Nine

by Zach Hines

  The fact was, Molly actually was gone. There was no denying it. Amit had checked with Headmaster Denton, and he confirmed as much. After much coercion, Denton made an announcement that he had received a notice that Molly’s father had been reassigned by the Department of the Lakes, and they’d had to move. But not everyone was buying it. Some said Molly simply ran away, and then her family, devastated, moved out of state.

  Anastasia was gone, too. Another undeniable fact.

  Gloria Merriweather’s father, who worked at the police station, told her that Anastasia’s single mother made a missing persons’ report, and the police started an investigation, but kept it all very quiet. They could’ve been protecting leads. Or covering something up.

  And then, when Anastasia’s mother also disappeared . . . Well, maybe she was involved in her daughter’s disappearance and fled. They were one of those scholarship families, after all. Who knew what went on in those parts of town?

  At the edge of all these rumors was one other rumor that few dared to mention. . . .

  Maybe, as Julian had so unhelpfully suggested during the incident, Molly and Anastasia were actually permadead.

  That seemed pretty ridiculous to Franklin. They were both only Threes.

  Constance suspected they were secretly dating. She told Franklin that the two girls simply couldn’t handle the Burner’s life and were spooked by her little secret lesson, and ran away together to wherever it was that Molly’s father was transferred.

  That sounded far more plausible.

  Franklin knew that there had been rumors and conspiracy theories about the Lakes for as long as there had been Lakes. You would have to be some kind of a weak-ass motherfucker to let them get to you now.

  Speaking of weak-ass motherfuckers . . .

  Franklin narrowed his gaze at Nicholas. He was still dully reading from the Burners’ Bible, recounting past glories in a sad attempt to inspire the twelve—twelve—people still here.

  It was pathetic how rattled and flustered Nicholas had become since these rumors started spreading, and the Burners stopped showing up.

  Finally, Nicholas snapped the book shut. He looked down at the mostly empty room and released a sigh into the microphone, a feeble scratch of anguish that ricocheted off the room’s expensive acoustic soundscape.

  “Dismissed,” he said.

  The twelve remaining diehards—or braindeads, Franklin suspected—shuffled their way to the exit. Nicholas stuffed the Bible into his bag and looked over at Franklin.

  “They’ll come back,” he said. All of Nicholas’s usual verve and energy—not to mention, bullshit—had escaped him like a ghost from a corpse.

  Franklin had nothing to say in response. He just watched as Nicholas trudged down the aisle to the exit.

  “Hey.” A girls voice.

  Franklin turned.

  Constance was standing in the stage left wings.

  “Let’s talk,” she said.

  She led Franklin, curiously, to Headmaster Denton’s office.

  They took a seat opposite Denton’s thick Lakespawn red oak desk. Denton sat behind it, snaking his fat tongue over his lips in that way he did when he reveled in his authority. Behind him, a man in purple robes stood tall and stoic. His purple mask and cowl were gathered around his neck, a pair of black goggles nested inside them. The man, who looked to be in his mid-twenties, had tidily cropped hair parted on the side, a clean-shaven face, and a vacant, unnerving stare.

  “This is the Prelate of the Lake,” Denton said.

  “He’s an alumnus, actually. George Vander.”

  Holy hell.

  Georgie Vander became the Prelate? At such a young age?

  That was seriously impressive.

  “The Honorable Prelate Vander is here today to talk about this little organization of yours,” Denton said.

  Georgie—the Prelate—stepped forward.

  “The Burners,” the Prelate began.

  Denton squirmed in his seat at the word. He still obviously hated outright condoning the club, and this must’ve been an arrangement it had pained him to make.

  “You know they are the most prestigious, if unofficial, club in your school. But they also play an important role in the wider world.” The Prelate’s voice was surprisingly deep and gravelly. What number was he on? Franklin couldn’t see behind the folds of his robe.

  “The Burners are one of the key ways we find our next leaders.”

  He nodded to Constance.

  “I have been watching your club, just as the previous prelates had been watching me when I was the Gold Star. I like the looks of you, Franklin. And Constance here had very good things to say about your leadership potential.”

  Franklin looked at Constance, arching his eyebrows in confusion. She grinned.

  “Truth be told,” the Prelate said, “I had approached her first, through your headmaster’s recommendation. We did a little a test run, actually, with two of your scholarship students. But then, after what happened at the abandoned fairgrounds . . . with those wild accusations.” He shook his head solemnly.

  “I don’t need to tell you that having thinner ranks in the Burners lowers your school’s overall life score, which was something I personally worked very hard to elevate when I was here.”

  Denton frowned at this as well and shook his head. “Not good,” he muttered. “Not good.”

  The Prelate continued, “Constance proved her worth, but we both agreed that if there was going to be a new face in charge of the Burners, it should be someone untainted by the incident at the abandoned fairgrounds. Someone who can inspire faith in the student body. Unlike your current . . . leader,” he said, spitting that last word out of his mouth like curdled soy.

  Franklin had to suppress a grin—the Prelate wanted him. The Prelate of the damn Lake was making him head of the Burners.

  “Because you’re so far behind on the score target now, I’ve arranged for some rewards to get things back on track,” the Prelate explained, looking to Constance. “Early acceptance to Azura University, for example.”

  As if this could get any more interesting.

  Denton leaned forward. “I don’t have to tell you that an opportunity like this for Azura is a rare and highly—”

  “Just raise the score by any means possible,” the Prelate interrupted.

  Denton shut his mouth and leaned back.

  The Prelate opened a briefcase that had been sitting on the table. He took out two official-looking pieces of paper and handed one to Franklin and one to Constance.

  Marked with the official DoL seal, they were exemption letters authorizing one Franklin Overton and one Constance Zandt, acting as agents of the nurses, “to administer and hasten compliance extinguishments.”

  Franklin looked up at the Prelate. In the light coming through Denton’s window, the Prelate’s robes had an iridescent shimmer, like a rare bird basking in a halo of morning glow. Beautiful. Just beautiful, Franklin thought.

  “The time for subtlety is over,” the Prelate said, clicking shut the briefcase.

  Denton nodded to them both. “Dismissed.”

  Franklin and Constance left together, each with a letter in their pocket permitting them to get away with murder.

  Chapter 28

  WITH MOLLY GONE, JULIAN BEGAN SPENDING MORE AND more time with Cody. Her presence, and her determination to unravel the secrets of the world, to find some kind of truth behind the chaos of their nine lives, made Julian feel more at ease. She was not afraid to grab Nicholas’s stage and upend it. Julian couldn’t help but admire that.

  For a simple, undramatic week after The Drop Dead Drop, he had been meeting up with Cody after family dinner. Almost always, it was at a different location in downtown Lakeshore or Poplar Heights in the hopes, as Cody put it, of “throwing a curve ball” to any prying eyes who might be following.

  It was much colder out now. The winters around Lakeshore and Poplar were infamous for the sudden onset of plunging frigidity. On a
few particularly windy evenings, Julian and Cody got hot chocolate soys and visited the alley behind the bookstore to feed the cats—they still shrank away from his presence.

  Cody had taken to checking them behind the ears for life numbers. She filled out a grid in her notebook with the numbers. Her notebook was also filled with pages about superpalingenesis, the scientific description of the rebirth process, which, she was quick to explain, was still poorly understood. In her opinion, the field needed to be integrated with quantum physics if anyone wanted to find a unifying explanation for the phenomenon.

  On one night so cold it felt like Julian’s breath froze before it could escape his throat, he met Cody at the harvest market in Perennial Park.

  She slipped ahead of him through the crowd, like she always did, a girl on a mission, even though the mission now was simply to find the synthetic cider booth. Julian jostled among the puffy winter coats, following her rusty tangle of curls through the crowd, trying to keep up. The colors and the scents were overwhelming, and chasing Cody through a throng of anonymous people, Julian felt alive and grateful for it. For a moment at least, his worries about Molly and his mother and the Attison Project had receded. . . .

  This is what life should be like, he thought. Your heart beating, your skin tingling, your mind bright and alive as you run headlong toward a future. Toward answers. Not death, after death, after death . . .

  Once, they met at Lover’s Leap—the jagged rock overhang that looked into a deep, limestone gorge. The trees were evergreen there, not that Julian could see their color anymore, and the air was rife with the scent of needles and musty leaves. Standing at the precipice of the rock, Cody had grabbed Julian’s hand all of a sudden and mock-jumped, terrifying him. She laughed at how easy it was to scare him, and then she pecked him on the cheek. It was, technically, Julian’s first kiss. It made him dizzy with excitement and confusion.

  Cody was strange. There was no denying it. While most girls Cody’s age were thinking about college applications, Cody was continually shaping and abandoning theories about the Lentic Research Unit and the Attison Project. She was going to prove to the world that the rebirth system was failing—she had become more determined than ever after witnessing that spectacle with the Burners at the abandoned amusement park.

  More than once, she told Julian a variation of “they got my parents, but they didn’t think about me.” Or “they’ll never see someone like me coming.”

  She had convinced Glen to focus his efforts on reverse engineering the OS they found on the cat’s microchip to find a way into the LakeNet servers, in hopes of uncovering anything they could about the “Spoof” Callum had told them about, whatever that was.

  It was promising, but it took time, and Julian could tell patience wasn’t Cody’s strong suit. In fact, it drove her to do things like take him to the harvest market, or kiss him on the cheek.

  On the final day of that week, Julian met Cody at Cat’s Cradle. Glen had a breakthrough. They crowded around his monitor as he explained what he had found, in between sips from a chocolate soy jug.

  “I can tunnel in through a server connected to the cat ID database. It’s all supertechnical, and I’ll spare you the details, but the point is, I found a way in with administrator privileges. I got to the root of the admin server and . . .”

  He took a huge glug of soy.

  “I found the index table with a list of files with ‘Spoof’ in the title. But . . .”

  He exhaled heavily.

  “I got locked out. I tripped something up. I’m not sure what, but the system sealed it all up once I was booted.”

  Cody crossed her arms, her brow furrowed. “Wait. So, we don’t have anything?”

  Glen smiled broadly. “Who said that?”

  He brought up a spreadsheet containing a long list of names. “I did manage to download this database file before it froze up. It’s a Spoof-marked file. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is exactly. I have a theory.”

  They studied the spreadsheet. Beside each name were two numbers and a date for each.

  Glen continued: “My guess is it’s—”

  “Two sets of books,” Cody interjected. “Like an accounting fraud.”

  Glen nodded. “Right. This is exactly how the Lake formats their tables to input into the life score database, but this extra column here . . .”

  “They’re giving people fake life scores,” Cody said, her voice focused and sharp. “Those assholes.”

  Julian leaned in closer to the screen.

  There were a couple of hundred names total. Glen scrolled through them.

  “Wait,” Julian said. Something had caught his eye. “Just stop for a second.” He gripped Glen by the shoulder and leaned in close.

  A name.

  He turned to Cody. She snorted.

  “Nicholas Hawksley,” she read.

  According to this, he wasn’t a Five. He was . . . a One.

  Julian had lost a color, Amit had lost his sense of taste, and Molly had vanished, had maybe permadied, all because of Nicholas.

  And yet, Nicholas never once took a risk. He threw them all under the bus, while he sat safely in the driver’s seat.

  It was all a lie. All of it.

  Cody stepped away from the monitor, her brow furrowed. She put her hands on her neck as she paced in tiny circles, thinking.

  “Think about this. Nicholas Hawksley has a fake number. Who is Nicholas Hawksley? He’s the son of the director of the Lake, David Hawksley. Why has Nicholas been prevented from burning? Maybe because he, or more likely, his father knows the Lakes are changing.”

  Julian nodded. That was feasible.

  “And you,” Cody said. “And Molly and Anastasia . . . You’re all the scholarship kids, right? The poor kids. This is not a coincidence,” she said. “Maybe the rich are hiding their numbers while the poor are burning faster.”

  This made sense to Julian. It was how the world seemed to work, after all. The haves straddling the dead bodies of the have-nots.

  Julian asked Glen for control of the screen. Glen conceded, scooching his chair out of the way. Julian scanned the sheet up and down—and noticed something else.

  Something that made his blood run cold.

  At the top of this spreadsheet, there was a small printed legend under the SPOOF stamp. It was in small type, like part of an automated filing system.

  It read, “Issued by Attison Project Director Lucy Dex.”

  “Guys,” Julian said. He pointed to the screen. “My mother didn’t just work there. She was in charge of Attison.”

  Cody leaned over him to inspect the monitor. “Holy moly, Mr. Julian. Director.”

  Julian’s heart sank.

  He closed his eyes and grasped at the strands floating in the murk of his mind: Nicholas, faking his number while running a suicide club, the obsession with topping Georgie Vander’s score, the dead cat, and now his mother, involved in this, whatever it was, hiding Nicholas’s number—but no, not just involved but directing. . . . There was a kind of grim logic lurking in this, a puzzle falling into place. But the key missing piece was the truth of what the Attison Project was actually doing.

  “Callum,” Cody said. “He told us about the Spoof files, but that’s not enough. Not anymore. We have to make him talk to us.”

  Glen shook his head. “You said there was surveillance. You were recorded on the premises. What if there are guards now, or they have the place on lockdown?”

  Cody shrugged. “We won’t be so stupid as to just drive up this time.”

  She insisted that they move on this tomorrow night. Glen gave up the fight quickly and volunteered to stay back at the house with the kids. “The only risks I’m comfortable with are the ones I can take from this chair,” he said.

  Cody looked to Julian. “You in?” He had vowed weeks ago that he would find out the truth of his mother. So, of course, there was no backing down now.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  Then the
re was a knock on the door.

  A little girl with a pink scarf, who looked about eight or nine years old, entered.

  “Cody, the Friends are here to see you,” she said.

  “Thanks, Carly,” Cody replied, rubbing the girl’s hair. She walked with Carly to the door, but before she left, she turned to Julian and Glen—“Tomorrow night.”

  After Cody left, Julian stood and straightened his jeans. He needed to walk, to move and clear his mind. . . .

  He followed Cody into the hall and leaned against the handrail to the stairs at the edge of the living room. He watched as Cody received a woman—the woman who ran Bardo Books with the rectangle glasses; they called her Johanna—and led her into the kitchen. They were carrying bags of groceries.

  He thought of his mother’s eyes. The deep green pools that were gray now. He recalled his last memory of her alive—crashing through their living room, calling out to him: What the hell are you doing here? His father dragging her away, the sound of blows out on the porch . . .

  The recollections made his head spin. Julian squeezed his eyes shut to chase them away, to give himself a moment’s peace, but when he opened them again, he noticed something.

  The red door to Cody’s room was open. A lamp was on inside, casting the room in a yellow glow.

  He realized that he was, once again, standing on the precipice of something. He was now involved with Cody, with Glen, with Cat’s Cradle, and Callum, and the Attison Project, and the secret cameras, and the cars following them down the streets of Poplar Heights. . . .

  Soon there would be no going back.

  So, if he was going to step across that line, then he needed to know what this was. He needed to look.

  Julian knocked softly on the door, then stepped into the room after no one answered. There was a bed in the corner. Clothes piled on the floor. An ordinary-enough-looking room. He saw a brush on the dresser, a tangle of red hair trapped inside it.

  There was a small black box beside the comb. It was open, and a photograph inside caught Julian’s eye. A pale-skinned kid with white hair and a white splotch on the side of his face.