Variant (13 page)

The shots up by the flag were fast and unending, and I wondered how soon it would be before Joel’s squad ran out of paint. We all carried spare packs, but there were hundreds of balls being fired.

Lily moved from tree to tree, and I tried to watch her and scan for bad guys at the same time. Most of them should be attacking the hill. The five minutes had to be close to up, and the game was going to end if no one got our flag down.

She left the cover of one pine and darted to another. Once she was in place, I moved from my rock and—

I never saw him before he shot, but as I ran I moved directly in front of someone in a ghillie suit, hidden in the grass.

“Medic!” I shouted, sitting down on a log. A moment later my shooter called out as well, two blue splotches on his shoulder.

Mason ran over to me and crouched for a moment. There was laughter in his voice. “You still haven’t fired your gun, Fish.”

“The V’s have lost the hill, and their flag has been lowered,” the bullhorn blared. “The timer is off.”

Lily motioned for Mason. “Sorry, Benson. We can’t wait.”

I watched them leave. Mason seemed to know what he was doing—much more so than I did. But Lily was a pro, moving as quickly and deftly as a deer through the forest.

When they were far enough from me that I wouldn’t risk their position, I yelled again. “Medic!”

There was silence for a moment, the hum of a distant four-wheeler the only sound. The guy in the ghillie suit spoke.

“So, Benson,” he said, stretching his back and then leaning against a stump, “are you still happy with your choice?”

I looked over at him, trying to recognize his face under the camouflage. Isaiah.

“What choice is that?”

He pulled a tube of paintballs from his belt and began refilling his gun. “Your choice of gangs. Have the V’s been everything you wanted?”

I kept my gaze on the forest around me, waiting for Jane to appear. “It’s better than the others.”

He closed the plastic cap on the tube and then looked over at me. I avoided his eyes.

The bullhorn blasted. “The Society has raised its flag!”

Isaiah seemed to ignore the game. “Why are the V’s better?”

“Because you’re crazy. Isn’t that enough?” I cupped my hands and yelled again. “Medic!”

“I didn’t mean the Society,” he said. “But don’t you think you fit a little better with Havoc?”

“What does that mean?” I glanced at his eyes, which were still motionless.

“You seem like you’d fit in well there,” he said simply. “You’re aggressive, you’re more concerned about yourself than others, you’re—”

I felt my finger almost unconsciously slide onto the trigger of my gun. “I’m more concerned about myself than others?”

His voice was calm and even. “Isn’t that true?”

“If anyone in this place can be accused of being selfish, it’s you and your Boy Scouts. If you wanted to help anyone, you’d just call off security and we could all climb over that wall.”

Isaiah was completely cold—he didn’t seem to react at all. “So we’d be over the wall. What would that do? Getting over the wall hasn’t helped anyone in the past. Surely by now you’ve heard that no one ever escapes.”

“Has anyone ever tried with a big group? All seventy-two of us? The guards can’t kill everyone.”

Isaiah paused. “How many of us have to escape to make the deaths of the others worth it?”

“Huh?”

He leaned forward, setting his gun on the ground beside him. “Let’s say all seventy-two try to escape. What are acceptable losses? Ten? Twenty? If it means that you’re safe and free, how many deaths are too many?”

I shook my head and turned away from him. There were still shots in the distance, and the occasional yell, but the only movement I saw was a fat brown squirrel sitting in a tree, chewing something.

“You’re in the Society,” Isaiah continued, “whether you want to be or not. This school is a society, and we all have our roles. There are those who want to keep people alive, and there are those who want people to die.”

I shot him a look. “Did Walnut want to die?”

“He knew the rules. He knew the consequences.”

I cupped my hands again. “Medic!”

There was no sign of Jane.

Without looking back at him, I spoke. “So when does it end? How long will you keep people inside here and alive?”

“Until conditions require us to leave. I really don’t know what you’re fighting against, Benson. You have everything here you could ever want in a school. Food, education, recreation. I’ve even heard there might be something between you and Jane. And yet you’d risk your life—and the lives of those around you—because you just don’t like being surrounded by a wall? And you say
I’m
the crazy one.”

There was a sudden sound of footsteps, and I turned to see Dylan, his medic badge clearly displayed, running toward us.

“Everyone is angry when they first get here,” Isaiah said, raising his hand so the medic could see him. “Don’t do something you’d regret.”

Dylan’s hand touched Isaiah’s shoulder, and they ran off together.

I watched them go, darting between the trees as they headed toward the flag. I hated him. I hated that I hadn’t been able to respond. He wasn’t right—I knew he wasn’t right. His words made a kind of twisted sense, but I knew he was wrong.

Someone was walking through the forest, but with a raised gun—someone was dead. As the person got closer I realized it was Lily. She had two bright hits on her shoulders, but her head appeared to be clean. I wondered why she wasn’t waiting for the medic.

“Is Jane dead?” I asked, as she got close. That would explain why she hadn’t come to heal me yet.

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “I’m hit.” She didn’t look over.

I watched her leave, walking toward the ribbon.

As she moved out of sight another set of footsteps broke through the silent forest. Jane appeared, sprinting through the trees. Her head moved back and forth, scanning the trees until she saw me. She changed course, running past me like before, her fingers brushing across my back.

“Hurry,” she shouted. “Get to the hill.”

I jumped to my feet and set out. I ran, crouched down, gun forward, from a juniper thicket to a boulder, to a tall patch of grass. I was angry, and I could feel adrenaline pumping through my body. I hoped Isaiah was at the flag.

The shooting at the hill continued, and I could hear lots of voices calling for medics.

“One minute!” the bullhorn blasted.

I was in the same situation as before—all alone, hadn’t fired a shot, and now I needed to charge the hill.

I took a breath and then ran, ignoring cover. The hill was right in front of me, but I didn’t see anyone, and no one was shooting at me. I heard a voice at the top. “Medic!”

Charging forward, I crested the steep hill. Two people turned, looking surprised. One was Dylan. I shot them both—wildly, firing and screaming at the same time.

Dylan swore. He couldn’t see it under my mask, but I was grinning from ear to ear.

I dropped to my knees, waiting for someone else to shoot at me, but no one did.

Reaching for the flagpole, I wrapped my left hand around the rope.

“Game over,” the bullhorn yelled. “Society wins.”

“What?” I jumped to my feet, searching for the ref with the horn. Oakland was standing under a pine at the bottom of the hill, his hand holding a stopwatch. I scrambled down the rocky mound toward him. Curtis was already ahead of me.

“He killed the last two, didn’t he?” Curtis said. “Everyone in the Society is dead!”

Oakland shrugged, smug. “That’s not how you win. At the end of five minutes, the Society flag was still up.”

“That’s—” Curtis stopped himself, and then turned away, his hands balled into fists.

Mason appeared at my side. His camouflage was wet with white splatters.

“Nice shots,” he said, pulling his mask up onto the top of his head. He grinned. “We’re going to have to work on your approaches, though. The suicide charge isn’t always the best tactic.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Mason nodded and laughed. “Yep. I just wish you were ten seconds faster.”

That night the V’s gathered in the cafeteria, doing our best to turn it into a ballroom. Rosa had collected lamps from several of the dorm rooms, and she and a couple others were making new shades out of construction paper. A few of the guys were cutting long sheets of butcher paper into strips for streamers, and Jane and I were working on a banner. It looked like a bunch of little kids had decorated their bedroom.

“So why are you always the medic?” I asked, painting where she had instructed me to.

She smiled. “Because I don’t like lying in the dirt.”

“Really?”

“No, not really,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t like being in the squads.”

“I get that,” I said, leaning back to stretch. “All of my moments of brave heroism have come when I was working alone.”

Jane laughed. “I wish I’d been there to see that.”

“It was very awesome.”

“We still lost.”

“That makes it even better,” I said, dipping the brush in more paint. “It’s not nearly as heroic if you win. I was Bruce Willis blowing up inside the asteroid, or Slim Pickens riding the bomb.”

She pushed her red hair behind her ear so she could see what she was doing. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“There aren’t a lot of movies in here,” I conceded.

“That’s got to be pretty hard on you,” she said with a laugh. “All you do is quote movies.”

I shrugged. “When you spend a lot of time alone, you watch a lot of TV.”

“You have to remember,” Jane said, moving the conversation back to the original topic, “that the gangs were formed less than a year ago. Before that it really was chaos in here. Our old paintball teams never used squads. It was just us. I got used to being on my own.”

I nodded and then set my brush in a cup of water.

“Jane, what did you used to do before you came here?”

She looked up at me from the side of her eye and then focused back on the banner. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious,” I said. “I think you’re interesting.” While that was true—I really did find Jane fascinating—ever since the paintball game I’d been thinking about what Isaiah had said. Maybe he was right—maybe I
was
concerned only about myself. I didn’t know how to fix that, but I thought I’d start with Jane.

“What did you used to do?” she asked.

“I moved around a lot,” I said. “Foster care. No idea who my dad was. My mom took off when I was five, I think. Left me with a babysitter. Never came back.”

She set down her brush. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want Jane to think I wanted pity. “I don’t really remember her. Anyway, since then, I’ve just bumped around. Bluff, Elliott, South Side. Not exactly the hot Pittsburgh tourist spots.”

Jane reached across the banner and put her hand on mine. “Isn’t this place a little better?”

And for a moment, I couldn’t think of a single reason I’d want to leave.

“What about you?”

She frowned. I was worried that she’d move her hand, but she didn’t.

“Baltimore,” she said, her green eyes no longer on me.

“You said that before,” I coaxed.

“I was homeless.”

There was a long pause, and I wanted to say something comforting but couldn’t think of anything. Homeless. To go from that to here. No wonder she kept saying this place wasn’t so bad.

She finally looked up at me.

I spoke. “Will you go to the dance with me tomorrow?”

Jane smiled, the corners of her mouth slowly widening until I could see her white teeth and a look of pure joy.

Her fingers curled around my hand and I squeezed them back.

Chapter Eleven

T
apping.

I opened my eyes. The room was pitch-black. I could barely see Mason’s bunk above me. No light was coming in through the drapes, and even the gap under the door was dark.

There it was again. Tapping, far away. I sat up and listened. It was persistent, somewhere down the corridor.

Standing up, I saw that Mason was still asleep. It was chilly, and I pulled my Steelers sweatshirt on and opened the door.

The hallway was dim, but I could tell that no one was there. I had expected to see someone trying to get into another guy’s room, but the corridor was empty. I checked my watch: 3:34
a.m.

The noise was coming from the far end, and I hurried down after it, even though I knew it was foolish going anywhere alone at night. I was well aware of the enemies I’d made.

As I got nearer, it was clear that the sound was coming from outside the dorm. Someone was pounding on our door. I quickened my pace and as I reached the door the lock buzzed and opened.

Carrie was there, alone.

She grabbed my arm. “Benson.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Lily’s missing. Go get Curtis.”

I nodded and turned, running back down the hall. Had she tried to escape? Or was it detention? Carrie had said she was missing, not that she’d been taken. But maybe she hadn’t heard? As I ran I could picture Laura and the Society girls dragging Lily away just as the guys had done to Walnut.

Curtis must have heard something because he opened his door almost immediately after I knocked. In seconds, we were back down with Carrie.

“She’s nowhere in the dorm,” Carrie said. “We’ve searched all the rooms, even the other gangs’.”

Curtis’s face looked grim in the dim light. “When was the last time anyone saw her?”

“We were all down in the cafeteria doing decorations last night,” Carrie said. “But no one remembers seeing her.”

The last I was sure I’d seen Lily was when she walked off the paintball field, with the two hits to her shoulder. Had she been in the cafeteria? I couldn’t remember.

“What about her roommate?” I said.

“Tapti didn’t get back to her room until after midnight, and the lights were off. She said she assumed that Lily was already there, asleep. Lily has the top bunk.”

Why hadn’t Lily waited for the medic? Did she want to leave the field?

Curtis put his arm around Carrie’s trembling shoulders. “Lily’s smart. She’s probably just . . . I’ll get everybody up. We’ll search the school.”

“Okay.”

I finally spoke. “I think she tried to escape.”

Carrie gasped. “What?”

“Did you know about this?” Curtis snapped.

“No,” I said, holding up my hands in my defense. “I don’t know anything about it. But Lily’s one of the few people in here who I’ve heard actually say that she wants to escape. She says it all the time.”

Curtis sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. “Other people say it, too.”

They obviously didn’t want to listen to me talk about escape attempts, but things were starting to click in my brain. “She left during the paintball game. Listen, I was hit and sitting there waiting for Jane, and Lily walked past me. She’d been hit in the shoulder, not the head, but she wasn’t waiting for the medic.”

Neither Curtis nor Carrie said anything, but they exchanged a look.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Let’s go look for her.”

Twenty minutes later, all the V’s had been roused out of bed and were gathered on the first floor. Jane was standing at the doors, staring out the window. I was about to go talk to her when Curtis got everyone’s attention.

“Just for simplicity,” he said, “let’s just break up into our paintball squads. I don’t want anyone going alone.”

“What’s the deal with the lights?” I asked. I’d tried the switches, but they weren’t working.

Curtis shook his head angrily. “I don’t know. They won’t come on.”

Mason, rubbing his eyes, whispered, “Rats in a cage, man.”

“Joel, you have the third floor,” Curtis said, handing out assignments. “Hector, second. John, first.” He paused, looking at Mason and me. Our squad was missing a member. “Mason, Benson, take the basement. If you find anything, meet back here. I’m going to go talk to Oakland and Isaiah and see if they know anything.”

“Isaiah probably did it,” Hector grumbled. “Put her in detention or something.”

“Don’t say that,” one of the girls said. “She’s going to be fine.”

Curtis clapped his hands, just as he did before every paintball match, and we all split up. Mason and I walked in silence, heading down the main stairs into the blackness of the basement. I checked the switch at the bottom, but it didn’t work, either.

“Hang on, Fish,” Mason said quietly. I could barely see his outline in the dark but heard him fiddling with something. A moment later a tiny round light turned on.

“Reading light,” he said, the blue glow illuminating his skin. He looked like a ghost. “I bought it a couple months ago but ran out of good stuff to read.”

I called out Lily’s name and then listened. The narrow cement walls muted the sound and it disappeared almost instantly. The two of us stood there, waiting, but there was no response.

Without a word, Mason headed for the first door. The lock buzzed and opened. He shined his light inside. The room was empty and small. It had one of the deep basement window wells, and the little bit of moonlight spilled on the floor.

I moved to the next door. We repeated the process up and down the hall, sometimes finding storage—mostly old desks or textbooks or scraps of lumber and pipe—but a lot of the rooms were empty, just as they’d been when I’d gone through here looking for trash. Our janitorial and maintenance contracts let us go almost anywhere we wanted—we searched the infirmary rooms, including any closets or cabinets she could possibly fit into—but there was no sign of her anywhere.

I had high hopes for the back stairs that Becky had shown me. If Lily had wanted to hide, that could have been a good spot. But, like everywhere else, they were empty. Besides, why would she want to hide?

“Did you see her on the field after she’d been shot?” I asked, as we opened another door. This room had several rows of boxes, stacked to the ceiling, and Mason peeked around them with his light.

“No,” he said. “We left you. I got hit and she kept going.” His voice was cold and tired.

“She passed me,” I said. “She’d been shot but could have waited for a medic.”

“You think she went over the wall?”

“Maybe. Don’t know.”

He turned his gaze back to the boxes and opened one. It looked like lab supplies—rubber hoses and Bunsen burners and all kinds of bottles and jars.

“I hated chemistry. Be glad you missed it,” Mason said absently, like he felt he ought to make a joke but had no desire to laugh.

“Do you think she was serious about escaping?” I asked as we moved to the next room. “I mean, really considered it? She talked about it all the time.”

He just pointed at a security camera.

“About a year ago I worked for a hospital,” I said. “I was just a janitor and I was only there for a month, but I knew the security guys and I hung out in their office sometimes. They didn’t even have TVs to watch their cameras. They were just there in case some crime was committed. Then they’d look at the tape.”

Mason sighed. “So what?”

“I think we’re all too afraid of these cameras. There have to be a thousand cameras. They can’t watch all of them all the time.”

“But people get punished every day,” he said. “Someone must be watching.”

I nodded, unconvinced. Did they really catch everything? The students were usually all in the same place, weren’t they? All in class or all at lunch or all in the dorms. The school didn’t even have to watch all the cameras.

Of course, sometimes the school punished people for no reason at all, cameras or not.

I changed the subject. “I wonder if we could make something with those chemistry supplies. Maybe some acid to burn through the fence?”

Mason spun, glaring at me. “What is wrong with you, man?”

“What?”

“Lily might be dead, and you don’t even care. All you ever talk about is escaping and trying to figure stupid things out.”

I paused, stunned. “Well, don’t you want to figure it out, too?”

“Not when we’re looking for Lily,” he said, turning and opening a new door.

In another ten minutes we met up with Tapti, Gabby, and Joel. I could tell from their somber faces that they hadn’t had any more luck than we’d had. We left the basement and returned to the main floor to join the others. Depression hung like a cloud over the gang. Curtis was sitting on a bench, his elbows resting on his knees. I sat beside him.

Mason’s words kept running through my head. He was right. My escape could wait.

I hadn’t been treating the V’s like friends. They were just people, just part of the school that I hated. My chest felt heavy and tight. I wished now that I’d said something to Lily, that maybe I’d . . . I don’t know.

“What about outside?” I asked Curtis, my voice low. Maybe, like me, Lily hadn’t been able to get over the wall. Maybe she’d gotten hurt and was out there somewhere.

Curtis shook his head. “I woke up Isaiah and Oakland. Isaiah insists that they didn’t take her to detention— and you know he’d be proud of it if they did. He’d say something. Oakland even offered to open the outside doors for us to go out there.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think he was doing it just to piss off Isaiah.”

“So let’s go,” I said. “Even if she didn’t try to escape, maybe she just twisted her ankle in the forest or something.”

“No,” he said. His face was ashen. “Oakland came down here but they wouldn’t open for him. He said they usually can’t get out until dawn.”

With nothing else to do, we all split up and headed back to our dorms. The schedule was already posted on the TV. Class today would be early—7:00
a.m.
I had to wonder whether it was a punishment; they weren’t giving us the chance to go back to sleep.

Mason opened the closet when we got back and started getting dressed.

“You all right?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Just . . . I thought maybe you guys, you and Lily, might have been . . .”

He shook his head. “No.”

It had to be a lie. They were always together.

“Oh.” I sat down on my bed. My head ached from stress and lack of sleep.

Mason turned to look at me as he buttoned his shirt. His face was tight and cold. “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to do that, get attached, I mean. Like with Curtis and Carrie—I think they’re nuts.”

“But isn’t that part of surviving this place?” I said, thinking of Jane. “We’re stuck here, so let’s make the most of it.”

“If you say so,” he said, his face stony and emotionless. “But what if one of them gets it? What if the school decides one day that Curtis has been too much trouble and they toss him in detention? What’ll that do to Carrie?”

I didn’t say anything. Images of Jane filled my mind—her hair, her eyes, her smile, her hand on mine.

“You know that old saying,” Mason continued. “‘Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all’?”

I nodded.

“Complete horsecrap. Especially in here.” He put his tie around his neck. “One day you’re going to get it. You know it and I know it. One day you’re going to do some fool thing and get caught.”

He waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t. Was he right?

“I stay quiet,” he said, making the knot in his tie. “I stay out of everyone’s way.”

I felt like hitting him, though I tried not to show it. “Why aren’t you Society then?”

“I don’t care what other people do,” he said. “If other people want to try to get out of here, then good for them. If you want to go to the dance with Jane, and screw up your life—and hers—then do it. I’m not going to stop you.”

He and Lily
had
been together. He wasn’t telling me about what might happen; he was telling me about what had just happened to him.

I lay back on the bed and stared upward.

“One dance is going to screw up my life?” I said with a little laugh, trying to lighten the situation.

Mason’s voice was serious. “Becky had a guy. She wasn’t always screwed up. She was a V. Helped start the V’s, actually.”

“You’re kidding.” I rolled onto my side to look at him.

He pulled his red sweater on, and his eyes met mine. “Do what you want, man. But if you’re going to get killed next week crossing the wall, stay away from Jane. She doesn’t deserve that.”