Feedback (9 page)

Mouse was watching me from across the field, her face still a massive bruise. I couldn’t help but notice that a lot more Greens were working on the barracks than kids from the fort.

I turned to Shelly. I wanted answers. “Someone told me you Greens are cowards.”

Shelly’s face didn’t change noticeably. She picked up a handful of gravel and began tossing the rocks into the dry grass one by one.

“We’re not like Birdman,” she said, her voice even and emotionless. “Or Mouse or Harvard or Jane.” On Jane’s name Shelly glanced at me for just an instant before throwing rocks again.

I folded my arms. It was surprising how quickly I’d gone from overheated to freezing. “I’ve seen what they do with the maps and the lists,” I said. “At least they’re trying to escape. What do you guys do?”

“We’re not cowards,” she said with a cold smile. “Who’s more paranoid? The people who hide in a fort and slice arms open, or the people who live out in the open?”

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re stupid.” I stood up and offered her a hand. Walnut was pushing the heavy wheelbarrow toward us.

“What do I have to be afraid of? I’m not breaking any rules, and I don’t know anyone who’s breaking any rules.” She took my hand. “Except for the people who are hiding you.”

Shelly brushed dirt from her jeans. Walnut heaved the wheelbarrow up, and Joel scraped the cement into the trench.

“So what’s your strategy, then?” I asked as they pushed the wheelbarrow back to mix a second batch. “You’re just waiting for someone else to solve your problems? Birdman’s right—you
are
cowards.”

I was goading her, making her mad on purpose. If there was any truth to what Lily said, I didn’t want to waste my time with Harvard’s crazy midnight hunts and Birdman’s useless meetings. I wanted to get out of here.

She paused, and then looked right at me and spoke. “First things first:
we
aren’t anything, because there isn’t a ‘we.’ You’re not back at the school. There aren’t gangs.”

“But—”

“No, listen. I want to escape. Tapti wants to escape. Some others do, too.” Shelly started pointing around the field at other kids. “But Taylor’s suicidal right now. Hog wants to sit and wait it out. Brendan thinks we should negotiate. And Eliana, well …”

“What?”

“She’s human, but she thinks she’s a robot. They’ve screwed with her brain so much that she doesn’t even know who she is. So if you want to show up here without knowing any of us at all and tell me that we’re all cowards, then fine. Hooray for you. Go play with Birdman and flirt with Jane and get out of my way.”

She gave me a final look and then walked away.

I had no business interrogating anyone. Old habits die hard.

Someone shouted, far away, and then someone else.

The bell at the fort rang. I shot a look at Jane just to see her collapse to the ground. Everyone around me was going limp, dropping violently onto the frozen earth.

I jumped, instinctively running toward the fort. But it was too far. I could hear the sharp buzz of the four-wheelers’ engines—they sounded like they were all around me.

One came speeding out of the forest, not following any path, just smashing through the brush and into the open field. I fell to the ground, my face against the cold, slick dirt. I may have looked like one of the other kids from a distance, but I couldn’t stay here. They were looking for me.

I crawled on my elbows, not lifting up more than a few inches, and worked my way between two pallets of lumber. In the narrow space I couldn’t make out the direction of any of the engines—the sounds were all around me, both near and far.

This wasn’t a permanent solution, but I didn’t have any other ideas. I was out in the open, fifty yards from the nearest building. Worse, I didn’t know which direction I could run—I had no idea where they were. I couldn’t see a thing.

I took a deep breath and risked a peek around the edge of the lumber. One of the four-wheelers was racing down the dirt road toward the barn. It passed me without slowing. Iceman was driving.

Without waiting, I darted out from my hiding place and jumped down into the freshly dug trench, landing on the congealing cement. It was still wet, but too dense for me to sink into, and I lay on my back about a foot below ground level. With one hand I tried to scoop from the gravel pile, to create an avalanche that could hide me, but instead of covering myself I only made a lot of noise.

I peered aboveground again. The engines, wherever they were, all sounded like they were idling now. I couldn’t see any of them.

I reached for the nearest person—Walnut. “If you can hear me, sorry. I won’t enjoy this either.” I grabbed his coat by the back of the neck and pulled him toward the trench. He was bigger than me—taller, and his coat was unbuttoned and loose—and when I pulled his body on top of mine it seemed like he hid me pretty well. It was a long shot—my legs could have been sticking out—but it was the best I could do.

I heard voices. Iceman, either talking to himself or to another copy of himself.

This was idiotic. What was I doing out in the open anyway? If Iceman had just stood at the tree line with binoculars instead of swooping into town he could have easily picked me out. I wasn’t going to make this mistake again.

I was going to get Becky and me out of this town. And if Birdman and Shelly were no help, I’d figure it out myself.

It was nearly half an hour before everyone regained consciousness. There were no speeches this time, no announcements that the kids needed to hand us over. Instead, they just searched. I heard doors open and rustling brush. I heard footsteps near me, walking all through the construction site, but they never paused or called anyone over. Eventually the engines revved and disappeared into the forest.

Walnut moved, scrambling up and cussing at me.

“Sorry.” I shrugged, clambering out of the slippery cement.

“What if they found you and thought I was hiding you? Did you ever think of that?”

I didn’t bother to answer. I was running for the fort before he’d finished. I slipped across the wet rocks of the stream, sinking one foot in the icy water, and darted up the far bank.

I ran the hundred yards to the fort, my soaked shoe heavy and cold, my sweatshirt plastered with wet cement, and I pounded on the old wooden door. No one answered, and I pounded again, yelling for someone to open it.

A few long seconds later I heard the latch, and a guy’s face appeared. Since I was alone, he had his box cutter out, ready to check my arm.

He started to ask me what the hurry was, but I grabbed him by the jacket and shoved him out of the way, knocking him to the ground and launching the box cutter from his hand. He yelled something after me, but I ignored him, running for the Basement.

Lily sat on Carrie’s bed, a bruise swelling up on her cheek. She took a look at my clothes and smiled.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Everything okay?”

Lily nodded and scooted the chair over to me so I could climb up into the Basement. Before I could, the door flew open. The sentry was there, and a bigger kid behind him. They both had box cutters out and ready, and the small one looked pissed.

Lily grinned at me. “Didn’t let them cut you?”

“You’re new here,” the sentry said, his arrogance ten times stronger now that he had backup. “So I’ll cut you some slack.” He grabbed me and drew the razor roughly down my arm. Blood spilled from my skin and dribbled onto the floor.

He spread the skin, checking the bone underneath, and then tossed me a bandage. “Do that again and I’ll kill you.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes and climbing back onto the chair. “It looked like you were really restraining yourself back there while you were lying in the mud.”

He took a step toward me, and Lily laughed. “Boys, boys. We’re all friends here.”

“Tell that to him,” the big guy said, and shuffled toward the door.

I ignored them all and pulled myself up into the Basement.

The two vents were closed, and a lantern was burning, filling the room with a warm yellow glow. Becky was still asleep, but she looked more peaceful somehow. I knelt beside her and touched her face—it was damp, but cool. Her fever was gone.

“How is she?”

“She’s Becky,” Lily said, peering in the opening after me, “which means that this time tomorrow she’ll be smiling like an idiot.”

Her joking made me tense up, but I tried to push my anger away. “You were here when Iceman came looking?”

“I jumped out when I heard the bell,” she said, and touched her bruise. “Landed bad.”

“She’s okay, though?”

“See for yourself,” Lily answered. “It’s not in the school’s best interest to let people die. They give us good medicine.”

I twisted the handle of the lantern, raising the wick and filling the room with bright yellow light.

I moved slowly, peeling back the gauze that wrapped Becky’s bare arm.

With the gauze removed I saw the thin silver patch Jane had laid over Becky’s gaping, jagged wound.

I didn’t even recognize what I saw underneath.

What had been a tangle of torn and infected muscle was now reassembled into what looked like an almost healthy bicep. I moved the lantern closer, searching for stitches—for anything that explained this—but there was nothing. Her entire upper arm was coated in something clear and thick, and—

No. It couldn’t be.

I stared at the wound—the wound that had been infected and festering—and saw new skin growing. Like delicate spiderwebs, tendrils of skin were creeping across the exposed muscle.

CHAPTER TEN

I
t’s a fort?” Becky asked, peering out the tiny vent onto the courtyard. The sun was just coming up, but she’d been awake for hours.

“Yeah. It was the first Maxfield.” I was exhausted, but too happy to sleep. She was almost back to her normal self. It was a miracle.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, and left the vent to come back and nestle next to me, her good arm against mine. “So they’ve been kidnapping people for what? A hundred and fifty years?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Well, they couldn’t have been making robots back then,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Would they run on steam power?”

Our situation was ridiculous, but Becky didn’t seem concerned at all—just happy and curious. I was sure the worry would set in soon enough. For now, she just seemed glad to be conscious.

“The pipe,” she said excitedly. “Steffen Metalworks, 1893. Remember?”

I nodded. An inscription molded into an old pipe coming out of the foundation of the school. She’d shown it to me the night before we left.

“So,” she continued, “Maxfield started here, and then around the turn of the century they upgraded to the school. A change in the experiment?”

“That place can hold more people,” I said. “And that leaves this town for humans who have dupes.”

“There wasn’t anything like that school out here back then.” Becky had grown up not far from Maxfield—on a ranch in Arizona. She knew a lot more about the history of the Southwest than I did.

I took her hand, and she laced her fingers with mine. “What was there?”

“I studied Arizona history, not New Mexico,” she said. “But there would have been Spanish settlements, Pueblo tribes. Navajos and Apaches. There wouldn’t—well, there
shouldn’t
—have been giant Ivy League–looking private schools with walls around them.”

“What do you think it means?”

Becky shrugged, and winced at the movement of her arm. “I wish I knew.”

It felt good having her back. She was far from healed, but talking to her—seeing her irrational cheerfulness—filled me with the hope and happiness I hadn’t felt since she’d been hurt.

“What do you remember?” I asked. “From the last couple days.”

“Not much. A lot of bad dreams.” She looked up at me. “When I get sick I have math dreams.”

“What’s that?”

“I do math in my dreams,” Becky said with a small laugh. “I can always tell if I’ve got a fever, because in my dreams I’ll be trying to solve some math problem, and it’s impossible. It’s just the same thing, over and over, and I try different solutions and nothing ever works.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It is,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “You had it easy out here in the real world.”

We sat there quietly for several minutes. I’d already told her all that had happened since we got there.

Her voice was softer now. “You’ve met everyone here?”

I nodded. “I think so. Unless they’re hiding someone else.”

Becky rested her head on my shoulder. “So you know who all the robots were back at the school?”

“I do.”

She was quiet, waiting. I could only guess how much it would hurt her. She’d been at the school a lot longer than me, and she’d cared more about the other students than I had. I’d been watching out for myself since the day I’d started at Maxfield, but Becky had been watching out for everyone else. She’d helped start the Variants, and then she’d joined the Society because she couldn’t handle watching people die.

I swallowed. “There were twenty-two.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but stopped.

“By my count, there were sixty-eight of us back at the school when we tried to escape. Twenty-two of those were robots.”

Becky didn’t make a sound. For a long time, I couldn’t even hear her breathe. When she finally spoke, her voice wasn’t even as loud as a whisper. “Who?”

I recited the names. I’d made the list, and I’d looked over it a dozen times. I knew them all. Jane, Mouse, Carrie, Mason, and on and on.

She was silently crying by the time I finished.

“It gets worse,” I said. “Sixteen people died when we went over the wall—humans. And there’s reason to think that at least a few more died after. We’ll find out.”

I could feel her body tense against mine as she stifled her cries.

“There’s a little good news,” I said, knowing it wasn’t much. “Lily’s here. And Jelly and Walnut. And Laura. Anyone who got sent to detention. They weren’t killed.”