The Lost Code (9 page)

Leech was arriving at our bench, his slopey grin in full effect.

A big squeal of laughter erupted from Paige and her group.

“Foxes,” Leech said, looking over at them and taking a little bow. I was amazed again by the amount of confidence that went with the actual physical person who was speaking. Then again, I knew after last night that appearances could be deceiving. Mine included.

Leech had just sat down, when Mike said, “Dude, what happened to your hand?”

Leech’s grin tightened. Before he could slip his right hand down beside him, we all saw that there was a thick bandage around the whole thing, making it look like a big white lump. “Nothing, shut up,” said Leech. He glared at Mike.

“Sorry,” Mike muttered.

We got to breakfast and things were pretty normal. The cross-table flirting was more intense, as now Jalen and Noah seemed to have found girlfriends, though I didn’t even understand what that could mean since we only saw the Foxes in the dining hall and during free time after dinner.

The bug juice was called watermelon today and we were eating oatmeal. I sat there with the usual cabin drama happening around me and barely noticed. I focused on getting food in, feeling ravenous from the night of swimming. Once I’d stuffed myself, exhaustion immediately overwhelmed me again. I tried not to fall asleep right there at the table, the whole time swimming with Lilly in the dark water somewhere back in my brain.

“Shut up!” Leech’s shout snapped me out of my stupor. He was glaring over at the Arctic Foxes, and for a second it almost looked serious.

Paige and her friends cracked up.

“They asked if he was Paul’s little boyfriend,” said Beaker, like he was now my personal assistant.

“Huh,” I said to him, then turned back to find that Leech had already reassembled his smirk.

“We take the motorboat out,” he was saying to the girls. “I know how to pilot it, so, if any of you ladies want to take an early morning ride with me sometime, I know some secluded spots. . . .”

This caused more cracking up and Paige’s eyes to go wide, like now she was auditioning for the part of “horrified.”

Leech turned back to our table and accepted his high fives from Jalen and Noah and Mike, and ignored Xane’s attempt, but I thought about how he’d lost his cool at the mention of Paul. He’d recovered, but that had seemed weird, defensive. Why? Wasn’t he proud of being Paul’s little favorite?

“Stop gawking, Turtle,” Leech sneered at me. “You taking notes on how to talk to girls?”

I didn’t say anything, but then I smiled. I didn’t mean to. I’d just thought about talking to Lilly underwater, and the smile slipped out.

Leech’s eyes narrowed at me. “What?”

“Nothing.” I remembered my plan to stay unnoticed, and turned to Todd. “Can I go get more?” I started to stand.

“Sure,” said Todd.

“You better leave,” Leech muttered as I walked away, and again I had that feeling like,
Yeah? Try it
.
I dare you.

I headed back across the dining hall. The CITs were in their still-life positions on the couches. I spotted Lilly but she was reading. I glanced at her for a second, hoping she might look up, then noticed that Evan was nearby, and staring right at me. I turned away quick and tried to find something else to focus on.

Colleen’s death made it easy.

I didn’t see her fall, just heard the crash of metal tray against concrete floor, the shrill spray of silverware and plates, and the soft thud of skull.

It happened just to my left, and I looked down and there she was, lying fanned out on the floor.

I saw her a second before most of the dining hall. In that one second, all the talking and clinking and clattering continued, a hollow cloud of sound. One of the other cabins was even in the midst of doing a cheer that involved foot-stomping and claps. The morning sun was angling in through the back windows of the giant room, flickering off cutlery and teeth and eyeballs, and arms were moving and waving, heads bobbing, people shuffling . . . and there in the middle of it all was this single tiny form lying completely still. Her spilled cup of bright red juice had created a pool in front of her that was spreading back into her hair and toward her head in a weird reverse scene, like it was blood being sucked back in.

Then heads started to turn, a few, then more, in a water ripple across the room. A little girl screamed, and then counselors were leaping, lunging, running. The Panda counselor was closest and got there first, sliding to her knees in a splash, red juice soaking her jeans.

“Colleen?” she called quietly, almost like she was hoping Colleen was just taking a little nap, like she didn’t want to wake her. The counselor pressed fingers to Colleen’s neck, looked up, head swiveling wildly. “Someone get Dr. Maria!” She slowly rolled Colleen over onto her back.

We wished later that she hadn’t. It turned out, watermelon bug juice was quite a bit different from blood. The stuff that was caked around Colleen’s nose and all down over her mouth and chin, like a dam had broken somewhere inside, was much darker, and you could see the stickiness of it, the way it seemed to cling to the lineless skin of her cheeks, collect on stray strands of hair, and stain the collar of the sky-blue T-shirt with the cute, giant-eyed cartoon panda, the words
Camp
above and
Eden
below.

Colleen was still. Her eyes had rolled up into her sockets like she was trying to see what had made this happen, up inside her brain, like she wanted answers from her technicians. I looked around and saw that kids and adults were crying. I thought it was terrible, but it wasn’t hitting me on any gut or tear-duct level; I’d never had a sibling and little kids seemed like strange lab experiments, but still, yesterday she’d been throwing up and today . . . this?

A crowd formed and Dr. Maria pushed through, her white lab coat getting pulled half off her shoulder. “Everyone, please stand back!” she barked, her voice finding corners of the high ceiling to echo from in the now utter silence.

She dropped to the floor. Checked the pulse, too. I thought she would start chest compressions, or something like that, but instead she produced that small electronic device with the glass dot in the middle. As she moved it toward Colleen’s forehead, it lit up a pale yellow, not green like it had for me when I’d drowned.

It seemed like Dr. Maria swore then, or sighed, her head falling.

“How is she?” Paul had arrived at the edge of the empty space around Colleen.

Dr. Maria just looked up at him, her eyes welling with tears but also like she was saying something silently to him. She maybe looked angry, though with the tears it was hard to tell.

Paul watched, arms folded, eyes hidden. Then he stepped forward, knelt, and slid his arms beneath Colleen’s knees and shoulders and lifted the body up off the ground. He turned without a word and headed for the back door, toward the infirmary.

Dr. Maria stood and stared after them. Sobs made her notice the counselor, still kneeling beside her, face in her hands. Dr. Maria reached down and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s not your fault,” she said, then again, her voice thicker. “It’s not your fault.”

The hall was beginning to fill with murmuring voices, kids asking, “Will she be okay?” and “What happened?” Everyone was looking around with wide, scared eyes, their mouths slightly open as the scene they’d just witnessed burned a permanent scar in their minds. . . .

Except for the CITs. I found Lilly standing with Marco and Aliah, watching from the Ping-Pong table, all with their arms crossed. Their eyes were narrowed, like they knew all about this.

“It’s okay, everyone,” Dr. Maria called. “We’ll find out what happened. It’s—” She paused and put out her hands. “No one needs to worry.”

She nodded to herself after saying this and started walking again. She was gazing blankly ahead, and I thought she wouldn’t notice me, but then she did.

“Owen.” She paused and rubbed my shoulder. “It’s okay,” she repeated vacantly. Then she seemed to peer at my neck, her brow furrowing. “Your bandages . . .” Her voice lowered. “The wounds . . .” She sounded confused.

“Oh, yeah, all better.” I shrugged like things were totally fine, nothing to see here.

This only made Dr. Maria frown. “Okay, um . . . listen, you’d better not come today, with . . . this.” She motioned to the door. “But tomorrow, come see me first thing in the morning?”

“Sure, okay.”

“Good.” Her eyes flashed to my neck again. I’d put the NoRad on thick like Lilly had suggested, but I still felt a surge of unease. Dr. Maria was distracted, though, and in this light there was probably no way she could see the faint gill lines. She hurried off.

Sound was slowly creeping back into the dining hall, but the volume never returned to its original level.

I walked back to our table. Kids were mostly quiet, eating. After a while, Jalen started whispering with Paige, and then turned and tapped Leech on the shoulder. “Dude, Paige says it’s your first move.”

Leech seemed to snap out of some kind of trance. He’d been bent over the table, and now I saw that he’d been drawing in a little notebook with a black pen. It looked like he’d been into it, because Jalen’s tap made him kind of jump. He looked up, but instead of his usual, mischievous smile, his face curled downward. “Shut up,” he muttered, like Jalen, Paige, all of it, was annoying and beneath him. He hunched back down over the notebook and returned to whatever he was doing.

“What’s with you?” Jalen asked.

Leech didn’t reply.

Jalen muttered something to himself and turned away. I wondered what was up with Leech, but soon my thoughts returned to Colleen, to the blood. It all played over and over in my mind. It seemed so weird that a little human could just drop dead like that—could stop being, right in the middle of everything.

Dr. Maria’s words played through my mind again:
It’s okay, everyone. . . . No one needs to worry.

And I realized that was weird too, because why
would
we need to worry? It had been such a random thing, why would any of us ever think that it could happen to us? Unless . . .

Unless
she
thought it could.

It’s because of this place
, Lilly had said.

My fingers brushed at my neck, feeling the subtle indentations of what this place had already done to me. What else was it capable of?

SOMEHOW, DESPITE THE DEATH ON OUR MINDS
, we were expected to keep the camp spirit burning bright throughout another perfect day of friendly sunshine. I felt like there ought to be some more discussion about Colleen, some more worry, and I thought maybe I saw some on Todd’s face, but he just took us to the archery range over on the back side of the playing fields like everything was normal.

Ten round targets were lined up against the trees. A rope was laid out on the ground, indicating where we were supposed to stand. We walked over to a small wooden shed.

Evan emerged, a black guard strapped to his arm, a bow in his hand. “Hey,” he said to us all.

“Evan’s here to give us some pointers on shooting,” said Todd.

Evan looked over us all like he barely knew what we were, and barely cared. When his eyes swept past me, I nodded a little to him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I hoped that was because he didn’t want to reveal our secret connection, but I worried it was because he didn’t approve of me being part of that connection in the first place.

We all got bows and quivers of beat-up plastic arrows. Evan had a nicer set, a polished bow and wooden arrows with tricolor feathers on the back. He fired a few with lethal accuracy, spearing the yellow center of the target each time. “Like that,” he said. “It’s all about the power when you draw the bow, and the discipline. You have to keep everything still.”

He walked up and down the line giving advice, but right by me without a word. I got one arrow into the red target area, a couple into the blue, and the others ended up flying past the target or landing in the grass in front of it.

After archery, there was some court time playing tetherball, which I did a little better at, then lunch, where no one died, and then the awkward electives hour, when Beaker and I joined the Lemurs at Craft House (Beaker had also failed the swim test, though without drowning). We made leather bracelets, stamping in designs and then putting snaps on their ends. The little kids were doing basic shapes and nicknames and code words from their cabin. I stamped
DAD
into mine, thinking maybe it would be a good gift for him. Not that he’d ever wear a bracelet. But still. I’d have to hide it though, ’cause it was kind of childish to make a present for your dad.

“Check it out,” said Beaker, who was right there across the table from me again, like we were connected by a magnet. He was holding out his own bracelet. Awkwardly spaced letters spelled out
AASGARD
. When I didn’t really react to it, he pointed up behind me. “Like that.”

I turned to see an old wooden sign hanging in the rafters,
CAMP AASGARD
whittled into it in big blocky letters that had once been painted bright red, but only a few chips of that color remained on the gray board. There was a date in the corner: 1993.

“I tried to do that cool logo, but it was hard,” Beaker added.

I saw what he was talking about. To the right of the name was a symbol of triangles and concentric circles:

I wondered if it was Viking, or just something that kids a century ago had come up with. It could have meant anything. But it was kinda cool, so I grabbed a little paring knife and tried to reproduce it, too. It came out okay. When it was finished, I put the bracelet on. I wondered if it was a silly thing to wear but then decided I didn’t care.

When we were done, we walked down to the lake and had to wait while the rest of our cabin came in from sailing. Lilly was out on the main dock, watching free swim. If she saw me arrive, she didn’t show it.

Beaker and I walked over to the boathouse, beyond the swim area. It was an old red building with two docks sticking out from it. There were kayaks and rowboats tied up here, as well as the camp motorboat. Our cabin had the sailboats out. We sat at the end of a dock and watched them tacking back and forth, shooting ahead whenever they caught the wind. At one point, a boat capsized. They were close enough for us to hear the laughing from Mike and Noah, who’d done it on purpose. The other boats circled around until they were righted, then finally everyone heeded Todd’s calling from a nearby boat to come in. On the way back to our cabin, they all laughed and joked about their sailing adventures while Beaker and I walked a few paces behind.

Paul was at flagpole before dinner, and began by addressing us all. “I know everyone has been worried about what happened this morning,” he said. He didn’t sound particularly worried. It was more like he was fulfilling a duty. “So I just wanted to let you all know that little Colleen from the Pandas is doing okay. We sent her over to the city medical facility, and the doctors there say she is recovering. She had a severe allergic reaction. Extremely rare. Naturally, we’re going over our food protocols and cross-referencing your files to be sure we have your safety first in our minds. But nobody needs to worry.”

“Yeah, right,” muttered Marco late that night as he bounded into the dark, flipping and slicing into the black lake.

I had just told them about Paul’s speech.

“He’s full of it,” Aliah added. “It was probably those stupid syntheggs that got her.”

“Dude, they’re better than real eggs. Did you ever have one, b-freeze?” said Evan. I’d learned by now that, among the CITs,
b-freeze
meant before they’d all been Cryoed.

“I liked eggs,” said Marco, hauling himself back onto the raft. “I heard they still have them, in Indo-Australia.”

“That was the only chicken population that didn’t have to be slaughtered because of the strain-three avian flu,” said Lilly. I was also learning that she was bursting with facts like these. “EdenWest claimed that their chickens were immune, but that was another lie. I heard they took them out a few kilometers from here and gassed and burned them.”

“Come on!” Evan groaned.

“What were the real ones like?” I asked. “Eggs, I mean.”

“Mushy,” said Aliah with a frown, “you know, like eating any unfertilized embryonic tissue.” And I’d learned that Aliah tended to have opinions like this.

“Ugh! What is with you and saying things like that all the time?” Marco moaned. “It’s gross.”

“They were good with salt,” Lilly added. “And with real pancakes—like, made of wheat, not that millet stuff.”

“I thought that the Edens were supposed to have all the pre-Rise ingredients,” I said. “I can get millet pancakes at home.” We hadn’t seen wheat again since the first night, though there had still been some vegetables: tough string beans and some thick greens, and also some fruit, which apparently grew okay in the hydroponics towers over in the city.

“Yeah, they did, but not anymore ’cause things are going to hell,” said Lilly. “And there’s a reason why all the fruit is peeled and cut up all nice. If you go back in the kitchen, you’ll see those things do
not
look as good as you remember. It’s the increasing radiation, and I’ve heard it’s toxins in the water, too. And all that’s just the tip of the iceberg for this place. But back to the dead girl . . .”

“Paul said she’s alive,” I reminded them. The CITs just looked at me. “What? You don’t think she is?”

“Doesn’t matter if she is or not,” said Aliah. “You saw her. She didn’t look like she was going to ‘recover.’ And why believe
that
when everything else Paul says is so ridiculous?”

“Well, yeah.” I agreed that it seemed crazy that Camp Eden had been so careless with us, first with my drowning, then Colleen’s allergies, but it still seemed kind of hard to believe that Paul and the camp were actually behind these things, or even
making
them happen.

We were sitting around the edge of the trampoline, legs extended toward the middle, like spokes of a wheel. Little waves slapped against the thick rubber of the raft, making hollow, smacking sounds. Lilly sat to my left, then Evan, and around to Marco, then Aliah. The breeze had been turned up tonight, making the hairs on my arms and legs stand up among fields of goose bumps. The CITs were all wearing rash-guard long-sleeve tops, looking like a team of high-tech warriors, and I felt like the rookie. Lilly’s was all black with thin white seams.

Going to bed hours ago with the rest of my cabin, after another chapter of
Pym
from Todd, I had wondered how I’d wake up, but then I just did, my gills burning softly, gently nudging me out of sleep.
Time for care and feeding of your new parts
, the new technician pleasantly reminded me.

This time, as I’d sneaked out of the cabin, I left one of my socks wedged in the door to keep it from latching. Walking down to the lake, I’d been nervous. Sure, Lilly had invited me back, but would the rest of the group really want me there? Then, when I arrived they were already out there and Lilly was like, “Hey, O!” and my name was still a single syllable and now here I was, among them again, one of them, the nocturnal sea monster clan.

“Besides,” said Lilly, “Colleen wasn’t the first, just the first that happened in public.”

“Other kids have died?” I asked.

“Three or four over the last couple summers,” Marco reported. “We’d just heard the secondhand stories, though. A boy that didn’t wake up one morning—”

“Or probably ever,” Aliah added.

“Right,” Marco went on, getting up and starting to bounce in the center of the raft. “But Paul said that kid got better over at the city hospital.” He vaulted out into the water, sending a big splash back over us.

“Uh,” Aliah groaned.

“Then there was that girl who attacked her cabin with a tennis racket,” said Lilly. “She went completely insane.”

“The kid who jumped off the Aasgard cliffs, too,” said Aliah.

“Wow,” I said.

“We don’t know that any of those kids actually died,” said Evan. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while. I noticed he was staring into the center of the raft, a scowl on his face.

“And we don’t know that they didn’t,” said Lilly, sounding annoyed with him. “But we know what we
saw
today.”

“I think that girl Colleen was from Cryo House,” said Aliah. “Can’t be sure, though—all those little sprouts look the same.”

“It would make sense,” said Lilly, “if it’s connected to what’s happened to us. Colleen’s body was probably too young to deal with the changes.”

“Maybe they gave her a stronger dose,” said Marco, pulling himself back onto the raft then intentionally shaking his hair right by Aliah, spraying her with droplets.

She spun to her knees. “Knock it off, butt blister!” She shoved him, but Marco grabbed her wrist and they both tumbled into the water in a tangle of appendages. They didn’t emerge right away.

“Dorks,” said Lilly, as if such flirting was beneath her. I wondered how one went about flirting with her. I’d have to watch carefully. She was so pretty, but the more I hung around her, it didn’t seem like being pretty had anything to do with who she was. Instead, it was more like that beautiful exterior just happened to be there, and she was all about her big ideas.

“Stronger dose?” I asked.

“Yeah, makes sense, right?” said Lilly. “Paul and his minions have got to be dosing us all, like, with a drug or something, that’s mucking with our genes. You know, causing mutations.”

Evan sighed. “That’s so carbon-dated. Nobody’s been doing research like that for fifty years.”

“Shut up,” Lilly snapped at him. “You remember all that stuff with the cloning in Asia, don’t you?” Lilly’s voice was rising, picking up speed. “How about the pigs with human arms and legs and organs?”

“Sure, b-freeze, when there were universities and people with time on their hands and money to waste on stupid stuff like that,” said Evan, “but that’s all gone. Young Owen here probably doesn’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.”

I didn’t. I also didn’t like being referred to as “young.” Evan was another king, like Leech, making sure I knew he was above me. “Pigs?” I asked. “With human limbs?”

“Mice with human ears growing out of their backs,” said Lilly, “and that was only the stuff that people
knew
about.” She turned back to Evan. “Remember those stories about that guy, I forget what he was CEO of, who made, like, six clones of his favorite girlfriend and all that?”

“Oh yeah, didn’t the clones gang up and kill him, then, themselves?” said Marco.

“I think so,” said Lilly. “And there was the whole thing with people storing DNA to make copies of their pets. You think that science is gone? It’s not like there’s
nobody
with money anymore. Look around: Who would have the money to run experiments like that?”

“Here we go,” said Evan, standing up and shrugging his soccer-ball shoulders against the cool breeze. “Welcome to Dr. Lilly Ishani’s Big Theory Spectacular.” He stepped to the center of the trampoline and started bouncing, gaining height.

“Screw you,” said Lilly.

“Maybe later,” Evan scoffed, and flew through the air.

As he disappeared into the water, Lilly turned to me. I was busy wondering: Had they screwed? Or dated? Was that what had just been revealed? But I had to focus, because I was the only one left to listen to Lilly’s ideas. And I think I was starting to understand that what she wanted, maybe more than meaty shoulders, was to spin her ideas and have someone listen and get it.