Rosa sat with everyone else in a banked lecture hall beyond the scorpion room, rubbing her left hand on her shorts. She wasn’t hurt, but the scorpion had brushed against her—hard, scaly like a roach, and now she couldn’t stop squirming. She didn’t see anyone who’d been injured, but she didn’t see anybody who looked happy, either.
Ms. Bauer walked forward, and she was almost smiling. “You’ll break into two groups for the next tests, just to make them manageable. Split yourselves into even groups.” No one moved. She clapped her hands together and barked, “You’re supposed to be smart. Can you count to one hundred?”
They jumped up and pulled apart like a cell dividing. Eddie’s group wound up with an extra person, and they all seemed to decide that Eddie was the spare. Several people pointed him across the room, and, face impassive, he joined Rosa’s group.
A man led the first group away. Friesta Bauer stood in front of the group containing Eddie and Rosa. “You probably have a little restless energy after the last test,” she said. They laughed nervously. “So, time to play outside.”
She led them out behind the hangar to a field with a zipline—the tall takeoff tower, the lower landing platform, and the cable strung between them. Rosa’s stomach jumped off the tower and landed in her ankles.
The kid with the sweep of dark hair—Brad—ran his hands over his temples. “Looks like we don’t have to get on that thing,” he whispered. “Thank goodness.”
Rosa nodded, but her focus was on a guy standing in the middle of the field. He held a box containing a bunch of remote controls like the type for video games. “Take one, and then line up. Give yourselves about a yard on either side.”
Ellis from lunch was in the group, and when Rosa reached for a remote control her hand touched his and he smirked. She slipped beyond Eddie so she wouldn’t have to see him. On the ground ten yards ahead of them was a line of foot-long toy helicopters. Thirty yards beyond that were plant stands topped by yellow cylinders with blue lids.
“You’re going to play with blocks,” Friesta Bauer said when they’d lined up. “Your goal is to put a block in the container directly across from you. If you put your block in a different container, you will fail the exercise. If you fail to get a block in the container, you will fail the exercise. You may not talk. Got that?”
They all nodded. She walked across the path, dropping blocks beyond the helicopters. They were red and oddly shaped—more complicated than triangles, but too far away to get a good visual. Rosa examined the remote while she finished, and wondered if it would operate the helicopter in front of her, or a different one. Because they took remotes at random, and each would have to be programmed for a specific helicopter. Anybody who didn’t realize that was going to operate one helicopter while looking at another.
Ms. Bauer had dropped all the blocks and stood now at the far side of the field, beyond the zipline cable.
The first thing Rosa had to do was determine which helicopter her remote was operating.
Friesta Bauer held up a stopwatch and shouted, “Go!”
Rosa pulled the joystick up and toward her, scanning to see which helicopter would fly the opposite direction from all the others. But two helicopters were coming toward them, so she nudged it left. Two swooped left. Had they rigged it so that each person controlled more than one? She tapped the control up, so the helicopter would rise—she didn’t dare move it right; unless the other toy moved right, too, she would crash them. Besides, it was a good idea to gain height, because all around them helicopters were crashing and people were swearing and then going suddenly silent as they remembered they couldn’t talk.
Two helicopters rose.
Beside her, Eddie hissed under his breath. Rosa looked at him, an eyebrow raised. She held her control so he could see it and moved her helicopter a little to the left. One helicopter moved. Ah—mystery solved. He’d been thinking along the same lines that she had, and now she knew which was hers. Around them people were untangling rotary blades and the pincers on the bottom of the choppers to lift the block. All without talking.
Rosa descended carefully over her block. Eddie swooped down for his, opened the pincer perfectly, and was off with it, headed for the container. She suspected he had more remote control experience than she did. Rosa hovered over her target, wallowing in the air, until she figured out how to get a grip on it. But she got airborne again and was off to the container before anyone else was untangled.
And—ha!—Eddie couldn’t get his block in the opening. She hovered over the container, carefully centering her block, and lowered it. She could see the red against the blue lid—this must be why they used different colors. But it wasn’t going in. She moved the block around on the lid, in case the hole was off-center. Seemed like the kind of thing they’d do.
Maybe the block was a complex shape and she was holding it wrong. What if she had it on its side? It would never go through. Eddie wasn’t having any more success than she was. Everybody else had their helicopters sorted out by now and were swooping into their containers. Crap. She’d squandered her advantage.
Rosa flew the helicopter straight back to her and made it hover in front of her face so she could look closely at the block’s shape. It was a star—it wouldn’t go in on its side, but her pincers were holding it upright. Why wouldn’t it go in?
Eddie took a good look at it, too, which wasn’t fair—it was Rosa’s idea to examine the block, and he hadn’t lost any time because of it. She sent her helicopter swooping back toward her container. Blondie’s hovered, pincers empty, trying to pry his lid off. She glanced down the row of cylinders—no one was getting a block to go in.
Rosa wished she could talk to him. Instead, she left her block on the floor and flew her helicopter over to his cylinder, angling to avoid his rotors. He looked sharply sideways at her. Rosa concentrated on getting her pincer to grip the edge of his lid. Ms. Bauer stood at the far side of the field, watching them, and she didn’t want to risk disqualification by communication—she didn’t dare nod to the kid, so she held her control out in front of her, her thumb on the lift toggle. He held his control beside hers, and together they lifted the helicopters. His lid came off.
He could have retrieved his block and won, but he swept over and helped Rosa get her lid off. When they dropped their blocks in their respective cylinders, they plunked at almost the same time. Did he beat her? Even if he did, she was the one who figured out the test. It was an exercise in cooperation—the only way to get the lid off was to use two helicopters. If they scored fairly, she would come in first.
But Rosa didn’t trust these people to be fair.