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“Come on already, Jessie,” Micah pleads. “What are you waiting for? Let’s find the others and blow this joint.
He prowls at the fence line like an anxious guard dog. And that’s what troubles me, because how do I know he won’t attack me once I’m inside? I know he suspects something, or else he wouldn’t be acting this way.
“I’m getting a really bad feeling standing around out here with all these bodies.”
I recheck Kelly’s message on my Link, hoping I simply misread it. Or maybe a new message will pop up and tell me it was all a joke. Ha ha! Just teasing. Micah’s not a traitor. Just thought you needed a little something to keep you on your toes.
But no.
Micah wrote the failsafe script?
How can it be true? How can Micah be the one who set us all up?
The whole world suddenly feels like it’s collapsing around me, crushing the air from my chest. The roar of it deafens me. And like a bolt out of the blue, I suddenly realize that everything I’ve ever believed in about Micah is a lie. It all makes sense, though, now that it’s actually been said. The signs were always there, staring us in the face.
I tap a reply, a single word: “Sure?”
He sends me three more messages in rapid succession:
<< ASH 100% POSITIVE >>
<< DONT SAY ANYTHING >>
<< WE NEED PLAN >>
“Jess?” Micah calls. “Was that Kelly? Are they okay?” Then, hesitantly: “What did he say? Tell me what he said.”
He sounds even more worried now. Do I sense a note of hysteria in his voice? Or is it suspicion? What would he do if I were to confront him right now with the accusation? Would he confess? Or would he double down on the lie he’s been telling us for the past year? He’s not a Southern States Coalition exile; he’s an Arc spy.
Everything we thought we knew about us being here on Long Island is wrong, especially the assumptions I’d made about Kelly. Micah had coordinated with Arc to manipulate Kel into thinking he was doing the company’s bidding. They were just toying with him, using him. That must be how Arc knew about Kyle in the first place: Micah told them. And here I thought I was beginning to understand how all the pieces were fitting together. Now I know it was nothing more than a scene in a stained glass window. But the glass is shattered, and I can finally see clearly what had been hidden behind it all this time.
Micah betrayed us. He’s been betraying us ever since...
Well, probably since the moment we first met him last year.
I guess I’d always suspected on some level that he wasn’t who he said he was. We all probably did, just that we were always so willing to ignore the inconsistencies in his story. We pretended they were real, because we didn’t want to rock the boat. What he brought to the group, we didn’t want to lose.
God, we were such suckers.
I think back to last year. He’d shown up in summer school out of the blue one day, the new kid sitting alone in the back, minding his own business, trying to be invisible yet impossible to miss. Fresh blood, always the focus everyone’s fascination. New kids are full of untapped and unknown potential, like a Schrödinger’s Cat, inhabiting multiple quantum social states simultaneously. Would he become an outcast or Homecoming King? Class clown or Brainiac? Whichever it would be depended on what happened when someone eventually decided to poke that proverbial box open.
It wasn’t going to be one of us. We already had our little group— me and Kelly, Ash and Reg. We didn’t need another mixing things up, disturbing our homeostasis.
Or so we thought.
The stories about him started circulating almost immediately: his family had defected from the SSC by climbing over the wall at the porous Texas-Oklahoma border. This was during one of Oklahoma’s famous breaks from the Coalition. As many people left New Merica as entered it through that wall. Apparently there’d been a raid, and some members of Micah’s party had been killed or taken prisoner. The Sandervols luckily escaped.
They fled north and east with nothing but the clothes on their backs, eventually making their way to Connecticut, where Government assigned them to subsidized housing for refugees.
I don’t know exactly how it happened, but he eventually wormed his way into our cozy little club. I guess I can assume it was all planned. He must’ve sought us out for our skills. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge that we were hackers — we never advertised it, of course — but enough people knew. That’s the thing about open secrets: you just have to ask the right questions of the right people.
We should’ve known something wasn’t right by the fact that his parents were never around. As far as I know, not a single one of us has ever met them. Micah always just dismissed this oddity with offhanded remarks about his father working all the time and backhanded comments about his mother preferring to be with family out of the country. We rarely pressed the issue. We didn’t want to rock the party boat. Now I wonder if they even exist. And if they do, they probably work for Arc. Or Government. Or both.
Micah soon became an invaluable part of our group. His house became our go-to place to hang out. It was always conveniently empty, a safe and private haven allowing us to do whatever we pleased — most of it questionable, some of it undeniably illegal — without fear of parental interference or discovery by the authorities. Plus, he always seemed to have access to tech equipment whenever we had the need. It was never very good, mind you, but perfectly adequate for all but our most ambitious plans. Anything better probably would’ve caused us to ask questions.
It was all a big, fat house of cards. It says a lot about how committed he was to the charade to keep it up for so long. And how committed we were to believing it.
The conversation Nurse Mabel and that man — Beaucorps is what Stephen had said his name was — had had that night I’d regained consciousness now comes to mind. Was it really only a week ago? It feels like forever. Beaucorps had talked about someone coming on-stream within days to help her out with some implant issue. “Another ArcWare coder,” is what he’d said. And now Ashley’s figured out that Micah’s the failsafe script’s author. Are they one and the same? It has to be. Micah had certainly been off-stream while he was recovering from his injuries from the bombing.
And he had recovered within days.
Now I’m wondering about this whole not remembering how to hack thing. Could it, too, be just another lie?
Has to be.
At least now I understand why the failsafe didn’t affect him. He never got the new updated implant, but not for the reason we thought. It wasn’t because he was too seriously injured, it was because he wasn’t part of our test group. He wasn’t Arc’s lab rat like we were.
And what about that tracking script he wrote before we ever even came here? Kelly thought Arc was extorting him to steal it. The truth was, they must’ve already had it.
But the clincher has to be Professor Halliwell’s identification card. I’ve puzzled over this every which way till Sunday since I found it in Micah’s house, and I always come to the same conclusion. He’s connected with the man who murdered my father. He can deny it all he wants, but it’s too huge of a coincidence. Arc is that connection. They’re the glue that sticks everything together. I just haven’t figured out what it all means. Why would Arc still be interested in the guy all these years later?
“Jessie!”
I jolt upright, blinking stupidly. The fear and suspicion must be written all over my face, because he winces, as if I’ve hit him. He says my name again, hesitantly. He looks so vulnerable, so...
So innocent.
More lies.
But it works, because now I’m starting to doubt everything. What if Kelly and Ash are wrong? What’s their proof?
Since it’s coming from Ashley, I guess that it has to be Micah’s signature in the script. She’d said before it looked familiar. If anyone would know, it’s her.
But signatures can be copied. Styles can be faked.
No, Ashley wouldn’t say something so damning about one of our own unless she was absolutely certain.
Come out, come out, wherever you are, my mind whispers. Come on out, from inside that fractured little head of yours, Micah. The game is up. Show me the monster hiding inside.
But it stays well hidden. His expression reveals nothing. He just stands there and gives me this quizzical look and says, “You’re starting to worry me, Jessie.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to react. Or what to do.
“Fine. Stay there. I’m going to look for the others.”
When he turns, I realize I’ve got no choice. I can’t let him get to the others alone. I need to protect them. And then we need to figure out what this all means for us and what we need to do next.
“Wait,” I call. “I’m coming.”
I step over to the tree and grab the lowest limb. I glance once more around me before beginning to climb.
Off in his little makeshift bed of flattened grass, Shinji raises his head and gives me a toothy yellow grin. No more barking now. He’s about as happy as a clam, unaware of the conflict brewing between his new human companions. He’s content to just lie there and chew on that old bit of fabric and stuffing. His stomach is full. The sun’s warm; the dew’s about to dry. He doesn’t care about the dead undead littering the field all around us or how they got there. Nor does he concern himself with the deadly deceits playing out right in front of him. None of that bullshit bothers him because he’s a dog. And with dogs, there is no such thing as hidden agendas.
I climb the tree without conscious thought of what I’m doing. My body remembers how to do it from my years as a tomboy. My mind is elsewhere. It’s a ghost possessing a machine guidance by reflex. I’m a passenger, barely aware of what I’m doing as I edge out over the fence.
Micah shouts at me to be careful, and I glance down and see that the toe of my shoe is dangling perilously close to the electrified wire. I’m almost tempted to just let it relax another inch or two, to see what it would feel like to have the charge surge through my body. I’m so angry right now I’m numb. I don’t want to feel this way.
But I don’t have the guts to do it. I never did, come to think of it. No matter how miserable I’ve ever felt, I would rather continue on in agony than to do the courageous thing.
I drop to the ground and he steps over. “What the hell’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”
The words sting, not because they’re so harsh, but because there’s this genuine-sounding note of concern in them. I want to slap him, to order him to stop. I want to demand he explain how he could do this to us. But I don’t. Kelly’s right. We can’t let on that we know, not until we figure out the much larger problems of saving ourselves and getting off the island.
He grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me. I flinch. “What the hell did Kelly say to you? Tell me, Jess.”
Olly olly oxen free. The monster is starting to reveal itself, isn’t it?
“Nothing,” I say, and brush him aside. “It’s... personal. Let’s just go find the others.”
“Sure. Let’s get them and get the hell out of here. It’s time to go home,” he says, unconvincingly.
The look on his face is all wrong. His lips are pressed into a frown. Yet is that a sinister grin lurking underneath it? Is there something off in the tone of his voice? His words say one thing, but they ring false to my ears. We both know getting back home is no longer going to be as simple as tapping our heels together. Even if Jake hadn’t been bitten, it’s still going to be a logistical nightmare. He knows this. And suddenly I realize that whatever ‘fix’ I came up to thwart his failsafe, in the end, he knows it won’t allow us to just leave. It’s not going to be as simple as that. It never was.
“I think it’s this way,” he says.
He turns and slides through the tall grass like a snake.
