The Academie (32 page)

Ruby and I fell crashing into
nothingness.

I caught sight of Schoolcraft’s face
just as everything disappeared.

47.
happy sadness

I opened my eyes.

The world was fuzzy, but I knew where
I was. Back in the room with the beeping computers.

But this time, I was fully
conscious.

I became aware of the hospital gown
and sheet draped over me, and the many wires taped to my body. I
began to pull at the ones on my face. They tugged my skin, not
wanting to give way; I could feel them distort my face for a moment
before releasing. The ones laid on hair brought tears to my eyes as
I forced them to let go.

Yanking the last from my
neck, I moved down to my shoulders and chest. Then to my torso and
stomach.
Abs? I never had abs
before…

Then I sat up.

As I removed the tapes from my arms, I
glanced around. Row after row of students on gurneys like mine
filled the room.

Except they were still
unconscious.

I continued peeling away
the wires.
How many are there?

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught
a flash of red.

My heart beat wildly, knowing that any
moment someone could come and I could be thrust back into The
Academie system.

My eyes found the red: Ruby was
sitting up, pulling off her own wires. I resumed tugging at mine,
but my eyes scanned the room, watching for movement.

“
AH!” I cried out in pain
as I pulled a tape from the back of my hand. I looked down to see
blood spilling over the white sheet and hospital gown that covered
me.
Shit.
The
tape had been attached to an IV. I grabbed up a bit of the sheet
and pushed it against my hand, attempting to stop the
blood.

“
Allie, are you
okay?”
Ruby called in a
whisper.

“
Yeah, be careful with the
IV.”

I wrapped the sheet around my bleeding
left hand, and continued pulling wires off with my right. Thigh,
butt, calf, ankle, foot, toe: the wires were everywhere.

When I thought I was free, I started
to move from the gurney, only to find more wires I had missed,
attached to my back. I yanked, and grudgingly, they fell
away.

I unwound the sheet from my hand and
found that the bleeding had slowed, so I dropped the sheet and
hopped from the table. The tile was shockingly cold against my bare
feet, and initially, my legs felt strange—like after an hour of ice
skating, when you return to regular shoes. I forced myself to
adjust—tottering slightly as I moved—and made my way over to Ruby,
who was still wrenching wires from her body.

Dozens of bodies separated her from
me, and I was forced to weave my way through them. I tried not to
look, but it was impossible. My body still hadn’t found its
equilibrium and my legs couldn’t quite remember how they were
supposed to work. I grabbed onto the gurneys for support, only to
be confronted with faces I recognized from classes. Faces that lay
too still to be alive. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the place
was a morgue.

I reached Ruby as she
attempted to move from the table.
“Wait.”
I said, stopping her.
“There’s some on your back.”

Gently, I peeled off the
tapes.

“
Thanks.”

She jumped from the table.

“
Careful. It takes a
minute to adjust.”

She tottered as I had, grabbing the
gurney next to hers for support. I watched as she peered at the
face on the table—the one I hadn’t noticed until then:
Stevie.

“
Oh god, Allie. We have to
get her out of here.”

“
We have to get
them
all
out of
here,” I said, looking around. “I wish Bryan were here. We need
someone with computer skills.”

“
We can do this. We just
need to think it through.”

“
What if we pull something
wrong though? We don’t know what we are messing with.”

“
Allie, we have to. We
can’t leave them here.”

I looked closer at the bodies that
surrounded us. They weren’t peaceful like those in coffins at
funerals I’d attended. These were different: living bodies,
trapped. “Okay, we can figure this out. What do we
know?”

“
Well, we’re out. And we
were able to pull off the wires, and we seem to be fine.” Her eyes
caught sight of my injured hand. “Allie, you’re
bleeding.”

I looked down to see a stream of blood
running down my hand.

Ruby grabbed the sheet from her bed
and tore at it, until a narrow piece of cloth broke free. She
grabbed my hand, took the strip, and wrapped it gently around and
around.

“
Thanks. You’re a great
mom.”

She smiled, and I saw a happy sadness
in her eyes.

“
Okay, so we were able to
get out without trouble, but we came through the door in the
program. That’s my concern: if we just pull the others out, what
will it do to their minds? Can they make the
transition?”

“
They’re sleeping now.”
The voice wasn’t mine. It was a man’s, deep, but gentle.

We spun to find someone in lab coat
standing in the doorway. Another man stood behind him. The first
was bearded and balding, with dark-rimmed glasses that framed soft,
kindly eyes. The man behind him was too blurry for my
still-adjusting vision.

“
You can’t keep them
here,” I said. “It’s over. We’re leaving. And we’re taking them
with us.”

The second man stepped forward and
came into view. “Allie?”

“
Matt?”

48.
dr. stanford

“
You’re okay? I
thought…”

“
I figured out the door,”
Matt said as he approached. “I wanted to tell you, but I thought
I’d check it out first. That didn’t quite work out the way I
planned…”

“
I woke him just a while
ago. He’s been helping me,” the man with the kindly eyes said. “I’m
Dr. Rupert.”

“
You’ve been…?” Wearing a
lab coat over his hospital gown, Matt now stood beside Dr.
Rupert.
Whose side is he on?

“
I became disenchanted
with the program months ago,” Rupert said, “when discussions began
about extending The Academie enrollment to age 30.”

I thought my heart stopped. Then I
realized I hadn’t breathed. I gasped.

“
Yeah, that was pretty
much my reaction. My son’s in there. But it’s more than that. It’s
wrong. They can’t keep you like this.”

“
So why haven’t you
stopped it yet?” Ruby asked.

“
Good question,” Rupert
said. “We’ve been trying—Matt and I.”

Matt nodded. “It’s not that simple.
Obviously, the program’s being monitored, so we have to be careful.
But also, there are only certain ways out—without at least
temporary if not permanent brain damage.”

“—
we don’t know for sure,”
Rupert chimed in. “But we don’t want to find out
either.”

“
So what do we do?” I
asked.

“
Well, luckily, thanks to
you both, these students are now in a sleep state.”

“
They aren’t in the
program anymore?” Ruby asked.

“
Right. As a fail-safe to
keep everyone else from finding out what you two were catching
onto, my colleagues and I were told to pull the students from the
program and put them in a dream state until all was set
straight.”

“
Yeah, do you know what
they were going to do to us?”
I moved
toward Rupert.

Ruby stopped me. “So what do we need
to do?” she asked.

“
We just need to wake them
up,” Rupert answered.

“
What? Poke them?” I
asked.

“
It’s not that simple,”
Matt replied. “They are in a drug-induced sleep. Dr. Rupert and I
already stopped the drug. But they haven’t woken up
yet.”

“
It must take a while to
wear off,” Rupert interjected. “I’m sure that’s all it
is.”

“
Who else is here?” Ruby
asked. “Is it just you two?”

“
There are four others,
patrolling the other floors. I volunteered for this one, to be here
in case you two woke up. And Matt, well, he’s supposed to be asleep
on a gurney in the isolation unit. I woke him up when the others
went to sleep.”

“
I’ve been up for a few
hours now,” Matt said.

“
Wait, how many floors are
there?” Ruby asked.

“
Four,” Rupert
said.

“
Better question: where
the hell are we?” I asked.

“
You don’t know?” Rupert
looked surprised.

I looked at Ruby, who looked as lost
as I was. We shook our heads.

“
You’re at The Academie.”
He said it matter-of-factly, as if we should have figured it out
long ago.

“
You mean
this
is our school? Our
town?”
If the people of this town knew
this is what the renovations had actually entailed…that
this
is what their tax
dollars had gone to…

He nodded.

I rubbed my head, thinking. “Okay,
four floors. Are they all like this?” I gestured to the many bodies
that filled the room.

“
Yes.”

I looked at Matt. “So now
what?”

“
They should wake up. I
guess we wait.”

“
Dr. Rupert, we can’t get
a visual on your room. Is everything okay up there?” The voice came
through a walkie strapped to Rupert’s waist.

“
Yes, everything is fine.
I’m working to fix the camera now.”

“
I disabled it shortly
after Rupert woke me,” Matt said.

“
Luckily, there was no
camera in his room,” Rupert explained, “since we usually have a
person monitoring the isolation cases at all times. I, of course,
was assigned to Matt.”

“
The camera was on the
wall outside the room I was in, facing out.” Matt pointed across
the room. “So I was able to get behind it and pull the
plug.”

“
Perhaps we should wait in
there now, in case anyone does happen to come up here?” Rupert
suggested.

“
Then we won’t hear
them
as they wake,” Ruby
said, gesturing to the students still sleeping around
us.

“
Yeah, I’m not going
anywhere,” I said. “I would really like my clothes
though.”

“
Ah, yes. Well, that could
be difficult. There is a clothing area, but it’s several stories
down. Very risky.”

“
Okay. We wait for the
others,” I said.

“
Won’t they be pleased
when they wake up and find themselves half-naked?” Ruby’s voice was
sarcastic.

“
Just as much as we love
it, I’m sure.” I grabbed the torn sheet from Ruby’s bed and tore
the remainder of it in half. “Here,” I said, handing her two. “At
least we can try to leave here with a bit of dignity. I wrapped the
sheet around me toga style, and Ruby followed my lead.

Then I watched as Ruby
walked back over to Stevie and stroked her hair.
“Stevie, wake up.”

“
I doubt she can hear
you,” Rupert said. “It’s a pretty strong sleeping agent. It has to
be to keep people engaged in the system, but it’s even stronger to
keep them out of it.”

“
So is The Academie
program turned off now?” Ruby asked.

He scratched his head uncomfortably.
“Not technically.”

“
Then how do you know that
when they wake up, they won’t just go back in?”

“
Well, I guess, we don’t,”
he admitted.

“
You have to get that
thing turned off,” Ruby demanded, leaving Stevie and moving toward
Dr. Rupert.

“
Right.” He looked
concerned.

“
Where are the controls?”
I asked.

“
Downstairs.”

“
Do you know how to use
them?”

“
I…think I do.”

Not convincing.

“
I’ll go with you,” Matt
said. “Together we should be able to figure it out.”

“
But—” I
protested.

“
We’ll be careful,” Matt
said.

“
I can’t just stand here,”
I said to Ruby when they left.

“
Me either. Come on, help
me with Stevie.”

“
What are you gonna
do?”

“
Pull off the
tapes.”

“
But what about—” I
started to protest, but Ruby interjected.

“
If we pull the ones from
her body, it can’t hurt her, right? Bryan said something about
muscle contractors. That’s got to be all they are. And sensors
probably, to allow us to feel things in the program. We’ll keep the
ones on her head and let her pull them off when she wakes
up.”