64   GROUND TRUTH

Right after the terrible assembly, Vanhi had run out of the auditorium looking for Alex. She didn’t love Alex. She didn’t even like him. But she feared what he might do next.

She wrote Charlie, and he instantly responded, calming her fears.

Don’t worry. He’s with me now. He’s fine.

Vanhi wrote back:

Fine?

Not fine. Ok for now. Safe.

Ok. Where r u?

Boiler room—come meet us.

Why on earth would Alex go back there?

The site of his last humiliation, peeing his pants over a virtual monster with real flames.

What was the Game doing to him?

But she went because she needed to help Charlie. Even if I’ve just put a knife in his back? Forget that. A week ago, he hadn’t even wanted Harvard anyway.

In the basement the boiler room door was already unlocked, no mystical code needed this time. She went into the darkness, calling for Charlie. It was pitch-black now, not even the safety lights on, and her voice echoed off the piping and through the empty nooks and back to her.

The door was creaking shut behind her, and suddenly she remembered the fight with the Hydra—how the door had bolted shut, trapping them in.

The echo faded and no one had answered, and Vanhi knew it, she was being played.

She turned and ran back toward the door, catching it just before the safety locks could click.

“Jesus, fuck.”

Her text buzzed again.

Went down to tech lab. come meet us.

She gritted her teeth, feeling manipulated. But if they were there, she had to find them.

When she walked in, it was still dark, but then all the monitors lit up at once. The sixteen linked computers in a semicircle. The fifty-inch LED over the NanoStation, hooked to a microscope. The other flat-screens over the robotics and circuitry labs.

They all clicked on and showed the same image.

Vanhi saw herself from behind, hiding in the woods across from the house on Tremont Street. Someone had been filming her then, from a cell phone. It felt like mirror on mirror: watching herself watching the house, feeling like someone must be behind her now. Lord Krishna? G.O.D.? She glanced behind her and was alone.

On the screens, time sped up and the stars rotated out of the sky and the sun came up. She snapped awake on the screens and left, satisfied the house hadn’t blown up.

Time sped on, the house on Tremont Street quiet until the front door opened, and a young man with his wrist in a cast opened the door.

He looked at the box and then around the neighborhood, his gaze passing right by the screen without stopping. He knelt down and opened the box clumsily, using his keys in his good hand and holding the box steady with his other elbow, grimacing when his wrist jostled a little.

He ripped the flaps open and dug out the balls of old newspaper. And then saw inside. His face looked absolutely, totally broken. He pulled out something limp, and it took Vanhi a moment to realize it was a cat, hanging lifelessly, its spine snapped in two, gray and black stripes, a collar with jangly tags. The video had no sound, but he appeared to cry out and held the limp form to his face and buried his nose against it. A lady came up behind him, clearly his mom. The scene was horrible. The cat hung from his arms like a shirt folded in half.

Vanhi started to cry. The deep sobbing came from a place far down inside her. It wasn’t just for the cat that was broken in half. It was for the dream that wasn’t going to come true.

She sobbed for what she had done, for what she had to do.