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by Robison Wells

Page 17

 

  It was nearly half an hour before everyone regained consciousness. There were no speeches this time, no announcements that the kids needed to hand us over. Instead, they just searched. I heard doors open and rustling brush. I heard footsteps near me, walking all through the construction site, but they never paused or called anyone over. Eventually the engines revved and disappeared into the forest.

  Walnut moved, scrambling up and cussing at me.

  “Sorry. ” I shrugged, clambering out of the slippery cement.

  “What if they found you and thought I was hiding you? Did you ever think of that?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. I was running for the fort before he’d finished. I slipped across the wet rocks of the stream, sinking one foot in the icy water, and darted up the far bank.

  I ran the hundred yards to the fort, my soaked shoe heavy and cold, my sweatshirt plastered with wet cement, and I pounded on the old wooden door. No one answered, and I pounded again, yelling for someone to open it.

  A few long seconds later I heard the latch, and a guy’s face appeared. Since I was alone, he had his box cutter out, ready to check my arm.

  He started to ask me what the hurry was, but I grabbed him by the jacket and shoved him out of the way, knocking him to the ground and launching the box cutter from his hand. He yelled something after me, but I ignored him, running for the Basement.

  Lily sat on Carrie’s bed, a bruise swelling up on her cheek. She took a look at my clothes and smiled.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Everything okay?”

  Lily nodded and scooted the chair over to me so I could climb up into the Basement. Before I could, the door flew open. The sentry was there, and a bigger kid behind him. They both had box cutters out and ready, and the small one looked pissed.

  Lily grinned at me. “Didn’t let them cut you?”

  “You’re new here,” the sentry said, his arrogance ten times stronger now that he had backup. “So I’ll cut you some slack. ” He grabbed me and drew the razor roughly down my arm. Blood spilled from my skin and dribbled onto the floor.

  He spread the skin, checking the bone underneath, and then tossed me a bandage. “Do that again and I’ll kill you. ”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes and climbing back onto the chair. “It looked like you were really restraining yourself back there while you were lying in the mud. ”

  He took a step toward me, and Lily laughed. “Boys, boys. We’re all friends here. ”

  “Tell that to him,” the big guy said, and shuffled toward the door.

  I ignored them all and pulled myself up into the Basement.

  The two vents were closed, and a lantern was burning, filling the room with a warm yellow glow. Becky was still asleep, but she looked more peaceful somehow. I knelt beside her and touched her face—it was damp, but cool. Her fever was gone.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s Becky,” Lily said, peering in the opening after me, “which means that this time tomorrow she’ll be smiling like an idiot. ”

  Her joking made me tense up, but I tried to push my anger away. “You were here when Iceman came looking?”

  “I jumped out when I heard the bell,” she said, and touched her bruise. “Landed bad. ”

  “She’s okay, though?”

  “See for yourself,” Lily answered. “It’s not in the school’s best interest to let people die. They give us good medicine. ”

  I twisted the handle of the lantern, raising the wick and filling the room with bright yellow light.

  I moved slowly, peeling back the gauze that wrapped Becky’s bare arm.

  With the gauze removed I saw the thin silver patch Jane had laid over Becky’s gaping, jagged wound.

  I didn’t even recognize what I saw underneath.

  What had been a tangle of torn and infected muscle was now reassembled into what looked like an almost healthy bicep. I moved the lantern closer, searching for stitches—for anything that explained this—but there was nothing. Her entire upper arm was coated in something clear and thick, and—

  No. It couldn’t be.

  I stared at the wound—the wound that had been infected and festering—and saw new skin growing. Like delicate spiderwebs, tendrils of skin were creeping across the exposed muscle.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It’s a fort?” Becky asked, peering out the tiny vent onto the courtyard. The sun was just coming up, but she’d been awake for hours.

  “Yeah. It was the first Maxfield. ” I was exhausted, but too happy to sleep. She was almost back to her normal self. It was a miracle.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, and left the vent to come back and nestle next to me, her good arm against mine. “So they’ve been kidnapping people for what? A hundred and fifty years?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Well, they couldn’t have been making robots back then,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Would they run on steam power?”

  Our situation was ridiculous, but Becky didn’t seem concerned at all—just happy and curious. I was sure the worry would set in soon enough. For now, she just seemed glad to be conscious.

  “The pipe,” she said excitedly. “Steffen Metalworks, 1893. Remember?”

  I nodded. An inscription molded into an old pipe coming out of the foundation of the school. She’d shown it to me the night before we left.

  “So,” she continued, “Maxfield started here, and then around the turn of the century they upgraded to the school. A change in the experiment?”

  “That place can hold more people,” I said. “And that leaves this town for humans who have dupes. ”

  “There wasn’t anything like that school out here back then. ” Becky had grown up not far from Maxfield—on a ranch in Arizona. She knew a lot more about the history of the Southwest than I did.

  I took her hand, and she laced her fingers with mine. “What was there?”

  “I studied Arizona history, not New Mexico,” she said. “But there would have been Spanish settlements, Pueblo tribes. Navajos and Apaches. There wouldn’t—well, there shouldn’t—have been giant Ivy League–looking private schools with walls around them. ”

  “What do you think it means?”

  Becky shrugged, and winced at the movement of her arm. “I wish I knew. ”

  It felt good having her back. She was far from healed, but talking to her—seeing her irrational cheerfulness—filled me with the hope and happiness I hadn’t felt since she’d been hurt.

  “What do you remember?” I asked. “From the last couple days. ”

  “Not much. A lot of bad dreams. ” She looked up at me. “When I get sick I have math dreams. ”

  “What’s that?”

  “I do math in my dreams,” Becky said with a small laugh. “I can always tell if I’ve got a fever, because in my dreams I’ll be trying to solve some math problem, and it’s impossible. It’s just the same thing, over and over, and I try different solutions and nothing ever works. ”

  “That sounds awful. ”

  “It is,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “You had it easy out here in the real world. ”

  We sat there quietly for several minutes. I’d already told her all that had happened since we got there.