Tim

  “The words of truth are always paradoxical.”

  --Lao Tzu

  Worse, while Haley hasn’t noticed me yet, Kei’s eyes are already locked onto me as soon as I step around the corner. I walk straight forward five steps before meeting her gaze and realizing – terrifyingly – that I haven’t stopped Fading, yet she’s watching me as though I’m the only thing interesting in all the world.

  Kei snaps her fingers and points, and suddenly Haley’s eyes shift and blink and she’s now staring at me also. Sure, she didn’t see me right off, but now her eyes burn a hole through my shield of stealth, and straight through my soul.

  And Kei simply watches as I keep walking forward, trying to come up with a reason why it wouldn’t look suspicious to just turn and bolt.

  But with every step forward I become more and more obvious, until the Fade becomes impossible to hold, even if I wanted to, and my number of excuses for fleeing diminishes to nothing. The Fade falls, and I face Kei and Haley as I am.

  Such as that is.

  “What are you doing, Tim?” Haley asks. Kei says nothing, but raises her right eyebrow as if to reiterate the question.

  “Going to my locker.” If you’re going to play dumb, state the obvious. Haley’s jaw juts out as she gives me a disbelieving look, and she draws in a breath to lay into me.

  “Then you’ll want to put this in there,” Kei interrupts, holding out my notebook. “Wouldn’t want to leave it around where just anyone could go through it.”

  I gulp. “You read my notes?” I demand, snatching it from her hand.

  “Just enough to figure out who it belonged to.”

  “How much was that?”

  “Your name was inside the back cover.”

  “Oh.” That sinks in like a pile of bricks in my stomach. I look from one to the other. “Well, thank you for returning it. I’ll just put this away.”

  “Interesting ideas you have in there,” Haley comments, her hands leaving her hips so she could fold her arms across her chest.

  “Look, I don’t know what you think you thought you read,” I say quickly. Actually, I have a very good idea, and this is very bad.

  “Thought?” Kei raises her eyebrow again. It’s pretty clear she knows exactly what she read.

  I slip between them to reach my locker, pressing close to Kei as if I were about to shoulder her aside. “Not here,” I says under my breath. I push, and for a second Kei is like a steel pillar, before she realizes she’s in my path. She bends like the breeze and is no longer blocking me, swaying gracefully clear.

  She slides aside less than a foot, just enough to let me open the locker, her eyes on me. Expectant. “Where?” she says quietly.

  I glance from side-to-side, trying to look casual, and probably looking as furtive and suspicious as possible, if anyone’s watching. Well, Haley is on one side, and Kei on the other, both staring, but I’m way past fooling them. “Look, I’ve gotta go,” I says, a bit louder. “My uncle’s expecting me at his shop.” Which is true, though basically I had the run of the place while I kept an eye on a project of his.

  Haley and Kei on either side of me lock eyes and nod. “See you later, then,” Haley tells me. Which sounds ominous, since the way to my uncle’s workshop is a path straight through the woods. And everyone knows it.

  Time to think of what I’m going to say.

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  ***

  “They’re testing us.” It sounds a little crazy to say it out loud, but the girls take it without batting an eye. I keep going anyway, trying to get it out before they start arguing or shut me up. “You have to have noticed how much tougher everything is at school, but we’re all breezing through it.”

  We’re standing in a glade halfway through the forest. They ambushed me at the start of my walk, like I expected, but I insisted on keeping quiet until we were away from the school.

  “The stuff we’re doing now, it’s not natural.” I have to get through to them. They aren’t just fearless kids. I’ve seen the data, and these are two of our smartest. Worse, I have an idea of just how smart.

  Haley nods. “Kept thinking it was just that we were in high school, now, but pumping iron and 5-mile runs seems kind of intense for gym class.” She’s standing in a ray of light piercing the forest canopy.

  “Not to mention how half the Freshman class is enrolled in AP honors classes,” Kei adds. “Even the ones for Seniors.” The hood of her hoodie’s over her head as she leans against a massive tree trunk. The shadows embrace her. I can still see her brilliant violet eyes clearly, gleaming in the dark. “Kind of like they’re trying to figure out just how smart we are.”

  “Tip of the iceberg,” I tell them. “Because this is a school, they’re gathering a lot of data onsite – it’s the best place to do it. Where it goes I don’t know. But… School security isn’t as good as they think it is. I’ve managed to get full access to most of it.”

  Haley cocks her head at me. “You hacked it, you mean?” Which is another way of saying I’m a criminal, the way she sees things, I’m betting. She doesn’t look too bothered, though.

  I shrug. “Part of it. They’ve got AIs on overwatch, even at the school. But I’ve got a few tricks. Point is, I’ve got enough of what they’re looking at, and my own AI to help me run the numbers. Nothing like the Big Tech ones, or the Government’s, but…”

  “But you’ve found something,” Kei finishes.

  “But I’ve found a lot of things,” I correct her.

  “How much?” she asks. She’s still unmoving under her tree, except to speak and to watch me. And Haley.

  I blink. It occurs to me this girl’s one of the biggest red flags the school has, with more blank spots and question marks in her story and profile than anyone. Really, more than all of us together.

  I have an uncomfortable feeling this is what someone feels in a mystery story, when they realize they’ve found out too much, and are about to be silenced.

  Still, I keep talking. This is all too much, and now that the dam has burst, I have to tell someone.

  “Some of us are pretty normal. Above average – I mean above above average, since most of us kind of started as regular above average.

  “But some of us… I keep running into words and phrases in the notes. ‘Genius.’ ‘Savant.’ ‘Olympic-level athlete.’ And then there are other words. ‘Superhuman.’ ‘Unnatural abilities.’ ‘Nonhuman.’” I pause to lick my lips. “The new drinks – the free lattes, smoothies, soft drinks, all of it – I’m pretty sure at least some of it has drugs.” Which is even crazier than it sounded, unless they can drop exactly the right dose for the right person into each drink it was being made. And assess, from moment to moment, whether each student has anything in their system which might react badly to the new drugs. Which apparently they can. “The new pop quizzes and gym exercises – they’re not just testing us. They’re amplifying us. And our abilities.”

  Kei eyes seem glazed and abstract under her hood. “Rats in a maze,” she breathes.

  “Lab rats,” Haley adds. She locks gazes with me. “And this is the whole school?”

  I snort. “Just our whole school? I wish. I think our school is a collection point for data. It’s guarded more carefully once they begin transmitting it, so I don’t have the details from offsite, but…”

  I pause and lick my lips. If everything I’ve said so far seems big, this is much bigger.

  “But…?” Kei prompts, her eyes never leaving me.

  “I don’t think this is our school. I think this is every school. In the whole country. Maybe the world.”

  “Say what?” Haley demands, her eyes wide, and a little wild.

  Kei just nods. “Makes sense.”

  Haley rounds on her. “What are you two talking about?” Knowing what I do about her stats, I do not want to be nearby if she goes ballistic.

  Kei’s eyes go from Haley to me. “Tell her.”

  I gulp as Haley whirls back towards me, moving just a little too fast for a normal kid. But then, none of us are normal. Something Kei clearly figured out before I did. In her what, three weeks here?

  “We’re—I think something happened recently, all over the world. I had my AI start looking. I couldn’t figure it out at first, so I had him looking for anything related to this the world was talking about. I didn’t find anything.”

  Haley says nothing, just taps her foot impatiently, and quickly. Kei’s like a statue, her eyes tracking us both.

  “Then I started looking for things we should have been talking about, but weren’t. Then I checked for when we stopped talking about them. Then I looked for what happened at about the same time…”

  “And…?” Haley’s eyes are boring into me.

  “Wait for it…” Kei chimes in.

  I draw in a deep breath. “The Sneeze. I think it set all of this off. Maybe it’s all the Sneeze, maybe that was just the final step. But there’s a Pre-Sneeze world and a Post-Sneeze world, and we’re definitely Post-Sneeze.” Okay, that made more sense when I said it in my head.

  “Gesundheit,” Kei adds, helpfully. Okay, it definitely made more sense in my head.

  “What could the Sneeze…?” Haley’s not having this.

  I gather myself. This is going to be a long explanation—

  Kei snorts. “Retroviruses. Or retrons. Or whatever. Someone used a pandemic that didn’t kill anyone to genetically alter the entire human race, or at least the kids.”

  I look over at her, mouth open. Okay, so maybe it isn’t so complicated. That sounds a lot more reasonable than what I going to explain. I didn’t even have to show them my big conspiracy wall.

  Haley looks at me as I started to nod, then glares at Kei. “Are you both crazy?”

  Okay, maybe the conspiracy wall’s back on the tour. Fortunately, I can bring it up on the screens in the basement of my uncle’s workshop, so we’re already on the way.

  “This is the kind of insane stuff people put on walls with red string,” Haley rants. Okay, they’re red lines on my graphics, but maybe the wall isn’t going to go over too well.

  “Really?” Kei asks. “What else fits the facts?”

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