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“Cupcakes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Just came up in the commissary’s elevators. I guess this is Maxfield saying, ‘Sorry we killed your friends. Have a cupcake.’”

It wasn’t a typical breakfast, but I tore mine open. The food in here was much more basic than what we’d had at the school, and I hadn’t eaten anything sugary in days.

“Benson was looking for you,” Jane said.

She laughed. “Looks like he found you first.”

Jane blushed and focused on her cupcake.

Lily’s eyes met mine, and I gave her a look indicating that we needed to talk somewhere else.

“They’re divvying up the food,” Lily said. “You ought to head over there before the good stuff runs out.”

Jane took a bite of the chocolate cake. It was factory-made, mass-produced stuff, but as Jane ate it you’d think it had come from a five-star restaurant. She licked a stray bit of frosting from her lip and smiled at me.

“You want to go?”

“You go,” I said, and leaned forward to check my wet socks. “I’m going to change clothes.”

She took another bite of cupcake and stood. For a moment, a mask of seriousness crossed her face. She knew what I was thinking. She knew what I was going to do to her. Again.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she said, her voice artificially cheerful.

I nodded.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
o, you and Jane, huh?”

Lily plopped down on a bench in the meeting room and set the box of treats on the floor beside her. I stood at the window, watching people wander over toward the commissary.

No one had cleaned this room since the events of last night. Some benches were shoved to the wall, and others overturned. The sheets of fabric—all of Birdman’s meticulous, paranoid notes—were scattered on the floor. No one cared anymore. I picked up one of them, looking at the detailed map of the underground complex. Notes marked the items in the room, the color of the paint, the places where guards usually stood.

I shrugged.

“Does Becky know?”

“If she doesn’t already, she will soon.”

“Did you bail on her, or did she bail on you?” Lily asked. She wasn’t even looking at me—all of her packaged food was lined up in rows on the bench in front of her, orderly and categorized.

“Both?” I said, leaning back against the cold adobe wall. “I don’t know. She bailed on me first, but I deserved it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Lily selected a row of granola bars and began organizing them by flavor. She was either obsessive or bored.

“Then what did you want to talk about?”

“You told me that Birdman wasn’t trying to escape, that Shelly was.”

She nodded.

“I want in,” I said.

“You heard the rules,” Lily said with a sardonic laugh. “No more groups.”

“I think if we’re trying to escape, it’s okay to break that rule.”

She held the box to the edge of the bench and swept all her goodies into it. “First, I can’t get you in Shelly’s group, because I’m not even in it.”

“Then how do you know it exists?”

“Just observation. Birdman grilled me about the underground complex, but Shelly grilled me about the forest—about where I’d gotten to and how I was caught.”

I looked back out the window. From here, I couldn’t quite see the ford.

A tall brown-haired girl was alone, sitting cross-legged in the road.

“Someone’s getting feedback,” I said.

Lily moved to the window. “Eliana. Interesting.”

“I heard a lot of people are now,” I said.

Eliana was far away, so it was hard to be sure, but I thought she was crying.

“They are,” Lily said. “Maxfield’s starting up the school again.”

She turned away from the window and faced me, arms folded. “You’ll have to talk to Shelly. She runs the show, and she doesn’t tell anyone everything. But I don’t know why you’re dealing with this. Gather supplies. Get out of here.”

“Isn’t that what you tried?”

“And I made it pretty damn far,” she said, annoyed. “I just didn’t have any weapons. But you’ve got anything you want—hammers, knives, shovels.”

“What if I go for help and they find out? What’ll Maxfield do then?”

“They’ll chase you.”

“Or they’ll kill everyone here and burn this place to the ground to hide the evidence.”

Lily didn’t have an answer to that.

I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and started for the door. “I’m going to find Shelly.”

“At some point you need to just take care of yourself,” she said.

“I’m not leaving without Becky.”

Lily turned, a small smile on her face. “Don’t you mean Jane?”

I stared back at her. I didn’t know what I meant.

No. That wasn’t true. I meant Becky. No, that wasn’t true either.

“I’m going to get
all
of us out of here.”

Maxfield couldn’t win.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
walked out into the courtyard and sat down beside Harvard. He was still grinning, and I didn’t even know whether he could talk.

I waved my hand in front of his face. “You there?”

He turned his head, but not far enough to look at me. “Benson. Hi.” He talked slowly, like he was strung out on some drug.

I couldn’t believe I was coming to him for help when he was like this. But I was out of options.

“Hey, Harvard. Snap out of it.” I slapped his back. “I need to talk to you.”

“They’re at the school,” he said dreamily. “The sisters. The ones we were talking about.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I need to know what you found out about the android I brought you. Anything useful?”

“Why would they be there?” he murmured. “They’ve seen the underground complex. They’re talking about it.”

“What?”

He wasn’t really talking to me—he was staring at the sky, but obviously seeing something I couldn’t.

“I don’t think they’re dupes. I think they got the implant, and then went to the school. They’re warning the other students.”

That didn’t make any sense.

“The android,” I said. “Anything?”

He turned his head slightly. “The heart.”

“What about it?”

“I love this,” Harvard said. “I haven’t been active for so long.”

“What about the heart?”

His voice was euphoric. “It’s an artificial heart. The whole thing was beautiful. It’s not gears and gizmos in there. It’s like a human, but fully artificial. It’s … elegant.” Harvard finally looked at me. “It’s shoved over to the side. Because there’s a power source in the direct center of the chest.”

“So what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, drifting off again. “It’s amazing. But that heart … it’s not protected, and it actually juts out into the left armpit.”

“The armpit?”

“He had a bump in his armpit,” Harvard said. “Like a design defect. I bet we could use it to tell dupes from humans.” He drifted away for a moment. “You should get an implant. This is wild. There are a lot of new students. More every hour.”

I swore under my breath, and then looked around his room.

“So that’s all you can tell me? A bump in the armpit?”

“It’s more than a bump,” he said, finally looking at me. “It’s the miracle you’re looking for.”

“What do you mean?”

“The heart is unprotected there. Smack that bump and it’ll push the heart into the power source. Should shut the whole robot down. I tell you, it was beautiful.”

He turned back to look at the sky, and then closed his eyes and began to hum. That was all I was going to get from him.

Harvard’s “miracle” was a little bump in the armpit. I was hoping for a whole lot more.

I met Jane on the boardwalk as she was coming back from the commissary. Her box of snacks was smaller than Lily’s, with more granola bars and fewer sweets.

I made up an excuse about needing to take a shower, but the truth was that I couldn’t bear to look at her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her—Jane was fun and beautiful, and had this been some other reality I probably would have been following her around town like a drooling idiot.

But now it was different. And she knew it. She’d known it the minute she’d left the fort, and even though she smiled at me, I could see it in her eyes. She knew something was wrong, that I’d betrayed her again.

So I left Jane at the fort. I hoped she’d go back to her room and scream at the walls and tell her friends how much she hated me, how much of a jerk I was, how much she wished I’d just leave this stupid town for good.

I wanted her to say that, to think that. It’d be so much easier if she hated me.

I hated me.

I climbed back into the Basement and found another set of clothes. They weren’t exactly clean—nothing here was very clean—but they were dry, and they’d been up against the wall that the Basement shared with a fireplace, so the shirt and jeans were warm. I wanted to pull them on right then, but I forced myself to head to the washroom.

There was no wait at the showers, and for a moment I thought I was really lucky. But the lack of wait was due to a lack of hot water. I still showered, mud and grime speckling the floor of the stall and swirling down the drain. Everything about this place was filthy. Now that Birdman’s power was gone, and the false security of the fort’s door had been beaten to dust, would everyone move into the cleaner, nicer barracks?

As I watched the dirt swirl around the drain, I wondered where the pipes went. Was that mud and grime all washing down to some enormous septic tank? Or did the pipes flow away from town and dump into a river somewhere? I guessed it was the septic tank. Nothing ever got out of here.

I dried off and got dressed, and made a halfhearted effort at washing my other set of clothes, my old Steelers sweatshirt and torn, muddy jeans, and then left the washroom to hang them on the clothesline—inside out, so the logo wouldn’t show. My clean coat had a hood, and I still had my scarf to obscure my face. I was glad I got here during the winter—it made hiding so much easier.

The commissary crowds had dissipated when I went inside. I knew most of the few people left in there, but no one wanted to talk to me. Maybe they blamed me for what happened to Birdman, or maybe they knew I’d kissed Jane, or maybe they just hated me. There were plenty of other reasons.

Six large cardboard boxes sat on one of the tables.

Almost all the treats were gone. A box of granola bars was empty of all the good flavors—the chocolate chip and peanut butter—leaving only about forty-five oatmeal-raisin ones. There weren’t any candy bars or cupcakes or Twinkies. I took the last of the sweets—a banana-flavored MoonPie.

What was left was probably more useful for me, anyway. It didn’t look like anyone had touched one of the boxes—it was still three-fourths full of beef jerky, Slim Jims, and, at the bottom, small packages of crackers.

I grabbed as much as I thought I could carry, making a pile on the table. If I was going to be escaping—whether it was hiking out to the road or following the trucks—I was going to need supplies.

There weren’t any more little boxes like Lily and Jane had, so I walked to the back of the kitchen to find something to carry my food.

It didn’t look like they did a lot of cooking here. There were two big ovens and a long grill, but I doubted it was feasible for feeding eighty people. Each day’s food came up through the elevators, just like at the school.

I opened a cabinet and saw huge packs of plastic forks, napkins, and paper plates. Nothing was organized. No one had jobs here. The few real tasks that people did were voluntary, or ordered by Birdman. Jane milked the cows because she liked the animals. The guys who’d been working on the barracks were doing it because they didn’t want to share with the newcomers. But it looked like no one ever volunteered to straighten the kitchen or sweep the floors.

I opened the elevator, just to look inside. It wasn’t disguised like the closets back at the school. This was obviously something unusual—a metal door about four feet tall and three feet wide. Inside it was a dull gray, but clean, and I could feel a breeze coming from the quarter-inch gap at the threshold.

I stretched my foot inside it, giving a little shove on the floor to test its strength. The elevator bobbled slightly.

I had an idea.

The barrack was full, and the chatter quieted as I stepped through the broken doorway. No one seemed to be doing anything special—just twenty people massed around the small fireplace, blankets draped over them while they talked and played cards.

At the far end of the building, Becky sat with her back to me, talking to Curtis and Carrie and taking notes in her journal.

Someone touched my arm before I’d made it five steps in. Shelly.

“What do you want?”

“I need to talk to Becky,” I said.

“She’s busy.”

“I’ll wait.”

Shelly folded her arms. “I’ll send someone to get you when she’s ready to talk.”

“This is important.”

“And you’re a jackass.”

“I know.”

Shelly pulled me to the corner of the room. Her voice was hushed.

“She heard about Jane.”

“I was going to talk to her about that, too.”

“It’s a little late.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

Shelly took an annoyed breath, looking over at Becky.

“Listen,” I said. “I know that you’re taking care of her because I was being a jerk—I was. But you don’t have to protect her from me.”

Shelly was obviously ready to unleash a tirade. I stopped her, holding up my hands and taking a step back.

“I’m terrible. I know. But I need
you
to know that there’s no one on this earth that I care about more than her.”

“Tell that to Jane.”

“I think she already knows,” I said. “But I’m not here to talk to Becky about that—I’m not here to apologize or beg her to take me back or anything.”

Shelly raised an eyebrow. “You’re not here to apologize?”

I smiled. “There will be a lot of apologizing, I’m sure. But I’m here to talk about something else.”