I’d never met anyone who wasn’t from our cell. Not in seventeen years. “Uh… where are you from?” I asked.
“B-97-4270,” she said. “It isn’t that far from here. It’s a manufacturing cell. We made your moped, and most of the tractors here. Kitchen appliances.”
Obviously I knew that people went to the store and bought new ovens or whatever, but I’d never wondered where the ovens came from.
“I know,” Tara said, nodding at my expression. “I never wondered where our bread came from.”
“I never wondered where our cars or our bread came from,” said another voice.
Now that my eyes had adjusted, I saw at least a dozen kids standing among the rusting equipment and old piles of bales. I recognized six of them from school. But the others I’d never, ever seen. I’d remember someone with such dark skin, or such different-looking eyes.
One by one they stepped forward and introduced themselves. Two of them came from the same cell as Tara. One came from B-97-4274, practically next door. One from B-65-1001. And one girl, tall and skinny with a mostly shaved head except for a tightly curled broad stripe of hair that ran from her forehead to the nape of her neck—she came from Cell F-14-27.
I’m supposed to be so smart—not smart enough for higher schooling, I guess, but I usually get the best grades in my classes. But it had never occurred to me that B-97-4275 wasn’t just a name. It was a designation.
“The United is divided up into six big sections, from A to F,” a guy named Jefferson explained. “Each section is divided up into a hundred smaller sections. Those smaller sections are divided up into anywhere from sixty to five thousand cells.”
All I could do was stare as connections started to click in my brain. How could I not have even thought about this? How had I never wondered? Everyone thought—we were all taught—that the cell was everything. We were cells united. But all I knew about was mine.
“How come you shot paintballs at the Provost?”
“We’re slowly educating people,” Tara said. “Showing them that the cell way isn’t the only way. That they can dissent. They can rebel against the Provost. Like by shooting paintballs at him, for starters.”
“What good is it for them to be bad citizens?” My whole worldview was shifting, and I felt like I was going to fall off the face of the earth.
“Bad citizens aren’t always bad,” a girl named Cecily said. “Sometimes they are—if they steal or hurt a neighbor—but sometimes the United calls someone a bad citizen just because they want to know more than the United wants them to know, because they won’t blindly accept everything that they’re told.”
Like I’d always done.
All this was fascinating and overwhelming, but really, the only thing I wanted was my sister back, safe and sound.
“But why am I here? What does any of this have to do with Becca?” I asked Nathaniel.
He looked surprised. “Because Becca was an Outsider, of course.”
35
BECCA
IT FELT LIKE I HAD just closed my eyes to sleep when I was awoken again by the all-too-familiar clumping of heavy guard boots coming this way. Swearing bitterly helped me to not start weeping in despair, so I pulled myself to a sitting position and started screaming inside my head.
These 2:00 a.m. classes/torture were killing me, probably literally. My chest and stomach were a pincushion of painful dots, relics of my last failure to execute a successful push-up.
Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet. I hadn’t given up yet. I wouldn’t give in. When they came to get me, I’d be ready.
Sure enough, the guards stopped in front of our bars. My fists clenched as I prepared to have my wrists cuffed.
“Robin Wellfleet!”
I’d already taken a step forward, and stopped in confusion.
The mean-faced guard bellowed the name again: “Robin Wellfleet!”
My roommates woke up quickly and completely, as prisoners do. Robin was already standing, blinking in the dim fluorescent light.
“Here,” she said.
“Time to go!” one guard said roughly, and rapped his billy club against our rusty bars. Robin stepped forward and was immediately grabbed, her hands twisted behind her back.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Why are you taking her?”
Ignoring me, the guards yanked Robin out into the hall just as the prison-wide comm system crackled into ear-shredding life.
“Prisoners! Report to the ring!” Strepp boomed.
“Oh, shit,” Vijay breathed, his brown eyes full of dread.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
The guards dragged Robin down the hallway, her bare feet scraping the cold concrete floor. She looked back at me again and mouthed, Be strong.
“Prisoners!” the comm system blared again. “Report to the ring!”
“Oh, my God,” I said, as I followed Diego and Merry out into the hallway. “Is this another fight? Jesus! They’re going to make us watch a fight in the middle of the freaking night? What is wrong with them?”
They didn’t answer me, just followed the stream of prisoners who were being released one room at a time.
Vijay bumped my shoulder. I was startled to see tears forming in his eyes. “It’s not a fight,” he said, his voice breaking. “It’s an execution.”
36
THE OTHER PRISONERS LOOKED SLEEPY and disgruntled as we streamed down the hallway and into the clammy stairwell. Myself, I was almost hysterical, grabbing my roommates’ arms, chattering questions, praying for someone to tell me that it was just a fight after all.
“What do you mean, execution?” I asked Diego. “They wouldn’t—they took Robin for something else, right? This doesn’t have anything to do with her, right?”
Diego met my eyes for a second and shook his head. “You know we’re all on death row,” he said.
“Okay, but not Robin, right?” I pleaded. “Not Robin?” In the short time I’d been in the crazy house, Robin had saved my life over and over—telling me what to expect, how to survive. There were kids at home I’d known my whole life, but in just a couple days Robin had become a real friend—and everything I needed to survive.
I couldn’t be about to watch her die. I just couldn’t.
In front of me, Merry was openly crying. Kids were whispering about another kid—a boy named Tomás. Inside I was frozen, every bit of life draining away. What would I do without Robin? For years I hadn’t needed anyone. I’d made do without my ma. I’d made do without my pa. I’d always had Careful Cassie, but tried not to depend on her: who knew how long she would be around?
But in here, in this hellish nightmare, I’d let my guard down. I’d desperately needed help. I’d needed a friend. Robin had stepped up. She’d risked her own safety to help me.
She couldn’t die. Not now.