The high grass brushing against my bare legs was making me itchy. I should have worn long pants, even if it was warm out.
“There’s no way she’s going to be ready in time,” Persephone repeated for the third time. “Nothing comes to mind that they could be getting you ready for?”
“I told you. No.” Eve was starting to lose patience. It would probably be wise for us to change the subject.
“They want something from you,” Persephone said.
“I don’t have anything. I can’t do anything.” Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I can’t even eat right.”
“That’s not your fault,” Lorena said. “No one taught you those sorts of things when you were little. We saw the kind of stuff they put you through. It’s their fault.”
“What about all the weird subjects they’re teaching us in this place?” I said. “I mean, etiquette? Negotiation? Foreign customs?”
“Maybe they want Eve to run for president,” Lorena said.
“You have to be at least thirty-five to run for president,” Persephone said.
Lorena gave Persephone a look. “I’m joking.”
“I know. I’m just saying.”
Eve’s wide, froggy mouth dropped open. She pointed. “Look at that!”
I squinted, trying to identify what she was pointing at. It was just more tall grass.
“What is that?” Eve stalked forward. Just when I was once again beginning to wonder if her eye-ears could sense things that were invisible to me, I realized she was talking about a blue and white butterfly.
“It’s a butterfly,” Lorena said. “You’ve never seen a butterfly before?”
Eve watched the butterfly trace wild circles in the air. “I’ve never seen anything before.” As if on cue, the butterfly flew right at Eve. It circled her head as she laugh-coughed, and it landed on her shoulder.
Lorena clapped a hand over her mouth. “That is so beautiful. It’s like it sensed it was making you happy and came to say hello.”
“Or it needed a place to land,” Persephone offered.
Eve stood perfectly still, watching the butterfly slowly open and close its wings. “It smells so nice.”
“It gets its food from flowers,” Lorena said. “Maybe that’s why.”
I might have made that connection at some other time, but right now I was wrapping my mind around the fact that Eve could smell a butterfly sitting on her shoulder.
Persephone leaned in to get a closer look at the butterfly. “When they’re young, butterflies are caterpillars—fuzzy worms. They transform when they reach adulthood.”
“There’s so much I don’t know,” Eve said, sounding utterly defeated.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll teach you stuff.”
The butterfly lifted off and flapped away. Lorena pressed her palms together and bowed her head. “Namaste, butterfly.”
“What does that mean?” Eve asked.
“It means ‘the eternal spirit in me bows to the eternal spirit in you.’”
“See?” I said. “We all learned something new.”
Eve turned toward the quickly receding butterfly and pressed her strange, stumped hands together. “Namaste, butterfly.”
We carried on walking. The point of being out in the itchy heat was to tell Eve what we’d found out and see if she could tell us anything about her past that might connect the dots, but Eve seemed to be having such a good time just hanging out with us that I hated to break the spell.
“When I was nine, my mom bought me this butterfly kit for my birthday,” I said. “You took care of the caterpillars until they turned into butterflies, and then you released them. When I opened it, I thought it was lame, but it turned out to be pretty cool.” A wave of homesickness washed over me as I remembered that birthday. “I wish we could go home for the weekends. I miss home.”
Lorena gave me a warning look. We walked in silence for a moment before I remembered that Eve had no home, no family. If we went home on weekends, she’d stay here alone. Or be taken back to that lab.
“Maybe when this is over, you can come visit me, Eve,” I said, trying to cover my gaffe. “Persephone and Lorena too. We could have a sleepover. That’s where you watch movies and play video games all night while you gorge on junk food.”
“You would let me come to your house?” Eve sounded stunned.
“Sure. You’d like my dad and stepmom. My stepbrother and stepsisters can be okay sometimes.” Wouldn’t that be something, if I brought Eve home for a visit? No one would be forgetting I was part of the family then, would they?
“Can we go now?” Eve asked.
“Well, no. It would have to be once we’re out of this place.” I gestured at the security fence rising to our right.
Eve studied the fence, hands on hips. “I can get through that fence. Let’s go now. All four of us. I want to stay up and eat junk food and watch Star Wars all night.”
“We can’t go now. One day, though.” I’d meant it more as a what if than a formal invitation.
“No, not one day. I want to go now. I want to go now.”
I gestured at the massive fence ringing the compound. “And I’d be happy to take you, if it wasn’t for that.” It was made of black, steel wire that was much thicker than your average chain-link fence, woven in a checkered pattern.
Eve eyed the fence. “I can shred that.”
“Even if you could, there are armed soldiers patrolling the woods.” Persephone gestured toward the campus. “Why don’t we see if they’ll open some of the rides for us.”
Eve strode toward the fence. “I’ll shred the soldiers too.”
I hurried after her. “Whoa, hang on.” I reached out to put a hand on Eve’s shoulder, then thought better of it. “Slow down.”
“I want to go now.”
“Eve, we can’t go to my house now.”
Lorena got in front of Eve and walked backward so she was facing Eve. “Why don’t all four of us ride The Cyclone together? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Eve didn’t reply. She kept walking, her head down.
“Eve, we can’t just break out of here,” Persephone said. “That’s not how this works.”
Eve reached the fence. She looked up at it as her skin flexed. The spiky barbs shot out all at once, spearing through her dress in dozens of places. Hissing, Eve raised her arms and slashed.
The fence rattled and shook, but it didn’t give.
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Okay. You tried. Let’s go back before—”
Eve’s hiss rose to a metallic shriek that set my teeth on edge and sank to my bone marrow. She threw herself at the fence.
The impact knocked her to the ground, but she’d left a foot-long gash in the fence.
She sprang up and attacked the fence with everything she had. I’d known she was fast and I’d known she was strong, but this was beyond anything I’d imagined. She slashed and kicked and kneed the fence in a blurred rage. The steel bent, twisted, and snapped.
A whole section of the fence buckled. Eve grasped a jagged end, then simultaneously yanked and spun, tearing a gaping hole in the fence.
She squeezed through the hole and disappeared into the woods.
“Eve!” Turning sideways to avoid the jagged ends, I went after her.
“Benjamin, wait!” Lorena called after me.
Eve was surprisingly fast. Her tree trunk legs drove her forward, and every so often she dropped and used an arm to propel her, like a gorilla. Where was she going? She didn’t know where my house was. She didn’t know where anything was.
“Eve, stop!” The forest bed was mostly clear of brush and coated with red-gold pine needles. I glanced back at the sound of footsteps behind me, hoping it wasn’t soldiers.
Lorena and Persephone were following.
I struggled to keep Eve’s flapping lavender dress in sight as the forest began to slope downward, the trees growing thicker. In the distance, an alarm began to honk like some giant, lonely goose. Someone had discovered we’d escaped. I pushed myself to run faster.
“Wait up,” Lorena called.
Reluctantly, I waited for them to catch up.
“Do you see her?” Persephone asked, panting, as we resumed running.
“No,” I managed between breaths.
The thump-thump-thump of a helicopter rose from the direction of the school. A moment later a shadow blotted out the mottled sunlight that filtered through the pine trees. The sound grew almost deafening. The helicopter passed right over us, flying just above the treetops.
“We are in so much trouble,” I shouted over the din.
We ran downhill, splashed through an icy-cold stream, and scrambled up the far bank.
I stopped running. Eve was waiting in a small clearing on the other side. She was just standing there, arms dangling at her sides. “Which way is your house?”
“Eve, it’s a hundred miles—”
Two soldiers burst through the foliage behind Eve, rifles pointed at us.
“Don’t move,” one of them barked.
More soldiers appeared, surrounding us. I wanted to raise my hands in the air, but he’d said not to move, so I stood perfectly still, my legs rubbery. A wind rustled the leaves overhead as the helicopter returned to hover right above us.
“No.” Eve shifted from one foot to the other. “No. I want a sleepover.”
I motioned with my hands, patting the air. “Eve, calm down. Let’s not—”
With a shriek, Eve charged the nearest soldier.
The soldier aimed his rifle and fired. There was no bang. Just a sound like an arrow traveling through the air. It was a tranquilizer gun.
Eve made it three steps before she dropped to the forest floor. She rose to her hands and knees, struggled to stand, then collapsed facedown on the forest floor.
Four soldiers raced to Eve’s still form. They lifted her and ran full tilt in the direction of the compound.
“Purple Girl is down,” a soldier shouted into a walkie-talkie. “Repeat, Purple Girl is down and in transit to infirmary.”
Principal Winn came on the walkie-talkie. “Understood. Detain her accomplices. Bring them to me.”
“We are in so much trouble,” I said under my breath.