I tugged at my sweatshirt, pulling it back to my elbow.
His face darkened and he swore.
“Are you stupid?”
“What?”
He grabbed my wrist and shared a look with Jane.
“What?” I asked again.
“The watch,” Jane said, her voice hollow and small.
“You led them right here,” he said angrily.
I stared at the beat-up watch, thinking back to when Becky had clamped it on my wrist the first day I’d arrived.
“I thought they just opened the doors.”
“They track you,” he snapped.
“We don’t know that,” Jane said quietly. She was talking to him, not me. “We’ve always assumed that, but we don’t know it for sure.”
“Of course it tracks you,” he said.
“So cut it off,” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.
“It’s too late.”
I looked back at him, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe Jane’s right. Maybe it doesn’t track you. We were in the woods all night, but we’re probably only a mile or two from the wall. If they knew where we were they would have found us in minutes.”
He stared at me and then at Jane. It felt like forever. We didn’t have time to argue. Mouse was herding the cows—five of them—past us. The four-wheelers could be here any minute.
I tapped my watch, pleading with him. “We’ll cut them off, and then when they come looking for us you can say that we stopped here and kept going.”
He lit a match on his pants and held it to the blade of the box cutter. “Tell me why we should put our necks on the line for you.”
I stammered for a moment, not sure what to say. I’d just made dozens of others risk their lives, stupidly, and they’d all suffered for it. But if these people didn’t help us, then Becky would die.
I took a breath.
“You’re trapped here,” I said. “Right?”
“Of course.”
“What keeps you here? There’s no fence, no walls. You all have a tracker like this? If you leave the town they’ll chase you?”
The guy ran his hand over his shaved head and looked out into the woods. “Worse. So what?”
“So whatever it is, Becky and I don’t have it,” I said. “Cut off my watch, and I can help you escape.”
“You can help us by leaving, now.”
Mouse rejoined us, a heavy pair of gardening clippers in her hand.
“Here,” she said, taking my wrist.
The guy held my hand steady. Mouse slid one end of the clippers under the metal watchband and then sliced through. It fell silently into the snow at my feet.
She then crouched beside Becky and cut through her necklace gently. Becky never stirred.
I picked up both the tracking devices.
“If you help Becky, I’ll work on finding a way out.”
He didn’t move, just stood his ground. I could understand everything he was feeling—the paranoia, the anger—but I couldn’t back down.
“She’s human,” Jane said, breaking the silence. She’d pulled back the bandage around Becky’s upper arm enough to examine the gaping wound. I couldn’t see it from where I stood, but I knew Jane was inspecting Becky’s bone and muscle.
The guy looked down for a moment, watching Jane, and then finally crouched beside her.
I wanted to say something, but it all sounded too argumentative in my head. I needed their help, so I needed to shut up.
Mouse bent beside him. “Where will we put them?” she said, her voice quiet and nervous.
He stared at Becky’s wound for several seconds, deep in thought. Finally, he stood back up and grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t move,” he said, his face unchanged. He held the box cutter to my forearm, where the bone was closest to the skin. “This is going to hurt.”
Mouse and the guy walked straight down the dirt road, which was visible through the snow only because of the deep ruts now frozen in the mud. Jane and I followed behind, Becky again in my arms. Maybe I was filled with adrenaline, but she felt lighter.
We passed farm buildings, chicken coops, rabbit hutches, and a few sheds before getting into the heart of the complex, where there were five green rectangular wooden buildings that reminded me of too many war movies—they looked like barracks for POWs.
Past them were two squat cement buildings, both of which looked several decades older than the five green ones. The larger of the cement structures had a sign on its plain steel door that read, MAXFIELD COMMISSARY. The other, which had a row of narrow windows running along the top of each wall, read, WASHROOM. Steam was trickling out through a broken pane of glass.
“What’s a commissary?” I whispered.
Jane paused, only for a moment, her eyes darting nervously from door to door. “It’s an old word for cafeteria. Everything here is old.”
As she moved in front of me, all I could think of was that night, only weeks ago, when the beaten and broken android of Jane had stumbled away from me and I’d learned the truth about her.
The truth. The concept seemed impossible now. What was the truth, and how would I ever know? I’d thought she and I had something. And then she was dead. But she wasn’t dead—she’d never existed at all. I’d been friends with a computer program. I’d kissed a machine.
But now she was real. I didn’t understand it at all.
The door of the washroom opened, and two girls appeared. They stopped instantly, and one reached for the door frame for support. I knew them both—Shelly and Tapti. Tapti—a Variant, like me—had revealed herself as a robot last night. Shelly was in the Society, and I thought I’d seen her fighting on our side last night.
The girls stared at us, gaping. I didn’t know what to do.
“It’s okay,” the guy said to them, his voice hushed as we walked past. “Keep it quiet. We’ll have a meeting later.”
“Tapti was one of them,” I whispered to Jane once we had moved past the washroom. “Like …” I stammered for a moment.
“Like me,” she said, her eyes on the road.
I nodded, uncomfortable. “But I don’t think Shelly was. She wasn’t fighting against us last night.”
“They went one at a time.” Her voice sounded pained. “As they were needed.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Shelly you knew was a robot. She just hadn’t popped yet.”
The guy shot back an angry look. We were being too loud.
Jane stood closer to me, her voice barely a whisper. “Most of the robots popped at the fence.”
“What’s ‘popped’?”
“It’s when the link between us and the robot is broken, and someone else takes control.”
I nodded slowly. I’d seen it happen—the blank look on Mason’s face when he attacked Becky, and when Carrie shot Oakland. They suddenly weren’t themselves anymore.
In my arms, I could feel Becky’s muscles tense and then relax again. It wasn’t much, but I took it as a promising sign. She wasn’t completely gone.
“Where are we going?” I asked. The road was dipping down into a dense row of trees.
“It’s safer on the other side of the stream,” she said. “Warmer, too.”