The Lost Code (5 page)

I ran my fingers over the bandages. Hotter. And I was starting to have this weird urge. I didn’t get what it was, I just knew that I couldn’t lie there anymore. I had to get up. Had to do something. It was almost like I wasn’t in control of myself.

I climbed down off my bunk, wincing now, gasping at the pain, and started pulling off my clothes, while at the same time wondering,
What are you doing?

Don’t worry
, said a new technician in a bright-red jumpsuit.
You want this itching to stop, right?

Yes, that was what I wanted. So badly.

Okay
, he said as he busily assembled a new monitor screen,
then just do this.

I stripped down, grabbed my towel from my cubby, wrapped it around my waist, and headed for the bathroom.

I turned on the shower, cold water only. Dr. Maria had given me explicit instructions: stay out of the water. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Or anything, really.

Keep going
, the new technician advised.

The water hissed out of the showerhead. I got in. The second the stream hit my chest, I felt this huge shiver, and then a rush of calm. Like everything was relaxing. My wounds still itched, but less.

Don’t touch them.
That was Dr. Maria’s other warning. But instead I started clawing at the tape that held the bandages on. I peeled it up and unwound the fabric. At the end, the last few layers resisted, stretching away and then finally breaking their dried-blood bonds with snaps of pain. The burning surged. I leaned out, tossed the crusted bandages into a sink, then dunked my head into the shower spray.

Water poured over me, down over the wounds, and the itching suddenly ceased. Like my nerves had been shut off. Relief spread through me.

There we go
, said the new technician.

I reached back up to the wounds. My fingers came away with thick crimson blots. Drops of water dabbed the blood away. But the wounds didn’t hurt. They didn’t itch. And the blood wasn’t bothering me. Not since the water had starting falling on me. There was blood and water and wounds, and yet I felt calm, that strange sense of peace like I’d had on the lake floor, returning.

Other technicians were shrugging.
I can’t explain it, sir
, said one.

None of this made sense except the undeniable relief.
Okay
, I told myself,
think like a normal person
.
If the wounds don’t hurt, then this blood is just ’cause the bandages pulled off some scabs on the surface, or something. The wounds must be almost healed. Fine.
So we rinse them off and cover them up again.
I stuck my head back into the shower stream and turned to the side, exposing the wounds. Water hit them directly and the calm feeling increased, the pain barely a memory.

Then I coughed. Took a breath but coughed again. Wait—there was a weird feeling, like water in my throat. Tightness in the back of my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe.

I lurched away from the stream of water and slapped at the dial. The water stopped, but my balance was off. Spots bloomed in my vision, and I tripped and fell sideways, tearing down the shower curtain and landing on the cement floor.

I lay there, staring at the wooden ceiling with its single naked lightbulb, trying to breathe, but I couldn’t, like nothing worked. Everything stuck.

Um, we really need air
, said a technician. He jabbed at the glowing button that should have opened my mouth, but my mouth was already opening and closing, gulping at the air but getting nothing.

Don’t panic
, said the new technician, working busily.

Oxygen is running low!
shouted the technician monitoring my blood.

The edges of the world grew dark again. I was back on the lake bottom. . . .

Owen, this is just the beginning.

It was her again. The voice from the lake. Who was she?
Stop thinking about that! You are drowning again!
But that didn’t make sense. Oh, maybe she was like a sprite, or a nymph, or one of those other creatures from old stories about shipwrecks and sailors. Mermaid? Siren?
There are no sirens in the lake!

The sound of other voices broke me out of my thoughts. From outside, getting closer. My cabin was coming back.

I tried to breathe again, tried to suck in air—

And it worked. I felt my throat burst open, my lungs ballooning, and then I coughed out a huge breath. Whatever had been keeping them from working—blocking them, it felt like—had stopped.

I scrambled to my feet, untangling from the nylon curtain. Had to not be naked when my cabin got back. I grabbed my towel from the hook and threw it around my waist. I had just secured it when that gagging feeling like I’d felt at the lake came back and I staggered to the sink and threw up a slick of bile, shower water, and blood. Looking up into the mirror, I saw my dripping chin, my shuddering naked body, and the wounds on my neck—

Whoa.

They were way worse than I’d imagined. Two long, red gashes on each side of my neck. They didn’t seem to be bleeding at the moment. I reached toward one with a finger and found that the red separated, and for just a moment my finger slipped inside the wound—
way
too far—and there was blinding pain and white spots. I grabbed the sink to stay on my feet.

The wounds had looked feathery inside. Like there were flaps of skin. These didn’t look like bites, like parasites feeding or whatever. What had happened to me? An infection? Was this that flesh-eating bacteria that you heard about at medical clinics along the ACF border? Or that cholera mutation that was ravaging south Asia?

The screen door slapped open. I could hear laughing. Okay, the wounds were really weird but seemed stable. I had to move. At any moment, the bathroom door would slam open and Leech or one of his crew would pop in and find me with this mess everywhere and come up with some amazingly stupid yet funny-to-them way to harass me for it. I looked at the shut door, then the broken shower curtain. First, my neck. . . . I grabbed the bandages from the sink. They’d gotten damp, but they’d have to do. I wrapped them back into place. The tape was gone, so I tucked in the end and hoped it would hold.

Feet clomped into the bunk room. I turned on the shower to wash away the blood, whipped paper towels out of the dispenser, tearing them free. Turned the shower off, dropped to the floor, wiped the blood from around the shower drain. I got most of it, threw the towels in the trash, tore out more, and threw them on top of the bloody ones to cover the mess. Then I grabbed the shower curtain. A few of the rings were broken, so I tossed it over the rod. Turned back to the door. It would have to be good enough. . . .

A few seconds passed. There were shouts, more laughing, then a heavy thud. I cracked open the door and peered out.

Leech had Bunsen in a headlock. His chubby legs were flailing uselessly. “I told you not to talk! Stupid bed wetter! You smell like piss! It’s cleaning time!”

Meanwhile, Mike and Noah were on Bunsen’s bed, stuffing his blankets, sheets, clothes, and pillow out the tiny window beside his bunk. Closer, Beaker was sitting on the floor, holding his knees to his chest, his face red, trying not to cry. Jalen was just finishing up giving his bed the same treatment. Jalen looked down at Beaker. “That’s for getting me put in the box,” he taunted.

I shuffled quickly over to my bunk, glad to be invisible by comparison. I kept my chin down, but nobody even noticed my wet bandages. I climbed up the ladder and found a metal dining hall plate on my bed. It was piled with some kind of noodle casserole, but there was dirt all over it.

“Oh, Owen, dude, sorry,” Xane called from across the room. I turned to see him shrugging apologetically. “We got that for you but it got knocked on the ground on the way back.” He sounded sorry, but not too much, and turned back to his conversation with Carl and Wesley. I took the plate over to the compost container and slid the food in.

The group moved on from tormenting Bunsen and Beaker to a game of Monopoly. The cabin quieted down.

Later, Todd came in and read to us. It was this old book with a long title by some author named Edgar Poe from, like, two hundred fifty years ago. It was apparently a cabin tradition, and it was weird, being read to, like we were innocent children instead of a bunch of savages, but it was also maybe cool, ’cause you could just lie there and picture the words, or not. It had seemed like it would be kind of a boring book, but then the main character, named Pym, was almost getting killed every chapter. He and the other two survivors on this lost boat were just deciding which of them they were going to cannibalize when I started to doze off.

I closed my eyes and felt the faint twinge of the strange wounds on my neck. They weren’t burning anymore. No pain since the shower, just a slight hum. Why had water made them feel better, when Dr. Maria had said to stay away from it?

Soon the cabin buzzed with slumber, light snores and heavy breaths, and as I drifted off to sleep, I thought of Lilly’s words.
No matter what happens . . .
Maybe this, these weird wounds, was what Lilly had meant. Maybe she was the one I needed to talk to.

WE WOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE REVEILLE
horn. It was a recorded trumpet sound, hissing from speakers in the trees. My wounds had awakened me a few times in the night, sizzling lightly, then calming down. In between, my dreams had been strange, dark, full of water and blood, the kind of dreams where you were convinced they were real the whole time, and yet I couldn’t remember any specifics, and so I just felt slow and fuzzy as everyone hopped up around me. The wounds were humming faintly now, not bad, just a prickling reminder that they were there.

Todd came in, wearing boxers and a dark-gray Camp Eden T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. “Good morning, ladies,” he said, stretching like he was giving us a furry armpit show. “We leave for flagpole in ten minutes.”

That was enough time for everyone to get dressed and for Jalen to run over to Beaker. “Wake-up wedgie!” he shouted like he was half our age, and yanked Beaker off the ground.

“Everybody make sure to put this on,” said Todd, reappearing and passing around a stiff plastic bottle of NoRad lotion. “Arms, legs, face, and neck.”

“Don’t forget your balls!” said Leech. “Can’t be too careful.” He looked toward Bunsen, Beaker, and me. “You guys probably don’t need to worry.” He and Mike slapped hands.

“Okay, enough,” said Todd, but I saw him smiling a little.

I slipped my pullover carefully over my neck. It didn’t quite zip over the bandages. When the bottle got to me, I rubbed the greasy, metallic paste onto my face, my hands, and my ears. It always tingled a little as it sank in, and you heard rumors that it was bad for you in its own way, but I’d seen the effects of extreme UV radiation out at Yellowstone: the purple melanomas etched into boiled skin, the whites of eyes burned brown, the lost fingers and noses. Apparently, there were regions of the world—in some of the Habitable Zone, a pocket over central Asia, parts of the Pacific—where the ozone layer was still thick enough that you could step outside without any kind of NoRad, at least for a few minutes. It hadn’t been like that anywhere near Hub for over fifty years, though.

We trudged out the side door and followed Todd toward the flagpole at the edge of the playing fields, where we met before each meal for announcements. On the way out, I noticed that Beaker’s blanket and sheets were still lying in the dirt. He’d apparently decided it was easier to just sleep without them.

We filed down the path, and I ended up walking next to Xane. “So, dude,” he asked me, “what was it like?”

Xane was from a place called Taipei, which had submerged in the Rise. The People’s Corporation of China had refused most of the refugees, so his parents had gotten him into Eden as a Cryo. I’d heard that when you were accepted as a Cryo, Eden got to choose which center you’d be placed in, based on space, so he ended up here instead of EdenEast. Xane’s parents, and most of the Taiwanese, had emigrated to Coke-Sahel, which was formed when the Coca-Cola company merged with Walmart and then purchased twelve West African countries. Even now, they were constantly advertising out at Hub for new employee-citizens.

“What,” I replied, “drowning?” I tried to remember. “It hurt, until I blacked out.”

“No, not that.” Xane turned and slapped me on the shoulder. “Getting mouth-to-mouth from Lilly. That’s what I’m talking aBOUT.” Xane always did that, making the second half of a word really loud.

“Oh.” This was a chance, I guessed, to earn some points. I could talk it up, and everyone in my cabin would think it was awesome. They were all trying to flirt with the oldest girls’ cabin, the Arctic Foxes, but nobody was getting anywhere, and here I was, having had actual lip contact, though not for the right reasons. But apparently it counted. Still, the thought of talking about that, of bragging about it or whatever, just made me want to be silent instead.

Luckily, I could answer Xane’s question with the truth: “All I remember is waking up and throwing up.”

“Wow,” Xane sighed. “That’s sad. A girl sucked your face and you don’t even reMEMber.”

Noah heard this and turned around. “I would totally drown to get mouth-to-mouth from Lilly. She’s HiRad for sure.”

“Easy, too,” added Leech. “She gets down with all the CIT guys is what I hear.”

“Duude,” said Xane softly, like he was imagining this. “Owen, man, you must have gotten some swEET views when she was all bending over you saving your life and all that.” He started sliding his hands up and down through the air, drawing idealized girl shapes.

“Look, I drowned,” I snapped. “It wasn’t a turn-on, so forget it.” The truth was obviously different: not that drowning was a turn-on, but that Lilly was, and that I’d definitely had all kinds of thoughts like that, though the part about her and other CITs was hard to hear, and it just reminded me once again that someone like me was not going to have a shot with someone like her.

Leech’s freckled face squinted at me. He shook his head slowly. “What a waste.”

We got to flagpole and sat on a long bench made from half a tree trunk. We were in the last row. Behind us, a short hill rose to the tall glass windows of the dining hall. All the campers were there, except the CITs, who didn’t have to do kids’ stuff like this. The activities coordinator, a lady named Claudia who wore a camp sweatshirt over her wide body and khaki shorts that showed off her purple-coated knees, welcomed us and then said good morning to each cabin. When she said it, each cabin had to say some kind of cheer. The littlest kids took it really seriously, but then the effort faded with age, with a huge drop-off when it finally got to us.

“And good morning, Spotted Hyenas!”

Groans and sighs. We couldn’t have hated this more. Todd’s idea for a cheer had been “Sssssneak attack!” because today we were playing capture the flag. It trickled out of our mouths in a sad mumble.

“Okay,” said Claudia with obvious disappointment. “And goood morning, Arctic Foxes!”

“Balance!” half the Foxes shouted in eerie female unison.

“Support!” called the other half.

“Strength!”

“In numbers!”

The girls, despite being oldest like us, seemed to take some sick pleasure in being super coordinated and enthusiastic about these kinds of things. They also always seemed to look great for flagpole, like they’d been up for hours, while us boys had our hair pointing every which way. They all cheered and clapped to themselves when their routine was over, and all the boys around me had their heads hanging sideways watching.

“They’re going to the ropes course today,” Beaker said quietly from beside me. I hadn’t even realized he was there.

Claudia started making announcements about the day. “I’ve checked in with Aaron up in the Eagle Eye and he reports that midday Rad levels will be slightly elevated, so everyone follow the two-hour application cycle.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Leech rubbing his hands all over his chest, like he was putting NoRad on girl parts, and making ecstatic faces while doing it. Mike and Jalen and Noah were cracking up.

The show was mostly for the Arctic Foxes’ ringleader, Paige, who was smile-glaring at Leech from across the aisle. She flipped her sandy blond hair like we’d already seen her do a hundred times in two days, and then made a big show of whispering something to her friends that made them all laugh hysterically. Then it was Leech’s turn to do the glare-smile thing.

Paige and Leech had apparently been going out last session, and now, even though there had only been one day off between sessions, it was suddenly this big will-they-or-won’t-they-date-again thing for reasons that nobody really knew, and you had to wonder if the two of them were just doing it to keep all the attention on themselves.

I saw other Arctic Foxes looking at our cabin and whispering, sizing us up. I figured the kid with the clumpy white bandages around his neck probably wasn’t going to interest them.

When announcements were over, one of the little girls’ cabins, the Lemurs, did a skit about something to do with always remembering to wear your NoRad lotion, and we were released to breakfast. Everybody walked up the gravel path to the dining hall in a mass. Leech and his gang mingled with the Arctic Foxes, and there was lots of pulling sweatshirt hoods over each other’s heads, and then when we got into the dining hall there were lots of whispers across the aisle between Leech’s end of the table and Paige’s. I was at the other end, and noticed that there was a similar quiet end at the Foxes’ table, too.

There was bread and margarine waiting on the tables, along with metal pitchers of bug juice. Today it was bright yellow and was supposed to taste like something called a pineapple. There were jokes about how it looked like pee, about how Beaker was drinking pee. Tables got called by age, youngest to oldest, so we had to watch tray after tray of millet pancakes and scrambled synth eggs go by. The food at each meal was still good, and there was plenty of it, but since that first night, there had been no sign of real wheat, or delicate leaves of spinach.

Now a piece of bread smacked against the side of Leech’s head. “Oh no!” he said, looking over at Paige, who was glaring wickedly, like she was auditioning for the part of “bad girl” in a school play. Leech scanned the table, grabbed a square of margarine, pressed it onto the tip of a knife, then flicked it back at her. She ducked and it hit a poor girl named Sonja, who you could tell had a life in her cabin like Beaker had in ours. The margarine bounced off her cheek and fell down the front of her shirt and she started grabbing at herself, and all the girls cracked up and the boys went nuts.

“Knock it off, Carey,” said Todd, using Leech’s real name.

“That’s bloodsucker to you, mammal!” Leech shot back.

Todd leaned forward, slapping both hands on the table. “Watch it, kid, or you’ll be missing electives today.”

Leech glared back at him, smile unflinching. “I think Paul would say that was unfair,” he said, like because he’d been here so long, he and the director were best friends.

“Not if I explain your behavior.” Todd’s eyes narrowed; his jaw set.

“Try it,” said Leech.

Todd kept staring at him . . . then looked away. “Food time,” he said, and everybody at the table knew who had just won.

We headed across the busy dining hall. I was glad to get away from all that table stuff, but also for the chance to walk by the CIT area. They owned one whole end of the dining hall. They had a normal dining table, but then also couches along the walls, and a Ping-Pong table. The CITs were all there, spread out over the surfaces like someone had tossed them carelessly, and yet placed them perfectly, legs in sweatpants hanging this way and that, heads covered by sweatshirt hoods or backward mesh baseball caps. They leaned on each other’s shoulders, their toes painted, their ankles and wrists wrapped in woven bracelets. They were like a portrait of perfection, like the ideal of youth that you’d see in holotech environments, who had that plastic feel and smiled at you and talked to you about the products they were wearing. Except the CITs weren’t smiling, and they were more real, unnerving, almost dangerous feeling. You could imagine them never even having to speak, lounging there, communicating in glances and scents like the Turkish lions that roamed the deserts of France and Germany.

And yet one pair of those silent eyes was looking at me, sky-blue irises peering through green-streaked bangs. She was sideways on the couch, legs draped over the armrest, her head against the fortress shoulder of Evan, who was reading a video sheet. CITs didn’t have to go the whole “no technology” route, like the rest of us.

Lilly’s gaze made me freeze, and then almost trip, and I looked away quick, hating that she was seeing me with these ridiculous bandages on my neck, but then I glanced back, and she was still looking at me, and she nodded, or at least I thought she did. I wondered if I should nod back, or do nothing, like I was playing it cool, or—

“Lil!” someone called from the Ping-Pong table, and she looked away.

I hurried into the kitchen. On my way back with my food, I caught a glimpse of her playing in a doubles game. She was wearing someone else’s purple-and-white mesh cap, maybe Evan’s, her sweatshirt sleeves pushed up, her gaze across the table intense. She didn’t look at me, and I told myself not to stare.

Breakfast dragged on, and as we were finally getting up to leave, Todd said, “Owen, you’re supposed to go see Dr. Maria?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Meet us down on the fields when you’re done.”

I headed out of the dining hall and across a dirt road toward the infirmary. I didn’t mind the idea of seeing Dr. Maria. She’d seemed nice. And I wondered again whether or not I should tell her more about what was going on with me. Maybe she should know about last night with the wounds and the shower. She was a doctor, after all. And yet, going to the infirmary also meant the possibility of running into Paul. That was something I definitely wanted to avoid.

“Hey! Owen!” I turned and saw Lilly pulling away from a little cluster of CITs, including Evan. “Just a sec,” she said to them, and hurried over to me. “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you.”

She had? When? Where? What about? Wait, she was still talking—

“How are you feeling?” Lilly was asking.

“Oh,” I said quickly, “you know, better. Fine.”

She nodded. “Cool, and what about your neck?”

“Oh, that,” I said, flapping a hand against my bandages like they were no big deal, except that movement made the wounds cry out and so then I tried not to wince. “Something must have gotten tangled around me on the bottom, or a parasite got me or something. Did you, um, see anything when you found me?”

“No.” Lilly looked around, almost like she as checking to make sure no one was listening. “So, that’s it?”

“It?” It sounded like she was expecting me to have more to report. There was the whole thing with the shower. “Well, actually—”

“Lil!” Evan called. He tapped at his wrist. “We gotta go!”

“Right,” said Lilly. “Gotta get down to the docks. Okay, listen . . .” She touched my arm. I looked down at that happening. She had teal-green nail polish with little glitter stars. “We should talk,” she said, starting to step away, “about your neck and stuff.”