Twenty-One
Rural Virginia
The sky was cloudless, the sunlight sharp and white-hot. Just the very faintest breeze shook the elms lining the footpaths.
There could hardly have been a better day for the exhibition—if only Nadiya hadn’t felt so ill.
For the second night in a row, she had dreamed of Giselle. Dreamed with her. And even during her waking hours, her thoughts had been plagued by red-gold hair and soft blue eyes, the sparkle of
lake water under the moonlight. Worst of all was how much she had begun to think of Sutton, begun to imagine him with Giselle,
holding her, touching her. It hollowed her stomach. It made her face burn.
Giselle had been right; Nadiya was avoiding her in the light of day. Only not for the reasons she had intimated. She wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with her—she
was embarrassed about how she felt when she was in her presence. Both unnerved and at ease. Shaky, with a strange but not
entirely unpleasant sort of adrenaline.
In a somewhat indulgent display, Nadiya had taken great pleasure in pummeling a few first years into the mats during hand-to-hand
combat class. It had exorcised some of her unease. Dr. Iver would not have been pleased to learn of her lack of restraint,
so she had hidden the blooming bruises across her knuckles.
She was hiding quite a lot from him lately. It was an odd feeling, having secrets of her own. Ordinarily she had always felt
that he was hiding things from her, answers to the questions she was afraid to speak aloud. What happened to my parents? Who killed them? Why?
Even more disturbingly, Nadiya had the creeping sensation that she had known these things, once, but the knowledge had faded somehow, like a photograph with age. In the classroom with Professor
Blanchard, he had deposited her own memories back into her mind, playing her nightmares on a loop. If he could put something
in, could he take something out?
Dwelling on these questions made her more ill. So she did what she always did, what she had been trained to do: strapped a
gun to her hip and went to prove she was no longer a scared little girl.
There was a weary, almost hungover feeling to the students who filled the seats in the amphitheater. Maybe it was the sudden
heat, or the fact that many of them had participated in the inaugural strategy game tournament the previous day. According
to the whispers in the halls, there had been some sort of major upset, and that seemed to have put everyone on edge.
Even Matteo. When she joined him in the amphitheater’s holding room, he told her that he had dropped out of the exhibition.
“What? Why?”
“Too tired,” he said. “I was up until three a.m. reading the game reports. Did you hear that Klaud—”
“So what are you doing here?” Nadiya cut in.
“Showing you moral support, asshole.”
“I didn’t ask you to. Jackass.”
Clearly she was a bit on edge, too.
“Your girl is here, though,” Matteo said. He pointed through the holding room’s floor-to-ceiling window, which looked into
the amphitheater.
Giselle was there, in the very first row, her hair gleaming in the sunlight. Nadiya’s heart skipped a beat. “Don’t call her
that.”
Matteo just gave her a thin-lipped grin.
Giselle’s face was not the only one Nadiya recognized in the first row.
Several seats away, Dr. Iver was conferring with a man in dark sunglasses.
Absolutely nothing about his face was distinctive, which meant that this was surely the representative from the Farm.
An unmemorable physical appearance was one of the CIA’s most sought-after traits; their ideal agent was someone who could blend unnoticeably into a crowd.
“No one from Auric?” Nadiya asked in surprise.
“I guess not,” said Matteo. “Which begs the question of why we’re supposed to be using these cheap things in the first place.”
He gestured toward the rack of weapons on the far wall. Luster pistols, carbines, snipers, and even a heavy machine gun. Nadiya
grimaced. She didn’t particularly like the idea of anyone other than her firing that near such a massive crowd. The barrels of the guns were ringed in gold, Auric’s signature color, because the CEO was nothing
if not conscious about his brand.
The other participating students were gathered by the weapons rack, murmuring to each other and stealing occasional glances
at Nadiya and Matteo. They were his usual coterie of admirers, resentful of Nadiya’s presence, which prevented them from fawning
more openly.
When she shot them a glare, the group instantly went silent. She didn’t need that as a distraction, too.
As the clock ticked near to noon, the door to the holding room opened. A first-year boy who Nadiya recognized from one of
her combat classes entered and approached her.
“Here,” he said, holding out a plastic case. A pair of nodes glinted inside.
“What are these for?” Nadiya asked.
“Dr. Iver said we’re all supposed to wear them.”
“We?” Matteo echoed.
The boy nodded. “Everyone participating, and everyone in the audience. It’s too bright for the projector machines to work. See?” He waved a hand toward the dusty field of the amphitheater. Heat was rising from the ground in a visible shimmer.
But . . . The protest formed on Nadiya’s tongue, though she couldn’t make herself utter it. Dr. Iver had told her nothing about this.
“So, what?” Matteo pressed. “He wants us all to experience some mass hallucination?”
The boy launched into a stammering explanation, but Nadiya tuned him out. She stared at Dr. Iver, trying and failing to catch
his eye. He was still in deep conversation with the representative from the Farm. He didn’t so much as glance her way.
Almost unconsciously, her gaze drifted toward Giselle. And somehow, Giselle seemed to notice, because she stared right back.
Something warm curled in Nadiya’s belly.
When Nadiya tuned back into the conversation, the boy’s voice was peaking with desperation. “Just put them on, please. I don’t
want to get in trouble.”
Another first year was walking among the stands, handing out node cases to everyone in the audience. She watched as Dr. Iver
put his on, and Giselle, too.
Nadiya relented and took the plastic case from him. She removed the nodes and fixed them to her temples, her skin prickling
as they came online.
“Thanks,” the boy said gratefully. Then he scuttled off.
In another moment, the intercom buzzed. The name of the first student was called out. He grabbed one of the assault rifles
from the weapons rack, squared his shoulders, and then stepped into the amphitheater.
As he walked to the center of the field, something began to materialize in front of him. It was not like any hologram or projection Nadiya had ever seen, translucent and glitching at the edges. It looked like a solid, breathing human being, clad in all black.
The nodes hummed against her temples. The audience glanced questioningly among themselves. Was Matteo right? Were they all
experiencing some kind of mass hallucination, fed into their brains by the nodes? Nadiya looked to Dr. Iver, hoping that his
face would reveal something, but his expression was as inscrutable as ever.
Just as shocked as the audience, the boy briefly stumbled back. The man—the hologram?—darted forward. The boy fell, and a
gasp of mild horror rose from the crowd.
Nadiya glanced once more at Dr. Iver and the rep from the Farm. Behind his dark sunglasses, the man’s face was impossible
to read. But he certainly didn’t look impressed.
Matteo made a disgruntled sound. “If they wanted a good show, they should’ve conscripted you and me alone.”
“Double trouble,” Nadiya murmured.
“Actually, if they really wanted a show, they should’ve sent me out there shirtless.”
Nadiya rolled her eyes.
In the arena, the boy struggled to his feet. He grasped for his gun and got off a shot, pinging the hologram in the shoulder.
The hologram looked so real that Nadiya flinched, bracing herself for a spurt of blood, a grunt of pain, but instead it simply
vanished. Dissolved, as if nothing had ever been there at all.
The audience gasped. The skin on Nadiya’s neck rose.
Moments later the boy returned to the holding room, sweaty and panting, his eyes wide. The other students crowded around him,
murmuring with concern and rising panic. Even Matteo was tense, and as he turned to Nadiya, he said in a low voice, “What
the fuck is going on?”
Nadiya couldn’t answer.
The intercom buzzed. The student whose name was called out jolted upright. But instead of taking his weapon, he froze in place. Fear hung heavily in the air of the holding room.
It was pure instinct, or maybe pity, that made Nadiya speak at last.
“I’ll go,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll go instead.”
The boy deflated visibly, mumbling his gratitude. She walked forward, as if in a trance, and took one of the guns from the
rack. The new targets were unsettlingly real, but Nadiya knew she could hit them. As long as there was no blood.
“Nadiya—” Matteo started.
“It’s fine.” Her voice sounded distant, even to her own ears. “I’ll be fine.”
As Nadiya slid the gun against her hip, she realized it wasn’t pity that had propelled her. It was an odd, simmering sense
of anger. She was so tired of secrets, so tired of unanswered questions and confusion and fear. It wasn’t a hologram she wanted
to face down. It was—
Dr. Iver’s ice-blue eyes narrowed as she stepped into the arena.
The slanting sunlight nearly blinded her, and Nadiya put up a hand to her forehead. The dust that had been kicked up by the
previous student clogged her throat. She waited for the hologram to shudder to life in front of her, but something else emerged
instead.
Professor Blanchard, striding from the side door to the center of the arena. His lab coat billowed out behind him and his
glasses flashed in the sun.
The audience tittered. Nadiya looked in confusion to Dr. Iver, but before she could read his expression, Professor Blanchard
had grasped her by the arm, and not too gently.
“This is off script,” he said in a low voice, covering the mic on his chest.