Chapter 21 #2
“You designed them for me?” I couldn’t help but blurt, my blood pressure rising again. It had been bad enough that she’d put me through all that without warning, not to speak of her being the architect of it all.
She nodded as if she were proud of herself, completely missing my tone.
“What was the point of all that?” I asked.
She gave me a wry look. “How about you re-hydrate first? You look like you could use some water. Here’s your snack bag.”
She handed the bag to me, and I grabbed the water and cracked open the lid, downing the whole bottle in seven long gulps.
The hydration helped me feel a little more human, and a little more confident about continuing this conversation without snapping at Anna.
My nerves were shot, and I had to be careful I didn’t end up saying something I would regret.
As insane as that experience had been, I couldn’t lose sight of the fact that she was the key to saving my parents.
“Come with me to the control room,” Anna said, gesturing toward the door.
I followed her out of the chamber, to the second door that stood in the small corridor outside.
We stepped through it and emerged in a small, round room whose walls were lined with tables and dimmed monitors.
She pulled up a chair by the door for me and I slumped into it, my muscles grateful for the rest.
When she seated herself in front of the largest monitor, I noticed a pair of black goggles strewn across the desk, next to a bottle of water. They were identical to the type I’d seen those men carrying earlier in the hallway.
“So,” Anna said, drawing my attention back to her face. “Before we get to the significance of the modules, I think your results will be a better place to start. If you failed, there’d hardly be point in discussing details, right?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but she was already swiveling around in her seat. She touched a button on the keyboard in front of the monitor, and the screen flickered to life.
It was blank, except for a small spinning disc in the center. “Ah, still loading,” she said.
I had been about to respond to her rhetorical question that yes, even if I had failed the screening, I damn well wanted to know the meaning behind the screening’s modules, given that she’d put me through them. But I held back, knowing the retort wouldn’t help me right now.
“You should eat the waffles now, by the way,” she added. “While they’re still warm.”
My eyes fell reluctantly to the contents of the cloth bag. My stomach was still too twisted up for me to possibly be hungry, but I knew that downing some calories would do me good. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I had just burned through a ton of energy.
I reached for the foil-covered food and unwrapped it, taking a deep bite into one of two crispy waffle pieces and feeling the warm cheese ooze into my mouth.
“It’s done!” Anna announced. My eyes shot back to the computer screen to see that it had lit up green—the same shade that little screen had done down in the water tank.
“Aaannd, I’m please to say you passed!” she said. She tapped a button on the keyboard and a bunch of complex looking charts popped up.
“Oh,” I managed, gulping down my mouthful quickly. I should have felt more enthusiasm, given what this could mean for my parents, but somehow, I could barely even muster relief.
“There is definitely room for improvement,” Anna went on.
Her large forefinger tapped another button and she scrolled further down the screen.
“But I think you’re at a good starting point.
You passed my minimum requirements, anyhow.
Your physicality and reflexes are good, your ability to cope under stress decent, and your decision making workable. ”
“Your computer is seriously telling you all this?” I asked, then remembered I still had those pads stuck to my body. I set my food down to pick them off.
“Mhm,” she replied with a smile. “And, of course, I was watching, too.” She pressed a button on a keyboard and several screens on the walls lit up, revealing all angles of the chamber next door, along with the underground water room.
I could make out the large shadow of the beastly fish lurking in…
what was now one large, single tank. The fish had broken the glass that separated the upper tank from the lower one.
It felt like my heart skipped several beats. “Wow. So my life really was in danger down there?”
Anna chortled. “Oh no, hon! Do you honestly think I’d let you die in a pre-screening?!”
That was what I had been hoping, at the back of my mind. That the whole time I had been in there, I had never been in real danger, despite how real it had felt.
But seeing that glass actually broken meant that my life had been at risk. The creature had been fully capable of reaching me.
“What if I hadn’t gotten out in time?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
The ceiling had opened for me with barely thirty seconds to spare.
How accurately could they even predict that glass breaking?
The computerized voice had said “approximately” five minutes.
What use was “approximately” when someone’s life was at risk?
“We have sensors on the glass,” Anna replied, waving a dismissive hand. “If the sucker got too close to breaking through before you got out of there, another sheet of glass would have shot out beneath it and you would have been let out of the tank.”
I gaped at her. That still felt like an incredibly dicey position to put someone in without prior warning. What if the technology experienced a glitch? What if the new sheet of glass shot out a few seconds too late, or the ceiling got jammed?
“What about that thing that was chasing me through the maze?” I asked, my throat tight. “Was that real too?”
“Ah, that,” Anna replied with a canny look. “That particular element, I would rather keep up my sleeve for now…”
“What was it?” I pressed.
“A topic we may or may not revisit another day,” she replied firmly, her lips forming a line.
I stared at her. If it hadn’t been a simulation, I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around what it could have been.
And even besides that element, there were still so many dangerous ones. What if that shooting platform had squashed me into the ceiling? It had been going fast enough to do that. What if the brakes had failed?
What if that heavy dryer cylinder had clamped down in the wrong place and crushed me instead of drying me?
What if those maze walls had shot upward at the wrong time?
The more I thought about it, the more disturbed I felt. There must have been a thousand little pieces that went into running that screening. It might have only taken one of them to fail, and my life could have been lost. At the very least I could have been badly injured.
It all suddenly felt very, very real—not just a simulation.
And Anna had been more than willing to put me through it.
And was now acting like it was no big deal.
I remained staring at her, and my disbelief finally seemed to get on her nerves. Her expression hardened and she folded her arms.
“What?” she asked. “Did you think a job in outreach was going to be easy? Do you think working out there in the Old World is rainbows and unicorns? It’s not.
And if I’m going to take you on as my mentee, I need to be sure you’re up for the job.
” There was a bite to her last words, and suddenly the atmosphere in the small room grew tense.
Frankly, I didn’t want to have anything to do with this woman after this, and I was starting to see truth in Hayden’s warning. My instincts were telling me to stay away from her.
The way she spoke about the Old World scared me, too, and made me even more nervous about what my future career would entail.
But fear wasn’t something I could afford to give in to right now. Nor did I have the luxury of listening to my instincts.
My parents, for all I knew, were dying.
“No, Anna, I’m sorry,” I managed, even as the words tasted bitter on my tongue.
“I understand you need to check what I’m made of, and I understand that a job in outreach won’t be easy.
I know times are tough out there, and, while I admit I don’t really know how bad the situation is outside of our small jungle world, I’m willing to work hard to train to help get people out of difficult situations.
It’s just… I’ve just been in shock… is all.
I wasn’t expecting what you threw at me. ”
There was a pause in which she gave me a long look, her face a passive mask. And then a smile returned to her lips, warming her expression. “Apology accepted,” she said. “I understand you’re still a bit shaken.”
“So, what was the meaning of the modules?” I asked, trying to change the subject. “I think I understand the first two: testing reflexes and quick thinking under pressure, but what about the last two? Those really confused me.”
“What did you find confusing about them?” she wondered, leaning back in her seat and giving me a considering look.
I frowned, frankly confused by her question. I would have thought that would have been obvious. “Well, I guess, first, did I make the right choice in the maze? Was I supposed to go after the adults?”
There was a pause, as though she were considering her next words carefully. “At this point,” she replied after a moment, “I would say there was no right or wrong answer to that. I was curious to see which you would pick.”