other services for the interior, and the butler hires and supervises all other services for the exterior. In addition, RDS servants are rigorously trained to serve as paramedics and as bodyguards, and to serve a truly authentic English tea.

  What they didn’t put in the brochure, but what everyone knew, was that RDS servants were expected to protect the lives of their employers at all costs. That included, if necessary, dying in the line of duty.

  Dying in the line of duty. That was another unhelpful, un-calming thought, and I kicked myself for having it. No dying. No. And no teenage soldier rapists. Get out of my mind!

  I heard footsteps outside, so I turned from the vidscreen to watch the door. The dark boy entered, presumably relieved. He sure didn’t look any happier, though. After a quick, cold glance at me, he resumed his silent screen-watching. I observed him for a minute. I even considered speaking to him, but his face was so hard-set that I decided against it.

  Instead, I went back to my safety zone: to the minute details of my real life. I concentrated once more on the events of December 21.

  I remembered that Mickie Meyers’s airplane (which she piloted herself) landed at The Highlands’ airstrip while Albert was driving me to satschool. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce when my stepmother was arriving. Her p
lane, a twenty-seat Gulfstream 50, had (and still has) MICKIE MEYERS painted on the side.

  She and her crew always “hit the ground running,” as she put it. They’d have their equipment set up shortly after Albert and I had rolled up to the row of townhouse office buildings on the Square. Albert dropped me off and watched attentively, Glock in hand, as I walked into the building that housed my satschool.

  In theory, I attended the prestigious Amsterdam Academy, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In actual fact, I went to school in a room with a mahogany conference table, eight executive chairs on rollers, and a large vidscreen connected by satellite to the real school in New York. And I was not alone in doing this. Other kids, clumped around other tables in other parts of the U.S., also attended this same satschool.

  Our teacher, Mrs. Veck, had retired from the Chicago school system in order to move with her husband to The Highlands. She taught a combined seventh-and-eighth-grade class. In addition to her, we had a series of vidteachers in New York. Throughout the day, the scene on the vidscreen changed, from classroom to classroom and from teacher to teacher, but we never moved from our adjustable, ergonomic leather-match chairs.

  As a result, I felt no more connected to the Amsterdam Academy than I would have to a school in a movie. Basically, I sat there with Patience and we gossiped all day about the boys we saw on the life-size screen. We tried to ignore everybody in our real classroom as best we could. We only semi-listened to the teachers on the screen, although we usually listened attentively to Mrs. Veck.

  Mrs. Veck had agreed to take part in Mickie Meyers’s latest bogus holiday program, titled “An Edwardian Christmas Celebration.” She stood at the front of the room next to the smartboard and waited for us all to arrive. She had already placed a pile of calligraphy pens, markers, scissors, and card stock in the middle of the table.

  To begin class, she held up a colorful Christmas card and rotated it so that we could all see. “Good morning, everyone. I am holding up a Christmas card from the Edwardian era in England, approximately from 1901 to 1910. Those were the years of the reign of King Edward the Seventh, the eldest son of Queen Victoria. Notice the use of red and green on the cards.”