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A moment later, the truck’s engine roared to life.

CHAPTER FIVE

B
ecky was sleeping calmly when I left the Basement. I didn’t know whether the powder Jane had sprinkled in the wound was an antibiotic or a painkiller, but it definitely seemed to be helping.

“Where are you going?”

Birdman was standing a few doors down from Carrie’s room talking with Harvard. Mouse sat on a wooden bench beside them, both of her eyes now black and swollen.

I stammered to answer, too focused on Mouse’s face to think.

“Do you see why you shouldn’t have come?” Birdman snapped.

“We’ll leave as soon as Becky is healthy.”

“No, you won’t,” Mouse said, her voice muted and pained. “You will get us the hell out of here.”

Birdman touched her shoulder. He turned to Harvard. “When do you want to check out the perimeter?”

“It’ll have to be tomorrow morning,” he answered, “or late tonight. I don’t want to go until this storm clears. And I want to take him by the Greens first.”

“The Greens?” I asked.

Harvard smiled. “The kids in the other buildings. You were a Variant, right? Think of this fort like the Variants. Anyone who wants to live here can, but if you’re here you fight. Greens don’t want to.”

Mouse seemed disgusted by Harvard’s comparison of the fort to the V’s, but she didn’t say anything.

I nodded and turned away.

“Where you going?” Birdman asked again.

“I want to find Jane.”

“Fifth door on the right,” Harvard said. “And plan on tonight.”

“Whatever.”

I headed slowly toward Jane’s room, trying to fight against the panic rising up in my throat.

“What’s your problem?”

I turned to see Birdman following me, Mouse a few steps behind.

“I don’t have a problem,” I said, and kept walking.

He grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back, hard.

“You answer me when I ask you a question.”

He was right in my face, maybe an inch or two taller than me. I could have taken him a month ago, maybe even yesterday, but I felt like I could hardly stand now.

The whites of Mouse’s eyes were completely red, making her bruised and blackened face look almost demonic.

I forced myself to ease my fingers out of a fist—they seemed to be clenching all by themselves.

I took a deep breath and then exhaled, long and slow. “What was the question again?”

Birdman’s voice was ice-cold. “What’s your problem?”

“You know what happened at that school last night?” I asked. “People died.”

“Don’t you think we realize that?” Mouse snapped. She pointed at her head. “We were there; a lot of us died.
I
died there, damn it. So don’t pretend like you’re some victim. You’re the lucky one.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” I said, throwing my hands up and turning away.

Birdman grabbed my shoulder again, and I spun and threw a punch. In one swift motion he deflected my fist and crashed his into the side of my head. I collapsed off the walkway and into the snow.

“Don’t turn your back on me,” Birdman growled.

“You’re as bad as them,” I said. “As bad as Iceman.”

He grabbed Mouse by the arm and shoved her toward me. “Look at her face, kid. This is your fault, just for showing up.” He towered in front of me, looking down menacingly. “I’m going to get everyone out of here, whether you help or not. But if you’re not helping, then get the hell out of my town. We have enough problems without you and your sick girlfriend.”

My head ached and my legs wobbled as I stood up. “You think you’re doing everyone a favor,” I said. “But you’re just getting them killed. Their blood’s going to be on your hands if you lead them to die. Just like … Just like …” I didn’t finish. But I could see the faces of everyone I’d killed, as I talked them into an ambush. We couldn’t fight this place, not when they could do the things Iceman did.

I noticed Harvard down the walkway, watching me.

I wished I’d never brought Becky here, wished I’d never taken her out of the school. Wished that I’d never even found out Jane was an android.

I headed for her room.

Jane’s room was the same size as Carrie’s, but looked much more lived-in. Her table was covered with knickknacks—figures carved out of wood or soap, pinwheels made from tin cans, clay sculptures. The walls were painted in bright colors, murals of skyscrapers and bridges and trees. In one corner were stacked boxes that looked like the entire town’s stash of medical supplies.

I leaned back against the adobe. It felt cool, even through my sweatshirt.

Jane was absently massaging her wrist, looking down.

“Is this Baltimore?” I asked, gesturing to the walls.

The corners of her mouth lifted. “You remembered.”

I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. I had come here for a reason. “Yeah. Why did they kill Dylan?”

Her grin faded slowly. “It’s this thing in our heads,” she said. She looked back down and picked lint balls off her quilt. “It screws you up.”

I watched her as she fiddled with the blanket, her fingers red from cold. She didn’t want to talk about Dylan, but I needed to know.

“But why do they care if he’s screwed up?” I asked. “You’re all prisoners—I bet everybody’s screwed up.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice shaking. “It’s different. Are you hungry?”

I sat on the edge of the bed and reached for her hand, taking it in mine. She was cold, her fingers rough from years of exposure and work.

Her eyes met mine just before she fell apart, sobbing.

I scooted across the bed and sat beside her. I wrapped my good arm around her shoulders and she fell into me, shuddering as she cried.

She wasn’t the Jane I knew, but right then I wanted to hold her forever. I bent my face into her hair, breathing her in and remembering.

“The Jane at school,” I said. “How much of her was you?”

She gasped a halting breath that almost sounded like a laugh. Her fingers curled into my sweatshirt.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see everything. I didn’t control her.”

“How does it work?”

She leaned back slightly, her head still on my shoulder, but more relaxed.

“The dupes have some kind of artificial intelligence that controls everything the dupe does.”

“Then how are you connected?”

“Emotions,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “Some memories and personality, but the main thing is emotions. And you have to remember—we’re guessing on a lot of this. Maxfield never explained it.”

“So the Jane I knew wasn’t you.”

“We started at the same point,” Jane said, exhaling long and slow. “They put this thing in your head and make your dupe, and they transfer memories to the dupe. Not everything, but the big things.”

“Like Baltimore,” I said. “And were you really homeless?”

“Off and on,” she said, and quickly moved on, not wanting to talk about it. “So, two and a half years ago, we were pretty much the same. The only thing that I had to do with the dupe was give her emotions.”

“She felt what you felt? Feel?”

“Harvard’s guess is that when the dupe needs to feel an emotional response—fear or anger or sadness—the implant in my head tells it what to do.”

“So when the dupe saw something scary, it would ask your brain how to react, and you’d tell it to be scared?”

“Pretty much. But it’s weirder than that. She felt what I felt, but I felt what she felt.”

“What do you mean?”

Jane laughed, a fat tear rolling down her cheek. “I don’t know what I mean. I can only tell you how it feels. When that Jane was really happy, I could feel her happiness. That’s when I’d see things in the school. Whenever the emotion was really strong.”

“How does that work?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it was like seeing through her eyes—like I’d go blind and see only what the dupe could see; that happened when the emotion was the strongest. Other times I was just kind of … aware of what was going on. I would know something was happening, but I couldn’t really see it—like I’d be lying here in bed, but I’d hear conversations my dupe was having, or I’d know what she was doing. And sometimes I wouldn’t see anything, but I’d dream about it later. And when all of us get together and talk about the dreams, there are similarities, so some things in our dreams are real, too.”

“So what
did
you see?”

“A lot,” she said. “It went in waves. There were some good times, and a lot of bad ones. During the war, I was aware of my dupe almost all the time.”

I leaned my head against the wall. It was hard to imagine—that so many of the people I’d known there hadn’t been real, but
someone
was inside of them, somehow.

“I remember you,” she said, finally. “Those times with you were my favorite times there. I was aware of you a lot.”

I didn’t answer. Becky was on the other side of the fort, sick and hurting.

“There were times—” Jane said, and then stopped.

“What?”

“It’s stupid.” She was still leaning against me, but she straightened up a little.

“What is it?”

She looked down again, at our intertwined fingers.

“I just sometimes wished I was back at the school.”

I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. So I changed the subject.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

I could feel her stop breathing. She seemed to be frozen, long enough that I started to wonder whether Iceman had come back. But when I pulled back to look at her she just wiped her red eyes.

“I remember almost everything from that night, from that whole day. I remember when we found out Lily was gone, and getting ready for the dance.” She laughed, embarrassed. “I remember you asking me—my dupe—to the dance.”

“And the end?”

She just nodded. “All of it. I was with you, and then Laura and Dyl—” Her voice broke on his name.

I squeezed her hand and waited.

“That’s why they killed him,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. She looked up at me, our faces inches apart as she spoke. “We were friends here, me and Dylan. He hated what his dupe was like, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Dylan—the real Dylan—was angry sometimes; he had a temper. And his dupe turned that into something awful. His dupe was a murderer.”

She paused, trying to collect herself.

“I wasn’t the first,” she whispered. “He’d killed others. During the war, working for Isaiah.”

“I didn’t know.”

Jane shook her head. “No one at the school did, except Isaiah. But the real Dylan—the Dylan here—knew, and it was eating him up. It was a cycle—he hated what his dupe was doing, so he’d get angrier, and his dupe would feed off that anger and do worse and worse things. When his dupe killed me, Dylan couldn’t handle it.”

She let go of me to rub her face with both hands.

“We told him that it wasn’t him, but he wouldn’t believe it. He said that if his emotions had made the dupe commit murder, then it was his fault. He left the fort. Sometimes he’d sleep outside, sometimes in the barn. And he wouldn’t talk to anyone. He stopped eating.”

“They didn’t have to kill him.”

“Did you hear Iceman today?” she asked, her voice gaining some strength. “We only have two rules. We’re supposed to stay out of trouble, and we’re supposed to live our lives.”

I nodded. “I thought that was weird.”

“That’s the most important thing here.” She wasn’t crying anymore. She was angry, filled with rage. “They killed Dylan because he was so depressed, almost catatonic. We warned him—we tried to help him, but he wouldn’t take it.”

“Why do they care?”

“Because they can’t make a dupe out of you unless you’re emotionally healthy—at least enough so that your dupe can act normal. The school couldn’t do anything with Dylan anymore, so they killed him.”

CHAPTER SIX

W
e stepped outside and Jane closed the door. The snow had stopped, but wind was rushing across the courtyard, throwing powdery specks of ice through the air like glitter. Jane said there was a meeting we had to go to.

“Benson!”

I turned to see Lily coming out of a door on the other side of the fort. She ran across the courtyard, kicking up snow as she went.

“Causing trouble wherever you go, huh?” she asked, grinning.

I paused. “Are you …”

“The real deal,” she said. “I was human there; I’m human here.”

“So you went over the wall?”

She nodded. “Made it a lot farther than you did before they caught me.”

I smiled. “They haven’t caught me yet.”

Lily had been the best paintball player at the school, an expert at camouflage, fast and clever. If anyone could have gotten out of the forest, it was her.

“The school told us you died.” I stepped forward to hug her.

“I know,” she said with a smirk. “I hear it caused all sorts of problems.” She looked at Jane, who smiled quietly.

“C’mon.” Jane nudged me. “Let’s get out of the cold.”

The meeting room was near the front door of the fort. It looked to be about the size of four or five of the bedrooms put together, with heavy timber beams supporting the roof, and eight wooden benches facing a podium at the far end. It reminded me of a church.

We were the first to arrive, and Lily set about lighting the lanterns. Jane adjusted the small drapes that covered each window. They didn’t look to be decorative as much as functional—heavy dark wool to cover each of the narrow slits.

“So what about the others?” I asked, watching them as they worked. “Mouse was back at the school, but what about Birdman? Where’s his dupe?”

“He has one,” Jane said. “It just isn’t active. A lot of people are like that. The school has dupes of everyone here, but they only use them when they need them.”

I sat down on one of the benches, exhausted. I still hadn’t slept. “I bet you’re glad to have it out of your head.”

Jane exchanged a quick look with Lily.

Lily plopped down beside me.

“It’s not like that,” Lily said, her voice hushed even though we both knew Jane was listening. “They say it sucks when your dupe dies. It’s like
you
die.”