Variant

But it’d be a while before I could afford anything good. Breaking the rules probably hadn’t been beneficial to my points, and I only had payment for part of a month. I clicked on a few menus to try to check my account-I hadn’t fiddled with it much-and it took me a few minutes to find it.

That’s not right…

“Hey, Mason,” I said, confused. “How many points do you have?” I knew he’d been saving up for several months for a ghillie suit, only splurging on a few things like the paintball grenades.

“Hang on,” he said sleepily. I could hear the tap of his keyboard. “Looks like… a thousand eight hundred thirty.”

That was good-1,830-he could buy most anything in the catalog except the most expensive things.

“I only need forty-five more,” he said. “Hey, did you see they finally added winter camo to…”

I wasn’t listening to Mason anymore. Something was wrong.

My point total read five million.

The school was trying to buy me off.

Chapter Nineteen

I didn’t want everyone to know about my points-the Society would have been suspicious if I’d ordered a ghillie suit with only a few weeks’ worth of points. But I’d bought a pair of cargo pants and I filled the oversize pockets with several expensive purchases-paintball grenades, binoculars, a flashlight, and, most expensive, a pair of two-way radios.

I also started building a stockpile of supplies: granola bars, crackers, beef jerky. Hopefully the school thought that I was enjoying their bribes, but maybe they knew the truth: I was preparing for escape. Either way, whoever was on the other end of the security cameras must have been pretty confident in the school’s walls; the gear they sold practically taunted me into trying to run.

I hated class now. Hated sitting there, day after day, staring at the two empty seats in front of Mason and me. Lily was dead. Jane was gone. Every day I’d sit in my desk, staring at her chair, remembering her hair, remembering her lying on the table in the basement.

I noticed Becky was the same way, sitting alone now in her front desk. Laura always sat beside her, and Laura was gone. Good riddance.

After several days of monotony, Iceman announced that we were to head outside for paintball. I tried to hide my excitement as I changed my clothes and packed up my gear. I wasn’t excited for paintball itself, but I wanted to use the time in the woods-away from the cameras-to work on something.

Mason had already left the room by the time I finished dressing. I was purposely being slow, and as soon as the door closed behind him I moved to my bed and pulled out the bottle of rubbing alcohol.

I shook it and looked at the color. It was completely reddish brown now. The night before I’d poured an entire can of cayenne pepper into it. I’d bribed a kid from Havoc to steal it out of the kitchen by telling him that it was for a prank I was playing on Isaiah, and giving him a three-hundred-point gold chain in exchange.

And, when I’d gone back to the infirmary this morning to get another day’s dose of pain medicine from Anna, I’d stolen a syringe and gauze pads.

Now I’d find out whether it all worked. I’d seen it done on TV, but that didn’t always mean anything.

I dropped the bottle into a pocket of my cargo pants and headed down the hall.

I could feel my extra gear weighing me down, thumping against my legs as I hurried for the stairs. I didn’t know who, if anyone, would get my second two-way radio. Of everyone left in the school, Mason was the one I trusted most, but he wasn’t eager to escape. Maybe no one would come with me.

But that didn’t matter today. For now, I was just experimenting.

Curtis found me as I was crossing the track. “Might get snow,” he said, looking up at the low clouds.

I shrugged. “It’s been doing this all week.”

Curtis was one I wasn’t sure of. He’d come six months after Isaiah, but he was still among the ten oldest students. I had to wonder whether all of the gangs were run by androids: Oakland and Mouse, Isaiah, and Curtis. The only one that seemed out of place was Carrie, who had only been in the school for a year. While she didn’t seem to be a co-leader of the gang, like Mouse was, Carrie had become a kind of second in command after Curtis.

I wondered whether she was a human in love with an android. Just like I’d been.

“Are you okay to play today?” Curtis asked me while we walked.

“I think so,” I said. “My head’s feeling better, and I can do most things with these braces, no problem.”

“And your ribs?”

“Hurt like hell,” I said with a laugh.

“Well, we’ll try to keep you in one spot if we can. Defending something, maybe. With any luck, we’ll be reffing today and you can sit out.”

The paintball field that we were heading to was one of the biggest, I was told, with dozens of small plywood buildings arranged like we would be fighting in a city.

As usual, Isaiah stood at the head of the crowd.