Harley received dinner in his quarters at six o’clock. This version of San Quentin provided room service. Each kid had a bedroom with king-size bed, a sitting area, and a full bath. But any place could be a prison if those who lived there were not free.
For ten months, he’d been stuck in this crazy place with these jailers who called themselves therapists. The weirdness, loneliness, and fear at times scraped his nerves raw. If he had instead been trapped in a nightmare, at least he would have awakened from it.
He didn’t know how much longer he could hold himself together. Something was coming apart inside him. Unraveling. Unplugging. His mind had always been a bright and busy place. But lately, some of the lights at the center seemed to be going out, so that sometimes he couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t see around that core blackness. When that happened, the sounds of this world became meaningless noise—people’s voices, music, bird songs—like the racket of roller-coaster wheels rocketing over buckled tracks. Then he needed to lie down, close his eyes, settle himself, and wait for the panic to pass. It always passed, but that didn’t mean it always would.
Some kids were in worse shape. The youngest two—Sally Ingram, seven, and Nora Rhinehart, eight—shared a room because they feared being alone at night and often in daylight. Jimmy Cole, ten, had been a fragile kid when this started, and last Christmas he had begun to withdraw; now he went days without speaking.
Harley ate dinner by a window, overlooking the moonlit lake in the distance and the estate grounds, to which the landscape lighting added a sinister magic. No barred windows. No locked doors. Inmates were allowed to roam the five-acre property. A nine-foot stone wall surrounded the place, but it could be scaled where decades-old vines wove a lattice of handholds. Some trees stood close to the wall, sturdy branches overhanging it, providing routes of escape. At the north end of the estate, a wrought-iron gate served a private pier, and the ironwork was easier to climb than the wall.
The setup enticed Harley with the promise of deliverance from imprisonment, but the promise proved false. He was not the only one who had broken out but failed to stay out. Their jailers must have some psychological purpose in tempting them.
He wanted to believe that everyone on the staff was a rotten, vicious, egg-sucking snake. But they weren’t. They seemed to be like his father and mother, ordinary people somehow changed, so they were and weren’t who they once had been. They went on with their lives as before, except when told to do something—even something freaky like giving up their children—and then they obeyed without objection. Worse, they believed they were doing the right thing. None of the staff physically or verbally abused those in their custody, and in a weird way, they were always pleasant, almost kind.
He wished they were complete zombies. Then he could have killed them. Sometimes he wanted to kill them anyway, but he knew that when it came to shoving the knife in, he couldn’t do it.
The jailers here weren’t the rotten, vicious snakes. The snakes were whoever changed these people. Harley had theories, but they seemed stupid. He’d seen countless movies and TV shows about body-snatching ETs, mind-controlling ETs, evil artificial intelligences, murderous robots from the future, demonic possession. This could be any of those things. But if the real future was like a sci-fi movie, that would be insufferably dumb. Life was more complex than movies, needed to be more complex if it was going to be any fun at all.
Besides, if the future took the shape of a sci-fi plot, there would be one scary difference between the movie and real life. In real life, no superstar hero could save the world from evil ETs. Armies couldn’t defeat such enemies. If the vicious snakes in this case weren’t people, humanity was screwed. And Harley would become one of them on his sixteenth birthday.
He had to make another escape attempt. Soon.
He figured there must be cameras, maybe hundreds, some obvious, others concealed. He supposed that the continuous streams of images from the cameras were analyzed in real time by software that could tell the difference between purposeful motion and the effects of the wind, that could also identify human heat signatures. When someone went over the wall, the system alerted the staff.
Getting out of the estate didn’t count as an escape, because the staff would be close behind you, but also because the entire population of Iron Furnace, sixteen and older, had been replaced by imposters or had been converted into mind-numbed worker bees. The first two times Harley skipped, he approached people he knew, thinking they would help him. Instead they detained him until the so-called school could collect him and take him back to his room.
The third time he escaped, he approached tourists for help. They thought he must be hoaxing them. Then they thought he must be mentally ill—which the staff from the so-called school confirmed when they showed up to get their disturbed young patient.
He had to get all the way out of town, and he needed to tell his story in a more convincing way than he had managed with the tourists.
He kept failing, but also learning. The previous night, having crossed the lake, when he came to Lakeview Road and saw the posse, he learned the most important thing yet: They might have hundreds of cameras and motion detectors; but they definitely had planted on him a GPS locater by which they could find him anywhere on earth.
After the father thing returned him here, Harley had stepped into the three-mirror nook in his walk-in closet, stripped naked, and examined himself, searching for a tiny scar that would betray a GPS implant. Maybe cameras watched from behind the mirrors. Maybe the snakes controlling everyone were pervs who enjoyed watching him. He didn’t care. He needed to know if he had a surgically implanted transponder that betrayed his whereabouts. He couldn’t find a scar.
Finally he had fallen into bed, exhausted.
Now, as he finished dinner, he thought about his shoes. When he first realized something was wrong with his mom and dad, he had been transferred to this place while in a drugged sleep. When he woke, he found his clothes had been brought here from home, though not his shoes. No footwear was provided except for a new pair of sneakers.
The previous night, after he’d grounded the rowboat and sloshed through ankle-deep water to the shore, after he had then climbed the meadow through the decomposed fruit of last autumn’s Mayapple, his sneakers hadn’t been ruined, though they had needed to be cleaned. Instead, a new pair had been put in his closet.
New. Maybe because the locater in the old pair was damaged.
He was wearing the new sneakers now.
His bathroom included a separate enclosure for the toilet, which he’d never seen anywhere else. They called it a water closet. If they thought the toilet should be hidden away and given a nicer name, they probably wouldn’t put a camera there. At least he hadn’t been able to find one in that small space.
He went in there now and closed the door and lowered the lid on the toilet seat and sat down and took off his sneakers. He inspected the left one from end to end, but he found nothing.
In the rounded back of the heel on the right shoe, however, he discovered a circular indentation about half an inch in diameter. As if a core had been extracted from the rubber. And something inserted in the hole. And then a cap of rubber glued over it.
His dinner had come with a steak knife, which was pointed enough to dig out the cap and open the hole and reveal the locater.
One problem. Maybe the thing couldn’t be removed without damaging it. Then they would know that he had found it.
As long as they remained unaware that he had discovered he was GPSed, he had an advantage.
Because he had slept most of the day, he didn’t fall asleep until 2:00 A.M., which gave him plenty of time to work out an escape plan for Tuesday night.