“You will get your answers soon,” Rebecca said, walking past him and back up to the rest stop. He followed her, looking around at the dome around them.
Yep, this is crazy, he thought, opening the door and walking into the office after her.
****
The office was how plain and ordinary as Walter had left it. He and Rebecca sat down across from one another. All of the hostility seemed to be out of the girl, which Walter preferred. He wasn’t ready to have another blade shoved in his face for not saying what she wanted to hear.
“What would you like to know?” Rebecca said.
“What is all of this?” Walter said.
“The ‘this’ you are referring to is the result of failed experiments with nanite clusters interacting with the human body. My father tried to save my mother from dying with them. It worked, but it did horrible things to those all around when it happened. They are called NaU, or rather, that’s what my parents called them.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call the ability to fly and shoot light from your body as being horrible.”
“Everything has a cost. All of us with them inside us are dying because of them.”
“You seem healthy.”
“We can talk more on that later.”
“So, that’s why they’re after you?” Walter said. “For your NaU?”
“Not exactly,” Rebecca said.
“I thought you said that I would get some answers.”
“You will, you will,” she said. “But honestly, Walter, Kent’s question is an important one. How much do you really want to know? Ignorance is a gift, and I would much rather have then my current situation, believe me.”
“No more riddles,” Walter said. “I need the truth now, please.”
Rebecca opened her mouth to speak, and Walter was confident that it was going to be more lies.
But they never got the chance to speak on that.
The others had arrived.
****
Walter approached the end of the field.
The four people up close were even worse than before. They all appeared to be young, with different colored veins and lights emitting from their bodies. The red one was shoving her head into the field repeatedly, not seeming to do anything.
Walter approached the one who appeared to be the leader. He looked like a Matt kind of guy. He was shirtless, and his body rippled with orange light. Next to him must have been Kent and Jolie. Kent was as awful to look at as Walter had imagined, with no legs and feet, hovering above the ground, pink veins running through his body like circuitry. Jolie appeared to the tallest out of the group, but with Matt levitating, it was hard to tell.
Walter walked right up to Matt.
“You are Walter?” Matt said, looking down at him.
Walter nodded.
“We need to take Becca with us. It’s very important.”
“And why should I hand her—”
“No, not hand,” Matt said. “You couldn’t get Becca to do anything anyway. We need you to convince her to come with us to come with me.”
“Come with you to die.”
“Yes.”
“And why would she do that?”
“Because,” Matt said, snow falling all around him. “She is my sister.”
Chapter Six
People will judge me, I know that. I know that they won’t take the time to try and see things from my perspective. I was dying, Carol was dying, and Matt was sick. What would they do in my situation? I seriously doubt that they would have the wherewithal to not do what I did.
-Robbie’s Journal
“What is the slope of the line represented by the equation 4x + 3y = 7?”
Kent rolled his green eyes and avoided Becca’s gaze. Through the open window, the far off, distant sounds of the Washington County Fair tractor pull was in full swing. Becca wished she was there, but someone had to help Kent. No one else would.
“Try writing it out,” she said, pointing down at the sheet below him on the desk. She handed him his graphing calculator and looked over his shoulder.
He was doing it wrong, but Becca didn’t want to stop him yet. Stopping Kent midway through what he was doing, even if it was wrong, was a surefire way to get him to give up. She tried not to listen to the sounds of her mother’s machines downstairs.
Becca’s room was on the second story of the McCarthy house. It was an old farmhouse, as most of the houses in Washington County were. The McCarthys weren’t farmers, though someone might be able to make the argument that they still grew things, but in labs and not out in fields covered with cow manure.
And that was the main scent of the town as of late. Whenever summer hit its halfway point, and all of the fields were being prepared for next spring’s harvest, manure was the name of the game.
Luckily, her windows were closed, though the smell still persisted. She loved Greendale with about every fiber of her being, but she could do without the cow manure. She really could.
“I don’t know,” Kent said, putting down his pencil.
“Have you been studying?” she asked.
“Why do I need to study?” Kent said. “Isn’t this whole tutoring supposed to replace that? You know I don’t have time to study for algebra, of all things. Why the hell does it even matter?”
Becca listened with patience, as she often had to whenever Kent got this way about his studying. Greendale South High School wasn’t exactly known for its high academic scores since most of the people that went there often went back to the farm fields as soon as they got home.
Robbie had complained that they should try and change school districts. It was too late for Matt, but Becca had at least a shot at a different school. Besides, though Becca didn’t say it outright, she knew that her father cared more for her then he did for Matt.
Robbie could do his research anywhere, and with the funding
