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“There it is,” she said. “Where it all started.”

Breathing heavily, I stared at a large adobe building that stood in a clearing. It was only one story, but probably a hundred feet or more on each side—from where I was, it appeared to be a square. At each corner was a squat tower, two of which were crumpled and broken. The one door was enormous, made of wood and iron. Other than the door, the only break in the thick brown walls were tiny window slits every ten or twelve feet. They couldn’t have been more than four or five inches wide. They had no glass, but a single iron bar ran up the center of each.

I’d seen this building a dozen times—or buildings like it—in every John Wayne Western.

“Fort Maxfield,” Jane said. “You’ll be safe here.”

We crossed the field of snow to the door, where Mouse and the guy stood.

As we approached, I could tell this wasn’t a replica of an Old West fort—this thing really was old. In many places the smooth stucco surface had flaked off, revealing the rough brown interior of the mud walls. Even the massive door seemed to be falling apart, and I could see some obviously recent repairs: one of the massive hinges was brass and shiny, out of place from the other blackened antique metalwork, and a two-by-four was nailed vertically up one side of the door to hold the decaying boards in place.

A wreath of flowers, long since dead, hung just above eye level.

This place wasn’t anything like I’d hoped it would be. It wasn’t safe; it wasn’t welcoming.

The door almost immediately clanked and then swung open, revealing another guy—tall and skinny, his thick black hair dreadlocked.

“Everybody check out, Birdman?” the new guy asked.

The guy with the shaved head nodded. “They’re good. Take them to the Basement.”

The dreadlocked guy looked at me and smiled enthusiastically. “I’m Harvard. Need a hand?”

I nodded, exhausted, and he scooped Becky out of my arms. I followed him along a rough wooden walkway.

The fort had a large open courtyard in the middle—now covered in a blanket of untouched snow. It looked like each of the four sides was lined with rooms, like a motel.

The farther we walked, the older the fort seemed. The adobe walls were crumbling and broken, and the wooden planks under our feet were cracked; about every fifth one was missing entirely. Harvard walked with careless expertise—stepping back and forth, left to right, avoiding weak boards without giving them a second thought. I copied his path, but even so I could feel the wood bowing under my weight.

As we continued around to the far side of the fort, I saw faces peering out of cracks in the centuries-old doors. I looked for others I knew, like Mouse and Jane, but couldn’t really get a good look at anyone.

“Do they watch you guys?” I asked.

Harvard shook his head. “They used to try, but we keep a pretty good eye on it. We have people whose job it is to watch for cameras. We can’t do much about the animals in the camp—you know about those?”

“Yeah,” I said, even though we’d figured it out only the day before. “Raccoons and deer and that kind of thing.”

“Right,” Harvard said. “The good news is we can keep them out of the fort. So far, we’ve never found a bird with a camera in it.” He stopped and nodded toward a room. “Can you get that?”

I opened the door—the antique brass knob like ice—and held it for Harvard.

Becky looked asleep in his arms, her face calm, mouth slightly open. I could hear her raspy breaths as we entered a quiet, dark room.

“Hang on,” a voice said, and I turned to see Jane catching up with us. She gave me an awkward smile and then hurried past.

Coming in from the white of the snow—even in the early morning—made it hard to adjust to the darkness, but after a moment Jane lit a lantern and the room filled with warm yellow light.

It was smaller than the dorms back at the school. The only furniture was a bed—narrow and low, like a cot—and a small wooden table and chair. A cardboard box at the foot of the bed was filled with folded clothes, and cans of food were stacked in the corner, under the narrow slit of a window. The walls were covered with drawings of all sizes, some on paper, others on large pieces of cloth. Some of the pictures were of the town—the fort, the barn, the stream—but others I knew well: the school, the cafeteria, the wall, and the gate. There were three pictures of Curtis, the leader of the Vs. He was still at the school, and I knew he was human.

Before I could ask about him, Birdman and Mouse joined us, stepping inside and closing the door.

“We’re taking a big risk,” Birdman said, looking at me out of the corner of his eye as he passed by. He shoved the bed to the other side of the room and climbed up onto it. “Not everyone in this town gets to live in the fort, but I want to keep an eye on you. Nothing you see or hear leaves this room, okay?”

I nodded. Even here there were secrets. That didn’t surprise me.

Birdman lifted a large cloth picture—a mural—and I saw him prying something off the wall.

“There aren’t many places to hide things,” Harvard said, grinning as he watched Birdman. “But last year we figured one out. This adobe is thick. Most of the walls are more than a foot deep, but because there’s a big fireplace on the other side of this one, it’s more than four feet of solid adobe. It took us months, but we hollowed out the top part of the wall.”

Birdman pulled a square panel loose and then slipped it into the hole it had been covering. He glanced down at me. “It’s not perfect. If they look under the picture it won’t be hard to find.”

“Nice.” I forced a laugh. “
The Shawshank Redemption
.”

He nodded. “Except this hole doesn’t get you anywhere.” He motioned to me, still scowling, but some of the harshness was gone from his eyes. “You’d better get up there first so we can hand her to you.”

The hole was high enough on the wall that even standing on the bed I could only just see inside. With one foot on the rickety bed frame, I clambered up into the Basement.

It was more like a cave than a room. The walls were all bare adobe—dry, uneven mud—and they’d laid down a few broken wood planks to serve as the floor. It was narrow, probably less than four feet wide, but almost the full length of the room below. The ceiling was low enough that I had to crouch to fit. At each end a tiny slit of light shone in.

“You call this the Basement?” I asked.

Jane handed me a stack of blankets, and Harvard spoke. “Just a little joke. In case someone overhears us talking about it. They’ll think we’ve dug a tunnel or something.”

I turned away from the opening and laid one of the blankets—the thickest I could find—on top of the rough boards.

None of this was supposed to be happening. This wasn’t what our escape was going to be like. We should have been running, not hiding.

Harvard and Birdman were both on the bed now, with Mouse holding the cloth picture out of the way. They lifted Becky, and I gently pulled her in. I tried not to let her arm drag or pull too much on her shoulder, but it was an awkward move. My hand slipped off her wet sweater, and even though I caught her, the jolt caused her to gasp and groan.

But she was in the Basement now. I put my hand on her forehead, which was red and hot. Her hair was wet with snow and sweat, and I brushed it away from her face.

Jane climbed into the hole, a Ziploc bag of medical supplies in her hand.

Birdman looked in after us, speaking to Jane. “We’re clearing out—need to make sure no one saw this.”

Jane nodded, and Birdman stepped down. I heard the bed scrape across the floor as he pushed it back into position. Mouse let the picture drop over the entrance.

“There are vents that open up on each end, and one in the ceiling,” Jane said. She was obscured by the dark, but I could tell where she was pointing.

I crawled to the end of the room and saw that the slit of light was a loose board. I pulled it out, creating a hole about a foot long and three inches tall. From here I could see the empty courtyard of the fort and the doors and walkway on the other side. Two girls were standing there, talking. I didn’t recognize them.

Jane crawled to the other slit and removed that board. She spoke again before I did. Her voice was soft and pained. “I thought you died last night—both of you.”

She moved back to Becky’s unconscious body, but was looking at me.

“What do you mean?”

She forced a small, humorless laugh. “We can see some of the stuff our dupes—duplicates—do.” She opened the bag, pulled out a pair of blue latex gloves, and began to untie the dark bandage around Becky’s upper arm. “The last time anyone saw you, Mason was running behind and then his dupe popped. We thought he killed you.”

“She fell on a log,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. “It was a broken branch—stabbed her.”

“Tripped?” Jane asked hopefully.

I shook my head, the images replaying in my mind. “Mason hit her, and she fell.” It hurt to even say his name. He’d been my friend, my roommate. “Is he here, too?”

She nodded. “But you have to understand. It’s not the Mason you knew.” Jane raised the bandage on Becky’s arm to peer at the gash. “The one who … who did this—it isn’t him. Isn’t the real him. When he did this, it was after he popped.”

She pointed toward a cardboard box in the corner. “There should be a lantern in there.”

I dug through what looked like an emergency kit—matches, first-aid supplies, packets of crackers, a milk jug filled with water. Everything was covered in dust and grit.

The lantern looked antique—glass with a cloth wick—but it didn’t seem too hard to figure out. I turned the handle to raise the wick like I’d seen her do minutes earlier, and then lit it with a match. A bright yellow flame flickered to life.

“No electricity?” I asked, moving the lantern over to Jane.

“Not here,” she said absently, her eyes focused on Becky’s bandage. “But there’s running water and lights in the washroom and commissary.”

“What’s the point of that?”

Jane removed the last strip of cloth from Becky’s arm and looked up at me. “Gives us more work to do. Keeps us out of trouble. Idle hands and all that.”

In the full glow of the lantern, the gash looked bigger and deeper and far more violent than I’d remembered. It wasn’t a clean stab—the broken branch had torn into Becky’s muscle, ripping and tearing it. Her skin was caked with dried blood, but with the bandage removed the gash had begun to ooze again—dark red and thick.

My stomach churned.

“Is she going to be okay?”

Jane bit her lip and moved the light closer.

Somewhere a bell rang. It sounded like the old bells of the cathedral back home.

Jane’s head popped up, and she looked into my eyes, terrified.

“I need you to do something,” she said.

“What?”

“If I pass out, push me out of the hole and close it up again.”

I almost laughed, but I knew she was serious. “What do you mean?”

“If you promise me you’ll do it,” she said, “I’ll stay and clean her arm. If not, I need to go.”

I nodded, though I didn’t understand what was going on. Jane immediately turned back to Becky.

I wanted to watch, to make sure everything would be okay, but every time I looked at Becky’s arm I was overcome—with nausea, with panic, with guilt. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.

Jane was working fast, scrubbing out the dried blood, the splinters of broken wood, the dirt. Becky was stirring, unconscious but in pain. I was at her feet; the Basement was too narrow for me to get up to her head while Jane was at Becky’s side. The best I could do was lean across her, holding her good hand while Jane worked on the other arm.

Jane paused, looking at my fingers intertwined with Becky’s, and then she focused again on the gash.

“You’re going to need to rebandage this,” she said, still scrubbing, using a toothbrush that she’d doused with rubbing alcohol. “It’s bleeding a lot, but I think that’s a good sign.”

“What about gangrene?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it infected?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, agitated. “I’m not a doctor.”

She set down the toothbrush and picked up a small silver packet.

“What’s that?”

Jane tore the top off and sprinkled a white powder onto the bare wound. “It comes with the supplies they send us. Good stuff. Amazing stuff.”

She laid a small piece of what looked like aluminum foil over the wound, and then opened a packet of gauze. She looked up at me. “Can you help?”

I nodded and let go of Becky’s hand.

“There are gloves in there,” she said, gesturing to the bag.

The cloth over the entrance moved, and a face peeked in. Carrie.

I froze. The last I’d seen Carrie she’d turned on us, taking the gun from Curtis and shooting Oakland in the chest. I remembered the drawings on the wall of the room below us. Three of Curtis. This must be Carrie’s room.

This Carrie was human. The one at school was a robot. That didn’t help my nerves.

She didn’t look at me. Her voice was timid and soft. “Birdman rang the bell.”

“I heard,” Jane said. “It’s okay.”

Carrie nodded grimly, and then let the cloth drop back into place.

I pulled on the latex gloves. “What’s going on?”

Jane kept her eyes down. She pulled Becky’s arm away from her body. “Can you hold it like this?”

It didn’t seem like enough—there were no stitches, there was no surgery—but as I held Becky’s arm, Jane placed a thick gauze pad over the wound, and then gently began wrapping the soft white gauze around the arm.

Jane paused, and then looked at me, eyes wide.

“You—”

She collapsed, her body dropping forward. I wasn’t ready for it, and I let go of Becky’s arm to stop Jane from falling. Becky jerked in pain.

“Carrie,” I called, then stopped myself, worried I was too loud. I laid Jane on her side—her eyes still wide-open—and peered out the hole into the room.

Carrie was on the floor, facedown by the door.

I swore under my breath, terror coursing through my veins. What was going on? Maybe they were all robots—turned off with the flip of a switch. I could barely stand to look at Jane; her lifeless, dead-eyed body was something I’d seen before, something I never thought I’d see again.