Variant

I sat on a rock and stared at the wall. There was no way over it without supplies or help. I could try to knock down another tree, but I knew they were right about crossing. I’d end up just like Lily.

I heard a rattle of stones behind me. Someone else was struggling up the slope. I listened without turning to look.

“Hey.” It was Becky.

“Hey.”

She walked to me, taking quick shallow breaths, and sat beside me on the rock.

“You’re not running,” she said.

I stared at the wall, and shook my head.

She didn’t say anything, just sat there next to me. The sun hadn’t hit this spot yet, blocked by the trees, and the air was cold. I was glad I had my sweatshirt. I hoped the school wouldn’t decide to punish us by leaving the doors locked all day and all night. Though if they did, we could just go back into the room with Jane. They couldn’t lock that one after what we’d done to it. At least we’d be out of the cold.

“I’m sorry,” Becky finally said. “I wish you would have told me, but…”

“No,” I said. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t have believed me. Some new guy shows up and starts telling you crazy things about a person you’ve known for a year. It’s okay.”

For a long time she sat next to me. Sometimes she’d take a breath like she was going to speak, but then stopped herself.

I stared at the wall. I was going to leave. I just had to figure out how.

“No one can trust anyone anymore,” Becky said. She was rubbing her hands to keep them warm. “It’s probably been like that for you for a while.”

“Yeah.” And it sucks.

“That’s why you were making the list,” she said.

I exhaled slowly and then rubbed my face. “Yeah. I figured that the androids had to have been here since the beginning. Like Jane.”

She nodded.

“But now we’ve found Dylan,” I continued. “So, that makes everything different.”

“Right.”

I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. It was going to be a long, cold day.

Becky shifted, turning her body toward me. I took my eyes off the wall and looked at her. She didn’t have her usual perfect style-her brown hair was still skewed and flattened from sleep.

“I know that you can’t trust me, Bense,” she said, and then paused, looking down at her hands. “I just want you to know that I trust you.”

“Does that mean that you’re leaving the Society? Are you a V again?”

She exhaled and then looked into my eyes. “I’m whatever you are.”

We sat in silence, staring at each other for what seemed like several minutes. Then Becky broke down, her body suddenly wracked in sobs. She fell against me and I held her. “I’m sorry,” she cried, brokenhearted. “I really thought I was helping people.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

Chapter Twenty-five

We buried Jane as the sun was climbing the cold morning sky. Becky, Mason, and I went to the maintenance sheds-which thankfully still opened-and got some shovels. The rest of the V’s soon joined us, and even a few people from the other gangs. We dug a new grave in the cemetery, and then Curtis and I lowered Jane’s body into it.

Most of the flowers around the school had died weeks ago, but Becky gathered some pine boughs. And, instead of a headstone, we made a pile of rocks at the head of the grave, each mourner adding one.

Yes, Jane wasn’t a real person. But she’d been real enough that we’d all loved her.

In the wintery silence, Oakland found me. I was sitting on the grass in the graveyard, my shovel still lying across my lap. Becky and a few of the other V’s were with me, but no one had spoken for a long time.

“Did Jane have trouble with pop culture?”

Oakland’s lips were tight together, and he was looking thoughtfully at the ground as he spoke.

“You know,” he went on, “like music and TV and stuff.”

Gabby replied before I got a chance to. Her voice was trembling. “I used to make fun of her for it. She didn’t know any of the bands I used to like.”

I was going to add that she’d never heard of any movies, but Oakland spoke first.

“I couldn’t get much out of that computer. I don’t think it’s networked, either. But I was able to get some system info from… from Jane. Most of it I didn’t understand-mechanical stuff. But there were a couple memory upgrades in there. Some programmer made a note about uploading a patch to fix the ‘pop culture problem.’”

So that was it. Whenever I quoted a movie to her, she didn’t know about it because she hadn’t been programmed to know it.

“The ‘pop culture problem,’” Curtis repeated, staring at the freshly covered grave.

“They were trying to fix her so we wouldn’t notice,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t spoken. It sounded too mean when it came out.

The group was quiet for a minute, and then Joel spoke. “So, who can name all the Harry Potter books?”

“Shut up,” Curtis snapped. “That’s the last thing we need.”

“They said they fixed it,” Oakland added.

The sun still wasn’t quite at its peak when someone called us from the school steps. The doors were unlocked, and a meeting was about to begin.