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“They came here?”

“The school recycles.”

Becky smiled and wiped her eyes. “So, what is there to do for fun around here?”

“A lot of sitting around and talking,” I said. “We’re building a new barrack. I saw some guys with a Frisbee. Jane milks cows.”

She looked up at me. “I assume you’ve been getting into trouble?”

“Always.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
t wasn’t snowing, but the clouds were dark and low. It had to come soon.

The second day of the construction hadn’t gone very well. The concrete wasn’t setting in this weather, and none of us really knew what to do about it. Shelly had said they’d move forward anyway.

I helped out for a while, but there wasn’t much to be done. Some of the supplies were missing—the heavy bolts we needed for attaching the support beams to the piers apparently hadn’t come in with the rest of the lumber, and the board count was off. There was an elevator in the commissary—like the supply elevators back at the school—and Shelly left a written message there requesting the missing materials.

I spent most of the day back at the fort, and in the evening Becky finally felt well enough to leave the Basement. The heavy wooden door to the fort was closed and locked, and there were guards on the roof—Mason was up there, and three others. We were safe for the time being.

I sat on the boardwalk, looking across the courtyard at where Becky sat with Carrie, laughing quietly and talking. “You’re lucky,” Harvard said.

I nodded, my eyes still on Becky. Her arm was in a sling, but I couldn’t see it now, hidden under the heavy parka made for someone a foot taller and a hundred and fifty pounds heavier.

“If you can call this luck,” Birdman said, leaning forward to warm his hands over the campfire that we’d built on the ground. “So she’s getting better. Big deal.”

“She almost died,” Jane said.

Birdman shrugged and shoved his warmed hands inside his pockets. “Great. Now she can get caught and have an implant jammed into her head. Or she can get killed trying to escape.”

I couldn’t say the same thoughts hadn’t been going through my head, but it still hurt to hear them out loud.

“Or they’ll escape.” Jane’s tone wasn’t very convincing.

“We will,” I said. “That’s what we’re here for.”

Becky glanced over and smiled.

I didn’t turn my head as I spoke. “I have a question.” Becky was getting better, and an escape attempt seemed more of a certainty. It was time to figure out whether Lily had been right.

“There are always new people showing up at the school, right? And more people keep trickling in here. And it’s been going on a long time. So why aren’t there any adults here?”

Harvard turned to me, excited. “Here’s my theory. Someone is trying to create hyperrealistic androids, right? Well, we’ve speculated on a million reasons for them to do that, but no one can think of any reason they’d only want hyperrealistic androids of
teenagers
. I mean, can you?”

The thought had never really crossed my mind.

“Maybe they … I don’t know,” I stammered. I couldn’t think of a reason. “Create an army of robot teenagers and release them on the population because no one would suspect kids?”

Birdman laughed at the suggestion.

“That’s part of my theory, though,” Harvard said. “We know they’re making androids of teenagers, and we know that doesn’t make sense, so I think we can assume this isn’t the only android training facility.”

“What do you mean?”

Harvard started to answer, but Birdman talked over him. “It means that we’re screwed.”

“Depends on how you look at it,” Jane said, staring at the fire.

Harvard nodded. “When you get too old, they take you away. It’s happened a dozen times since I’ve been here.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s weird. Maybe they just take them away to kill them.”

Harvard scoffed. “You’re still stuck in the mind-set that this place is some evil torture chamber. No, I think they have to have a reason for what they’re doing. We’ve seen them kill plenty of people here—you saw them kill Dylan—so if they just killed adults, then why wouldn’t they do it here? No, they take adults away. I think it’s to another training facility. For adults.”

“So it never ends.”

“That’s bad and good,” Jane said. She flicked a sliver of wood into the fire and watched it burn. “We don’t get out of here. But we don’t die, either.”

Birdman stood up and turned his back to the fire to warm himself. “And what’s so bad about this place?”

I shook my head. “I’ve heard that crap before.”

Birdman’s response was sharp and fast, like he’d been waiting for me. “It’s time you listen to it. You’re not going to lead a rebellion here.”

“I thought the whole reason I’m here is to help you escape.”

Birdman looked at Harvard, who answered in his usual excited tone. “We have a lot of things we want you to do—like look for the transmitters—but most important, we want
you
to escape. It’s not that we don’t want to get out of here. We just don’t want to put our necks on the chopping block.”

“So you’re putting mine.”

It was Birdman who answered. “We already took our risk by hiding you here.” He pointed to Becky. “And it looks like we fulfilled our part of the bargain. Now we want you to escape so you can get us out of here.”

“It’ll still be a while before she can travel,” I said.

“You don’t have to leave yet,” Jane said quickly.

I looked at her, but she refused to meet my eyes.

Back at Maxfield, I’d thought she’d been giving up, that she was scared. Now I realized it was because the real Jane, the Jane here at the fort who was giving that android her emotions, was resigned. She’d rather face the unknown of adulthood in another prison than risk her life in an escape.

Lily was right. No one was trying to escape. Jane had given up; Harvard was crazy; Birdman was only planning for when he got too old and had to leave.

I’d been wasting my time.

We sat in awkward silence for several minutes watching the flames flicker and pop, leaving a trail of sparks winding up toward the dimming sky. I didn’t think I’d ever sat around a campfire before. Back in Pittsburgh we’d occasionally started a fire in a metal trash can in the winter, but this was the closest I’d ever come to camping.

“Want to know how it works?” Harvard said, breaking the silence and changing the subject.

“How what works?” I glanced at Birdman and he rolled his eyes.

“How Maxfield works,” Harvard said.

That surprised me. “You know?”

Birdman answered, his voice annoyed and tired. “He guesses.”

“I hypothesize,” Harvard corrected. “So, here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

Jane laughed a little, but it wasn’t annoyed, like Birdman. It almost sounded relieved. “One thing you’ll have to get used to. Every conversation with Harvard ends up with this question.”

“Because it’s the most important thing we need to figure out,” he said.

“Why we’re here?” I guessed.

“No, no, no! We know why we’re here. We’re here so they can test the androids. We’re here because of the neural link, and you guys at the school are props.”

“Props?”

“Yeah,” Harvard said, seeming to ignore the callousness of his statement. “Maxfield needs something for their robots to interact with. One of the big goals, I assume, is to fool the humans at the school.”

Birdman shot me a cruel look and winked. “You and Jane know something about that, right?”

Jane shot him a quick look, then stood and walked away.

“No, the question isn’t why we’re here,” Harvard said. “That’s been answered. The question is: who is Maxfield?”

I shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “what do we know about them? Three big things. First, we know they started out here with this fort, and we know this fort is old—at least a hundred and fifty years.”

“You assume,” Birdman said.

“These are all assumptions,” he said, unfazed. “We know that at some point they expanded out of the fort. Benson, you told me about the pipe that Becky found—that school is old. Maxfield has been here a long time.”

He stood up, gesturing while he talked. “Second, this level of technology is ridiculous. Just think of all the crazy things they had to figure out. They had to build a robot that, structurally, was a perfect match for a human. Then they had to figure out the artificial intelligence—not only to make the robot act like a human, but to think that it’s human, that it’s real.”

I nodded. “And they had to make them look real.”

“Yes!” he said, pointing at me. “And it’s more than just looking real—the dupes have real skin. They bleed. They eat and sleep and breathe and think. They’re more than just robots that look human—they’re like artificial humans. How does that work?”

Birdman tapped on his forehead. “And there’s the implant.”

Harvard spun to face him. “The implant is crazy. And what about a power source? What’s keeping those dupes running for years? They don’t plug themselves in at night.”

“I get it,” I said. “They’re high-tech.”

“They’re more than high-tech,” Harvard exclaimed. “They’re
impossibly
high-tech.”

Birdman shook his head and sighed. “This is where you start taking things with a grain of salt.”

Harvard was indignant. “What?”

“You’re smart,” Birdman said with a laugh. “But the last grade you completed was what? Eighth?”

“Ninth,” he said. “And that doesn’t matter. You don’t have to go to college to know that a jet is more high-tech than a biplane.”

“What’s the third thing?” I asked. “They’ve been here a long time, they’re high-tech, and what’s number three?”

“Money,” Birdman said, standing up. He kicked one of the logs, rolling it toward the center of the fire. “They built this place and the school, and they own all this land, and they feed us all, and they pay for whatever makes the androids work. They have a lot of money.”

“So what does this tell you?” Harvard asked. I could tell he’d rather I ask him to enlighten me, but I wanted to take a guess.

“The technology doesn’t matter,” I said, “because of the money. Anyone with the money could have the technology.”

Harvard frowned. “No, the technology’s still important, because it’s so impossible.”

Birdman smiled. “If you’d never seen that jet, you’d think it was impossible, too. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

“The time is what’s most important,” I said. “Because we know that whoever is behind this isn’t a single person. It’s a group. Anybody here at the beginning would be long dead by now.”

Harvard looked like he still wanted to talk about the technology, but he grudgingly nodded. “Right. We’re not talking mad scientist, or crazy rich guy. We’re talking about an organization.”

“Government,” Birdman said. “Has to be.”

“That’s my guess,” Harvard said. “This is Area 51 a hundred years before Area 51. Government testing.”

Birdman kicked at the fire again, angrier. “It should be pretty obvious. This is a fort. U.S. military. And who else would be able to keep this huge area a secret? Why doesn’t the forest service come through here once in a while?”

He was right. It should have been pretty obvious. I wasn’t a historian, but I couldn’t think of a group that could fit. Other ideas ran through my head—the Masons or the Illuminati or a dozen other conspiracies—but that stuff was only in the movies. Then again, so were androids.

“It still doesn’t make sense,” I said.

Birdman turned to leave. “Screw sense. C’mon, Harvard.”

Before they left, Birdman looked at me. “Here’s
my
most important question: If it is the government, do you think we’ll ever get help? Even if we escape?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but strode off to the meeting room, Harvard a few steps behind him.

I felt frozen. Stuck. Helpless. I’d led too many people to their deaths, and I’d stood idly by while terrible people hurt the innocent. But what else was I supposed to do? Turn myself in? Live here until I got too old, and then be hauled away to an unknown fate? What if they just killed us all?

I looked up at the roof, at the guards who stood watch for animals and androids. They spent endless hours worrying about security. Maybe they could help me sort this out. And it was about time I finally talked to Mason.

There was a ladder, hand-built and rickety, in the corner of the fort for the guards to get up on the roof. I made sure my scarf was in place, and then climbed up.

There were four guys up there, but I knew only one of them.

“Hey, Mason.”

He looked over at me, quiet and nervous, and then turned back to scanning the fields around us. It was dark, but the snow on the ground highlighted every rock and tree. There was a man walking slowly around the perimeter.

I instinctively ducked, though he was too far and it was too dark for him to recognize me.

“How long has he been out there?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“You didn’t ring the warning bell?”

“Deer are out there almost every night,” he said. “Today it’s Iceman. But they’re all robots.”

We stood in silence and watched.

“What are punishments like here?” I asked, staring at the shadowy figure in the distance. He was in no hurry, just wandering slowly along the tree line.

“You don’t change,” he said, with a quiet chuckle.

“I don’t blame you,” I said, even though I had to force the words out. “For what happened to Becky.”

He didn’t answer. It was his dupe that attacked her, after he’d popped. He wasn’t in control—it wasn’t even his emotions.

“Punishments aren’t as bad as at the school,” he finally said, changing the subject. “We’re too valuable. They have to keep us happy. You saw what happened to Dylan.”

“Then I’m going to kill that guy.”

He laughed, too loud. “The hell you are.”

“Haven’t you ever wanted to see what’s inside one of those things?”

“Punishments here aren’t bad for
us
,” he said, emphasizing the last word. “We are important. You’re not. You don’t have a dupe, and you’re a pain in Maxfield’s butt.”