The Academie (29 page)

The figures were getting
closer. Teachers I had seen throughout the halls before were
approaching us at speeds I never imagined they were capable
of.
I always knew that teachers were out
to get me.

“
It’s not a matter
of
can
, Ruby.
It’s already
done
,” I told her.
“Believe it! See
yourself on the other side!”

The mob was thirty feet away now. Ruby
closed her eyes. The panic I had seen suddenly drifted from her
face. She looked calm, peaceful.

And then, suddenly, she was
through.

“
YES!” I cried, grabbing
her arm. I pulled her away as the mob reached the fence.

Just before we left, I caught a
glimpse that made me do a double-take. The teachers didn’t look
human anymore. The centers of their eyes were gray, their skin
pale, and whitish. Their uniformed arms reached through the fence,
grabbing.

“
What the—” Ruby
exclaimed.

“
Let’s get out of here,” I
said, pulling her further from the fence. “This way!” I took off
running through the neighborhood, with Ruby close
behind.

“
This isn’t the
neighborhood outside of the school,” Ruby noticed as we
ran.

“
No it’s not. It’s
Bryan’s.”

She looked at me strangely.

We turned down Bryan’s street and
continued running.

Come on. Be there. You have
to be there.

As we approached his house, I could
see the mailbox with the nameplate hanging below.

“
What are we doing?” Ruby
asked as I pulled her up the walk.

“
Just follow
me.”

Anna answered the door.

“
Allie! What a nice
surprise!”

I glanced to Ruby and saw the
surprised look I expected.

I turned back to Mrs. Allen. “I’m
sorry, Mrs. Allen, but I really have to talk to Bryan. Is he
here?”

“
Oh, no. He’s out looking
for you.”

Shivers ran up my arms. I looked to
Ruby again. This time I shared her surprise.

“
He is?”

“
Yes of
course.”

“
Do you have any idea
where he’d go?”

“
Where he always goes
looking for you, Allie. Dean’s Bagel Shoppe.”

42.
expulsion

We were running again.

Just as in my dream, as we reached the
town, I could see it had now transformed into the area where I had
tried to meet Bryan over a year ago. Across the street, in the
center of a strip of shops—where the coffee shop had once been—now
stood Dean’s Bagels.

As we waited for the traffic to clear
so we could cross to Dean’s, Bryan stepped out of the bagel
shop.

“
Oh my god. It’s
him,”
I said, disbelieving.

“
Who? Bryan?”

I nodded.

“
Allie!” he yelled from
across the street.

His image had been so
sketchy in my brain for so long now. Just pieces remained lodged in
my memory: his eyes, his beautiful heart-shaped face, his
lips….Only in my dreams had I come close to recreating the complete
picture. And now, there he was, as perfect as the day I first met
him….the
only
day
I’d met him.

“
How will we know if it’s
really him?” Ruby asked.

My mouth was still slightly agape from
shock. I stared at her blankly.

“
I’m sorry, Allie, but I
don’t believe anything I’ve seen in the last hour.”

I watched as Bryan ran across Dean’s
parking lot and stopped on the other side of the street, now also
waiting for the traffic to clear. “I’ll come to you!” he yelled,
and I could see his dimples dent in from the smile that had spread
across his face. He seemed a bundled mess of nervous and
excited.

I looked to Ruby. “Alright…” I said
hesitantly. “You’re right. I’ll…I’ll ask him.”

She looked at me as though I’d lost my
mind, but Bryan was quickly navigating his way through the
traffic.

“
Allie!” he said, running
toward me.

I held my hand out to stop him. “I’m
sorry, but we have to be sure it’s you.”

He looked hurt but agreed. “No, you’re
right to be cautious.”

“
Where did we meet?” I
asked.

“
Online.”

“
Too easy,” Ruby answered.
“They would guess that.”

He nodded.

“
Okay, what happened when
we tried to make cookies at your mom’s house?”

“
You got covered in
flour,” he said, grinning.

“
Oh, I did, huh? And you
didn’t?” I answered, teasing. For a moment, I forgot all about The
Academie.

“
You looked so cute with
flour on your nose.” He was still smiling.

I ran over to him. It was him. I was
sure of it.

He pulled me close, picking me up off
the ground.

“
It’s so good to see you
again,” I said.

I grabbed his hand as he set me back
down, and despite everything going on, his touch made me feel warm
all over.

“
Okay, kids,” Ruby said.
“I hate to break things up, but we have a little situation on our
hands.”

“
Right,” I said, looking
from her back to Bryan.
Man, his eyes are
gorgeous
….
Focus
Allie!
“The…uh…oh man, where do we start?”
All the emotion was starting to overwhelm me.

“
The Academie. It’s after
us.
They
are
after us,” Ruby said.

“
Our friends are all…” I
couldn’t finish.

“
So it’s happened?” Bryan
said. “You’ve figured out too much, and they know you have. So
they’ve initiated the emergency protocol.”

I shrugged. “What’s that
mean?”

“
No one can know what The
Academie really is,” he explained.

“
Of course!” I said,
turning to Ruby. “That’s why Shara never came back.”

Ruby shook her head, obviously
confused.

I tried to explain. “The Academie’s a
computer program.”

“
A super-sophisticated
computer program,” Bryan clarified. “It’s high-tech virtual reality
unlike anything I knew existed. I can’t even begin to explain how
complex it is—I don’t fully understand it myself.”

Ruby still looked lost. “But
why…?”

Bryan sighed. “Because they think it’s
safer this way. I’ve been following their correspondence online.
They don’t trust us—teenagers, young adults. They’re afraid. So
they thought that this would keep us—and them—safe.”

He spun to look at me. “They’re
considering extending it again.” His eyes were wild,
urgent.

“
They won’t,” I said.
“We’re going to end this.”

“
So wait,” Ruby
interrupted. “What happened to Shara?”

“
She must have woken up
from the system when she meditated. She would have learned too
much, so they couldn’t put her back into the program,” I
explained.

I turned to Bryan. “She should be
okay, right?”

“
I’m sorry, but there’s no
way to know.”

“
So what does that mean
for us?” Ruby asked.

“
It means they’re going to
eliminate you from the program,” Bryan answered. “You’re being
expelled.”

“
But our friends, are
they—” Ruby cut off.

“
They should be fine. They
shut down the avatars so they couldn’t learn any more. Once they
delete you from the program, they can re-initiate the other
students and move on without trouble. Your friends will probably
wake up where they left off, with no memory of what has happened.
If the programmers do it right, your friends may not even remember
knowing you when this is finished.”

“
That’s not
right
,” Ruby said,
obviously offended.

I began to get nervous. By now the
teachers—or whatever they were—surely would have made their way
through the fence and be heading this way. “We need a
plan.”

“
How are you here?”
Ruby interrupted. She looked at Bryan
accusingly.

“
It doesn’t matter,” I
defended.

“
Yes it does,” she
insisted. Ruby turned to Bryan. “
How?
”

He looked at me apologetically. “I’m
not. I’m in Canada.”

I backed away. “What?”

“
I’m sorry…”

My head began to ache as a sick,
spinning feeling came over me. Nothing made sense
anymore.

“
It’s a program, Allie.”
His voice was soft and gentle.

“
You wrote yourself in,” I
said, trying to steady myself.

He nodded.

A raw ache in my chest competed with
the pain in my head. I felt betrayed—not even so much by him—but by
myself. I thought for sure he was really there.

Tina was right. How could I ever know
for sure what was real?

“
You wrote all of this,” I
said, looking at Dean’s and the strip of stores around it. I turned
back in the direction from where we came. You put your old
neighborhood here.”

“
I thought it could help
you. I hoped you could find me when you needed me. I couldn’t leave
you here.” He looked at the sky and then back to me. “I couldn’t
enjoy being out of The Academie, knowing you were still in it. And
once I figured out what it was, I knew I
could
do something. I had
to.”

“
Did you happen to figure
a way out of here?” Ruby asked.

“
There is a way,” he said,
looking from her to me. “There’s one way....There’s a
door.”

“
Did you create it? Please
say it’s out here somewhere,” I pleaded. “In your
house?”

“
I
didn’t…
I couldn’t
….There’s only one.”

I knew what he’d say next.

“
It’s inside The
Academie.”

43.
lines of code

“
We need a plan before we
go back in there,” Ruby said.

“
Definitely.” I turned to
Bryan. “The school’s surrounded by an angry mob of—uh… zombie
teachers.”

His eyes widened. “I see…” He took a
deep breath. “So much for sneaking in.” He sat down in the grass at
the sidewalk’s edge.

“
Does the program have a
weakness?” I asked, sitting beside him.

Ruby didn’t sit. Instead, she paced
back and forth on the sidewalk in front of us.

“
Of course,” he answered.
“No program’s flawless.”

Ruby stopped her pacing. “Do you know
what this program’s flaws are?”

He smiled. “Yes.” A dimple
showed. “At the moment,
they’re
us
.”

I grinned.

Ruby remained serious.

“
Okay, so tell me more
about this door. Do you know where it is?”

He sighed and shook his head
slightly.

Ruby resumed pacing.

“
I tried to find it, but I
just—I—”

“
Okay, do you know
anything about it that could help us find it?” I asked.

“
A little.” He squirmed.
“Not much. All I know is they’ll want to hide it. And of course,
they’ll want to make it inaccessible to students.”

“
There are so many places
like that,” Ruby noted as she paced.

I didn’t reply. Instead I tried to
remember all the places I’d been at The Academie since it opened.
The places they took us on the tour when Matt started. The places
I’d been when I visited him…. “There was a dark hallway I went
down,” I said to Bryan. “Remember, I told you about the hallway I
went down by mistake when I visited Matt?”

“
Yeah, but didn’t you say
that you thought it might have been a dorm?”

“
Yeah?”

“
They wouldn’t put it
somewhere like that. Too risky.”

We were silent again, and I resumed
scanning my memory for places.

“
The addition,” Ruby said,
stopping again. “Cayden mentioned the walk you guys took once, when
he came to find you.”

My heart sped up, and my stomach felt
sick. I really didn’t want to Bryan to know about Cayden. I didn’t
want him to think anything might be going on—since it
wasn’t.

I looked to Ruby and silently begged
for her to steer clear of the subject. She stared back.

Thankfully, Bryan seemed unfazed.
“What addition?”