Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  I left after history to meet up with North. We were taking the one-fifteen train to Cambridge, hoping to catch Dr. Hildebrand on her way back from lunch. When I knocked on North’s door, Hershey answered, wearing skinny black pants and a V-neck cardigan that I’m pretty sure was intended to be worn with a T-shirt underneath. Hershey had opted for a lacy black bra.

  “Don’t worry,” Hershey said when she saw my face. “This isn’t for your boyfriend, it’s for mine.” She stepped back to let me inside. “Yours is in his secret room.”

  I shrugged out of my dowdy blue jacket, wishing I’d worn something nicer. Hershey said I could wear whatever of hers I wanted, but I felt weird about it now that she was back. So I was stuck with my own stuff, and the worst of it at that, since all my decent clothes were at the bottom of my laundry basket. “Is yours the same guy as before?”

  Hershey smiled coyly. “Maybe. Hey, I have a present for you.” She turned and walked over to the couch, reaching under the cushion and pulling out an oversize hardback book.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “The Evil Queen’s yearbook. Class of 2013 was the last one they printed on paper.”

  “Where did you get this?” I demanded.

  “I figured there might some be clues in there,” she said, not answering my question.

  “Hershey, this isn’t a game. We don’t know what this woman is capable of.”

  “I’m not scared of her,” Hershey retorted, reaching for her jacket and a pair of dark sunglasses. “She’s just a bully who needs to be put in her place.” She tossed her hair and pulled open the door. “Oh,” she said, turning back around. “North was waiting for that.” She pointed at the small box on his coffee table, imprinted with the Gnosis logo. “It came a few minutes ago.” She blew me a kiss and was gone.

  I picked up the box and carried it into the bedroom closet. The door to North’s secret room was cracked. I could see him at his desk chair, leaning back with his eyes closed, bobbing his head a little like he was listening to music. But it was quiet in the room.

  “Hey,” I said, ducking inside. North didn’t look up. It was as if he hadn’t heard me. I tried again, louder. “Hey!” This time, his eyes popped open.

  “Come over here,” he said, leaning to grab my hand. “I want you to hear this.” He pulled me into his lap. As my body came in line with his, I heard the distinctive sound of Nick’s mandolin coming from a speaker above our heads. I looked up.

  “Was that on the whole time?”

  “Cool, right? It’s called an audio spotlight. Only the person sitting in this chair can hear what’s coming out of that speaker. Although, apparently, the sound isn’t actually coming from the physical speaker but from ultrasonic waves in front of it. Don’t ask me how it works, though. I’ve read the manual forty times and still don’t get it.” He reached around me to twist the knob on the little gray box on his desk, turning up the volume even more. “But the song’s amazing, right? The guys released their new album today. This is the first track.”

  It was one of the songs we’d recorded in the mausoleum. I leaned back against North and closed my eyes.

  “I can’t get over how good they are,” I said when the song was over, sliding off his lap. I realized I still had the box in my hand. “Hey, this came for you,” I said, setting it on North’s desk.

  “You mean Norvin,” North corrected, slitting the packing tape with his pocketknife. Inside was a smaller, shinier black box, plain except for an image of the Gold and the words BOW DOWN printed in glossy gold foil. “Does it come with an altar?” North retorted as he lifted the lid. I peered into the box. The shiny device was snapped into a clear silicone wristband.

  North slipped the band onto his wrist and grimaced. “It’s so tacky.”

  I giggled. “All you need is a matching gold chain for your neck.”

  North tapped the tiny screen and it lit up. It was 12:35.

  “We should probably go,” I said. “I don’t want to miss our train.”

  “I want to show you something first,” North replied. “I found Beck’s Lux profile.”

  I perked up. “And?”

  “And you should look at it,” he said, scooting his chair toward his desk. “You—”

  The music suddenly went silent, like someone had turned the speaker off. But the power light on the control panel was still lit. North looked at the ceiling, puzzled. He turned the volume knob all the way up and the speaker started making a loud popping noise. Still no music.

  “Did we blow it out?”

  “I don’t think so,” North said. “It wasn’t even that loud.” He leaned over toward the far end of his desk where the plug was and the music started to blare. My hands flew to my ears as North quickly reached for the volume knob. But before he even touched it, the music cut out again. North looked down at the Gold on his wrist. Slowly, he outstretched his arm. The music came on again. He brought his wrist toward his body. The music stopped.

  “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

  “I think they’re canceling each other out,” North said slowly. “But for that to happen, the Gold would have to be emitting sound waves at the exact same frequency as my speaker. Really high frequency waves that we can’t hear. That we aren’t supposed to hear.”

  “Why would it be doing that?”

  North shook his head. He looked baffled. “I have no idea. Especially since there’s nothing about it in the new terms of use.” He unsnapped the Gold from its strap and tossed it onto a pile of clothes in his closet. The music came back on. He shook his head again and scooted back up to his desk.

  His computer had finished booting up. North clicked on a document saved to his desktop, labeled BECK.

  “Show me the threats first,” I said. North zoomed in on the bottom right quadrant. My eyes scanned the list. Surprises. Sunsets. Storms. Solar eclipses. “No, the threats first,” I said.

  “These are the threats,” North replied.

  “But Beck loves eclipses,” I argued. “They’re, like, his favorite thing. And he gets his best artistic ideas at sunset.” North slid his cursor over and zoomed in on the opportunities quadrant. Predictability, monotonous routine, temperate weather, successful people, homogenous neighborhoods, steady income, stable work. My chest tightened.

  “No.” I shook my head violently. “This is not Beck.” Part of me was relieved. I hadn’t been able to reconcile Beck’s behavior at the party with the boy I’d grown up with, the free spirit who blazed his own path. Now I understood. “Lux is manipulating him.”

  “Of course it is,” North replied. “That’s what Lux does. It steers people into the life they think they want—the ‘happiness’ they think they deserve.”

  “But this isn’t the life Beck wants,” I insisted. “You don’t know him the way I do.”

  “I don’t know him at all,” North said. “But, Rory, if Beck is trusting Lux, then he’s choosing to. You can’t blame the app for that.”

  But I did blame the app. Beck wouldn’t just decide to become a whole different person—a total d-bag, by the way—just because he thought it’d make his life easier. My best friend was less shallow than that.

  Help, I said silently, pleading with the voice. Help me figure this out. There was something I wasn’t seeing here, maybe something I couldn’t see. But if I’d learned anything about the Doubt, it was that it could see. Everything I couldn’t. I needed that vision now.

  “I know it’s hard to accept,” North was saying. “But the only person at fault here is Beck. He’s the one who decided to listen to—”

  Just then North’s screen froze. “Crap,” North said, quickly typing a series of commands. The screen didn’t budge.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” North replied, holding down the power button. After a few seconds, the screen went black and lit up to blue. And stayed that way.

  “Yikes. That seems bad,” I said. I’d heard stories about old computer malf
unctions, the dreaded blue screen. Gnosis devices hardly broke down.

  “I back everything up every ten minutes, so it’s not a huge deal if it’s fried. I’d just prefer not to spend another ten grand on a machine if I don’t have to.”

  “These computers cost ten thousand dollars?”

  “They didn’t originally. But nobody makes computers with hard drives anymore. Everything is on the cloud. I have to have mine custom built by some guys who used to work for Apple, before they went under.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve still got twenty-five minutes. You okay if we swing by the shop and drop this off on the way to the station?”

  I could see Noelle behind the counter, so I went in with North to thank her for letting me borrow the dress. There was an older man with her this time. Her grandfather, I assumed. He smiled when he saw North come in with his laptop.

  “Zapped another one?” the old man asked.

  “I’m hoping it just needs the Ivan touch,” North said, setting the laptop down on the counter.

  The old man’s eyes wandered to me. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “I’m Rory,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  The man reached across the counter and lifted my pendant. “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “It was my mother’s,” I told him.

  “What do you keep on it?”

  I looked down at my pendant, confused. “What do I keep on my necklace?”

  He pinched my pendant between his finger and thumb and pushed his thumb up. The face of the pendant slid up and a little port popped out. “It’s a thumb drive,” the old man said. “You didn’t know?”

  “I don’t even know what a thumb drive is,” I said, still staring at my pendant.

  “It’s a little hard drive.” North sounded as awed as I felt.

  “So that means—”

  North finished my sentence. “There’s something on there.”

  26

  IT WAS LUCK that North’s laptop froze exactly when it did. First because it brought us to the shop while Ivan was there, but second because it meant that we got Ivan’s clunky loaner laptop that, while heavy and slow, had something North’s nine machines did not: a USB port.

  Then again I didn’t believe in luck. Not anymore. I’d asked the Doubt to help me, and it had. I’d bristled and balked when Hershey suggested that listening to the voice made life easier, but she’d been right after all. It was the back and forth, the wavering between reason and faith, that was difficult. Once I’d decided to trust that still small voice in my head, the stormy sea inside me got calm.

  “Unsurprisingly, the files are encrypted,” North said, typing furiously, the laptop balancing on his knees. We’d made it to the station less than a minute before our train was supposed to depart and had sprinted to the platform.

  “Can you open them?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He was chewing on his lip, his eyebrows knitted together in thought.

  I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the train window and watched the blur of brightly colored leaves, waiting.

  The thick of trees gave way to a high double fence, like something you’d see around a prison. There were little metal plaques at regular intervals. CAUTION: ELECTRIC FENCE.

  “Hey, what’s back there?” I asked North. Just then a guard station and gated driveway came into view. Beyond it, I could see a great expanse of water. “Oh,” I said, answering my own question. “It’s the reservoir. But why is there an electric fence and an armed guard?”

  “To protect the water supply, I guess.” North was still chewing on his lip, staring at his computer screen. “Damn, if your mom wrote this encryption, she was good.”

  I smiled. Despite his frustration, this was high praise.

  I looked back out the window. We were in front of the reservoir’s entrance now, so I was no longer seeing the stone sign at an angle. ENFIELD RESERVOIR, it read. There was a carving next to the words. A tree sprouting out of a pair of hands. The tree looked just like the one on my Theden pin.

  I pulled out my Gemini and went to Panopticon. The entry for the Enfield Reservoir was surprisingly paltry.

  The Enfield Reservoir is an inland body of water created by the Enfield Dam on the Connecticut River just east of Theden, Massachusetts. At capacity, the reservoir holds two million cubic meters of water. It is the only privately owned water source in Massachusetts. Before the Enfield Dam was built, the land where the reservoir now sits was home to the Enfield Quarry, a quarter-mile deep, quarter-mile wide pyrite mine made famous when it collapsed in the late 1980s, trapping twelve miners inside. In 1998, the Theden Initiative purchased the quarry in order to build the dam that created the reservoir.

  The Theden Initiative. I’d never heard of it, but the tree logo made me think it was affiliated with my school. I clicked the link.

  The Theden Intiative, founded in 1805, is the private entity that manages the roughly two-billion-dollar endowment of Theden Academy. The company’s other assets include extensive land holdings in western Massachusetts, the Enfield Reservoir, and a controlling stake in Gnosis, Inc.

  It took a second for it all to register. The entity that ran Theden’s endowment owned a controlling stake in Gnosis? How did I not know that? It explained quite a bit, actually. The Gnosis gadgets all over campus. Dr. Tarsus’s position on the Gnosis board. The fact that our practicum simulations worked a lot like Lux. The water reservoir was more puzzling. It was just so random.

  Something was bugging me. I went back to the reservoir’s page.

  At capacity, the reservoir holds two million cubic meters of water.

  There had to be billions of cubic meters in a cubic mile. I couldn’t do the math in my head, but that quarry’s capacity had to have been way more than two million cubic meters. So why didn’t they make the reservoir bigger?

  I clicked over to the page for the Enfield Quarry and skimmed it, looking for clues, but there weren’t any. My eyes hung on the passage about the mine’s collapse.

  For eight days, rescue workers communicated with the twelve trapped miners via a six-inch borehole drilled through nearly a quarter mile of rock. Relief supplies were sent down in narrow, rocket-shaped parcels called “doves,” which were lowered through the small tunnel in the rock. All twelve miners were eventually evacuated by a rope pulley system through an eighteen-inch rescue shaft adjacent to the room where the miners were trapped. After the accident, the mine was shut down.

  I clicked out of Panopticon and lay my head back on the headrest, thinking of those twelve miners. I couldn’t imagine what they must’ve gone through, being trapped beneath the earth. I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew North was shaking my shoulder, telling me we’d reached our stop.

  Dr. Hildebrand’s office was in William James Hall on Harvard’s campus. I felt like an impostor walking through Harvard Yard, but it’s not like there was anyone checking student IDs at the campus gates. We found the building easily.

  “So the plan is to act like you accept her diagnosis, right?” North whispered as we took the elevator to her sixth-floor office. “Like you assume those entries are real?”

  “Right. I’m going to tell her my mom’s illness sparked my interest in psychology, and that I figured there was no better person to intern for than the woman who treated her. If she’s actually the one who wrote those reports, she’ll have to pretend the appointments really happened.”

  “And who am I?” North asked.

  “My boyfriend,” I replied, and smiled. “I’m sixteen. It’s not weird that I’d bring you along.”

  “Come in!” A woman’s voice called when we knocked on her door. I took a breath and turned the knob.

  On the other side of the door was a cramped office. The woman behind the desk wore vintage horn-rimmed glasses and had a mane of fiery red curls that cascaded halfway down her back. The hair would’ve looked amazing on a girl my age, but Kristyn Hildebrand
was at least fifty years older than that and twice as many pounds overweight. She wasn’t unattractive, just incongruous. Even more so hunched over a cheap metal desk. There was an older-model Gemini at her elbow and an unopened Gemini Gold box on the bookshelf behind her.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, peering at us through thick lenses. “I don’t recognize you. Are you students of mine?”

  “Uh, no,” I said, tentatively stepping inside. “I, uh— I think you may have treated my mother.”

  “Oh?” Dr. Hildebrand pushed her glasses up on her forehead. “What was her name?”

  “Aviana Jacobs,” I said. “She was a student at Theden Academy. I think you treated her at the health center there? It would’ve been in April 2013.”

  “Nope,” the woman said, sounding very certain. “I never saw patients at Theden. I was doing research at a lab there in 2013 and had a Theden student as a research assistant, but her name wasn’t Aviana.”

  “So you’re absolutely certain you didn’t treat my mom? She suffered from akratic paracusia.”

  Dr. Hildebrand pinned her eyes on mine. “Are you symptomatic?”

  She caught me off guard. My eyes flew to the ceiling, then the floor. “Me? No.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” She wasn’t being antagonistic. Her brown eyes were curious.

  I faltered. My interested-in-psychology cover story was on my lips, but something stopped me.