Free to Fall

29

IT TOOK NO EFFORT NOT TO CRY. It was as if my insides had turned to dry sand when North said the words Griffin died, my emotions disappearing into dust.

“Rory, talk to me. Are you okay?”

I was still standing where I’d been standing, less than a foot from North’s chair, but I was eons away. My brain clung to its pragmatism, determined to solve this, to gather the facts that would explain how this happened, how I could’ve lost my father literally less than an hour after I’d found him.

“How did he die?” My voice sounded hollow. The way I felt.

North turned back to his screen. “Cerebral venous thrombosis. But it doesn’t say what that is.”

“It was a blood clot in his brain,” I said. The same way my mom had died, except hers was in her lungs. My eyes came into focus. “Could nanobots do something like that?”

“I don’t know. I can’t even—” He clasped his hands behind his neck, cradling his head between his elbows. “It’s insane, Rory. He’s been dead for three days and they’re telling the world he’s still alive. How long are they going to keep this up?”

“For as long as it takes to convince people that Gnosis can run itself without him,” I said flatly. “Then they’ll have him suffer some setback in whatever ‘private facility’ they’re supposedly sending him to, and to everyone’s great surprise and shock, he’ll die.” I met North’s gaze. “You said it yourself. They control the medium, so they control the message.”

“Rory, this is seriously effed up. How does a thirty-five-year-old man have a stroke and die?”

“Because they killed him, North.” My voice was uncharacteristically cold. I couldn’t help it. The warmth that filled this tiny room a few moments ago, when our bodies were pressed against each other’s, was gone.

“You think they caused his stroke?”

“Think about it. He was about to say something critical of Gnosis two days before the Gold’s launch, on national television. We saw him talking to Dr. Tarsus right before, remember? She knew what he was about to do. The Few couldn’t risk the fallout of whatever he was going to say.”

“Okay,” North said slowly. “But how?”

“If nanobots can mimic oxytocin, why couldn’t they clump together to cause a clot? Tarsus was standing with him on the stage. She was close enough. She could’ve done it from her handheld.” I pointed at North’s computer screen. “Is there a link to the autopsy?”

North scanned the page then tapped his screen. “An autopsy was declined. There’s a form here, signed by his father.”

His father. My grandfather. Why wouldn’t he want an autopsy? Because he already knew what it would show. Griffin’s voice echoed in my head. My parents never liked Aviana. My stepfather hated her.

“It must be his stepfather,” I heard North say. “The last name’s not the same.” He squinted at his screen. “It’s hard to read the signature, but it looks like it says Robert Atwater.”

My chest contracted like a corset. I couldn’t breathe.

“Robert Atwater is Griffin Payne’s father.” I nearly choked on the words.

North looked over his shoulder at me. “You know him?”

I managed to respond before I threw up. “He’s the dean.”

I lay on North’s couch, my mind whirling, my stomach churning, wishing I could rewind my life. If only I hadn’t picked akratic paracusia as my research topic. If only I hadn’t applied to Theden in the first place. I could be in Seattle right now, blissfully addicted to my handheld, convinced, like Beck was, that I was living my best life. Instead I was here. Drowning in the awareness of how bad things really were.

How easily I’d fallen for it. Dean Atwater’s inquisition the day after the Gnosis party. His urging that I tell him all that I knew. It was all an act, part of the society’s evaluation process, designed to test my allegiance. I saw that now. He wasn’t trying to root out society members. He was trying to weed out those who didn’t have what it took to become one.

I realized all at once what had been bothering me. The thing I couldn’t put my finger on. The dean made that comment the first day of school about my not letting history deter me. But my real history wouldn’t have deterred me. I was the daughter of a valedictorian, not a dropout. He knew that. But he assumed I never would. He was the one who’d altered my mom’s file.

I pulled up Griffin’s Panopticon page on North’s tablet. The “Early Life” section said that Griffin had been raised by his mother and a stepfather but didn’t mention a name. His biological father was killed in a boating accident off Cape Cod two weeks before Griffin was born.

“How are you feeling?” North had emerged from the closet, carrying a plastic trash can. I groaned, covering my face with my hands.

“Mortified,” I said from behind my palms. “You cleaned up my puke.”

“I must really love you,” North replied.

I bit my lip, keeping my face hidden. Love. Was that what this was? I wanted the brain space to think about it, but every ounce of gray matter was focused on the Few and how to take them down. I let my hands fall and nodded a little, the corners of my mouth turning up just a bit. It wasn’t a response, exactly, but North didn’t seem to be looking for one.

“How are you feeling, really?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “None of it feels real. Even the part about Griffin being my father in the first place. It’s like I’m living someone else’s existence. And yet, the one I had before, it never really felt like mine either.”

“I know what that’s like,” North said. “Feeling like you don’t belong in your own life. That’s how it was for me growing up. My dad was my real dad, but we might as well have been strangers.” North hesitated for a second. “So why not leave? I mean, what’s keeping you at Theden, knowing what you know about the Few? If it goes as high up as the dean, then the whole school is under its thumb.”

“It’s more than being under its thumb,” I said. “The society is the whole reason the school exists. Theden is their breeding ground.”

“Then why stay?” He knelt down so we were at eye level. “I have an apartment in New York City. Paid for in cash. You and I, we could—”

“I can’t leave,” I told him. “Not until I stop them. Not after what they’ve done. If I’m right, then these people killed both my parents, North. And they’ve brainwashed my best friend. Not to mention hundreds of millions of other people.” I shook my head. “I can’t just run away.”

North sighed. “I knew you were going to say that. But I can’t let you go back into that place, their godforsaken tomb, by yourself.”

I knew better than to argue with him. But I was going back in. Whether or not I had a way out.

I left North’s apartment not long after that. Our conversation had come to a standstill. He felt how he felt, and I wouldn’t budge. There wasn’t much else to say.

The courtyard was quiet when I got back, no doubt because of the cold. The temperature had dropped ten degrees since last night, and the wind had picked up. It was now whistling through the dry leaves of the maple trees that lined the campus sidewalks, ripping them from their stems and tossing them in the air. I tilted my head back and looked up at our window. Our light was on. I was almost certain I’d turned it off.

The main door was propped open with a rock, so I hurried inside out of the wind. I took the stairs two at a time, digging in my bag for my Gemini. But it wasn’t in my bag. It was in the belly of the dining hall’s trash bin.

Crap. I was locked out of my room.

“You accidentally threw it away?” Izzy was looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

“It was on my tray at dinner,” I said, refusing to be defensive. “I must’ve dumped it with my food.”

“And you’re just now realizing it?”

“I’ve been at the library,” I lied. “I thought it was in my bag. So can I borrow yours? I need to call the janitor.”

“Sure,” she said, unsnapping her Gold from her wrist. “Unlock,” she said to the device before handing it to me. I gave her a quizzical look. “It’s tethered to your voice,” she explained. “It won’t work for someone else unless you unlock it first.” Oh good, I thought. So your phone won’t activate the nanobots in someone else’s brain.

I didn’t even want to hold the thing, much less put it near my head. But I took it from Izzy and quickly dialed the campus help line. The janitor was at my door five minutes later with a key card. He, too, seemed confused about how a person could lose their handheld and not realize it for several hours. “When does your new one arrive?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” I lied, and thanked him for his help.

The moment I stepped through my door I froze. I’d left Dr. Tarsus’s yearbook on my desk, open to her senior photo. The yearbook was gone. Its disappearance reminded me that this wasn’t the first time someone had come into my room. I checked under my pillow, then grabbed Paradise Lost and began flipping pages, looking for another handwritten clue. But there wasn’t any.

I sighed and stepped out of my shoes, climbing into bed without bothering to wash my face or brush my teeth. It was hard to care about zits and cavities at this point. “How far I’ve come,” I muttered, yanking my blanket up to my chin. As soon as my fingers touched the crisscross orange stitching at the top right corner, I bolted upright in bed. There were two of them in the design, one at the top right corner, by itself, away from the tiled square design and the other in the center of the smallest square. Liam had told me that the entrance to the tomb was in that smallest inner room, exactly where my mom had sewn an orange X.

X for Exit.

My eyes jumped from that X to the other one, seeing for the first time what my mom had left me.

A map.

Flinging off the covers, I sprung out of bed then smoothed my blanket back down. Liam had said that the rooms of the tomb were laid out the way the squares on my blanket were, so if I could figure out where the entrance was, I’d be able to pinpoint where the other X would be. Maybe it was my way out.

I grabbed my tablet off the desk and launched my map. I started with my current location then scrolled over to the edge of the woods, toward the cemetery. When the fence came into view, I switched over to satellite mode and zoomed out. Almost immediately, I gasped. It’d been there all along. I just couldn’t see it from the ground.

The stone sidewalks of the cemetery were laid out in the same tiling pattern as the squares on my blanket. My eyes went to the innermost square. It enclosed the patch of lawn where I’d seen the apple tree, right across from North’s mausoleum hideout. The mausoleum was also surrounded on all four sides by stone. It was the second square in a Fibonacci sequence. The spot where my mom had put the first orange X.

My heart picked up, each beat crashing into the next, as I stared at the aerial shot on my screen. The mausoleum was the entrance to the tomb. It had to be. It explained why there was no body in the coffin, and why the lid was so light, and why the floors were swept every week. It also made sense that there would be a lone apple tree in the innermost square. The iconic symbol of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

“Now how do I get in?” I asked aloud, double-tapping my screen for a ground shot of the mausoleum, as if I might find some clue there. But of course, what I really needed was a look at the inside of the space. The coffin that I was sure hid a stairway into the earth. Staring at the outside of the building would get me nowhere.

So I zoomed back out. Placing the other X would be harder, because the stone tiling stopped at the cemetery gates. Wherever it was, it wasn’t on campus. It was much farther away. I’d have to do the math to figure out exactly how far. But I could, as long as the pattern held up.

Fibonacci numbers followed a particular sequence. The first two numbers were always zero and one, and every number after that was the sum of the previous two numbers. The pattern on my blanket was a tiling with squares whose side lengths were successive Fibonacci numbers, with a series of curved arcs connecting the corners of the squares and forming a golden spiral. I knew that the two smallest squares were one millimeter on each side, and that the largest was fifty-five by fifty-five. I’d measured them when I was a kid. The second orange cross-stitch was set away from the squares, at the widest curve of the spiral, which ended at the stitch. I had two questions to answer: How many millimeters away from the innermost square was that little X, and what was the corresponding distance in miles?

I used the scale on my map to figure out that the mausoleum was a twelve-foot square. So one millimeter on my blanket was equal to twelve feet on the map. I immediately downloaded a ruler app and began measuring out what would’ve been the next several squares on my blanket, the ones my mom hadn’t stitched. Why had she stopped after the tenth square? My only guess was that that’s where the Few’s tomb ended, probably at the big arena they’d taken us to, which according to my map was just beneath the Theden Green. The orange stitch, then, was pointing to something outside the tomb, something that lay at the tip of the arc on the fourteenth square.

I went back to my map and began drawing squares on my screen with my stylus. The draw function allowed me to type in the side lengths of each one, so I just had to line them up in the right pattern. It was staggering, the precision with which the tomb must’ve been built. Not just the tomb, but the cemetery and campus and town above it, all laid out in a careful mathematical sequence.

When I got to the fourteenth square, I stopped and stared. There, near the northeast corner, right where the second orange cross-stitch would be, was the Enfield Reservoir. Owned by the Theden Initiative, funder of the SynOx study, the same entity that controlled Gnosis and my school, a man-made pool occupying a mere fraction of the quarry beneath it. I pictured the reservoir’s armed guards, electronic surveillance, and high-powered electric fence.

There was something underneath that water.