by Zach Hines
“What was the new direction?” Cody asked.
Callum wiped his hands on his jeans, then regripped the shovel. “You should leave here. This is liable to get you into trouble.”
Julian frowned. “Wait. Did you know a Lucy Dex?”
Callum was filling in the cat’s grave, but upon hearing Lucy’s name, he suddenly stopped. He studied Julian’s eyes.
“Thank you for bringing this old boy back to me,” he said, gesturing toward the little mound of earth. “But you need to go now.”
His eyes scanned behind them and all around the edge of the woods. He tightened his grip on the shovel, as if it were some defensive weapon, as if Cody might at any moment unzip her skin and reveal some kind of monstrous form he had to defend himself from.
“Leave,” Callum said firmly. “For your own good. You kids have too many lives ahead of you to get messed up in this.”
But Cody pressed him.
“Something is happening at the Lake, and I need to know what it is. It’s not just that the cats are behaving differently. Retrogression is even worse now, a lot worse than it was when you were studying it. But even scarier than that . . . ,” she said. “People aren’t getting all nine anymore.”
A pall fell over Callum’s face. The corners of his mouth twitched.
Cody continued, “The Lake is covering it up, labeling anyone who is defective a retro and sending them down to the Row. Right?”
“Is she right?” Julian asked. “Is it true?”
It was plain in Callum’s eyes that he wanted to say something, but fear held him back.
At last, he spoke: “The one thing I can tell you is that you need to stop extinguishing—right now.”
“Because people aren’t coming back? Please, you have to tell us,” Cody argued.
He looked away from her.
“There has to be something more you can do,” she said. “When you first came to Retro Row, you wanted to help us.”
Callum stared at her.
“Now’s your chance to really help.”
Callum looked at them for a long moment. He slung the shovel over his shoulder with a sigh. “Look for the Spoofs,” he said. “Now, go.”
“Wait, what’s a—”
“Go!” He swung the shovel menacingly toward them, then turned it to point up the hill.
Wordlessly, they walked to the front of the house. Callum disappeared inside, and the door slammed shut.
Cody and Julian got in the car and drove down the long driveway to the main drag. Julian’s hands were trembling on the wheel. He felt light-headed. Cody sat beside him, the notebook open on her lap, filling out her notes more completely, trying to ensure she had captured everything Callum had said.
What was this project, and what connection did it have to his mother? His mind was buzzing, but he was cognizant enough to notice the strange tops of the fence posts as they approached the exit to Callum’s driveway.
“Cody,” Julian said.
“I’m concentrating,” Cody said, working on her notes.
“Cody,” Julian said again, more urgently. “Keep your head down.”
“What?” she said, looking up, confused.
He grabbed her and pulled her down so that she was hidden in the passenger seat. He ducked down, too, peeking up over the dash just enough to see where he was driving.
Once they were out of the driveway and a little distance down the main road, he stopped the car and craned his head back to look at the fence posts. They were capped with little black monitors.
“Cameras,” Julian said. “Shit.”
“They filmed us coming in already, didn’t they?” Cody asked.
Julian nodded.
“Double shit,” Cody said.
Chapter 25
SCHOOL FELT LIKE A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE NOW. TRIGONOMETRY. The history of the Lake Superior rebellion. Group discussions of the unfolding Ukraine crisis in Civics . . . It all just bounced off Julian.
All he could think about was his mother, this Attison Project—whatever the hell it was—and that dead cat, the dirt filling up around it, the shovel tamping it down, sealing it into the earth.
If classes were bad, the Burners meetings were worse.
Julian had burned the two lives he needed to, and yet still he sat in the meetings. Why did he need to be there? Nicholas went over final preparations for The Drop Dead Drop—Halloween was the following night, which was fast approaching. Apparently, they had succeeded at getting the old roller coaster running again at the abandoned fairgrounds (or at least the test run worked), and Nicholas was now going through a list of death totals on the screen, showing how, with the new influx of Burners members, they were on track to kill more people this year than the notorious Georgie Vander ever did.
Julian felt sick watching it.
All this death.
All this morbidity.
As if it were just a game.
Plans and schemes to kill people faster. More death. More quickly. In larger quantities.
Was his mother like this on the Attison Project? Was she some more official version of Nicholas, charting out death totals?
And—worse—what if Cody was right? What if people weren’t coming back?
For what other reason would Callum tell them to stop burning now?
Julian wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who could understand. Someone who knew what it was like to live and die at Lakeshore Academy.
He wished he had Molly.
But Molly still hadn’t returned his calls or messages. Her phone now went straight to voice mail every time he tried. She hadn’t been in any Burners meetings either, and he never saw her in the lunchroom.
Julian scanned the auditorium just in case—but still, there was no Molly.
It was as if she’d just vanished.
After the meeting ended, Julian stayed behind at the door, watching the Burners file out past him, checking all of their faces in case he had missed her in the crowd.
She wasn’t there. But Constance was. Julian stepped up next to her.
“Hey, Constance,” he said.
She gave him a look of supreme annoyance. “Yes?”
“Have you seen Molly recently? I’ve been having trouble getting hold of her.”
Constance’s eyes lit up. “Molly who?”
Was Constance playing some kind of game? Of course she knew Molly.
“Ah, yes,” she said, as if suddenly recalling her image. “The little pudgy dark-haired girl. Perhaps she quit. It wouldn’t surprise me if she couldn’t handle it.” Constance studied her carefully manicured fingernails. “She always struck me as the overly delicate type.”
She pushed past Julian, done with the conversation.
Delicate? Not Molly. But if she had quit, surely Julian would’ve found out by now. Surely Nicholas would have called out any quitter as some kind of public example. Or, at the very least, Molly would have reached out to Julian and tried to convince him to quit, too.
Wouldn’t she?
Julian continued his search all day at school. He scanned the hallways, staked out her locker, and searched through the parking lot looking for her car. But there was absolutely no sign of her.
He pulled other Burners aside during lunch. Amit still hadn’t seen Molly, either. He shook his head gloomily as he thought about her absence. “It was the Burners,” he whispered. “The Burners took her away.”
This caught Julian’s breath in his throat. “What do you mean?”
Amit shrugged, looking over to the Burners’ table in the back as if to say he couldn’t talk about this here, and then shuffled away.
The Burners? Did they do something to her? Did they . . .
No. He couldn’t let himself think that. Not yet.
Julian cornered Logan at lunch. He had noticed Molly’s absence as well. And something else: Anastasia was also missing.
Julian immediately made the connection: Anastasia, Molly, and he were the only three kids in the aca
demy on scholarship.
The current version of the story, according to Logan, was that Molly and Anastasia had both gone to Constance’s house for some kind of initiation ritual shortly after they joined, and that’s when they vanished. No one saw them after that. Logan said everyone was trying to keep it quiet. No one wanted to leap to any conclusions or make any accusations. After all, “Nicholas is a little nuts,” Logan said with supreme understatement. Logan even suggested that not everyone was as eager to go through with burns at Nicholas’s big Halloween party as Nicholas thought they were.
Julian was taken aback. “Constance acted like she barely knew what I was talking about when I asked her.”
Logan giggled. “The Burners wouldn’t be lying to you, would they?” He winked at Julian and got up from the table, a stupid grin still plastered to his face.
Julian’s head spun. The whole world had become unhinged.
He needed to go to the source.
He found Nicholas at his locker right after the eighth-period bell. But Nicholas was as elusive and saccharine as always. He cooed in his singsong voice, “Of course, I did notice Molly had stopped attending the meetings. And Anastasia as well, for that matter. It was on my agenda to sort that out, but what with all the new pledges, and The Drop Dead Drop just getting more and more complicated . . .” He shook his head, exasperated. “Time is in short supply, and intelligent people who can get things done in even shorter.”
“Can’t you find out what happened to them?” Julian asked.
Nicholas looked at him with theatrically exaggerated pain, as if wounded by Julian’s implication that there was something in this world that he couldn’t figure out. “Of course, I could, but it doesn’t seem like a mystery to me. The Burners have always had a high attrition rate.”
“But would they really miss school for days to avoid the Burners?” Julian asked.
Nicholas shrugged and wedged his schoolbooks into his bag beside the big white Burners’ Bible.
“The thing is,” Julian said, “I heard Constance performed some kind of initiation ritual with them. Right before they stopped coming to school.”
This made Nicholas stop. There was a subtle tremor in his face—a quavering in his immaculate smile—that made Julian realize he was now heading down a fruitful path. Either Nicholas knew something and was covering it up, or possibly he didn’t even realize that something was happening right under his nose. Julian had to press this.
“Maybe Constance is doing things that you aren’t aware of,” he said. “Maybe she’s hiding something from you?”
Nicholas darkened.
“No,” he declared, spitting the word out like it was bitter fruit. “No one is doing anything behind my back. I can’t believe you would even suggest it.”
“I’m just telling you what I heard.”
Nicholas made a tiny, condescending snort. “Look at you. You get two lives under your belt, and you think you’ve figured out how everything works.”
“I just want to find Molly,” Julian said, defensive. Weeks ago, he couldn’t imagine being this aggressive with Nicholas Hawksley. But since then, the world had grown so much bigger—and more dangerous—than Nicholas and his little power plays.
“Why do you care so much about this Molly, anyway? You should be focused on the bigger picture. Tomorrow is The Drop Dead Drop, and you’re our superstar. Don’t you even care? It’s going to be the biggest burn in Burner history!”
Switching gears? Nicholas was definitely rattled.
“It shouldn’t matter to you what I care about,” Julian said.
Nicholas’s face darkened. “It damn well should,” he hissed. “Considering I made you who you are.” Nicholas glared at Julian now, his eyes as hard and black as little volcanic stones.
He closed his locker with a hard click, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and walked off without another word.
Julian was left standing in the hall, frustrated, worried—and alone.
He went back to his own locker, peeled off his white blazer, and flung it inside. The idea of having this damn thing draped over him now—this flag of death—made his skin crawl.
That night, Julian sneaked out after a late dinner, which this time included soy cream for dessert, thanks to his father’s high spirits at Julian’s delivery of the life score they desperately needed.
Now he was parked across the street from Molly’s house, in the shadow of an elm tree. There was no sound except the dull scratching wash of cicadas. No lights were on in Molly’s house—the windows were inky black squares.
He got out of the car, the door’s loud ding intruding into the stillness of the night. He shut the door gently and made his way to Molly’s front porch.
He stood in the gloom for a long moment on the front step, straining to make out any sounds, but there was nothing to be heard inside. Just a silence, deep and steady.
He knocked twice, but no one came. He knocked again, a series of knocks this time. And still no one came. Then he tried louder and louder. Almost two minutes of knocking. But still, there was no answer. He tried the handle. It was locked.
He sneaked around to Molly’s window. The curtains were closed. He called her name but was met only with more of the same terrible silence. Then he remembered something: the kitchen door had a dog entrance.
Julian kneeled down in front of the dog door, sizing it up.
He had come this far. . . .
He lay flat against the ground and pushed his arms through the flap. He pulled himself all the way inside, snaking in, and stood up.
This was Molly’s kitchen, all right. He had been here countless times with Molly’s family. But now everything was gone.
The big wooden table they would play board games on—gone. The refrigerator where he once spilled a two-liter jug of soy milk and then stood, petrified of his mistake as Mrs. Terra yelled at him—gone.
He tried the light switch, but there was no power. He lit the way with his phone lamp.
The living room was also empty. There were deep gouges in the floorboards leading to the front door. Someone had been dragging furniture out.
As he crept down the hallway to Molly’s room, Julian felt a pang of fear. The house was eerie, like the essence of the family still hung in the air, ready to coalesce at any moment into an apparition.
Molly’s room was also entirely empty, all the furniture removed. Even the carpet had been stripped. His footsteps echoed on the hardwood floor.
What the hell was going on?
People didn’t just vanish. They didn’t just pack up all of their stuff, say nothing to no one, and just vanish.
Julian felt a lump in his throat.
There was still that something he dared not think. . . .
But how long could he continue to avoid it?
He walked back through the house, through the empty cavern that was once a living room, to the front door. He unlocked it to let himself out, and that’s when he noticed a single sheet of paper lying on the floor. It must’ve been slipped through the crack.
It was marked with the official government seal.
NOTICE—THIS RESIDENCE HAS BEEN SEIZED BY LAKESHORE LENTIC RESEARCH UNIT HOLDINGS LTD., A SUBSIDIARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE LAKES.
For a long moment, Julian stood—alone and shattered—in the empty gloom of a world he no longer recognized.
Chapter 26
CODY IMMEDIATELY LINKED MOLLY’S DISAPPEARANCE TO the Burners. She had been suspicious of them from the moment Julian had told her about them.
“Have you ever heard of the Orphids?” Cody asked. Julian and Cody were drinking hot chocolate soy in the café across from Bardo Books.
Julian shook his head.
“A secret society in New York City. They host cabaret shows. You know, with half-naked women and all that. Once the show is over, they close the doors, and that’s when the real sick stuff begins. No one leaves alive.”
Julian frowned, trying not to conjure the ghastly i
mage.
“Then there’s the Society of the Hemlock,” Cody continued. “They’re foodies all about avant-garde cuisine, but every dish contains a lethal poison. Or the Jumpers out west,” she continued, gesturing theatrically. “Extreme sports, but particularly focused on cliff diving.”
Julian nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“Or Gabriel’s Army,” Cody continued. “You must have heard of them.”
He had—they were an aggressive cult with a quasi-religious bent that would infiltrate institutions like universities or the army and urge mass suicides. At one point, they had raised the money to air a national advertising campaign promoting suicide. Julian recalled their ads—“Everyone is doing it. Except you.”
“Yes.” Julian nodded. “Where are you going with this?”
“These clubs are basically all the same. No matter what their philosophy,” Cody said, “there are always two fundamental traits: their adherents had to kill themselves frequently, and, no matter what they did, they never got in trouble with the law.” She sipped from her hot soy. “The Best Practices in Extinguishment Act is supposed to have relegated all suicides to ex clinics. Any death outside one is illegal, as you know. And yet, these clubs have never had any high-profile arrests.”
She put her mug down and narrowed her eyes at Julian.
“Either they are tacitly encouraged to exist, or they are outright funded and protected by the government.”
Julian watched the cats across the street as he mulled this over. “I suppose it is possible that the head of the Burners could be involved in something,” he said. “He’s a kid called Nicholas Hawksley, and he—”
“Hawksley?!” she asked, incredulous. “Is he related to Director David Hawksley? The man who runs our Lake?”
Julian nodded. “Yes. His father is the Lake director.”
“That is no coincidence,” she said, as if all the connections were self-evident.
“The Department of the Lakes officially runs the life score and they run the ex clinics, and all the while claim they have the moral high ground—they’re not officially making anyone kill themselves,” she said. “It’s purely voluntary. But these clubs are given free rein.”