D shrugged. “If she’s a spy for Zuraw—”
“She’s not!”
“Fine,” D said. “But if she is, she’s going to wish she stayed behind. Help me with this.” Together they shoved sand away from the trap door that led into the maze of death under the school. Soon they had the door clear, a grimy square of wood with metal-reinforced corners.
“I tried getting it open again myself but it was sealed shut,” Jake said.
D’s response was to jam his pry bar into one edge of the door. Grunting, he heaved back until the wood splintered and cracked. Then he shoved his fingers into the hole he’d made and pulled upward with all his strength. The door groaned open, revealing the white staircase leading down and inside.
D was in a lot better shape than Jake, it seemed.
The three of them hurried inside. Jake started to pull the trap door closed behind him but D told him not to bother. “By the time they realize what we’re up to, we need to be done and on our way out of here. We have maybe half an hour. It all depends on whether Zuraw is paying close attention. How far apart are your tests? A couple days?”
“I’m in some kind of lightning round,” Jake said.
“Crap.” D looked scared for the first time. “I’m so sorry. I would have come sooner but I had to get everything ready, first. We only get one chance at this.”
“Who is this guy?” Megan asked.
They both turned to look at her. Jake licked his lips. “This is my fellow clone, D,” he said. “He was part of the Curriculum a while ago—I don’t know how long ago. He’s the only one who didn’t fail and who wasn’t executed. Instead he got a grade of INCOMPLETE instead. That’s what it said in Mr. Zuraw’s computer, anyway.” He looked at D. “How do you get an INCOMPLETE?”
“Well, you fight your way out. Then you run away,” D said.
“I thought of trying that, but I’m only seventeen. There’s no way I could get a job or rent an apartment on my own, and the police would always be looking for me—”
“Not up in the mountains.” D grimaced. “Nobody ever goes up there. There aren’t any roads. I nearly starved to death my first week, but now I do okay. If I ever see a human being I hide and wait for them to leave. I have a little cabin I built for myself, camouflaged from the air so passing planes can’t see it. Mostly I hunt and fish for the food I need.”
“That sounds horrible,” Megan said. “You must be so lonely.”
“I’m alive,” D said. “That’s more than I can say for E, F, or G.”
Jake felt his blood running cold. “They were—”
“Murdered. Yeah,” D said. “I sneak down to watch it happen every time. I felt like I owed it to them, to be there when it happened. I always knew I would come back when I was ready and save one of us. Looks like it might be you, H. But only if we move fast, right now.” He stepped up to the door at the end of the stairway and tapped it with his fingers. When it didn’t open he took a step back, then ran at it and smashed through it with his shoulder. It was made of light wood and it collapsed easily under his weight.
“Now, come on. We have work to do.”
“What do you mean?” Jake asked. “What’s your plan?”
“I’m going to make sure there is no I or J or K. I’m going to shut he Curriculum down, permanently. You in?”
The phone in Jake’s pocket chose that moment to start vibrating.
Chapter Fifty
Jake pulled the phone out of his pocket. D stared at it as if Jake was holding a live hand grenade. “Have you seen these?” he asked D. “I don’t know how they work, but—”
“They’re called cell phones,” D told him. “I know they must seem pretty cool to you, but out there, in the real world, everybody has them. Even kids these days. Who’s calling you?”
“Mr. Zuraw. Should I answer it?”
D nodded tensely.
“Hello, Jake,” the guidance counselor said. “Everything alright? It looks like you might be late for a test. I don’t need to tell you how unfortunate that would be.”
Jake swallowed the lump in his throat. “Things are… fine,” he said. He looked at Megan and D but they both just shrugged. They didn’t know what to do, either. “I’m here on the soccer field,” Jake went on, improvising, “waiting for a test to begin. It looks like there’s a problem.”
“Oh? Really?” Mr. Zuraw asked, sounding no more than curious.
“One of the Proctors had a fit. Or something. Maybe a seizure.”
“I see. Well,” Mr. Zuraw said with a sigh, “I suppose I’ll have to come down there personally and investigate, hmm? See you soon.”
Jake clicked the phone shut.
“Okay,” D said. “Good work. It’ll take him a while to figure out what happened.”
“Can’t he just look at the cameras?” Megan asked.
D frowned. “What cameras?”
Jake explained, “He’s always one step ahead of me. We assumed he must have cameras everywhere, and microphones too.”
“Nope.” D shook his head. “He keeps track of you through spies—people close to you, people you’re likely to trust.”
Jake forced himself not to glance at Megan. She couldn’t be a spy. It was impossible. “My mom was one,” he said. “Our mom, I guess.”
“Yeah. I know. Both of you, come with me, and hurry.” He headed down the white corridor and busted through another door. Inside lay a shiny and immaculately clean machine shop, with tools hanging on the wall and stacks of wood and sheet metal piled under a waist-high table. D went to a closet and took out a number of small items which he placed on the table. He started assembling some kind of electronic device from the pieces, and kept talking while he did it.
“There are some things you should know,” he told Jake. “Things I’ve found out by hacking Zuraw’s computer system.”
“You know about the computers, too?” Megan asked. “Let me guess. Outside of Fulton everybody has one of those as well. Even the kids.”
“Especially the kids. They kept cell phones and computers out of Fulton to limit your contact with the outside world. Listen, if any of us survive to get out of here, we can do questions and answers then. For now, just let me talk.” He plugged a wire into a small black box and a screen on its side lit up, showing the numbers 00:00. “I don’t know why they’re doing this to you. I’ve never been able to learn what they hope to accomplish with all this testing—you have to pass the Curriculum to find out, and nobody ever has. But I know some history, about how this got started.”
With deft hands he loaded batteries into another small box, then sealed it by wrapping it numerous times with electrical tape.
“It began as a kind of nation-wide gifted program, administered by a group called the Youth Steering Committee, about thirty years ago. There was a competition. A written test that every high school student in America took. Every year the winner with the top score came here to Fulton to take additional tests, on a Pass/Fail basis, with a prize going to anyone who could pass the full Curriculum. The tests weren’t anything like they are now. Most of them were just word problems or complicated math equations. They were looking for the smartest kid who ever lived, basically. But there was a problem. Nobody could ever pass the complete round of tests. One kid got pretty close—close enough that when he grew up they actually asked him to take over running the Curriculum. You would recognize him if you saw a picture of him. You would call him Jake McCartney, the original Jake McCartney, though that wasn’t his actual name.”
On the table D laid out several lengths of insulated wires. He stripped their ends and twisted the exposed copper fibers into tight braids.
“McCartney’s job was to get at least one kid to pass the full series of tests. He hired the best teachers, child psychologists, biologists money could buy and brought them here to create the perfect learning environment. A lot of them still live here. He tried everything they could think of—he brought whole families out here so the Curriculum studen
ts wouldn’t get homesick, he offered cash and prizes for anyone who could solve some of the especially thorny tests. He even tried giving them drugs to enhance their problem-solving abilities. Nothing really helped. The tests were just too hard. The YSC still needed somebody who could pass them all, though. So McCartney told them he had another idea, one which they might not like. If incentives weren’t enough to get people to pass, he would try disincentives. He would threaten the students. If they failed too many tests, he would punish them. The YSC agreed—they didn’t like it at all. To prove he was right, McCartney put himself through the tests again. He hired teachers to intimidate him and even give him severe electric shocks if he couldn’t solve the tests. These teachers were his employees, and he worried he might fire them if they were hard on him, so he made them wear masks so he could never see who it was who was torturing him. He made the masks reflective so that when he looked at his tormentors, he would see his own face and remember he was doing this to himself.”
D took a pronged object out of a carton full of them and hooked it up to the box of batteries. Sparks jumped between the prongs. He unhooked the wires from the batteries and the pronged device and then wired the timer inbetween them.
“It turned out McCartney was right. He got closer to solving the tests then anybody ever had before. A lot closer. It turned out he had a very special quality. Most people freeze up when they’re scared or hurt. Their brains shut down and their reflexes take over. But some rare people actually think better when they’re under stress. McCartney was one of those people. He was much too old for the purposes of the YSC—they wanted a high school senior—but he had a solution to that, too. This was back in the late 90s. About the time scientists first managed to clone a healthy mammal—it was a sheep, if I recall correctly. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before somebody cloned a human being. McCartney decided to be the first. Can you see where this story is going?”
D put the pieces he’d been working on together and wrapped them with more electrical tape. Then he slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.
“Next stop,” he said, and headed for the door. “The cloning vats.”
Chapter Fifty-One
This time D didn’t knock down the door. Instead he pulled his Proctor’s mask over his face and touched the door gently. It slid open and a wave of humid air washed out and over them.
They stepped inside into a dimly lit room full of what looked like refrigerators lying on their backs—long white boxes with hinged lids. One of the boxes was open and vapor was rising from its contents.
A pair of Proctors were working over the box. One reached down inside with a hypodermic needle. When it pulled its arm back, its sleeve was sopping wet. As the three kids entered the room both Proctors looked up, their masks hiding any surprise or anger they might feel at being disturbed.
D had said before that the Proctors were trained to trust implicitly anyone in a mask. D strode confidently toward them and said, “There’s a problem with the current test. Both of you are needed on the soccer field.”
The two Proctors filed out of the room without comment. When they were gone D peeled his mask off again. “You may not want to see this,” he said.
“But I have to, right?”
“No. You can choose to not look. That’s how you know you can trust me. I give you choices, alright? But I think you should see it. Come over here.” Jake came and stood where D showed him. He looked down at the lid of one of the large boxes. It had a letter I painted on it, near the top. There was also a digital readout that said RUNTIME REMAINING 65 DAYS, 7 HOURS, 31 MINUTES, and a yellow sticker that warned the contents were at risk of bacterial contamination if preventative measures were not followed.
“Open it up,” D said, and together they lifted the lid. It was heavy but once it was lifted it stayed up without anyone holding it. Mist boiled up out of the box and Jake waved it away. When he could finally see what lay inside he nearly gagged, though he had expected something much like it. Inside, floating in yellowish liquid, was a miniature version of himself, perhaps four and a half feet tall. It was curled in a ball, completely naked, and a cluster of thin tubes ran into its nose and mouth and the corner of one eye.
“They’re already growing my replacement,” Jake said.
“They have been for nearly a year. Take a look at this one,” D told him.
The next box over was labeled J. The remaining runtime on that one was 327 DAYS, 21 HOURS, 9 MINUTES. Jake pushed back the lid and when the steam cleared he saw an embryo floating in the liquid, just a curl of flesh that didn’t even have proper eyes yet. It was connected to its box by the same bundle of tubes in its face, but also had a thicker one attached to its belly button.
“It takes a little less than twelve months to grow a new Jake McCartney,” D explained. “They’re very patient people, the YSC, but they don’t want to have to wait seventeen years every time somebody fails the Curriculum. They want a new test subject every year, and one who appears to be seventeen is good enough. When these are done there won’t be a doctor in the world who can tell them apart from a real seventeen year old.”
“Wait—there’s something wrong here. You’re saying they grow a new one every year? But they can’t have grown me like this. I’m a lot more than a year old!”
D said nothing. He just watched Jake’s face.
“No, come on. I remember—I remember being sixteen. I remember being nine.”
“Really? Try.”
Jake closed his eyes and tried to call up a memory from when he was a kid. A birthday party—yes—he was surrounded by—by fifth graders. He was blowing out the candles on a cake. For some reason he was much taller than any of the other kids at the party. And he had stubble on his face. He tried again. A family vacation he’d taken when he was eight. Jake and his parents had gone to Hawaii and they’d taken Cody with them. The two of them had watched girls walking on the beach in their bikinis and—no. He couldn’t have been eight. No eight year old would think things like that about a girl in a bikini.
Every memory Jake had could have taken place in his seventeenth year of life. He could not remember a time when he was shorter, or before his voice had broken, or when he hadn’t worn size 32 pants.
D grabbed his arm. “I’m sorry. But I have to ask. What is your father’s first name?”
Jake shook him off. He didn’t know the answer. He couldn’t remember a time he’d ever heard his father called anything but Mr. McCartney.
“What are you saying?” Megan demanded. “Of course he knows his own father’s name!”
D ignored her. “You were never sixteen, Jake. You’ve been alive for only a few months. You were never conceived, never born, and all your memories are lies, fed to you in your vat through that cable going into your eye—”
“Stop!” Jake shouted. The word echoed in the windowless room.
He walked to the next vat. It was labeled K. There was no runtime listed. Presumably they hadn’t even begun to grow that one, yet. “Who was he?” Jake asked, finally, in a very quiet voice.
“Who?” D asked.
“Jake McCartney. The original Jake McCartney. You said that wasn’t his real name. Do you know what it was? He was my father, I guess.”
“No. He made you from nail clippings, or maybe a strand of your hair. A father’s something different,” D said. “Are you sure you want to know this? He’s never acted like a father toward you and he never will. Be sure. This is not like an adopted kid finding his birth father.”
“I’m sure,” Jake said. He tensed up every muscle in his body, as if he expected to be struck.
“His name was Jonathon Zuraw. His name is Jonathon Zuraw.”
Jake grabbed the side of one of the vats so that he didn’t collapse on the floor.
“Zuraw knew that he thought best when he was in danger. So he reasoned that if he was close to passing the tests just by having Proctors threaten and abuse him, then if he put himself under threat of death then
he would do even better. But it had to be a real threat, you understand? He had to believe it was real. The biggest problem was that he couldn’t be sure he would pass, anyway. If something went wrong, if some small part of the Curriculum broke down, he could fail easily and there would be no way to repeat the experiment, because he would be dead. Unless there were more of him.”
“So he cloned himself. Except it still didn’t work,” Jake said, imagining how it must have gone. “Jake McCartney A failed. So did B. And all the rest, including me.”
“Imagine what it must be like to pass judgment on yourself like that,” D said, sounding almost as if he pitied Mr. Zuraw. “To have to finally put yourself down so many times, over and over again. Is it any surprise he’s gone insane?”
“And the Youth Steering Committee—”
“Has no problem with what he’s doing,” D finished. “He isn’t hurting anyone but himself—technically—and in the process, he might just give them what they want. A seventeen year-old who can pass every test they can think of.”
D closed the lids of the two vats and headed for the door again. “I know it’s a lot to process, but we don’t have time for you to try to make sense of it right now. We’ve got maybe five minutes left before this place is swarming with armed Proctors. One last stop and then we head upstairs.”
He led the two of them to another corridor. All the doors looked alike but somehow D knew exactly where to go. He busted down a door and inside was an armory. The walls were lined with pistols, hung up carefully with their clips ejected. Boxes of bullets were stacked neatly on the floor.
“Gear up,” D said. “I don’t know what kind of resistance we’ll meet up top, so choose the gun that looks best to you.”
“No,” Jake said. His brain was starting to hurt, but he was sure he was making the right decision. “No guns. Going up there with a gun would make me just like him. That’s my choice.”
D studied Jake’s face for a while before shrugging in acceptance. “Fine. Then take this instead,” he said, and handed Jake his stun gun. “There’s one, maybe two charges left. Listen,” he said, when Jake hesitated before taking the weapon, “I guarantee you won’t kill anybody with it.”
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