CHAPTER ELEVEN

THREE A.M.

AS MY BEDROOM door clicked open, I snapped awake. I didn’t know what time it was. My brain had been dipping in and out of sleep for hours. The night had spooked me. I didn’t trust the smiling, squeaky-clean faces at dinner. Or Professor Bhegad.

“It’s Marco,” came a whisper. “Time to get up.”

The little glowing clock on my bed table read 2:56. My foggy brain was awakening. Three A.M. we run away.

“You’re early,” I mumbled.

Marco stepped inside. His backpack was slung across his shoulder. “Just wanted to be sure you got up. I’m kind of a control freak. But you probably figured that out. Come on before it’s too late. Aly disabled the bugs.”

I turned to face him. “The what?”

Marco gestured toward the banner with the KI symbol. “Wake up and smell the coffee, Jethro. They’ve got a recording device in that banner. And in a few other places, too. Just sound, out of respect for privacy, I guess. The cameras are on the outside of the building. Now come on. Don’t make me carry you out of here.”

I was on my feet. I hadn’t changed out of my clothes since dinner, so all I had to do was slip my feet into my Chucks.

Marco flung the door open. Conan was slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, snoring. “Aly hacked into the medical-supply security and liberated some sleeping pills,” Marco explained as we walked toward his room. “Horse strength for Conan. Not that he really needed it. Sleep is his natural state.”

Marco’s room was the second door to the right. Cass and Aly were already waiting inside, looking grim and worried. The little smiles that had always been plastered on their faces were gone.

“We owe you an explanation,” Aly said, talking very quickly. “You think we’re idiots. Children of the Corn zombies. We had to act enthusiastic. We’re under surveillance, indoors and out, twenty-four seven. I’ve been trying to hack into the system since day one. The encryption makes the US government look like amateurs, but I finally did it.”

“So…everything you’ve been telling me…about how happy you are here, how much you like this place…” I said.

“Lies,” Cass said. “At dinner I wanted to whisper the plan to you, but that chandelier is full of unidirectional mikes. Then I tried to talk to you in Backward, but you outed me. Sorry about the code. It was my only choice. If I had my way, we would all be talking in code, just for the fun of it. Naem I tahw wonk uoy fi.”

“I’m adjusting to the idea that you’re all normal. Don’t spoil it.” I smiled. “So I was right—they’re evil; they’re fooling us.”

“We’ll talk later, bro,” Marco said. “We have to move, before they notice the system is down.”

“I replaced their live feed with a recording,” Aly explained. “It’s showing an hour-long endless loop of what happened from about one A.M. to two A.M. If they’re listening to Marco’s room now, they’re hearing him snore, all curled up with his toy sheep, Daisy.”

“Leave Daisy out of this,” Marco grumbled.

Cass was peering out the window. “At two o’clock, they switch to only one guard on duty outside. We’ve been watching him for the last week, and he always sneaks off for a snack by five after three—at the latest. M&M’s and Diet Dr Pepper. He’s like clockwork.”

“That’s it?” I said. “Just one guard? For such a high-tech place?”

“It’s because of the high-tech security they don’t need so many guards,” Marco said. “You get past the guards, and the electric eye zaps you anyway.”

I must have turned green, because Aly immediately added, “They disabled it when you escaped, Jack.”

“They knew?” I said. “But—but no one stopped me!”

“Until…?” Marco said.

“This monkey appeared in the middle of nowhere,” I murmured, “with a set of keys…”

“Led you to a clearing in the woods, right?” Marco said. “A big chopper just waiting, with ol’ Sweet Cheeks in the pilot seat? Same thing happened to me. They let you go, Jack, and then manipulated your return. To teach you a lesson. Wear you down. That’s the way they operate.”

I felt as if I were emerging from a fog. For the first time since I got here, I was actually hearing things that made sense. “What about all that junk about the superpowers? How’d you make that basket from three miles away, Marco—invisible ropes?”

“He really did that,” Aly said, gently taking my arm. “Look, I think the G7W marker is real. With each treatment, we get smarter, stronger, more whatever we are. That’s what I think their goal is, Jack—to make some race of superpeople, not save us from death. They want us supercharged so we can help in their crazy missions. After this Atlantis thing, who knows what’s next? Maybe finding the abominable snowman.”

“Aly’s supposed to be having her treatment right now,” Cass said. “She went in at eleven o’clock and is supposed to stay hooked up to machines all night. But when the docs left, she rewired the hospital monitors so it seems like she’s still there.”

Aly smiled. “And look at me. Skipped the treatment and I feel great! Body feels good, mind is sharp. Ask me to recite the opening lines of Star Wars Five.”

“When we bust out of here, I’m heading for the NBA draft,” Marco said.

Cass had taken twelve sheets of loose-leaf paper from under the rug and carefully taped them together. On the combined sheets was a map drawn in exacting pencil strokes. A miniature replica of the campus was at the bottom, each building labeled. At the top right was a cloud of dense trees with a dotted-line path ending at a clearing. Cass had drawn a key and a monkey on the path, and a helicopter at the end of it. “How do you know all this?” I asked.

“We have outings, nature walks,” he replied. “Sometimes the guide lets us go off the beaten track. I remember it all. If I have enough data, I can mentally map a larger area according to the size and variety of the vegetation and the dispersion of light. Also spoor deposits. Patterns of animal poop can be geographically significant. Also, by the way, poop is a palindrome. The same backward and forward.”

“Thank you,” I said numbly.

Cass traced his finger along a path through the jungle on the upper left, a different direction from the path to the helicopter. At the very top of the map was a shoreline with a dock and a boat. “We’ll head here, to a beach the guards use. Which has a boat.”

On the way, his finger had crossed a line with jagged markings. “Is that the electric fence?” I asked.

Aly shook her head. “Not a fence. Filaments. Thin as cobwebs. You don’t know you’ve been through them until you’re on the ground, wriggling. They don’t kill you, but you’ll wish they had. The filaments were de-electrified and dropped to the ground during your escape attempt.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Active again,” Aly said, shaking her head. “And hard to disable. The security system is decentralized. I managed to hack the recording devices and cameras around the dorm. But the other campus cameras are still live, and so are the filaments.”

“Dora the Explorer here knows where all the surveillance cameras are,” Marco said, gesturing toward Cass. “We’re going to take a route to the control building that avoids the guards’ sight lines.”

“Once we’re there, I will get to work on the security system,” Aly said.

“How will we get in?” I asked.

All three of them smiled at me.

“Dude, you’ve got to have some kind of talent, right?” Marco said.