They never even received a trial. They just vanished. My dad had been a philosophy professor, and my mom had been a genetic engineer. At least before all the research facilities and universities were placed under government control. My mom quit her job because she said the UNA just wanted to use her research to develop biological weapons.
I never found out exactly why both my parents got seized when they did, although I assume it was partly because of my mom’s refusal to cooperate. I was told their old jobs had just been covers anyway, and that they’d been plotting to form a terrorist cell and assassinate government leaders.
For a long time, I was certain this was a lie. But these days I’m no longer sure what to believe. I loved my parents deeply, and I still hate the government for what they did to them. But it’s also true that the UNA succeeded in restoring order. There are no more bombs going off in buses, or people dying on the streets in rebel attacks. Perhaps accepting the inconvenience of being controlled by the government is actually the price of safety, like Minister Harka says.
Sometimes I feel angry at my parents for doing whatever it was that got them taken. They must have known I’d be stranded and sent to an orphanage if they got caught. Why would they jeopardize our family like that if they truly loved me?
I assume by now they’re probably dead, because prison conditions are harsh in the UNA. I often try to pretend that the first ten years of my life were a dream, and I was always an orphan. It’s easier that way.
I sneak a look at my classmates watching the screen. For once they look excited, probably hoping to see some on-screen violence. Usually their faces are slack with boredom, their minds dulled from taking government-prescribed thought-pills. The thought-pills are meant to increase concentration and help us do well in school, although they just seem to make most kids sleepy. They’ve never had much effect on me.
In fact, I’ve always felt slightly different from most of my classmates. This is partly because orphans with dissident parents aren’t too popular, but also because the things other kids bond over—like military parades and government war movies—just don’t interest me much. And the things that I love, like music and books, don’t seem to interest them.
“Oh my God!” Melissa yelps, startling everyone.
At the same instant, another girl shrieks, “Look!”
I stare up at the screen as a figure steps into view.
The instant I see his face, I gasp. I expected to see a menacing juvenile delinquent. Someone with a shaved head and blackened teeth, with curved talons for fingernails. Carrying a blood-spattered weapon.
Instead, I see a remarkably good-looking teenage boy staring defiantly into the camera lens. No weapon, no blood, no talons. His dark brown hair is disheveled, and his eyes are a magnetic shade of blue, set above high cheekbones. He’s lanky, but muscular. Wearing beat-up jeans but no shirt, displaying his tanned, lithe torso.
The strangest thing of all is that the more I stare at the contours of his face, the more I feel like I know this boy from somewhere. But of course that’s impossible. I instantly dismiss the feeling. He’s just a random Unanchored Soul fending for his life on a prison island, while I’m here on the mainland, on a school-sponsored field trip.
Still, I feel oddly drawn to him for some reason. His blue eyes are piercing and intelligent.
“Ew, he looks so wild,” Melissa spits. “Like an animal.” Other kids instantly chime in with comments.
“I bet he hasn’t bathed in a month!”
“Or a year!”
“He doesn’t even own a shirt. . . .”
Our earpieces begin playing classical music to calm us.
“Quiet!” Ms. Baines admonishes, but no one listens to her, least of all me. I’m still mesmerized by the boy.
He’s gesturing with his hands as his eyes remain locked on the camera. At the same time, I see his lips start moving and I realize that he’s talking. He looks intense and focused, like he’s trying to convey an important message.
I speak up, startling everyone including myself. “Can you turn the volume up?”
The docent glances over at me. “There’s no audio. We can’t risk inmates trying to corrupt innocent minds with their madness.”
“Yes, yes,” Ms. Baines seconds, glowering at me for asking an innocent question. “This boy’s probably speaking in tongues.”
“Someone should put him down like a rabid dog,” a chunky kid named Jonas mutters. He gets some murmurs of agreement.
“Stop it!” Ms. Baines snaps. She glances over at the docent sheepishly, like our class is embarrassing her. Then she turns back to us. “The island will take care of Unanchored Souls like this boy.” Her voice rises in pitch. “The island knows what to do with savage teenagers who don’t fit in!”
On-screen, the boy continues to talk and gesture fiercely. His hands dash and twirl, drawing complex figures in the air. I realize he’s trying to use sign language to communicate his message, but I still can’t understand.
It’s then that another figure emerges from a cluster of trees behind the boy.
This second figure is huge and menacing—a good head taller than the first one—and he’s wearing a long black robe. I can’t see his face clearly.
“Whoa. They’re gonna fight!” Jonas and his friends begin yammering. My heart starts beating faster.
“We can dim the screen,” the docent says, no doubt trying to protect our tender eyes. But Ms. Baines interrupts him.
“Don’t. It’s important that they see this.”
I watch as the dark figure edges closer, head down, slowly moving up behind his intended victim. The blue-eyed boy is still looking at the camera, oblivious.
“I can’t take it!” a girl cries. But she keeps watching, and so do I, the breath stuck in my throat. I’m surprised the boy hasn’t heard anything yet, like the crackling of twigs underfoot. But the dark figure is moving forward with methodical precision, like he’s done this many times before.
Now he’s twenty paces away from the boy.
Now fifteen.
Now ten.
Now five.
At the very last second, the boy’s eyes widen, and he spins sideways. Melissa and her friends scream. The attacker lunges forward, his mouth twisted into a toothy snarl. I now see that his face is painted bloodred, with black lines rimming his eyes and lips.
The blue-eyed boy raises an arm, and surprisingly, I catch a flash of something sharp and silver hidden in his palm. It looks like a knife. Almost like he was expecting the attack and was just biding his time.
Then the image pops and slips into a dizzying array of electronic glitches. Everyone gasps. The screen cuts to black.
The docent looks truly alive for the first time. My classmates start babbling:
“Dude, what happened?”
“We want to see!”
“Bring it back up!”
“We lose the satellite feed sometimes,” the docent explains, entering a code on a touch-screen pad. “Not often, but it happens.”
Our class is getting noisier, and Ms. Baines shushes everyone. Our earpieces are practically blasting classical music now. A moment later the screen flares to life again.
But the blue-eyed boy and the dark figure are both gone. It’s just the trees, the grassy plain, the buildings, and that strange stone staircase, sitting there in a lifeless tableau.
Goose bumps run up and down my arms. The boy might be dead, unless he did indeed have a knife. Around me everyone is speculating about what might have happened.
The boy definitely didn’t look like he belonged on the island to me, but supposedly no one can tell from appearances. An Unanchored Soul is invisible to the eye. Antisocial tendencies cut across skin color, gender, looks, and everything else. Which is why the GPPT is so important.
At least I have nothing to worry about, I think. Of the millions of kids who take the test every year, only one thousandth of 1 percent fail and get sent to the island. And I’ve never done a single thing that sugg
ests I’m a burgeoning psychopath. In fact, I’m pretty much the opposite of an Unanchored Soul. I get good grades, I keep my head down, and I look forward to the future.
While life as an orphan in the UNA might not be perfect, it could be a whole lot worse. So I know that the GPPT will show I pose no threat to anyone—let alone society itself.
Our class moves on to make way for another. Yet something about the blue-eyed boy on the video screen continues to linger in my mind and unsettle me just a tiny bit. What was he trying to tell us so desperately? And why did he look completely sane if he’s supposed to be an Unanchored Soul? For an instant, I wonder if it’s possible he got sent there by some fluke accident.
Then I put the thought right out of my mind. There’d have to be some kind of terrible mistake during the GPPT for such a thing to happen. And that would be inconceivable, because Minister Harka’s government—as it so often reminds us—never makes mistakes.
SCANNED
WHEN THE NEXT MORNING arrives, I slouch downstairs and sit at the long breakfast table at the orphanage, next to Sandy and Claudette, two other girls my age. I’ve lived with them for six years, but we’re not as close as we could be. We orphans tend to keep to ourselves, even as we live on top of one another. All of us know how much it hurts to lose people you care about, and it’s hard to risk forming close bonds again.
“Sleep well?” Sandy asks. I nod.
Sandy always smells like cherry lip balm and spends most of her time pining over government-promoted teen idols. Claudette is thin and studious with short black hair. Like many of the girls here, both of them lost their parents in the ongoing wars with Europe and Asia.
“Ready for our big day?” Claudette asks me, arching an eyebrow.
“I guess. You think anyone we know will fail?”
Claudette peers at me over her bowl of cereal. “Well, they probably won’t send any orphans to the island.”
“Really?” Sandy asks.
Claudette looks at her like she’s stupid. “Think about it. It’d be like the government admitting they screwed up if they sent one of us to the Forgotten Place. That they couldn’t fix our brains. They’ve raised us since we were little. What would it say about them and their orphanages if we turned out to be Unanchored Souls?”
“Good point,” Sandy agrees.
After breakfast we line up with dozens of other juniors and head outside to board our bus. The local testing arena isn’t far. Just a thirty-minute drive down the Megaway, the twenty-lane highway that cuts across New Providence like a thick gray ribbon. A decade ago the arena used to hold football games. But now it’s been enclosed and subdivided into thousands of tiny cubicles, each one housing a scanning machine.
As we drive, I look out the window at all the UNA billboards. Most of them display images of Minister Harka’s benevolent, smiling face. With his dark hair, hypnotic eyes, and rugged good looks, he appears both attractive and paternal. Even the large diamond-shaped white scar on his left temple, sustained in battle, seems to enhance his appeal. But he also seems curiously ageless. Although I see new pictures of him every day in the government media, he looks exactly like he did when I was eight. Of course no one else seems to notice this, or if they do notice, they don’t seem to care.
We eventually reach our destination and turn off the Megaway. In the distance, the covered testing arena resembles the hub of a small city. Doctors in white jackets lead teams of nurses into the gigantic domed structure, and mobs of kids cluster everywhere.
We drive down an access road and pull into the parking lot. Miles of buses and cars sparkle under the sun, as automated shuttles transport people inside. I hear a loud droning noise overhead, and I look out the window of the bus to see a military helicopter passing above us, flying low, its spiderlike shadow falling across the crowd.
On the surface everything seems disorganized. But as I look closer, I see there’s a network of guards, teachers, and social workers, guiding lines of kids along.
Our driver parks, and we disembark. Some kids look excited, while others look bored. I just feel vaguely annoyed that I have to take a test I already know I’ll pass.
I wonder how that blue-eyed boy felt on the day of his test, which probably wasn’t even that long ago. He must have suspected he was an Unanchored Soul, with malevolent, antisocial forces lurking inside his brain. I realize that even though he seemed lucid on-screen, it was probably some kind of act.
I gaze around, taking in the sights before me. I wonder how they even ship the few kids who fail the GPPT to the island. Planes? Helicopters? Boats? The whole system is shrouded in secrecy, but somehow it works.
We’re led onto one of the shuttles, which comes to a halt several minutes later at an entrance to the arena. After we exit the shuttle, a guard takes us through a brick opening into a noisy atrium. The sound of the teeming crowd echoes off the walls.
Sandy, Claudette, and I are shuffled into a long line. A government official walks down it, handing out paper cards with absurdly long numbers and bar codes printed on them.
Another official appears, barking orders through a megaphone: “Keep your GPPT scanning cards safe! Do not bend them. Do not tear them. These are important government documents! You will be led into a holding pen. When you hear the nurse call your number, you will follow her into your assigned testing cell!”
The man keeps walking. He repeats his speech all over again. I realize he probably spends his whole day dispensing instructions. A robot could do his job, and might even be nicer about it.
The line keeps moving relentlessly. Warm bodies press against me, reeking of sweat and perfume. Finally we reach a large octagonal waiting area decorated with framed photos of Minister Harka. I realize this must be one of the holding pens. I just stand there with Sandy and Claudette, getting jostled as more kids flood into the room.
But kids are exiting this room as well. On the other side of the vast space is a series of openings. They lead into narrow hallways lit with flickering fluorescent lights.
Every minute or so, a nurse appears from one of them and yells out a number. I check my paper card each time.
Sandy’s hair is lank, and her face has gone pale. “You’d think they’d have some soda pop machines in here,” she complains, twisting her fingers.
“You would think,” Claudette mutters. “But they don’t.”
I shift my weight from one foot to the other.
“Number 014-562-388?” an unsmiling nurse cries, poking her head out of a long hallway to my right.
She starts repeating the digits, practically screaming them. I glance down at my card and realize she’s calling my number. I double-check it quickly, like an eager government lotto winner, then blurt: “That’s me!”
I wave good-bye to Sandy and Claudette, and I make my way through the crowd toward the nurse.
She leads me past rows of closed doors until we reach an open room. She takes my card, swipes it in an electronic reader, and gestures for me to go inside. I do as she indicates. She turns to leave, and closes the door behind her.
Not sure what to do, I sit in the lone chair, smoothing down my pleated skirt. The chair is bolted to the cement floor in the center of the tiny room. I can still hear the noise of thousands of teenagers thrumming away in the holding pens outside, like I’m in an angry beehive.
I glance around my testing cell. It’s cold, lit by an overhead bulb, with nothing on the walls but peeling yellow paint. It’s like a cross between a dentist’s office and a school bathroom.
A laptop computer and a large silver box with wires running out of it sit next to me on top of a storage cabinet. Electrical cables and a strange metal halo hang from the ceiling above my head, just under the light.
I hear a knock at the door as it opens. A tall man in a white lab coat appears. “Alenna Shawcross?”
I’m surprised he’s using my name instead of a number. “That’s me.”
He nods. “Just making sure I got the right girl.”
/> As he walks into the room, I check out his government name tag. Oddly, there isn’t even a name on it, just a bunch of cryptic symbols.
The man stands next to me, tapping keys on the computer and fiddling with knobs on the silver box. “I’ll be your scanning tech today, Alenna. Roll up a sleeve, if you don’t mind.”
“You’ve done this before, right?” I babble, knowing it’s a stupid thing to ask. But I can’t stand getting shots or having blood taken. It always makes me nervous.
“Ten thousand times, give or take a few hundred.” He smiles and slips an electrode belt around my chest. I reluctantly roll up one sleeve of my blouse. “Now take a deep breath and hold it.” He adjusts the belt. “Now relax.”
Relaxing is hard, but I try to ignore the medical aspects of the GPPT. Then I notice that the tech already has a narrow syringe in his hand. Where did that come from?
“You’ll feel a small poke,” he says as he suddenly sticks the needle into the crook of my left elbow.
“Ouch!”
He depresses the plunger and shoots the scanning fluid into me, and then withdraws the needle with a grin. “C’mon. That wasn’t too bad, was it?”
As I rub my arm, he dims the light and starts lowering the metal halo from the ceiling. Right away, I begin feeling drowsy, but soon the pleasant sleepiness morphs into woozy seasickness.
“I feel kinda weird,” I manage to say through numbed lips. “Hard to talk . . .”
“Oh, that’s normal,” the tech replies blithely. He brings the metal halo down farther and places it around my head, gently pushing back my hair.
“I don’t have to . . . do anything . . . right?” I ask, my speech slurred. I’m afraid I’m going to faint.
“Naw, the machine does all the work.” He adjusts the halo, tightening the cold metal around my skull. “You can even fall asleep if you want. Most kids do, once the serum takes hold.”
“How long . . . does the test take?”
“Depends on the person.” He leans over and extracts an object from the top drawer of the cabinet. It looks like a candy bar. He unwraps it and hands it to me. It’s made of green plastic, with the texture of spongy foam.
The Forsaken (Forsaken - Trilogy) Page 2