“It hurts, sure. Kind of like a vibrating headache. But how do we know that my pain threshold is the same as Harvard’s? Even if there is something out there, there’s no way to tell what direction it’s in. And I know my geometry, too—it could be twenty feet away or a hundred. This is pointless.” She glanced back again for Harvard, and then stared at me. Her smile was gone. “You need to get out of here.”
“I told you already: I’m not leaving without Becky.”
“Damn it, Benson,” she said. “I’ve only been here a couple weeks, and I’m already going crazy. I heard about Becky’s arm—that’s going to take a while to heal, and every day you spend waiting is another chance to be caught.”
I peered through the bushes. Harvard wasn’t far away, talking to a guard. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to us.
“But I’m helping you,” I said. “That was my deal with Birdman. That’s what we’re doing right now—trying to figure out where these transmitters are.”
“This is all Harvard, not Birdman,” she said, frustrated. “Birdman’s not trying to escape. He’s waiting.”
“For what?”
Lily shook her head. “Listen, I don’t know all the politics of this place, but I’ve learned there’s one subject that no one here talks about: you get too old and they take you away. This whole place exists as a training facility for teenage robots. If you get to be twenty or twenty-one, you don’t fit anymore.”
“Where do they go?”
Lily shrugged. “No one knows. But Birdman is getting close to the deadline, and he’s scared.”
“Then he should be trying to escape.”
She shook her head. “He thinks they’ll take him back underground. That’s why he holds the meetings and makes the maps. He thinks that’s his best shot.”
Harvard was walking toward us.
Lily dropped down into her old hiding place by the tree line, disappearing into the dark shadows.
“It’s gone,” Harvard said, out of breath, his voice hushed. “I don’t know if it was a real one or a camera.”
I stood and fought my way through the brush. “I’m going back.”
“We made a deal,” he said.
My eyes weren’t on him as I spoke—I was watching for the deer. “The deal was that I help you if you help Becky. If they find us because I’m out here on some wild-goose chase, how does that help Becky?”
“You’re going to have to search for it sooner or later,” he said.
“Later.” I started across the field, and he had no choice but to follow.
CHAPTER NINE
Jane came to get me the next morning. The sun was already climbing—it was later than I’d thought.
A dozen people were outside. They were all heading to build the new dorms—on Birdman’s orders, Jane told me. No one seemed to be protesting, even though I couldn’t have been the only one who wished I was still asleep.
Jane insisted I pull the hood of my sweatshirt up to conceal my face as much as possible. She even brought me a knitted scarf that I wrapped around my nose and mouth.
“Did you find anything last night?” she asked as we walked.
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think you would.”
“It was too dark,” I said. “And I wouldn’t know what a transmitter looked like if I saw one.”
“If they’re even out there.”
“Well, something’s messing up your brain.” As soon as I said it, I felt embarrassed. “I mean—”
“It’s fine,” Jane said. “You’re right. There’s a transmitter somewhere. I just don’t believe it’s in the forest.”
“Where else would it be?”
We entered the shade of the trees along the stream. “I don’t know much about science, but I do know that there are better ways to stop us from leaving than putting transmitters around the town.”
“Like what?”
“GPS. If they’re going to all the trouble to put an implant in our brains, don’t you think they’d make sure it could track us no matter where we went?”
She took a step onto a rock dotted with frost. I followed her lead, and we hopped from stone to stone across the stream.
“GPS makes sense,” I said, kicking myself that I hadn’t thought of it first. It was so much simpler.
“Harvard’s just looking for something to do,” she said. “We’ve talked about GPS before, but if that’s what it is, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I wanted to keep holding her hand. Her skin was warm in the cold morning air, and something about it just felt comfortable, like I wasn’t so alone.
Before I could think about what that might mean, Jane stuffed her hands into the front pockets of her cotton jacket, and gave me a quick, uncertain smile.
I could see the others now, all gathered in the field beside the commissary. The stacks of lumber sat uneven on the frozen ground, and several people were already digging the foundation for the new dorm with old, square-ended shovels and heavy picks.
“Don’t worry,” said a voice behind me. “We have guards out.”
I turned to see Mouse.
“I hear you had some problems last night at the tree line?” I couldn’t tell whether she was upset with me or with Harvard, but something had ticked her off.
“Just a deer,” I said, and turned back to watch the digging.
“Should Benson even be out here right now?” Jane asked.
“We have extra guys at the perimeter,” Mouse said. “They’ll keep out the animals.”
She was gone before Jane could reply.
It didn’t make any sense to me, either. Any help I could give building this dorm was only going to be negated by the several guys who had to leave and guard the tree line.
The construction was moving quickly but with precision. These were teenagers, not construction workers, but they seemed to know what they were doing.
“What’s the point of this?” I asked, watching the guys dig. “Why make us build the barracks when they could just bring in robot labor? For that matter, why were you milking cows when the school sends food?”
“Keeps us busy,” Jane said, and she actually sounded like it didn’t bother her. “It’s not nearly as strict as at the school—the cows and chickens are here because Maxfield offered and we accepted. We can grow fresh vegetables. But most of the field is for games—soccer and football and whatever else. It’s not a terrible place.”
“They keep you just happy enough that you won’t end up like Dylan.”
Someone shouted something, and I looked up to see Shelly staggering in the road. A girl ran to her, grabbed her around the waist, and helped her sit.
“Feedback,” Jane said, and tapped her head. “Shelly still has an active dupe.”
“And that makes it so she can’t stand up?”
Shelly was sitting cross-legged now in the dirt, her face in her hands. She was sobbing, loudly enough that we could hear it thirty feet away.
“Like I said,” Jane answered, taking a deep breath and turning away, “if the dupe is feeling a really strong emotion, then it’s all you can see. It takes over.”