“Almost a whole day. But don’t worry. It’s shift change and Dad’s downstairs. He thinks I’m in the labs. I work here now,” she said. “Sort of. I just started and I’m not technically supposed to interact with students. I’m more of an information custodian. Dad says he needs somebody he trusts, but I suspect he just wants to keep an eye on me.” And then she stopped and pursed her lips. “I think I’m upset,” she said. “I talk a lot when I get upset. You look really bad.”
“Am I in the infirmary?” I looked around at the whitewashed walls, the little tubes and cords that were attached to my arm. “Where’s Tuck?” I asked.
“Who?” she said.
“He was right here,” I said. “I saw him.”
She shook her head. “It’s just us.”
There was a snapping sound in the hallway and Bethany looked over her shoulder, freezing like a nervous rabbit. She was quite beautiful, I realized—her features were very delicate, and she wore some kind of pink lip gloss that sparkled.
“You need to leave,” I said.
“I want to apologize,” she said. “I’m usually a good liar, and I definitely would lie to keep you out of trouble, but I was wearing the matching barrette when they questioned me. I’m so sorry, but I had to warn you. It would be worse if you said you found it on the bus or got it from some boy.”
“I would never say that.”
“Really?” she said. “Why not? The penalty would be less.”
“This is crazy,” I said. “I can’t be found with you.”
“We’ll need to be more careful”—she nodded—“in the future.”
I searched for a button to summon a nurse. It was better to turn her in than be discovered. “What are you looking for?” she asked. “Don’t move around.” I tried to sit up. Pain shot through my left elbow and shoulder. I recoiled.
“I’m going to make it up to you,” Bethany said. “I feel like it’s all my fault.” She lifted a handheld out of one of the voluminous pockets on her lab coat. She showed it to me and quickly put it away. Several of the components were different colors, as if they had been spliced together. “I’m not supposed to have one of my own,” she said. “But I did have a very dull childhood. I think when you keep children indoors it makes them sneaky. If I ever have kids, which I definitely won’t, I’ll send them out in the yard as much as possible.” She nodded as if to confirm this resolution.
“I don’t want to scare you,” she said, “or sound too crazy, but I need you to know—I have planned the most amazing field trip for us. Only we should meet first. Get to know each other.”
“We can’t meet,” I said. “And I don’t go on—what did you call them?—field trips.”
“The real obstacle is your roommate,” she said. “But I know you’ll find a way to deal with him.”
“That’s insane,” I said. “Where do you think we are?”
“Tell me you don’t like me,” she said. “And you never want to see me again.”
“I shouldn’t like you,” I said. “And I shouldn’t see you again.”
“That’s not the same.”
I was waking up now, feeling each injury. I was also aware that I had a catheter, and there was a little bag of yellow urine hanging on the edge of my bed. I was wearing a backless robe.
“Believe me,” I said. “If I thought it was possible to sneak out, I would.”
“It is possible,” she said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” And when I opened my mouth to cut her off, she said, “Just listen. I’m good with machines. It’s not like an inflated sense of ability or something. I rebuilt that handheld from a scrap pile. I mean, what kind of idiots leave all their spare parts lying around, right? And I’ve been testing out commands using the passwords of ex-employees, because somebody never purged them. And I’ll tell you another thing—half the people who work here are too lazy to change their default password. They’re just typing in their ID number. How stupid is that?” She mistook my look of astonishment for an expression of contempt for Goodhouse security. “I know!” she said. “And Dad is all puffed about how impregnable this place is, and you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been authorizing boys to do. I’ve been typing in all kinds of crazy commands. I mean, if they knew.” She started to giggle. “I guarantee you won’t set off one of their alarms. All you have to do is get to the south kitchen entrance without being seen. Easy,” she said. “Two a.m., next Sunday night. A week from today.” I just stared at her, unable to speak. “Is that a yes?” she asked. She sat on the side of the bed and leaned toward me. She was so close I could see the fine hairs on her cheek.
“If I get caught,” I said, “they’ll lock me in Confinement. Do you know what happens to those boys?”
“Chicken,” she said.
This shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“Chicken.” She lowered her face to mine and hovered there, then slowly pressed her lips against my cheek. I went very still. I could feel a vibration of life inside her, the slight stick of her lip gloss on my skin. It was all I could do to keep my hands at my sides. “Chick, chick, chick,” she whispered. “I can make you happy. And happy is the safest place to be.”
* * *
After the fire, I’d hidden inside one of the school vans. I’d curled up on a bench seat and watched the arrival of the police, the firemen, and the paramedics. Each man had a hat: a fire hat, a police hat, a watchman’s cap—even the paramedics had matching baseball caps. I remember thinking that we were beyond hats, that they were some twentieth-century relic, but when something needed to get done, everyone had a hat. Men ran past me, their footsteps crunching on the gravel of the parking lot. They covered the bodies on the lawn with tarps and blankets. There was some problem with the water, and firemen were shouting into their handhelds, hurrying in every direction.
The Zeros were gone, or at least their hats, the red balaclavas, were gone. Later it became clear that many of them had still been on campus, wearing their official Goodhouse uniforms. Blending in, then disappearing, one by one. They’d infiltrated the school—as members of staff, as proctors and technicians. They’d been with us all along.
A policeman found me and a paramedic checked my lungs. They gave me something hot to drink and wrapped me in a thin metallic blanket, like the coatings they put on hot-water pipes. I was evacuated along with the other surviving students, all of whom were much younger and had been housed in a different part of campus. We were taken to the basement of a little church in Bend. Army cots had been set up, and the local police watched over us. They tried to comfort the smaller ones, who hadn’t seen much but cried anyway. Bibles were placed strategically around the room, and I remember touching the yellow cover of one and leaving a gray smear of a fingerprint.
People gathered in the parking lot outside the church. The crowd was chanting something, but I couldn’t make out the words. At first I could see their feet through the tiny basement windows, but then the church covered those with plywood and they played classical music loud enough to drown out sound.
It took a few days for our La Pine proctors to join us at the church. They all had to pass a security screening. Some had spent a night in jail despite their innocence, and all were angrier than we were, or at least more vocal. In the early-morning hours, when most of the younger boys were asleep, I’d creep into the hallway and listen to the proctors talk. They had lost friends. They knew the names of each Zero, the men who had lived with them, who’d had dinner with their families.
The school interviewed me, as did the police. They wanted to know why I was the only living member of my class. I had to offer them some explanation—but I was afraid to tell the truth—and so it was easier to credit the proctor, the one I’d lain next to on the grass. “We were friends,” I said. And I’d felt free to grieve for this fictional connection, to become inconsolable as I described how he had saved me. I couldn’t speak of my real friends. Thin
king of them was a trap—a cage, a sort of blindness. And even if the school did not fully believe my explanation, they believed in my grief. They believed that, no matter what, I’d been truly punished.
I had no intention of meeting Bethany again. It had been disturbing to see her in the infirmary, to have her here in my world, within the walls. I tried to put her out of my mind, to focus on more important things. I had struck a class leader. I had beaten another boy senseless. There was something wrong with me, some weakness manifesting itself. Seeing Bethany was a reminder that I had to be more careful. She was a threat. Even if she thought she wasn’t, I knew better. To imagine any future together was to invite wrong-thinking; it would be the beginning of some larger transgression. I had to forget about her. But I couldn’t.
* * *
On my second day in the infirmary I awoke to an alarm. The overhead lights dimmed and the door to my room slammed closed.
“Campus is now on lockdown.” A prerecorded message echoed throughout the building. “Please report to a secure area.”
The top of my door had a glass window and I saw someone race past. The message repeated itself, and I rolled out of bed. I yanked the IV from my arm and wobbled over to bang on the door. It was firmly latched. I was trapped.
“Campus is now on lockdown,” a woman’s voice repeated.
I was looking for a tool, something I could use to beat at the glass, feeling how bruised and sore my body really was, when a man in a tan nurse’s uniform stepped into my room.
“Back in bed,” he said. He had to shout to be heard over the alarm. “It’s only a drill.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. We’d never had a drill before.
“Relax.” The nurse held up his hands and gestured for me to calm down. The torn IV site had sprayed an arc of blood onto my infirmary gown. I probably looked wild. At least the catheter was gone.
“Boy, they weren’t kidding when they said you were jumpy.” The nurse smiled at me. “Haven’t you ever heard of emergency preparedness?”
I got back in bed, but perched on the side of the mattress. And then, abruptly, the alarm ceased. A little chime sounded an all-clear and the lighting reverted to its normal greenish hue.
“See?” the nurse said. He pressed a thick gauze pad to my wound. “What did I tell you?” His tone was kind, and I glanced quickly at his face, wondering if I had misinterpreted something. His hair was freshly cut to regulation, his uniform a little too large for him—the fabric holding the shape of the pressed seams more than it folded to his contours. He was new.
He used his thumbprint to unlock a drawer. He removed a roll of surgical tape and secured the gauze pad.
“I’ll have to put a new port in your forearm,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. He gestured for me to extend my right arm, and it took me a moment to comply. I was struggling to calm myself. In a place that prized control, to feel out of control was the worst feeling. I just wanted to know what had happened to me. But I couldn’t ask directly. “I don’t think,” I said, and I had to clear my throat to get the words out. “I don’t think the drug you gave me had any effect.”
“I’m sorry?” he said. He swapped out my IV, opening a new port in my arm. The tiny flash of pain made me want to hit him, an impulse I easily curbed, but still, its intensity was startling.
“It wasn’t you,” I said. “Another nurse.”
“What other nurse?” he said.
“The one who gave me the injection,” I said. “For the Intensive.”
“What are you talking about?” I waited for him to say that he’d never heard of that word—but he didn’t. “When was this?” he asked.
I shrugged. I said, “I’m a little confused about time.”
The nurse checked my IV bag to see if perhaps there was a tag on it, some specification. Then he brought out his handheld and tapped at the screen. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. If the Intensive was in my record, it meant that Creighton and Davis were somehow acting within the confines of the school, which was confusing. But off-record meant it might all be a sham. It meant that maybe that needle had been full of nothing. No Intensive, just savagery. It only took a few seconds for the nurse to flip through my file. His eyes scanned text. The dull white glow of the screen reflected in the black of his pupils.
“There’s nothing here about testing,” the nurse said finally. “I’m going to step back your pain medication. I think you’re confused.”
“But I do remember somebody,” I said.
“Opiates can affect cognition and memory,” he said. “That’s not unusual. The foggy feeling should clear up very soon. Then you can get up, access the wallscreen.” The man peeled off his gloves, preparing to leave. “And when you’re up,” he said, “you’ll need to log in for meditation and reflection.” He walked across the room and activated the wallscreen. There was Tanner, speaking in a slow, sonorous voice. “A half hour is required today,” the nurse said. “That’s all.”
In a moment, the nurse would be gone. He’d be replaced at the end of his shift by someone with more experience. “Wait,” I said, my mouth dry as I issued the command. “Wait,” I said again.
Soon he would not turn around when a boy spoke to him. He would learn, or he would be dismissed. “Do you think—” I started. It was hard to get the words out, to make them as loud as they had to be. “Can you find out where they took me two nights ago?” I asked. “I was led off campus. It’s a building in the Exclusion Zone.”
“Excuse me?” The nurse shifted his weight, uncomfortable now.
“It should be on my tracking chip for sure. But I need someone to check. I mean, how do they account for what happened to me? My class leaders authorized it. Some proctors know about it, too, the ones that work with my year. So I need your help. After I’m discharged, I won’t know who to ask,” I said. “Can you get word to a supervisor? Or someone in administration?”
The man flushed. His cheeks reddened. I was witnessing his education. “Now, wait just a minute,” he said. “It’s not my job to relay messages.” And there was the look that all proctors had to some degree or another—resentment, the job being made more difficult. “I’m sure there’s a protocol for grievances,” he said.
“Not for this,” I said. “I need your help.”
He backed out of the room. “I’ll find someone for you to talk to,” he said.
But no one ever came.
* * *
Later that night, I logged my time on the wallscreen and then opened my personal page, typing in my name and password. Each student had one of these pages. A photo of me, taken on my first day here, was in the top right corner. Beneath the photo was my location and my heartbeat, ticking along, broadcasting from my chip to the screen. Sometimes proctors stopped boys whose heartbeats were elevated, presuming they were up to something—and often they were. More than once I’d seen boys sitting with their personal pages open, breathing deeply, getting coached by a roommate or a friend on how to calm themselves. You were supposed to turn people in if you saw them doing this. They were planning on deception, which was wrong-thinking itself. Owen would have turned them in, but I never did. Seeing roommates together, planning something, reminded me of how lonely I was.
I clicked on my infraction page. I scrolled through the days until I hit Saturday. Immediately I saw my demerits from the bus accident, followed by the charge of theft, and then—a charge of predatory violence without provocation. Creighton was listed as the injured student. This was one of the worst violent infractions you could get. I clicked on the incident, but there were no further notes, only a Disciplinary Committee hearing, scheduled for Friday, June 7, ten days from now. I stared at the screen. In the space of a few hours I had dropped from a high Level 1 to a mid Level 2.
I went back to my page and clicked through the list of medical studies and Maintenance Intensives. These were the best way to work off demerits, but every study was full, with hopelessly long waitlists. I closed th
e page and looked down at my hands. I had red welts between my knuckles, broken blood vessels from the punches I’d thrown. At La Pine, where fighting was banned, we’d developed a way to fight that didn’t leave a mark. It was the sort of thing that happens to an isolated group. It was like the palming here at Ione, just another adaptive language. At La Pine our fights were fought with our legs. We were like kangaroos, or cartoon kangaroos, anyway, and every part of the body that was covered by clothing was a target. We developed special kicks, and they circulated like a fad through the school, the smaller boys imitating the older ones. Some had talent for it, a natural way of hiding their intentions until their foot was planted in your diaphragm. Just the way some were good at math or reading, some boys could really kick.
But hitting with the hands felt more personal. It felt taboo and strangely animal, almost as if I’d been digging in the dirt. I’d had no choice, I told myself. But I’d done real damage to another person, and perhaps this wouldn’t have bothered me if he had been a competitor or a Zero. But it sickened me to think of my hands tearing into Tuck. He’d been motionless when the lights came on. His face had been slack.
No, that wasn’t right. I was forcing myself to hold on to the remorse, the revulsion. These were my true feelings, but they flared and dimmed in a strange way. It was as if this memory were a distortion—something I didn’t quite believe in, more like a dream than a concrete event. Perhaps I’d reached the limit of my emotional capacity. The school taught us to look for this, for this moment of deadening. But my memories of the Exclusion Zone just felt wrong. They were all duty and detachment. They didn’t agitate the busy, anxious part of myself, didn’t mix with the me that I knew. The memory of that night felt impersonal. And yet, who else had been there? There was no one else but me.
SEVEN
I was discharged after breakfast and given orders to return for a cortisone shot the following morning, and every morning for the next week. I wanted to stop by the dormitory and talk to Owen, but my clearances instructed me to report immediately to the factory. I ran most of the way there. Everybody had an AJT, or an Allotted Journey Time, after which the computer automatically generated demerits for tardiness. The lower your status, the shorter your AJT, and I was so worried about it, so stressed by the invisible clock, that I arrived at the factory shaking and out of breath, my arm out of its sling.
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