“We’ve got to move,” said Goldsmith. “We’re running out of time. If I find Pete before—”
“Pete’s dead,” croaked Sadie. “They shot him.”
“Who?” asked Cooley.
“I don’t know.” Sadie glanced at Stella. “Who’s this?”
“Just go,” Cooley told Goldsmith and Stella. “Get the files onto the server now. I’ll be waiting here with her. We’ll get Bunson and then we’re getting out of here.” Cooley took Sadie by the hand. Goldsmith led Stella toward the digitized weeping willow grove in the distance.
“Cooley?” said Stella, looking back over her shoulder at him.
“Yeah?”
“I’m the best valedictorian this place ever saw. And her face says she’s a liar.” Cooley just stared as Stella and Goldsmith disappeared into the digital underbrush.
“What’s happening? Why did she say that?” asked Sadie, pulling Cooley close.
“Everything…,” he started, the exhaustion catching up to him again, “everything’s gone insane. I think the school’s deep into this bad stuff. They’ve been trying to pin it on me.”
“Who’s been trying to pin it on you?”
“I’m not sure exactly.” He stopped as Sadie pulled his head near, letting him rest on her soft shoulder.
“How do you know it isn’t that senator who hates us?” she asked.
Cooley looked up at her, stepping back. “How do you know about him?”
“I just … I do read the newspaper, you know. I’m not totally sheltered.”
“It’s not him.”
“Shhh … I love you,” Sadie said, pulling him closer.
“I love you, too.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“Tell me who you think is trying to nail you.”
“It must be Lang.”
“What?”
“I’m sure, all right? I’m sure. I don’t have the time to explain everything right now. You’ve got to get out of here with me. Help me find Bunson and we’ll—”
Cooley felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck. It pushed his skull forward, jamming his chin against his sternum, forcing him down to his knees, like gravity was caving in on him. He reached back to somehow get rid of it, but could not. He strained to look up at Sadie and saw her staring at him, her lips shaking and her blue eyes watery. He finally managed to twist his head around and saw good old Thaddeus Bunson—his face tight with concentration, the same way it looked when he was polishing the sink in their bathroom before room inspections—pressing him down with his huge hands, jamming some kind of laser into him. Cooley felt something being injected into his body and understood that Bunson stabbed him with a laser syringe. He tried to stand up, but the big man’s weight was too much for him to bear. Sadie let out a sob and knocked Bunson’s hand away. Cooley collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain.
Their voices faded into flickering whispers, faint and distant as Cooley reached back and yanked the syringe out of his neck. The label read: ADM+5.
* * *
Goldsmith helped Stella into a chair, placing her before the simulcast terminal in an empty first grade progression room on Level 4. Her eyebrows were furrowed, giving the impression of serious contemplation. Her wounds were deep, red, and wet. Stella’s head nodded to an unseen rhythm, like her gifted brain had already calculated the precise number of seconds that were left to her in life and she was counting them down, rationing them out so that she could complete this final task. Goldsmith had so many questions he wanted to ask her. Feeling his gaze on her, Stella looked over.
“I enjoyed it,” said Goldsmith. “Everything. Selmer-Dubonnet. The peer reviews. The power. Truthfully? I can’t imagine life without those things.”
“It’s not an easy thing, is it?” she grinned. “Tearing down everything that’s made us who we are.” For a moment she looked exactly like what she was: twenty-two years old and unsure of what she would be when she finally grew up. “Without this place, I don’t even know who I am.”
“I don’t know who I am, either,” he said.
“Sure feels like something else, doesn’t it?”
* * *
Bunson stepped over Cooley’s body and slapped Sadie, his huge hand drawing blood. She stopped crying.
“Get a grip,” he hissed. “We had to do it.”
“I … I know.”
“Lang said if he specifically named her, we had to go through with it.” From the floor, Cooley heard Bunson’s baritone voice crack the way it always did when he was scared. Bunson took a big gulp of air to force the fear away. “Just get out of my way and let me finish this.”
“I never would’ve gone through with everything if I knew it meant doing this!”
“Sadie, get the fuck out of my way!” Cooley saw the ADM+5 syringe was still half full. Lying prone, he spied Bunson’s and Sadie’s feet shuffling as they argued: Sadie’s knee socks and Bunson’s trousers above two pairs of polished black shoes from the uniform department. He watched Bunson’s legs and thought of all the different ways that two friends could say good-bye. After racking his brain for a few moments he only came up with one thing: Sorry, buddy. I’m sorry you bought into whatever they were selling. I’m sorry I didn’t notice sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t rescue you. Most of all, I’m sorry we both ended up at a place like this. I blame them, not you. Really, my friend, I do.
Cooley had tears hanging in his eyes when he slammed the syringe into Bunson’s ankle and pressed down, injecting the remainder of the chemical into his bloodstream. At first, Bunson swatted at his leg the same way one would brush away an insect. By the time he saw what had happened, his knees went dead on him and he collapsed to the floor, almost on top of Cooley. Cooley jumped up, watching as Bunson started to lose his breath and gag, a sickeningly rough grinding noise coming up from his throat. Blood began to pour out of his nose as he reached into his blazer, pulled out a gun—a Glock 12—and aimed at Cooley. Cooley drew his M-8, but saw that it was only a cursory move on Bunson’s part: his eyes were darting back and forth, unfocused because something in that brain seizure adamite-5 caused had irrevocably damaged his vision and depth perception. The Glock fell from his hands, making an anomalous metallic clatter against the ground, which was meant to look like a soft dirt path. As his best friend fell forward, his huge body shuddering a few more times before finally coming to a permanent rest, Cooley was grateful he could not see his face, that he would never know if it ended up this contorted, bloody, foamy mess without a tongue like Riley’s did.
Cooley could feel Sadie’s eyes on him. He looked over and saw they were wide with shock because he was not dead despite the ADM+5 injection. He remembered the day his class received the ADD vaccine, way back when they were eight, maybe nine years old. Laser needles terrified him back then, too. He skipped the whole day of progressions just to avoid getting shot up by the med techs and hid far off in the outskirts of the atrium’s forest, counting fake leaves fall from silvery beech trees as they spun to the ground.
He aimed his gun at Sadie and tears blurred his vision before he could see the look on her face. The chokes and sobs (his first since this whole ordeal began, he realized) came from his mouth as if they were sharp emotive projectiles because each time they did, Sadie shuddered and sobbed herself. After a moment, he wiped his face off and picked up the gun lying next to Bunson’s dead hand. That Glock 12. It looked eerily familiar.
“This is Riley’s gun,” he said. “He took it from him that night in the bathroom.” Sadie nodded her head. “And I’m betting Bunson used it to kill Pete.” She nodded again. “Bunson … you and Bunson killed Riley.”
“In the beginning Lang said … she said she could get us into any school we wanted … even Brown or Princeton and—”
“I don’t buy it. No one cares about getting into college that badly. Not even in this place. And why wouldn’t she hire professionals?”
“She secretly doctored our med cycle dos
es, Cooley! Added drugs that made us more malleable, clouded our judgment, chemicals that aren’t even legal, okay? Lang had us on it for weeks before she even approached us with the offer. She could control us … blackmail us. And professionals couldn’t spy on you like we could. She needed us to make sure you’d leave campus on the same dates the murders were scheduled. She needed us to spy on you and Goldsmith. Only specimens, friends of yours, could do that for her.” Cooley remembered favors done for Sadie and Bunson over the past six months—runs to San Angeles for cigarettes for her and the girls … most recently, his disastrous journey to Riley’s two days ago for clean piss for his boys. He just stared at her, numbing over. “In the beginning, it was simple,” she said. “All we had to do was stick a laser syringe into this foul homeless man who slept on the street. Somewhere in E Sector out in San Angeles.”
“Because laser syringes don’t leave any traceable evidence.” She nodded. “Keep going.”
“He … he smelled like some filthy bathroom, and she was right, he was just taking up space. We injected him while he was passed out in an alley and watched him die … he opened his eyes at one point after the chemical kicked in and had this look of disbelief, like it had to have been a bad dream. He probably was hoping for a good dream when he fell asleep that night. You know, some way to escape things. He died, and then the real work started. We…” She started to become unhinged. Cooley waited for her to slip up in the retelling somehow so he could convince himself that she wasn’t really involved. “We stabbed him with a rusted knife Captain Gibson gave us, plunged it into his neck … right into his carotid artery. Gibson showed that artery to Bunson in an anatomy textbook, so he’d know exactly which one to sever … it started gushing blood and then we stabbed his chest over and over again until his body was … mutilated and … we told ourselves—I told myself, anyway—that no one would miss him.”
“Mr. Alberto Munoz Santana,” said Cooley, not capable of looking her in the eye, relieved to find his voice wasn’t shaky anymore. “That was his name.”
“We freaked out afterward. I … I wanted to go to the police, you have to believe me. I did. I wanted to do it and told Bunson I would, like right after it happened. But he said he’d kill me if I did. And then Lang told us that she lied, that it didn’t end with one person, and if we didn’t do it again she’d expose us, turn us in.”
“And what did you two say?”
“Bunson was the one who spoke up.”
“He stood up to her?”
“No.” She started weeping. “He just asked her to give him more of the drugs.” Cooley looked away. “The next one—”
“Miss Monica Miller,” said Goldsmith, stepping out from around some trees. He crouched down and took a look at Bunson’s corpse. Sadie looked at him.
“Just listen to me! She was worse than worthless … her little boy was born addicted to some street drug, and she hit him when—”
“She didn’t deserve to die,” interrupted Cooley.
“If we didn’t do it she would have sent us to jail!”
“So you thought it would be better if I went instead? Who placed my hair and skin fragments at the crime scenes?” Cooley grabbed her shoulders, yanking her close.
Sadie just looked at him. Her big, beautiful eyes were all cried out. “The paper they send in the mail to tell you that you’re accepted is so beautiful,” she said. “Expensive, heavy stock in this milky, ivory color. Even the creases from the folding are perfectly symmetrical. Their coat of arms at the top is so bright with color that it practically jumps out at you and dances right before your eyes. It’s a funny thing, opening an envelope and finding the validation of your entire life inside on a single sheet of that wonderful paper. It felt so heavy … so heavy in my hand.”
Goldsmith stood there, looking at her. If they were in an examination room and this were a peer review, he’d have had some pithy remark to offer, something about how he received dozens of those love letters from places she could only dream of, and how he too hoped to find the kind of validation she mentioned upon opening the envelope. But he never got it. Never really felt it in his heart, anyway, and that’s what was most important. Not with the first one (Harvard) or the last (Stanford, for those keeping score).
Suddenly, he felt her eyes on him. “Don’t look at me like that!” shouted Sadie, snapped out of her trance. “Not everyone’s as smart as you! I took the same meds my whole life, the same progressions! Why didn’t I know the answers?”
“Let’s go, Cooley,” he said, breaking off her gaze. He put his hand on Cooley’s shoulder and gently began to pull him away from her. “It’s almost time.”
Sadie stared at Cooley as he moved away. Cooley took one last look at Bunson’s crumpled body, the syringe still jutting out from his ankle. Compared to his thick leg, it looked almost comically small, the tiny laser needle that felled a giant of Goliath proportions.
“She made me do it,” she said to Cooley. “We never had a choice, remember? You told me that yourself. I said that I’d stick by you if you were in trouble. I told you that, and…” Her voice disappeared into the wind and running water as Cooley and Goldsmith walked away through the atrium space. They made their way down another winding path.
“Stella’s about to begin her simulcast,” said Goldsmith.
“What do we need to do?”
“She told me to find a phone and call the police.” He looked at Cooley as he stared off into the distance, his eyes hollow. “Cooley, I’m sorry about Sadie.”
“What about Bunson?” he asked, his voice wavering slightly. “Are you sorry about him, too?”
“Yes.”
“Part of me was doing all of this for them. I was fighting for my life because I loved being with them so much I didn’t ever want the ride to end. And now … I’ve got to admit I’m searching for reasons to keep on giving a shit.”
“How about me and Stella?”
Just as Cooley was about to answer, he stopped short. Goldsmith looked at him. The atrium began to fill with the slowly building din of specimens pouring out of the coliseum on their way to the last progressions of the day. “Cooley,” Goldsmith said.
“Shhh.…” And then Cooley heard it. A barely perceptible, slightly high-pitched hum that could be just another holographic hummingbird flittering around from digitized branch to digitized branch underneath the high hanging, washed-out sun. But it was not. Goldsmith instantly recognized it, too. And with every moment that passed, that sweetly deceptive hum of a security detail ThermaGun locking onto its target got louder and louder. They broke into a sprint, Cooley running directly through the illusions of this paradise of Nature & Co. technology, passing through trees, rocks, and whole mountains while Goldsmith’s long legs kept him just a few steps behind.
24
It was a strange sensation for Goldsmith, running directly through apparently solid, massive objects like age-old maple trees, boulders, even that big red barn that was near the meadow, the whole time not incurring any damage to his person. They seemed realistic enough, absorbed light and cast shadows perfectly (the barn even smelled a tad raw, like manure), and had remained standing in the same place for the twelve years of his time there, these immovable landmarks of Goldsmith’s childhood; and yet, now he found himself able to pass through them with ease. Running a few steps ahead of him, Cooley came to the riverbank and did not slow down. He simply ran across the surface of the water without getting a drop on him. Goldsmith followed, not sure where he was being led, but getting to like this feeling of invincibility. They reached the opposite side of the river. Cooley sped up. Goldsmith did the same and crashed into a disconcertingly solid object at full speed. The flock of specimens walking to their next progressions, unfortunately was not a hologram. The legs that Goldsmith found himself tangled in on the floor belonged to Mr. Ravi Chandrashaker, a sophomore who Stansbury rumor held had found a viable, improved alternative to the Mandelbrot Set equation.
“Hey!” Chandrashaker sho
uted, grabbing at stray papers that were knocked loose from the impact. “Watch where you’re going!” The boy froze upon seeing at whom he was yelling. “Uh, I mean I’m sorry to be in your way, Mr. Goldsmith, sir.”
The collision seemed to jar the painkillers flowing through Goldsmith’s body and his bullet wounds started to throb. As he picked himself up, he saw Camilla staring at him from the crowd, the only stationary specimen among dozens of others as they swarmed around her to their destinations.
“Camilla,” Goldsmith began to say, watching her eyes as they glanced inside his blazer and focused on the half-wet bloodstains on his shirt. “I’m…”
“Goldsmith!” came Cooley’s voice. Goldsmith looked over and saw Cooley beckoning to him, frantic.
He knew they had a few seconds. The detail’s ThermaGuns couldn’t fire into a space with this many warm-blooded targets, so Goldsmith searched for something meaningful to say. Not wanting to repeat the “I love you” statement in front of all these other people, some of whom were now gawking at him as he stood up from the floor, he tried to think of something appropriate, another sincere declaration, an explanation, maybe even a warning for her not to trust anyone inside this place.
“I’m sorry,” was all he could manage. She blinked some tears back, probably wondering when the world she knew started to go insane. Goldsmith ran off toward Cooley and saw Officers Tannen and Willets headed toward them. Tannen had his ThermaGun out. Willets wielded an electrified shock stick, specifically made for close-quarters specimen control. Some specimens saw their ordnance and, since they were med cycle adherents, did not scream or panic, but rather turned and walked off in another direction like businessmen studiously avoiding a minor car accident that might have made them late for work. Goldsmith saw Cooley’s hand go for the Colt M-8 in his waistband.
“No,” he said. “If you miss and hit one of the specimens, you’re finished.”
“I’m finished anyway.”
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