Qualify

  We repeat this several times, crossing the street, finding a glassed walkway, going through, until we reach Yellow Quadrant Dorm, which is last.

  Gracie enters first, and takes me directly to an info desk near the doors. We’re in a very large hotel-like lobby that stretches along the entire first floor like an airport terminal. It is filled with noise and teens, mostly all Yellow Candies such as myself.

  The official at the desk scans my token and informs me I am on the third floor, which is all girls’ dormitory space, in Section Fourteen, bed #172.

  “Your personal belongings from your RQC have been brought over by freight shuttle last evening together with all the others who passed Semi-Finals, after the end of the event. Your belongings are now waiting for you next to your bed,” he tells me, handing me a small check-in packet that includes a paper map of the complex and a general conduct and instructions checklist. “Be sure to locate and introduce yourself to your Section Leader who will give you the next instructions and answer any questions. Good luck, Candidate.”

  And the official turns away.

  I go to find the nearest stairs, and Gracie and I go up to the third floor that resembles another airport terminal row, except instead of airline terminal check-in areas there are dormitory Sections along an endless hallway. Each Section is the size of an RQC girls’ dorm floor, and has double doors marked by a Section number.

  We walk past endless doors and many girls I don’t know moving past us through the hall in both directions, until we come to Section Fourteen.

  We enter the dormitory which is another sea of neatly placed rows of cots—most of them slept-in but empty because their occupants are elsewhere—and Gracie helps me find bed #172 that’s somewhere in the back.

  My bed is pristine, and my two duffel bags sit on the floor before it.

  “There’s your stuff!” Gracie says with excitement. “You might want to check to see it’s all there.”

  But I am hardly listening. Instead I glance around the huge room to see who my bed neighbors are, and who else is here.

  And that’s when I see Claudia Grito. She’s three beds down from me, her metal piercings glittering in high contrast against her silky black hair, sitting on her cot with her feet up and going through stuff in her bag. As though she senses my presence, she happens to look up in that moment, and our gazes lock.

  Oh, great, just great. . . .

  Claudia frowns and glares at me. “Look who’s decided to show up, Gwen-baby! Didn’t think I’d ever see your skinny ass again, loser face.”

  Gracie immediately turns around and her jaw drops in outrage. “Who the hell do you think you are? Don’t talk to my sister like that!”

  “It’s okay, Gracie.” I glance at her. And then I turn back to Claudia. “Sorry to disappoint you.” And then I look away.

  Meanwhile, I notice a few other girls in the room, and they all look vaguely familiar. And then . . . the bathroom doors open and I see Laronda! And there’s Dawn behind her, and Hasmik too!

  “Girlfriend!” Laronda shrieks, and rushes toward me, and practically jumps in my arms with a huge choking hug. “You’re alive! You look good! Way, way good, compared to yesterday when you were half-dead in the hospital!”

  “Hey!” I exclaim. And then the others reach me, and I am hugging Hasmik and Dawn simultaneously, who both look tired and excited and generally healthy except for a kind of slight air of additional gravity and resignation that all of us who’ve passed the Semi-Finals now seem to have. It’s an imprint of tiredness, of suffering, of death, that stamped us all, deep underneath the veneer of “happy.”

  “Can you believe, I make it!” Hasmik says in a high-pitched tone, and repeats it. “I, I make it this far? No way, huh? I still don’t believe it! Complete accident!”

  “Shut up, girl,” Laronda turns and punches Hasmik lightly on the arm. “Of course you made, it, I told you, you would! Good thing you picked Dallas, too—no big deal, just an obstacle course in the middle of burning oil wells! I picked New York like an idiot and got to climb ledges and fall down from skyscrapers like some kind of caped comic book heroine—ugh!”

  “New York, eh?” I say with a grin. “Yeah, I heard the horror stories.”

  “Yeah, another New York here,” Dawn says in her usual calm deadpan manner. “Though Los Angeles was pretty rotten too, eh? What was it, you crazy Wild West cowboys rode explosive drones? Whose bright idea was it?”

  “Oh, well,” I say in a somewhat flustered voice. “I didn’t really want to actually, it was the only thing we could do, to get over the—”

  “Hey, hey, whoa! Kidding you.” Dawn rolls her eyes at me, with a quick, sly smile. “It was a brilliant thing to do. Color me way impressed . . . Shoelace Girl.”

  “Oh, crap. . . .” But now I’m the one grinning and rolling my eyes.

  We chatter back and forth, and it turns out, Section Fourteen is basically all the girls from our Pennsylvania RQC-3’s Yellow Quadrant, so no wonder everyone’s here, and no wonder the girls in the room look familiar.

  “All right, we have tonight and tomorrow to relax, before hell resumes,” Laronda says, sticking her finger out to poke my shoulder. “But now, I say we talk trash and gossip while we go have a good look at this huge National Qualification Center! Who’s in? You can tell me all about those flying shoes and drones and other absolutely insane junk you’re single-handedly responsible for, while we walk. Tell me everything, girlfriend!”

  Chapter 42

  The rest of the free day we spend wandering the immense sprawling compound and learning where everything is—the Quadrant Dorms and the Common Areas, which include more cafeterias, training gyms, classrooms, not one but three arena stadiums with track and sports training equipment, and three double-Olympic-length and extra-wide swimming pools.

  “I hear we’ll be doing swimming training in addition to other types of classes,” Dawn says as we walk through yet another glassed-in walkway between building structures to cross to the other street that runs parallel.

  “Interesting,” Laronda says. “I wonder why. Does Atlantis have a lot of oceans and water?”

  “It could also be their tradition,” I say, “stemming from the Earth’s original continent of Atlantis. So much stuff related to the sea, oceans, water. Like the name of their ancient city, Poseidon, who’s the Ancient Greek god of the sea—though it’s earlier than Greek, we now know, it’s in fact Ancient Atlantean. . . .”

  “Glad you’re still such a smarty-pants.” Laronda smiles.

  In that moment, Grace—who’s been tagging along with us on the walk, and has been somewhat inseparable from me since the trauma of Semi-Finals—looks up and points.

  Four Atlantean shuttles plummet down from the sky, and land somewhere beyond the buildings, their aerial activity generating a sonic boom.

  “That way lies a huge airfield,” Dawn says. “Want to go see?”

  “Um,” I say, as my expression darkens. “Not sure . . . I think I’ve had enough Atlantean shuttles and airfields to last me a lifetime.”

  “No! Don’t say that!” Gracie immediately tugs my sleeve. “If we Qualify, we will have to deal with them all the time.”

  “Okay, I know,” I reply tiredly. “But seriously, let’s just—not.”

  Dawn shrugs comfortably. “Okay.”

  So instead we walk toward the nearest cafeteria to get more free food for as long as they’re still feeding us.

  As we stroll down the street between buildings, Gracie pulls me aside for a moment, while Dawn and Laronda and Hasmik walk ahead.

  “Gwen . . .” Gracie walks at my side with a strange closed-up expression and stiff posture, hands nervously clutching the bottom of her uniform shirt. “Gwen, I . . . I have to tell you something.”

  Okay, this does not bode well.

  “What?” I say, glancing at my sister carefully.

  Gracie does not say anything for several long moments.

  “Promise?
??” she says. “Promise me you won’t go crazy when you hear this, okay?”

  “How can I promise when I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  Gracie bites her lip, takes a deep breath. “You know that awful night when they found that chip in Laronda’s jacket?”

  “Yeah. . . ?” Suddenly I feel cold. And I’m really beginning to dislike what this is leading up to.

  Gracie stops and looks up at me. Her face is full of anguish. “I put that chip in her jacket! I am so sorry!”

  “What?” I stop also, while cold waves of fear pass through me, one after another, and I am reeling with it.

  Gracie grabs my sleeves and her hands are shaking. “Please, don’t freak out, oh, don’t freak out, please!”

  “Gracie, what are you saying?” I take hold of her, and my fingers dig into her shoulders, at the same time as my voice grows very hard and very quiet. “Are you telling me you planted that navigation chip on Laronda? Oh my God, what are you involved with? Who gave it to you? Who told you to do something like that? Do you realize what you’ve done? You got so many people in trouble—you—”

  “I know! I know it was awful and wrong, now, okay! But at that time I didn’t know what it was, just a stupid little chip! I was supposed to just hide it temporarily, they told me—drop it in someone’s pocket—any person I knew and dealt with casually—and I could get it back later from them, after the Correctors finished searching our dorm. It was supposed to be for one night! That’s why I came over to have dinner with you and went up to your dormitory floor, so I could find a safe spot to hide it overnight. The guys were all passing it around like a game of hot potato, they were saying that was the best way to keep it hidden—” Gracie’s face is red and she is on the verge of tears.

  “The guys? What guys? Tell me!” I shake her, hissing in her ear, while glancing before us where up ahead the girls are still walking and laughing and talking loudly. They didn’t notice yet that we’re lagging behind.

  “The guys were from Red, they were some kind of rebel group, and they were doing all these crazy secret things to get back at Atlanteans and to steal their secrets. . . . And I thought I might be cool if I did something wild like that, and Daniel might think I am—”

  “Daniel?” I am filled with sudden rage. “Is it Daniel Tover? Did he put you up to this, Gracie?”

  “No!” Gracie whimpers. “No, not Daniel! He had nothing to do with those guys, he is not one of them, I swear! But—but I didn’t know it at the time! I thought he was, and I thought I would do this one awesome thing for them and he might notice me and—”

  “Oh, Gracie!”

  “I screwed up, okay! I had no idea! I didn’t want to hurt anyone either! And turns out, Daniel is not even one of them, even though he hangs out with many of them—that’s why I thought he was with Terra Patria, but he’s not—”

  “Hush!” I hiss again, and look around, wondering what kind of surveillance cameras and maybe audio surveillance they might have in this compound.

  And then I take a deep breath and force my voice to calm down as I speak to my little idiot sister. “Gracie, listen to me. You have to keep your voice down. This is bad, you cannot be screaming all this loudly.”

  “Okay. . . .”

  “Now . . . I am not going to tell you now that you did something stupid, idiotic, and horrible that could have gotten you and all of us Disqualified, hurt, punished, and possibly killed. You already know all this. What I want to know is why didn’t you tell me—or George—any of this earlier? Have you any idea what kind of position you’ve put so many people in?”

  Gracie scrunches her face and big fat tears roll down her cheek. “I am sorry! I am so sorry! I was scared! I wanted to tell you, and I kind of tried to, before, but I just couldn’t! And then, when they took Laronda away and then locked you up, it was too late! I didn’t know what to do! And now—I still don’t know what to do, what if they find out? Will they Disqualify me and lock me up? And what about you guys—”

  I squeeze Gracie’s shoulders again. “Look at me. . . . Stop. You did the right thing telling me. And now, just hush, okay? Let me think. . . . We need to figure out what we need to do. Okay? Stop crying! Okay? It will be okay!”

  And then I hug Gracie, and I feel her completely shaking and falling apart into a weeping mess in my arms. Might as well let her cry it out, and then she’ll get a grip. Eventually. I hope. . . .

  “What’s going on here?” Laronda and the others have backtracked and now look at Gracie crying and me hugging her. “Is she okay?”

  “Oh yeah,” I say. “She’s having a delayed-reaction nervous breakdown, I think. The Semi-Finals—she remembered bad stuff that happened then, and it’s getting to her.” And I pat Gracie’s hair gently while she quiets her sobs and wipes her nose on her sleeve.

  “Oh, poor baby,” Laronda says to Gracie. “Here. . . . Girl, let me give you a hug too!”

  Of course at that, guilty Gracie weeps even harder, since it’s Laronda she wronged in the first place. And me, in second. And herself, ultimately.

  My poor fool baby sister!

  I tactfully let everyone do their hug thing, and then change the subject.

  For the rest of the day, Gracie follows me around—continues following me like a puppy, wherever we go.

  And now I know why.

  She’s not just feeling vulnerable, and lost, and clingy-dependent on me after our hell experience in Los Angeles, as I originally thought. No, she’s also one helluva guilty puppy.

  I continue to think about what Gracie told me all evening, and wake up the next morning and it hits me hard, like a bucket of cold water.

  Gracie can get in huge trouble because of this. If anyone finds out, she can and likely will be Disqualified—and probably worse.

  I feel sick to my stomach as I go to breakfast with the people I know from the Pennsylvania RQC-3, Yellow Quadrant—including some guys who I am glad to see, such as Mateo and Jai and Tremaine—and then I go to look for my brother George, who needs to be told as soon as possible.

  Instead I run into Logan.

  Logan is standing outside the Red Quadrant Dorm structure in a small crowd of Candidates from all Four Quadrants, near what looks to be a news media van and truck lineup. Compound guards pace idly, blocking off most of the area, while a portable platform has been erected right on the street. A major network news channel crew of holo-projection techs and cameramen is arranging a brightly lit interview area. A familiar news anchor’s hologram has been projected directly from their studio into one of the chairs to interview selected Candidates about their Semi-Finals experience.

  Someone is occupying the other chair, a brown-haired boy I’ve never seen before, with a cool manner. He is talking while a sound tech moves a studio microphone in his face.

  “Logan!” I say in a loud whisper, waving and leaning in toward him past a guard who blocks my approach. “What’s going on?”

  Logan hears me, glances in my direction, and nods with an immediate light smile. He then raises one hand and mouths “ten minutes” to me. And so I wait at the periphery with a few other gawking passerby Candies, while he in turn gets briefly interviewed about his experience in New York, climbing cables and scaling the side of a tall building.

  I watch Logan take a seat easily, lean back in his chair and speak with effortless confidence into the cameras, and I realize he was born for this—calm yet outgoing, composed, friendly, making great eye contact.

  “And really,” he concludes with a self-depreciating bittersweet laugh, looking directly at the various media feed cameras. “It was a tough marathon and I am glad it’s over—at least this Semi-Finals phase. We may never forget how many of us got hurt, and yeah, many teens died out there. Manhattan is a floating graveyard for so many. But at least they died trying, having hope, up to the last second. And I am hardly the only one who managed to make some rather lucky and solid decisions that helped me survive.”

&nb
sp; He pauses, and his gaze suddenly searches the surrounding audience and settles on me. “For example, right here is a Candidate who is far more interesting than me and should really be interviewed, if you want to get the best of us here in this chair. You all know her from the Los Angeles live feeds. I believe some have used the term ‘Shoelace Girl’. . . .”

  My mouth falls open as everyone turns to look in my direction. The hologram anchor stares at me, and suddenly his expression lights up with recognition. “Oh, my, that’s right! How incredibly lucky we are, there she is! My dear, you are Los Angeles Shoelace Girl, the clever amazing girl who commandeered hoverboards, rode the drones, and then created the flying contraption with the shoes!”

  He waves energetically toward me. Two techs approach, and suddenly I am directed past guards onto the brightly lit media platform. Logan sleekly moves aside and gives my hand a quick squeeze, while I am seated in the interview chair, and the microphones point at me.

  “We are absolutely privileged to have you with us, Shoelace Girl!” says the anchor. “Which is of course, not your real name, I realize—so what is your name, dear, for our audience? The nation wants to know!”

  “Gwen . . .” I say, in a breathless voice. “Gwen Lark.”

  “And where are you from?”

  “Highgate Waters, Vermont.”

  “Fantastic achievement, Gwen—may I call you Gwen? And may I be the first to congratulate you on passing the arduous Semi-Finals! Now, how did you ever come up with all those incredible clever ideas?”

  My mind is going into a light version of deer-in-the-headlights panic and my temples pound. What is this? What can I say? I don’t know anything! Logan, how could you do this to me?

  Instead I say, “Well, I just got really desperate, I guess.”

  “Is that so?” The anchor prompts me encouragingly with a smile. “Go on, tell us. How was it that you survived the brutality of the attacks and obstacles that left many of your fellow Candidates helpless and even worse, dead? I am sure everyone remembers the way you managed to carry on with the horrible army of explosive drones—”

  I flash back to the fallen Blue girl underneath a freeway overpass, her shattered body . . . Sarah Thornwald’s perfectly still glass eyes as she lies on the grass of the Huntington. . . .