The Lost Code (17 page)

A group of herbivores appeared, girls from the Koala cabin, their faces painted with cute whiskers and black noses. They were silent, nervously glancing up at the ridges on either side, a few clutching food tokens to their chests.

They had nearly reached us when Leech cupped his hands to his mouth and called,
“Whoop-oop-oop!”
A battle cry, and though I hated him, it was also the right thing to do, because the girls jumped and screeched, terrified, and we all leaped up from our hiding places.

They spun and ran, bumping into one another. “This way!” shouted their counselor, and they fled back down the hill. We took off, a pack in pursuit, the gravity of the hill spinning our legs. We were all making the whooping animal call now. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it at first, but it felt good, and combined with all the adrenaline and nerves left over from the fight, I felt myself in the grip of a bloodlust, a predator, running full speed after the meek beings below, mine for the kill.

We caught them as the trail flattened out. Noah and Xane tagged the last girls in the pack and both shouted, “Caught!” and then I was reaching a little girl in pigtails who saw me and squealed in terror. Nearby, a girl tripped and fell and skinned her knee just as Beaker was about to grab her.

“Ooh, sorry!” said Beaker, the least predatory of us all.

“Okay, that’s enough!” the counselor called. “You got us.”

They had only found one stash of food so far, so we got all one hundred credits of that, plus five of their armbands. The counselor collected the loot from the girls and then turned toward us. “Here.”

Leech stepped up and took it.

As the girls headed back to the entrance to get new armbands and wait to reenter, Leech turned with the spoils. “Everybody gets their forty,” he said, and handed things around. He gave me a token and an armband without looking at me.

I tensed, ready to pick up where we’d left off, but Leech just said, “Come on.” He wiped at the still-trickling blood beneath his nose and started up the other side of the gully, off the trail again. I figured our fight wasn’t over, but maybe it was suspended for the rest of the competition.

Noah and Xane followed Leech. Beaker was watching me again, to see what I’d do. I thought about taking off on my own, but I kept following them. They knew these woods from the previous games, and I didn’t.

We continued cutting our own trail. At one point we had a silent run-in with an Arctic Fox team. Now and then, we heard the ghostly sounds of other kills happening in the distance. I walked behind Leech and Noah. Each time they leaned close to whisper, I tensed for the retaliation, but then they’d just change direction. Noah would turn back to me and Beaker and Xane and make a pointing motion in our new direction, like we were a military unit.

“Where do you think the carnivores are?” Beaker asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said. In terms of winning the game, I wasn’t supposed to want to run into them, but the thought of that encounter, of Lilly and the chase, was starting to dominate my thoughts.

We crossed another stream and passed a high-fenced pen where two black bears were sleeping in a rock enclosure. They didn’t move. I wondered if they were real. A sour stench seemed to indicate that they were.

In the distance, the air horn sounded twice.

“What was that?” Beaker asked.

“Halfway point,” said Leech, “but it also means that half the food in the game has been taken away, to symbolize it being lost to the Great Rise. Resources are scarce now, so we have to be extra careful.”

We twisted through the trees, peering in all directions. Heard more screeches of a distant attack in progress.

“Wait,” Leech suddenly hissed. “Did you hear that?”

“What?” I asked.

“Listen.” He pointed toward a huge boulder, maybe three meters tall and wide, just off the trail. We were silent for a few seconds, and then we heard someone snicker, then a shushing and a young giggle.

“Whoop-oop-oop!”
Leech shouted again, and we rushed the stone. Herbivores sprinted from behind it, a herd of squealing little boys all with black-and-white stripes on their faces. They headed straight back through the thick forest, dodging and twisting through the underbrush.

We tore after them, screaming our banshee wails and closing fast. The boys answered with their own screams of terror.

“Over here!” Their counselor had found a path. The herbivores veered after him. Ahead, a dirt clearing opened up, ringed by trees. There was another animal pen, with a little rock mountain in it. A cougar lounged atop it, basking in the SafeSun, watching us mildly.

We broke out into the space right on the heels of the herbivores, our fingertips almost to their shirts, when more cries and shouts sounded.

Our cabin’s other team suddenly swept out of the trees on the far side of the clearing, Jalen leading the charge, fangs bared. The little ones screamed even louder.

“Get there first!” Leech shouted.

We sprinted. The kids were heading straight toward the fence of the cougar pen. Nowhere left to run. But then as soon as they hit the fence, they all turned and started shouting, “Safety Zone! Safety Zone!”

I saw it now, the yellow signs hung on the fence.

“Damn!” said Leech.

The little kids huddled against the fence, looking at us, relieved and yet still wide-eyed. We’d all arrived at the same time, and now both teams stood in a semicircle around them, panting, like animals leering at the edge of the firelight.

“We can wait all day, meat,” said Leech.

“We get five minutes here,” said the herbivores’ counselor. “Then you have to give us a head start.”

Leech began to say, “No probl—”

But he was cut off by a sound from the trees. A call, starting in a low pitch and rising steeply to a high screech at its end.
“Ooouup!”

We looked around wildly.

Now an answering call, from nearby:
“Ooouup!”

Everybody peered into the trees.

“Ooouup!”

“CITs?” Xane whispered.

The calls seemed to be coming from so close that someone should have been able to see them. Unless . . .

I looked up. Thick branches, fans of needles . . . And then I saw a shadow, high up against one of the trunks.

“They’re in the trees!” I shouted, and even by the time I had turned to run, they were swooping down on us, on ropes they’d tied in the branches. I saw that they weren’t my CITs; this was a team of others. Five of them, coming from all sides.

“Ooouup!”

“Ooouup!”

“Run!” Leech screamed.

Our group had two steps on the other half of our cabin, and that turned out to be the difference. We careened around the side of the cougar pen and blasted down a path that sloped steeply downhill through the trees. Behind us, I heard Jalen cursing as his team was caught.

“That way!” one of the carnivores shouted. Footsteps pounded after us.

Our legs wheeled beneath us. The path dropped steeply and then flattened out and opened up at a tiny pond bordered by tall grass and weeds. We broke out into the sun again, all turning around to look for our pursuers.

“See anyone?” Leech asked, breathless.

“Nothing,” I said, and the others agreed. The forest behind us had become eerily silent.

“Why would they let us go?” said Beaker.

“They’re probably collecting tokens from the other group,” said Leech. “I think we’re safe.”

I turned, hands on my knees, catching my breath. My eyes fell on the little pond, its surface reflecting the sky.

But beneath that, something moved.

“No, we’re not,” I said, scrambling backward to my feet.

“What?” asked Leech.

But the tan water was already starting to bubble and roil. As I stumbled back, my fellow monsters burst out of the pond.

“It’s a trap!” Noah shouted.

They surged out of the frothing water, Evan, Marco, Aliah, and Lilly, skin and bathing suits glistening, and, only apparent to me, gills tucking themselves away.

Or maybe Leech noticed them, too. “Fish monsters!” he shouted.

In the second before I ran, I caught Lilly’s eye. She was smiling wickedly at me, and I knew our game was on.

My team scattered. I sprinted into the trees, the crashing of footsteps seeming to come from everywhere.

“Ooouup!”
The call came from up the hill. Silhouettes hurtled down toward us. The other CITs were joining in the pursuit. Now they had us pinned from both directions.

I ran to my right, figures flying on both sides of me, everyone darting and flicking among the trunks.

Behind me I heard a scream like someone had been grabbed. Technically, the rules were that if someone in your group was caught, that was it, but I saw Leech still sprinting, and I kept going too, sure that Lilly would be doing the same.

Someone came flying down from my left. A CIT I didn’t know. I angled down the hill, vaulted a fallen log, amazed I even landed the jump, heard a scraping of dirt, and looked behind me to see the CIT girl tackling Xane in a spray of pine needles.

I raced on, glancing back over my shoulders. Bodies still moving back there. Where was Lilly?

I wove through the trees and emerged into another patch of sun. I was at the far edge of the little pond. A stream burbled out of it, through tall grass and then down a cascade of rocks, disappearing into the dark woods in the direction of the lake. A narrow trail ran beside the stream. I started that way.

A butterfly dropped down, bouncing on the air nearby. It had teal wings with jewel-green dots, and seemed to hover, facing me, and I wondered if, up in the Eye, someone was monitoring our locations in the Preserve.

Then footsteps, pounding, close behind me. The sound of the stream had masked their approach.

I glanced over my shoulder, smiling, ready for the chase—

But it wasn’t Lilly. The figure was too big, still-wet shoulders working. Eyes peering at me coldly.

Evan.

I turned and sprinted down the little trail, pressing as hard as I could with each step, telling my legs to do all of this faster, this moving up and down and still avoiding rocks and roots, things they were not good at.

I could hear him closing.

The stream and the trail leveled out and left the trees again to meander through a flat area of high bushes. I could barely see over them. Their branches scraped my arms and thighs.

The trail made a sharp turn. Ahead was a tiny wooden bridge over the stream—

“Gotcha!” Arms wrapped around me and shoulders slammed into me and I was falling forward, to the side of the bridge, into the tearing fingers of the bushes then out and down a dirt bank, weight crushing on top of me, down to the stream’s edge, my hands smashing against rocks, my face ending up right by the water.

Hands flipped me over.

“What’s up, flavor of the moment?” Evan leered down at me, his princely face twisted with malice, and now I knew that Leech wasn’t the most dangerous predator in these woods.

I didn’t answer him.

He punched me in the face.

The fist hit jaw, nose, temple, and the world went out of balance and the sun got brighter in my eyes and there was a second where it hurt so much it didn’t even hurt.

Then the pain spread in white-hot waves all across my face. I tried to struggle to get free, but my movements were little more than loose flopping.

“Whatever,” Evan spat at me. “You’re all head over heels, but do you think she loves you or something? You’re just the next distraction. Which I guess makes me an idiot for being the last one. But at least I was smart enough to push back against her crazy ideas. With you being her little yes-boy, she’s going to ruin everything here!”

I stared up at him, realizing that at least part of this fury was meant for Lilly. I was getting punishment for two. But I had no comeback, my face useless, my body pinned tight.

He raised his fist again.

I watched it. My cheek tingled in preparation. I tried not to wince.

Then I noticed the curious green light that appeared on Evan’s chest. It moved to his neck. His fist began its descent.

But before it could reach me, the dart
thwipp
ed into his neck, a silver needle with shimmery blue feathers, nearly five centimeters long.

“Tch—,” Evan coughed. He thrashed backward and slapped at his neck. The dart popped free in a little splash of blood.

Its work was done, though. Evan’s eyes bugged wide and he pitched forward, his sweat-smelling torso meat crushing down onto me.

I struggled to push him off, which dumped his body facedown at the water’s edge.

I rolled over, dug my elbows into the slick dirt and got a few feet away, then collapsed on my back. My whole face was pounding.

What had happened?

In the bright slice of sky above me, the teal butterfly appeared, bouncing to its wingbeats. It hovered over me, and for once I was almost glad that someone had an eye on me.

There was a pop of air, and the butterfly jerked back and disintegrated in a burst of sparks, a little rain of electric debris falling on and around me.

Footsteps clomped onto the little bridge. Those feet landed, burly high-laced boots beside me, half in the water. The figure above was a shadow, backlit by the bright sky.

A whistling sound. This person whistling. Now a response from nearby. Sounds in the underbrush. Bodies emerging. More predators, but these weren’t CITs.

“YOU’RE SURE THAT’S HIM?” ONE OF THEM
whispered.

Three people standing in front of me now. Three adults in ragged clothes, denim and flannel and LoRad fleece jackets. All the clothes were originally other colors but had been dyed in a camouflage of dark greens and grays and blacks. Their faces were painted, but not with lively designs. Mud brown. Simple. And the paint didn’t hide all the purple lesions or crimson boils. The effects of exposure, of a life spent on the naked surface of the earth. They held rifles.

“Definitely. Check the photo.” The Nomad woman held out her subnet phone, showing the others the screen.

“That’s him,” one of the men replied.

“Okay.” The woman had short, spiky black hair and a chiseled face. She spoke into her phone. “Robard, this is Beta Team. We have our target. Any word from the others?”

“None yet,” the voice of Robard replied. “You guys get out of there, pronto.”

“Who areeyyou?” I asked, the words slurred by Evan’s fist. I knew, though, despite the cloud from my now swollen eye, that they were Nomads.

“Relax, Owen,” said one of the men. “We’re your rescue team. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“Out of here?” I mumbled.

“It’s okay.” The woman knelt down. Her brown irises swam in whites that had been irradiated to pink, the blood vessels singed to near black. “I’m Pyra, and this is Barnes and Tiernan. We know who you are, Owen. We know
what
you are. Our contact here alerted us to you.”

“What I—”

“Sshh. Don’t talk.” Pyra was fiddling with something in her hands. She held up a circular piece of fabric between her fingers. She reached to my neck, pressed it there, and a white wave of unfeeling spread through my body.

My words came out as whispers. “What did you do?”

“Neuro dampener,” said Pyra. “To ease the pain. Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to move.”

Barnes and Tiernan lifted me up and slung my arms over their shoulders. They were both lean and strong, Barnes with a wiry brown beard, Tiernan with thick glasses and one of those false ears made of pale-pink plastic. I could distantly feel my feet on the ground, but they seemed far away. Pyra was right, I could still move, but not enough to try to escape.

“We’re going to take you out of here,” said Tiernan. “Get you away from Project Elysium before it’s too late. And once we’re out, we’ll explain everything. Promise.”

“But right now we’ve got to move,” said Pyra. “Fast.”

They dragged me back up to the trail and we crossed the bridge. I heard some commotion of the game back toward the pond, maybe even the shouting of names, but we were headed in the other direction. Were they looking for me? Would they even notice I was gone?

Up a hill, and then we turned off the trail, weaving through the trees.

I could barely control my movements. My feet were stumbling along almost on their own. At least the pain in my face had been numbed.

I heard Pyra talking into her phone. “We’re en route to the extraction point, copy.”

“Good,” Robard replied. “Alpha Team?”

“We are holding position,” another voice replied, “and looking for an opening to acquire our target.”

A woman’s voice spoke on the phone. “This is Skull Team, over. We’re almost to the temple. Disabling the alarms and cameras took time, but we’re at the nav room now and are about to try—”

A sharp crack cut her off, then an electric shriek tore out of the phone.

“Agh!” Pyra jerked it away from her head. “Robard? Come in, do you copy?” No one replied.

“They could be jamming us,” said Barnes.

“Sounded like rifle bursts,” said Tiernan.

Pyra tried again. “Robard? Alpha Team? Anyone copy?” The only reply was a hiss of dead air.

We jogged through the forest, moving up a series of undulations. I thought we were maybe parallel with the pond, and then likely past it. I couldn’t tell how long we’d been going. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe more.

“Robard,” Pyra whispered. “Skull Team . . . Someone answer!” Nothing.

Ahead it was brighter, and we reached an abrupt end to the trees. In front of us was the high fence, the dry moat, and then the dome wall. We turned left and followed the fence. At the bottom of a hill, we reached a gate. It hung open, a blackened hole where its lock had been. Beyond the gate, a narrow metal bridge with wire railings crossed the moat. At the other end, a thick hatch-like door hung ajar, its handle similarly blown out. Beyond that door, brilliant sunlight baked barren rock.

We stopped at the broken gate.

“Robard, anyone, come in,” Pyra repeated. When no one replied again, she glanced wildly in all directions.

“Now what?” said Barnes.

“Not sure,” said Pyra, her voice tense. “We were supposed to meet back here.”

“We should just get out,” said Tiernan. “The other teams may have been compromised. If we’ve got the boy, we don’t need the skull anyway.”

“Yes, we do!” Pyra snapped. “He’ll be useless without its information.”

“But there’s the other one, down south. And the girl.”

“That’s not how it works!” said Pyra. “At least, not according to Dr. Keller’s studies.” She tried the phone again. “Robard, do you copy?”

As she listened to the static, I wondered, What was this? They were talking about a skull, a temple, and a girl. The skull from my vision? And the girl they mentioned, was that Lilly? Were they after her, too? Either way, what it definitely meant was that these Nomads were related to what was happening to me, and to that vision, even the siren. Somehow, all of it was connected.

“Okay, you’re right,” said Pyra. “We’ll make for the rendezvous and hope for the best.”

The men angled me through the fence and out onto the narrow bridge. Pyra followed behind us. Tiernan let go of me and started toward the door, gun raised. Barnes guided me from behind. I glanced over the meager wire railing at the ten-meter drop to the concrete floor of the moat.

Then, I looked ahead at the approaching brightness of the outside world. I was being taken from EdenWest. And I couldn’t move to do anything about it.

“Robard, this is Pyra, we are exiti—
Gluh!
”

The bridge shuddered, the wires to my side springing like they’d been plucked.

“Pyra!” Barnes shouted. He let go of me, his shoulder brushing my back as he spun around.

There was a hissing of air.

“Agh!”

I was turning around, trying to control my balance, when Barnes jerked backward into me. In the blurry sweep of my vision I saw that Pyra had vanished from the bridge. And something was wrong with the back of Barnes’s head. The shape wasn’t right.

Something hot on my face.

Hands grabbed me by the armpits, dragging me back toward the door. “Come on, kid!” Tiernan shouted.

I watched Barnes slump to the ground, saw the movement back in the trees. Black figures emerging from the shadows, helmets on, amber visors down, rifles raised.

“Put the boy down!” one of the soldiers shouted.

Something cold pressed against my neck. A knife. The dream, on the pyramid . . . no, this was now. “Don’t come any closer or he dies!” said Tiernan. I saw our shadows cast in front of us by the daylight. We were almost to the door.

A pop. Another hissing of air. The feel of more hot liquid, this time spraying onto the back of my neck.

I was tossed forward. The knife clattered off the side of the bridge. I couldn’t stop myself from careening over face-first. I got my arms out, but they didn’t do much good. My forehead slammed against metal.

Tiernan fell on top of me. Drops of warm fluid falling onto my cheek. Streaming to my nose and falling free. I watched Tiernan’s blood as it plinked on the grated metal floor of the bridge. Some drops slipped through and fell all the way to the concrete below, to where Pyra’s body lay in a twisted
S
shape, a pool of blood spreading from her head.

Footsteps banged on the bridge. The body was pushed off me. Gloved hands under my armpits. They pulled me up.

“I have him,” the officer said. He set me on my feet. “Can you walk?”

I glanced at his amber visor, reflecting the bright real sun and the open door behind me, and tried to answer, but no words actually came out.

“Okay, just hang on to me.” He slung my arm over his shoulder and led me back toward the gate. We stepped over Barnes, over his contorted face and misshaped head, some important piece of it missing now. I saw red among the hair, insides now exposed.

It all passed over me. Images. Things. None of this was real. Couldn’t be.

Back through the gate, and there were many officers now. They sat me against a tree. I watched them use ropes to get into the moat. I looked down and saw blood splattered on my shirt, my arms and legs. Other people’s blood.

“Owen!” I looked up to see Dr. Maria running over. She dropped to one knee in front of me. “You’re okay,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She yanked the patch from my neck.

“Better than them,” I whispered.

Dr. Maria glanced toward the bridge. An officer was climbing up out of the moat, Pyra over his shoulder. He carried her off the bridge and dumped the body to the pine-needle ground with a hollow thump.

When Dr. Maria looked back, there were wet edges beneath her eyes. She sniffed, like the sight of the bodies had gotten to her. Then she saw me noticing. “Sorry,” she said, wiping at the tears.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Dr. Maria opened her black backpack and pulled out a red medical kit. She checked my eyes with a penlight. Took my wrist and checked my pulse. “Anything hurt besides this?” She touched my swollen cheek lightly.

“Nah,” I said.

She pulled an ice pack from her backpack, shook it, and put it in my hand. I noticed that her hand was shuddering. “That’s for your cheek,” she said. “The neuro dampener should wear off in a few minutes. You’ll get your feeling back.”

“Okay.” I could already feel prickling in my toes and fingers.

She rummaged in the kit. “Just one more thing . . .” She pulled out that square box with the glass dot. She held it toward my forehead. The light blinked green again. “Good.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“It’s—”

“Owen.” Paul was striding toward us. Beside him was Cartier, the head of security. Paul introduced him, then glanced over his shoulder. “This is very unfortunate,” he said, as if what had happened here was just a bad-tasting meal rather than the deaths of three people. “Owen, listen: we’re going to need to know everything they may have said to you. I’m sure most of it was lies—the Nomads are experts at misinformation—but still . . . it might give us a clue as to what they’re up to.”

I almost laughed at this. Lies . . . As if he was one to talk.

Dr. Maria sniffed. I saw her scowling as she busied herself with her pack, like she felt the same way.

“How is he holding up?” Paul asked her.

“Seems fine so far,” Dr. Maria mumbled.

Paul knelt down. I saw my face in his glasses. There was a streak of blood across my cheek, like someone had been careless with a paintbrush. “It’s important for you to understand me right now. It turns out we were wrong about yesterday’s bombing. It was actually designed to draw our attention away while this Nomad team got inside. They had help, too. Someone on the inside hit our detection systems with a virus. Whoever was behind this, they knew our schedule, knew you’d be in the Preserve unsupervised. They probably figured this was the perfect time to make their move.”

“Did they get anybody else?” I asked.

“No,” said Paul, but my question seemed to interest him. “Why do you ask?”

“They were talking,” I started to say, then thought I should hide what I knew. “I couldn’t make out much of it.”

Paul nodded. “Do you remember anything else?”

“No,” I said. “They just grabbed me, told me to keep quiet.”

“I think he’s in some shock.” I looked over at Dr. Maria and found her gazing at me seriously, and when our eyes met, her head seemed to hitch slightly. Had she just nodded to me?

“Maria,” said Paul.

“Yeah?” Her head snapped away, up to Paul, and I thought her eyes looked wide, like she’d been caught.

But Paul was looking across the clearing. Two officers were carrying Evan out of the trees. He was still unconscious. “Go see to him, would you?”

“Okay.” Dr. Maria grabbed her bag and hurried away.

Paul turned to Cartier. “Go check the bodies for information,” he said. “I’ll meet you over there.”

Cartier left, and now it was just me and Paul.

He leaned closer to me, lowering his voice. “Look, Owen: it’s time we talked more frankly about what is going on here in EdenWest.” He reached out and rested a hand on my shoulder. “About what’s going on with
you
.” I wanted to slide away from his touch, but my body was still foggy from the dampener. “I thought we could take our time,” Paul went on, a slight smile forming and fading, “let things develop in their own way, but I’m afraid this little incident illustrates that we’re going to have to get right to the point. Do you understand me?”

I didn’t answer.

“I think you do, Owen,” Paul said like I was a child, “but this is my fault. You deserve to know what’s really going on here, and I, I need to know everything that you know.” He glanced to the bodies, then back at me. “It’s the only way I can keep you safe.”

For a moment, I almost had an urge to tell him. After the bullets, the deaths . . . Paul was the most powerful person here. If I had just gone to him about my gills, told him about the siren and the vision, he might never have let me out here, and none of this would have happened. Maybe it was time to stop playing games, to stop keeping secrets, before there were more bodies.

Except, who was really the one playing games? Paul had lied to the camp multiple times. I’d seen it. And what he’d just said: it sounded more than ever like he knew way more about what was happening to us than he was letting on, and he was just sitting back and letting things
develop
? So, if I told him everything, what would he do then? Was that when the experiments would begin like he did with Anna?