31 Students Remaining
I’m distracted while walking to the barns with Zo for Calculus the next morning, the dream from the night before playing in my head on a loop.
Fireflies. Dandelion. Peppermint.
The dream was about Rani. I’m sure it was about Rani.
I mean, okay, I didn’t actually see this dream guy’s face.
He was standing in the shadows. I can clearly picture his fingers on the flower stem, can remember the heat of his lips, the hard muscle of his abdomen beneath my fingers. But his face? Total mystery.
But it had to be Rani. Who else would I have some sexy dream about?
I can’t think of a single person.
“Lia? Are you even listening?” Zo asks as we walk.
She’s the only one of our friends who takes Calculus with me.
I blink and turn to see that she’s staring at me with one eyebrow cartoonishly raised.
I can tell that she’s trying to seem annoyed, but it doesn’t work on her.
She looks more like she’s about to sneeze.
“Did you say something?”
“I asked if you’d heard that Jenna was gone. Apparently, she didn’t show up for breakfast this morning.”
“Jenna Hughes?” Jenna’s in Innovator with us.
Or, she was. Another three students were sent home last night, which would have been shocking a few days ago, but now feels almost normal.
I feel a pang of guilt that I didn’t realize Jenna’s name was gone when I was scanning the list for Scar and the rest of my friends.
“Yup. Gone. Just like that.” Zo snaps her fingers. “People are dropping like flies.”
I roll my lip between my teeth. I haven’t told anyone about the notch marks or the get out note I found, not even Scarlett. If they are part of some new test, I’m not sure if telling someone will lose me points. But keeping it all a secret has been making my stomach cramp, so I spill.
“That doesn’t sound like a test,” Zo says, frowning. “Who would leave you notes like that?”
“Ashlyn?”
Zo scrunches up her nose. “I guess.”
“Or it could be another student? Like, one of the ones who’ve already gotten expelled?”
Zo frowns, thinking this over. “If the note and notches were left by one of them, you know you can’t trust them, right?” Her eyes suddenly light up. “Wait a second…what if they were left by a student who’s still in the running? Someone trying to freak you out to get you to leave on your own?”
“That would be vicious,” I murmur. And also kind of brilliant. If only five of us are making it to the end of the year, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before we all start turning on one another. “So, you think I should ignore them?”
“I would,” Zo says. Then, nodding to someone down the path ahead of us, she adds, “Hey, look, it’s Rani.”
I turn to look so fast I give myself a cramp, and warmth rushes through my body when I spot his familiar dark hair.
Fireflies, I think. Dandelions. Peppermint.
“Um, hi, you have a little drool. Just there.” Zo gestures to my lip, but I swat her hand away, glowering at her.
When we arrive at Barn 3, there are a dozen cages suspended midair scattered around.
They remind me of old-fashioned elevators, only they don’t have walls or a ceiling, just a floor surrounded by a skeletal enclosure.
Thick cables feed through iron pulleys bolted to the ceiling above, and the floor below each one opens into a deep, dark shaft.
I stand at the door to the barn for a beat, studying the elevators. They can’t be safe.
“The hell are those?” Zo mutters, from behind me.
I glance at her, then creep up to the edge of one of the elevators and peer down the shaft. The walls are aluminum, but I can’t see any floor below. Just a deep black hole.
The rest of the class has started filtering into the barn. They gather around us, staring and whispering about the elevators. I barely hear what they’re saying. My heart beats hard in my chest. What are they going to make us do?
Zo says, “How deep do you think it goes?”
“No idea,” I say. Another kid from Innovator—Tyler—releases a nervous laugh, then stops abruptly.
Our Calculus instructor, Frank, suddenly claps his hands to get our attention. Everyone goes quiet.
“Welcome, all!” he says. “Today is your end-of-module Calculus test, where you’ll be tested on your understanding of constant acceleration, velocity, and displacement.”
Frank steps up to the nearest platform. “By now you’ve all learned the displacement formula for constant acceleration,” Frank explains.
“Today, you are to partner up and choose an elevator. The test will begin with a challenge appearing on your tablet. Your job will be to solve using the correct formula and input the correct answer here.” Frank gestures to a brass control panel filled with two rows of buttons labeled from zero to nine.
In a normal elevator, these would be the buttons you hit to choose your floor.
Frank punches in the numbers 0, 1, 2, 5.
There’s a moment of silence. Then a mechanical grinding begins.
Gears turn, pulling the cables and jerking the platform up a few feet.
“As you can see, a correct answer will raise your platform at the correct acceleration.” Frank turns to us and explains calmly, “Inputting a wrong answer, on the other hand, could cause the elevator to destabilize.” He presses his hands together as though in prayer, and touches the tips of his fingers to his chin. “Any questions?”
A stunned silence fills the room. A girl named Keira Langley raises her hand. “That doesn’t sound…safe?”
I glance at her, nodding in solidarity, and murmured agreements come from all around us as several others express their own doubts. The word destabilize echoes in my head. My eyes travel over the pulleys and gears, nerves creeping up the back of my neck.
Frank explains that the elevators will calibrate according to our heights and weights once we step onto the platforms. In other words, they might look scary, but they’re safe.
I force myself to think of Blackwood. The scholarship.
The escape room was scary, too, and in the end it wasn’t dangerous at all.
But I can’t stop looking at that dark shaft. I feel a phantom twinge of pain through the ankle I injured falling off the gauntlet and swallow, nervous.
Frank says, “Feel free to choose your partner and platform and get started.” He starts to turn, then whirls back around.
“Oh, I forgot to mention, first team to the ceiling gets top marks. The rest of you will be graded in the order you finish.” Another clap, and then he gestures vaguely to the barn ceiling a good twenty feet above our heads.
“Partners?” Zo asks me.
Don’t be scared, I tell myself. This is fine. It’s all going to be fine.
I reluctantly drag my gaze away from the elevator shaft. “Yeah, okay.”
We choose an elevator in the far corner of the room. The platform shifts as we step on. All around the room, I hear low murmurs and the creaks of cables as the rest of the students choose their partners and platforms.
Our first challenge is already on our tablets, and a moment later, an image of an analog clock appears on the screen, along with the sound of ticking. My shoulders clench together, nerves pricking through me.
“Are we being timed?” I ask.
“Guess so,” Zo says. “Do you know the formula?”
Her words don’t make an impression in my head. I’m too distracted by that ticking. It reminds me of the escape room, the explosion. That was fake, I remind myself. Think of Blackwood.
The second hand is already halfway around the clock face. How long are we going to have to solve the problem? More than a minute, right?
“Lia?” Zo asks, touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
I exhale shakily. I’m okay. I have to be okay. My heartbeat’s still pulsing in my throat as I say, “Yeah.” I punch 3 into the control panel, my hands jittery, the button lighting up beneath my fingers.
There’s a moment of tense silence. Nothing happens. I look at Zo. Her eyes are wide, scared. Every muscle in my body tightens, bracing itself for the fall.
The platform beneath us hums. I feel a slight vibration through the soles of my shoes as it rises slowly into the air.
“One down,” Zo says, smiling anxiously. “Okay, that was kind of cool.”
I nod, offering a tentative smile back. Math has always been my worst subject.
I’ve never really gotten how all those numbers and symbols relate to my life, why I should bother caring.
But just now, feeling the platform rise at the exact acceleration that I plugged in, it was kind of an adrenaline rush.
A nerdy adrenaline rush, but still. It’s more than I’ve ever felt while doing math.
A new problem appears on our screen.
For the next hour, my brain is so focused on working through the equations that I don’t have time to obsess about the clock or the growing distance between our platform and the bottom of that dark shaft.
My brain feels sharp and quick, easily untangling problems I would have spent much longer on in any other situation.
Our progress is swift. We rise higher. Higher. The platforms around us jerk up toward the ceiling as well. Slowly, slowly.
Keira and Diego Martinez are working on the elevator just next to us. At one point, they must input the wrong acceleration, because it drops suddenly. Keira releases a short scream, and they both grip tightly to the guardrails until the elevator stops moving.
“Careful!” Frank warns from below. “The elevators will only rise if you input the correct answers!”
Another elevator, the one where Isaiah Moore and Tyler Campbell are working, falls down a few feet, signaling that they, too, must’ve gotten a question wrong. Isaiah and Tyler look freaked for a moment, then nervously laugh when the elevator steadies.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
As the seconds slip away, I find myself breathing a little easier.
Zo and I are around twelve inches from the ceiling.
One more problem and we’ll be the first ones finished.
My entire brain is focused on the formula I’m working through, on the narrow space between the top of my head and the rafters above.
Zo hastily whispers instructions, and I tap in the final answer, chest squeezing as the numbers light up beneath my fingers.
A hush falls over us. The clock ticks.
The platform shudders, and there’s a brief, heart-stopping pause before it begins a smooth ascent.
Zo and I exchange a look of triumph.
“We’re first,” I say, laughing.
But before Zo can say a word, a sharp crack echoes through the barn. My head snaps around.
There’s a tense pause. For a moment, it seems like nothing’s going to happen.
Then Diego and Keira’s elevator shudders. The overhead gears scream as it plummets, drowning out their terrified voices.
Cables snap and sparks light up the darkness as, with an impact that reverberates like a thunderclap, the platform slams into the floor deep inside the shaft.