The Limit

by Kristen Landon

  “Me? Bro, I think you’re the one who should answer that question.” Coop walked closer, holding the lantern he used at night right in my face.

  “Did you follow me?” I asked, shielding my eyes.

  “Every step of the way, and I must say I’m disappointed. A girl? Is she why you abandoned me in my room, injured and possibly dying?”

  “No, of course not. You weren’t dying, and I don’t even like her.”

  A little erp came out of Paige.

  I turned toward her. “I mean, I like you fine. I just don’t . . .”

  She slid her head forward until her hair covered her face. Man, I screwed up big-time. Why did I always say such stupid things to her? I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.

  “I like you,” I said, lowering my voice. “I really do. You’re cool. It’s just that before today I didn’t even know you, really. You know?”

  “I know,” she said in a barely recognizable whisper. “It was all part of the plan. I know.”

  I knew too, but for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss.

  Before any of us could say anything else, the dark space behind Coop got a lot darker. Goatee Gorilla Guard had come into the room, hulking and breathing hard.

  “Don’t yell,” I said fast. “The Fourth Floors are all asleep down here. You don’t want to wake them up.”

  “Get . . . back . . . to . . . your . . . rooms.” His voice was low and controlled. Barely controlled. We bolted.

  A piece of paper had been slipped under my bedroom door. I snatched it up fast and took it into the closet to read with a flashlight. It was from Jeffery.

  Got it. We’ll take a look tomorrow.

  THE INSTANT LUNCH BREAK BEGAN, we sprinted to the rec room. Forget about eating; we had more important things to do.

  “Where’d the machine come from?” Coop asked.

  “I’ve got half a dozen of them in my room,” said Jeffery.

  “You didn’t have any problem getting them through package screening?” asked Paige. “Sometimes the guards can be stinkers about electronic devices.”

  “Why would they care about blank laptops?” asked Jeffery. “They don’t have anything dangerous on them. There’s no wireless Internet in the building, so I can’t download anything they don’t want me to. It’s a totally unconnected machine—which is one of the reasons I’ve never pulled it out of its box before.”

  “And why we’re using it instead of one of our other computers. We can’t let any of the monitors know what we’re doing. Jeffery turned this laptop into a lethal weapon. It now holds all the files full of incriminating evidence he copied onto a flash drive last night. Coop, every few minutes jump out of your chair and yell, so the guards will think we’re playing a video game if they happen to see us on the monitor.”

  He jumped into the air immediately, pumping his fist. “Wa-hoo!”

  “Uh, Coop, it might be better if we were actually looking at the computer first. Matt, here’s the flash drive I used.” Jeffery handed me the black plastic rectangle, and I stuck it deep inside my front pocket.

  “Thanks, Jeffery.”

  The four of us scrunched around the laptop at a table. Paige sat off to one side while Coop, Jeffery, and I huddled in front of it. No one else was in the rec room. We needed the privacy. Meeting in one of our bedrooms would’ve eliminated the chances of another Top Floor walking in on us, but then Paige wouldn’t have been able to come. She deserved to see what Jeffery had copied as much as anyone. More than Coop, actually.

  “What exactly are we looking for, bro?” Coop asked.

  “Anything that has to do with headaches or seizures—I’ll do a search using one of those words in a minute.” My eyes scanned the names of the displayed files. “We’ve also got to find something about how they’re beaming information into our brains through the computer.”

  “I don’t like the idea of getting my brain zapped every day.” Coop shook out his shaggy hair. “It’s zapped enough as it is.”

  I had to smile as my eyes flicked across the screen. “I won’t argue with you on that one.” I clicked on a folder labeled Outside Communication. If the information being fed into our brains came from outside the workhouse, the folder seemed likely to be the one we wanted. We found files on each kid in the workhouse. I clicked Jeffery’s first, but it was blank inside.

  “Always knew there was nothing going on inside you, bro,” Coop said, reaching around me to nudge Jeffery on the back of his head. “Try me next.”

  Coop’s file was full of messages, copies of e-mails to and from his parents.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning close. “Hey!”

  We were all realizing the same thing at the same time. This file contained original e-mail messages followed by edited, altered, or completely rewritten drafts.

  “I knew it!” Coop said, almost happy. “I told you the messages from my parents sounded stiff, didn’t I? See, read here. They’re cool. They’ve got a sense of humor.” His voice suddenly got cold. “Those FDRA jerks were trying to cut me off, weren’t they?”

  “They don’t want us to care about any life other than what we have on the top floor.” My teeth ground together so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d cracked. I opened my own file. The first line read, Technical Difficulties Simulated. The next line said, Block Lifted and a date—the date I escaped and went home. I found a concerned message from my dad that he had sent that very night, explaining the family’s financial situation and apologizing for the mistakes he and Mom had made and his plans to fix the situation. His plans weren’t much better than Mom’s, but I could tell that both my parents loved me and were doing the best they could. The rewritten FDRA version of Dad’s e-mail, the one that I’d received, was also in the file.

  “This makes me so mad I can hardly think,” I said, closing down the folder. “Let’s move on to something else.”

  “Right,” said Coop, dragging out his words. “Because we know everything else we find is going to make us so-o-o happy.”

  “Hey! Look in that one,” yelled Jeffery. His finger pointed to a folder labeled simply Profit. I clicked on it. “It was really hard to get. But I did what you told me to, Matt, and I got it. You said the hardest files to get to are the ones you want. What’s that document you’re reading? What does it say?”

  “It’s some sort of a contract.” My eyes skimmed over the endless lines of tiny words. “Someone is paying the workhouse to do something.”

  “Ooooh, big surprise,” said Coop, wiggling his fingers and bugging out his eyes. “That’s the whole point of this place, fool. Companies pay us to do work all the time.”

  “I think . . . this is something else.” I’d gotten deeper into the contract, and I wasn’t comfortable with what I was reading. “This is a big contract. For dozens and dozens of kids.” I sat back a bit, letting out a long breath. “I can’t find where it says what the contracted work is.”

  “Let’s go look at those other files in the folder,” said Jeffery, practically bouncing in his chair.

  Each file—and there were scores of them—was labeled with a child’s name.

  “Ho-ly. Cow.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

  “No way, dude,” said Coop. “That has to be like illegal or something. Doesn’t it?”

  “I said it from the beginning. They’re reprogramming our brains.”

  “Treating us like lab rats is more like it,” said Paige, her soft voice edged with anger.

  “It’s an interesting concept, anyway,” said Jeffery. “Modifying behavior, implanting knowledge.”

  “Too bad it can have side effects like . . .” I pointed to a line at the bottom of a Second Floor’s file. “Severe headaches.” I exited out of that file and found Lauren’s. “And here, mild seizure.”

  “Not everyone gets them,” said Paige. “I wonder why not.”

  “Maybe that’s part of the experiment,” I said, disgust thick in my voice. “Find out what make
s some people susceptible.”

  “Neela started getting really bad headaches,” said Paige. Last night I’d told the others about Neela still being at the workhouse, but on the fourth floor. I hadn’t really thought about her much since I saw her, with everything else that had happened. It was only when Paige and I discussed sneaking down to the fourth floor as part of our plan that I remembered Neela was there.

  “No one else on the top floor has. Statistically, we should be the same as the other floors. About a fourth of us should be getting them.” I searched around for the Top Floors’ files and learned an interesting fact. Of all the remaining Top Floors, only one of us had a file. Brock Reginald.

  Coop punched the air with his fist. “Yes. I told you. I knew there was something off about that dude. He really is a dumb muscle head. They just programmed him to be supersmart and moved him up here with the rest of us geniuses.”

  “And also programmed him to stay out of sight, so we wouldn’t get suspicious. Interesting. I wonder why he’s the only one who became a superbrain.”

  “Just like the headache thing, bro. People respond differently. The dude was an anomaly whose brain accepted the info-dumping to the max.”

  “The rest of us Top Floors don’t get experimented on, because we’re valuable.” I rubbed one finger up and down the side of my jaw as I stared at the screen. “We’re smart, and we make enough money doing our work. They don’t want to mess with our brains.”

  Paige sucked in a sharp gasp of air. “Neela. She was really struggling with her work. And then . . .” Her voice choked up. “Her family never did get under their limit, did they? Miss Smoot lied to us.”

  I nodded. “Right. They just started reprogramming Neela’s brain and dropped her down to the fourth floor as soon as it was obvious the info dump on her hadn’t worked.”

  “This sucks, man,” said Coop. “They better be making a bundle off all those poor robot-brain kids.”

  “We can find out.” It only took me a few seconds to bring up the workhouse’s accounting files. “Yep. They’re raking it in—not bothering to pass any along to the kids or their families, though. The company that’s paying for the experiments must think this research is very valuable.”

  “Ew,” said Paige in a shaky whisper. “I don’t like the idea of a company developing technology to get into people’s brains like that.”

  “It’s not legal.” I shook my head. “It can’t be.”

  “Hey, bro, while we’re in here, pull up my account. Let’s see how much moola I’m pulling in. Database designers like me shouldn’t come cheap.”

  I had to chuckle. Thanks goodness for Coop being around to lighten the mood.

  “Whoa, dude, I’m rich,” said Coop.

  Smiling, I nodded. Each week a good chunk of cash was deposited into Coop’s family’s account thanks to him.

  “But what . . . why are there so many deductions?” asked Paige, her voice squeaking as she struggled to raise it above her normal mouse-quiet level.

  Scrunching his nose and pushing up his glasses, Jeffery leaned close to the screen. “Yeah—wow—look how much they took out of the account.”

  What the heck? They were charging us major bucks to live our luxurious lives on the top floor. Man, they made us pay for everything—including all the food and clothes we ordered. The room rental and housekeeping fees alone ate up a huge chunk of Coop’s weekly payroll deposit—which would be similar to the rest of ours. Then the FDRA added charges like a pool maintenance fee. An extra power fee for all our electrical equipment. They even tacked on an extra fee for bringing deliveries all the way up to the top floor.

  “Hey, who’s the dude who gets the school tutorial fee?” asked Coop, pointing to a line on the screen. “Nobody ever tutorialed me.”

  “Me either,” I said, my voice gone dead.

  “We need to ask for a refund, bro.”

  We needed to ask a lot of things.

  “Why didn’t I see any of this when I pulled up my family’s account back home?”

  “Check it out,” said Jeffery. “Deposits are made into our families’ accounts weekly, but withdrawals are only posted every month. The money is taken out daily, but they wait and post it all together at the end of that month. You haven’t been here long enough, Matt.”

  “What kind of wacko accounting system is that?” asked Coop.

  “One that keeps our families in the dark until it’s too late for them to do anything about it,” I said.

  “I’ve been here long enough,” said Paige. “My parents would’ve seen the deductions by now. Why didn’t they tell me?”

  “Maybe they don’t want you to worry.” I remembered how hard she said her family was working to get back under their limit. “Maybe once the FDRA gets us here, there’s no way for our parents to get us out. Or maybe your parents tried to tell you, but their e-mails got blocked. Or it just might be that your parents never look at their account statement. Lots of people don’t.”

  “They look,” said Paige.

  “My parents never look,” said Coop. “They’d rather live in ignorant la-la land. How do you think I ended up in here in the first place?”

  “Same with me.” I pulled up my file. I dug deep to see how much had been taken out of my family’s account. A huge batch of fees had been applied a week and a half ago—the day Lauren was taken. I’d have to go back and check Coop’s file again to be sure, but I didn’t remember seeing such a large amount taken from his account at one time. It made me wonder if someone had noticed how smart I was and decided they needed another Dunston sibling at the workhouse. Maybe the FDRA knew how smart I was before they took me in the first place. That might have been the “special circumstance” that caused them to bring me here instead of giving my family a choice of consequences for going over the limit.

  The fees they charged me included a transportation fee, a hefty testing and training fee, and a first-night room fee so big I wanted to go back to the first floor and check to see if the sheets I’d slept between down there were spun from pure gold. Some of the blame for our family’s financial mess still belonged to Mom and Dad, but not all of it. Not by a long shot.

  “I bet hardly any of our parents realize how little of what we earn helps pay off the debt.” I looked more closely at the numbers, adding them up quickly in my head. “In fact, look at this. It’s worse, much worse. Even if we didn’t order a single item online—including food—we don’t make enough to cover the cost of living on the top floor.”

  “Shoot,” said Jeffery. “So I don’t really need to waste time buying all those expensive electronics?”

  “Whoa. You mean after busting my butt here for three months, I’ve done nothing but improve my paddle-wall-ball skills and drain money from my family’s account?”

  A soft sob came from Paige’s direction. Tears streaked down her face.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do they give us so much and then turn around and make us pay more for it? What good does that do? It’s like . . . it’s . . . like . . .”

  My words trailed off as it hit me. It must have hit Coop at the same time.

  “They want to keep us here as long as they can. They hope we never go home. We’re like indentured servants. We’re smart, bro, the smartest there are. They must be making major bucks off us. They don’t have to pay us as much as adults get for the same work. It’s all about the dollars, dude.”

  Kia and Isaac walked into the room and headed for the pinball machine. The four of us huddled closer to the computer.

  “What are you dweebs so interested in over there?” asked Kia.

  “Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to explain what we’d learned to anyone else until I got a firm handle on it. We’d let Kia, Isaac, Madeline, and maybe—somehow—even Reginald know before long.

  I lowered my voice to a whisper that barely registered over the bells and dings of the pinball machine. “It seems like they went to an awful lot of work just to keep what . . . eight kids up he
re?”

  “Work they’d have to do anyway, because of Federal Debt Ordinance 169-D,” said Jeffery. “Do you think they do the same thing at every workhouse?”

  “Who knows,” I said. “The only thing that matters to us is that the people at this one—the one we’re stuck at—decided to make some extra money at our expense.” I clicked back into Lauren’s files. “Yeah, see, they don’t give Third Floors as much nice stuff as we have, and they don’t charge them anywhere near what they charge us. They don’t care so much about keeping them.” I checked a few random files of kids from different floors. The lower the floor, the lower the charges.

  “Those second-floor dudes must be living in a dump,” said Coop. “They don’t have to pay hardly anything.”

  “They’re no good to the FDRA,” I said. “They want them to go home. In fact, maybe they want the lower-floor kids to rotate out. Maybe they need fresh brains to experiment on every so often. We Top Floors are valuable. They lie to us, make us think we’re special. Make us think we’re helping our families when all we’re doing is dragging them deeper into debt. What the . . . look at that! They’re charging us thirty percent interest on the amount we overspend—and we’re all overspending after they deduct all those hiked-up fees. It’s insane! Man, they hit pay dirt with us, didn’t they?”

  “Man,” echoed Coop.

  “And the poor kids who aren’t smart enough to pull in the big bucks get turned into lab rats. Money, money, money. Let’s see how much money we can suck out of these kids before they drop over dead.” A ball of angry emotion barreled up from my feet.

  I picked up the chair I’d been sitting on and lifted it high over my head. With an anguished roar I ran over to the pinball machine and smashed the chair down on the smooth, horizontal surface. Glass shattered. Kia screamed. The pinball machine pinged.

  “Whoa, dude,” said Coop.

  Isaac grabbed the front of my shirt and would have lifted me onto my toes if he’d been strong enough. “What’d you do that for, you little brat? I’m going to kill you, you know that?”

  “Yeah? Go ahead.” I stuck my nose defiantly in the air. Despite his tough words, I knew he’d never try anything. He was too skinny to hurt me. Even if he could, what did I care?