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Gabby shook her head. “I wasn’t conscious for any of that. I woke up in the cell.”

“They’re like hospital rooms,” Curtis said, searching the map for them. “Except they have bars like a prison. It’s where you recover after surgery.”

I’d seen rooms like that on the map. “These?”

He and Gabby both inspected them. “I think so. Yeah.”

Shelly held up another piece of cloth. “I think this is a more detailed map of that.”

The floor plan on that map was darker, with a lot more written in the margins. It looked like any and all details people remembered had been included—one note said the walls were white tile, and another said one of the bars on a certain cell was loose.

Becky tapped one of the scribblings and read it aloud. “‘Pass code for cell number nine starts three-seven-eight.’”

“How do the pass codes work?” I asked, looking at Curtis and Gabby. “The note says you can reach the keypad from inside the cell?”

Gabby shrugged. “Think of a jail cell, but it has a keypad instead of a keyhole.”

“You’re in there for a long time,” I said. “Can’t you just mess with it and figure it out?”

“No,” Carrie spoke up. “If you put in the wrong code an alarm goes off.”

“The only problem with this map,” Becky said, “is that it doesn’t have any information about where that commissary elevator goes.”

“None of us ever got that far,” Curtis said, and tapped the cell map again. “All we saw was surgery, the cells, and we walked through this other section when we were leaving.”

Shelly sat back. “That brings up the big question. What’s our goal down there?”

I dug through the other maps and found one that was significantly different. While the others were quickly sketched and covered with scribbles, this one was finely drawn, annotated with clear lettering and even illustrated. It was drawn on the back of a torn white T-shirt, and labeled CONTROL ROOM.

“I read through it this morning,” I said. “Birdman was the only person to ever go there. It says he escaped at some point and opened a lot of doors trying to find his way out. He got captured here. This map was his personal drawing.”

I laid it out for the rest of them to see. The room was long and narrow, lined with things that Birdman had marked as “machines” and “monitors.” At the far end were two chairs in front of a row of computers, and something on the wall that looked like a window that curved inward. From the care he took with this map, it was obvious Birdman knew it was important.

We all stared at it, reading the notes. They were very descriptive—talking about the colors of the lights, the size of the monitors, the polished cement floor—but nothing that explained what we were supposed to do when we got there.

It was Shelly who finally spoke. “If we go in there and start flipping switches, we could kill someone.”

“We’ll have to figure it out. It’s our only chance.”

We stared at the map. Everything that kept us captive here might be destroyed in that room. Could we turn off the implants? Turn off Iceman and Ms. Vaughn? Maybe even call for help?

“I’m going,” I said. “You guys don’t have to.”

Shelly shook her head. “Of course we’re going.”

We spent the rest of the day memorizing the maps. Carrie got some charcoal from the fire, and we took turns trying to redraw the floor plans from memory, right there on the barn wall. While one person sketched, the others would watch and correct. After several hours, all of us could remember the hallways and label the main rooms, and even some of the smaller ones.

“What about weapons?” Gabby asked as dinnertime approached.

Shelly leaned back against a wall and tiredly ran her hands through her hair. “We have a small stockpile. Knives, spikes, some homemade brass knuckles. And, of course, all the tools from the work site and the barn. A lot of nasty stuff we haven’t had a chance to use, since they can just stop us with the implants.”

Carrie looked at me. “They’re going to do that, you know. As soon as we get down there.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “I’m going to be the distraction. I go first and they start coming after me. You come down after. Since it’s only me, they might not shut you guys off so fast.”

“And me,” Becky said.

We all looked up at her. She was doing so much better, but I knew how quickly things could take a turn for the worse.

But she insisted she could do it. It was time for me to start trusting her.

“You and me,” I said.

Lily spoke, changing the subject. “When are we going?”

“Not tonight or tomorrow. We need more time.” I did my best not to look at Becky. We didn’t need more prep time; I wanted her to recover as much as she could to give her a fighting chance.

“Oh,” Curtis said, a broad grin breaking across his face. He sat on a cot and took off one shoe. “I wore these old crappy shoes for two years at the school. They’re falling apart.”

He pulled out a torn piece of the insole and set it down beside him. He looked at Carrie and winked. “You always—” He stopped, and then looked back at the shoe, his voice quieter now. “The other Carrie always told me to spend some points on a new pair, but now I’m glad I never did.”

The insole out of the way, he fished inside and then reached out his hand to me.

“Been giving me blisters for a week,” he said, dropping two bullets into my hand. “Thought they’d come in handy.”

“But we don’t have a gun,” Becky said.

“We can make a zip gun,” I said.

Everyone just stared at me.

“Don’t you guys watch movies? A zip gun. It’s basically a homemade gun—you put it together with a little pipe for the barrel, and some other stuff.”

Curtis looked skeptical. “Do you know how to do it?”

“Not really. I was kind of hoping one of you did.”

Shelly took the bullets from me. “Lucky you’ve got a Louisiana girl here. We can make a powerhead.”

“What’s that?”

“You kill gators with ’em,” she said with a smile. “It’s like a spear with a bullet on the end. You jam the end of the spear into something, and the pressure pushes the firing pin on the back of the bullet. Kills the alligator.”

I laughed. “That’s perfect.” I looked around at the group. “Anyone else have any hidden weapons?”

Becky reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the Taser. “I’ve been carrying this around, but it’s already been fired.”

Without a word, Gabby took it from her and pulled off the cartridge at the front, then flipped a tiny switch and pulled the trigger. The front of the Taser popped and buzzed.

Becky’s mouth dropped open. “You mean that thing’s worked the whole time?”

Gabby smiled and handed it to me. “It only fires darts once, but it still works if you touch someone with it.”

Carrie laughed. “I think I’m the only person here who doesn’t know freaky things.”

That night we slept in the barn. The others in the camp might have suspected something was going on, if they were paying enough attention to care. But everything was in so much disarray now that we weren’t too worried.

I’d heard Skiver moved into the fort, and a lot of the other Havoc guys I’d hated. Things were quiet now, because of what had happened to Birdman, but it wouldn’t be long before the power vacuum was just too appealing and the thugs began to flex their muscles. Someone was going to start taking control again.

If this attack down the elevator worked, it wouldn’t matter.

Shelly and Curtis sat by the lantern during the night, fiddling with the powerheads. They’d gotten metal pipes from the washroom—breaking two of the sinks to do it—which they were using as barrels, and after trying half a dozen different handles, they settled on long screwdrivers. These wouldn’t be spears, but I was still thrilled to have them—fourteen-inch-long sticks that fired a bullet when you rammed them into someone. I hoped I’d get to use one on Iceman.

Carrie sat beside Curtis, watching him work. They seemed happy together. Awkward, but trying to figure it out.

Gabby read the maps over and over, backward and forward. When it got dark, she closed her eyes, her hands gesturing left and right. She must have been visualizing walking down the corridors of the complex.

Lily watched the doors, anxiously moving from one to the other, fiddling with gear, wandering around the barn.

“Do we know how to get into the elevator?” Becky asked, lying on her side on a pile of old hay.

I sat near her feet. We’d been together all day, friendly and uncomfortable and not discussing anything.

“It’s just housed in cinder-block walls,” I said. “We can break the walls and then rappel down. We have rope.”

“That’ll be loud.”

“We’ll have to be fast.”

I wanted to say more to her, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound awful.

“I need to ask you something,” she said quietly.

My stomach lurched.

She turned and looked at me, right at my eyes. Her face was lit orange by the lantern, her brown hair glowing like copper.

“But first,” she said, “I swear I’m not trying to make things weird. I’m not. This will sound a little backhanded, like one of those things girls do to tear each other down. But I swear that’s not what I’m doing.”

“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.” I should have said more, but I could hardly speak those single syllables.

“Jane patched me up when I first got here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But don’t think anything about—”

“That’s not what I want to talk about,” Becky said quickly, holding up her hand to stop me. “No. That’s … that’s different.”

“Okay.”

“I took a shower yesterday,” she said. She touched her arm. “It’s crazy. Maybe I don’t remember right, because I was so sick and it was always so dark in the Basement, but my arm was torn up pretty bad, right?”

“It was horrible.”

She sat up, pushing her thin blanket off. She wore a plain white T-shirt, the sleeve cut off at the shoulder. Her arm wasn’t in the sling now—she’d removed it to sleep—but it was wrapped in new gauze.

She stretched her arm forward, like she was reaching toward me, and then up to the ceiling, and then out to the side.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Becky said. “It’s like it’s just regrowing. There’s even skin on it—new skin, not scabs or anything.”

“I know. I saw it starting to regrow when we were in the Basement. I don’t know how it’s happening.”

Becky motioned for me to sit by her, and she slowly began unwrapping the gauze. The skin underneath was red and puffy and smooth, but had grown entirely back over the wound.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not much. It’s really tight.”

“That’s incredible,” I repeated.

She stretched her arm out again. “Mind helping me rewrap it?”

“Sure.”

Becky straightened her arm, resting her hand on my shoulder. I carefully adjusted the bandage and began wrapping.

“So,” she said, looking at my hands, not my face, “the reason I’m asking about Jane … She couldn’t have done this. Even a real doctor in a hospital couldn’t have done this—not this quickly.”

I kept rolling the bandage.

“Jane had a packet of powder,” I said. “It looked like Kool-Aid. And there was some tinfoil-looking thing.”

“I saw that when I took a shower. I threw it away.”

I nodded, trying to think of something to say. “The robots can heal really fast.”

Her eyes went wide, and then her face contorted in revulsion.

“No!” I said, laughing. “I’m saying I think Maxfield has that kind of technology. The robots bleed, and their skin feels and looks like ours. They have to know a lot about anatomy and medicine. Jane was just using what was in the first-aid kit.”

I pointed over to Gabby, now asleep on her cot. “She should have been dead. And Curtis—people thought he was going to lose his leg. The school can heal humans. We’re valuable here. Well, the kids with the implants are valuable. The school is going to make sure they stay alive, and they have crazy advanced medicine to do just that.”

I finished wrapping the bandage and tried to tuck the end under to secure it. She flinched.

“Anyway,” Becky said, “I’m sorry for implying that Jane was …”

She lifted her arm off of mine, flexing her biceps and testing the bandage. I grabbed her hand and held it.

“Becky,” I said, my heart racing. “I know what people told you about me and Jane.”

Her face flushed. “You don’t have to—”

“Just listen,” I said. “What they told you was true. I kissed her. And I’ve regretted it ever since.”

“Stop. You don’t have to explain.”

“I want to.”

She looked up at me, her eyes finally locking on mine. “When I came down from the Basement, when I first talked to Carrie …” Her voice trailed off, but her gaze didn’t. She took a deep breath. “I asked Carrie about David,” she blurted out, and then her voice quavered. “You never knew him. We used to be together. A long time before you ever came to Maxfield. I thought … I thought, maybe …” She looked away, at Carrie sleeping on the floor beside Curtis, her fingers touching his leg while he worked.

I nodded. Mason had told me that Becky had a boyfriend who was killed in the war. I hadn’t even thought about it, but as soon as she found out about the dupes, she must have wondered whether there was a human version somewhere here.

In a way, this town gave some people a second chance. But not everyone.

“I don’t want you to go down the elevator,” I said.

She squeezed my hand. “I’m going. My arm is a lot better.”

“I know.”

“I’m getting stronger every day.”

“I don’t want you to die.”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and nestled her head in my shoulder. “We’ll make it out of here,” she said. “You and me, together.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

C
urtis and Shelly finished the powerheads several hours later. There was no way to test them—we only had the two bullets—so all we could do was hope.

We watched for the last lanterns to be extinguished in the other barracks, and then we waited for what felt like at least two hours after that before leaving the barn.