“Just shut up.” Owen turned toward me. His eyes were glassy, as if he were furiously fighting back tears. “Are you really saying anything I need to hear?”
I looked around. “Everyone else is talking,” I said.
“I will not have my life fucked up by a second-tier roommate,” he said, and then added, “Sorry, but it’s true. I’ve worked too hard to keep my status.”
“I have, too,” I said.
“Just stay the fuck out of my way,” he said.
And then the tent city was rushing past—the chain-link fence and the different-colored tarps and structures. Several bearded men stood by that same fence with their arms above their heads. I thought they were waving at us. I remember being confused because there was a sudden tapping sound, like hail on a metal roof. It took me a moment to understand that the men were throwing rocks. One hit the window just ahead of our own, and the glass fractured into a web of lines. “Stand down.” A proctor spoke through the external address system. “Stand down,” he said. The sides of the bus were booming now, and then something large hit the windshield. The glass went opaque and the driver lost control. The back end of the bus spun as if it were going in a separate direction from the front. The tires shrieked. I felt a sickening sense of weightlessness as we left the road, then a shudder as we punched through the fence. The bus bounced wildly, like the body might detach from the wheels. I glimpsed flashes of color out the window, tents and tarps going by.
When we came to a stop, I was on the floor underneath several people. I smelled smoke—an oily, acrid stench that gave me a jolt of adrenaline. I couldn’t see, couldn’t orient myself. “Fire!” I shouted. “It’s on fire.” I felt tangled in bodies, struggling with the elbows and legs of other panicked people. I looked up and had a moment of vertigo. I realized that the bus was on its side, and with half the windows underfoot it was much darker—smaller somehow, a metal tube.
“Clear the roof,” the address system barked. “Clear the roof. This is your last warning. We will open fire.” Footsteps sounded overhead, shadows crossed the windows. They would drop a match, I realized. That’s how it would happen. I had a general sense of where the back door was located and I began moving toward it, fighting and flailing, but there were too many of us, all crowded together. There was no exit.
“Do you smell that?” I asked the boy beside me. His name was Harper. He had a line of blood oozing from his mouth, darkening his teeth.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s the Zeros,” I said. “They’re going to burn us.”
“They would have done it already,” Harper said. But his expression was uncertain, and now there was a drumming sound—people banging on the sides of the bus, metal on metal.
“It’s gasoline,” I said. “I know the smell.” It was what they’d used in the dormitory at La Pine. It was why the fire had been so unstoppable. I struggled to stand on one of the seats. I used it to boost myself up to an open window. I was tall enough to get my hands around the edge of the frame.
“You idiot,” a proctor shouted. “Stay in the bus.” Someone pulled at me, trying to drag me down. I kicked him.
This is what the Zeros did. They wanted to purify, to cleanse. They didn’t believe in reforming us. We were how the Devil was made flesh, how he crept into the world and did evil. There was a map now, a way to find us, a genetic story. Zeros interpreted the science. They believed that when the world was cleansed of evil, when evil had no more flesh to occupy, only then would the oceans teem once more with life, only then would the weather normalize, the aquifers refill, and the drought break—only then would there be peace.
“Code 15,” a proctor called. “Code 15.”
I wrapped a hand around the edge of the window frame and heaved myself partway through, just far enough to get my head and one shoulder out. I looked down the long, battered flank of the bus. A crowd had surrounded us, a terrifying sight. They were chanting something I couldn’t make out. I struggled to free myself, twisting in the window frame, and then I saw two men rushing toward me. Each of them wore red—one had on a balaclava and the other a bandanna tied at the neck. They were only a few feet away when another student emerged from an intervening window. They seized him, trying to lift him out, even as he fought.
“You fucking killers,” I screamed. “Leave him alone.”
I heard shots—a cluster of them in quick succession—and then a proctor appeared to my right. He stood on top of the bus, so I was level with his feet. “Inside,” he bellowed. He kicked at my shoulder, forcing me down as he passed. I slid to the ground. There was some kind of foam on the floor, filling the damaged cavity. It would be the fire retardant. The foam had a gritty chemical stench, like the substance they used in the school latrines.
“Don’t get it in your eyes,” a boy beside me said. “Don’t touch your face.”
The drumming stopped. It happened all at once, no more banging, no more shadows overhead. Little flecks of foam hung suspended in the sunlit air, glowing like bubbles. All of a sudden it was eerily quiet, and we were huddled together—everyone looking up, waiting. “They’re here,” someone said. “They’ve arrived.” And I didn’t ask who they were, just someone bigger, just someone more.
* * *
An ambulance took away the students with broken bones. The rest of us were deemed well enough to walk. They marched us out through the back door of the bus. Proctors formed a corridor and we traveled between them, arms folded, stepping over debris—a quickpaper comic book, a red plastic spoon. Sleek black-and-white helicopters whirred overhead. Police in riot gear with black vests stood at intervals, and peace drones rumbled past. These drones were large metal boxes on thick rubber wheels. Each one had a telescoping neck and a heavy coat of graffiti. They roamed the tent cities, going where officers couldn’t. They had probably converged on the bus moments after the accident, trying to record the identities of the perpetrators.
I walked down the aisle of our new bus. This one was a commuter model with cloth seats and little white shawls to protect the seat backs from dirty hair. Owen waited for me. It was surreal, a revision of our departure from Meadowlands, except now we were all disheveled and bloody and our clothing was torn. “You okay?” Owen whispered. The foam had left oily smears on his jacket.
I nodded. “You?”
“Fine,” he said.
My hands shook and I sat on them. There was that terrible feeling that someone was standing behind me, breathing on my neck. I was ready to run or fight; my body was tense and frustrated by inaction. I closed my eyes, but quickly opened them again. Behind my eyelids there were people I didn’t want to see or remember. I was unreliable. I was wrong. There was no gasoline. I’d been reliving what had happened at La Pine. It had never stopped, the fire still burned, and the panic used this moment as an opportunity to burrow deeper, to claim me more fully. I had to exert all my willpower not to vibrate out of my seat.
“I hate this part,” I said.
“What part?” Owen asked.
Police officers had cordoned off the accident scene with orange tape. All the tent city residents had been moved back a hundred feet or so, and everything near the site was abandoned. Mundane objects lay in the dirt like they had been swept up in a great wind and then dropped—a blanket, a blue jacket, a plastic bottle for filtering water.
Nothing had really happened, I told myself. We were all accounted for, even the boy I’d seen pulled halfway through the window. It was a crime of opportunity and we all knew that the Zeros were out in the world, knew what they thought of us, and yet, still, it felt somehow surprising, as if I were learning it all for the first time.
“Yes,” Owen said, out of nowhere. “It’s possible.”
“What?” I asked.
“I’m answering your question. We can live in a neighborhood like that. Why not? These people aren’t better than us. No way.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Subversive,” I said.
“Fuck the statis
tics,” he said. There was a gleam in his eyes, and his voice rose continually as he spoke. “When I have a career and when civilians pay for my work, I will not sell to Zeros. If they don’t like this planet the way it is, they can fuck off—set themselves on fire and clear the fucking air.”
One of the boys behind us slapped Owen on the shoulder. “Little O,” he said. “Tell it.”
“Don’t call me that,” Owen said. But it was just Runt, a short, ferrety-looking kid who had too many teeth in his mouth. He’d been Owen’s roommate a few years back.
“This one here.” A proctor with a torn sleeve stopped beside our row and pointed at me. The name on his tag read McIntyre. “Two demerits,” he said.
“For what?” Owen asked. “For what?”
But the man scanned my chip. “Climbing out the goddamned window,” he said. “Disorderly conduct.”
“Me?” I said. “I was disorderly? They were going to kill us.”
“You want another?” the proctor asked. “I’m in the mood.” He had a frayed, slightly manic cast to his features. Owen and I both shut up. The proctor waited a moment to see if we had ourselves under control, and then he moved on.
When he was gone, when there was no chance of being overheard, Owen turned to me and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
But I just looked away. That wasn’t a question I could answer.
It felt unbelievable that just a few hours before, I’d stood beside a civilian girl, been close enough to see the faint spray of freckles across her cheeks, the slight curl of her tongue as she spoke, the shape of her body, not stuffed in a uniform but in a dress, tight at the waist. She was another species altogether, more like the birds that migrated overhead. For a moment we’d breathed the same air, felt the same sun and wind. But there was no pleasure in thinking about impossible things. The memory of this afternoon just confused and depressed me now.
Finally, we were cleared to go. We drove past the site of the accident. There were several citizens injured near the fence. I saw a shape under a blanket, but I didn’t turn toward it. I knew how images could get caught in your head, could hang there like some obscene piece of art that you couldn’t take down. They could press on you. Work on you. I looked at the sky instead, blue, with a few puffs of white cloud. It was empty space—vapor—something unrelated and indifferent to humans. When one of the tent city women started chanting “Murderers, murderers,” I tried to send her voice into the sky. Away. Away, I thought. Away.
* * *
We returned to Goodhouse with a police escort. I felt relief when the campus came in sight. First I saw the fence. Electricity ran between its tall black poles. From a distance the fence looked like a giant comb jutting from the ground. And then I saw the Vargas Administration Building with its huge Romanesque façade, the red brick glowing in the late-afternoon sun like a fairy-tale castle. It was another remnant of the original Preston School of Industry. Built on a rise, visible from over a mile away, Vargas was all ornament, sweeping arched windows and graceful balconies. It had two turrets and a defunct clock tower—a truly odd counterpoint to the more modern, utilitarian architecture that dominated the campus.
Far in the distance, below the castle, I saw the guard towers for the Mule Creek State Prison. This was where California warehoused some of its worst criminals, and the irony of its proximity was not lost on us. It was where our wrong-thinking might take us: into that concrete fortress, that web of razor wire and chain-link fencing—a campus that made even Ione look welcoming.
We drove along the west side of Goodhouse, passing the factory, a dark brick box of a building with a tall smokestack. It was where the school produced the bread and cupcakes that made up a part of Ione’s income. Every student worked in some capacity, and I spent my afternoons in the factory’s mixing room, moving sacks of flour and sugar. We weren’t allowed to eat sugar, only artificial sweeteners—the kind that didn’t rot teeth and create dental bills. But sometimes a leaky bag would leave glittering crystals on my clothes. A wet finger could lift them to my tongue, and then the taste was unbelievable: an awakening. At the end of our shift we walked under a blast of air to clean us off, but the taste had been imprinted on me. It remained.
As the bus pulled through the main gate, the silent hounds raced back and forth in their pen. We passed the gray-and-white Proctors’ Quarters and the old athletic field, driving into the heart of campus, coming to a stop in front of the main laundry buildings. The other Community Day buses had already returned. A thick line of boys stood outside the laundries, waiting to shed their civilian clothes, gawking at us, palming furiously.
Those with injuries exited first. Several infirmary nurses, all dressed in their tan-colored uniforms with the Goodhouse logo in red, were setting up a table—unpacking a case and a screen. Surprisingly, Tanner himself stood nearby with his entourage and a couple of men, one of whom was tall and skinny, like a stretched shadow. I tried to be patient, but I felt claustrophobic. The bus was a cage, and every little noise made me swivel in my seat.
When it was our turn to exit, I pushed into the aisle, struggling to make the muscles in my arms and legs obey. The crowd felt as if it were compacting around me, a solid wall of flesh. It took all my attention to mimic normal movement, to maintain some composure, and still, I stumbled into the boy in front of me. He elbowed back, almost connecting with my chin. That’s when I saw the white-haired man, the one with the rangy body—the man I remembered from that night in La Pine. He seemed to be standing alone behind the nurse’s table, wearing the clothes I remembered, the black pants and the tailored shirt. He stood out as a still figure in the busy yard. Hallucination, I thought. Phantom. And I made myself look away. I wanted to forget. I wanted to get better. Wrong-thinking started in the warping of perception, and I couldn’t permit myself to keep reliving the worst moments, reinforcing them. I had to make a choice.
We exited the bus, and a proctor directed us to wait in a long line at Laundry 1. Ahead of us, students were already pulling off their jackets, stripping down to their T-shirts and underwear. A sour smell wafted from the open doors, and proctors were shouting instructions, their broadcast voices interrupting each other and contributing to the confusion they were trying to dispel.
“Pants to the right, jackets to the left.”
“To the right,” another shouted. “You there, stand for inspection.”
“Each item will be placed on the countertop, and you will not be dismissed until the items have been cleared.”
The two boys in front of us palmed with speed and dexterity. Their fingers formed shapes I couldn’t recognize, and then they both laughed at the same time. Rows of thick red boils dotted the backs of their arms, and above each boil was a number written in a marker directly onto their skin.
I stuck my hand into my jacket pocket—and encountered the prickly metal of Bethany’s barrette. For a moment, I just stood there, unsure of what to do as the line advanced. I began to dig at the inner seam of the coat, hoping I could force the barrette into the lining, hoping it would be overlooked in the inspection. But there wasn’t time. We were about to go through the laundry room doors. I quickly tossed the barrette away from me and into a clump of dirt to my right. It fell short, landing near the path—a bright, unnatural blue against that brown earth.
I felt Owen watching me and I slowly turned toward him, surprised to see even the smallest hint of indecision. If he reported me, he’d be cleared of our earlier demerits.
“Please,” I said.
But he raised his hand in the air. “Proctor!” he shouted. “Proctor to me.”
FOUR
Two proctors pulled me out of the line and led me to a basement room underneath the gymnasium. They told me to strip. “It was an accident,” I said. “I picked it up to return it. I was going to give it back.”
“Strip down,” the proctor repeated. I did so, taking everything off, turning slightly away as if I were modest. I wasn’t. The band of my boxers hid an i
nfraction more illegal than theft. I’d been taking one of Owen’s pens and marking the site where I’d been chipped, months ago, on intake. I now had a semipermanent black scar on the right side of my belly. It wasn’t very visible, merely a freckle, but all the same I kept my arm over the mark.
One of the proctors pulled a little plastic bag from his pocket, scanned the code on the front, and tossed it to me. I snatched it out of the air.
“Take your pill,” he said. I recognized the round lemon-colored tablet.
“I’m supposed to take it with food,” I said. “They were very clear about that.”
“Please show your compliance,” the proctor said. He sounded almost bored.
I pinched open the bag and quickly took the tablet. “It’s down,” I said. The man clicked on a pin light and I opened my mouth to show him that I’d swallowed the pill. It was, in fact, stuck in my throat.
“Are you experiencing any unusual dizziness, fatigue, or chills?” I thought of the sickening, weightless feeling of the bus leaving the road. “Are you experiencing any anxiety?” he asked.
I stood before him, shivering and naked. “Seriously?” I said.
He left me in that room for a long time, or maybe it only felt like a long time, because there were no windows, nothing to look at but a concrete floor with a drain in the middle and a lightbulb encased in a metal cage. I didn’t want to sit on the ground, so I stood. It was much cooler in here, a relief at first—and then the gooseflesh started to rise and I paced to keep warm.
I tried to cough up the pill, but this only made it lodge deeper in my throat. I needed water. I knelt and peered into the drain, where a dark liquid glinted below the metal grate. My own eye stared back and I jerked away, imagining people under the floor.
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