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by Robison Wells

Page 33

 

  She turned away from the window and faced me, arms folded. “You’ll have to talk to Shelly. She runs the show, and she doesn’t tell anyone everything. But I don’t know why you’re dealing with this. Gather supplies. Get out of here. ”

  “Isn’t that what you tried?”

  “And I made it pretty damn far,” she said, annoyed. “I just didn’t have any weapons. But you’ve got anything you want—hammers, knives, shovels. ”

  “What if I go for help and they find out? What’ll Maxfield do then?”

  “They’ll chase you. ”

  “Or they’ll kill everyone here and burn this place to the ground to hide the evidence. ”

  Lily didn’t have an answer to that.

  I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and started for the door. “I’m going to find Shelly. ”

  “At some point you need to just take care of yourself,” she said.

  “I’m not leaving without Becky. ”

  Lily turned, a small smile on her face. “Don’t you mean Jane?”

  I stared back at her. I didn’t know what I meant.

  No. That wasn’t true. I meant Becky. No, that wasn’t true either.

  “I’m going to get all of us out of here. ”

  Maxfield couldn’t win.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I walked out into the courtyard and sat down beside Harvard. He was still grinning, and I didn’t even know whether he could talk.

  I waved my hand in front of his face. “You there?”

  He turned his head, but not far enough to look at me. “Benson. Hi. ” He talked slowly, like he was strung out on some drug.

  I couldn’t believe I was coming to him for help when he was like this. But I was out of options.

  “Hey, Harvard. Snap out of it. ” I slapped his back. “I need to talk to you. ”

  “They’re at the school,” he said dreamily. “The sisters. The ones we were talking about. ”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I need to know what you found out about the android I brought you. Anything useful?”

  “Why would they be there?” he murmured. “They’ve seen the underground complex. They’re talking about it. ”

  “What?”

  He wasn’t really talking to me—he was staring at the sky, but obviously seeing something I couldn’t.

  “I don’t think they’re dupes. I think they got the implant, and then went to the school. They’re warning the other students. ”

  That didn’t make any sense.

  “The android,” I said. “Anything?”

  He turned his head slightly. “The heart. ”

  “What about it?”

  “I love this,” Harvard said. “I haven’t been active for so long. ”

  “What about the heart?”

  His voice was euphoric. “It’s an artificial heart. The whole thing was beautiful. It’s not gears and gizmos in there. It’s like a human, but fully artificial. It’s … elegant. ” Harvard finally looked at me. “It’s shoved over to the side. Because there’s a power source in the direct center of the chest. ”

  “So what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, drifting off again. “It’s amazing. But that heart … it’s not protected, and it actually juts out into the left armpit. ”

  “The armpit?”

  “He had a bump in his armpit,” Harvard said. “Like a design defect. I bet we could use it to tell dupes from humans. ” He drifted away for a moment. “You should get an implant. This is wild. There are a lot of new students. More every hour. ”

  I swore under my breath, and then looked around his room.

  “So that’s all you can tell me? A bump in the armpit?”

  “It’s more than a bump,” he said, finally looking at me. “It’s the miracle you’re looking for. ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The heart is unprotected there. Smack that bump and it’ll push the heart into the power source. Should shut the whole robot down. I tell you, it was beautiful. ”

  He turned back to look at the sky, and then closed his eyes and began to hum. That was all I was going to get from him.

  Harvard’s “miracle” was a little bump in the armpit. I was hoping for a whole lot more.

  I met Jane on the boardwalk as she was coming back from the commissary. Her box of snacks was smaller than Lily’s, with more granola bars and fewer sweets.

  I made up an excuse about needing to take a shower, but the truth was that I couldn’t bear to look at her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her—Jane was fun and beautiful, and had this been some other reality I probably would have been following her around town like a drooling idiot.

  But now it was different. And she knew it. She’d known it the minute she’d left the fort, and even though she smiled at me, I could see it in her eyes. She knew something was wrong, that I’d betrayed her again.

  So I left Jane at the fort. I hoped she’d go back to her room and scream at the walls and tell her friends how much she hated me, how much of a jerk I was, how much she wished I’d just leave this stupid town for good.

  I wanted her to say that, to think that. It’d be so much easier if she hated me.

  I hated me.

  I climbed back into the Basement and found another set of clothes. They weren’t exactly clean—nothing here was very clean—but they were dry, and they’d been up against the wall that the Basement shared with a fireplace, so the shirt and jeans were warm. I wanted to pull them on right then, but I forced myself to head to the washroom.

  There was no wait at the showers, and for a moment I thought I was really lucky. But the lack of wait was due to a lack of hot water. I still showered, mud and grime speckling the floor of the stall and swirling down the drain. Everything about this place was filthy. Now that Birdman’s power was gone, and the false security of the fort’s door had been beaten to dust, would everyone move into the cleaner, nicer barracks?

  As I watched the dirt swirl around the drain, I wondered where the pipes went. Was that mud and grime all washing down to some enormous septic tank? Or did the pipes flow away from town and dump into a river somewhere? I guessed it was the septic tank. Nothing ever got out of here.

  I dried off and got dressed, and made a halfhearted effort at washing my other set of clothes, my old Steelers sweatshirt and torn, muddy jeans, and then left the washroom to hang them on the clothesline—inside out, so the logo wouldn’t show. My clean coat had a hood, and I still had my scarf to obscure my face. I was glad I got here during the winter—it made hiding so much easier.

  The commissary crowds had dissipated when I went inside. I knew most of the few people left in there, but no one wanted to talk to me. Maybe they blamed me for what happened to Birdman, or maybe they knew I’d kissed Jane, or maybe they just hated me. There were plenty of other reasons.

  Six large cardboard boxes sat on one of the tables.

  Almost all the treats were gone. A box of granola bars was empty of all the good flavors—the chocolate chip and peanut butter—leaving only about forty-five oatmeal-raisin ones. There weren’t any candy bars or cupcakes or Twinkies. I took the last of the sweets—a banana-flavored MoonPie.