“Yes,” I said, praying I could go back to my room and sleep, but strongly suspecting I was about to do thirty push-ups over the nail board instead.
Ms. Strepp stood up briskly, tapped the papers into a briefcase, and seemed like her usual cold, hateful self. “Okay. Good job, Becca,” she said, and left the room without looking at me.
Mouth open, I just stared after her.
Then it hit me: This was another one of her crazy-house games. She was keeping me off-balance, unable to know what to expect.
It was working very well.
44
CASSIE
“ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS?” Nathaniel’s voice was low in my ear.
“No,” I said. “But I don’t know what else to do.” It was still weird, hanging with the Provost’s son—I’d despised him for so long. But I knew he hadn’t ratted me out about going to the Boundary yesterday, and this morning he’d been looking out for me, at Harrison’s house. It was still hard to believe that schmuck was dead. As soon as I had a minute to feel glad about it, I intended to.
Now it was dark, but we still had a couple of hours till curfew. I should be at home doing schoolwork—my grades had suffered since Becca had disappeared—but instead I was out here, preparing to break the law for the first time in my life.
“This is the only boundary road, right?” I asked quietly. “There’s not some secret entrance hidden somewhere that only the Outsiders know about?” I was pretty sure it was, but wanted to double-check. Before last week, I would have said I knew the cell like I knew my garden tools. Since then I’d found out that it had a lot of secrets.
“Yep,” Nathaniel said. “Our crew has been all over the Boundary. There’s one way into Cell B-97-4275, and one way out.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We’d left our mopeds behind—even their small electric engines would make more noise than us walking. With Pa’s rifle over my shoulder, I followed Nathaniel through a hole in the barbed wire, about two hundred yards from the open boundary gate. Cellfolk are so used to following the rules that the Provost doesn’t even bother closing or guarding the gate.
“This way.” Nathaniel’s voice was very low. He stepped carefully over rocks and avoided the clumps of wild roses that made a thick and effective thorny barrier. There was a big ditch, a gully, about a hundred yards in, and he climbed down one side and offered me his hand. After a moment of internal back-and-forth, I took it. He motioned for me to go first up the other side, I guess to catch me if I fell. I scrambled up the boulders, my feet sliding only a bit, and then I was up and holding out a hand for him.
“You’ve been out here before.” I wasn’t asking.
“Yes. We’ve done as much exploring as we could.”
“What for? I mean, what’s the point of knowing people from other cells?”
Nathaniel pause
d for a minute, the moonlight making a sculpture of his face, his cheekbones. “There’s a bigger picture,” he said finally. “There’s a whole world. There are tens of thousands of other cells. And that’s just in the United! There are other Uniteds out there—where people speak different languages, where they look different. There are oceans—bigger than you could possibly imagine. Not just one ocean. Five of them. All of the United is on one landmass, one huge chunk of land. But there are six other enormous, gigantic chunks of land.”
We walked in silence for a bit while I tried to wrap my mind around this. Was he just making it up? Maybe. What if he wasn’t? What if there really were oceans and huge lands besides the United? What would that mean for me? For any of us?
“Your ma got taken for a mood-adjust,” he surprised me by saying.
My brows came together and I got ready to lash out at him.
“Mine did, too.”
That was the last thing I expected him to say, and I gaped at him. In the night shadows, he gave me a half smile. “But they brought her back.”
“Yeah,” I said in confusion. “I’ve seen her standing with your dad, like at speeches and stuff.”
“That’s not really her.” Nathaniel sounded wistful. “I mean, that’s her—her body. But her mind is different. Like she’s not even there. Sometimes she doesn’t know who I am, or where she is. During the day she sits in a chair, not speaking. Not doing anything.”
This was horrible. I’d had no idea. As much as I’d imagined what had happened to my ma, it had never crossed my mind that having her come back might be worse.
“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”