Qualify (73 page)

As Gracie continues to chatter with a mix of nerves and excitement, we walk along the wide thoroughfare street area between buildings, until we reach a glassed-in walkway inside the CA-1 structure. The walkway allows us to cut in perpendicularly through the miles-long structure, since there is no easy way of walking around it, and we end up on the next street and across from the next dorm structure which is Blue Quadrant Dorm.

We repeat this several times, crossing the street, finding a glassed walkway, going through, until we reach Yellow Quadrant Dorm, which is last.

Gracie enters first, and takes me directly to an info desk near the doors. We’re in a very large hotel-like lobby that stretches along the entire first floor like an airport terminal. It is filled with noise and teens, mostly all Yellow Candies such as myself.

The official at the desk scans my token and informs me I am on the third floor, which is all girls’ dormitory space, in Section Fourteen, bed #172.

“Your personal belongings from your RQC have been brought over by freight shuttle last evening together with all the others who passed Semi-Finals, after the end of the event. Your belongings are now waiting for you next to your bed,” he tells me, handing me a small check-in packet that includes a paper map of the complex and a general conduct and instructions checklist. “Be sure to locate and introduce yourself to your Section Leader who will give you the next instructions and answer any questions. Good luck, Candidate.”

And the official turns away.

I go to find the nearest stairs, and Gracie and I go up to the third floor that resembles another airport terminal row, except instead of airline terminal check-in areas there are dormitory Sections along an endless hallway. Each Section is the size of an RQC girls’ dorm floor, and has double doors marked by a Section number.

We walk past endless doors and many girls I don’t know moving past us through the hall in both directions, until we come to Section Fourteen.

We enter the dormitory which is another sea of neatly placed rows of cots—most of them slept-in but empty because their occupants are elsewhere—and Gracie helps me find bed #172 that’s somewhere in the back.

My bed is pristine, and my two duffel bags sit on the floor before it.

“There’s your stuff!” Gracie says with excitement. “You might want to check to see it’s all there.”

But I am hardly listening. Instead I glance around the huge room to see who my bed neighbors are, and who else is here.

And that’s when I see Claudia Grito. She’s three beds down from me, her metal piercings glittering in high contrast against her silky black hair, sitting on her cot with her feet up and going through stuff in her bag. As though she senses my presence, she happens to look up in that moment, and our gazes lock.

Oh, great, just great
. . . .

Claudia frowns and glares at me. “Look who’s decided to show up, Gwen-baby! Didn’t think I’d ever see your skinny ass again, loser face.”

Gracie immediately turns around and her jaw drops in outrage. “Who the hell do you think you are? Don’t talk to my sister like that!”

“It’s okay, Gracie.” I glance at her. And then I turn back to Claudia. “Sorry to disappoint you.” And then I look away.

Meanwhile, I notice a few other girls in the room, and they all look vaguely familiar. And then . . . the bathroom doors open and I see Laronda! And there’s Dawn behind her, and Hasmik too!

“
Girlfriend!”
Laronda shrieks, and rushes toward me, and practically jumps in my arms with a huge choking hug. “You’re alive! You look
good!
Way,
way
good, compared to yesterday when you were half-dead in the hospital!”

“Hey!” I exclaim. And then the others reach me, and I am hugging Hasmik and Dawn simultaneously, who both look tired and excited and generally healthy except for a kind of slight air of additional gravity and resignation that all of us who’ve passed the Semi-Finals now seem to have. It’s an imprint of tiredness, of suffering, of
death
, that stamped us all, deep underneath the veneer of “happy.”

“Can you believe, I make it!” Hasmik says in a high-pitched tone, and repeats it. “I,
I
make it this far? No way, huh? I still don’t believe it! Complete accident!”

“Shut up, girl,” Laronda turns and punches Hasmik lightly on the arm. “Of course you made, it, I told you, you would! Good thing you picked Dallas, too—no big deal, just an obstacle course in the middle of burning oil wells! I picked New York like an idiot and got to climb ledges and fall down from skyscrapers like some kind of caped comic book heroine—ugh!”

“New York, eh?” I say with a grin. “Yeah, I heard the horror stories.”

“Yeah, another New York here,” Dawn says in her usual calm deadpan manner. “Though Los Angeles was pretty rotten too, eh? What was it, you crazy Wild West cowboys rode explosive
drones?
Whose bright idea was it?”

“Oh, well,” I say in a somewhat flustered voice. “I didn’t really want to actually, it was the only thing we could do, to get over the—”

“Hey, hey, whoa! Kidding you.” Dawn rolls her eyes at me, with a quick, sly smile. “It was a brilliant thing to do. Color me way impressed . . . Shoelace Girl.”

“Oh, crap. . . .” But now I’m the one grinning and rolling my eyes.

We chatter back and forth, and it turns out, Section Fourteen is basically all the girls from our Pennsylvania RQC-3’s Yellow Quadrant, so no wonder everyone’s here, and no wonder the girls in the room look familiar.

“All right, we have tonight and tomorrow to relax, before hell resumes,” Laronda says, sticking her finger out to poke my shoulder. “But now, I say we talk trash and gossip while we go have a good look at this huge National Qualification Center! Who’s in? You can tell me all about those flying shoes and drones and other absolutely insane junk you’re single-handedly responsible for, while we walk. Tell me
everything
, girlfriend!”

Chapter 42

T
he rest of the free day we spend wandering the immense sprawling compound and learning where everything is—the Quadrant Dorms and the Common Areas, which include more cafeterias, training gyms, classrooms, not one but three arena stadiums with track and sports training equipment, and three double-Olympic-length and extra-wide swimming pools.

“I hear we’ll be doing swimming training in addition to other types of classes,” Dawn says as we walk through yet another glassed-in walkway between building structures to cross to the other street that runs parallel.

“Interesting,” Laronda says. “I wonder why. Does Atlantis have a lot of oceans and water?”

“It could also be their tradition,” I say, “stemming from the Earth’s original continent of Atlantis. So much stuff related to the sea, oceans, water. Like the name of their ancient city, Poseidon, who’s the Ancient Greek god of the sea—though it’s earlier than Greek, we now know, it’s in fact Ancient Atlantean. . . .”

“Glad you’re still such a smarty-pants.” Laronda smiles.

In that moment, Grace—who’s been tagging along with us on the walk, and has been somewhat inseparable from me since the trauma of Semi-Finals—looks up and points.

Four Atlantean shuttles plummet down from the sky, and land somewhere beyond the buildings, their aerial activity generating a sonic boom.

“That way lies a huge airfield,” Dawn says. “Want to go see?”

“Um,” I say, as my expression darkens. “Not sure . . . I think I’ve had enough Atlantean shuttles and airfields to last me a lifetime.”

“No! Don’t say that!” Gracie immediately tugs my sleeve. “If we Qualify, we will have to deal with them all the time.”

“Okay, I know,” I reply tiredly. “But seriously, let’s just—not.”

Dawn shrugs comfortably. “Okay.”

So instead we walk toward the nearest cafeteria to get more free food for as long as they’re still feeding us.

A
s we stroll down the street between buildings, Gracie pulls me aside for a moment, while Dawn and Laronda and Hasmik walk ahead.

“Gwen . . .” Gracie walks at my side with a strange closed-up expression and stiff posture, hands nervously clutching the bottom of her uniform shirt. “Gwen, I . . . I have to tell you something.”

Okay, this does not bode well.

“What?” I say, glancing at my sister carefully.

Gracie does not say anything for several long moments.

“Promise—” she says. “Promise me you won’t go crazy when you hear this, okay?”

“How can I promise when I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

Gracie bites her lip, takes a deep breath. “You know that awful night when they found that chip in Laronda’s jacket?”

“Yeah. . . ?” Suddenly I feel cold. And I’m really beginning to dislike what this is leading up to.

Gracie stops and looks up at me. Her face is full of anguish. “I put that chip in her jacket! I am so sorry!”

“
What?”
I stop also, while cold waves of fear pass through me, one after another, and I am reeling with it.

Gracie grabs my sleeves and her hands are shaking. “Please, don’t freak out, oh, don’t freak out,
please!
”

“Gracie, what are you saying?” I take hold of her, and my fingers dig into her shoulders, at the same time as my voice grows very hard and very quiet. “Are you telling me
you
planted that navigation chip on Laronda? Oh my God, what are you involved with? Who gave it to you? Who told you to do something like that? Do you realize what you’ve done? You got so many people in trouble—you—”

“I know! I
know
it was awful and wrong, now, okay! But at that time I didn’t know what it was, just a stupid little chip! I was supposed to just hide it temporarily, they told me—drop it in someone’s pocket—any person I knew and dealt with casually—and I could get it back later from them, after the Correctors finished searching our dorm. It was supposed to be for one night! That’s why I came over to have dinner with you and went up to your dormitory floor, so I could find a safe spot to hide it overnight. The guys were all passing it around like a game of hot potato, they were saying that was the best way to keep it hidden—” Gracie’s face is red and she is on the verge of tears.

“The guys? What guys?
Tell me!
” I shake her, hissing in her ear, while glancing before us where up ahead the girls are still walking and laughing and talking loudly. They didn’t notice yet that we’re lagging behind.

“The guys were from Red, they were some kind of rebel group, and they were doing all these crazy secret things to get back at Atlanteans and to steal their secrets. . . . And I thought I might be cool if I did something wild like that, and Daniel might think I am—”

“
Daniel?”
I am filled with sudden rage. “Is it
Daniel Tover?
Did he put you up to this, Gracie?”

“No!” Gracie whimpers. “No, not Daniel! He had nothing to do with those guys, he is not one of them, I swear! But—but I didn’t know it at the time! I
thought
he was, and I thought I would do this one awesome thing for them and he might notice me and—”

“Oh, Gracie!”

“I screwed up, okay! I had no idea! I didn’t want to hurt anyone either! And turns out, Daniel is not even one of them, even though he hangs out with many of them—that’s why I thought he was with Terra Patria, but he’s not—”

“Hush!” I hiss again, and look around, wondering what kind of surveillance cameras and maybe audio surveillance they might have in this compound.

And then I take a deep breath and force my voice to calm down as I speak to my little idiot sister. “Gracie, listen to me. You
have
to keep your voice down. This is bad, you cannot be screaming all this loudly.”

“Okay. . . .”

“Now . . . I am not going to tell you now that you did something stupid, idiotic, and horrible that could have gotten you and all of us Disqualified, hurt, punished, and possibly killed. You already know all this. What I want to know is why didn’t you
tell me
—or George—any of this earlier? Have you any idea what kind of position you’ve put so many people in?”

Gracie scrunches her face and big fat tears roll down her cheek. “I am sorry! I am so sorry! I was scared! I wanted to tell you, and I kind of tried to, before, but I just couldn’t! And then, when they took Laronda away and then locked you up, it was too late! I didn’t know what to do! And now—I still don’t know what to do, what if they find out? Will they Disqualify me and lock me up? And what about you guys—”

I squeeze Gracie’s shoulders again. “Look at me. . . .
Stop.
You did the right thing telling me. And now, just hush, okay? Let me think. . . . We need to figure out what we need to do. Okay? Stop crying! Okay? It will be okay!”

And then I hug Gracie, and I feel her completely shaking and falling apart into a weeping mess in my arms. Might as well let her cry it out, and then she’ll get a grip. Eventually. I hope. . . .

“What’s going on here?” Laronda and the others have backtracked and now look at Gracie crying and me hugging her. “Is she okay?”