“Don’t worry, James,” Dr. Cleveland said. He clapped me on the shoulder. The contact startled me—it filled me with a kinetic sort of despair, something that seemed to radiate out from his touch. He was real. This was real. “So,” he said, stepping past me to sit sideways in the front seat, “after you allowed my daughter to drive at a high rate of speed, and after you led her into what is essentially a den of drug addicts and thieves, where did you leave her?”
I looked over at him, looked into his bright blue eyes. She had not been found. She had not turned up in a hospital somewhere, hadn’t been caught on the streets—and this gave me hope. I had not failed completely. I could, at least, keep her secrets.
“I saw her collapse,” I told him.
“Where?” he asked.
“In the crowd at the church,” I said, improvising. “But then the police arrived and we got separated.”
Dr. Cleveland leaned forward, and the tension in his face created a wrinkle on his forehead, a deep, vertical fold. “Did she look like she was in cardiac arrest?” he asked.
“She looked bad,” I said. “Really bad.”
Dr. Cleveland didn’t react. After an uncomfortably long time he said, “I don’t need a heart monitor to know you’re lying, and instinctively I want to dismiss this youthful loyalty that you feel toward one another. I want to diminish it in some way, but I think”—and here he paused—“I think I have merely forgotten what it was like.”
He opened the driver’s-side door and walked around to my side of the vehicle. I pushed the lock button on the armrest, but it was his van and my door opened at his touch. Fresh air flooded the cab. It was heavy with some kind of sweet fragrance. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I will find her. It’s just a matter of time.”
We were parked in a driveway. A high chain-link fence cut through the backyard, and beyond this fence, in the distance, I saw a field of parked cars—a quilt of color. “Where are we?” I asked.
“You don’t recognize it?” He gestured for me to climb out. “I guess you’ve never seen it from this side.”
“Proctors’ Quarters,” I said. And I felt hopeless, looking at the familiar landscape, at the orderly flower beds, at this approximation of a civilian residential street.
Dr. Cleveland grabbed and steadied me. I was wearing the same pants, but my shirt was gone. It had been replaced with a black sweatshirt. He tugged its hood over my head, and then he looped an arm under mine, supporting me as we walked toward the back door of a small wooden house. A neighbor was working in a raised garden bed. The doctor waved to her, and she stopped what she was doing, openly staring. “Nosy bitch,” he said under his breath. I was having a hard time staying upright, and he all but dragged me up the back stairs and onto the porch. He opened the door and helped me inside to a little civilian kitchen.
Everything was white—the countertops, the cabinets, even the walls, which were covered with tiny white tiles with an opalescent sheen. I realized that this must be his home. Bethany’s home, too. This is where she’d returned to every night, and I’d not even thought to imagine it.
Dr. Cleveland walked me over to the kitchen table and deposited me into a chair. The incision in my side ached. On the wall across from me were dozens of photographs of his daughter. A whole panel had been dedicated to her childhood. I even glimpsed the hated doll head in one of the pictures. It was sitting on a box, under a Christmas tree—a pink-skinned head with yellow hair. A ten-year-old Bethany stood beside it in a fuzzy bathrobe. Her feet were bare and her expression was very serious, almost adultlike in its intensity.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“I took some precautions,” Dr. Cleveland said. He set a plastic storage tub on the table and then began to pull the pictures off the wall, to stack them in the box.
“Another chip?” I asked.
“I sewed it into your back,” he said. “I hope you’re not offended. It did save your life.”
With each picture he lifted off the wall, he left a place where the paint was a shade whiter, the opposite of a shadow, a memory of what had once been there. I was starting to feel a little better, a little stronger. I sat up in my chair, but the more awake I was, the more confused I became. “Why am I not in the dormitory?” I asked. “Or Protective Confinement?”
“Because you are still at large,” he said.
But it was an unfamiliar term. “I’m where?” I asked.
“Kidnapping,” the doctor said. “Theft. Not to mention a tracking chip found in the latrine of a Zero church. It’s quite a story.”
He leaned over and grabbed a quickpaper magazine off the kitchen countertop. He scrolled through something and then tossed it onto the table. I looked at the page. It featured an almost unrecognizable picture of me. I glared at the camera with a malevolent expression on my face, one hand raised. It had been captured from a video feed and was slightly out of focus. Below the headline, ENDANGERED, there was another title—GOODHOUSE STUDENT, 17, ABDUCTS MEDICALLY FRAGILE GIRL.
“You know, abducting a child carries twenty years in a federal prison,” he said. He raised an eyebrow. “Something to think about.”
“I’d feel right at home,” I said.
He pulled the last of the pictures off the wall and tucked them into the sides of the box. “Are you ready to tell me where she is?” he said.
“I obviously don’t know,” I said, “or I wouldn’t be here.”
“You had a falling-out,” he said. “But not immediately, I don’t think.”
He was too close to the truth. I stood up. I had to lean on the countertop to walk the length of the kitchen, and even then, I was shaking with the effort. From the window over the sink I saw the soybean field where I’d worked with Owen. The plants had yellowed slightly, but I didn’t see any work details, which was unusual. “We had a falling-out,” I said, “because I saw someone I recognized. A proctor from school.”
“That would be Timothy,” the doctor said. He lifted the flaps at the top of the box and snapped them closed. “He’s a speaker-elect for the Holy Redeemer’s Church of Purity.”
His offhand tone surprised me even more than his certainty. “How did you know?” I said.
“I was following up on a tip.” He smiled. “A rumor about inmates in the factory. And I would have been able to do much more, except for one little problem. Do you know what that was?”
“Your daughter,” I said.
“No,” he said. He put the magazine on top of the box. “My patient. Or should I say patients,” he corrected. “They were found wandering around campus. And now I’ve had to offer my resignation.”
I leaned more fully against the countertop. The idea that I was somehow responsible for this turn of events filled me with the kind of satisfaction that was hard to keep to myself. “Those rooms are illegal,” I said. “Even for us. You can’t do that.”
“Quite illegal,” he said.
“And they’ve shut you down, haven’t they?” I felt strength building inside me, determination. “They’ve confiscated your research.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “An investigation is pending. They’ve cordoned off my office—the entire basement level, actually.” But his eagerness to confirm his own downfall began to make me nervous. “And poor Robert,” he said, “he was really hoping for an early retirement. But he’s had to hold one press conference after another. I’m afraid that it just reflects so badly on him.”
I walked to the kitchen door and looked through the glass panel at its top. It was almost fully dark now. Purple-and-white bunting spanned the front of Vargas. A Goodhouse flag hung from the old clock tower, draped like a pennant. Several civilian cars traversed the main road, and two proctors used glowing orange wands to direct traffic.
“How long was I in the tent?” I asked.
The curved white roof of the pavilion was just visible off to my left. I opened the kitchen door and heard the distant sound of singing, many voices in concert with each other.
“What day is it?” I said.
But I already knew the answer. I was looking at a full parking lot. I was listening to the ceremony itself playing out in the distance. It was Founders’ Day.
* * *
The doctor clicked on a wallscreen, and in my haste to pivot—to turn and see what he was doing—I must have lost my footing. I fell to the ground, legs slipping out from under me, hands clutching at the countertop, but not fast enough to get a grip. I lay on the floor, feeling the weight of my body. I’d been inert for so long, it had left me incredibly weak.
“You know,” the doctor said, “half the people on the planet can’t remember a world before Goodhouse.” He stood near the kitchen table, seemingly unaware of my difficulties. “Fifty years,” he said, “is a long time.” He was scrolling through dozens of security videos. Time stamps spooled across the bottom of the display, and I had an accelerating feeling of dread.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Tanner thought an evening service would be more elegant, more dramatic.” The doctor selected a video and expanded it to fit the screen. “Quite a nice event, really. Though I’m no longer invited.”
The screen showed the interior of the pavilion—hundreds of stadium-style seats packed with people. It was easy to spot the students, that navy-colored stripe at the top of the auditorium—and then, below them, the civilians with their colorful clothing. Little star-shaped lights dangled overhead, all of them suspended at different heights, seeming to float, to obliterate any sense of a ceiling.
“My father used to tell me that every setback was just an opportunity in disguise,” Dr. Cleveland said. He minimized the video, then selected another. A man wearing a blue sash across his suit stood at a podium. “At the time, I thought he was patronizing me—you know, the way adults tell children that everything will be okay when, clearly, it will not. But now I think maybe he was correct.”
“You told Tanner,” I said. “Right? You told him about Tim?”
But the doctor was distracted. “Told him?” He frowned at me. “James, you don’t look well.”
I’d managed to sit up, but I was leaning against the cabinets, unable to do much more.
“Maybe you’ll feel better,” Dr. Cleveland said, “if you tell me where Bethany is.” He hefted the box he’d packed and then stood over me. “Give me the truth,” he said, “and I’ll take you with me. Out into the world, like a real citizen.”
“And if I don’t?”
On the screen behind the doctor, the man with the sash was smiling, lifting his hands, clapping and turning—he’d been giving an introduction of some kind.
“You once asked me if I was helping the Zeros. Well”—he shrugged—“it turns out, they’re helping me.”
“Helping you with what?” I said.
“There isn’t going to be a scandal,” he said. “There isn’t going to be an investigation of my methodology. You know, cleanup is part of any experiment,” he said. “You wash out your glassware. You incinerate your trash.”
I shook my head, trying to understand him fully.
“You shouldn’t have run out on me, James,” he said. “You shouldn’t have opened the door.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“I could have helped people,” he said. “I could have saved lives.” And here he actually looked pained. “But you forced my hand.”
I heard a sound, a percussive boom that made the cabinets rattle, that seemed to shake the floor beneath me. The video screen turned white. The doctor did not react to this noise, did not flinch or look around. He just stared at me, gauging my expression.
“I hate to cut this short,” he said, “but you need to make a choice. You can die here with your friends or you can tell me where my daughter is.”
I couldn’t pull myself up, but I used what strength I had to strike him, to kick at his leg. He merely grunted and took a step back. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said, “but it was worth a try.” He balanced the box on his hip and spoke into a handheld. “I need some cleanup at the house,” he said.
“Copy that,” a voice said. The words were faint, seemingly distant.
“Don’t put your faith in the police,” the doctor said. “They won’t be here anytime soon.” And then he turned to go.
“Bethany knows who you are,” I said. I was reaching for a way to hurt him. “She knows you and rejects you.”
The doctor gave me a weak smile. “But I will be there when she outgrows her adolescent infatuations and misconceptions. And you,” he said, “will not.”
* * *
I managed to get to my hands and knees. The image of the pavilion disappearing—that starlit auditorium, with its rows of students and administrators and civilians—filled me with terror. This terror gave me strength that only moments ago had been impossible. I crawled through the kitchen door. The doctor was already in his van, backing out of the driveway. I watched his red taillights disappear down the street. In the distance, an alarm throbbed, a computer-generated voice repeated a message that I couldn’t quite make out.
Pushing for some reserve, I summoned the strength to walk into the backyard, to stumble over to the chain-link fence and look out at the campus. There was a tower of black smoke where the pavilion had been. I strained to see through it to find the familiar curving roofline. I hoped the building had been damaged and not obliterated. But I saw only smoke, a thick, shaking blanket in the floodlit sky.
I tried to scale the fence, to make hand- and footholds out of its little diamond-shaped openings. I slid repeatedly to the ground. I kept looking over my shoulder, afraid that someone would materialize just behind me, a Zero, a man in a red mask. It would be smarter to hide, to wait out the attack. But every student who was not participating in the ceremony would be locked in his room. They would be beating on the doors, terrified and trapped.
The barbed wire had been removed, and when I reached the top of the chain-link fence, I sat there straddling it, trying to catch my breath, certain that I would simply fall when I tried to descend. I glanced behind me and saw the neighbor woman standing on her porch, her handheld pressed to her ear. All of a sudden a series of explosions detonated near the heart of campus, far to the south. The sound was so deep and disorienting that I didn’t immediately know I was falling. I slammed into the ground and lay there, unable to draw a breath, the wind knocked out of me. I tried to roll onto my side, but there was something wrong with my left arm. At first I thought I’d reinjured the elbow, but then I realized that the whole arm was useless and limp. The pain was so intense that I just sat there, heaving on an empty stomach, unable to focus.
The campus had gone completely dark. There were no backup lights, no sirens, and somehow this darkness created a terrible kind of intimacy. Voices floated over the soybean field, people screaming, people calling to each other. Everything seemed very close now. Several cars pulled out of the parking lot. They were small civilian vehicles, and as they sped toward the main gate, they were met with a burst of gunfire—little green tracers that arced through the air, coming from the guardhouse itself. At first the shots fell short of their targets, but then the lights seemed to adjust themselves, they lifted and lengthened their trajectory. The tracers swept through the line of cars, entering one windshield and then another. One of the cars flipped, and made an awful crunching sound as it spun through the field beside me. The others just swerved into each other, blocking the road. And still, people were leaving the parking lot and driving toward the exit, almost as if they didn’t know what else to do.
A large tour bus tried to clear a path, tried to ram its way through the pileup, but now the tracers were coming from other locations, too—the parking lot itself, the field opposite my own—beautiful arcs of light, graceful as spirits. They found their mark and the bus crashed into the knot of vehicles, swerving, then nosing to a stop.
And then there were no more cars, no more attempts at an exit. I saw a group of masked men running down the main roa
d. Without a word they broke into three groups and disappeared onto the campus. I was still leaning against the fence, sitting exactly where I’d fallen. It had been only a few minutes, but the amount of destruction was staggering. Someone in a nearby car began to moan, and in the distance, two thick columns of smoke rose into the sky, smudging the stars, bending slightly in the wind, until they had the look of some inverted rainbow, corrupted and colorless.
This was beyond anything I’d ever experienced, and only the thought of Owen could compel me to my feet. I clutched my injured arm to my chest and staggered forward. One of the wrecked cars had its headlights aimed at the field in front of me. I would have to go around the beam or step through it. To save time, I decided to cut closer to the main road.
I doubled over as I approached the wreckage, my eyes scanning the darkness, alert for any kind of movement. Every step sent a little spike of agony through my shoulder, and I struggled to keep my breathing quiet and my footsteps soft. One of the windshields ahead was smeared with a dark liquid and had what appeared to be a mat of hair pressed against the inside of the glass. I looked away.
I crept past the bus. The damaged engine chuffed slightly. A little tendril of smoke leaked from its hood. That’s when I saw the word UTAH on the vehicle’s license plate. There was a picture of a rock formation and then the words SALT LAKE CITY underneath. I stopped. The dormitory that I’d helped to prepare, the one that was meant to house the choir, they were coming from Salt Lake City. Some piece of that alternative life had found me—it had rolled to a stop right here.
The door wasn’t locked. It was a bifold, and it was loose, just pulled halfway across the entrance. I took a few steps inside, careful to stay below the windows and out of sight. The bus was partway in the field, its back end in the dirt, its front tires on the road. I thought it would be full of people, but I saw only one—a student lying prone in the aisle. There was blood on the floor underneath him and a trail of blood leading from the driver’s seat. The boy wore a uniform like ours, only his was beige in color. I touched his shoulder. He didn’t move.
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