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I walked through one of the paintball fields, passing speckled trees and bunkers. It was the first one I’d played, back on my second day here.

We were their playthings. Somewhere, they were taking notes as they watched us follow their every order.
Benson Fisher reacts violently under stress—physically assaulting his classmates, damaging school property. How will he react if we lock the doors? If we cut off the food? If we kill his friends?

I crossed the ribbon at the back of the field. It was rockier here, and the ground sloped upward sharply. I had to run, sliding backward in the loose rock with every step. A minute later, panting and exhausted, I reached the wall.

It was the same here as it was everywhere else—more than twice my height, with the nearby trees cleared so no one could climb over. I touched it. The brick was cold under my hand.

I sat on a rock and stared at the wall. There was no way over it without supplies or help. I could try to knock down another tree, but I knew they were right about crossing. I’d end up just like Lily.

I heard a rattle of stones behind me. Someone else was struggling up the slope. I listened without turning to look.

“Hey.” It was Becky.

“Hey.”

She walked to me, taking quick shallow breaths, and sat beside me on the rock.

“You’re not running,” she said.

I stared at the wall, and shook my head.

She didn’t say anything, just sat there next to me. The sun hadn’t hit this spot yet, blocked by the trees, and the air was cold. I was glad I had my sweatshirt. I hoped the school wouldn’t decide to punish us by leaving the doors locked all day and all night. Though if they did, we could just go back into the room with Jane. They couldn’t lock that one after what we’d done to it. At least we’d be out of the cold.

“I’m sorry,” Becky finally said. “I wish you would have told me, but . . .”

“No,” I said. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t have believed me. Some new guy shows up and starts telling you crazy things about a person you’ve known for a year. It’s okay.”

For a long time she sat next to me. Sometimes she’d take a breath like she was going to speak, but then stopped herself.

I stared at the wall. I was going to leave. I just had to figure out how.

“No one can trust anyone anymore,” Becky said. She was rubbing her hands to keep them warm. “It’s probably been like that for you for a while.”

“Yeah.”
And it sucks.

“That’s why you were making the list,” she said.

I exhaled slowly and then rubbed my face. “Yeah. I figured that the androids had to have been here since the beginning. Like Jane.”

She nodded.

“But now we’ve found Dylan,” I continued. “So, that makes everything different.”

“Right.”

I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. It was going to be a long, cold day.

Becky shifted, turning her body toward me. I took my eyes off the wall and looked at her. She didn’t have her usual perfect style—her brown hair was still skewed and flattened from sleep.

“I know that you can’t trust me, Bense,” she said, and then paused, looking down at her hands. “I just want you to know that I trust you.”

“Does that mean that you’re leaving the Society? Are you a V again?”

She exhaled and then looked into my eyes. “I’m whatever you are.”

We sat in silence, staring at each other for what seemed like several minutes. Then Becky broke down, her body suddenly wracked in sobs. She fell against me and I held her. “I’m sorry,” she cried, brokenhearted. “I really thought I was helping people.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

Chapter Twenty-five

W
e buried Jane as the sun was climbing the cold morning sky. Becky, Mason, and I went to the maintenance sheds—which thankfully still opened—and got some shovels. The rest of the V’s soon joined us, and even a few people from the other gangs. We dug a new grave in the cemetery, and then Curtis and I lowered Jane’s body into it.

Most of the flowers around the school had died weeks ago, but Becky gathered some pine boughs. And, instead of a headstone, we made a pile of rocks at the head of the grave, each mourner adding one.

Yes, Jane wasn’t a real person. But she’d been real enough that we’d all loved her.

In the wintery silence, Oakland found me. I was sitting on the grass in the graveyard, my shovel still lying across my lap. Becky and a few of the other V’s were with me, but no one had spoken for a long time.

“Did Jane have trouble with pop culture?”

Oakland’s lips were tight together, and he was looking thoughtfully at the ground as he spoke.

“You know,” he went on, “like music and TV and stuff.”

Gabby replied before I got a chance to. Her voice was trembling. “I used to make fun of her for it. She didn’t know any of the bands I used to like.”

I was going to add that she’d never heard of any movies, but Oakland spoke first.

“I couldn’t get much out of that computer. I don’t think it’s networked, either. But I was able to get some system info from . . . from Jane. Most of it I didn’t understand—mechanical stuff. But there were a couple memory upgrades in there. Some programmer made a note about uploading a patch to fix the ‘pop culture problem.’”

So that was it. Whenever I quoted a movie to her, she didn’t know about it because she hadn’t been programmed to know it.

“The ‘pop culture problem,’” Curtis repeated, staring at the freshly covered grave.

“They were trying to fix her so we wouldn’t notice,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t spoken. It sounded too mean when it came out.

The group was quiet for a minute, and then Joel spoke. “So, who can name all the Harry Potter books?”

“Shut up,” Curtis snapped. “That’s the last thing we need.”

“They said they fixed it,” Oakland added.

The sun still wasn’t quite at its peak when someone called us from the school steps. The doors were unlocked, and a meeting was about to begin.

The main foyer inside was ringed with students, mostly sitting against the walls or on the stairs. There were a few cardboard boxes of food that Havoc had dragged up from the cafeteria. Without any clear idea of what was going to happen, they didn’t really feel compelled to fulfill their contracts, so they just left the unprepared food—some still frozen—for us to fend for ourselves. I don’t think anyone complained.

It was Isaiah who had called the meeting, and he sat on a stone bench by the front door, a notebook in hand. We were going to be discussing our negotiations with the school. The room was silent, everyone determined to hear every word.

Isaiah raised an eyebrow when he saw Becky and me sitting together on the floor. She looked away.

“So what’s the most important thing that we want?” he asked. He wrote a heading across the top of the paper and underlined it.

“We want to get out of here,” Curtis said. “All of us.”

Isaiah drew a bullet point but didn’t continue. “We can’t just take that to them. This is a negotiation. All of us leaving gives them nothing.”

“What?” Carrie leaned forward. “We can’t make a compromise about that. We can’t say ‘let half of us go.’”

Isaiah shook his head. “Then all we’re doing is making a demand, not negotiating. And call me crazy, but I don’t think that we want to make demands of a school that kills people.”

One of the Society girls raised her hand. “What if we start with something simple, like ask them why we’re here?”

Isaiah nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. That’s better.”

“I think it’s obvious why we’re here,” Oakland said. He was slouching in his chair, wearing a hooded sweatshirt instead of his uniform. “We’re being researched. This is some big stupid psychological experiment.”

Isaiah raised an eyebrow. “This is obvious?”

“Of course it is,” he said. “Why do you think that all this weird stuff happens? Why do they lock the doors and leave us outside? It’s all just to see what we’ll do. And these robots are part of it.” He pointed over to me. “Maybe they wanted to see what he’d do if he had a girlfriend, so they programmed Jane to like him, and then they wanted to see what would happen if the girlfriend died, so they sent Dylan.”

No one said anything, but Isaiah looked unconvinced.

“I’m serious,” Oakland said. “Why else would they have one robot beat the crap out of another one? Those things can’t be cheap.”

Mason spoke up, but quietly. “If they wanted to see what happens when someone’s girlfriend—or boyfriend—dies, they didn’t need to make robots do it.”

I didn’t look at Becky. She was perfectly still and silent.

“What about being trained?” Hector asked. “Why else would they make us play paintball? There aren’t any cameras in the woods, so it can’t be part of a research experiment.”

Curtis spoke next. “I think it’s safe to say that wherever there are androids there are cameras.”

“Yeah,” Oakland said. “And here’s another thing. If we’re being trained for something, then what is it? No one ever leaves here, and no one is getting any better at anything. If this is a training program then it’s got to be the most expensive, most worthless training ever.”

Mouse nodded. “And if they just want to train a bunch of super soldiers, why not program the androids to do that?”

Isaiah jumped in, loudly, to stop anyone else from talking. “I think this is why we need to ask them why we’re here. Let’s just ask.”

Rosa stood. She was carrying a worn notebook and a small bag. Isaiah continued to speak, but Rosa interrupted.

“Can I say something?” Her hands were shaking.

A few people nodded.

“I need to explain,” she said. Our eyes met for an instant, but she looked away, staring at the floor. Tears were flowing down her face now. Carrie stood, but Rosa waved for her to stop.

She opened her notebook. With a quivering voice, she spoke.

“I’ve been in that room before,” she said.

Whispers erupted around the room, and Rosa glanced up, fear and guilt in her eyes. “I promise I didn’t know that anyone was a . . . robot. I didn’t know, I swear.” She looked back at her notebook. “It was more than a year ago, and I was doing maintenance. I was in the library, all alone, and I had all the tools with me. I decided to open a vent and see where it went. I thought maybe it would go down into wherever the closets go.”

Everyone was silent, hanging on Rosa’s every word. Her fear seemed to be increasing, though.

“I came out in that room. There weren’t any people in there then, but there were a lot of other things. Lots of computers. I looked all over but then I heard something, like someone was coming. I got scared and ran.”

Mason spoke. “I saw you leave there.”

Rosa didn’t look up. “I didn’t have time to look at the computers, but I grabbed the only thing I could find before I ran. Just one piece of paper. I wrote down what it said in my notebook.”

She held up the notebook and then read. “‘I understand your concern about the slowness of the process. However, it is not in the interests of the experiment to instruct them in tactics. Our goal is to have them develop strategies on their own, not to see how well they can learn existing strategies. The fact that they’re still behaving poorly on the sports field should not be viewed as failure of the experiment, but as valuable data to be studied.’”

Rosa finished reading and looked up. The foyer was silent. When someone finally did speak, it was Curtis, asking her to read the words again.

I didn’t know what to think. This was an experiment, like so many had guessed. And we played paintball so that we could figure out strategies ourselves. But the rest still didn’t make sense. That paper only explained paintball, and paintball was only a tiny portion of our time here.

“What happened to the paper?” Isaiah asked.

Rosa’s eyes fell again. “The school asked for it back.”

All of us were stunned, but it was Isaiah who jumped to his feet. “What? The school actually contacted you?”

She nodded.

“What did they say?”

“They just asked for it back—a message on my computer—and they told me I wouldn’t get detention. I gave it back, but I memorized it. I wrote the words down in the notebook later.”

Carrie finally stood and walked to Rosa. “We won’t let them send you to detention now.”

Mouse wasn’t as compassionate. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

Rosa wiped tears away with the back of her hand. She looked up at the security cameras. “They were paying me,” she said, hysterical now. “Millions of points. Anything I wanted.” She opened her bag and dumped the contents into her hand. Out spilled every kind of jewelry I’d ever seen on the catalog—necklaces, rings, bracelets, hair clips. There were at least a hundred pieces, falling from her hand and clattering across the marble floor.

Isaiah jumped to his feet. “You were hiding this all because of that?”

Curtis stood. “Shut up, Isaiah.”

“No,” he snapped. “She knew why we were here, and she didn’t tell us because she wanted a lot of cheap chains.”

Rosa was sitting again, shuddering with tears, and Carrie had her arms around her. Isaiah and Curtis were right in each other’s faces. I decided to step in.

“We still don’t have any leverage,” I said, finally speaking up. “I think this whole thing is ridiculous. The school has all the power here and they know it.” I pointed up at a camera twenty feet away. “They’re listening to everything we’re saying right here. They control everything. They can cut off our food if we don’t follow their rules.”

Isaiah spun to me, jabbing his finger into my chest. “That’s why we’re just asking a question. They know that we know there are androids here—and they know that Rosa told us what she saw—so now we’re asking them a question.”

“What do you think they’re going to do? I’ve known about the androids for days, but it’s not like that made them give me answers. They just tried to shut me up—they tried to bribe me, too.”

All eyes were on me, even Rosa’s.

“They gave me five million points,” I said. “I’ve been trying to stockpile supplies in my room ever since. I don’t have much yet. I haven’t checked today, but what do you want to bet my balance is now zero?”

The room was quiet for a minute.

“But doesn’t that prove it?” Isaiah asked. “They were willing to give you and Rosa special treatment because you knew the truth about them.”

“You’re an idiot,” Oakland said, rolling his eyes. “They
were
willing to give special treatment, but they’re not anymore. They didn’t want him to tell us.”

“Right,” I said, happy for once that Oakland was around. “I had some leverage because they didn’t want you guys to find out what I knew. But, there’s no leverage anymore.”

“Not unless they know that we’re serious about leaving,” Oakland said. He pointed a finger at Isaiah. “And they’ll always know we’re not serious about leaving, because their cameras are watching all the time, and all they see is the Society—a bunch of pansy Girl Scouts—too scared to do anything.”

Isaiah’s face was tight. “That kind of talk isn’t helping. Are we going to send them a message, or not?”

Oakland stood up. “You can kiss their butts all you want. But if you keep me in this place because you’re too chicken to stand up for yourself, the school’s not going to be the one to kill you.” He smacked the notepad from Isaiah’s hand and it spun onto the floor. Isaiah and Oakland stared at each other for a moment, and then Oakland left.

Mouse stood, and then Curtis and Carrie. Mason, Becky, and I were next, and then most of the student body was on its feet.

“I’m trying to keep everyone alive,” Isaiah said, not moving.

We left, climbing the stairs toward the dorms. By the time we got to the second floor, only a handful of the Society members were still sitting.

Oakland was already gone, and Mouse marched away toward her dorm, her shoes clacking on the hardwood floor.

The V’s all went their own ways. We were defeated and paranoid, and no closer to a solution than we’d been before I’d shown them Jane.

Curtis walked slowly toward the dorm. I think it was the only time I’d ever seen him leave Carrie without a kiss or a hug. They’d been sitting in the room together, but I hadn’t seen them holding hands.

Carrie watched him go and then turned for her dorm. She reached out a hand for Rosa, who went with her.

It was just the three of us left—me, Becky, and Mason.

Becky looked at me. She was nervous. “What now?”

I glanced at the window. It was early afternoon.

Reaching down, I unzipped a pocket on my cargo pants and pulled out one of the radios.

“Keep one with you in case something happens.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“No idea. But there’s something on the other side of that wall that killed Lily. And something took Laura to detention.”

Becky fiddled with the radio, twisting the dial from frequency to frequency. She didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to go anywhere.

I noticed that Becky and Mason hadn’t said more than three words to each other. I had thought, perhaps foolishly, that we could trust each other a little more than that. I trusted both of them, or at least I thought I did. I wanted to.

Mason turned to leave. “I’m going back to bed,” he said with a defeated sigh.

I looked back at Becky. She was smiling—the same tour-guide grin—only now with red swollen eyes.

“What if we just stick together for a while?”

She seemed almost embarrassed to ask the question, but I nodded and put on an optimistic smile.

“Sure. We’re going to be okay, though.”

Becky laughed, shaking her head and turning away. “I know
I’m
going to be okay,” she joked. “I’m worried about you. Trouble seems to follow you.”

There wasn’t anywhere to go. There was no point in studying, and Havoc wasn’t doing any cooking in the cafeteria. We sat in the common room and talked.