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I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I hurt all over, and it felt like I was breathing through heavy cloth—I couldn’t get enough air.

“Now please give your hands to Dylan so that he can bind them,” Laura said sternly, as though she were reciting directly from the rulebook. “You will be taken to the school for detention.”

Dylan tried to take my hands, but I fought him and after a moment he backed up. I saw him draw something from his belt, but he was obscuring it in his hand. Pepper spray?

“Resisting security,” Laura continued, her face red and wild, “is also punishable.”

“What is wrong with you people?” I said, fighting for air to speak.

“We follow the rules, Benson,” Laura said.

“Don’t you want to get out of here?” I gasped. “We—us four—could knock down a tree and be gone.”

“That is not true,” she said. “Now, Dylan.”

Dylan took another step forward, and this time the other boy stepped around behind me. Dylan raised the canister in his hand.

Another voice rang out. “Stop.”

Dylan’s head shot up.

“He was trying to escape,” Laura declared indignantly.

I rolled over again, rocks cutting into my sides. Five others were standing in the woods. Curtis, Mason, Jane, Lily, and Carrie.

“He wasn’t trying to escape,” Curtis said. “He was going for a jog to try to keep warm.” His dirty face was red and tired, and he was panting heavily.

Dylan let out a loud mocking snort, and Laura spoke. “He tried to jump from this tree. He was trying to get over this wall.”

Curtis motioned for Mason, who hurried over to me and helped me up. Dylan and the other Society boy seemed unsure of what to do. They wanted to fight—I was sure of that—but they were outnumbered.

“Benson was jogging,” Curtis repeated.

“He was going to meet me out here,” Jane said. “We’d arranged it. He was in the tree watching for me.”

I put my arm around Mason’s shoulder and hobbled slowly back to where the V’s stood.

“The fact is,” Curtis said, “that’s what we’re going to say when we appeal his detention. And you know the rulebook, Laura—what’s the punishment for making a false accusation for detention?”

“He was trying to escape,” Laura said. Her voice was shrill and furious. “Everyone here knows that.”

Curtis walked toward Laura and lowered his voice, so quiet I could barely hear him. “And everyone here also knows what detention means. Do you really want that?”

Laura’s eyes looked black in the dim light. She was clutching the metal baton tightly with both hands. “If we let him break the rules then everyone here is in danger. Do you want to go back to the way things were before the truce?”

“So you’ll kill him to keep the peace?” Curtis asked. He turned and walked back toward the V’s. Laura was still fuming, but there was nothing that she could do. There were three of them and six of us. Even with the pepper spray and baton, the odds were on our side.

We hiked in silence for several minutes, picking our way through the uneven forest floor in the quickly dimming light. I hurt all over, but I tried to not let it show.

Curtis moved next to me. Keeping his gaze straight ahead, watching the forest, he whispered, “That’s the last time. Don’t do something stupid like that again.”

I didn’t reply.

I knew things now. I knew how Society security guards were armed, and I knew how fast they could respond. The next escape would work.

Chapter Seven

T
he doors never did unlock that night. We slept outside.

It had been an experiment, just like Mason had said. While I was at the wall, ten sleeping bags had dropped out of the windows of the school. Someone had been in there—must have come up through an elevator, like our clothes did—but no one saw anyone. Just the sleeping bags. Ten of them for more than seventy people.

And, since Curtis had been in the forest with me, the V’s didn’t end up with any of the bags. In fact, the Society claimed them all, and for whatever reason, Havoc didn’t fight them on it. Instead, they tried to cram their whole gang into the two small groundskeeping sheds.

The V’s climbed down into one of the deep window wells on the side of the building—deep, broad holes that gave light to the large basement windows. It was fifteen feet wide and maybe eight feet down; we needed help getting in and out. Someone jokingly suggested that we just break the window, but no one looked like they were seriously considering it. I wasn’t sure what they were afraid of. Damaging property wasn’t one of the Big Four rules, and the punishment couldn’t have been worse than sleeping outside all night.

I didn’t know where the Society decided to gather. Once we were down in the window well I couldn’t see anything. The four-wheeler engines didn’t stop running all night, though, and before we all had climbed down I’d seen Isaiah arguing with Curtis about something. I’m sure it was me.

None of the V’s said anything about my escape attempt. They all had to know—they saw us come out of the forest, and they saw my bloodied knees and scraped arms and elbows. Maybe escaping was something that all the students tried when they first got here. Even Becky and Isaiah—maybe even Laura. Maybe their devotion to the rules and the Society was something that came from months and years of failing to escape.

I looked down the row at the other V’s. Curtis and Carrie were awake, softly talking, though Curtis’s eyelids were drooping low. Mason was asleep, his head hanging forward, chin against his chest. Lily was next to him, snoring just loudly enough that I could hear it a few feet away. Jane was beside me, eyes closed. I could feel her body move with each slow breath.

There were hundreds of stars in the rectangle of sky above us. Thousands maybe. I stared at them. I’d always heard about stars like this. I heard that you could see lots of them once you got out of the city, more than just the few dozen brightest ones that could break through the city lights. It seemed like I’d maybe seen a view like this once or twice, though I couldn’t really remember where. Maybe it was just on TV.

As I looked upward I felt a surprising thrill of freedom. I could see so many things in the sky that I never got to see back home—things I’d only heard about. If I got out of that well and got a better look I could probably see the Milky Way. Maybe a planet or two.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

Jane’s voice was soft, barely a whisper.

“Yeah.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Sore. Do you think I’ll get detention?”

She took her eyes off the sky for a moment and looked at me. “I don’t know. It depends on whether the school believes Laura and Dylan.”

I wanted to turn to her, but we were so close together that our noses would probably touch, so I kept my face toward the sky. I also wanted to ask her more questions. How had others gotten over the wall? Did they plan ahead? Take supplies? But I felt guilty. Jane and the others had come into the forest to rescue me. I didn’t know if that was a risk—maybe they’d get punished for it. To ask more questions about escape didn’t seem the best way to thank her.

“It’s cold,” she said. She reached out her hands and flexed her fingers open and closed a few times, and then folded her arms again.

“We could start a fire. Would that be against the rules?”

She smiled. “We don’t have any matches.”

“We don’t need them,” I said.

Jane raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You were a Boy Scout?”

“No,” I said with a little laugh. “But I’ve seen lots of movies.”

“There are movies that teach you how to start fires?”

“Sure. Didn’t you ever see
Cast Away
?”

Jane shook her head.

“Never? What about the Discovery Channel—
Man Vs. Wild
, or
Survivorman
? Heck, I think they even had to make fire on
Lost
.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen any of those.”

“What?”

“I’ve been in here for two and a half years.”

“Those are all older than two and a half years.
Cast Away
is way older.”

Jane shrugged and, much to my surprise, rested her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled good—a little like honey. I thought maybe she wanted me to put my arm around her, but I didn’t.

In the window in front of us I could see my dim reflection. I looked just like everyone else. In the low light I couldn’t make out any facial features, and I was just another white T-shirt in a row of white T-shirts.

“Why don’t we break this window?” I asked quietly. “Get out of the cold. What’s the punishment for that?”

Her answer was sleepy and hushed. “You can’t break it. People have tried, but it’s bulletproof or something. Keeps us inside.”

I nodded. The unbreakable glass made it a prison—a prison we now wished we could get back into.

Shortly before she fell asleep, Jane touched my arm. “Don’t go anywhere tonight, okay? The Society aren’t the only ones who guard the wall.”

“There are guards out there?”

“I don’t know. There has to be something.”

Just before dawn the doors unlocked. In the morning silence we heard the buzz and click even as far away as we were. The Society kids must have spent the night close by; we could hear their groggy shouts of relief, and the sound of the doors opening, before most of us had even stood up. We followed drowsily, a few guys giving the others footholds to climb out of the window well. I was the last out and had to have Curtis and another V pull me up—my side aching with pain as they did so. No one bothered to say much.

Even though everyone had dismissed the lockout as normal, I was expecting something different inside the school. Maybe they forced us out so they could work—paint the walls or install new security cameras or put iron bars on the doors. But nothing was different. This happened all time, they said. Just a stupid test.

Let’s give them ten sleeping bags and see how they divide them up.

When we got back to the dorms, I went to the showers and turned the water up as hot as I could stand it. I washed the dirt and rocks out of my knees, and inspected my cuts. Nothing was serious. A deep purple bruise had appeared on my left side, but even that wasn’t as big as I’d expected. It felt a lot worse than it looked.

By the time I was finished and back in the room, Mason was getting dressed in camouflage.

“What is that?” I said.

Mason frowned and pointed at the ticker. “No class today. We have paintball.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

He sighed and pulled on a camo jacket over an olive green T-shirt. The jacket was mostly light colors—tans and browns. “This is our version of high school sports. Paintball, war games, debate, chess.” He paused and grinned. “It’s like the nerds meet the military.”

I fingered the pair of plain tan sweatpants that hung next to my uniform and then glanced back at Mason.

“Why do you have better clothes than I do?”

“I spent some of my points on it. And you’d better do that, too, when you get some.” His serious face broke into a smile. “You’re going to get slaughtered out there.”

I picked up the gun. It was powered by a canister of compressed air, and a large kidney-shaped hopper on top held the paintballs. “This is crazy.”

“I know,” Mason said. “Some people think that they’re training us. Like, this school is some kind of breeding ground for super soldiers or something.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” he said, sitting down to lace on a pair of boots. “Because they
don’t
train us. If the government was in charge of this and wanted us to be learning tactics or something, wouldn’t they sit us down and teach us how to do it?”

“I guess so.”

“Rats in a cage, Fish. Rats in a cage.”

At ten minutes to ten, we left the building, heading out to the woods. It looked ridiculous—more than seventy kids, all in varying degrees of camouflage, trotting out of a school. A few of the outfits were plain, like mine, but some were elaborate. Not only did they have camouflage, but some had fake sticks and leaves attached to their clothes, and a few looked almost like Bigfoot—long hairy grass hanging from almost every inch of their bodies.

“I’m saving up for one of those,” Mason said, admiring a Society kid. “It’s called a ghillie suit. Snipers use them. If you’re wearing that and you crouch down in a patch of grass, you’re invisible.”

In a way, the walk was exhilarating. I’d never actually played a school sport. And, even though this one was bizarre and fit right in with all the other random crap at Maxfield Academy, it sounded like fun.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Curtis.

“Welcome to paintball,” he said cheerfully, as though nothing had happened yesterday—to me
or
him. “We’re the smallest team, so everybody plays.”

“The teams are split up by gang?”

“Yep,” he said. “Well, technically we’re just supposed to divide up into teams. But a while ago everyone agreed that this is the best way, and we submitted team rosters to the school. They approved it.”

I had to laugh. “The school endorses the gangs.”

“You should have seen this place before the gangs,” he said, shaking his head. “Anyway, we can only use as many players as the smallest gang, so now that you’re here each team gets eighteen.”

“I’ve never played before,” I said. My grip was tight around the butt of the gun, and my finger rested anxiously on the trigger.

A knot of students had formed about a hundred yards into the woods, and I noticed a bright pink ribbon strung from tree to tree, stretching for a hundred yards in either direction.

“I’m forming a new squad,” Curtis said, taking me by the arm and leading me forward to a group of V’s. “You, Mason, and Lily.” Mason was already following, and Curtis motioned for Lily. She was wearing more camouflage than most of the others, like the ghillie suits we’d seen earlier, but it only covered her upper body, like a poncho. The mask she held in her hand had grass and sticks tied to it, and she’d applied green and black paint to her bare legs. Even though she was probably as old as I was, Lily was short and skinny and looked hilarious in the massive suit, like a kid dressed up for Halloween.

“New squad,” Curtis continued when she got there. “Lily’s got front. Mason, you’re in back, and we’ll put Benson in the middle. Lily’s the boss.” He turned to me. “She’s the best. She’ll teach you what to do.”

He left to organize the rest of the gang, and I wondered for a minute how he got to be in charge. I’d have to ask Mason later.

I turned back to Lily, who was sitting on a rock, tightening her shoelace.
She
was the best? Maybe it was her hair pulled back into pigtails or her bare legs sticking out from the bulky mass of her ghillie poncho, but she looked more suited for a tea party with her dollies than a paintball game.

“You ever play before?” Lily asked.

“Never.”

She pointed to my mask—it had wide, clear plastic covering my eyes and a slotted mouth guard. “Always keep that on. Paintballs hurt, even through your clothes. You could lose an eye or a tooth.”

Lily explained how the gun worked, showing me where to load the paint and how to install a new air cylinder.

“Usually the game is something like Capture the Flag,” she continued, “but they like to switch things up.” She frowned. “Like that crap with the doors last night.”

“Right.”

“In a minute one of the Society guys will read the game rules, and then we’ll head to our positions. We might not even play today—two teams play and one refs.”

“They let Havoc ref?”

She rolled her eyes. “Havoc’s goons know that we’ll be their refs later, so everyone is fair. Usually.”

I nodded. There were no cameras out here, and I wouldn’t have been surprised by anything that Havoc did. Or the Society.

“What did he mean about you being up front and me being in the middle?”

“Those are our positions in the squad. The front person moves up fast and scouts for the other two. Mason’s playing back—he should be doing most of the shooting. When you and I are in front of him, we’ll be taking most of the fire, and that gives him a little more freedom to move and shoot.” Lily’s eyes lit up while she talked—the first time I’d seen something approaching happiness from her.

“You’re in the middle,” she said, “which means you do a little of both. You also cover me. You know how to cover someone?”

I shrugged, smiling at the strangeness of the question. “I guess so. I’ve seen movies.”

“We’ll work on it during gym sometime,” she said. “I wish we’d known about this change yesterday. We could have been practicing all night.”

The bullhorn squawked, and Isaiah called everyone over.

“Sorry I don’t have time to explain everything,” Lily said as we walked up the slope to where the teams were congregating. “If we end up playing today, stick with me and Mason. Try not to get shot.”

“It’s just a game, right?” I joked.

“Not exactly.” She pointed up front.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but all the students were loosely arranged around a large boulder, which Isaiah was now climbing.

Havoc was on the far side. Even in their paintball gear they were recognizable. Many had new tattoos on their faces, almost like war paint. Mouse was at the front of the group, wearing a black suit that reminded me of the Special Forces I’d seen in movies. The material was thin and formfitting, and her face was dark and serious—like she was really going to war. Oakland stood beside her, and when he caught me looking he pointed his gun and laughed.