The Lost Code (4 page)

“Sorry,” he said mildly, and I had no idea if he was, but his smile was its widest yet, like he wasn’t actually sorry at all, and suddenly I needed to get out of there.

“I should go,” I said, and stepped toward the door and yanked it open, trying to stay calm but really wanting to run.

“Of course.” Paul didn’t stop me. “Owen?”

I turned to see him standing casually, hands in his pockets. “Just remember, I’ve seen it all. The more you share with me, the more I can help.”

“Okay, um, thanks.” I hurried out.

OUTSIDE, IT WAS EARLY EVENING. THE TEMPERATURE
was balmy, the breeze like a soft hand. The moisture in the air made my skin feel sticky. It was still a strange feeling, but a relief compared to being with Paul.

The SafeSun lamps had been dimmed to orange, the SimClouds tinted purple. The wind had been turned down, and the insects were making a bunch of different sounds: drones and screeches and blips. Out at Hub, we only had the usual insects that could’ve cared less about the Great Rise, like ants and flies, and the cockroaches that had adapted to become hand-sized so they could compete with the snakes for the rodent supply.

EdenWest was supposed to contain all the animals that used to live in this part of the country except for the mosquitoes and biting flies, which they’d thoughtfully not included. I was passing tall bushes of purple flowers by the dining hall, ones that Todd had called rhododendrons, and I saw yellow-and-black bugs buzzing around. Bees. Actual bees. That made sense. You’d hear stories of how they had things like real honey in the Edens, just like they had up north in the HZ.

I stopped to watch them work, floating to a flower, then flicking their delicate leg structures and abdomens to gather pollen. It seemed so amazing that creatures like that, so small and complex, were the work of the same world that offered massive things like oceans, or a Three-Year Fire, or even this soaring dome.

Something bounced on the air, closing in on the bush like it was being controlled by a puppeteer. I flinched, then saw that it was a butterfly, another creature that was only memory out at Hub, and in most of the world. Its wings were powder blue and jewel green with black curling patterns. It flittered around the bush, like it was looking for a free flower. I stuck my arm out near it and the butterfly wobbled, then landed right on the top of my wrist. I could barely feel its feet.

I moved it closer to my face to get a better look, its wings flicking up and down slowly, its feet readjusting so that it almost seemed to be looking right at me. It had a long, straight abdomen trailing behind it, two delicate antennae, and shiny eyes. Except, I saw that there was actually only one eye. And it wasn’t even an eye. . . . It was a camera. Now I recognized a tiny humming sound, and clicks as the legs moved.

A robot.

Its tail was actually an antenna. I looked up at the lavender TruSky, and wondered if there was someone up there in the Eagle Eye who controlled this thing. It lifted off and fluttered away from me and the bush, not actually needing the flower nectar.

I started down the hill to the playing fields. The itching on my neck was acting up again, getting hotter. Despite Dr. Maria’s warning, my fingers found the outside of the bandages and started rubbing softly. It helped a little.

The boys’ cabins were on the south side of camp, in the woods between the playing fields and Mount Aasgard, which wasn’t really a mountain like out West, but it was a high hill with a naked set of rock ledges at the summit that reached out and almost touched the curving dome wall. The granite sparkled in the pink sunset light.

I entered the pine trees, my sneakers scuffing along a wood-chip path. The forest was still except when I passed near an air blower. A steady chord of insect noises hummed in the background, but I wondered now if that was real or instead broadcast from hidden speakers.

I reached the clusters of boys’ cabins. The girls’ cabins were on the other side of the fields, near the beach. Each cabin was named for an extinct creature, and I could hear the wild calls and thumps from mine, the Spotted Hyenas, before it was even in sight.

I got to the door and felt the usual flutter of nerves. I hated this place already, and I felt pretty sure that there was no way I was going to have the amazing transformation that Paul and Dr. Maria talked about.

I walked into the front room. Todd was lounging on his bed, the curved brim of his dirty white cap pulled low over his eyes. He was reading a paper book. Another part of the costume of this place.

“Hey, Owen, good to see you back,” he said. “You feeling okay?”

“Fine.” I passed him and walked through the doorway into our bunk room. There were wooden bunk beds built into the walls, a small window beside each bed. Another wall was lined with cubbies. Everyone was messing around, some kids playing dice on the wooden floor, others joking, some sitting, legs hanging off their perches. I headed straight for my bunk, which was in the far corner, by the side exit door.

I was just reaching the little ladder up to my bed when a balled-up, sour-smelling sock whipped past my head and smacked against the wall.

“Check it out: the Turtle lives!”

I looked over to see Leech staring down at me from his bunk, where he was leaning on his elbow, lounging like royalty, giving no indication that he’d just thrown the sock. Everybody stopped when they heard him and turned to look at me.

“We thought you were dead,” said Jalen, sounding disappointed.

I wanted to say something, but what? Leech was the undisputed ruler, there was no use fighting it. When we’d all first walked in, each dropping our bags onto our bare bed and sliding our trunks underneath, Leech’s top bunk had already been decorated with posters, photos, and drawings, his stuff already hung in cubbies. He’d been wearing the hand-dyed T-shirt from last session that was signed by the other kids and even the counselors, like an endorsement of his king status. He’d already shown that he knew everyone on the staff by name, and they all knew him. Even the kitchen cooks gave him high fives.

He’d started handing out the nicknames during the first dinner, the night before. I’d been busy eating real wheat pasta for the first time, and also this leafy plant called spinach, which was greener than anything I’d ever seen and tasted bitter and smelled like wet rocks. People were giving welcome speeches to the whole camp, when I heard Leech begin.

“How about . . .” He scratched his chin with his index finger and thumb, a scientist hard at work. To either side of him, Jalen and Leech’s other freshly minted minions were already leaning in close. “Ooh, I know,” he said, and then he pointed dramatically to the two kids at the opposite end of the table. “Bunsen and Beaker.” Leech’s gang laughed, though I’m not sure any of them knew what those nicknames were from. I didn’t. “Who else?” said Leech, scanning the table with his squinty gaze. It landed on me. He nodded and grinned. “Turtle,” he said. More snickering laughter.

“What?” I said back to him, because I didn’t even know what he meant by the nickname. I figured I didn’t look turtlelike in any way, since I wasn’t overweight, so I wondered if maybe it was because of how the tortoises out in Yellowstone lived in burrows and how I lived underground, too.

“Turtle,” he snapped back at me, and I guess it was the fact that I’d dared to question him that suddenly made his grin curl downward. “That’s you.”

The reason for the nickname turned out to be even dumber than I’d thought. I learned later that night that it was just because I had been
wearing
a turtleneck shirt. And nobody called those shirts turtlenecks anymore. I’d never even heard of the word. It was just a LoRad pullover like anyone else might wear back at Hub. They were part of the dress code at my school, where Rad levels were a daily issue.

And the reason Leech even knew a retro word like
turtleneck
was because he was a Cryo. He’d been frozen during the Great Rise and put safely inside EdenWest by his parents, who couldn’t afford to move in themselves. After things settled down, the Cryos were awakened in batches. He and the others lived at Cryo House, which was like a foster home over in the main EdenWest city. All the Cryos came to camp, but then the rest of the kids here were apparently normal, the grandchildren of EdenWest’s original inhabitants, and so this was just another part of their life of luxury. Not that I blamed them for that. It wasn’t their fault they’d grown up in here. They couldn’t be expected to know what it was like outside, to treat the sun like an enemy, to never have tasted spinach.

I ate that first dinner quietly, thinking,
Great, twenty-nine days left and I’ve already been identified, categorized, and labeled
. And things only got worse as dinner went on. I sat there mostly quiet except when Todd would ask me a question, and watched as friendships formed around me, everyone gravitating to one another, the natural thing that people did, except for me, a satellite off in my own orbit. It was just like so often back at school, and I never knew how it happened, how you did that magic thing where you became part of a group, and it seemed like, once again, it was already too late before it even started.

There were ten of us in the cabin. We’d gotten the basics out of the way the first night: Leech, Jalen, and Xane were the Cryos. Mike, Carl, Wesley, Bunsen, and Beaker lived with their families in EdenWest. Noah and I were the outsiders. He was from Dallas Beach, along the Texas coastline. It was kind of like Hub: a little satellite state of the ACF, which basically meant that, other than the military units that came and went to escort supplies, it was on its own. You’d think that would have made us natural friends, but Noah had already made his intention clear to join Jalen and Mike as one of Leech’s minions. I suppose I could have done the same, but it never really occurred to me, and it had been obvious even by the end of dinner that first night that no more invitations for the Leech club were going to be available. Also, I was pretty sure I didn’t like him from the first moment I met him.

Leech and Jalen had immediately started bonding by referencing ancient TV shows and comic books and junk from way back in pre-Rise, talking in code and making the rest of us feel inferior. When Leech had started tossing out nicknames at dinner, Jalen was the only one who laughed. Xane got the jokes but didn’t really join in. He was the one who’d told me what Turtle meant, later.

“What happened to your neck?” asked Beaker as I reached the ladder to my bunk. He had the bed below mine. Leech had two cubbies, even though we were only supposed to take one each, and so all of Beaker’s clothes and shoes were stuffed under his bed.

Just the mention of my neck made the slow itching seem to get stronger.

I was about to answer when Leech’s voice boomed across the room. “Beaker! I thought I told you: no speaking!”

Beaker sighed quietly and his shoulders slumped.

“Good Beaker,” said Leech.

It had been established that Bunsen and Beaker were on the lowest rung of the cabin food chain, where everything you did made you a target. I seemed to be up on the second level, where you were more just invisible, enough so that you could drown without anyone noticing.

“You can talk if you want to,” said Bunsen quietly to Beaker. He was lying on the next bunk over, typing up a letter on a computer pad, the blue light reflecting on his big round glasses. The cabin only had one computer. You weren’t allowed to bring your own, to preserve the experience. But you could write a letter home on the cabin pad, and then the camp would send the letters out over the gamma link each night.

“Hey, bed wetter!” Noah snapped, looking up from an old board game called Stratego that he was playing with Mike. He was talking to Bunsen. Jalen claimed that he’d seen Bunsen crying and changing his sheets in the middle of the night. No one could confirm this, but Leech and his gang had decided it was fun to believe it, and so it was. “Shut up and try not to piss yourself!”

“You—,” Bunsen began.

“Careful, bed wetter,” warned Leech.

I climbed up into my bunk and lay down, staring at the ceiling. My neck was starting to really burn. I rubbed at the bandages with my knuckles.

“All right, guys.” Todd appeared in the doorway. “Time to head to the dining hall.”

Everyone stopped what they were doing and started out.

I sat up but then felt a wave of dizziness and lay back down. The itching rose like a wave.

“Owen, how you feeling?” asked Todd.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Dr. Maria said you might need to rest. If you want to skip dinner, that’s fine with me.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“We’ll bring you back some food.”

“Thanks.”

I listened to them leave, a commotion of shuffling footsteps, jostling shoulders, and laughing and shouts. It faded. The insect drone seeped through the window, the cabin now silent and still.

I fell asleep for a little while, but the burning in my neck woke me up. I needed a distraction, so I grabbed the computer pad and lay back down. I started a letter to Dad:

Hey Dad
,

Things are okay here. Guess you heard about my swimming accident but I’m mostly okay.

I stopped, not knowing what else to report. I didn’t want to tell him about my neck. Not because of Lilly’s warning not to tell anyone, but because I didn’t want him to worry. I wondered if I should tell him that things were basically terrible in my cabin? That would probably make him worry, too.

It’s Tuesday. How was work? How was the game?

I tried to think of more to write, like maybe ask him what he had for dinner. Thinking about Dad and how he’d manage on his own made me think of how Mom always made fun of him for not liking to cook. She used to say that he’d be lost without her. Except she didn’t seem to think about that when she left.

The itching was getting worse, so much so that I could barely think straight.

Okay, write back soon.

Owen

I sent the message and put the pad down. I lay back, trying to keep my hands off the bandages. Maybe if I thought about Lilly, about her lips on my ear as she whispered to me, about the closeness of her leaning over me and the view I’d had of her bathing-suited figure—and that made things start to burn in other places. . . . But even that couldn’t compete with the searing in my neck.