“No one,” the man said. “It’s just me.” He tried to bring his hands together and I stepped on one of them, grinding my heel into the fingers, making him gasp. “Keep your hands apart.” He would have some kind of panic button on his ID bracelet. All the staff did. He relaxed his fists and lay on his belly. He was looking past me, and then he raised his head off the ground, his expression full of disbelief. I turned and saw Bethany standing in the illumination of the guardhouse, holding her father’s antique revolver.
“Jesus,” the guard said.
Bethany’s hands trembled, and the barrel of the gun swayed to such a degree that I was included in the threat. “Careful,” I said.
“I have little kids at home,” the guard said. “Think about what you’re doing.”
“Actually,” Bethany said, “you need to think about what you’re doing, because I’m more likely to act in an impulsive and fear-based way. So,” she added, “no sudden movements. No loud noises.”
She was beside me now. The gun wasn’t cocked, but neither of them seemed to notice.
“Please,” he said, “don’t do this.”
I stepped forward to remove his handheld and his weapons. I tossed them away. The handheld made a crackling noise as it bounced, and then a voice said, “Checkpoints are now at Code 20. I need everyone to key in.”
“What does that mean?” I asked Bethany.
But she just passed me the revolver. “Watch him,” she said.
I didn’t like guns and I hated this weapon in particular, hated the weight of the metal, the smooth wooden stock. It was familiar—I had fired it before. I had cleaned its cylinder. I hefted it and clicked the hammer back with such ease and confidence that they both paused. “I’ll just aim for the stomach,” I said, “like we discussed.”
“Right,” Bethany said. “Good.” But she flashed me a quizzical and cautionary look as she turned to unzip one of the backpacks. She withdrew a small tablet with a white screen.
“Hold out your arm,” she said to the guard. I stepped closer and kept the gun only a few feet from him. I was worried that he might grab her, try to pull her in front of him. But up close I saw the sweat streaming down his face and the way his eyes darted back and forth between us. He was too scared. I felt a pang of sympathy for him. I felt it but didn’t show it.
Bethany removed his ID bracelet and laid it on top of the tablet. The two devices lit up simultaneously. The tablet projected a small holographic image, a long column of streaming white text, and Bethany began to use her fingertips to manipulate the lines of data. I leaned toward her, still watching the guard closely.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“Why is everything different in theory than in practice?” she asked. She cursed softly and squinted down at the shifting letters and numbers.
“Checkpoint 5, key in,” the handheld said. “Twenty seconds remaining.” And then another voice came over the handheld, almost interrupting the last transmission. “Check 5, we good? I can’t get a visual.”
I looked around the guardhouse, searching for a camera, but couldn’t locate it. In addition to the usual fencing, I saw that the exit had a physical barrier, a retractable arm—and some kind of electromagnetic field, like the one they used at the main gate. I could discern a slight shimmer in the air, some projected light, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if we tried to pull through it.
The guard’s ID bracelet—the one that lay on top of the tablet—started to beep. “What’s happening?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“I tripped something,” she said. Bethany was staring at the device, seemingly at a loss.
“How bad?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not at my best under pressure,” she said. “I really need a quiet workspace.”
I glanced at the empty access road, and some instinct urged me to action, promised me that hesitation would bring failure. I grabbed the bracelet, threw it to the ground, and crushed it with my foot. The beeping stopped.
“Problem solved,” I said.
“No,” Bethany said, “that’s worse.”
“Stand up,” I told the guard. “Hands in front of you.” The man got to his feet, but he was looking around, expecting help. I advanced slightly, pushing Bethany out of the way, aiming the gun at the guard’s head. “Get in the trunk,” I said.
A voice issued from a speaker inside the guardhouse. “Check 5. Check 5.”
“Get in the trunk,” I repeated. The guard moved slowly. He was trying to delay.
“You’ll regret this,” he said to me.
“Only if I shoot you,” I said. I was the proctor now. “And then,” I added, “only if you die.”
* * *
I thought Bethany was going to plow through the exit. From the way she was gripping the steering wheel and hitting the gas, I was prepared for impact, prepared for the electromagnetic barrier to disable the engine, lock up the car in some dramatic way, spin us around. I didn’t expect to see the arm retract and the film of light pass harmlessly over the exterior. We shot through the gate and into the night, and then I actually turned in my seat to stare at the guardhouse behind us, at the school growing smaller. I thought of Owen and felt a pang of regret.
“How did we just drive out?” I asked.
“It’s hubris,” she said. “Well, Tanner’s hubris, anyway. He never put restrictions on his car. Pride is a great weakness. Though I have to include myself in that category, and I find that a little galling. I don’t know if this is going to work.”
“It just worked,” I said.
“We’re like ten feet down the road,” she said. “Hubris, James. Remember?”
She took a hand off the wheel and reached for me, her cold fingers digging into my arm. I realized I was still holding the gun. I placed it on the floor and slid it under the seat, not wanting to touch her and it at the same time. “That was awful,” I said.
“I sweated through my shirt I was so scared. But don’t worry, I took a lot of medicine.” She glanced at me, nodding earnestly. “I’m at the max, but it’s helping, okay? No need to worry.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m not going to worry.” I was braced for a swarm of proctors or the actual police. The road was narrow, and all the vegetation had been removed. There were no buildings, no lights, and the darkness felt pregnant and oppressive. We said nothing for a full minute, just sat there listening to the tires hiss on pavement. I folded her hand in mine. The contact restored some measure of calm.
“How long before they notice the guard is gone?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s a bit of a problem.”
She was wearing a thin black cord around her neck, something I hadn’t noticed until she pulled on it, lifting it up. At the end of the cord dangled a small metal disk. It was a stopwatch, or something like it. I could see the numbers accumulating, minutes and seconds. She glanced at its face, and then the car accelerated. The momentum pushed me farther into my seat.
“We’ve got an appointment,” she said, “with a friend of mine. It’s going to be tight, though. We should have an hour.” She tilted her head from side to side as if doing some internal calculation. “Twenty minutes to get there, twenty to find him. Okay,” she admitted, “maybe less than a hour.”
“Before what?” I asked.
“The computers catch on,” she said. “I’ve been running the displacement program for seventeen minutes now and I jammed the camera signals, too, so security won’t know exactly what to look for, but still…” She trailed off. “The system knows it’s being hacked and it’s getting better at identifying non–source code. I’ve actually been able to see it learning about me, amassing algorithms—now it recognizes my keystrokes. I had to write this last program with just my pinkie.” She held up her hand, her pinkie finger extended. “Can you believe that? It took forever.”
But I was thinking, Less than an hour. That was how long I was going to remain free. I looked out the window. Ma
nzanita trees with their thin, twisted branches flashed in and out of view. Thick clumps of sagebrush covered the ground. We were really off campus now. Our narrow road doubled in size, and Bethany accelerated to the point that I scrambled for my seat belt. I reached across her and buckled her in, too.
“The airbag will probably kill me,” she said. “But that’s sweet of you.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “What is the drug your father’s testing?”
“Let’s just start over,” she said. “I think that’s the best way. Don’t look back.”
“I’m not starting over,” I said.
She tugged at the zipper on her coveralls, and when it didn’t move, she shrugged out of the top, freeing one arm at a time. “I just don’t think you’re going to react well,” she said. “And I have to say, I feel responsible. More than a little. It’s not that I didn’t believe you.” She hesitated. “Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
“Just tell me,” I said.
“I’ll wait until we’re in a public place,” she said.
“I’m not going to freak out.”
“You say that now,” she said.
“I’m used to bad news,” I said. “Trust me.”
She took a deep breath. “The drug,” she said, “limits fear. Essentially eradicates it.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. “That’s not the drug they gave me,” I said.
“It is,” she said. “And I know you had a reaction, because Dad was overjoyed. I read his notes. And he couldn’t wait to plug you back into his Exclusion Zone experiment. It’s why he’s full of school spirit these days.”
“I don’t remember being fearless,” I said. “I mean, right now, I can barely look out the windshield without being terrified.”
Bethany smiled. “That’s just my driving,” she said.
I remembered the first night I’d fought—I’d felt titanically strong, righteous, able. I hadn’t dwelled much on what had happened after it was done. Other than my guilt over Tuck, there was no residual feeling, no dreams. That night had happened and then receded—unlike the fire, unlike La Pine.
“Are you freaking out?” she asked. “It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, in the scheme of things. Everybody knows they test drugs on us. I thought it was going to be worse.”
“Not a big deal? Have you even been listening?” She turned to stare at me, and I had to point to remind her that she was driving.
“Don’t kill us,” I said.
“Do you know how much a drug like that could be worth? Think about it. A soldier who doesn’t feel fear? Come on. Billions of dollars.”
“But I was afraid,” I said. “At least, I think I was.”
“James,” she said, trying to get my attention, “billions of dollars.”
“I heard you,” I said.
“It’s not about one or two doses,” she said. “It’s about what happens over time. When you take it, you don’t make long-term memories. That’s why people don’t feel the stress afterward. There’s no trauma, because there’s no deeper evaluation.”
“That sounds pretty good,” I said. But I remembered Harold, the way he’d been hunched over, his spine protruding like a snake underneath his skin. “What happens to the boys who don’t come back?” I asked.
Bethany was silent for a moment.
“What do you think?” she said.
The lines of the highway slipped under the car, an irregular thread, one that seemed to pull us toward our destination. I leaned my forehead against the glass of the passenger’s-side window. It felt cool against my skin.
“It can’t remain a secret,” I said. “Not after tonight.” I remembered the stampede out of the Exclusion Zone, the students who’d followed me back through the fence onto campus. “The school will figure it out,” I said.
She gave me an incredulous look. “You really think they don’t know? I can tell you, Swann Industries is definitely not suffering an ethical dilemma.” She shook her head. “Money,” she said, “is the worst drug of all.”
* * *
It was a beautiful, clear night, and we were somewhere rural, passing the occasional farmhouse and barn. A thick spray of stars dotted the sky. I hadn’t seen anything like this since Oregon. There was a button on the armrest of the passenger door. I pushed it and was startled to see the glass of my window retract. A current of warm air filled the car.
Bethany was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “I have something for you.” She reached into the backpack, which was open on the seat beside her. “Here,” she said. She withdrew a single piece of quickpaper, one embossed with the Goodhouse logo, and handed it to me. I looked down and saw my name and ID number. “It’s a scan of your intake form,” she said.
My grip on the paper tightened. I felt a bright spark of anticipation, something that was a little like the fear I reportedly could not feel. “What’s in it?” I asked.
“It’s you,” Bethany said. “Well, some of it has been redacted.”
I scrolled through the pages. It was a form that had been filled out when I’d arrived at La Pine. I’d been three years old, and there was a description of me at that age—quiet and serious. I read the notes. I’d had a toy car that I carried everywhere and would not relinquish. It said I liked drawing and puzzles, which amazed me, as I couldn’t remember doing either. And then I felt a little jolt of surprise. “I’m already eighteen,” I said. My birthday was printed at the top of the sheet. “As of last week.”
At first Bethany didn’t say anything. Then, after a long pause, she said, “Happy birthday.”
The second page detailed the genetic legacy of both my parents and myself. The language was opaque, talking about RNA polymerase and provisional synthesis. The names of my father and mother had been covered with a black, highlighted box that said AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED. I touched the black lines, but they were the same texture as everything else. “The school said it didn’t keep any family information,” I said. “It’s all supposed to be encrypted.”
“Yeah, they say a lot of things. You’d be surprised at what Tanner has on his computer.” Bethany smiled. “God,” she said, “even his porn is ostentatious.”
“We can find my parents,” I said. I laid my hand on the quickpaper as if it were a holy relic. “Thank you.”
Bethany was glowing with triumph. She reached over to me and I kissed the pad of her thumb and then tasted her palm, which was salty like the electrolyte drink her father had given me.
“It’s strange how you just keep living and things keep happening,” I said. I stared at the halo around the moon, at the white moths that appeared and disappeared in the headlights, little bits of floating paper. I let my hand hang out the window. The warm breeze exploded between my fingers. We drove past a broken-down house with cows standing on the porch. The rusted hulks of ancient cars briefly lined the roadway like a fence, and then it was open land. A rabbit’s eyes flashed orange in the headlights.
“Who was your mother?” I asked.
Bethany shrugged. “Mom was one of those back-to-barter tent-city people grinding their own barley flour and weaving ponchos,” she said. “She’s dead now, of course. I don’t really remember her. Dad met her when he was doing charity work up north.” Bethany shrugged as if the term charity work was ridiculous. “It was some roving-doctor thing, physicians without borders. Dad was full of idealism back then, everything he accuses me of, really. He didn’t want to marry her, and Mom wouldn’t abort the baby even though it was defective. The baby is me, by the way.”
“I got that,” I said. Just then, without warning, Bethany turned the wheel and the car veered off onto a dirt road. Rocks rang like buckshot against the metal frame. A wave of dust rose around us and she rolled up the windows, though I could still smell dust coming through the ventilation system.
“Dad told her I had a hypoplastic left heart and
she’d better just flush me. I read all their correspondence. He deleted everything, but he never could scrub a hard drive. They gave me a ventricular pump, then a heart transplant, and then one of those new hybrid synthetic hearts that were supposed to be better than the real thing. Dad made me get the surgery. He said I could go off my medications, but then it came out that the hybrids were defective.”
I thought about the scar on her chest. They must have broken her ribs, I realized, to get inside. “Defective, how?” I asked.
“There’s not really a pattern.” She shrugged again. But her casual tone was a little too disinterested. “Some people have normal transplant rejection, others have some kind of necrosis in the tissues that spreads out. Very nasty. Most just have a heart attack.”
“Most?” I said. “How many?”
“I’m supposed to avoid stressful situations,” she said. “Though, honestly, having a hybrid heart is a stressful situation.”
“But you don’t feel sick, right? You don’t have any symptoms?” I scooted closer and slid a hand onto her shoulder. I felt the tension there.
“Dad thinks he’s God,” she said. Her voice was suddenly thick with emotion. The tendons on her forearms stood out as she gripped the steering wheel. “And when you’re a god, there are never any consequences. You can just do whatever you want.”
She looked so despondent, I wanted to comfort her—to communicate some level of empathy. “It’s not your fault,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Dad hit on this formula and he’s been handing it out like candy, picking boys with different genetic profiles, pumping them full of it. Killing some of them. Cutting them open. He thinks he can save me, and now”—she took a deep breath—“there are billions of dollars.”
She drove faster even as the road narrowed and its surface grew more heavily pitted. We rounded a tight corner, nearly missing the remains of a wooden fence that a previous traveler had punched through.
“Slow down,” I said.
But she ignored me. “I know that Dad thinks he got tricked. He never wanted a kid, especially not one like me,” she said. “He really loves me, you know, but the feeling of it drives him crazy. He resents it.”
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