I was in a… prison. Not like the little jail we had downtown that hardly ever got used. This was a prison, like I’d seen in books. So they hadn’t taken me back to the cell. Which meant I’d disappeared.
Just like Becca. And the other kids.
And no one would know where I was. Not Steph. Not Nathaniel.
A woman was there, big and broad with odd yellow hair and a very red face. She came up and pulled the duct tape off me—not fast, but not nearly slowly enough.
As soon as I could breathe I gulped in air, my chest rising and falling and my bullet-bruise hurting with each movement.
“Where am I?” I gasped.
A guy in a uniform stepped forward and gave me a smart rap on my arm with a billy club.
“Ow!” I said, then shut up quickly as he raised it again.
I was led down a cement-block hallway with peeling vomit-green paint. Bare lightbulbs flickered overhead, and several times we had to walk through puddles.
Oh, God, where am I? What’s happening?
In a small room, two guards took my clothes, cutting the zip ties on my wrists so they could get my hoodie off. I was shaking with cold as well as hysterical, razor-wire fear, but all they did was throw a yellow jumpsuit at me. I leaped into it as fast as I could.
Down another hall. Through a heavy metal door. Its tiny glass window had wire fused into it. This door opened into a wide hallway with a tall ceiling four stories high. Each story had a walkway around the outside, bordered with a line of barred cages, little jail rooms, one after another.
Each room held kids. Kids who looked like Outsiders, all colors, all types.
The guards shoved me up concrete steps and down one of the walkways. They put me into an empty, barred room, and just then a horrible alarm sounded. The din of hundreds of marching feet filled my ears. Pressing my face against the bars, I saw more kids, all in yellow jumpsuits, filing in and heading to their cages.
Then… one head out of the entire crowd. One face that was like looking into a mirror.
“Becca!” I screamed as loudly as I could. “Becca!”
54
BECCA’S HEAD SNAPPED UP AT my voice, and she met my eyes instantly. In a flash she put a finger against her lips, telling me to be quiet. I was shocked at how different she looked; she was thinner and moved stiffly and slowly. Her hair was a rat’s nest, and any skin I could see was either dirty or discolored with bruises or scrapes.
Kids in jumpsuits began to file past my barred door. No one seemed surprised or curious about my being there. A hulking, uniformed guard stopped in front of me to unlock the door. The bars slid open, and he pushed in a small girl with mouse-colored hair, a light-tan boy, a taller, dark-tan boy… and Becca.
“Get inside!” he shouted as Becca lingered, looking at me like I was an icy soda on a haying day.
The guard pushed her in roughly, then slammed the door shut and locked it. Becca suddenly spun and looked at him in shock. “Tim?”
The guard didn’t answer—just marched away.
“Oh, God, Becca!” I exclaimed, and grabbed her in a hug. After a moment, she brought her arms up and hugged me back. She felt bony, and it was like hugging a stranger. “I missed you so much!” I said. “I looked for you everywhere! I never stopped looking.”
When we pulled back, the other kids were staring at us.
“There’s two of you,” the small girl whispered.
“Yeah. The before and the after,” one of the guys said wryly.
“This is my twin sister, Cassie,” Becca said quietly. “Cass, this is Merry. And this is Vijay, and this is Diego.”
I didn’t know what to say. We were just kids, locked in a prison together. This was a nightmare I could never have predicted, and I had no idea how to act. But I nodded at them, and they nodded back.
“Why are we here?” I asked Becca. “What happened to you?”
She shrugged and sat down on a narrow bunk. “Got taken,” she said. “Like everyone else.”
This is Becca, I told myself. This really is Becca. It’s just… a completely different Becca. I didn’t know what she’d been through to make her like this; she was serious, calmer, and just so… not Ridiculous.
“You’ve been here since you disappeared?” I asked.
She nodded. “What about you? Where did they get you? At home?”
“No.” I had to gather my thoughts for a minute. “You disappeared, so I went all over looking for you. I talked to Taylor, that guy you played chicken with, out on the boundary road.”
Becca looked surprised.
“Then Nathaniel showed me the Outsider hangout. I didn’t know you were an Outsider,” I said wryly. “And then one night he cut the wire on the boundary fence and we went down the road till we found the truck—my truck.” I couldn’t seem to work up any anger about that now. “Then someone killed Mr. Harrison. I mean, first I hit him with my backpack and knocked him out, and then someone shot him.”
Becca’s eyebrows rose farther on her forehead. “You… hit him…”
I nodded and took a breath. “Yeah. Then today—today?—maybe today I got kicked out of school. I’m expelled. Plus they took away my vocation. So I got the moped and Pa’s rifle, and drove through the gates down the boundary road to the truck—to where you had been last.”
Becca’s mouth was hanging open and her eyes were wide.
“Suddenly I was surrounded, don’t know by who. I took off across the brush and drove down into a gully. Then I was in a ditch, and one of the cars crashed right over me, and then the second one was chasing me, and it was dark, and I hit a tree trunk head-on. ’Fraid the moped is totaled,” I admitted. “I flew up out of the ditch and almost got run over by an all-wheeler. Anyway, I still had Pa’s rifle, so I aimed at them, but then in the end I couldn’t shoot ’em, so I fired over their heads. But then they shot me with a plastic bullet and knocked me out. And that’s gonna hurt until I die. When I woke up I had a black hood over my head, and they brought me here, and now here I am.”
Four pairs of eyes stared at me like I was a two-headed calf.
“You…” Becca began, shaking her head in wonder. “You hit Harrison, and you found Taylor, cut the fence, and met the Outsiders, and you got expelled, and you left the cell and got chased and fired at them…”
“Over their heads,” I pointed out.
“I thought you said she was the good one,” the guy named Diego said.
55
BECCA
“SHE IS,” I SAID, STARING at my sister. “She’s the good one, the careful one. Careful Cassie.”
Cassie looked surprised. “Well, you’re the ridiculous one!” she said. “Ridiculous Rebecca! Only now, you’re…”
“Sounds like you’re not so careful anymore,” I told her. “Like, rob any banks while you were at it?”
“No! Of course not.” Cassie looked embarrassed.
“Someone shot Harrison?”
She nodded, her expression darkening. “Yeah.”
“Do they know who?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that he was dead. That I never had to dread him again.
Cassie shook her head.