Variant

They obviously didn’t want to listen to me talk about escape attempts, but things were starting to click in my brain. “She left during the paintball game. Listen, I was hit and sitting there waiting for Jane, and Lily walked past me. She’d been hit in the shoulder, not the head, but she wasn’t waiting for the medic.”

Neither Curtis nor Carrie said anything, but they exchanged a look.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Let’s go look for her.”

Twenty minutes later, all the V’s had been roused out of bed and were gathered on the first floor. Jane was standing at the doors, staring out the window. I was about to go talk to her when Curtis got everyone’s attention.

“Just for simplicity,” he said, “let’s just break up into our paintball squads. I don’t want anyone going alone.”

“What’s the deal with the lights?” I asked. I’d tried the switches, but they weren’t working.

Curtis shook his head angrily. “I don’t know. They won’t come on.”

Mason, rubbing his eyes, whispered, “Rats in a cage, man.”

“Joel, you have the third floor,” Curtis said, handing out assignments. “Hector, second. John, first.” He paused, looking at Mason and me. Our squad was missing a member. “Mason, Benson, take the basement. If you find anything, meet back here. I’m going to go talk to Oakland and Isaiah and see if they know anything.”

“Isaiah probably did it,” Hector grumbled. “Put her in detention or something.”

“Don’t say that,” one of the girls said. “She’s going to be fine.”

Curtis clapped his hands, just as he did before every paintball match, and we all split up. Mason and I walked in silence, heading down the main stairs into the blackness of the basement. I checked the switch at the bottom, but it didn’t work, either.

“Hang on, Fish,” Mason said quietly. I could barely see his outline in the dark but heard him fiddling with something. A moment later a tiny round light turned on.

“Reading light,” he said, the blue glow illuminating his skin. He looked like a ghost. “I bought it a couple months ago but ran out of good stuff to read.”

I called out Lily’s name and then listened. The narrow cement walls muted the sound and it disappeared almost instantly. The two of us stood there, waiting, but there was no response.

Without a word, Mason headed for the first door. The lock buzzed and opened. He shined his light inside. The room was empty and small. It had one of the deep basement window wells, and the little bit of moonlight spilled on the floor.

I moved to the next door. We repeated the process up and down the hall, sometimes finding storage—mostly old desks or textbooks or scraps of lumber and pipe—but a lot of the rooms were empty, just as they’d been when I’d gone through here looking for trash. Our janitorial and maintenance contracts let us go almost anywhere we wanted—we searched the infirmary rooms, including any closets or cabinets she could possibly fit into—but there was no sign of her anywhere.

I had high hopes for the back stairs that Becky had shown me. If Lily had wanted to hide, that could have been a good spot. But, like everywhere else, they were empty. Besides, why would she want to hide?

“Did you see her on the field after she’d been shot?” I asked, as we opened another door. This room had several rows of boxes, stacked to the ceiling, and Mason peeked around them with his light.

“No,” he said. “We left you. I got hit and she kept going.” His voice was cold and tired.

“She passed me,” I said. “She’d been shot but could have waited for a medic.”

“You think she went over the wall?”

“Maybe. Don’t know.”

He turned his gaze back to the boxes and opened one. It looked like lab supplies—rubber hoses and Bunsen burners and all kinds of bottles and jars.

“I hated chemistry. Be glad you missed it,” Mason said absently, like he felt he ought to make a joke but had no desire to laugh.

“Do you think she was serious about escaping?” I asked as we moved to the next room. “I mean, really considered it? She talked about it all the time.”

He just pointed at a security camera.

“About a year ago I worked for a hospital,” I said. “I was just a janitor and I was only there for a month, but I knew the security guys and I hung out in their office sometimes. They didn’t even have TVs to watch their cameras. They were just there in case some crime was committed. Then they’d look at the tape.”

Mason sighed. “So what?”

“I think we’re all too afraid of these cameras. There have to be a thousand cameras. They can’t watch all of them all the time.”

“But people get punished every day,” he said. “Someone must be watching.”

I nodded, unconvinced. Did they really catch everything? The students were usually all in the same place, weren’t they? All in class or all at lunch or all in the dorms. The school didn’t even have to watch all the cameras.

Of course, sometimes the school punished people for no reason at all, cameras or not.

I changed the subject. “I wonder if we could make something with those chemistry supplies. Maybe some acid to burn through the fence?”

Mason spun, glaring at me. “What is wrong with you, man?”

“What?”

“Lily might be dead, and you don’t even care. All you ever talk about is escaping and trying to figure stupid things out.”

I paused, stunned. “Well, don’t you want to figure it out, too?”

“Not when we’re looking for Lily,” he said, turning and opening a new door.

In another ten minutes we met up with Tapti, Gabby, and Joel. I could tell from their somber faces that they hadn’t had any more luck than we’d had. We left the basement and returned to the main floor to join the others. Depression hung like a cloud over the gang. Curtis was sitting on a bench, his elbows resting on his knees. I sat beside him.

Mason’s words kept running through my head. He was right. My escape could wait.

I hadn’t been treating the V’s like friends. They were just people, just part of the school that I hated. My chest felt heavy and tight. I wished now that I’d said something to Lily, that maybe I’d . . . I don’t know.

“What about outside?” I asked Curtis, my voice low. Maybe, like me, Lily hadn’t been able to get over the wall. Maybe she’d gotten hurt and was out there somewhere.

Curtis shook his head. “I woke up Isaiah and Oakland. Isaiah insists that they didn’t take her to detention— and you know he’d be proud of it if they did. He’d say something. Oakland even offered to open the outside doors for us to go out there.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think he was doing it just to piss off Isaiah.”

“So let’s go,” I said. “Even if she didn’t try to escape, maybe she just twisted her ankle in the forest or something.”

“No,” he said. His face was ashen. “Oakland came down here but they wouldn’t open for him. He said they usually can’t get out until dawn.”