Freddy was still rubbing his temples. He watched Miles walk away. “I’ve got a bad feeling about that guy.”
Voss raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? That your spade at work, Link? Pretty bold observation.”
Freddy spun and pointed at Voss. “At least Asha had our back. Some teammate you are.”
“We get our own backs, bro. Get used to that.”
Outside of the library, Freddy whapped Jack on the shoulder. “Dude, Claire Lacoste! She’s not at boarding school at all; she’s here. Aren’t you happy I made you stay now?”
“You didn’t make me stay, Freddy. They drafted us. We can’t leave.”
“I totally made you stay,” Freddy said. “And she’s clearly still mad at you. How crazy was that, her keeping you away with that static spade? That actually makes sense. She was alone a lot at St. Paul’s.”
“Lots of people like to be alone sometimes,” Asha said.
“Not like that though.” Freddy looked at Asha. “She hardly ever talks. I never understood how Jack could hang out with her for hours every day. What did you do when you guys hung out, Jack? Just sit there and stare at stuff? I mean, I get it, if you’re hanging out with your cat or whatever, but—”
“Just because she doesn’t talk incessantly doesn’t mean she doesn’t talk,” Jack said. “We talked.”
“Yeah, until she left without saying good-bye,” Freddy said. “But I’ll tell you what. When she finds out you’re gonna save the world, she’s going to be intrigued, dude. Girls love that stuff.”
Asha gave him a look. “Girls love what stuff?”
Freddy waved her off dismissively. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I wouldn’t understand girls?” Asha rolled her eyes.
“No, I mean . . .” Freddy checked to make sure Jack wasn’t paying attention. Then he whispered to Asha. “It’s complicated.”
“I can hear you,” Jack said. “And it’s not complicated.”
“Perfect,” Voss mumbled. “A distraction. Because we were already doing so well.”
Freddy clapped Jack on the shoulder. “Come on, man. We’ll see Team One at the Dome. You can talk to her then.”
CHAPTER 8
THIRTEEN DOORS
The simulation dome will either mold you into an operative,” Instructor Bakari announced, “or it will break you.” He spoke with an accent that made his words round, hard, and rhythmic, like bullets hitting a target. “There is nothing in between.”
Instructor Bakari stood with the bearing of a general on the grassy floor of a large outdoor amphitheater. The recruits sat above him on stone benches secured to stair-stepping terraces that formed a half-moon. The instructor wore a flowing hunter-green tunic with a traditional African print, round glasses, a long gold chain around his neck, and a severe look that suggested he had never laughed in his life. Behind Bakari stood the Dome.
The curved steel walls shone in the low evening sun. The roof swelled in a shallow dome of tight mesh. The entire structure wasn’t much larger than a one-story house. Built into the walls were thirteen doors, each marked with its number. The first twelve doors were smooth polished steel, matching the mesh of the roof. The thirteenth door was brushed copper with exposed bolts running along the edge, as if a facade were going to be installed on it but never was. This must have been the Corpus Christi door Alexander had repurposed.
Instructor Bakari checked his band and barked for his apprentice. Alexander, rubbing at his nose with a handkerchief, hurried over to manipulate a small screen on the front of the Dome. He stumbled as he returned to his place, drawing Bakari’s exasperated glare. In Bakari’s presence, Alexander reminded Jack of a dog accustomed to being beaten.
“You are charged with identifying and blazing the reaper in your simulation,” Bakari continued. “The threat level of the reaper will be matched to the skill level of your team. Team One’s reaper will be closest to what an operative would face in combat, but each reaper is different,” he said. “You have one chance to identify the reaper correctly. You won’t have time to recover from a mistake.”
Team One’s bands glowed yellow and vibrated. “That’s your signal, Team One,” Bakari said. “Good luck.”
Team One lined up in front of the first door. Claire stood calmly behind Miles, staring forward at the Dome.
She was so focused, it was aggravating. Jack had waited at the front of the amphitheater before they arrived. Claire had walked past him as if he didn’t exist. When Jack leaned forward to try to catch her eye, he experienced an uncomfortable jolt, the same feeling you got touching a doorknob after walking across the carpet in your socks. He noticed others around him leaning back as she passed. They all seemed to know that you don’t try to get close to Claire Lacoste.
Jack had spent a lot of time with Claire over the last two years. He knew her face as well as his own. But her expression now was unlike anything Jack had seen on her before. It was as if he were watching a humanoid Claire, one that hadn’t yet had an emotional motherboard installed.
The first door slid open, and Team One disappeared into the Dome. Immediately the world around Jack changed. At first he thought he had merely gotten something in his eye. But it was more than that. Everything got hazy, like heat rising off a parking lot in summer. The murky air filled the amphitheater, thickening until they were no longer looking at the Dome; they were looking at a farm on a bright sunny day.
Jack felt the wind blowing and could smell the harvest. The wide door on a red barn swung open and out walked the four members of Team One. They wore old jeans, boots, and T-shirts or button-down flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Besides Miles and Claire, the team was made up of Kasun Banda, a kid with long limbs who seemed to be constantly talking to himself under his breath, and Janelle Moreau, a girl with the gait of a ballerina who barely left a footprint in the dusty landscape.
“The farm is the standard recruit simulation.” Bakari’s voice came to them like an announcer in a dark theater. “There are up to twenty-four characters in the farm. One of them is the reaper. Which one will change every time.”
A woman and her two grown sons stood on the wide porch of a cream-colored house with black shutters. They were typical white Midwesterners, their skin tanned from years of outdoor work. Surveying the house from the bottom of the porch steps were three individuals in crisp gray suits, two men and a woman holding a clipboard. A For Sale sign hung in the yard. The word Foreclosure had been added to the sign’s top.
In an adjacent field, a farmer sat on a rumbling tractor. Four workers crouched on the roof of a faded red barn, repairing an area that had been torn off. Walking up the long driveway from the dirt road were a half-dozen farmhands lugging carpentry tools, talking and laughing as they came.
Claire wore a snug white T-shirt, scuffed working jeans, and a faded blue baseball cap. She had on a pair of large gray work gloves. She and the others blinked in the glare of the cloudless day, shading their eyes.
Bakari motioned vaguely at Team One, who could not hear him. “You will notice that the recruits are no longer in their uniforms but rather in typical farm gear,” he pointed out. “Recruit uniforms are made from fabric that adapts to the setting. It saves operatives from worrying about the appropriate clothing for an engagement.”
The recruits in the amphitheater looked down at their own uniforms with new appreciation.
Miles, in a red flannel shirt with pushed-up sleeves, was barking orders at his team through earpiece communication monitors. The four of them fanned out, each moving toward a different group on the farm.
“You cannot rely on your eyes to identify the reaper,” Bakari reminded them. “You must learn to sense it. You’ve learned that reapers have a skin that crackles slightly. The best operatives can almost feel the vibrations of it, even from a distance.”
“Don’t our bands glow red when a reaper is present?” asked a kid from the front row.
“Operatives use bands as a last resort only,” Bakari
answered. “Wait for the band to turn crimson and you’ll find the reaper may be too close to its prey for you to stop it.”
“How is Claire supposed to fight a reaper with static?” Freddy whispered to Jack.
“I don’t know. How are you supposed to fight a reaper with conspiracy theories?” Jack asked.
“Hmm. Fair point.”
Claire was now tracking the farmer, jogging toward his tractor in the field. Miles Watt and Janelle approached the workers on the roof of the barn, calling out something to them. Kasun walked up to the farmhouse.
Before Kasun arrived, the farmhouse porch broke into chaos. The two sons were shouting at the visitors in suits about how many generations the family had lived on the farm. Then one of the sons lifted a rifle that Jack hadn’t noticed before and pointed it at the agents, still yelling. The agents backed away. The mother shouted desperately at her son to lower the gun.
As Kasun ran closer, he touched his ear and called over the monitor that one of the brothers was the reaper.
Janelle Moreau broke into a run toward the farmhouse. After a few strides, she squatted down and sprung through the air, over about twenty feet. She landed soundlessly like a grasshopper and continued springing in huge bounds.
On the porch, the son cocked the rifle and aimed at the terrified agents. The other son picked up a baseball bat just as Kasun reached the steps. Jack wondered which man he would go for. But a moment later the recruit physically split into two identical Kasuns. One Kasun tackled the son with the bat, and the second Kasun pinned the son with the shotgun against the wall. The mother screamed while the brother with the gun, his back pressed flat against the house, shouted for help. Kasun snatched his blade off his hip and deployed the long sword with a quick twist of his wrist.
Kasun hesitated, his knee pressed against the chest of the brother. “He’s not fighting back!” The brothers and the agents were all shouting, bewildered and terrified.
Instructor Bakari’s accent filled the amphitheater. “Recruit Banda has mistaken human anger for the behavior of a reaper. It is a common recruit mistake. A disappointing start for Team One.”
Jack’s attention was drawn far from the house, to the group of construction workers approaching the farm from the long driveway. He sensed something from the group. A vibration of some kind. Or a crackling sensation.
Then he spotted him. A small man in a blue plaid button-down and torn jeans. His face was blank, like a wax mask.
Jack grabbed Freddy’s arm. Freddy jumped. “What?”
“The reaper is in that pack of men coming down the—”
Jack didn’t finish his sentence. The bands on Team One flashed crimson and buzzed madly.
“There!” Miles screamed over the monitor.
But his teammates were too far away. The shadow reaper was now running toward the day laborers. One of the laborers turned to look at it and screamed. He saw the monster for what it was. Team One members deployed their blades and sprinted toward the driveway.
From the other side of the farm, Miles ran at the reaper. He had no hope of reaching it. Then Miles stopped and put his hand to his forehead. The workers fell to the ground in agony, gripping their heads. The reaper stumbled too, flinching as if he had taken a physical blow to the skull. But the beast recovered quickly.
“A strong effort by Miles Watt,” Bakari said. “But his spade is not yet powerful enough to work on reapers, and certainly not from that distance—”
Bakari stopped speaking. Something was happening. The hair on Jack’s arm stood on end. Moisture seemed to be sucked from the air, like the moments before a storm.
Claire ran with the grace of a gazelle, toward the reaper. She peeled off her gloves and tossed them aside. Then she rubbed her hands together as if to warm them.
In a full sprint Claire clapped her hands together and then swept them apart. A single, colossal bolt of lightning torpedoed from the sky like a javelin. It struck the reaper with a deafening thunderclap. The reaper careened a hundred yards through the air and slammed against the wall of the barn.
Claire pulled her blade from off her hip. The tip exploded with blue fire as she drove straight toward the center of the beast’s chest. The blaze met the reaper’s icy exoskeleton, and the reaper vanished in a puff of violet smoke.
The world they had been in—the immersive hologram of the farm—blinked out. They were back in the amphitheater. The Dome stood before them. Not a single recruit breathed.
A green light illuminated Team One’s silver door as it slid open. Out tumbled Claire, followed by Miles, Janelle, and Kasun. They staggered into the open space of the amphitheater, checking themselves for wounds that weren’t there.
Kasun and Janelle leapt on Miles in jubilation. All of them, Jack noticed, were careful not to touch Claire, who remained expressionless.
“Congratulations, Team One,” Bakari announced. “You’ve just completed your first simulation.”
The bands of Team Two glowed yellow and buzzed. They looked more nervous than Team One had, having just watched the events of the past few minutes.
“Learn from what you saw,” Bakari advised them. “Claire Lacoste has never used static to affect the troposphere before today. She relied on her instincts. Trust your spade. And be ready. The reaper will be different every time.”
The second door opened and Team Two disappeared inside.
By the time Team Twelve staggered out of the Dome, Jack had given up hope. Instructor Bakari had continually reminded them that the reapers were matched with the team’s skill set and that the Dome would never give them something they couldn’t handle. But to Jack’s eye there didn’t seem to be a great deal of difference between the reapers in any of the simulations.
“Team Thirteen.” Instructor Bakari’s tone dripped with contempt. As they approached their door, Bakari looked them over as he might look at a mutt that had wandered into the Westminster Dog Show. “Don’t worry too much about being unprepared, Team Thirteen,” Bakari said absentmindedly, checking a hologram that hovered over his wrist. He peered over his glasses and picked out Jack. “I expect your reaper will cower before the mythical Guardian.”
Jack felt his face burning. He knew Claire was watching.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Voss said under his breath.
Bakari heard him. “I don’t control the Dome, recruit, and neither do you. The Dome decides when you enter.”
The moments passed achingly slowly as they stared at their bands, waiting for them to turn the canary yellow and vibrate. Jack’s chest constricted so tightly that his lungs had difficulty inflating.
Then, with a single tone, the Dome’s golden light blinked off. The entire structure whirred as it powered down.
Bakari looked at Alexander. “What’s happening here, Edison?” he asked angrily. “You told me the installation was complete.”
Alexander shrunk, furiously flipping through holograms, tapping out codes. “It was, sir. The door is functioning properly.”
“Then why did the Dome not call Team Thirteen in? It’s programmed specifically so that an improbable can . . .”
Bakari paused, as if coming to a realization. He walked over to Team Thirteen. “But you’re not, are you? You’re not improbables.”
Asha took a breath. “Not yet, sir.”
“The Dome is programmed for improbables. The Dome does not give access to dormants.” Bakari practically spat the last word. “When Director Darius and Superior Blue convinced the Council to accept a Team Thirteen based on the Great Prophecy of the Order of the Grays, I was skeptical. Still, I thought perhaps there was some reasoning behind it. But no.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “And while I have the highest respect for the Order of the Grays, the Great Prophecy was never—never—meant to be taken literally.”
He shook his head, a mix of disgust and pity. “There is no way for you to simply manifest your spades overnight,” he said. “If we must go through this charade for two more nights, then
so be it. But I recommend you search for a way to be honorably discharged before that time.”
Bakari turned to the crowded amphitheater. “That concludes the Dome session for today. Excellent work, the rest of you. You are released for dinner.”
The twelve teams filed past them. Jack watched Claire go, her face still expressionless. He felt defeated and hopeless and utterly alone.
CHAPTER 9
“We need something radical. We need a shortcut.”
THE INCIDENT
It’s only day one,” Freddy said as he reached for a dinner roll from a basket in the center of the table. “Of course, the Dome didn’t let us in yet.” They sat across from each other in Prophecy Hall. Jack had never been in such a beautiful building in his life. The dining hall was named for the thirteen prophecies of the Order of the Grays. The walls, wooden pillars, and rafters were covered in intricate symbols, hand carved by the Grays centuries ago.
Recruits and cadets filled the center of the hall, laughter echoing around the high ceilings. Between tables, recruits pushed butcher block carts piled high with grilled steaks, rotisserie chicken, and thick pork chops, sautéed green beans, roasted carrots, and massive bowls of salad. Instructors and apprentices like Alexander sat together at long tables that ran along the west side of the hall. They were served by cadets rather than recruits.
Jack’s team, along with Team One, had been on setup duty, lugging a couple hundred plates and bowls to the tables from the industrial-sized kitchen in the back of the hall and setting the tables. Voss had physically carried the heavy carts from the kitchen into the hall without breaking a sweat. Kasun split in two to cut his work in half. And Janelle leapt across the hall with silverware and cloth napkins. Now they were finished and could relax. For the first time since he’d arrived at Hadley, Jack found he had an appetite.
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