by Zach Hines
Cody looked at him for a long, silent moment.
“We’re going to break into the Lake. We’re going to get that smoking gun.”
Glen sighed. He hung his head low, his fingers idly rubbing Callum’s confession.
“Cody,” he said. “Not again . . .”
“We have to,” she said.
Not again?
“Cody,” Glen said. “The last time we did this, it was a total—”
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” Cody said, cutting him off. “Now I know exactly what I’m looking for. The Spoof floor.”
Julian tried to pay attention to them, but it was difficult. He kept retreating into himself, pulling back the curtain in his mind and peeking at the revelation that his mother ran this project, a truth that loomed over everything else like a roiling storm cloud. Bit by bit, he would take in a portion of it but then freeze up, close the curtain, and return to the world. Return to the table, and his hands spread out on it, and Cody talking about breaking into the Lake, and running right into the center of everything they were trying to escape from. . . .
And then, finally, Julian spoke.
“Who is Robbie the retrograde?” he asked. “Who is he really?”
Glen froze, his mouth hanging open. He looked to Cody, who was staring at Julian with hot coals for eyes.
“You didn’t tell him?” Glen asked.
Cody didn’t react. She just stared at Julian, the silence heavy between them.
“He calls himself Robbie now, but his name is Jake. We used to be . . . friends.”
Glen shifted his weight in his chair, and Cody blinked.
“More than friends,” she continued. “He was my boyfriend. We met after moving to Cat’s Cradle. And . . .” She frowned, dimpling her cheeks.
“We broke into the Lake receiving center once, trying to steal a numbering gun. The nurses caught us, and we ran. I got away, but Jake was caught. And . . .”
She looked down at the dirt covering her hands.
“Well, now . . . After what we found tonight, I can only assume they kept him as a test subject. The next time we saw him, he was retrograde. He didn’t remember anything about who he was. It was . . .”
She had to turn away. Her eyes were hard and dark, almost shiny in the fluorescent light.
“It was shitty,” she said, her voice growing smaller. “Pretty shitty for everyone.”
She let out a long exhale, then snapped her look back over Julian.
“I understand that might change your thoughts about breaking into the Lake,” Cody said, her voice once again studded with firm assurance. “But I know what we’re looking for now, and I can avoid the mistakes we made before.”
That was all he could bear.
Julian stood up from the table.
He had to go home. He had to go home and check on his brother. He should be asleep now, since it was late on a Thursday night, but he had to make sure he was actually there, in his bed.
And he had to make lunch for his family tomorrow—it was his turn.
And he had to tell his father what he had discovered about Mom, if he could summon the courage, if he could hold the curtain back long enough to observe the knowledge as it laid waste to everything.
And finally, he had to tell his family never to burn again.
“Julian, your mother set all this in motion. You have to undo it. You know this,” Cody said, serious and unblinking.
Without another word, Julian left, his mug of hot chocolate soy still steaming on the table.
Chapter 32
“MEETING ADJOURNED,” NICHOLAS SAID AS THE LAST remaining Burners trickled out of the orchestra room.
Logan was last at the door.
That good old boy, Nicholas thought. Bless him.
“Logan,” Nicholas called.
Logan stopped at the door.
Nicholas lifted up his cup of coffee.
“Thanks for your dedication,” he said. “You’re the real Warrior spirit.”
“Don’t mention it!” Logan shouted, a slanted grin plastered to his face, giggling to himself.
Hmm, Nicholas thought. Never mind that he might be brain-damaged by retro. Loyalty still counts for something.
He sipped from his cup and held the hot liquid in his mouth, turning it around until it filled him with its bitterness.
Vile coffee.
At least he would always have that.
Nicholas looked over to stage left. Constance was approaching from the wings.
He turned to stage right. Franklin was approaching from that side.
Nicholas set his coffee down and closed the Bible sitting on the podium. So this was it.
Franklin spoke first.
“It’s not personal,” he said. “We need to put the club first.”
Nicholas ran his hand across the white leather of the Bible. He snorted. “Franklin, if I may, while I’m still in charge for a few more seconds—shut your ugly mouth. Speeches aren’t your forte.”
Franklin glared at Nicholas, balling his fists. All bluster with that one, Nicholas thought. Good luck trying to put the club back together with that kind of attitude.
“I don’t suppose you’ll give me another week?” he asked. “If I can just convince Julian to renounce what he said and return to us, I—”
“The Bible, please, Nicholas,” Constance said, interrupting. The grin that Nicholas was attempting vanished.
He picked up the Bible—for the last time, he supposed—and he appreciated the weight of it in his hand. This old tome was passed down through one hundred years of Burner Gold Stars, a grim log of thousands and thousands of student deaths. It was never his—it was always meant to be passed down to the next Gold Star. Now it was just a matter of accepting that it had all ended much sooner than he had hoped.
“Tell me, my dear Constance,” Nicholas said. “Do you know what actually happened to Molly and Anastasia?”
She shrugged. “I asked them to burn, is all,” she said nonchalantly.
“Behind my back,” he said.
She shared a look with Franklin and turned back to Nicholas.
“I was just . . . stretching my wings, you know,” she said.
Something happened to Molly and Anastasia, that was for sure. Something involving Constance. Something that had unfolded under his very nose, and he was in the dark the whole time.
Maybe he didn’t deserve the Burners, in the end. Maybe this was meant to happen. He sighed and handed her the Bible. She struggled a little with the unexpected weight of it but kept a straight face.
“Didn’t even come close to beating Georgie Vander, did I?” Nicholas asked.
“Not even close,” Constance said, her pretty red lips forming a sinister grin.
Nicholas picked up his cup of coffee and held it out over the orchestra pit, as if in a toast to an imaginary class of Burners who were still sitting before him, hanging on his every word.
He turned the cup over and watched as the thin brown coffee pooled, steaming, onto the orchestra pit carpet.
Banzai, then.
Chapter 33
JULIAN WOKE UP LATE.
The exhaustion of the previous evening had taken its toll on his psyche. After he got home from Cat’s Cradle, he lay in bed for hours, pushing away the thoughts of his mother on a secret floor in the Lake center, orchestrating rekillings on unsuspecting people.
Eventually, he had managed to empty his mind by concentrating on the steady rhythm of his skipping heartbeat and soon, a black nothingness had taken over, blotting out his consciousness.
It was as if no time had passed at all, but it was almost noon already.
He looked out the window as he poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen sink. Gray clouds hung low over the horizon. A swarm of black cicadas arced across the scrapyard down below before dissipating into the forest, like a blob of ink bleeding down a drain.
He checked his phone. There was a series of text messages from his fat
her:
Where are you?
Where were you last night?
Thank you for burning your two lives to raise our score. I needed to burn one more myself. I know how you feel. I couldn’t ask you to do any more than two. So I am doing the last one.
My appointment is at 10 a.m. Please meet me at the bus stop at 6 p.m. I should be there not long after that.
No.
Julian reread the messages again and again. Nicholas had tried to warn him—they did need to burn one more.
Nicholas was right—but Julian couldn’t imagine that it meant his father’s life, not his.
He tried to call his father’s phone—but he could hear it ringing in his bedroom. Of course, you don’t bring your phone with you to the ex clinic.
Julian checked the time: it was almost 12:30.
He was far too late to stop him.
No!
He pounded his fist on the countertop, knocking his glass into the sink with a clang.
He looked out over the gray banks of clouds hanging over the world, like they were about to crash into it.
“What’s going on?”
Rocky was at the door to the kitchen, still in his pajamas. His little brother’s presence calmed Julian for a moment.
Everything might be fine. Yes, his father had gone to extinguish, but people extinguish every day. Yes, Lakes might be changing, but what are the odds that, out of the thousands of rebirths in the Lake that happened that day, something would happen to his father? He had to believe this now, for Rocky’s sake.
“Hey kid, you’re just in time to help me make lunch,” he said.
“Ugh,” Rocky replied.
Julian pushed his fears away and roped Rocky into lunch prep. He concentrated on the process, on the motions, pushing away the dread threatening him, like the clouds that threatened to tear open outside.
Together, they made soy-cheese macaroni, but they only had enough for one serving. They also had one tofu brick left in the fridge. Rocky, of course, hated tofu, but Julian had a trick to make it palatable—he fried it in corn syrup oil and added chocolate soy milk to it, making a slimy sweet dessert.
As they ate lunch, Julian reminisced about all the harvest meals they had eaten before—it was a good way to keep his mind occupied. Coconut curry chicken was Julian’s favorite. Rocky loved apples—he said he still sometimes had dreams of the candied apples and pie they had at the harvest fair two years ago.
Julian pushed through the rest of the day, anxiously counting down the time to 6:00 p.m. Everything might be just fine. His father would show up on a new life and their house would be saved.
And here was Rocky, still on his One. He had no idea of the meat grinder of a world that was waiting for him. A world that would begin for him in just a few short hours if their father didn’t return . . .
The rest of the afternoon, they played video games together until it was time to drive out to the bus stop to pick up Dad.
At 6:00 p.m., they sat in the car at the bus stop. Rocky was lost in a game on Julian’s phone. Julian watched as rebirths in their paper gowns got off the buses. Most had family or friends there to greet them, but some didn’t—confused strangers in paper gowns, shuffling through the cold into the heated bus terminal. Was someone coming for them? Who were they, anyway?
Who were any of these people?
Fours. Fives. Sixes. Sevens. Even an elderly Eight.
What had they lost in all of their lives? What colors were they missing? What flavors?
The buses cycled through the lot, a new one arriving every fifteen minutes. For the bus drivers, this was their life. They checked in every day at work and carried rebirths back from the Lake. The rebirths were just following the life score, devised by actuaries in Lake Tower, who were also just doing their jobs. Julian suddenly remembered the little fat man with the bald head at the Tasty’s. It was a job for him, dishing out the flavored protein bricks that kept everyone’s new bodies fed. All these people, with their multiple lives, and their appetites and hungers and desires, spreading out among Lakeshore valley, across these lands, stretching on to cover America and beyond, out to every unclaimed scrap of land available. Each was a tooth in a giant gear that kept grinding and grinding for the benefit of a select few.
This was the world that Julian was born into: a kaleidoscopic tapestry of lives—nine per person, or maybe less now?—raying out across the world until it consumed everything. Not so long ago, he had dreamed of living alone in a shack on a Lake-less island in the Indian Ocean. Now, he realized what a naive dream that had been. Even there, the machinery of the human race would surely come for him.
He saw glimpses and fragments of these apocalyptic visions in all the faces climbing off the buses. But none of those faces belonged to his father.
He allowed himself to sink into a powerful, deep pool of envy for Nicholas Hawksley. A boy outside the system who never needed to burn. He could hoard his lives until he needed them in an emergency, or to prolong his old age to the absolute limits of the human life span. Julian had a vision of an elderly Nicholas Hawksley sitting in a room at the top of Lake Tower, looking out giant windows, crunching into a bright green sour apple—eight more lives left to live.
Julian looked over at his brother. He had fallen asleep, his head propped against the window, Julian’s phone limp in his hands.
Exhausted from the worry, Julian laid his head back as well, and he drifted in and out of a fitful sleep. In his spectral half dreams, he saw that cat again, with the white eye patch. It was sitting on the hood of Julian’s car, staring into the window, watching him, its tail flicking like it was about to ambush its prey.
His eyes shot open, and the cat was gone. A dream, it must’ve been.
He looked around. It was dark out now, the loud thrum of the cicadas drowning out the occasional hiss of the air brakes from the buses, which by now had slowed to a trickle. One every half hour maybe.
One or two rebirths milled around in the bus stop.
It was almost midnight.
Their father wasn’t coming home.
Chapter 34
THERE WAS A BANGING ON THE DOOR.
The sunrise was a faint orange glow quietly smoldering from behind the clouds. It was barely morning.
That’s when the nurses arrived.
Two nurses and a doctor stood at the door. Two of them were middle-aged men with dead eyes, in powder-blue robes. Behind them stood an older doctor holding a clipboard—a woman with frizzy hair and a Seven on her neck.
This woman introduced herself as Dr. Tazia, and she led her two colleagues inside, uninvited. Julian and Rocky were standing in the living room, still in their pajamas and underwear.
“What is this?” Julian asked. He flushed in a hot feeling of panic as it dawned on him that what he was seeing was actually happening—the nurses walking through his house like they had through Callum’s, taking notes and bagging evidence.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father reported for an appointment at the extinguishment clinic, but he failed to register with us after his rebirth.” Dr. Tazia’s voice dripped with the condescending authority of all the worst teachers at the academy.
Julian was cognizant enough to put those words into some kind of order and ask her back in bold-faced terms what she was trying to sugarcoat: “Is he . . . permadead?”
Her lips made a grim line, and she looked over to Rocky, who was clutching Julian’s arm.
“Unfortunately, we have to assume so,” she said.
It felt like the roof tore off the house, like the sky had cracked open, and a terrible black doom was descending upon all and everything.
The two male nurses were now going through the drawers in their father’s desk, in the corner of the living room.
“Because you are both under eighteen, we have to take you to the group home. Now, I know this might seem scary to you, but the home is a safe place.”
Julian grabbed Rocky close to his chest.
/>
“Get out of here! All of you!” he shouted.
Dr. Tazia tried to soothe him: “I know this is hard to understand.”
“This is our house,” Julian said, his voice hard and angry, almost in a growl.
Dr. Tazia became sterner. “Now, about that, I’m sorry that I have to inform you that, actually, this house belongs to the Adirondack Bank. Mortgage payments are long overdue, and we have no choice but to repossess the house.”
The lien. That was what all this burning was about in the first place—but maybe there was some loophole he could find. Some way to buy some time.
“If that’s true, then where is the bank person?”
“The Adirondack Bank is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of the Lakes. I’m here on their authority to seize this house.”
Julian grabbed Rocky and ran for the hallway, but the two male nurses stepped in front of them. The fatter one with the thick beard grabbed Julian by the arm. Julian tried to yank out of his grip, but the nurse pulled him so hard he felt his shoulder burn.
“Be gentle, Raymond,” Dr. Tazia said. “They’re just boys.”
“They should wait in the van,” the nurse said, a weary kind of authority in his voice, like he had done this many times before, and they had forgotten the simple fact that you put the kids in the van before anything else.
Dr. Tazia nodded, and the nurse gripped harder on Julian’s arm, twisting it. The nurse practically dragged Julian out to the van, the other nurse escorting Rocky. Rocky’s face was red, his eyes puffy, tears welling up in them.
They sat in the back of a van, and the nurse locked the door. Julian wanted to climb into the front, steal the keys, just start driving and never look back, but a metal grate separated the cabin. The grate extended over the back windows too. It was like they were arrested, like they were common criminals.
All Julian could do was watch as the nurses carried out their possessions and tossed them into a crate they had set up outside the door. They even took the shoebox out from under his bed—the one stuffed with all of Julian’s memories—and tossed it into gray plastic bins labeled “Property of the Department of the Lakes.”