He was standing by Mr. Harrison when two more teachers rushed in.
“What in the world happened?” Ms. Jenkins gasped.
“We heard a crash,” said Mr. Moore. “Oh, my goodness, is that Harrison?”
They looked back and forth between me and Nathaniel, and I waited for him to turn me in, like the bullying jerk he was.
“Mr. Harrison fell,” Nathaniel said. “I saw him. I think he fainted. Maybe he had a heart attack.”
My eyes widened as Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Moore ran off to call a cell ambulance.
“Why did you do that?” I asked. “You know I clobbered him.”
“I doubt he’ll admit that to anyone,” Nathaniel said. “But I really do need to talk to you.”
We heard the sounds of running feet, and a far-off siren.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and for once I listened to him.
32
“LOOK,” NATHANIEL SAID AS WE walked quickly to the school parking lot. “I need to show you something. I promise if you come see it, I’ll never bother you again. After you see this, if you tell me to never talk to you again, I won’t.”
I stopped by my moped. “See what?”
“I can’t talk about it here,” he said quietly. “But please, it’s important.”
“Why should I trust you?” I asked, thinking of the hundreds of times he’d been a jerk to me or Becca.
He paused for a moment, and finally said, “Well, I can’t think of any reason you should.”
Oddly, that made me trust him—a tiny bit.
“Okay, I’ll go see this whatever,” I said. “But if this is a double cross, I will hunt you down like a rabid raccoon and put you out of my misery.”
“Got it,” he said, and we both started our mopeds and headed away from school.
Like I said, our cell is four miles across, pretty much a big circle. There’s the town part and a factory part, but those are pretty small compared to all the rest, which is farmland. Nathaniel led me to an outer road that I’d only been on once or twice, with Pa.
“Where are we going?” I called to Nathaniel, but he didn’t answer.
No one lived out here—these were the far reaches of other people’s farms. We passed acre after acre of fenced pasture, saw herd after herd of soft-eyed dairy cows, and still we kept on, heading toward the edge of the cell.
Cassie, you’re being stupid—again, I told myself. You know you can’t trust him! Why are you so willing to follow him out to the edge of nowhere? Maybe this is what he did with Becca. Maybe he’d found her out on the boundary road, after she played chicken with Taylor. Maybe he was the reason she’d disappeared.
Maybe it was my turn to disappear.
Crap. I almost stopped and turned around. If I got a bit of a head start, he might not be able to catch me—his moped was brand-new and shiny, but I’d tinkered with the engine on mine, and could probably squeeze a bit more power out of it.
Nathaniel seemed to sense my hesitation; he looked at me then, caught my eye, and pointed off to the distance. Barely visible, surrounded by wheat fields, stood a building. A farmhouse. Suddenly Nathaniel took a sharp right. It looked like he was plunging right into the wheat, but as I clumsily turned and followed him I saw we were on a narrow dirt track.
It would be easy to dump a body here, I thought. There wouldn’t be anyone around to notice a cloud of buzzards circling overhead. Drying heads of wheat stalks whipped against me, and I kept my face down. I couldn’t turn around here—the track was so narrow that the only way out was forward with Nathaniel, or backward. My mouth went dry as I accepted the fact that I’d made a huge mistake.
Then suddenly we were out of the wheat field and right in front of the house. It hadn’t been lived in for a long time—windows were broken, the porch was rotten, and there wasn’t even a bit of paint on the worn weatherboards.
Nathaniel stopped his moped and kicked the stand in place. I stopped, but kept my engine running.
He came over and took hold of my handlebars. Keeping his eyes on me, he reached forward and pressed the ignition button off. The slight vibration ceased, and then the world seemed silent, empty of people, and there was no one except me and the Provost’s son.
“Get off the moped, Cassie,” he said softly. “We’re going in back, to the barn.”
33
IF I QUICKLY STARTED AND gunned the engine, I could putt-putt back toward the wheat field and pray that I could find the track that already seemed to be gone. If I jumped off the moped and ran, I would no doubt get lost in the wheat, and Nathaniel would just follow me and drag me back. Either way, I was totally out of luck. I’d been stupid to follow him out here.
I got off the moped. Nathaniel took my arm lightly, as if to tell me not to even think about running. My brain was spinning, trying to come up with a plan for escape. Maybe in the barn there would be old farm tools, like a scythe or something.
The only sound out here was the wind. I heard no birds, no insects, no rodents scurrying. Soon there would be no sound of Cassie. My throat was tight. One week ago my life was the new normal: no Ma or Pa, but me and Becca and regular everything else. So far today I had decked a teacher and was now with the Provost’s son, wondering if I would have to kill him to escape.
He kept hold of me as he pulled one of the big barn doors open. It ground on rusty hinges, revealing the dark inside an inch at a time.
When it was wide enough for us to slip through, Nathaniel pushed me gently forward. I blinked, unable to see anything after the bright afternoon. Behind me, Nathaniel pulled the door shut with a groaning crunch. I tried to swallow and couldn’t, blinking wildly in the faint light let in by cracks in the boards.
On the count of three, I was going to whirl, stomp on his instep, and then throw myself at the door, I decided. One, two—
“Hey, Cassie,” said a girl’s voice. “Long time no see.”
“Wh—who is that?” I said.
A shadow moved toward me, and then another. And another. The nearer they got, the clearer their features became, and my mouth opened in surprise as I saw Rachel Detweiler, Russ Mickelson, and Tony Hanson. Kids from school.
Nathaniel let go of me and went to stand next to them.
“What is this?” I demanded. “Why am I out here?” I backed up, heading for the door, and glanced around to see if anyone else was coming at me. My eyes fell on a couple of rifles sitting on an old bale of hay. I tensed, but then realized that they had green paint splattered around the ends of their barrels. They were paint guns. The paint guns used to shoot the Provost the other night.
Nathaniel held his arms open wide. “Welcome to the Outsiders,” he said.
34
“WHA—?” I MANAGED.
“We’re some of the Outsiders,” Rachel said.
“Some of the kids that disappeared were Outsiders,” Nathaniel said. “We didn’t take them—we don’t know who did. Maybe my father. Maybe the police. Believe me, we want to find out just as much as you do.”
“But… what do you do, as Outsiders?” I asked, sitting abruptly on a hay bale before my legs gave out.
“Mostly we try to learn what we’re not being taught.” That was a voice I didn’t recognize. A girl with straight black hair, shaved off on one side of her head, stepped out of the shadows.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Tara Nightwing,” she said. “And guess what—I’m not from your cell.”
I’d never met anyone who wasn’t from our cell. Not in seventeen years. “Uh… where are you from?” I asked.
“B-97-4270,” she said. “It isn’t that far from here. It’s a manufacturing cell. We made your moped, and most of the tractors here. Kitchen appliances.”
Obviously I knew that people went to the store and bought new ovens or whatever, but I’d never wondered where the ovens came from.
“I know,” Tara said, nodding at my expression. “I never wondered where our bread came from.”
“I
never wondered where our cars or our bread came from,” said another voice.
Now that my eyes had adjusted, I saw at least a dozen kids standing among the rusting equipment and old piles of bales. I recognized six of them from school. But the others I’d never, ever seen. I’d remember someone with such dark skin, or such different-looking eyes.
One by one they stepped forward and introduced themselves. Two of them came from the same cell as Tara. One came from B-97-4274, practically next door. One from B-65-1001. And one girl, tall and skinny with a mostly shaved head except for a tightly curled broad stripe of hair that ran from her forehead to the nape of her neck—she came from Cell F-14-27.
I’m supposed to be so smart—not smart enough for higher schooling, I guess, but I usually get the best grades in my classes. But it had never occurred to me that B-97-4275 wasn’t just a name. It was a designation.
“The United is divided up into six big sections, from A to F,” a guy named Jefferson explained. “Each section is divided up into a hundred smaller sections. Those smaller sections are divided up into anywhere from sixty to five thousand cells.”
All I could do was stare as connections started to click in my brain. How could I not have even thought about this? How had I never wondered? Everyone thought—we were all taught—that the cell was everything. We were cells united. But all I knew about was mine.
“How come you shot paintballs at the Provost?”
“We’re slowly educating people,” Tara said. “Showing them that the cell way isn’t the only way. That they can dissent. They can rebel against the Provost. Like by shooting paintballs at him, for starters.”
“What good is it for them to be bad citizens?” My whole worldview was shifting, and I felt like I was going to fall off the face of the earth.
“Bad citizens aren’t always bad,” a girl named Cecily said. “Sometimes they are—if they steal or hurt a neighbor—but sometimes the United calls someone a bad citizen just because they want to know more than the United wants them to know, because they won’t blindly accept everything that they’re told.”
Like I’d always done.
All this was fascinating and overwhelming, but really, the only thing I wanted was my sister back, safe and sound.
“But why am I here? What does any of this have to do with Becca?” I asked Nathaniel.
He looked surprised. “Because Becca was an Outsider, of course.”
35
BECCA
IT FELT LIKE I HAD just closed my eyes to sleep when I was awoken again by the all-too-familiar clumping of heavy guard boots coming this way. Swearing bitterly helped me to not start weeping in despair, so I pulled myself to a sitting position and started screaming inside my head.
These 2:00 a.m. classes/torture were killing me, probably literally. My chest and stomach were a pincushion of painful dots, relics of my last failure to execute a successful push-up.
Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet. I hadn’t given up yet. I wouldn’t give in. When they came to get me, I’d be ready.
Sure enough, the guards stopped in front of our bars. My fists clenched as I prepared to have my wrists cuffed.
“Robin Wellfleet!”
I’d already taken a step forward, and stopped in confusion.
The mean-faced guard bellowed the name again: “Robin Wellfleet!”
My roommates woke up quickly and completely, as prisoners do. Robin was already standing, blinking in the dim fluorescent light.
“Here,” she said.
“Time to go!” one guard said roughly, and rapped his billy club against our rusty bars. Robin stepped forward and was immediately grabbed, her hands twisted behind her back.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Why are you taking her?”
Ignoring me, the guards yanked Robin out into the hall just as the prison-wide comm system crackled into ear-shredding life.
“Prisoners! Report to the ring!” Strepp boomed.
“Oh, shit,” Vijay breathed, his brown eyes full of dread.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
The guards dragged Robin down the hallway, her bare feet scraping the cold concrete floor. She looked back at me again and mouthed, Be strong.
“Prisoners!” the comm system blared again. “Report to the ring!”
“Oh, my God,” I said, as I followed Diego and Merry out into the hallway. “Is this another fight? Jesus! They’re going to make us watch a fight in the middle of the freaking night? What is wrong with them?”
They didn’t answer me, just followed the stream of prisoners who were being released one room at a time.
Vijay bumped my shoulder. I was startled to see tears forming in his eyes. “It’s not a fight,” he said, his voice breaking. “It’s an execution.”
36
THE OTHER PRISONERS LOOKED SLEEPY and disgruntled as we streamed down the hallway and into the clammy stairwell. Myself, I was almost hysterical, grabbing my roommates’ arms, chattering questions, praying for someone to tell me that it was just a fight after all.
“What do you mean, execution?” I asked Diego. “They wouldn’t—they took Robin for something else, right? This doesn’t have anything to do with her, right?”
Diego met my eyes for a second and shook his head. “You know we’re all on death row,” he said.
“Okay, but not Robin, right?” I pleaded. “Not Robin?” In the short time I’d been in the crazy house, Robin had saved my life over and over—telling me what to expect, how to survive. There were kids at home I’d known my whole life, but in just a couple days Robin had become a real friend—and everything I needed to survive.
I couldn’t be about to watch her die. I just couldn’t.
In front of me, Merry was openly crying. Kids were whispering about another kid—a boy named Tomás. Inside I was frozen, every bit of life draining away. What would I do without Robin? For years I hadn’t needed anyone. I’d made do without my ma. I’d made do without my pa. I’d always had Careful Cassie, but tried not to depend on her: who knew how long she would be around?
But in here, in this hellish nightmare, I’d let my guard down. I’d desperately needed help. I’d needed a friend. Robin had stepped up. She’d risked her own safety to help me.
She couldn’t die. Not now.
Numbly I followed the others into the big auditorium where Tim had beaten me to a pulp. The raised ring was still there, but this time there were two gurneys parked on the canvas surface, and two monitoring machines, like the kind they had Pa hooked up to at Healthcare United.
Strepp was standing in the ring, wearing—get this—a white medical coat. Like she was a doctor. Didn’t doctors promise to do no harm?
Our prison block sat in one section of wooden bleachers. I felt like I was going to be sick. I clung so tightly to Vijay’s hand that he pulled it away and shook his fingers to get the feeling back. But the four of us—Diego, Vijay, Merry, and me—Robin’s roommates and friends, sat together, pale-faced and with tears streaming down our cheeks.
Guards pulled Robin up into the ring. On the other side, two guards pushed a boy toward the gurney. He was small, young, and clearly terrified. Robin’s dark skin was ashen. I saw her scanning the bleachers, looking for our section. I jumped up and yelled, “We’re here!” only to have Diego and Merry grab my jumpsuit and slam me back onto the bleachers.
“Shut up!” Diego hissed. “Do you want to get us all tased?”
Guards were patrolling the aisles, Tasers out. I’d been so freaked I hadn’t noticed them. Now I huddled down between my friends, my fist pressed to my lips so I wouldn’t get them in trouble, too.
In the ring, Strepp’s nurse minions fastened Robin and the boy onto their gurneys, locking their ankles and wrists into thick leather straps. The lit billboards on either side of the auditorium flashed: ROBIN WELLFLEET. TOMÁS RIVERA. ENEMIES OF THE SYSTEM.
I wanted to scream that they weren’t enemies! That it was the system that was the enemy!
Instead I bit my knuckles so hard that I broke the skin.
My breath stuck in my throat as an assistant pushed a needle into a vein in Robin’s arm. They attached monitors to her chest, and the small screen showed my friend’s scared, rapid heartbeats racing from one side to the other.
“This can’t be happening,” I whispered, and Merry clenched my hand tightly. She, Diego, and Vijay had all known Robin longer than I had. This was hurting them, too.
Tomás was hooked up as well, his heartbeats flying across his monitor.
This had to be a bad dream. I couldn’t be sitting here in some secret prison, about to watch my best friend die right in front of me.
Strepp dropped her hand, as if starting a car race. Many prisoners around us were stone-faced, silent, or even bored-looking. I saw one girl chewing her thumb, another playing with her hair, not watching the scene at all. They were coping. I didn’t judge them.
The assistant pushed a button on the IV machine. It took only two breaths before Robin’s eyes closed. Almost immediately the green blips of heartbeats slowed and lengthened. Merry’s nails dug into the back of my hand. I grabbed Diego’s jumpsuit so hard the fabric almost ripped.
It took less than twenty seconds. In just moments the green blips had flattened into a straight line, repeating over and over. Robin’s chest quit rising and falling. Her lips went slack.
Robin was dead.
37
PAIN IS HAVING YOUR MA disappear for a mood-adjust and never come back. Pain is your pa propping his rifle up between stacks of farmers’ almanacs and pulling a string tied to the trigger.
Watching your good friend be murdered right in front of you is worse.
Robin, who had whispered instructions that helped me survive; Robin, who had been the first friendly face I’d seen in this insane freak show; Robin, who was strong and brave and loyal and beautiful—was actually dead. Really and truly dead. I had seen it.