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Chapter Seventeen

I
do not want to find these guys making out in a bunker.”

My left eye opened slowly, like it was struggling under some heavy weight. I could only see dirt and rocks.

“Benson and Jane I can understand,” another voice said, “but Dylan and Laura? The Society won’t put up with that—they’ll be kicked out.”

“All four of them will get detention anyway. Whose dumb idea was it to open the doors? Did you see Benson and Jane leaving together all gooey eyed? I wanted to throw up.”

The voices faded away and I closed my eye again.

I could tell that I was breathing because it hurt to do it, but my brain was foggy and sluggish. My muscles weren’t responding.

I was cold.

Two four-wheelers were out in the forest, one far and one close. I could hear their engines.

Footsteps somewhere nearby. Someone was running.

“Hey, guys!” someone shouted. “I think they tried to escape.”

“What’d you see?” It was Curtis.

“Blood, and lots of it. Around the front of the school. The Society just found it.”

“I knew it. Benson ran.”

“But Jane?”

Curtis’s voice was hard and angry. “He talked her into it.”

There were more footsteps crunching in the loose rock, and the voices disappeared.

I opened my eye again and found the strength to move my head slightly. I was in the forest, but I wasn’t sure how far. There was a patch of dry grass a few inches in front of me, and bare dirt. A lone intact paintball lay among the pebbles.

My left hand was in view. It was swollen, caked in blood, and purple.

I could hear more voices now—not clearly enough to understand what they were saying, but I knew that there were lots of people outside. Probably all the students.

Dylan, Laura, Jane, and I were missing. They were searching for us, just like when Lily disappeared. But the Society must have been able to unlock the doors to check outside this time.

What would the announcement say about Jane? Hit by a car?

Grunting, I moved my right arm underneath me and began to lift myself off the ground. It felt almost impossible, like I had an extra hundred pounds of weight strapped to my body.

I coughed and nearly fainted.

I could see the students now. They were spread out across the campus, some in groups and some alone. Most were over at the school, and more were heading around to the front, to where the blood had been found. Jane’s blood.

Why would an android have blood?

I raised my right hand, hoping to signal someone, but I couldn’t keep it up. It was too heavy.

“Hey,” I croaked, but even I could barely hear myself.

I watched them as they searched. It wasn’t organized, not like how Curtis had set things up yesterday—
was that only yesterday?

It would be a tough search. If they were assuming we were in the woods somewhere, they’d have a huge area to scour. Still, if they quit ogling the blood, it wouldn’t be hard to find me.

Did I want them to find me?

I raised my hand again and managed this time to give a little wave before dropping it. Still no looks in my direction. I was wearing my red uniform sweater. That had to stand out.

My mind was numb now. I wasn’t angry, wasn’t sad. I was nothing. I would die in this school, today or a year from now.

There were footsteps behind me, but I couldn’t muster the energy to turn.

“Hey,” a voice said. “Hey, what’s that?”

The footsteps sped up, getting louder and louder, and suddenly they were next to me.

“Benson? Oh, wow.”

Someone stepped in front of me and then darted out onto the track. I tried to identify her. My brain was moving so slowly. I knew her. Gabby—one of the V’s. She was screaming for the others to come, jumping and waving her arms.

“Oh, Bense,” a voice beside me said, and I felt arms around me in a hug. “Hang on, okay?”

I nodded.

“Do you know where Jane is?” the voice asked.

I turned to look, rotating my head slowly and shakily. Brown hair, curled. Becky. I stared at her, not sure what to say.

“Jane,” Becky said again. “Do you know what happened?” Her gaze was moving around my injured body, from my hand to my face to the bloodstains all over my clothes. Not all the blood was mine.

“It was Dylan,” I said. “And Laura.”

Becky gritted her teeth and looked down at the ground for a moment, tears forming in her eyes. After a moment she spoke again. “Do you know where they took Jane?”

I stared. Was Becky friends with Jane? I didn’t know. What would Becky think if she knew the truth? Maybe she already did.
Maybe she’s one of them.

“No.”

Becky bit her lip and nodded. “You’re going to be okay, Bense,” she finally said, her voice quivering, but her smile appearing. “The infirmary’s great. You’ll be okay.”

Others were almost to us, and Gabby came back. She asked the same thing about Jane, and Becky answered for me. A moment later Isaiah arrived, two younger Society guys in tow.

“What happened?” he asked accusingly.

Becky stood, stared at him, and then walked away.

“It was your stupid goons,” Gabby said quietly. “Laura and Dylan did this.”

The two Society guys flinched, stepping forward like they wanted to shut her up. Curtis appeared and jumped in front of them.

Was this real? Were they humans? Or was I watching an elaborate play designed to make me think they weren’t all in on it?

Curtis turned on Isaiah, jabbing his fingers into Isaiah’s chest and speaking in a low growl. “I don’t care what you think happened here, but you have the medical contract, and you’d better get someone over here this minute.”

Isaiah opened his mouth to say something, but Curtis grabbed him by the sweater. “And if I find out that Dylan was doing this under your orders, I will break every bone in your body. One at a time. Slowly.” With his last word he shoved Isaiah backward.

One of the Society kids threw a punch, but Curtis easily dodged and then knocked the kid to the ground. Isaiah barked out a harsh order, and the fight was over as quickly as it started.

A crowd was forming around us now, and almost all of the V’s were there. Mason stood quietly at the edge of the crowd, his face stoic. He’d been right. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with Jane. Did that mean that he wasn’t one of them? He’d tried to get me to not fall for Jane—he was working against her.

Or was this all an act?

Carrie, Jane’s roommate, was on her knees at my side, tearfully pleading to know where Jane was. I told her I didn’t know.

“Were you together?” Curtis asked. They thought she was still out there somewhere. Maybe they’d find her, like they’d found me.

I tried to nod, but even that hurt. “Yeah,” I said. “We’d left the dance. We went around the front of the building . . .” Everyone’s eyes were glued to me as I spoke, even the Society’s. Oakland and Mouse stood at the edge of the circle, listening to every word. “It was Laura and Dylan. He had a pipe.”

There were murmurs in the crowd, then raised voices, and then people began shoving each other again. Curtis bellowed at everyone to shut up.

“Go on,” Carrie said, her face red.

Jane’s face was like that when she cried. Then again, so was everyone’s.

“They attacked us,” I said. “Dylan knocked me into the window well.” I paused, wondering what I should say. How would I explain how I got over here?

Carrie touched my hand. “And Jane?”

I shook my head. Pain. “I don’t know.”

I should be crying
, I thought.
I should be sobbing. Why can’t I?

A moment later Isaiah broke back through the crowd, with Anna following him. She looked terrified as she knelt beside me.

Everyone grew quiet as Anna fumbled with her first-aid kit. She opened it uncertainly, looked at me, then looked back at her kit. She pulled out a gauze bandage and with trembling fingers tore the plastic shrink-wrapping off. But then she paused, staring back at the various items. She pulled out a little bottle of something, then set it down and chose another.

“Come on,” Curtis snapped, motioning to Mason and Joel. “Let’s get him down to the infirmary. The rest of you get out there and find Jane. She could be anywhere.”

Chapter Eighteen

I
spent five days in the infirmary. Anna was out of her league. She could take X-rays, but never saw the results. Instead, she’d put the undeveloped films in a locker—an elevator, like my closet—and then get back a list of things to do. In the end, I was surprised to find that the only serious injury was a concussion. I had bruises and contusions from head to toe, a nasty cut on my forearm (Anna said it would normally have had stitches, but too much time had passed before they found me), and two dislocated fingers. My arms and hands were bandaged like a mummy’s, both my wrists in braces, and I was on a heavy dose of pain medication, but that was all. She said I probably felt worse than I was. I felt terrible.

Some days I was the only person in the infirmary, and other days the entire gang was there with me. I heard it was different now—things had been shaken up. For a while Curtis worried about another gang war, like before the truce, but that had blown over. In the end, four people left the Society. Three had gone to Havoc, and Anna joined the V’s. Since Dylan was gone and Anna was now a V, the medical contract was automatically transferred to us, which infuriated Isaiah.

The strangest news, however, was Iceman’s explanation of events. Jane was dead, though we got no explanation about how or where. But Dylan and Laura were sent to detention. Curtis had asked Isaiah about that, and Isaiah insisted he wasn’t involved. Someone else must have taken them.

On the fifth day, knowing that I was about to be discharged I got out of bed and looked around the infirmary. I couldn’t face the idea of going back to my room, back to the normal routine. I needed to find a way out of here. I needed escape plans and weapons and tools.

I inspected the elevator through which Anna sent X-ray film and received instructions. It was short and built into the basement wall. I would have assumed it was just a cupboard if I hadn’t known better. There were no buttons or controls.

The other cabinets had about what I expected: gauze and tongue depressors and latex gloves. There were syringes but no needles. Nothing that looked like a weapon of any kind.

I took a bottle of rubbing alcohol because I vaguely remembered something from a cop show about how to use it as a weapon. At the very least, I figured it was flammable. And I hoped that whoever was watching on the cameras would assume my theft was a dangerously moronic attempt at getting drunk.

“Hey, Bense.” I spun from the cupboards to see Becky standing in the doorway. I did my best to look innocent as I put the alcohol bottle on the counter.

“Hi.”

She was holding a clipboard against her chest, her arms folded. “I just need to ask you a couple of questions before you’re released. Stupid forms I have to fill out.” She made a fake grimace and laughed.

I nodded and moved to sit. I was wearing a pair of white flannel pajamas Anna had taken from a closet, and I felt like a kid as I climbed up onto the too-tall hospital bed.

“There’s paperwork in this place?” I asked.

“That’s ninety percent of my contract,” Becky said.

I lay back onto the raised pillows. My head still ached, though the pain was duller now.

“Shoot,” I said, staring at the ceiling. I didn’t want to look at her. There were plenty of people in this school that I strongly suspected of being robots. Becky was on the list. All of the Society was.

She clicked her pen. “First, how would you rate the care you received while you’ve been in the infirmary?”

I rolled my head to look at her. She smiled.

“You’re kidding.”

Becky glanced down at the clipboard. “Scale of one to five, one being excellent and five being not good at all.”

I looked back at the ceiling and then closed my eyes. “This school, where we’re prisoners and people die, cares about good customer service?”

“We don’t know that people—” Becky stopped.

There was silence.

I cracked open one eye. She was wiping her cheek.

Her voice trembled. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

We sat there for several seconds, Becky staring at her paper and me looking at the white cement ceiling.

It was never going to be normal here. I’d been fooling myself before, back when I thought that I could actually enjoy myself. I had liked paintball and the good food and the guys in my gang and . . . Jane. But it was all a lie.

Becky held up her clipboard. The paper was blank.

“There’s no paperwork,” she said, and wiped her eye again. “I just wanted to check on you.”

“I’m okay.”

I returned to my dorm that afternoon. A few people had made get-well cards for me, and some girls collected plants from the gardens and put them in a vase on my desk. I thanked them all, but things were different now.

I hid the bottle of rubbing alcohol in my pillowcase. I needed more ingredients before I could make it into a weapon, but that could wait. In my five days spent lying in bed I’d come up with a theory.

My logic went like this: First, we were in the school for a reason, either to be tested or to be trained. I couldn’t guess which because neither really made sense. If we were being tested then the test was extremely broad and abstract. If we were being trained then you’d think there would be more focus on what we were learning—better teaching, stricter testing, higher expectations. Even the people who thought we were being trained as soldiers because of the paintball didn’t have any answer for why we weren’t being taught tactics. We were just making everything up.

Anyway, if I assumed we were in the school for a reason then I should also assume that the presence of Jane and any other androids—I still hated using that word for her—would be to aid in the training or testing.

So, if androids were the basis for the experiment or training, then it would make sense that they had been here since the beginning of the experiment. Jane was perfect evidence—she was the first of all of us.

I decided to chart all of the students, all sixty-eight of us who remained, and figure out who came first. If my reasoning held up then they should be the androids.

Unless they all were.

And, of course, I had no idea where to draw the line. Were there five of them? Ten? Thirty?

I made a chart in a notebook, and then walked down the dorm hallways, with Mason’s help, asking how long people had been there. I didn’t tell Mason why I was doing it, and I think that he might have thought I’d lost it. Maybe he wasn’t too far off.

The V’s all offered up their info easily enough, and most everyone else did, too. When I got down to Oakland’s room, Skiver opened the door. Oakland was sitting in his chair, his feet up on the desk while he scrolled through his minicomputer. He glanced up long enough to see who I was and then looked back at the screen.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “I have a couple questions for you.”

Skiver started to close the door in my face, but I stepped forward and it hit my shoe.

He scowled and puffed out his chest. “What’s your problem?”

“Just have a question,” I said. “Humor me. I’m trying to chart the whole school and see who’s been here the longest.”

“What do you care?”

“I’m curious.”

He gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes in what was probably supposed to be a threatening face. “You got me out of bed for that?” Skiver acted tougher than his size warranted, but ever since the fight on our first day he’d taunted me as though he’d beat me in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

“I realize that it’s a long way from the bed to the door,” I said. “And I apologize.”

He stared back at me, with more of his semi-threatening expressions.

I pointed to the chair. “If you want, you could sit and catch your breath.”

Skiver opened his mouth, but Oakland spoke. “What’s the question?”

“How long have you guys been here?”

“Why do you care?” Skiver snapped.

“You already asked me that,” I said calmly, watching Oakland.

He looked back at me, thinking. Skiver seemed to be confused as to why he wasn’t hitting something.

I decided to ease the tension. “I’m trying to figure something out about this stupid place,” I said. “But I need to talk to the people who’ve been here the longest.”

Oakland stared at me for a long time, and then finally spoke. “Jane was the oldest, wasn’t she?” His words weren’t sympathizing, but they weren’t his normal jerk self, either. It was a simple statement.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“About a year and nine months,” Oakland said. “I think. Not totally sure. Skiver’s less than a year.”

Skiver looked confused that Oakland would help me and stared as I wrote the dates down in my notebook.

“Thanks, guys,” I said.

As I was turning to leave, Skiver spoke. “Nice job taking care of your girl, Fisher.”

I paused, rage building up in my chest. Taking a deep breath, I looked back at Oakland. I stared at him long enough for Skiver to wonder what was going on, so that he looked back, too. Then I sucker punched Skiver in the jaw.

He dropped straight to the floor. Oakland’s eyes met mine for a moment, paused, and then he turned back at his computer.

By the end of the night, I had gotten answers from almost all the guys. Two Society guys refused to answer, saying that they needed to ask Isaiah before they helped me. I wanted to hit them, too.

Isaiah didn’t answer either, but I was able to find out about him from several others. Not surprisingly, he was one of the oldest. I knew it. He had to be an android.

Over the next two days I was able to gather the information from the girls, in class and in the cafeteria. In the end, I found that there were five of them who had arrived at school together, including Isaiah. They all claimed to have been in the school for just over two years, and they remembered driving in together in a van. In addition to Isaiah, there was another Society kid, Raymond, and two girls from Havoc—Mouse and Tiny. And Rosa, one of the V’s.

I didn’t know Rosa very well. She was one of the oldest girls. She had the best paintball gun. She had asthma. She didn’t seem to go out of her way to talk to people.

I was going to have to keep an eye on her.

Of course, the entire list was a guess. It was still all based on the assumption that the androids came first. And it was based on the even greater assumption that there were more than just Jane.

That night, lying in bed, I wanted to say something to Mason. Based on my chart, he was among the newer half of the students. Hopefully that meant he wasn’t part of . . . whatever this all was.

It was dark, and I could hear him in the bunk above me, quietly tapping on his minicomputer.

“Hey,” I said.

He yawned. “What’s up?”

I paused. Dim light glowed from his screen, and it reflected off the smooth lens of the security camera in the corner.

“Nothing, I guess,” I said.

“’Kay.”

It would have to wait until we were outside, away from the microphones.

I got up from my bed, too awake to sleep, and took my computer from the closet. The contracts were coming up for renewal again soon, and I was curious about the medical one. There had been talk that the Society might try to take it back from us. The gangs were supposed to get together to discuss it soon. It sounded like a silly thing to fight over to me, but I’d heard that the contracts disputes often got violent—that’s why everything had been settled with a truce.

I read the medical requirements, but there wasn’t much of interest there. The points were relatively low, compared with the big contracts like groundskeeping and the cafeteria—the two huge ones that Havoc owned.

Bored, I toggled over to the purchase screens and looked at what new items were being offered. It wasn’t much—a few new kinds of snacks, a few new outfits (all for girls), and a new video game.

The paintball stuff was enticing—page after page of camouflage clothing, and eight different kinds of ghillie suits. There was even a white-and-gray one, for when the snow started to fall. Looking at the paintball pages, I wanted one of everything—not because I wanted to excel in paintball, but because escape would be so much easier if I could do it in full camo.

But it’d be a while before I could afford anything good. Breaking the rules probably hadn’t been beneficial to my points, and I only had payment for part of a month. I clicked on a few menus to try to check my account—I hadn’t fiddled with it much—and it took me a few minutes to find it.

That’s not right . . .

“Hey, Mason,” I said, confused. “How many points do you have?” I knew he’d been saving up for several months for a ghillie suit, only splurging on a few things like the paintball grenades.

“Hang on,” he said sleepily. I could hear the tap of his keyboard. “Looks like . . . a thousand eight hundred thirty.”

That was good—1,830—he could buy most anything in the catalog except the most expensive things.

“I only need forty-five more,” he said. “Hey, did you see they finally added winter camo to . . .”

I wasn’t listening to Mason anymore. Something was wrong.

My point total read five million.

The school was trying to buy me off.