“Shoot,” I said, staring at the ceiling. I didn’t want to look at her. There were plenty of people in this school that I strongly suspected of being robots. Becky was on the list. All of the Society was.
She clicked her pen. “First, how would you rate the care you received while you’ve been in the infirmary?”
I rolled my head to look at her. She smiled.
“You’re kidding.”
Becky glanced down at the clipboard. “Scale of one to five, one being excellent and five being not good at all.”
I looked back at the ceiling and then closed my eyes. “This school, where we’re prisoners and people die, cares about good customer service?”
“We don’t know that people—” Becky stopped.
There was silence.
I cracked open one eye. She was wiping her cheek.
Her voice trembled. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
We sat there for several seconds, Becky staring at her paper and me looking at the white cement ceiling.
It was never going to be normal here. I’d been fooling myself before, back when I thought that I could actually enjoy myself. I had liked paintball and the good food and the guys in my gang and… Jane. But it was all a lie.
Becky held up her clipboard. The paper was blank.
“There’s no paperwork,” she said, and wiped her eye again. “I just wanted to check on you.”
“I’m okay.”
I returned to my dorm that afternoon. A few people had made get-well cards for me, and some girls collected plants from the gardens and put them in a vase on my desk. I thanked them all, but things were different now.
I hid the bottle of rubbing alcohol in my pillowcase. I needed more ingredients before I could make it into a weapon, but that could wait. In my five days spent lying in bed I’d come up with a theory.
My logic went like this: First, we were in the school for a reason, either to be tested or to be trained. I couldn’t guess which because neither really made sense. If we were being tested then the test was extremely broad and abstract. If we were being trained then you’d think there would be more focus on what we were learning—better teaching, stricter testing, higher expectations. Even the people who thought we were being trained as soldiers because of the paintball didn’t have any answer for why we weren’t being taught tactics. We were just making everything up.
Anyway, if I assumed we were in the school for a reason then I should also assume that the presence of Jane and any other androids—I still hated using that word for her—would be to aid in the training or testing.
So, if androids were the basis for the experiment or training, then it would make sense that they had been here since the beginning of the experiment. Jane was perfect evidence—she was the first of all of us.
I decided to chart all of the students, all sixty-eight of us who remained, and figure out who came first. If my reasoning held up then they should be the androids.
Unless they all were.
And, of course, I had no idea where to draw the line. Were there five of them? Ten? Thirty?
I made a chart in a notebook, and then walked down the dorm hallways, with Mason’s help, asking how long people had been there. I didn’t tell Mason why I was doing it, and I think that he might have thought I’d lost it. Maybe he wasn’t too far off.
The V’s all offered up their info easily enough, and most everyone else did, too. When I got down to Oakland’s room, Skiver opened the door. Oakland was sitting in his chair, his feet up on the desk while he scrolled through his minicomputer. He glanced up long enough to see who I was and then looked back at the screen.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “I have a couple questions for you.”
Skiver started to close the door in my face, but I stepped forward and it hit my shoe.
He scowled and puffed out his chest. “What’s your problem?”
“Just have a question,” I said. “Humor me. I’m trying to chart the whole school and see who’s been here the longest.”
“What do you care?”
“I’m curious.”
He gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes in what was probably supposed to be a threatening face. “You got me out of bed for that?” Skiver acted tougher than his size warranted, but ever since the fight on our first day he’d taunted me as though he’d beat me in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I realize that it’s a long way from the bed to the door,” I said. “And I apologize.”
He stared back at me, with more of his semi-threatening expressions.
I pointed to the chair. “If you want, you could sit and catch your breath.”
Skiver opened his mouth, but Oakland spoke. “What’s the question?”
“How long have you guys been here?”
“Why do you care?” Skiver snapped.
“You already asked me that,” I said calmly, watching Oakland.
He looked back at me, thinking. Skiver seemed to be confused as to why he wasn’t hitting something.
I decided to ease the tension. “I’m trying to figure something out about this stupid place,” I said. “But I need to talk to the people who’ve been here the longest.”
Oakland stared at me for a long time, and then finally spoke. “Jane was the oldest, wasn’t she?” His words weren’t sympathizing, but they weren’t his normal jerk self, either. It was a simple statement.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“About a year and nine months,” Oakland said. “I think. Not totally sure. Skiver’s less than a year.”
Skiver looked confused that Oakland would help me and stared as I wrote the dates down in my notebook.
“Thanks, guys,” I said.
As I was turning to leave, Skiver spoke. “Nice job taking care of your girl, Fisher.”
I paused, rage building up in my chest. Taking a deep breath, I looked back at Oakland. I stared at him long enough for Skiver to wonder what was going on, so that he looked back, too. Then I sucker punched Skiver in the jaw.
He dropped straight to the floor. Oakland’s eyes met mine for a moment, paused, and then he turned back at his computer.
By the end of the night, I had gotten answers from almost all the guys. Two Society guys refused to answer, saying that they needed to ask Isaiah before they helped me. I wanted to hit them, too.
Isaiah didn’t answer either, but I was able to find out about him from several others. Not surprisingly, he was one of the oldest. I knew it. He had to be an android.
Over the next two days I was able to gather the information from the girls, in class and in the cafeteria. In the end, I found that there were five of them who had arrived at school together, including Isaiah. They all claimed to have been in the school for just over two years, and they remembered driving in together in a van. In addition to Isaiah, there was another Society kid, Raymond, and two girls from Havoc—Mouse and Tiny. And Rosa, one of the V’s.
I didn’t know Rosa very well. She was one of the oldest girls. She had the best paintball gun. She had asthma. She didn’t seem to go out of her way to talk to people.
I was going to have to keep an eye on her.
Of course, the entire list was a guess. It was still all based on the assumption that the androids came first. And it was based on the even greater assumption that there were more than just Jane.
That night, lying in bed, I wanted to say something to Mason. Based on my chart, he was among the newer half of the students. Hopefully that meant he wasn’t part of… whatever this all was.
It was dark, and I could hear him in the bunk above me, quietly tapping on his minicomputer.
“Hey,” I said.
He yawned. “What’s up?”
