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Becky’s tour-guide smile appeared, and she cocked her head to the side. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do mean it,” I said. “Nothing here makes sense, and the place is run by thugs and . . . whatever Laura is.”

Becky folded her arms. “Laura’s my roommate.”

“She wanted to send me to detention.”

“Because you were trying to escape,” Becky snapped, and then glanced up at the cameras self-consciously.

“Look at you,” I said, raising my voice. “You’re afraid of people you’ve never even seen. Do you think this school could run without our consent? What would have happened if you Society guys just refused to take Wallace and Maria?”

Becky opened her mouth, but I kept talking. “What if all of us tried to leave—all seventy-four of us? Let’s just build some ladders and go. No one is keeping us in here except us.”

Becky sat down at the desk. “It’s not that simple.”

“It
is
that simple,” I insisted. “That’s all there is to it. Maybe the only real person on the other side of those cameras is that woman who dropped me off. She’s just some rich crazy lady, all alone, screwing with our heads.”

“No.” Her voice was firm. She stared at me for a long time, not saying anything. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but her eyes bore into me, and I couldn’t read the emotion on her face.

“What is it?” I insisted. “What’s stopping us?”

A tear boiled up in Becky’s eye, but it didn’t drop. She spoke barely above a whisper, and she had turned her face away from the cameras. “I don’t know. Something. Back in the spring four Society kids tried to escape. They were working together, on guard duty. They didn’t make it.”

“What stopped them?”

She wiped her eye with the back of her thumb and then turned away. “Let me take you to the infirmary,” she finally said. She tapped the computer screen with her fingernail. “According to the schedule, Anna is on call.”

Becky stood and opened the door. She was all Society. When logic and reason conflicted with obedience, she just ignored them.

I followed her down the hallway. She passed the basement stairs without a look. I’d thought that was the way to the infirmary.

“I think you’ll like Anna,” Becky said. “She’s from Pennsylvania, too. Maybe you guys know some of the same people?”

Yeah
.
Because it’s really small.

She turned a corner and opened a small door. It was another set of stairs, old and narrow. She held the door for me as I went in, and then let it close behind her. As soon as it shut she put her hand on my arm.

“There are no cameras in here,” she whispered.

I waited for her to continue—she wanted to say something, but looked scared.

“What?”

“I—I just wish you would stop,” she said. “I don’t know a lot of what goes on here. But there are two things that I wish you’d understand.”

She took a deep breath. “First, detention is death. We don’t know much about it. There’s a room downstairs for detention. You get put in the room for the night. In the morning, no one is left in there.”

I cut her off. “Then how do you know they kill you? What if it’s like the closets in the dorms—like they’re secret elevators or something.”

Becky was trembling now, and she folded her arms to stop from shaking. “I haven’t ever seen it. But there’s blood sometimes.” Her voice was wavering. “On the floor.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but couldn’t. She was watching my eyes.

“What’s the other thing?” I finally said.

Becky shook her head, like she was trying to clear a thought. “No one ever escapes. People make it over the wall sometimes—the security guys have seen people do it. But they’re still caught. Like the ones I told you about. I don’t think we’re the only ones who guard the wall.” She stared into my eyes. “That’s why I’m Society. I want to stop people from going to detention and from trying to escape. This place isn’t so bad. Why risk . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“No,” she said, stopping me with her hand. “That’s enough. The cameras will notice if we’re in here too long.” She pushed past me and hurried down the stairs.

“We’ll have to get out of here eventually,” I said, calling after her. “We’re not going to live the rest of our lives in this school.”

She refused to turn and look at me. As she reached the bottom of the stairs she threw the door open, seeming almost relieved to be back with the cameras. I had to jog to catch up with her as she sped to the infirmary.

“Here we are,” she said, her voice cheerful but her eyes not yet recovered.

“Becky,” I began, but she put her finger to her lips.

“I have to get ready for class,” she said. She turned to the girl sitting behind the infirmary desk. “Anna, this is Benson.” Before I could say anything else, Becky was out the door.

Anna didn’t even bother inspecting the welts. She hardly even glanced up—just pointed to a basket of individual packets of medicine on the desk. She said she always had a constant stream of bruises and aches on the day after paintball.

I took the pills and swallowed them with water from the infirmary drinking fountain. When I stepped back into the narrow basement hallway, Becky was nowhere to be found.

Returning to the old stairway, I plodded up the rough cement steps, taking a tiny amount of pleasure in knowing I was out of the school’s sight for a few minutes. When I reached the door I paused, not wanting to go back out in front of the cameras.

I was wrong when I talked to Becky. It wasn’t seventy-four anymore. It was seventy-two.

I walked slowly back up to class on the third floor. At least it wasn’t going to be as hard to stay awake this time; I had something to think about. Why kill people in detention? It wasn’t as a warning to others—if that was the goal then wouldn’t they display the bodies? Wouldn’t they call it something other than detention?

Or maybe the school liked that it was all rumor and hushed conversations. Maybe that kept people more scared than a dead body ever would. A dead body might make people mad, make them rebel.

Back in Pittsburgh I’d always been around gangs. Real gangs, not these cocky wannabes. There was always fighting, always violence. But it wasn’t until a kid got shot in the grocery store parking lot on a Saturday afternoon that the community really rallied. People had been dying for years, but it was always in alleys and back lots, in the middle of the night. When people actually saw it with their own eyes, that’s what made them want to stop it.

Maxfield Academy wanted us to be afraid. They didn’t want us to ever know why we were here.

I’m going to find out.

I was almost to the classroom door when I heard my name.

“Benson!”

I turned just in time to see Jane inches away. She threw her arms around me.

“Oh my gosh,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Confused, I hugged her back. I didn’t want to tell her that the only thing causing me pain right now was her squeezing my bruises.

“I’m fine.”

She pulled back and looked into my face. She was smiling, but her eyes were red like she’d been crying. “I heard what happened. What were you doing out of your room?”

“Just looking around,” I said.

It took a minute for me to realize we were standing in the middle of the hall holding each other, and I quickly let go of her.

“Don’t do that again,” she said, shaking her head and laughing nervously. Her voice hushed. “What if Isaiah caught you?”

We turned toward the classroom door.

“There’s nothing in the rules about being out at night,” I said.

“Unless he thinks you’re trying to escape.”

I nodded. She grabbed my arm and gave it a squeeze. “Just be careful, okay?”

“Okay.”

Laura was teaching again, smiling as brightly as she had before, but she never made eye contact with me. We halfheartedly discussed the aesthetics textbook that we were supposed to have read, although no one—not even the Society kids—really got into it. I hadn’t even thought about the book since I’d gotten it.

As the bell rang for lunch, Laura read a note from her computer.

“We have an announcement from the school,” she said happily. “There is going to be a dance in ten days. As contracts will be renewed next week and points awarded, please note that dance attire is available for purchase. You will also be able to purchase music that you wish to have played during the dance. Whoever gets the janitorial contract this month will be responsible for setup and decoration.”

Lily slumped in her seat. “That’s more work for the V’s.”

“The contracts are being changed?” I asked.

“They’re being renewed,” Jane corrected, turning back to look at me. “Nobody negotiates anymore. We have a truce.”

I nodded, listening to the rest of the room chatter about the dance. After my conversation with Becky, this all felt so wrong. I understood what she had meant—that it was safer to follow the rules—but could I really go to a dance knowing what I did about the school? That the same people who were letting us buy tuxes and music were also murdering kids in the basement?

“You okay?” Jane asked. Shaken from my thinking, I realized that most of the other students were on their feet and heading out the door. She was still sitting in front of me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“The first week is always the hardest,” she said. “Everyone has trouble.” Jane put her elbows on my desk and rested her chin in her hands, grinning mischievously. “You’re a little more vocal about it than some, but everyone thinks like you at first.”

I looked at the people filing out of the room, chatting excitedly about the dance. “How long does it take to get brainwashed?”

“Listen,” she whispered. “You’re in the V’s, and we agree with you. A lot of terrible stuff happens here.” There was something in her eyes, some hurt that I couldn’t identify. “But have you ever stopped to think about where you’d go if you left? You don’t have any family. No one here does.”

“I’d have my freedom.”

“Freedom to do what? Get a minimum-wage job and live in a run-down apartment—if you’re lucky?”

I snatched my textbook from my desk. “So you’re here because you like it.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

Jane pulled back from my desk and took a breath. She tiredly ran her fingers through her hair. Finally, she stood and extended her hand to me. “Let’s go get some lunch.”

Chapter Nine

T
hat afternoon we didn’t have classes. Instead, Iceman announced that we had last-minute time to complete our contracts before they were renewed. The V’s met in the maintenance room, and Curtis and Carrie handed out our assignments.

In addition to the vacuums and mops, the maintenance room had a wide selection of hand tools—hammers and wrenches and saws—and I immediately thought of how I could use them for escape. I searched the peg board for wire cutters, to get through the fence, but didn’t see anything too promising. There was a pair of pliers that might work, but it’d be suicide to get all the way over the wall only to have them fail.

Extension cords, on the other hand, were as good as rope, and there were at least three of them. I couldn’t help smiling as I turned back to Curtis for my assignment.

It turned out to be trash duty.

It was interesting, being able to walk the halls of the school in silence, to inspect all the nooks and crannies. I started on the top floor, rolling a large garbage can down the halls of the guys’ dorm—another V girl was doing the same on her side—dumping the small trash bins. I peeked around some of the other rooms, but no one had much to look at. A few guys had some books, one had a guitar, and three rooms had TVs and video games. Mason had told me that those took almost six months’ worth of points.

I don’t know what I was expecting in Oakland’s room—a gun collection? A list of people to beat up?—but other than an unmade bed and some smelly socks, nothing was out of the ordinary.

I moved floor by floor, room by room, but the building was so big and there were so few of us that most of the trash cans were unused.

On my way down to the basement I stopped by Becky’s office and emptied her bin, but Isaiah was talking to her and I didn’t want to hang around.

I searched the basement for the detention room. The infirmary was down there, as well as dozens of small storage areas and a boiler room. I checked every door on the floor—the chip in my watch opened all of them since we had the maintenance contract—but none of them looked like what I expected for the detention room. It was just like the basement of any old building: cramped, dark, and plain.

And then I found it, after I’d almost given up. It looked like the other storage rooms—cement walls, poorly lit. But I noticed the door was heavy when I swung it open, and as I looked closer I could tell it was metal, painted to look like the other wooden doors. And the floor had a hollowness to it, like I wasn’t walking on foundation cement anymore. I was standing in an elevator.

I stepped out quickly, suddenly nervous that it might drop out from under me.

As I stood at the door, I could see scratches in the paint. Doomed students trying to get out before the floor lowered?

My muscles tensed and I wanted to run, but something stopped me. I took a deep breath, looked up at the security camera—its glass, lifeless eye staring back at me—and I spit into the detention room. Then I went back upstairs.

When the garbage bags were all gathered by the outside doors, I peered out the windows. I could see a few Havoc members, one in the distance riding a large lawn mower, and two more close by, trimming the bushes and edging the grass. Curtis had said that even though the rules allowed me to take the garbage out to the incinerator, the doors wouldn’t open for me. I’d have to get one of them to open it.

I held up my hand to pound on the window, but behind me I heard someone call my name. Jane.

“Hey,” she said, jogging down the hall toward me. She was holding a push broom and set it against the wall when she reached me. “Let me go with you. The V’s use the buddy system.”

She pulled a few loose strands of red hair from her face and readjusted the elastic that held her ponytail. Her eyes sparkled happily, as though taking out the trash were her favorite pastime.

I turned back to the window so that I wouldn’t stare at her.

“So, how do you like being a janitor?” she asked with a grin, as she started knocking on the windows.

Through the glass I could see two people walking toward us. One was Skiver, and the other was a girl I didn’t know.

“It’s awesome,” I said. “That’s why I signed up for this school in the first place.”

Bringing Jane along didn’t make me feel any safer, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. And, besides, I didn’t feel as nervous around Havoc as I did the day before. I’d refused to turn in Oakland and Mouse to the paintball refs for the overkill, and I’d cut Mash’s handcuffs off. I figured they might cut me some slack.

I tried to pick up all the bags, but Jane scowled at me and took two of them.

“So, who’s Private Ryan?”

“Huh?”

“You started to talk about him yesterday. Private Ryan at Omaha Beach. Was he a relative of yours?”

“What? No. It’s a movie. You’ve never seen that one, either?”

Jane blushed. “I’ve been in here for two and a half years.”

“That one’s even older than
Cast Away
.”

“I didn’t watch a lot of movies before I got here.”

I wondered how old she was, how old she’d been two and a half years ago. But the doors opened before I could ask.

“Well, if it isn’t the new kid and his girlfriend,” Skiver said. I ignored him and pushed my way outside, turning to make sure they didn’t stop Jane.

“Just heading to the incinerator,” I said. Jane didn’t seem bothered by Havoc, but she didn’t look at either of them in the face. When she was past them we headed toward the back of the school.

In the distance, closer to the forest’s edge, I could see one of the Society’s guards on a four-wheeler.

“You need some alone time?” Skiver shouted. They were walking slowly, following us.

“How old are you?” I asked Jane, trying to get her mind off Havoc.

She looked up at me with a smile. “How old do I look?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Seventeen?” I figured it was probably best to aim high.

“Sixteen,” she said. “I’ll be seventeen in June.”

Skiver wasn’t far behind, but it didn’t look like he was trying to do anything other than intimidate us.

“So when you got here,” I said, trying to do the math in my head. She cut me off.

“Thirteen. Pretty great, huh?”

I couldn’t imagine coming into a place like this so young. No one here now was younger than fourteen, and there were only a few of them. I looked over at her. I wanted to say something—it seemed so terrible—but I couldn’t think of anything.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Seriously. That’s what I keep telling you. This place isn’t that bad once you get used to it.”

“It’s all you’ve ever known.”

She rolled her eyes and grinned. “That’s a little melodramatic.”

The incinerator was a big rectangular machine, about eight feet tall, and it smelled terrible. Curtis had told me that I didn’t need to do anything to operate it—it was all automatic. A small sign indicated where to put the trash, and I tossed the first bag inside.

Skiver shouted, “Nice job at paintball yesterday.”

I lifted the next bag up and in, and then the third.

Skiver turned to goading Jane. “Did you know your little Benson wasn’t in his room last night? I think he’s cheating on you. But for some reason he was still in the boys’ dorm. I wonder what that means?”

I threw the last two bags in the incinerator and then turned to look at Skiver. He was smiling nastily. But the girl behind him had left.

I wanted to punch him in the teeth. Not for anything he’d said or even anything he’d done to me. I just felt like hitting him.

Jane took my hand in hers. “Come on.”

I nodded and inhaled deeply. Holding her hand felt comfortable, but I knew I was squeezing too tight—angry about Skiver.

We’d only taken a few steps when I noticed a small door in the side of the building. Judging by the slope of the grass, I figured it had to go into the basement, but I didn’t remember seeing any exterior doors while I was down there.

“Do you know where that goes?” I asked Jane. The image of the detention room was clear in my mind, and I knew there had to be more to the basement, something deeper down.

She shrugged.

We walked up to it but didn’t hear a buzz, and the knob was locked.

“What are you doing?” Skiver shouted.

I turned to him. “Do you know where this door goes?”

“What do I look like, an architect?”

“No, you definitely do not.”

He snarled and walked down to me. I listened for the buzz, but it didn’t happen for him either. So, the door wasn’t opened for maintenance or groundskeeping.

“Aren’t you supposed to get back inside and scrub toilets or something?” he said.

Jane’s fingers curled tightly around mine.

I breathed out, long and slow. “I guess we’d better.”

That night I went to talk to Curtis. He was lying on his bed, fiddling with his computer.

I knocked on the open door. “What’s up?”

He sat up. “Oh, hey, Benson. Just entering the contract bids.”

Curtis punched a few buttons, and then closed the computer with a click. “Speaking of which, we get paid tomorrow—you’ll have a few points.”

“Nice,” I said, and leaned against his wall. “Too bad I won’t be able to afford a fancy new ball gown for the dance.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry. Most of the guys will just wear their uniforms. The girls can buy dresses if they want, but I doubt many guys will waste our points on it.”

“I was wondering if I could ask you something,” I said, looking toward his window. It was dark out now, and the moon was just over the horizon. There wasn’t any haze.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“How long have you been here?”

“Not as long as some, I guess. Maybe a year and a half. I’ve stopped paying attention.”

“Were there ever more students than there are now?”

He nodded, as if my questions weren’t surprising. He clasped his hands together and gazed at the floor. “You mean total numbers? Or do you mean, have people ever left?”

“Total numbers,” I said. “I already know people have left. Died.”

He glanced up at me. “I’ve never seen a body, you know. I mean, other than the war.”

“Huh?”

“I’ve never seen a body of someone sent to detention. I always hold out hope. Maybe they’re alive.”

“But I heard about what happens with detention,” I said. “I heard about the blood.”

He stood up with a grim smile and moved to the window. “Wow. You really are more nosy than most of us. I’d been here a lot longer than you by the time I learned that.”

Curtis didn’t make much sense to me. He ran after Ms. Vaughn’s car. I thought that would mean he was trying to escape, like I was, but most of the time he didn’t seem like he was even interested.

“What about total numbers?” I asked.

“It’s never been very high.” He glanced at me over his shoulder. “You’re wondering why the school is so big?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. We’ve all wondered.”

On a corkboard above his desk were a dozen pencil drawings—the school building, still lifes, faces I didn’t recognize.

“You do these?” I said, leaning over for a better look.

“No. Carrie.”

“They’re good.”

“I’ll tell her.”

I stood back up and turned him. “Who’s the oldest here? I mean, who’s been here the longest?”

“That’s easy. Jane.”

“Really? But she said there were people here before her.”

“That’s the big mystery,” he said with a shrug. “She explained it to Carrie once. Fifteen were here before Jane came. One morning they were gone. I guess it was some kind of mass escape.”

“Did they get away?”

Curtis shook his head and lay down. “No one escapes. If any of us ever got out of here they’d tell the police and this place would get shut down. Anyway, those fifteen were the only link to the past, and none of them confided in her. She was all by herself until more students were brought in.”

I nodded, but my heart fell into my stomach. She would have been young—thirteen—going through all the same things I was going through now, only completely alone. She must have been scared all the time. It was no wonder she kept saying things weren’t so bad. They’d been so much worse.

Looking back up at Curtis, I tried to push thoughts of Jane away. “So,” I reasoned, “for all we know, this school’s been like this for years—decades.”

“Maybe. That’s why I’m not Society.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some people say that we need to just ride it out. Follow the rules and keep our heads low. I agree a little with that, I guess.” He smiled. “I mean, I don’t think we need to try crazy escapes and fall out of trees. But I do think that, sooner or later, we’re going to have to try
something
.”

“Right,” I said. “They’ll never just let us leave because we’d tell the police. So, what does the Society say about that?”

“I think they’re scared,” he said. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I think they’re just too afraid of punishment. Probably because they know better than any of us what the punishments are like.”

Curtis was right—it didn’t look like it. Maybe Becky was scared, but Dylan? Isaiah? They couldn’t be enforcing the rules just because they were too scared to break them.

I looked out the window, trying to guess where the wall was, but all I could see was trees.

“One last thing,” I said, touching the glass and peering into the dark. “Have you ever seen smoke in the woods?”

“The campfires, you mean?”

I turned my head enough to look at him with one eye.

He nodded. “You can see them from the girls’ dorm better than here. Just little trails of smoke—sometimes one and sometimes eight or ten. We think they might be guards.”

“Or a campground,” I said. Could help be that close?

Curtis laughed. “Campgrounds. Now that’s an optimist.”

Back in my room, I stayed up late on my little computer, scrolling through catalog pages of clothes, gear, jewelry, and games. There was nothing for sale that gave any insight into the outside world. No books, no magazines. Even the music we could buy for the dance was fifty or sixty years old.

“You know anything about computers?” I asked Mason, close to midnight.