“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “So you think this thing’s turning people into computers?”
Dr. Chatterjee said, “As organisms we’re not unlike computers to begin with. I mean to say they’re not unlike us. Maybe that’s why the eyeholes go all the way through. Maybe they need to access—or plug into—all parts of the brain.”
I could feel the heat of Ben’s gaze fixed on me, but I couldn’t look away from the footage fast-forwarding across Ezekiel’s eye membrane. It flew into the humanities wing, entering various classrooms and spiraling through them. I felt a chill as the point of view neared Mr. Tomasi’s room, passing the very spot where we stood. It zipped through Tomasi’s room, spiraling out to the perimeter in seconds. As it zipped toward the door, a familiar meaty hand swung into the frame holding a stun gun, the gleaming barrel filling up the screen. A bolt of lightning fizzled across the membrane, the spark so bright it made us jump. The next view was straight up at the ceiling, each tile delineated with those weird blueprint lines, though they were now even more scrambled and staticky than before. Soon enough the ceiling slid into a blur, passing through the doorway into the hall, and then we were looking up at ourselves looking down at us.
Live footage.
“I asked you a question, Chance,” Ben was saying.
“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t lift my eyes. I could barely even speak. “What?”
Ben’s image, even fuzzily captured in the bubble membrane, looked annoyed. “I said, ‘Transmitting to who?’”
Before I could answer, a sudden movement in Ezekiel’s eye startled me so badly I jerked back onto my heels.
A virtual eyeball rolled into the membrane, replacing the view of us. Squirming and veiny, it stared up from the space where a real eyeball was supposed to be.
Alex screamed. I might have as well.
Not Ben, though.
Ben had his stun gun out in a flash. He fired it directly through Ezekiel’s forehead into the brain. All light vanished from the membrane, taking that horrific eyeball with it.
ENTRY 16
“What the hell was that?”
“And what does it want?”
“Where is it?”
“Are there more?”
“Did it see us?”
“I don’t know.”
The tense voices washed over my back. We were still right outside Mr. Tomasi’s classroom, but I was at my locker, twirling the combination dial.
“Does it know how to get here?”
“Well, it is a friggin’ Mapper, Ben.”
“But why would it think we’d stick around? Wouldn’t it think we’d be long gone?”
“That’s true,” Chatterjee said. “If it saw us, then it knows that we saw it see us.”
“Plus, the signal looked all weak and screwed up,” Patrick said. “Maybe it wasn’t transmitting clearly.”
“Either way,” Alex said, “we’ll have to watch out even more.”
“Meaning what?”
My combination lock clicked open, the battered metal door swinging on its rusty hinges.
Taped to the inside, a photo of me, Patrick, and Alex at the creek. We’d propped a camera on a rock and set the timer before huddling together, Patrick in the middle, one arm around each of our necks. Our only concern that day had been finding flat rocks to skip.
“Ezekiel used keys,” Alex said. “We saw him use keys.”
“Big deal,” Ben said. “They’re using all kinds of things.”
“The big deal is, lots of teachers have keys to the outside fences,” Alex said. “And it’s clear the Mappers want to record everything.”
“Ezekiel already got the school,” Ben said. “We just saw it.”
“But he didn’t finish. And we don’t know what he transmitted.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Patrick said. “They might come back to finish the job.”
“We need to switch the locks and post lookouts,” Alex said.
I flipped through various textbooks in my locker. A pencil box. An old apple, soft and brown. In the back I found what I was looking for: my composition notebook from English. I ran my hand over the battered black-and-white static design of the cover. The corners were worn, dog-eared, the pages nearly filled. I set it aside and reached for the one beneath it, still blank. The one I was gonna use when I ran out of room in the old one.
Behind me Dr. Chatterjee said, “We have a lot to keep track of.”
“Yeah, we do,” I said, elbowing my locker closed as I turned. At the clang, the others looked over at me. I gripped the new notebook. “We need to start writing all this down.”
*
In the quiet dark of the gym, surrounded by sleeping bodies, I stared down at my neat, slanted handwriting.
It was past midnight. I was still working in the barn when I heard the rolling door lurch open. I started and lost my grip on a block of hay. It tumbled off the baling hooks.