Walking down the hallway, I feel both tired and very alert. The omming had the same effect as a long nap. The nausea from earlier is gone. If only the backpack were gone, I might actually feel good.
In the dining hall, we eat as much as possible, not knowing when our next meal will be. I hope the Sentries don’t notice us shoving our faces full of the disgusting food.
We’re going through the specifics of the plan for the tenth time, when Mary says, “Where will we hide after the escape?”
We stare at her blankly.
“What kind of plan is this?” she asks, disgust in her voice.
“There was no plan until we had the StickFoot, so we didn’t get much further than that,” admits Silas.
Mary rubs her hands together. “I know where we can lay low for a while.”
“Spill it!” Silas says.
She sits up tall, enjoying the attention. “My brother’s been building a new house since February. He’s written me all about it. He hasn’t finished the plumbing yet, but it has a roof and a floor that we can sleep on.”
“Won’t he catch us?” Juda says.
“That’s the thing,” Mary says. “He ran out of money. He hasn’t been able to build anything new for months. He’s stuck living with my parents until he earns the rest of the money. It’s perfect!”
Silas looks wary. “I don’t know, Mary. If he finds us––”
“He won’t, and even if he did, he’s my brother. He wouldn’t turn us in.”
Silas raises his eyebrow.
“It sounds risky,” Juda says.
“What’s your brilliant idea?” she asks him.
“Sleep outside,” he says.
She snorts. “And you think we won’t get caught out in the open?”
“Not if we hide—”
“The Bees will catch you if you stay outside. You think you can control your thoughts while you sleep?”
“I think she’s right,” I say, liking the sound of a roof over our heads. “How about we head for the house and check it out? If it doesn’t feel safe, we go somewhere else. Okay?”
Mary nods. “Good plan.”
Defeated, Juda says, “Okay.”
Silas, begrudgingly, agrees too.
“Next item on the agenda,” Mary says, sounding very official. “Where are we going for the long term?”
We eye one another, wondering who will speak first.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” says Silas. “And I think we should head west.” His voice gets wispy on the word “west.”
“What’s west?” I ask.
“A fantasy,” says Mary.
“No,” says Silas emphatically. “It’s real. It’s where the people went who lost the Dividing. Even Ram says it’s true.”
“It’s a fantasy that it’s any better than here,” Mary says.
“At least it will be different.”
“Do you know how far it is?” asks Mary.
“Not exactly, but—”
“Far, like really, really far. We’d need a car or train or something.”
“There are cars all over the place,” Silas says.
Juda interrupts them. “I don’t know whether ‘the West’ exists or not, but, uh, I won’t be joining you. After I see my mother, I’m going back to Manhattan.”
“What are you talking about?” I say, horrified.
“A war is starting, and I can’t leave the Convenes behind. So many of them are sick or dying. It wouldn’t be right.”
“We don’t know for sure that there’s a war,” I say, hating the neediness in my voice. “That was just Rayna—”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about going back to help the Laurel Society and your Nana,” he says.
I look away. Of course he’s right.
“You can’t go back!” Mary says, as loud as she dares. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s not like the Unbound have treated us so much better,” he says with bitterness.
“No one wants to kill you,” she says.
“Are you sure about that?” Juda says. “I think Jeffrey in session would be pretty happy to see my head on a spike.”
Luke Tanner made it clear he didn’t want any of the Manhattan Five in Kingsboro, but I’m not about to tell Juda about him.
People in the cafeteria begin to look at us.
“This is a useless argument,” I whisper. “We aren’t even free yet.” I’m too overwhelmed to consider that Juda might want to go back to the island. We went through so much to escape it. Once he sees Rose, he won’t be able to leave her, right?
“How about you, Mina? What will you do?” Silas asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. It’s been one day at a time for so long. Seeing Juda is all I’ve cared about, and he’s here beside me. I don’t know what else I want.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Mary says with a gentle smile.
“What about you, Mary?” I ask.
She shrugs, smiling. “Upstate? I don’t know. As long as I don’t have to wear khaki.”
Thirty
Mary and I wait as late as we can to return to the dorm, determined to avoid a fight with Connie and her cronies. We can’t afford any trouble tonight.
Mary is convinced we’ll be able to go to sleep without any harassment, but I can’t see how this will happen after our fight this morning. Connie was ready to rip my head off when we left.
When we arrive, Connie sits on a top bunk with both her friends.
“Gross. It’s back,” she says when she sees Mary. “And it’s caught a disease.” She means me.
The girls giggle like Connie is a genius with words.
Mary ignores her, going to her bed and pulling back her blanket.
“Are you sure that bed can support you, Meatball?” says Connie. “I’d hate for you to get hurt.”
Mary is breathing steadily, and I know she’s repeating one phrase over and over: I’ll never see her again. I’ll never see her again.
We have about five minutes until lights out. Neither of us plans to change out of our clothes. Mary says the other girls won’t think this is odd since she never changes in front of them with the lights on.
Mary helps me climb into my bunk, using her hands to take some of the weight of the backpack. I land with a thud on the mattress.
A ball of something hits Mary in the back of the head. “Hey, Meatball! I’m talking to you!” Connie says, laughing.
You’ll never see her again, I try to transmit with a look.
“Hey, woolie!” says Connie looking at me. “Is this lezo trying to hook up with you?” She turns to her friends. “What do you guys think of a woolie/Meatball sandwich? Gross!”
The three of them shriek with laughter.
Mary turns to them, face red, and I hold my breath. “Shut your mouth. I’m warning you,” she says.
“Doesn’t look like you’ve ever shut your mouth, huh, Meatball?”
Mary walks to Connie’s bunk.
Don’t do it, Mary. Please.
She puts her hands on her hips. “Connie, since the moment you arrived in the Forgiveness Home, you’ve been lying about why you are here. You want these vapid friends of yours to think it’s because you blinkered your lady bug with Daniel Holmes, but I happen to know from my brother that you were caught feeling up Diana Flaunder. So maybe think again before you start calling other people ‘lezos.’”
Connie’s face goes from very pale to deep purple. She makes a choked sound, like kuh. She turns to her friends, saying, “The Meatball is a lying cow, right guys?”
They stare at her in silence.
“She’s just saying that because she wishes I was a lezo.”
The girls climb down from her bunk and climb into their own beds.
I stare at Mary in awe. Is she telling the truth?
Waiting to hear Connie rail and scream, I watch instead as she climbs under her blanket and turns her face to the wall.
&
nbsp; Mary gets into her own bed, and instead of the look of triumph that I expect, she looks sad. She was telling the truth. All this time, she’d been keeping a secret that she knew would shame and humiliate Connie, and she chose not to share it despite how nasty Connie was. She only revealed it tonight to protect our plan.
I’ve learned something big tonight, but it wasn’t about Connie. I learned Mary is a better person than I am.
I’m sure I’m too nervous to sleep, but the next thing I know, Mary is nudging me awake. She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t have to. She’ll go to the bathroom and, five minutes later, I’ll follow.
The moments after she leaves feel interminable. I’m paranoid every other girl in the room is awake, ready to start screaming the moment I get out of my bunk, but when it’s time, I carefully step down the ladder and don’t hear a sound. I tiptoe out of the room.
I debated a lot on whether or not I should bring the backpack with me. I decided the extra weight would cause the ladder steps to creak, so I left it behind. If I get caught in the hallway without it . . . I can’t bear to think what Solomon would do.
I step into the hall, looking both ways for Sentries. When I see the coast is clear, I hurry down the hallway and around the corner.
With relief, I step inside the restroom, which is enormous. Rusted lockers line one wall, and our showers are down a tiny corridor on my right. They’re moldy and old-fashioned, but I prefer them to the one at the Dixons.
I approach the toilet stalls, where Mary is supposed to be waiting. I knock on the door at the end, and she knocks back, both of us too nervous to speak.
I go into one of the other stalls, lowering the toilet seat to sit. And then we wait.
Juda and Silas are due here by 12:30 am. It can only be 12:05. Why did we come so early? Waiting is torture.
We had argued about whether or not Mary and I should meet the boys in the kitchen, but it was finally determined that it would be too dangerous for us without StickFoot, and they needed to come get us.
I don’t regret the decision. I really don’t want to run into Solomon or Kalyb in a dark hallway.
Mary whispers, “I’m scared.”
“Me too,” I whisper back. “What will they do if they catch us?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “but I have a feeling none of us would remember each other when Solomon was done.”
A chill runs through me. What he did to me was awful—I now remember screaming and screaming—and the idea that it could get worse is terrifying.
I hear a rattling of the door. I hold my breath and raise my feet, in case another girl has decided to use the toilet.
I hear Juda’s voice. “Mina?”
I exhale. “Yes.”
“It’s about time,” says Mary.
When we exit our stalls, Silas and Juda are standing in the bathroom. Seeing us all in our tan uniforms, I wish we had the Smokers to camouflage us a bit.
“Any problems?” Mary asks them.
“Not yet,” Silas says. “Lift your feet.”
We do as he says, and, one at a time, he sprays our shoes with the StickFoot. Then he sprays our hands.
“Remember when you walk to step lightly and push your foot forward or you’ll activate the adhesive,” he says.
We all nod. He gave a long tutorial this afternoon.
“How’s your wrist?” I ask him.
“It hurts, but it’s major worth it,” he says, grinning.
Juda leans in, kissing me lightly on the forehead. “You look better.”
“So do you,” I say. His swollen lip has calmed down.
“Can we get out of here?” Silas says.
“Chill,” Mary says.
Juda pushes the bathroom door with his back, then peeks into the hallway. Once he’s sure it’s safe, he nods at us, and we file out. Silas quickly climbs up the wall and onto the ceiling. I want to laugh because he moves like some sort of bug.
“You next,” whispers Juda to Mary.
Mary grimaces. “Nope. I don’t want you staring at my butt.”
Juda laughs but then realizes she’s serious. He signals for me to go.
Putting my hands on the wall, I begin to ascend just like Silas taught me. My body feels like someone else’s—my back and shoulders throbbing with the memory of hulking rocks.
When I get to the ceiling, I panic. Looking at Silas, I know that the StickFoot will hold me, but convincing yourself to place your body upside down is a whole other thing.
Juda is soon next to me on the wall, smiling. He and Silas crawled across the ceiling to reach Mary and me, so he’s already done this. Was he nervous too?
He attaches one hand and one foot to the ceiling, and then the other hand and the other foot. I imitate him, and the next thing you know I am hanging upside down on the ceiling. Wow.
Mary climbs up quickly, and she is impressively graceful, but then she grew up using StickFoot like Silas.
Silas creeps across the ceiling toward the cafeteria while the rest of us follow. I try to focus on Juda’s feet so that I don’t look at the floor, which will make me lightheaded.
Walking on the floor through the hallway, the cafeteria seems close, but now it feels miles away.
The halls are deathly quiet except for the slight hwwwick hwwwick of our hands and feet sticking and unsticking from the ceiling. It sounds as loud as car horns to me, and I can’t imagine that the sound isn’t waking up Solomon, Kalyb, and the Sentries.
Silas suddenly stops, and I’m so surprised I almost lose my grip. He listens for a moment, frozen. I’m about to ask him what’s wrong, when I spot it––a Sentry coming up the hallway to our right. I swallow the cry that surges up my throat.
The Sentry moves casually, making rounds that he’s made a hundred times. He hasn’t spotted us yet, which seems absurd, since we’re hanging only a foot above his head.
He passes beneath me. I could reach down and touch his sandy blond hair. I hold my breath, starting a counting loop, hoping it will keep me calm.
1000. 999. 998.
He strolls toward the dorm, where we’ve just come from. Turning the corner, he passes out of sight.
I barely have time to exhale before Silas is moving again. He must be thinking the same thing as me: will the Sentry notice our empty beds?
My heart races like a hummingbird.
After several more turns, we reach the kitchen. Silas attempts to open the door from the ceiling, but the angle is too awkward. He has to shimmy down the wall and open it from the floor, which feels reckless. The rest of us return to the floor and hurry through.
The kitchen is huge, with long counters covered with crates of vegetables and grains. I hear a horrible crack and look over to see Silas biting into a raw carrot. “Sorry,” he says, putting it down.
I understand the urge. I’m so nervous, I need to do something and eating seems like a great idea. I find some nuts and consider filling my pockets, until I realize they’ll all fall out when I’m upside down again.
I watch Juda, who paces. We’re all nervous, but he’s got an extra level of anxiety. He doesn’t even know if his mother is alive.
I feel guilty that I’ve seen her and he hasn’t. I pray she’s okay.
I worry about all the “ifs” in our plan. I wonder about Mary’s brother’s house—if it will be safe, if we’ll be able to find food. Will Dr. Rachel help us see Rose? If so, will Rose be well enough to travel? Will Juda really go back to Manhattan?
There are so many questions. Have I really thought this through? We’re setting something huge in motion here, and we won’t be able to undo it once we go out the panel doors. We’ll be escapees and no longer subject to the good graces of the Unbound. Am I ready to be on the run again? The last time was hard enough and it ended in the death of two people.
My hands tremble. Has the Sentry already noticed we’re gone?
“Juda, maybe this is a bad idea,” I tell him.
“What?” he says, confused. “Wh
at’s wrong?”
“Someone might get hurt.”
“I have to go, Mina. I have to see Ma.”
“I know you do, but maybe I should stay. Maybe I should profess my sins, go back to the Dixons, and—”
A noise comes from above, a buzzing that sounds like a Bee but then increases to a vibrating drone, like a car engine.
“It’s time!” says Silas.
“We have to go,” Juda says, grabbing my hand and leading me to the wall. Silas and Mary scurry up and perch by the panel doors.
Juda looks at me. “You’re coming with me, Mina Clark. Don’t even think about saying no.”
I smile weakly.
I climb up the wall, so nervous I can barely remember how to place my hands.
An enormous clank fills the room as the panel doors open, but instead of dropping straight down and stopping, like we anticipated, they keeping moving and lifting to the sides. They continue toward the ceiling, straight for us. “Out of the way!” says Silas.
I manage to get out of the way just in time, but the door catches Juda’s ankle, and the next thing I know, he’s tumbling to the ground.
He lands with a horrible thud.
As I wait for him to move, I hear a terrifying sound. Food is dropping into the kitchen, and it’s about to land right on top of Juda.
He opens his eyes, and they grow huge as he sees an enormous crate aiming straight for his head.
He rolls out of the way the second before it lands.
I scramble back down the wall.
“No, Mina!” he cries. “Go! The door will close!”
“I’m not leaving you!” I say, reaching the floor.
The creaking of metal signals the panels beginning to close.
“Come on!” says Mary.
“Go!” I tell her and Silas.
I run to Juda, forgetting to step lightly. The StickFoot on my shoes adheres to the floor and I trip immediately.
By now Juda is standing, and he helps me up. Silas and Mary are gone and the doors are halfway closed.
“Hurry!” I say.
Running to the wall, we shimmy up like monkeys avoiding a flood. We scurry across the ceiling and reach the panels just as they’re about to close. Juda shoves his body in between the metal slabs, blocking them from closing any further. The huge gears grind in protest.
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