Chapter 5

chapter Five

SAMANTHA-SAM-AND I were both assigned to Cabin 27, along with the rest of the girls from our bus that were classified as Green. Fourteen in all, though by the next day, there were twenty more. They capped the number at thirty a week later, and moved on to filling the next wooden structure along the camp's perpetually soggy and trampled main trail.

Bunks were assigned based on alphabetical order, which put Sam directly above me-a small mercy, seeing as the rest of the girls were nothing like her. They spent the first night either stunned into silence or sobbing. I didn't have time for tears anymore. I had questions.

"What are they going to do with us?" I whispered up to her. We were at the far left end of the cabin, our bunk wedged in the corner. The walls of the structure had been thrown together so quickly that they weren't completely sealed. Every now and then a freezing draft and sometimes a snowflake whistled in from the silent outdoors.

"I dunno," she said quietly. A few beds over, one of the girls had finally dropped off into the oblivion of sleep, and her snores were helping to cover our conversation. When a PSF had escorted us to our new residence, it had been with several warnings: no talking after lights-out, no leaving, no use of freak abilities-intentional or accidental. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone refer to what we could do as "freak abilities" instead of the polite alternative, "symptoms."

"I guess keep us here, until they figure out a cure," Sam continued. "That's what my dad said, at least, when the soldiers came to get me. What did your parents say?"

My hands hadn't stopped shaking from earlier, and every time I tried shutting my eyes all I could see were the white coat's blank ones staring right back into mine. The mention of my parents only made the pounding in my head that much worse.

I don't know why I lied. It was easier, I guess, than the truth-or maybe because some small part of it felt like it was the actual truth. "My parents are dead."

She sucked in a sharp breath between her teeth. "I wish mine were, too."

"You don't mean that!"

"They're the ones that sent me here, aren't they?" It was dangerous, how fast her voice was rising. "Obviously they wanted to get rid of me."

"I don't think-" I began, only to stop myself. Hadn't my parents wanted to get rid of me, too?

"Whatever; it's fine," she said, though it clearly wasn't and it wasn't ever going to be. "We'll stay here and stick together, and when we get out, we can go wherever we want, and no one will stop us."

My mom used to say that sometimes just saying something aloud was enough to make it true. I wasn't so sure about that, but the way Sam said it, the low burn beneath her words, made me reconsider. It suddenly seemed possible that it could work out that way-that if I couldn't go home, I would still be all right in the end if I could just stick with her. It was like wherever Sam went, a path opened up behind her; all I had to do was stay in her shadow, out of the PSFs' line of sight, and avoid doing anything that would call attention to me.

It worked that way for five years.

Five years feels like a lifetime when one day bleeds into the next, and your world doesn't stretch any farther than the gray electric fence surrounding two miles of shoddy buildings and mud. I was never happy at Thurmond, but it was bearable because Sam was there to make it that way. She was there with the eye roll when Vanessa, one of our cabinmates, tried to cut her own hair with garden shears to look more "stylish" ("For who?" Sam had muttered. "Her reflection in the Washroom mirror?"); the silly cross-eyed face behind the back of the PSF lecturing her for speaking out of turn yet again; and the firm-but gentle-reality check when girls' imaginations started running too wild, or rumors sprung up about the PSFs letting us go.

Sam and I-we were realists. We knew we weren't getting out. Dreaming led to disappointment, and disappointment to a kind of depressed funk that wasn't easy to shake. Better to stay in the gray than get eaten by the dark.

Two years into life at Thurmond, the camp controllers started work on the Factory. They had failed at rehabilitating the dangerous ones and hauled them off in the night, but the so-called "improvements" didn't stop there. It dawned on them that the camp needed to be entirely "self-sufficient." From that point on, we'd be growing and cooking our own food to eat, mucking out the Washrooms, making our uniforms, and even making theirs.

The brick structure was all the way at the far west side of camp, cupped in one end of Thurmond's long rectangle. They had us dig out the foundation for the Factory, but the camp controllers didn't trust us with the actual building of it. We watched it go up floor by floor, wondering what it was for, and what they would do to us there. That was back when all sorts of rumors were floating around like dandelion fluff in the wind-some thought the scientists were coming back for more experiments; some thought the new building was where they were going to move the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows, if and when they returned; and some thought it was where they were going to get rid of us, once and for all.

"We'll be fine," Sam had told me one night, just before they turned the lights out. "No matter what-you hear me?"

But it wasn't fine. It wasn't fine then, and it wasn't fine now.

There was no talking in the Factory, but there were ways around it. Actually, the only time we were allowed to speak to one another was in our cabin, before lights-out. Everywhere else, it was all work, obedience, silence. But you can't go on for years together without developing a different kind of language, one that was all sly grins and quick glances. Today, they had us polishing and relacing the PSFs' boots and tightening their uniform buttons, but a single wiggle of a loose black shoelace and a look toward the girl standing across from you-the same one who had called you an awful word the night before-spoke volumes.

The Factory wasn't much of a factory. A better name probably would have been the Warehouse, only because the building consisted of just one huge room, with a pathway suspended over the work floor. The builders had enough thought to install four large windows on the west and east walls, but because there was no heat in the winter or AC in the summer, they tended to let more bad weather in than sunlight.

The camp controllers tried to keep things as simple as possible; they set up rows and rows of tables lengthwise across the dusty concrete floor. There were hundreds of us working in the Factory that morning, all in Green uniforms. Ten PSFs patrolled the walkways above us, each with his or her own black rifle. Another ten were on the ground with us.

It was no more unnerving than usual to feel the press of their eyes coming from every direction. But I hadn't slept well the night before, even after a full day of work in the Garden. I had gone to bed with a headache and woken up with a glossy fever fog over my brain, and a sore throat to match. Even my hands seemed lethargic, my fingers stiff as pencils.

I knew I wasn't keeping up, but it was like drowning, in a way. The harder I tried to work, to keep my head above water, the more tired I felt and the slower I became. After a while, even standing upright was taking too much effort, and I had to brace myself against the table to keep from swan-diving straight into it. On most days, I could get away with a snail's pace. It wasn't like they had us doing important work, or that we had deadlines to meet. Every task we were assigned was just glorified busywork to keep our hands moving, our bodies occupied, and our minds dead with boredom. Sam called it "forced recess"-they let us out of our cabins, and the work wasn't difficult or tiring like it was in the Garden, but no one wanted to be there.

Especially when bullies came It to the playground.

I knew he was standing behind me long before I heard him start counting the finished, shiny shoes in front of me. He smelled like spiced meat and car oil, which already was an unsettling combination before a whiff of cigarette smoke was added to the mix. I tried to straighten my back under the weight of his gaze, but it felt like he had taken two fists and dug the knuckles deep between my shoulder blades.

"Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen" How was it that they could make mere numbers sound sharp?

At Thurmond, we weren't allow to touch one another, and we were beyond forbidden to touch one of the PSFs, but it didn't mean that they couldn't touch us. The man took two steps forward; his boots-exactly like the ones on the table-nudged the back of my standard white slip-ons. When I didn't respond, he snuck an arm past my shoulder, on the pretense of sorting through my work, and pressed me into his chest. Shrink, I told myself, curling my spine down, bending my face to the task in front of me, shrink and disappear.

"Worthless," I heard the PSF grunt behind me. His body was letting off enough heat to warm the entire building. "You're doing this all wrong. Look-watch, girl!"

I got my first real glance at him out of the corner of my eye as he ripped the polish-stained cloth out of my hand and moved to my side. He was short, only an inch or two taller than me, with a stubby nose, and cheeks that seemed to flap every time he took a breath.

"Like this," he was saying, swiping at the boot he had taken. "Look at me!"

A trick. We weren't supposed to look them directly in the eyes, either.

I heard a few chuckles around me-not from the girls, but from more PSFs gathered at his back.