by Spencer Baum
No, what’s made me upset to the point of tears is the way Officer Tafoya handled me during the arrest. The way he pushed me to the ground and yanked at my arms. Pressed his knee into my back as he cuffed my wrists together.
I know that, to most of you, to most of the world, Officer Miguel Tafoya is a hero, a handsome, well-spoken, utterly respectable hero. And I have no reason to believe he’s not a man of good character.
But you’ll forgive me if I don’t think of him as fondly as you do. The way he handled me in that moment, the way I remember that moment, the way I felt being pushed to the ground by a man who was bigger than me for the second time in 24 hours…
I’m sorry, but in my memory, and my dreams, Officer Tafoya always plays the villain.
Hero or villain (and maybe we’re all a little bit of both), Officer Tafoya had a tight grip on me when we went through the doors. When I stepped outside into chaos.
Fucking hell. Bullhorns and sirens and angry factions of an angry crowd trying to get at each other. In that moment when I emerged from McCallister Hall, I was living in the world Sunny had created. In that moment, Hillerman College was a war zone.
Yellow caution tape. Police in riot gear. People running and shouting on the perimeter of the scene.
My friend Danielle standing behind the wall of police, her face drenched in tears. She shrieks at me. What happened, Jenna? What did you do?
The spinning lights of the police cruisers color Danielle’s face in flashes of red and blue. There’s an Action 7 news van off to the side, reporters and cameramen in a shouting match with police. And then they see me and the shouting grows more intense. Who’s that girl in handcuffs? Who are they taking away? Do you have a suspect in custody?
And then the blood. When it happened, the blood was a confusing bit of nonsense, something I saw but didn’t believe. But in the dream, the blood takes center stage.
A river of blood on the concrete, flowing in my direction. In the dream I accidentally stepped in it and it splashed all over my pants and I felt like I was somehow defiling the deceased.
I feel like it’s my fault, what happened to him. It’s crazy, I know, but I do. Why do we do that to ourselves? I didn’t kill him. I didn’t do anything to him. But I was still angry. Still hurt. Still tumbling in a storm of contradictory emotions from the night before. The blood has a source, a river flowing out of a lake. A scrum of policemen surround that lake. At this point I don’t know what it is that’s bleeding out on the concrete. A wounded protestor? Someone who got his head bashed in with a nightstick? A disgusting bit of vandalism from the protestors? A water balloon full of pig’s blood?
Jenna, what did you do?
Policemen circle around the source of the blood. They shuffle. They squat down. I get flashes of information every time they move. I see that it’s a body on the ground. Someone severely wounded or dead. A body lying face-first in a pool of blood.
“What’s going on over there?” I say.
Officer Tafoya grips me tighter and says, “Keep walking.”
We’re in a struggle now. Officer Tafoya is pulling at my wrists, stretching my arms out behind my back, pushing on my shoulder blade, and I’m yelling, “Please, I just need to see!”
I feel like I know whose body that is. I feel like, from what little I’ve seen already, I recognize it.
But I don’t want to believe it.
In the dream, I said his name, and then he sat up and looked at me. In the dream I can see that he’s alive and I’m so, so relieved.
But in the memory I’m squirming and shouting because I already have an idea of what I’m looking at. In the memory I’m shouting, “Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”
My anger becomes the crowd’s anger. We humans are so delicate, so easily set off. This crowd is my community at Hillerman College, a community that I once knew to be rational, kind-hearted, and calm. I don’t recognize these people anymore. My friends, my professors, my fellow students. My agitation has set them off. The perimeter of the scene is full of unrest, about to become a riot.
And now the thunk of a police cannon. The hiss of a canister. Screams of anger and fear. The acrid smell of tear gas.
It’s here that the memory gets distorted like old, degraded film. My eyes are watering. My vision is blurred and refracted. I yank and pull, twist my neck around, fight to get a better look.
An officer in the scrum steps to his left and I get my first clear line of sight to the body. It’s him. His eyes are open. Lifeless.
“Seth?” I say.
The world closes in. The blood sparkles in the sunlight. I scream his name.
“Seth!”
CHAPTER 32
Bart Devlin rewound the footage of the Semifinal’s ending. Jenna on the straightaway. Jenna goes down. Jenna gets up. Jenna survives.
He watched it again. He paused when she fell. Went slow-mo when she fell. Frame by frame when she fell.
A single sentence of truth in his mind: Someone made Jenna fall. He grabbed hold of the sentence before it could fade. He repeated the words to himself until he was certain they would drive him to action. Someone made Jenna fall.
He called Dr. Hoyer to arrange a medical exam for Jenna.
“She had her post-race exam last night,” the doctor said. “She’s in good health.”
“Did you check the log on her implant?” Bart asked.
“No, we check the implant log in the pre-race checkup.”
“I want to check it again,” said Bart. “I’ll bring her down myself.”
An hour later, Bart stood in the corner of the exam room, looking at Jenna, who sat on a table while Dr. Hoyer waved an RF sensor over the back of her neck. A beep, a blue light, a transfer of data. Dr. Hoyer went to the computer cart. He zoomed in on the implant log, a short and easy-to-read listing of the dates and times Jenna’s chip had been activated.
A few clicks. Electric jolts from her trainer, four of them spread out over three months. And two activations of the Gross Motor Shutdown switch.
“Twice,” Bart said, quietly.
“I’ve already sent an email to operations to ask about this code,” Dr. Hoyer said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Of course you haven’t seen that code before, Bart thought. No one else has had their GMS activated and lived to tell about it.
Jenna’s GMS had been activated twice, yet here she was, alive and well, sitting on the exam table, staring at Bart.
Raging at Bart.
“Would you excuse us for a moment, Doctor?” Bart said. “I’d like to speak with the inmate in private.”
Dr. Hoyer’s initial reaction was visible disappointment, but, realizing he was speaking to a company director, he contained it. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll be in my office.”
Bart waited for the door to close behind Dr. Hoyer, then he said, “I want to hear about your fall last night.”
“My fall?” said Jenna.
She looked like she’d just stepped off the battlefield. Bandages on her knees and elbows, a wrap around her wrist, antibiotic ointment smeared across a scrape on her cheek.
“Yes, I want to hear about the tumble you took on the course,” Bart said.
“Which one?” said Jenna.
And now Bart remembered that Jenna had two notable spills during the race, the first coming when Nathan Cavanaugh stuck out his foot and tripped her.
“The last one,” said Bart, “when you were near the end and you kind of…”
He struggled for the word but Jenna found it for him.
“Flopped,” Jenna said.
“Right. You flopped.”
“It’s something with my implant, isn’t it?”
Bart felt his heart rate quicken. “Your chip?”
“It’s the second time it’s happened, you know.”
Bart glanced back at the implant log. GMS Activation – two instances. “Second time what happened?” he said.
“The second time somet
hing has gone haywire with the chip you put in my spine. It’s the second time I’ve completely lost the ability to move.”
Bart inhaled through his nose and got a strong whiff of hospital disinfectant. “Describe it to me,” he said. “What did it feel like?”
“It didn’t feel like anything,” Jenna said. “There was no pain. Everything just quit working. Total bodily dysfunction.”
“What do you mean, dysfunction?”
“I couldn’t move. My arms, my legs, not even my fingers and toes. It was the same both times.”
“You’re saying that fall at the end of the course was the second time it happened?”
“Yes.”
“And the first?”
“Last week we were training on a practice course,” Jenna said. “I fell into a water pit. I was a few feet underwater, getting ready to swim to the surface, and then my limbs froze. I thought I was going to drown.”
“But your movement came back?”
“Yes, after I got clicked.”
“Someone clicked you when you were underwater?”
“Margo clicked everyone who didn’t finish in the top 12 on the practice course that day.”
Bart nodded. “But what about last night?” he said. “You were on the ground, unable to move, and then you were up again.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. First I couldn’t move, then I could.”
Bart looked back at the implant log still up on the computer screen, matching the listed activities to the story Jenna told him.
The log showed that, on the previous Monday, when she was in training, Clicker 34 activated her GMS switch. Less than a minute later, Clicker 22 sent her a behavior modification jolt.
Clicker 22 was Margo’s clicker. But who was Clicker 34?
Who tried to drown Jenna?
The next activity on the log was Sunday night, race night, when she was seconds away from escaping the course. Clicker 34 activated her GMS switch again.
The same clicker, probably the same person. Someone tried to drown her in training, and then tried to kill her on the live course.
On the implant log, seconds after one clicker knocked her down, a signal from another clicker allowed her to get back up. Like people were fighting over Jenna’s life, a proxy war over this girl, played from the sidelines, with clickers.
What the hell was going on?
“Something’s wrong with my implant, right?” Jenna said.
Bart took a long time to answer. When he did, he said, “Everything’s fine.”
“Then why does this keep happening? It’s almost killed me twice!”
Bart thought about telling Jenna the truth, or at least part of it. He liked the idea of opening up to her, of the two of them becoming allies. She was, after all, about to give the company its best Finale ever.
She was also a prisoner who was likely to die in his care.
“You can go back to the cellblock,” he said. “I’ll get someone to escort you.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to tell me what’s going on?”
“I have the information I need. Have a good day, Jenna.”
“A good day? Are you fucking kidding me?”
Bart said nothing.
“Is this going to keep happening?” Jenna demanded.
“No,” Bart said, then added, “I don’t think so.”
Later that morning, Bart gathered with the other directors in a conference room on the top floor of Devlin Tower. Bart’s brother Donnie, Bart’s sister Chanelle, and their father, Herman, all had cleared their schedules at Bart’s request. When the door was closed, and everyone was seated, Bart said, “Someone made Jenna fall.”
Silence in response.
“Someone’s trying to kill Jenna,” he added.
Now he got silence and puzzled looks.
“Someone inside our company is actively trying to kill Jenna Duvall.”
Still nothing.
“Is it one of you?” Bart asked.
“What in the devil are you getting at?” said Herman.
Bart slid a printout of Jenna’s implant log across the table. “Jenna’s GMS switch was activated,” he said. “Twice.”
Herman pulled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. He picked up the paper and began to read.
“There are only four people in the company authorized to activate a GMS switch,” Bart said. “And they’re all sitting right here.”
“Are you saying one of us did this?” said Chanelle.
“Well if it wasn’t one of us we have a big problem. If someone who’s not at this table is accessing high level security protocols on a contestant’s chip-”
“Are you sure someone used the switch?” said Donnie.
“It says GMS event right here,” said Herman, pointing at the printout. “Says it twice.”
“Maybe there’s an error in the log,” said Donnie.
“I talked to Jenna this morning,” said Bart. “There’s no error in the log. There was a deliberate effort to kill her.”
“We’re making a deliberate effort to kill every prisoner except one,” said Chanelle.
“This is different,” said Bart. “Someone is threatening the integrity of our contest.”
“But I thought that was the whole point of the GMS switch,” said Chanelle. “Sometimes we don’t trust the integrity of the contest. Sometimes we want to control who lives and dies on the course.”
“And I didn’t authorize anyone to use Jenna’s GMS switch!”
The look Chanelle gave him, the kind of dismissive skepticism that only a big sister can give, was what drove him to blurt out his next words.
“Was it you?” he said.
“Me?” said Chanelle. “Why would you think it was me?”
“You and Barbara Lomax were close.”
“You can just stop right there, Bart. Yes, Barbara was my friend, and truth be told, I’d love to see Jenna Duvall die a miserable death. But I never activated her GMS switch. I wouldn’t do that. As far as I’m concerned, the decision to take out a contestant during a race is yours to make, and yours alone.”
“I agree,” said Donnie. “And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t do this either.”
Bart took a few seconds to process. Whatever their differences (and when you work with your siblings for twenty years you learn you have plenty of differences), he’d always trusted Donnie and Chanelle. He’d always believed they had the best interests of the business at heart.
Which left only Herman.
“Dad?” he said.
Herman was still staring at the printout. “Hmm?” he said.
“We’re talking about two activations of Jenna’s GMS switch.”
“Are you asking if I did this?”
“Yes.”
Herman laughed. “I haven’t used a clicker in years.”
“Then we’ve got an issue, don’t we?” Bart said. “Somewhere, someone in this company is using a clicker in a way they aren’t authorized to use it.”
“This printout gives device numbers,” Herman said.
“Yes, and I suppose that’s the next place I’ll have to look,” said Bart.
“Why are you spending time on this?” said Chanelle. “Get your assistant to do it. Better yet, have Donnie assign someone from operations.”
Bart shook his head. “This is too important,” he said. “We might have a security breach.”
“I think that’s a stretch,” said Donnie.
“And I think Jenna Duvall might give us the biggest audience we’ve ever had, but not if someone kills her before the Finale!”
“How is someone going to kill her before the Finale?” asked Donnie. “Between now and then Jenna is spending her time in the cell block and the practice course.”
“The first GMS event was an attempt to kill her during training,” said Bart. “Someone waited until she was deep in a water pit then shut down her movement. She could have drowned.”
“Jesus,”
said Chanelle.
“If you think she’s important,” said Herman, “you should put her somewhere safe.”
“Her roommates are dead. She has Cellblock G all to herself now,” said Donnie. “We could hold her there until we know what’s going on.”
“That sounds good,” said Bart. “But even in the cellblock, with that chip in her neck--”
“She’s not going to fall to her death in the cellblock,” said Donnie.
“No, but someone could click her over and over until she’s fried,” said Bart.
“Is there a way to limit access to her implant?” said Herman.
“No,” said Donnie. “We’d have to special order a new one assigned to specific clickers.”
“Then we should take it out,” said Bart.
He got looks of horror from the others at the table.
“If we’re going to lock her in her cellblock alone she’ll be fine,” said Bart.
“Just to be clear, you’re talking about rolling a prisoner into surgery to remove her implant,” said Herman.
“We’ll just tell her we’re fixing it,” said Bart. “She already thinks something’s wrong with it.”
“But we’re not fixing it, we’re removing it,” said Herman.
“And after we remove it, we lock her in her cellblock until we know who did this,” said Bart.
“You’re risking a lot for this girl,” said Chanelle.
“She’s special,” said Bart. “She’s the most engaging contestant we’ve ever had, and she’s going to make us a mint when she runs in the Finale.”
CHAPTER 33
A curious thing Jenna noticed on her first day in the cellblock—the bedroom doors locked from the inside. After years of being locked in, it was quite pleasing to be able to lock the rest of the world out.
There was a reason the bedrooms had interior locks on the doors. There was a reason for everything at the Tetradome, and in the end, that reason was always generating revenue for the company. In the case of the bedrooms, the ability to lock yourself inside was crucial if you wanted to make use of the famous (or maybe infamous) Tetradome Yack Shack.
