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by Robison Wells

Page 12

 

  “Glad I can help,” I grumbled.

  “Man, I’ve been waiting for you for years. ”

  “Why?”

  Harvard stopped at a door. It hung open a few inches.

  “Kid, you don’t have one of these things in your head. ” He struck a match and lit Dylan’s lantern. “You’re gold. ”

  “I thought Dylan moved out of the fort. ”

  “He wandered,” Lily said. “We always hoped he’d come back. ” Dylan’s room was blank and empty. The bed was made, but rumpled, and Dylan’s few belongings were in a cardboard box by the window. Unlike every other room I’d seen, there was nothing painted on the walls. In fact, they looked recently whitewashed.

  “They always said detention meant death back at the school. ”

  Harvard smiled. “It can mean death if you’re stubborn and fight them. It probably would have meant death for you. But nope, they just take you down the elevator, give you an implant, and ship you here. ”

  “We’re a freak farm,” Lily said.

  I found a windbreaker. It was thin, but new and sturdy, and it was big enough to pull over my sweatshirt.

  “I didn’t recognize half the people at the meeting today,” I said. “Why aren’t all their dupes active?”

  “Science,” Harvard said, relishing the word like it was just as exciting to him as escape. “You don’t want to load a school full of robots if you’re testing the robots. Our assumption is that the whole point of the robots is to meld into the real world—to interact naturally with humans. If the school was mostly robots, then it would be a lousy experiment. ”

  He pulled a pair of thick wool socks from Dylan’s box and stuffed them into the pocket of his coat. Lily blew out the lantern.

  “Where’s your dupe, then?”

  “The last time I was aware of him, he was in a dark room somewhere in the underground complex. It looked like a closet. ”

  I looked over at Lily. She nodded. “Me, too. ”

  We left the room and headed for the massive front door. Harvard knocked on a door and got a kid I didn’t know to follow us out and lock the gate after we’d left. Lily pulled my sweatshirt hood up to cover my face. They were still searching for me, after all.

  “They’re just waiting to use your dupes? Saving them for later?” I asked as we trudged out onto the snowy road. The mud was frozen solid now, and it seemed petrified, like the tire ruts were dinosaur tracks preserved in stone.

  “I guess,” he said. “There are a lot of us like that. And the implants do more than just connect us to the dupes. They trap us here in town, and they can disable us, too, like they did today—”

  “Or kill us, like with Dylan,” Lily said.

  “So we all have implants,” Harvard said simply. “I’m only aware of mine once or twice a month. I’m hoping they’ll use it when they repopulate the school. ”

  “Repopulate?”

  Lily didn’t seem nearly as excited as Harvard. “It’s empty now. Everyone’s underground getting chips in their heads. If the experiment continues, they’ll need a new batch of dupes—and humans. ”

  I didn’t want to think about that. More innocent kids at the school. More screwed-up kids in the town.

  I couldn’t see the other buildings of the town yet—they were on the other side of the creek and through the thick stand of cottonwoods—but the smoke from their fires was hanging in the sky. I’d watched that smoke from the school. It was what had led us here.

  “So what’s the deal with Fort Apache?” I asked, glancing back at the moonlit adobe box we’d just left. “Jane said something about that being where it all started. ”

  “It’s a guess,” Lily said with a shrug.

  “A guess that makes a lot of sense,” Harvard added enthusiastically. “Picture the whole complex. The oldest is the fort, probably built in the mid–eighteen hundreds. Then we have the washroom and commissary—maybe built in the thirties?”

  “A guess,” Lily added.

  “It’s all guesses,” Harvard said, ignoring her. “Then the Greens’ barracks, which are maybe forties or fifties?”

  The shallow creek was partially frozen over, though I could see the smashed ice where the truck had driven through it. The layer of snow over the ice gave us plenty of traction—I didn’t slip once as we crossed.

  “We’re not sure how old the school is,” Harvard said. “But I have a theory about the history of this place—”

  Lily cut him off, plainly tired of Harvard’s long explanations. “The experiment started in the fort way back two hundred years ago. Then it moved to the school, and the humans stayed here to control the dupes. ”

  “So when the experiment was here—when the dupes were here—where were their humans?”

  Harvard paused, looking down the road.

  “We have extra guards on duty tonight,” he whispered, his mind suddenly elsewhere. “They’re going to be looking for you. ”

  Lily leaned closer to me. “We don’t think they had humans before. ”

  Harvard put his finger to his mouth, watching something, and then motioned for us to follow him down the dirt road toward the barracks.

  “We think Iceman and Ms. Vaughn are older models of androids,” he finally said. “Straight AI, no humans attached. But the AI wasn’t good enough, so they couldn’t fit into society—they couldn’t blend in. ”

  We stopped again, pausing in the shadow of the commissary while Harvard watched.

  “I think we’re good,” he said, and started moving forward. “Keep quiet, though. ”

  I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I was glad Dylan’s windbreaker was dark blue to cover up the white-and-yellow logo on my sweatshirt.

  One day I wasn’t going to have to watch over my shoulder, afraid for my life. Paranoia had become normal life, and I was sick of it.

  We left the road. The untouched snow gave me confidence that we weren’t walking into an ambush as Harvard directed us around the back of the buildings. Steam was pouring out of the washroom’s broken windows, and I could hear the running water of showers.

  I followed Harvard to the last of the barracks. The green paint was flaking off, exposing the bare old wood underneath, but it seemed sturdy enough.

  He motioned for us to wait along the side of the barrack, and went around the front.

  “Why do we trust this guy?” I whispered to Lily.

  She smiled. “I don’t trust anybody. I like Harvard, though. He’s in charge of escape. ”

  “I thought that Birdman was in charge. ”

  “Birdman’s in charge overall,” she said. “Mouse is in charge of something, too, though I haven’t figured out what. I get the feeling that she just latches onto whoever is in charge. That’s what her dupe did. ”

  Harvard’s head appeared around the edge of the building and he waved to us. “We’re clear,” he said, louder than I’d expected. Whatever he was worried about, it wasn’t here.

  The inside of the building wasn’t what I was expecting, either. I’d pictured tidy rows of cots, like an army barrack, but it was much nicer. There were rows of soft beds heaped with blankets and pillows, each with a dresser and lantern. Three overstuffed couches surrounded a community fireplace. The fact that anyone chose to live in the fort instead of the barracks was a testament to how paranoid Birdman was about security. Maybe Maxfield made the barracks more pleasant to entice people out of the relative safety of the fort.