21 Students Remaining
I’m so distracted when I walk back into my dorm that I almost don’t notice the large black crow sitting on my desk, and once I do, I’m so shocked that I have to clamp both hands over my mouth to keep from screaming.
What in the actual hell?
The bird is massive, the size of a large cat, at least, with gleaming black feathers and deeply intelligent eyes. It must’ve flown through the window I left open, per Zo’s instructions, and now it looks at me with its head cocked, as though waiting for something.
That’s when I notice there’s a note tied to its foot.
“Okay, Mr. Crow,” I whisper, slowly reaching for the note. “Please don’t peck the shit out of me. I’m just going to take this and…”
The crow doesn’t move as I take the note from its ankle, though it does seem to give me a haughty look, like it’s annoyed that I would assume it would be so uncivilized as to peck me.
I unfold the note and find a message in what I assume is Zo’s spiky handwriting:
Skip breakfast tomorrow and meet me in the library instead, it reads. We have things to discuss.
“First, explain the crow,” I say the next morning.
Zo’s all the way up on the third floor, as far as she can get from the librarian, Mr. Hubert, and his dog, Earl. I’m not terribly surprised to see Seven slumped in the chair beside her. After all, Scarlett followed me off the trolley.
“I can’t believe you have a pet crow,” Scar says, taking the seat across from Zo. “What’s its name?”
“Her,” Zo says, looking delighted. “And Luna. She’s great, isn’t she?”
Luna seems like far too pretty of a name for the animal I found on my desk last night, but whatever. “How did you train her to carry notes?”
“Oh, you can train crows to do tons of things. They’re very smart. I trained Luna to carry notes to my girlfriend whenever my mom confiscated my phone, but she also used to bring me money and warn me if there were cops nearby that might hassle me about sleeping in my car.”
“Neat,” I say, deadpan. “You could’ve warned me before you sent her flying through my window.”
“That’s the thing about secret messages, Lia. They’re supposed to be secret.”
“That reminds me,” Seven interrupts. “Hand over your tablets.”
We all take our tablets out and slide them over. Seven takes a sweater out of their bag and wraps them inside. “There’s probably some creepy spyware installed. Why else would they make us all carry them around?”
“I can’t believe Tammy would send us here,” Scarlett murmurs, hugging herself. “She must not have known it was this bad.”
I thought the same thing, but I still snort. “Yeah, I bet she thought it was one of the nicer violent behavior mediation programs.”
“I can totally believe my mom would send me,” Zo adds darkly.
“I wasn’t living in my car for the fun of it.
Before this she sent me to this place called Truth Quest out in Arizona.
It wasn’t like this, though. There was a lot less focus on education.
They just set us up in front of a computer and made us take these awful online quizzes. ”
“I vote we leave,” I say. “I can break us out of this place, we just need to find a way to turn off the cameras, otherwise I don’t see how we make it out without the guards catching us. It would be helpful to have a getaway car waiting for us, too. But the cameras are the big thing.”
Zo’s nodding along, but Scar and Seven just stare at me.
“What?” I ask them.
Scar swallows and says, “In my letter, Tammy said everything would be okay as long as we followed the rules. I just don’t know if we should be stepping out of line right now.”
“You were the one who wanted to leave this morning!” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Scar, they smashed Mando’s hand with a mallet.”
Scar’s eyes fill with tears. “I know, but…only because he broke the rules. That’s why I think we should do what we’re told, because I don’t want anyone else getting hurt. Besides, even if we did manage to break out, where would we go?”
“My gran would just drive me right back,” Seven says. “She wouldn’t believe any of that stuff about hands and electrified laptops and violent tests.” They release a laugh that sounds a bit like a hiccup. “I mean, would you believe it if you didn’t go here? It sounds made-up.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Zo says. “They make everything just weird enough that no one’s going to believe we’re telling the truth.”
“And that’s if they would believe us to begin with,” Seven adds. “Considering what problem kids we are.”
“We can’t stay here,” I point out.
“Hey, I’m with you,” Zo says. “I want to get the hell out. I can’t help with the getaway car, but I might have an idea for the cameras.
” She pulls something out of her pocket: It’s the little black device she showed me our first day here, the Penguin.
“If we can find a computer that’s hooked up to Luminary’s network, I can program the cameras to turn off whenever we want. ”
“How long will they stay off?” Seven wants to know.
Zo hesitates. “Fifteen minutes? Maybe a little less.”
“That’s not a lot of time,” Scar says.
“It’s long enough for us to get through the front gate,” I say. Then, thinking of the computer I found in the Records Room the night Ian and I snuck out, I say, “I can find a computer, but there’s security.”
“This thing can hack a password, easy,” Zo says.
“What about a riddle?”
Zo frowns. “What kind of computer is riddle protected?”
“A Luminary computer,” I mutter. “And we still don’t have a way to call a getaway car.”
“If only we’d managed to get ahold of Mando’s phone,” Zo says, shoulders slumping.
“Poor Mando,” Scarlett adds, a tear slipping down her cheek.
For a moment we’re all quiet, thinking about what happened to Mando. Then Seven exhales heavily and says, “You’re right, we can’t let what happened to Mando happen to one of us next. We’ve got to get out of here.” Their eyes flick up to mine and they add, “I’m in.”
I glance at Scarlett, who nods and says, “Yeah, me too.”
Seven and I have our end-of-module Chemistry test that morning, so we say goodbye to the others and head out together.
The chem lab is in the basement of one of the townhouses, a wide, low-ceilinged place with narrow, foggy glass windows near the ceiling, the floor and walls all covered in tile.
Four rows of workstations line the room, and this morning there are flasks, beakers, and burners meticulously arranged on each.
Aprons, goggles, and safety gloves sit neatly on all the chairs.
I stop in the doorway, taking it all in. No one’s started working yet, but the air already smells like burnt chemicals. The inside of my nostrils itch.
Ian’s in this class, too. Without making the conscious decision to do so, I find myself glancing toward his table in the corner. I mean to look away instantly, but his eyes snap to mine before I can turn around and—
Oh. Wow. Heat.
The corner of his lips pulls up in a little half smile, and my stomach flips. You hate him, I remind myself. Think of the ties!
But I have to admit, that little half smile is doing something to me…
Seven turns around to see what caught my attention, and when they turn back to me, they have one eyebrow arched high.
“Oh,” they murmur under their breath. “That’s an interesting development.”
“It’s not what you think,” I murmur, pulling my eyes away from Ian.
“Liar,” Seven says, knocking their shoulder into mine. “C’mon. Let’s get this over with. Then I want to hear everything.”
We head for our workstation, which is the last table in the far corner of the room, just below one of the windows.
The rest of the class files in around us, and everyone quietly begins to pull on gloves and tie aprons behind their backs, all while shooting anxious glances at one another.
There are only five of us left. The empty tables seem to mock us.
A girl named Lauren Garrett loses her grip on her apron tie and accidentally knocks a beaker off her worktable. It slams to the floor and shatters, the sound of breaking glass like an alarm in the otherwise silent room. Everyone goes perfectly still. Staring.
Lauren’s eyes widen. No one says anything.
She’s worried she’s going to be punished, I realize. I think of Mando’s gut-wrenching screams. All of a sudden, I feel sick.
But a few seconds pass, and no one reprimands her. Lauren drops to her knees and begins gathering pieces of broken glass, her movements quick.
Seven takes a pair of goggles from our table and hands me the other. As I slide the elastic band over my hair, our instructor, Pete, takes his place at the front of the room.
“Your midterm today is fairly straightforward.” Pete pauses for a moment, a smile flitting across his face. There’s something off about his voice, I notice, and he’s not looking at us, but staring down at his clenched hands.
He’s terrified, I realize.
A second later, I find out why.
Pete says, “Your assignment today is to re-create the rainbow flame demonstration.”
No one in the room says a word. Pete did the rainbow flame demonstration for us on our first day of class. It was a very cool experiment that involved adding a flammable solvent to a series of different ionized metal salts in order to produce a rainbow of brightly colored flames.
When Pete performed the demonstration, he was careful to issue loads of warnings about everything from how much salt to add to our beakers to how much solvent to use to where we were to stand if we didn’t want to literally get set on fire.
Most of us laughed at the idea that we were in any danger.
It was easy to feel safe with Pete handling all the dangerous chemicals, and in the end, he produced seven perfectly contained flames in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. A rainbow of fire.