“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.

The main foyer inside was ringed with students, mostly sitting against the walls or on the stairs. There were a few cardboard boxes of food that Havoc had dragged up from the cafeteria. Without any clear idea of what was going to happen, they didn’t really feel compelled to fulfill their contracts, so they just left the unprepared food—some still frozen—for us to fend for ourselves. I don’t think anyone complained.

It was Isaiah who had called the meeting, and he sat on a stone bench by the front door, a notebook in hand. We were going to be discussing our negotiations with the school. The room was silent, everyone determined to hear every word.

Isaiah raised an eyebrow when he saw Becky and me sitting together on the floor. She looked away.

“So what’s the most important thing that we want?” he asked. He wrote a heading across the top of the paper and underlined it.

“We want to get out of here,” Curtis said. “All of us.”

Isaiah drew a bullet point but didn’t continue. “We can’t just take that to them. This is a negotiation. All of us leaving gives them nothing.”

“What?” Carrie leaned forward. “We can’t make a compromise about that. We can’t say ‘let half of us go.’”

Isaiah shook his head. “Then all we’re doing is making a demand, not negotiating. And call me crazy, but I don’t think that we want to make demands of a school that kills people.”

One of the Society girls raised her hand. “What if we start with something simple, like ask them why we’re here?”

Isaiah nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. That’s better.”

“I think it’s obvious why we’re here,” Oakland said. He was slouching in his chair, wearing a hooded sweatshirt instead of his uniform. “We’re being researched. This is some big stupid psychological experiment.”

Isaiah raised an eyebrow. “This is obvious?”

“Of course it is,” he said. “Why do you think that all this weird stuff happens? Why do they lock the doors and leave us outside? It’s all just to see what we’ll do. And these robots are part of it.” He pointed over to me. “Maybe they wanted to see what he’d do if he had a girlfriend, so they programmed Jane to like him, and then they wanted to see what would happen if the girlfriend died, so they sent Dylan.”

No one said anything, but Isaiah looked unconvinced.

“I’m serious,” Oakland said. “Why else would they have one robot beat the crap out of another one? Those things can’t be cheap.”

Mason spoke up, but quietly. “If they wanted to see what happens when someone’s girlfriend—or boyfriend—dies, they didn’t need to make robots do it.”

I didn’t look at Becky. She was perfectly still and silent.

“What about being trained?” Hector asked. “Why else would they make us play paintball? There aren’t any cameras in the woods, so it can’t be part of a research experiment.”

Curtis spoke next. “I think it’s safe to say that wherever there are androids there are cameras.”

“Yeah,” Oakland said. “And here’s another thing. If we’re being trained for something, then what is it? No one ever leaves here, and no one is getting any better at anything. If this is a training program then it’s got to be the most expensive, most worthless training ever.”

Mouse nodded. “And if they just want to train a bunch of super soldiers, why not program the androids to do that?”

Isaiah jumped in, loudly, to stop anyone else from talking. “I think this is why we need to ask them why we’re here. Let’s just ask.”

Rosa stood. She was carrying a worn notebook and a small bag. Isaiah continued to speak, but Rosa interrupted.

“Can I say something?” Her hands were shaking.

A few people nodded.

“I need to explain,” she said. Our eyes met for an instant, but she looked away, staring at the floor. Tears were flowing down her face now. Carrie stood, but Rosa waved for her to stop.

She opened her notebook. With a quivering voice, she spoke.

“I’ve been in that room before,” she said.

Whispers erupted around the room, and Rosa glanced up, fear and guilt in her eyes. “I promise I didn’t know that anyone was a . . . robot. I didn’t know, I swear.” She looked back at her notebook. “It was more than a year ago, and I was doing maintenance. I was in the library, all alone, and I had all the tools with me. I decided to open a vent and see where it went. I thought maybe it would go down into wherever the closets go.”