“It’s terribly unpleasant,” she said with a sneer. “I suggest you start writing…” She took out a stopwatch and clicked it. “Now!”
I opened the test book and almost started crying when I saw the first question had to do with figuring out the area of a circle. Shit. Careful Cassie had bugged me about this stuff, like, my whole life. I could just hear her voice: I told you this was important! I told you and told you and told you! You have to know about your own cell! It’s four miles across!
Frowning, I sat up straighter and tried to get a couple of synapses to ignite. Okay, if a circle is four miles across, then its radius is two, then there’s some kind of formula…
Sweat dotted my forehead. I brushed it away. No idea if I’d remembered correctly, calculated correctly, or did anything correctly. But I started thinking that if I did okay, I would get to eat. And maybe live longer—long enough to see my sister again.
The next question had to do with how much fertilizer to use on seven acres of crops, given the application rate of fifty pounds of fertilizer per one hundred square feet.
Oh, my freaking God.
My stomach rumbled. I hunched over the book and started writing.
16
“To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” - Theodore Roosevelt.
Another weird quote from someone I’d never heard of.
The morning had not gone well. In addition to having Cassie saying I told you so in my head, I had Ms. Strepp pacing noisily around the room, distracting me. Not to mention the huge guard with the Taser looming over me.
I was hungry, nervous, scared, and angry, none of which was adding up to the cool ability to think straight. I did the best I could on questions about mitosis and photosynthesis and weather predictions. Vague math formulas floated around my brain like moths circling a sputtering candle. There was a section on electrical engineering, which I was reasonably confident about. But as the testing went on and on, I got tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier until I was almost willing to be tased just to take a nice break and be unconscious for a while.
What was happening to me? I’d lived my whole life in the cell with hardly any problems—I mean, besides Ma being carted away, and then Pa—
But I had no idea what I was doing here.
Wham! I jumped as the heavy wooden stick smashed down on my desk half an inch from my hand. Ms. Strepp had approached without me hearing her. I wondered if she’d meant to break my fingers.
“You better get your act together, missy,” she said in a voice like iron. “After this you’ll be tested on all the other subjects they tried to drill into you.”
Oh, holy hell.
The next test booklet wanted me to write five hundred words about the importance of a group work ethic and how that related to our unit’s mascot of a bee. I put my head down on my arms and braced to get tased. But as I heard Ms. Strepp rapidly walking over, I suddenly exploded in rage.
Standing up, I snapped the pencil in half and swept the test booklet off the desk.
“This is all bullshit!” I yelled. “I’m on death row! Who cares about any of this school shit? Why are you doing this to me?”
Ms. Strepp held up one hand, as if to stop the guard who was advancing on me. She met my eyes and said calmly, “We’re all on death row, ultimately. Are you so stupid that you don’t see that? Sure, you kids in here, as enemies of the system, will assuredly die earlier than most. As well you should. But all of us everywhere have a one-way ticket to death.”
I gritted my teeth. “Then what’s the point of all this?” I asked, waving my arm at the classroom.
“The point,” Ms. Strepp said, “is to find out what you know. And what you don’t know.” She gave a nod to the guard, and before I could leap away, I felt a horrible jolt, like a million watts of electricity streaking through my body. I went rigid, unable to move, and fell over face-first, headlong onto the floor without being able to catch myself.
The electrical feeling only lasted a few seconds, but even after it stopped I lay there quivering like jelly for who knows how long. Drool seeped out of my mouth but I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t raise my hand, couldn’t even curl up into a sad little ball.
“Take her to the ring,” Ms. Strepp said, and the two guards hoisted me up.
With great effort I stumbled along between them, too fuzzy to worry about what “the ring” might be, but unwilling to be dragged like a sack of feed. I noticed we were in another prison hallway with rows of jail rooms on the side filled with kids, and high windows that let sunshine in.
Little black dots floated above me like sunspots. I blinked over and over, trying to make them go away, figuring they were just another effect of the Taser.
They didn’t go away. Gradually my eyes began to focus. One of the black dots fluttered closer. It was… a dragonfly. In the cell, some of the older folks called them darning-needle flies, because of their long, thin tails.
Mesmerized, I watched the dragonfly flit in and out of the sunlight, its glassy wings looking like tiny blue fairy lights. Then there was another one, cruising next to it. And another. All in all, I counted six of them, dipping and swirling in circles high above me.
The guards paused before a pair of tall gray metal doors, and my brain started to slowly ping back to life.
What now?
17
CASSIE
THEY DON’T LIGHT COUNTRY ROADS. At night after lights-out the whole world is dark—dark enough to see the amazing glitter of a trillion stars overhead and the filmy gauze of the Milky Way moving slowly across the sky. Even if there’s no moon—especially if there’s no moon—the stars cast enough light for me to pick out the shapes of our neighbors’ barns, the haystacks in Pa’s fields, the shiny outline of a cow’s back as it dozes.
This cellar was much darker than that.
At the bottom of the steps I hesitated, feeling for solid ground with my foot. I glanced back to see the guy close the door at the top of the steps, leaving me in blackness.
I turned to race up the steps, ready to break the door down, but then my gaze was caught by the dimmest blue light. I couldn’t tell what it was or how far away it was.
Swallowing, still holding on to the stair railing, I said hesitantly, “Taylor?”
No one spoke, but I heard the scrape of a chair across a floor. I cleared my throat and said more strongly, “Taylor?”
“Yeah?”
So there was a Taylor. I didn’t know whether to be more scared or relieved. Maybe he was a psychopath, and those kids upstairs just threw new people down to him every so often. Sweat broke out on my palms and my throat felt like it was closing. I couldn’t help blinking, though it did no good.
“Um… where are you?”