MILA 2.0: Redemption

by Debra Driza

  I gave her a small lead, then rose. I squeezed the spot on my ear lobe.

  Enhance audio?

  Yes.

  Magnify 10x.

  I heard no human activity beyond Hannah’s retreating footsteps. No sign of life from the hallway beyond my room. Just the faint crackle and hum of the heating unit, as it worked to warm the drafty halls.

  Stealing a page from Lucas’s book, I linked to the video cameras in the dorm.

  Video feed: Intercept.

  Loop parameters: 60 minutes.

  After a little bit of haggling, I realized that one hour was the longest loop the system would accept. Better than nothing. We’d just have to return in time, if we didn’t want our night wanderings to show up on the feed.

  I crept out into the hallway, easing the door behind me. Once I made it to the safety of the stairwell, I summoned my new text function.

  Abby, did you see her?

  Three steps later, I had a response.

  Yes. Went out south door. Sharon is with her.

  J.D. too, came a reply from Hunter. Same direction.

  That correlated with the blue dot that blinked in my head, marking Hannah’s position. In the bag Lucas had given me, I’d found another prize. A tiny GPS chip. I might not like it when people inserted them into my body, but I wasn’t opposed to sticking one in my roommate’s favorite pair of shoes.

  As I watched it move, I knew we’d guessed right. She was headed to the vacant building. They all were.

  My team converged on the bottom floor, speaking in hushed whispers. I hadn’t been sure how to group us at first, but Samuel had suggested that we’d probably be less suspicious if we were caught all together, like we were planning some massive prank.

  The landscaper would only go for the phony boyfriend story once.

  Lucas had checked in an hour ago, and now I had to try to put him in the back of my mind. Whatever happened now was up to me. I was driven by human curiosity, assisted by android functionality. The next time I entered the dorm, perhaps all the mysteries of Montford would be solved.

  The campus streetlamps cast eerie shadows as we walked across the field without speaking. I wondered at the absence of security guards in this area. Then it hit me. If there were security guards stationed here, they would see the grant kids, heading for the vacant building. Maybe the dean banished them on certain nights.

  Somehow, over the course of the last two days, my fears had shifted. The bomb still terrified me; that was a given. But now I was haunted by another terror: failing to save Holland’s next round of victims.

  I checked back in with the blue GPS dot that marked Hannah’s location. Before we’d left the RV, I’d downloaded blueprints of the entire campus. There was no question Hannah was inside the locked building. The coordinates matched up perfectly.

  Something else was amiss, though.

  Expand.

  The grid appeared before me, glowing a ghostly blue. I ran a comparison between the GPS location and the blueprints.

  Error: Results incompatible.

  The blueprints hadn’t shown any basements on campus. But the GPS didn’t lie. Hannah’s coordinates matched up with this building. But not inside it. Below it.

  I stepped toward the building’s security camera, motioning the others back. Positioning myself directly under the camera felt all kinds of wrong, but I forced my feet to stay put.

  I wanted to get this over with and get inside.

  I extracted the copies of Hannah’s eyes from my database, then manipulated the code that would allow her eyes to serve as a cloak for mine. I shivered when the program indicated the change had been implemented. The idea of stealing someone’s eyes was disturbing.

  I summoned Hannah’s username. The security system responded.

  Initiate retinal scan.

  The red line of the laser began its downward descent, scanning my eyes from top to bottom. When nothing happened, I started to worry that the program wouldn’t work. If the alarm went off now . . .

  Scan accepted.

  The door clicked open, and I led the rest of the group inside after determining there were no humans on the ground floor.

  Once the door closed, we were swallowed by darkness.

  Night vision: Activated.

  Samuel snapped on a small flashlight, and the soft glow revealed a surprise.

  The room didn’t look like anything special. Or scary. Ceiling-to-floor shelves lined the middle of the room, crowded with boxes of varying sizes. There was a pile of power tools in a corner: drills, hammers, a jigsaw. Dean Parsons hadn’t been lying, necessarily. It was hard to believe that anything of interest to us would happen here, but I knew that somewhere there had to be a staircase, leading down. I told my team what to look for, and branched off to the left.

  If I used my GPS and followed Hannah’s path, it should lead me right where I needed to go.

  In fact, it led me right to a row of oversized appliance boxes. Baffled, I turned to tell the others, when I noticed something in the shadows. One of the boxes had been shoved away from the row, as if to make room for something. Or someone.

  Bile rose in my throat as I stared at the markings on the floor. I reached down to pull open the trapdoor, but my fingers paused on the carved handle. I didn’t want to go down there again. Or do those tests.

  With a shudder, my hand slipped from the handle. I rose and backed away. He was expecting me, but I couldn’t do this anymore.

  I had to go home. Before it was too late, and I was in too deep.

  I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the tiny indentation. Then I turned and ran.

  I blinked away the memory and stared down at what was apparently a trapdoor. Whatever it led to was something that had scared Sarah into leaving.

  “Over here,” I said.

  I dug the handle out of the floor, gently eased the door open, and began to climb down a set of rickety metal stairs. The weight of my body made them sway and creak. I hated going in blind. If someone had followed us, we would end up sandwiched in on both ends.

  “Samuel, can you stay upstairs, and let us know if anyone tries to follow?”

  “Sure. And if I see someone, I’ll just pretend to be a box. They’ll never notice me in this junk heap.”

  With Abby and Hunter right behind me, I headed forward. I could feel the angle of the hallway that extended out before us. It sloped down, gently but significantly.

  15-degree angle.

  Every step only intensified my anxiety.

  Hannah’s path glowed like a beacon in my head.

  The walls were cold and concrete, the flooring the same. The tunnel was barren. If I’d ventured in here by accident, I’d have no reason not to turn back.

  Finally, from around an upcoming corner, I heard a muffled voice.

  There was a change in the temperature. It was warmer here, like something was generating energy.

  Temperature increase: 5.2 degrees in 55 seconds.

  Something ahead of us was creating heat. And the voices: they were getting louder.

  A muffled shriek made us all freeze.

  Voice recognition: Match.

  Hannah.

  I sped up until I reached the corner, then peered around the edge. Abby and Hunter joined me. From where we stood, the floor sloped down even farther, into a wide-open space the size of a large auditorium.

  But that wasn’t what caught our attention. Instead, it was the sight of Hannah, slowly climbing to her feet after what looked like a fall. Then she shook it off and reached above her head to grip things as though she were rock climbing, her legs bending and scrabbling for purchase beneath her.

  Only there was no rock wall in front of her. There was nothing but air.

  I located the other four grant kids too.

  There was Sharon, throwing punches in what appeared to be a street brawl with an invisible assailant. Her head whipped back and her grunt echoed off the walls.

  Across the room, Claude and J.D. sprin
ted, Claude ducking behind an invisible wall, J.D. diving into a perfect somersault and regaining his feet, all in one fluid motion. Both of them held their right hands in front of their bodies. Then J.D. whirled, kicking out with his leg and extending his arm, his face a mask of panic. Claude swooped in behind him and executed a flying tackle . . . at thin air. He hit the floor with a crash and a groan, but was back on his feet in seconds. Sometimes, they seemed to notice their surroundings. Claude would start to run, then slow and shake his head, as if dazed by where he was. J.D.’s kick would end halfheartedly, or he’d drop both hands to his sides.

  Off on his own, Ben sat on the ground, occasionally curving his hands around an invisible steering wheel, but mostly just staring into space.

  Abby mouthed something at me, her eyes wide. “Drugs?”

  I shook my head. I’d been thinking that at first, but not now. Not with this. This all looked too familiar. Almost like a video game.

  My suspicions were confirmed when I spotted Mr. Grassi on an elevated platform behind a giant monitor. He wore a headset, his fingers flying across a keyboard. From his vantage point, he had a clear view of all the students, but not of us.

  Zoom.

  The monitor enlarged, and I could see there were five names arranged in a column:

  Hannah

  Claude

  Sharon

  J.D.

  Ben

  Beside each name was a score. Hannah’s was highest, by far. There was a big drop-off after that, with Claude coming in last.

  I wasn’t interested in the scores, though. I wanted to see what these kids were seeing.

  Access networks in range.

  Several appeared, including the main one for the school. But only one caught my attention.

  GVirtAff.

  GVA: Grassi’s Virtual Afficionados.

  I hijacked the network, and in an instant, my entire view changed. Instead of empty space, I saw threats, everywhere. Masked men with knives attacked Claude and J.D. Done with the wall, Hannah now hovered on a tight rope in bare feet, arms outstretched. Below her was a pit of sharp rocks. Behind her, a masked assassin. Sharon fought off a brawny man in a bedroom, with narrow eyes and an evil grin. Ben was inside an SUV, trying to evade another SUV with a gun pointing out the window.

  “What?” Hunter mouthed, when I grabbed the wall for support. These reminded me way too much of scenes from a different underground lair, below a building I’d once visited in Washington, DC. Grassi was using virtual reality on these kids . . . and it had Holland’s stamp all over it. When Hannah and J.D. talked about testing, I thought they were talking about schoolwork. Or SATs. Now I had a feeling this is what they meant.

  Text app: Initiated.

  Virtual reality. Soldier stuff. Stinks of Holland.

  Before my team could respond, I gathered more data. I didn’t need my android functionality, as Grassi’s monitor was flashing numbers. Not scores, I saw, but vital signs.

  Heart rate, respiration, blood pressure.

  But how was Grassi getting the information? They had no monitors, no headsets. No pulse oximeters that I could see.

  Despite the heat of the room, a chill ran through my body. I could monitor that kind of data remotely, but Grassi couldn’t. I doubted his headset would help much.

  Unless these kids had some kind of monitoring device on the inside . . .

  It was terrible to contemplate, but I knew I had to be right. I searched for the shadows of signals that had to exist.

  Five appeared, one for every student.

  Trace signal HANNAH005WTSN.

  I’d known what to expect, but I had to stifle a gasp. My throat went desert dry. Before my eyes, thin bands of light appeared, like yellow-and-blue LED streamers. The disturbing part was that the lines led from Grassi’s console . . . straight to the back of each student’s neck.

  Images flew into my head. The memory of me as Sarah, rubbing the nape of my neck and feeling an indentation there.

  And then, back in Mr. Grassi’s classroom. I’d felt a zap in that same exact spot, and for a split second, my security system had recognized something intrusive. Was someone trying to monitor my data just then? And, if so, who?

  The horror spread from my throat through my entire body, until every fabricated muscle felt incapable of movement.

  And then horror turned to fear when an alert notified Grassi of an unauthorized user. I mouthed one word to Abby and Hunter.

  “Go.”

  But I couldn’t leave until I knew for sure. While Grassi frowned down at his monitor and started switching off programs, releasing the kids from their electronic prisons one by one, I kept my focus on the spot where the network had connected to Hannah.

  Zoom.

  Her skin came into focus; with my enhanced vision, I could see the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck.

  I could see an oversized freckle just below the base of her skull. I zoomed in on Ben, who was still sitting. He had an identical mark, in an identical spot. My stomach plummeted as my suspicions were confirmed.

  They’d been implanted with chips. That’s how the virtual-reality platform was able to remain wireless. These kids—all of them—had undergone experimental surgery. And if they had, I guessed, so had Sarah.

  A loud beep emitted from Grassi’s system. He half rose, lips parted in surprise. “Looks like someone’s trying to steal our juice. We need to shut down for the evening.”

  They’d be leaving any second. Heading directly for me.

  I backed away, hoping he was too engrossed in his system to notice. Once I got to the corner, I could race for the trapdoor.

  I was almost there when my heel hit something. The object kicked up and smacked against the concrete.

  Crack.

  Grassi’s head whipped up. “Who’s there?”

  With a stealthy exit now impossible, there was only one option left.

  I turned and fled.

  I ran the way we’d come, up the slight incline, after Hunter and Abby.

  “Who has the flashlight? Hand it over!” Grassi’s voice followed me down the passageway, along with the smack-smack-smack of his footsteps. Luckily, I had no problem maneuvering in the dark.

  Human threat detected: 30 ft.

  I ran for the trapdoor, not daring to look over my shoulder. I couldn’t waste even a fraction of a second. Once they rounded that corner, and his flashlight caught me . . .

  As I ran, my sensors analyzed Grassi’s position in relation to mine.

  Based on current speed, escape without detection unlikely.

  I yanked the hood of my sweatshirt up to hide my hair and sprinted.

  The stairs leading up were empty, and the door at the top flung wide open. Hunter and Abby must have already made it up into the main room. I started up after them. The metal steps rocked and swayed as my sneakers slammed the metal rungs.

  Just as my hand reached the top, I caught a flash of light bouncing off the wall in front of me.

  “This building is off-limits. If you don’t stop now, you’ll be expelled!”

  My body jolted at the sound of Grassi’s voice, but I didn’t hesitate. I bolted through the opening, slamming the door shut the moment I was on firm ground.

  Not that there was any way to lock it.

  The others were congregated by the outside door, staring at me in horror.

  “Run!” I urged.

  Samuel yanked it open and we darted outside.

  “Now what? There’s no way we can get back to the dorm before they spot us,” Samuel said.

  “Go,” I whispered, waving them on. “I have an idea.”

  I turned to the security camera, knowing I had only moments to spare. I wasted several of those moments signing in and waiting for the retinal scan. I heard the clatter of the trapdoor being thrown open.

  We were almost out of time.

  With one last breath, I communicated with the system, running data until I found what I needed. A thing that I hadn’t been sure e
xisted, until this very moment.

  Initiate emergency lockdown.

  Processing request . . .

  I backed away, urging the system to hurry. The footsteps inside were almost to the door.

  I took two more steps back. I hadn’t been quick enough.

  Request granted.

  Lockdown commencing.

  Had it worked?

  I heard the snap of a lock bolting into place, a second before there was pounding on the door.

  “What the hell?” That was Grassi’s angry voice, signaling that they were locked inside. For now.

  I didn’t know how long it would take Grassi to reverse the lockdown. Minutes at most, I figured. That gave us just enough time to get back up to our dorm rooms unnoticed.

  Only if Grassi didn’t call security first.

  Up ahead, the others were just reaching the dorms. Samuel ushered Hunter and Abby inside, but waited for me, gesturing frantically with his hand.

  Hurry.

  I sprinted until the cold air blew back my hood. I snatched it back with one hand, without decreasing my speed.

  When I was a few feet away, I waved Samuel on, catching the door when he complied.

  “Faster,” I told Samuel. We all needed to be back in our rooms and our beds. I rushed inside behind him, then reconnected the alarm to the system.

  Abby was still in the stairwell. I grabbed her hand and pulled her up behind me. When we reached the hall, we speed-walked toward our rooms.

  I tore open Hannah’s door, dumping my shoes in her closet. My change into pajamas was performed in record time, and then I went right for the bed, throwing back the covers and climbing in. My heart continued its racing beat for another ten seconds while I waited. And listened. I had no idea how Grassi would proceed from here. Would there be a check on all the students? Would they suspect students, or would they think it was an outside job? Would Grassi call the police? No, not unless he wanted to expose his secret project.

  My heart continued its frantic beat but the pace gradually slowed as the minutes ticked by. That was when I could finally start to make sense of what I saw.

  No wonder the grant students were tired. No wonder they were taking drugs. They worked all day and trained all night in a terrifying virtual reality, directed by an adult who was supposed to be their teacher. Their friend. All trust had to be ruined by now, as he put them through dangerous simulations and monitored their progress by embedding chips in their bodies.