“Prisoners! Report to the chapel!”
I winced as the crackling, fuzzy words assaulted my ears. Kids around me stood up and shuffled into the aisles. Diego took my arm and pulled me to my feet.
“Report what to the huh?” I whispered through my tears.
“The chapel,” Vijay whispered back. “Sometimes we go to the chapel after an execution.”
This was the most outrageous thing of all. The guards marched us across a barren expanse of hard-packed gray dirt, and then suddenly an incredibly beautiful church rose out of the bleakness like a peony blooming in a salted field.
I was still crying, but once inside the church a hush fell over all of us. I blinked in amazement—our plain, serviceable little church at home was nothing like this. This was… grandeur, a ridiculous flight of fancy, with stone carved into elaborate arches overhead, large stained-glass windows, and behind the white marble altar, a rose window so ornate and stunningly beautiful that my mouth went dry.
“What is this?” I managed to whisper to Diego. “Where did this come from?”
He shrugged slightly—he didn’t know.
Line after line of prisoners filled the polished wooden pews, our dusty feet almost silent on the deep-red carpet. I saw Kathy again. She met my eyes for a second, then looked away. I remembered that she said she’d seen Livvie Clayhill, but that she was gone now. Did that mean Livvie was dead? Who else from our cell had ended up here? Every kid that had disappeared? Only a couple of them?
The air was still and faintly scented with something spicy. My sobs slowed to hiccups as I looked around, taking in every miraculous detail.
Then Strepp stood in front of the altar and began to speak.
“‘No one wants to die,’” she said. “‘Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.’”
She paused, letting the words sink in. “A man named Steve Jobs said that. And he was right.” Her eyes raked the rows of prisoners, teenagers in grubby yellow jumpsuits, some spattered with blood.
I was numb, trying to process that Robin was actually gone. Gone forever.
“Death is necessary. Death is the means of change that is necessary for every society to achieve its full potential.” Strepp paced back and forth, her heels sounding like crickets on a summer night.
“There is good and there is evil in the world,” she went on. “Evil will always try to suppress good. ‘When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.’ A woman named Pearl S. Buck said that, and she was right, too. What choices have you made against evil?” She stopped suddenly and stared right into the crowd. “I’ll tell you! None! You have made no choice against evil! You have supported evil, you have facilitated evil, and you have excused evil, every day of your lives!”
My eyes widened at this crazy diatribe, but no one else seemed surprised. No doubt they’d heard it all before. The Strepp went on like this, sprinkling in quotes to support her whole good versus evil schtick. I mean, good versus evil. Had she looked in a mirror lately? Irony much?
Despite my being wracked with grief and horror, something about this place still felt soothing. The stained-glass windows were so beautiful, showing different scenes of people I didn’t recognize.
There was a tiny detail in one corner of a window, barely noticeable; basically a couple of dots at the border of a much larger scene. I blinked as I realized it was… a dragonfly. A green-and-blue dragonfly with crystal-clear wings, made of glass who knew how long ago.
Something caught fire inside me. The shock of Robin’s death, the brutality of being here, the absurd but life-threatening tests I’d been put through—my senses exploded.
I am a dragonfly, I thought. I can be a dragonfly.
With no more coherent thought than that, I stood up and shouted, “This is bullshit! You’re a murderer! You’re evil! This place is evil! Murderer!”
38
THE GUARDS DIDN’T WAIT FOR orders. In moments they had seized me, dragged me out of the pew, and shot me with their Tasers. My body jerked and twitched as the electrical current shorted my brain out.
It took a long time for me to join the pieces of myself back together, but right at the moment that I understood I was drooling onto the deep-red carpet, a guard pulled back a heavy booted foot and kicked me so hard in the stomach that I gagged and retched. A terrible, seizing agony gripped me; surely my insides had exploded. A coldness swept over me, and then my system just shut down.
When I came to, I was on a stretcher. I heard someone murmur, “The blood,” and my consciousness slowly swam above the pain to realize that my legs were covered in a sticky warmth.
The lights overhead were bright. I was in one of the hallways with the high windows. I had to throw up and tried to lean over the edge of the stretcher, but didn’t make it.
Well, this day couldn’t possibly get worse, I thought hazily, and tried hard to pass out again—anything to escape this burning, searing pain in my gut. A weird, animal-like moaning reached my ears, and it was a while before I realized it was me.
Blinking, I saw my dragonfly flitting above me. “Hope,” I mumbled.
“It’s too late for that, I’m afraid,” said Ms. Strepp, and my heart sank. She leaned over and motioned to the guards to set the stretcher on a gurney.
“Get her an IV!” she yelled. Turning back to me, she said, “I think you’re having a miscarriage. When were you going to tell me you were pregnant?”
Gasping, I opened my eyes wider. “What?”
“Were you planning to have a baby without a new-birth license? Is that how you were going to rebel against your community?” Her face looked cold, and her jaw twitched with anger.
“No!” I moaned, closing my eyes. “I didn’t know… I’d hoped not… it was a teacher. A teacher forced himself on me. I didn’t want this!”
My mind was reeling, unable to deal with everything—anything. I’d tried to be strong for so long. But this… on top of Robin… now… now I broke down. I couldn’t even pretend to be brave. Not anymore. My raw, ugly, heavy sobs broke free and filled the room. Crying felt like dropping bricks onto my shattered insides, but I couldn’t control it. This was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my entire life, so total and complete that I couldn’t imagine a time that I wouldn’t feel it. Pain was my whole world, and I was living in it.
“I want my ma!” I sobbed. “Why is this happening? Why are you doing this? Robin—I watched her. You killed her! And now you’re telling me…” I ended with a screech of agony, both physical and emotional. I was broken inside. My body was broken, bleeding, rejecting the life I’d refused to admit was growing there. My brain was seared, severed, any ability to think destroyed. Maybe I belong here in the crazy house, I thought hysterically.
I lay there and howled, uncaring of anything, praying that I would die, that they wouldn’t be able to stop the bleeding, that this wretched, ridiculous wreck of a life would finally be over and I would be at peace. A nurse came and started a drip in my arm and the pain eased slightly. Still I sobbed, getting out every last bit of misery, terror, and shame. And right before I drifted off into blessed unconsciousness, my gaze fell on the hateful face of Ms. Strepp. She looked… her eyes looked… her mouth… she looked sympathetic. Caring.
No. That couldn’t be right.
And then I was out.
39
CASSIE
I’D HAD THE REST OF the day to absorb the fact that my sister had been an Outsider and I hadn’t known about it. All the times I’d thought she was out somewhere, hanging out with bad citizen friends, she’d actually been with Nathaniel and the others, coming up with plans to turn the cell upside down.
Why hadn’t she told me?
I pressed my lips toget
her and unpacked my ma’s field glasses from my shoulder bag. She hadn’t told me because I would have been horrified, I admitted to myself. I would have fussed at her, warned her, been scared for her—for us. I would have thought she was making bad, stupid decisions.
My chest hurt, thinking about all this. I’d been a bad sister. I hadn’t meant to be. But I’d been so caught up with being good for the cell that I hadn’t even noticed I’d let Becca down.
Now it was almost dark, and I was out by the boundary gate.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Nathaniel Allen crossed his arms over his chest, long legs supporting the moped he sat on.
“Look who’s talking,” I retorted, and raised my ma’s field glasses to peer into the distance.
“You’re too close to the Boundary,” he pointed out unnecessarily.
“Oh, really? Is that what all the barbed wire is about?” I scanned the horizon, peering as far down the boundary road as I could. I’d been good for so long. All my life. Even extra good, like I had to make up for my ma and my pa. But being good wouldn’t help me find Becca. If I wanted to find my sister, I was going to have to start breaking rules.
I lowered the glasses with a sigh. All I could see from here was bare dirt, rocks, and tire treads.
“And you’re loaded for bear,” Nathaniel observed, gesturing to my pa’s hunting rifle. “What are you even looking for?”
I knew now that he wasn’t my enemy. He was just extremely closely related to my enemy. But that wasn’t his fault.
“A guy named Taylor told me that he and Becca had been playing chicken out on the boundary road, the night she disappeared,” I told him. Nathaniel looked convincingly shocked. “In my truck, I might add. So I’ve been searching along the boundary, hoping to at least find my truck—and maybe some clues about what happened to Becca.”
“Jeez,” Nathaniel said. “I had no idea she was doing stuff like that.”
I frowned at him. “Why would you have any idea of anything she was doing?”
He gave me a too-patient look that I’d seen him use on teachers. It made me want to sock him in the jaw. “Becca was an Outsider. We told you.”
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, you told me, but hang on: she hated you. And you were an asshole to her at school. I saw you.”
Nathaniel grinned, and I blinked at how different it made him look. “That was so fun,” he said. “We had to keep our cover up. It was hard to be such a prick without falling over laughing.”
I digested this information. “I bet. Anyway, what—”
“Oops, one sec,” he said, and held up a finger. A small radio was duct-taped to his moped, and now he fiddled with its dial until he got a clear signal. “Time for the daily rant.”
It was 6:00, when the main edition of Cell News aired.
“There has been more bad citizen activity from the Outsiders,” our newscaster announced. “Provost Allen is here with encouraging words. Provost?”
“What is happening to our community?” the Provost asked. “What are we?”
Voices in the background cried, “Stronger United!”
The Provost went on, “Exactly! Our cell works, and is the best cell ever, because we are united. We are one. We support each other. So what is happening with these so-called Outsiders? Their very name means they’re outside of being united! They are not of us! They are choosing to not participate in our cell! Do we have the time for that? Do we have the space for that? Do we have the resources for that?”
The voices in the background cried, “No!”
“If you’re not with us,” said the Provost, “then you’re against us!”
The crowd in the news station booed.
“My friends, we must hunt them down,” said the Provost. “We must discover who these Outsiders are, and we must put them outside of our cell—our happy, united cell.”
“Yes!” cried the people.
“Oh, my God!” I said, and ripped the little radio off his moped. “I can’t listen to this!” With the right arm that won our middle-school baseball championship, I heaved the radio as far out into the boundary as I could.
“Hey!” Nathaniel said. “That was my radio!”
I raised my pa’s rifle to my shoulder and took aim. Bam! “Now it’s dust,” I said, and lowered the gun.
In twelve years I’d never seen obnoxious Nathaniel Allen at a loss for words, but I was seeing it now. It was the best feeling I’d had in a long, long time.
40
MS. STREPP
“THIS IS THE PLACE.” HELEN STREPP nodded curtly at her driver, who pulled over to one side of Weaver Road. Out of habit Ms. Strepp glanced up and down the street. Though Harrison lived in town, not on a farm, the houses were far enough apart here that there shouldn’t be any trouble.
“Drive around the block and meet me in back,” Ms. Strepp instructed, and the guard nodded, just once. With no hesitation Ms. Strepp got out of the car and headed up to the porch. She rang the doorbell as the black car turned the corner, out of sight.
A curtain over a window twitched, and then the front door was unlocked. Christopher Harrison stood there, his sandy hair backlit by the living room lamp. For a second he wore a bland, questioning smile, and then his eyes flared in alarm.
“You!” he blurted, already stepping backward to slam the door in her face. But Ms. Strepp was ready for that and blocked it with her foot. She shoved it open as Harrison backed awkwardly into the room.
When she pulled out the gun, he became belligerent. “Wait a second,” he began angrily, holding his hands up. “There’s been some misun—”
The silenced pistol shot made a faint whistling sound, almost simultaneous with the sound of Christopher Harrison hitting the floor as hard and heavy as a sack of feed. His eyes blinked up at her as the red stain on his shirt spread rapidly.
“I don’t think there’s been any misunderstanding, you bastard,” Ms. Strepp said. “That was for Becca. And for me. And no doubt for other girls as well. Love the black eye, by the way.”
She allowed herself to watch as the life faded from his eyes. One less asshole in the world. About a million more to go.
Ms. Strepp walked through the house to the back door. She crossed the yard to the alley, where the black car was waiting. She slid inside, oddly breathless. Then the car glided away, taking her back home.
41
CASSIE
OUR USUAL ALARM IS FOR tornadoes. Every once in a long while, for flash flooding. Sometimes I heard fire trucks—almost everything on a farm is flammable. Do not throw flour on a grease fire.
On my way to school the next day, I heard a different siren, a different alarm. I was early anyway, so I turned off the east road and headed toward it.
And I wasn’t the only one. The nearer I got to the wailing sound, the more people I met heading the same way.
“What’s going on?” I called to Mr. Henry, who lived north of me.
He spit tobacco juice into a bottle. “Don’t know!” he said. “Gonna go find out!”
The feeling of dread started when I realized we were approaching where Mr. Harrison lived. A crowd had already gathered in front of his house. There was an EMS truck, a fire truck, and two police cars. Uniformed officers were already stringing up yellow crime scene tape along his fence.
“What happened?” I gasped, as two EMS techs walked out of Mr. Harrison’s house carrying a stretcher. Someone was on the stretcher, covered by a white sheet.
“It’s Christopher Harrison,” an older woman told me, her hand to her cheek. “He’s dead, they say.”
Icy alarm swept me from head to foot. I had hit him really hard—was it just yesterday? Maybe he had gone home and had an embolism or something. Maybe his brain had bled out. Oh, my God—was I a murderer?
“Relax, it wasn’t you.” Nathaniel’s quiet voice almost made me tip my moped over.
My head whipped around. “Quit sneaking up on me!”
His light-brown eyebrows raised. “I apologize fo
r sneaking up on you in a big crowd of people outside in broad daylight with a lot of drama happening.”
“Well, you snuck up on me yesterday!” I was upset and slightly freaking, and Nathaniel Allen was the last thing I needed. He made me feel off-balance, unsettled.
“Yesterday, when you shot my radio to smithereens?” he asked mildly. “Would that be when I drove up to you in the middle of nowhere where you could see and probably hear me coming from half a mile away? Was that the time?”
I pressed my lips together before I gave him more ammo. When I flashed an irritated look at him, he smirked and patted the brand-new radio he had chained to his moped. I wouldn’t be grabbing that one any time soon.
I exhaled and tried to get a grip on my emotions. “Do you know what happened?”
“Well, he’s dead,” Nathaniel said, making my heart sink.
“Do you… do you know how he died?” I asked in a small voice.
“He was shot!” A woman had overheard me. “Someone shot him!”
My jaw dropped.
“Do they have any idea who?” Nathaniel asked, casually.
“Outsiders, no doubt,” said an older man, looking disgusted.
Sure enough, at that moment a large car pulled up, its rare, non-electric engine sounding weirdly loud. A young woman in a suit jumped out and opened the rear door, and Provost Allen got out. The woman handed him a megaphone.
“Neighbors!” The Provost’s voice made me wince. “Cellfolk! This tragedy is upsetting for all of us! And once again, it shows our increasing need and determination to rout these Outsiders!”
The crowd yelled their agreement; several people raised fists in the air.
“He’s saying that Outsiders did this?” I whispered to Nathaniel.
Nathaniel kept his public, “outraged” face on, but spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Yep. We didn’t, of course.”
“The same Outsiders who have been taking our children!” the Provost went on. “But fear not, citizens!” He lowered his voice and leaned forward as if about to tell a secret. “We have discovered who these Outsiders are!”