“How in the world did you reach that conclusion?”
Ah. The tricky part in all of this. How to B.S. the fact I had cheated and seen the answer, rather than being in possession of brain power to actually work it through. “I was trying to think of what else uses three digit numbers, when I remembered hearing them—Greg and the others, I mean—talk about needing to find a radio here. I should have mentioned it to you guys before, but I didn’t think anything of it until now.”
“Oh my God.” Chubs was shaking his head, mildly stunned. “I don’t even believe it. We have honestly had such shit luck this entire trip I thought at least two of us were going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere before we figured it out.”
“We need a radio,” I said. “I think I’m right, but if I’m not…we need to test it before telling the others.”
“Betty?”
“No!” I wasn’t about to leave the tent unguarded, even for fifteen minutes. “I thought I saw a radio in the back—let me go grab it.”
The store was rushing around me in dark streams and fading colors as I ran, but I wasn’t afraid of what was lurking there, not now. I hadn’t imagined the radio after all. It was back in the small cluster of rafts and blankets that Liam and his friend had set up the last time he was here.
Chubs was pacing in front of the shelves by the time I got back. I set the small device up on a shelf that was about eye level and began to fuss with its buttons, searching for the ON switch.
I had to be the one to start it up—and the one to fumble with the volume knob when it just about blew our eardrums out with static. The thing was ancient, a beat-up silver box, but it worked. The speakers jumped between voices, commercials, and even a few old songs I recognized.
“It has to be AM,” Chubs said, taking the radio in his hands. “FM frequencies don’t go up past 108 or so. Here we go—”
My first thought was that Chubs had somehow tuned it to the wrong station. I had never heard a sound like the one sputtering through the speakers—a low growl of static pierced by what sounded like a tub of broken glass being tossed around. It wasn’t painful like the White Noise, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.
But Chubs was still grinning.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, and was all too happy to explain when I shook my head. “Have you heard that there are certain frequencies and pitches that only kids with a Psi brain can pick up?”
I braced a hand on the shelf to keep from doubling over. I had. Cate had told me as much, when she explained the camp controllers had embedded a certain frequency in the White Noise to root out any of the dangerous ones still hiding out in the other cabins.
“It’s not so much that others can’t hear the noise, it’s that their brains translate the sounds differently than ours do—really fascinating stuff. They did some testing with it at Caledonia, to see if there were any pitches that certain colors couldn’t pick up and others could, and it always sounded like this when we couldn’t—”
No sooner had the words left his mouth, than there was another sharp click, and the noise cut off altogether, replaced by a soft, male voice whispering, “If you can hear this, you’re one of us. If you’re one of us, you can find us. Lake Prince. Virginia.”
That same message, three times, before it clicked again and switched back to the frequency we had heard before. For a long time, Chubs and I could only stare at one another, speechless.
“Oh my God!” Chubs said, “Oh my God!” And then we were saying it together, jumping up and down, arms flung around one another like two damn fools—like we had never, ever wanted to reach over and slap each other multiple times on multiple days. I hugged him without any kind of fear or self-consciousness, fiercely, with a rush of emotion that almost brought tears to my eyes.
“I could kiss you!” Chubs cried.
“Please don’t!” I gasped out, feeling his arms tighten around my ribs to the point of cracking them.
Either by his internal clock or Chubs’s excited squeaks, Liam woke first. I saw him out the corner of my eye, his head of tousled blond hair sticking out of the tent. He looked between us once and retreated back into the tent, only to reemerge a second later looking torn between confusion and worry.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
Chubs and I glanced at each other, wearing identical grins.
“Get Zu,” I said. “You guys are going to want to hear this.”
SEVENTEEN
ACCORDING TO CHUBS, Jack Fields was the second son in a family of five kids, and the only one to survive Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration. His father had owned an Italian restaurant, and his mother died of cancer when he was young. Jack was unremarkable in appearance, the kind of kid you would pass in a school hallway and not think twice about. But he was stealth cool, the only one in their room that knew what Liam was talking about when he started in on Japanese horror flicks or articles from back issues of Rolling Stone. Apparently, he liked to tell stories in weird voices and spent years scratching out a replica of New York City’s skyline on the converted classroom’s blackboards. The PSFs assigned to their room had been so impressed with the sheer detail of his work that they actually let him finish.
More importantly, Jack took great pleasure in antagonizing the camp controllers by using his abilities to lift things off their belts and out of their pockets, or to throw things into their paths so that they’d trip and fall in front of everyone. To hear Chubs talk, you would have thought Jack Fields was a saint walking on earth, a disciple of Awesome, preaching the proper way to use their Blue abilities after spending years figuring it out for himself.
Which was probably why he was the first one the camp controllers shot in the back of the head the night the kids tried to make their escape.
Liam was silent as we approached Petersburg’s outer city limits, only nodding once or twice to confirm that the craziest parts of Chubs’s tale were true. He had been just as excited as the two of us when we dragged him over to listen to the broadcast, but slowly, over the course of a few hours, his mood had deteriorated. When Chubs’s stories died out, so did all conversation in the van.
“It’s supposed to be really beautiful there,” I said, suddenly, then winced at how awkward it sounded. “Lake Prince, I mean.”
Liam didn’t looked stressed so much as profoundly sad. That was what worried me—that he was sinking into something that not even our breakthrough could pull him out of.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, quietly. He handed me the half-folded map. “Can you put this back in the glove box?”
I certainly hadn’t been looking for it when I opened the small compartment, but there they were, nested on top of a pile of crumpled napkins.
Truthfully, I had been expecting envelopes, or at the very least lined notebook paper. Which was stupid and didn’t make any sense, because it’s not like their camp had arts and crafts days. It’s not like they were just given the paper and pens. Still, I had been expecting the letters to be something…heavier. For Chubs and Liam to be carrying theirs with them.
Jack’s letter was on top, written on half of what looked like a computer printout, folded over several times. He had managed to squeeze his father’s name in tight capital letters on the back of the paper, between the large black words: AREA RESTRICTED.
Instead of putting the map away, I took the letter out, only vaguely aware of the argument Liam and Chubs had gotten into over the best route to Lake Prince. I wasn’t thinking much of anything as my fingers slid over the wrinkled surface, smoothing it out as I unfolded it. No date in the upper right-hand corner, just a hasty, straight to the point Dear Dad.
I didn’t get to take in another word. Liam reached over and ripped the paper out of my hand, crumpling it slightly in his fist.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.