“I can’t go any faster.”
“I know, but go faster.”
“Fuck you. Argh! Dammit.” Milo must have miscounted. He hit a laser with his trailing foot. An alarm sounded, the guard woke and jammed a button, and shutters caged the room, trapping them. try again appeared in block letters.
Last time, David had been the one to wake the guard, so he was happy Milo had screwed up this go-round. “We were close.”
“We weren’t even as close as last time. Back to pig organs?”
“Yeah, but my question . . . What were you seeing in that room?”
“The same thing I’m going to see when I fall asleep tonight: laser beams coming from every angle, making me do controller gymnastics I don’t know how to do.”
“And what are you hearing? What else is going on?”
“There are the codes, but I’m trusting you to deal with those, unless you want to switch. And, um, the dude’s music, I guess? Why?”
He could say it now, or shut up. If he couldn’t explain it to his best friend, though, whom could he tell? “When I’m in there, the whole room is shouting. Every one of those beams hums at a different frequency. Between that and the music and the podcast and the video, it’s like torture.”
“The video?”
“Yeah, the guard watches some warrior race thing on his phone, and even if I don’t look at the screen, I hear the announcer shouting in Spanish like it’s a soccer match, and the volume is almost as high as the music.”
“Are you saying you think it means something? A clue we’ve missed for how to get through the room?”
“No! I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s noise we’re supposed to tune out, only it sounds like you have and I can’t.” He didn’t add the other things: the faint sounds of the museum crowd beyond the guarded room, the whisper of air in ducts, the rattle of the one loose screw still attached to the panel they’d removed to enter, the guard’s soft snore. Beyond that, David’s actual bedroom: the gurgling radiator, the fly trapped between the blinds and the window, the scent of whatever his ma was cooking, chili maybe, news television chatterboxes keeping her company.
“Huh.”
Now was the time. “It’s always like this. Is yours?”
“Like what?”
“Loud. Noisy. Like everything needs your attention at once, but not like a wash—like every single thing is individually and specifically trying to get your attention?”
“Huh,” Milo repeated, and he didn’t need to say more for David to know he didn’t understand. “Have you told anybody? That doesn’t sound right. I pay attention to the things I need to pay attention to. I haven’t noticed all that other stuff.”
“I’m telling you. I thought maybe this is how it’s supposed to be, and I’m just bad at it.”
“I dunno. Either mine is defective or yours is, I guess, or you’re getting used to it slower. Are you doing your exercises like they told us to?”
“Yes! But I don’t feel like exercises make the difference. Maybe you’re right that I’m getting used to it slower.”
“I dunno. You wanna try that room again or quiz each other on pig parts?”
“Once more, then back to the pig?”
“Deal.”
David surrendered. He’d tried, but the thing felt indescribable. Like, how did you know if you were seeing colors the same as someone else? How would you ever know if your blue sky was someone else’s pink? Maybe he was oversensitive to a thing everyone else had dealt with. He’d do the exercises and learn how to tune it out, the same as they had. The important thing was that he had a Pilot, and nobody could tease him anymore, and he could catch up again. The rest was just noise.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VAL
December exams rolled around, and David got respectable B grades across the board. They celebrated with another ice cream cake, season be damned. Val cut Sophie the smallest slice she could get away with without protest. The ketogenic diet hadn’t worked for her, but Val was still convinced they might be able to control the seizures better if they controlled her sugar intake. And her stress. And her sleep. And her temperature. Poor kid; wait until she hit her teens and they broke the news about alcohol and caffeine.
And what if Sophie’s class was soon full of Pilots, too? Surely it was a matter of time. They had managed to keep her just a year behind her age level and working well despite the brain-addling medications, but her head could never host that enhancement. She’d fall further behind. Maybe there would be special classes for all the kids who couldn’t get Pilots for one reason or another. Val let that train of thought chug into the logical future before recalling it to the present. They would deal with it when the time came.
In January, David asked Val if he could start running with her before school, so he could be in better shape to try cross-country when the season started. She agreed casually, though she was secretly overjoyed. She took him to buy new running shoes, since he’d grown out of his last pair over winter break. His feet were like snowshoes; she teased him that he could walk barefoot after a storm and someone would think a yeti had passed.
For their first run, she allowed him to set their pace, slightly slower than her usual; she didn’t think he was pushing himself as they set out through the neighborhood. Val debated whether to talk or run in silence. She didn’t want running with her to become connected with invasive conversations, but it seemed like a good opportunity.
She settled on the topic at hand. “So, you’re going to try out for cross-country?”
“It’s not a tryout. Anybody can join and run with the practices. They only have
