Free to Fall

30

“THERE’S SOMETHING UNDER the Enfield Reservoir,” I said to North at eight o’clock the next morning. I’d called him on Kate’s phone from Izzy’s Gold, which she’d been willing but reluctant to part with at breakfast. I was meeting her outside Hamilton Hall and timing it so I’d arrive just as first period was starting so I wouldn’t have any alone time with Dr. Tarsus.

“What kind of something?” North asked, his voice echoing a little. Paradiso’s tiny bathroom was the café’s only private space.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But whatever it is, my mom thought it was important.” I quickly told him what I’d figured out about my blanket, and how it corresponded to the landscape around the cemetery. “It’s a Fibonacci tile,” I explained. “Which basically just means that there’s this sequence of bigger and bigger connected squares with a spiral running through them. The pattern on my blanket stops after ten squares, and I think because that’s where the tomb stops. But the spiral continues into what would’ve been the fourteenth square, and that’s where my mom stitched the second X.” I was talking fast now, hurrying to get it all out. “And if you keep drawing the spiral even farther, all the way out to where the twenty-first square would be, you run into the Gnosis headquarters. Like, right through the center of the building. So I’m thinking all three are connected underground—the tomb, whatever’s beneath the reservoir, and the Gnosis complex.”

“Wow,” North said. “It’s like something out of a bad Nicolas Cage movie from the early aughts.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You don’t know who Nicolas Cage is?” North sounded incredulous. “You need to see National Treasure immediately. I mean, it’s terrible, but since you’re essentially living it, you ought to at least see it.”

“Focus please. The Enfield Reservoir. What would the Few put under there, and why?”

As I was talking, I spotted Dean Atwater across the courtyard and physically recoiled. Now that the courtyard had begun to clear, the walkway between Hamilton and Jay was in his direct sightline. I ducked behind the buildings, out of view.

“Beats me,” North was saying. “Want to drive out there this afternoon and check it out? I get off at four.”

“Definitely,” I replied, pulling the Gold away from my ear. 8:44. Dr. Tarsus would lock her classroom door in sixty seconds. “I gotta go,” I told North. “I’ll come by Paradiso after my last class.”

I got to practicum at exactly 8:45, just as Dr. Tarsus was pulling the door closed. I caught it with my hand. “Feeling better today?” she asked when she saw me.

“Much,” I told her, and flashed my brightest smile. “Looking forward to that make-up session.”

“Glad to hear it,” she replied, reaching into the pocket of her blazer. “You’ll need this.” I looked down at her hand and saw a small envelope pressed between her finger and thumb. She handed it to me at waist level, as if she were trying to keep it out of view. I quickly slipped it into my bag.

“Let’s get started,” she said then, louder, to the whole class.

I stepped into my pod and dropped my bag in the bin by my seat, but not before pulling the envelope back out. I heard a sliding sound as I lifted it sideways, and heaviness at the lower end.

“The goal today is escape,” I heard Tarsus say. “You’ll be evaluated based on your ability to reason without relying on your sensory perception. How well can you make decisions in the dark?”

I tore open the envelope and stared at its contents. The silver chain and pendant were in a heap at the bottom corner. She was giving the necklace back?

My screen turned on, but the scene was so dimly lit, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. I thought for a second that my screen was messed up until I heard Dr. Tarsus’s voice again.

“We rely on our senses to guide us. But what if you were in a situation where your senses were compromised? How would your mind compensate?”

I looked down at my necklace again. You’ll need this, she’d said. For what?

“You’re on the top floor of a burning building,” Dr. Tarsus was saying. “There is a single elevator that connects all the floors and a stairwell between each set of floors, but these stairwells are not stacked, meaning that each one is in a different location.” These were important details and I’d only half heard them. I shoved the envelope with my necklace back into my bag and tried to listen. Burning building. Stairwells in different locations. Escape. “The fire in this building originated on your floor,” Tarsus went on, “and will quickly escalate. Your task is to get out of the building alive. The meter at the bottom of your screen will tell you how much smoke you’ve inhaled. If you lose consciousness, the simulation will end and you will get a zero score. Good luck.”

The lights in the room dimmed and the simulation began. I blinked a couple of times, as if that would help me see more clearly, but of course it didn’t because there was virtually no light on my screen. I looked around for the smoke Tarsus had mentioned, but I didn’t see any. Or any other signs of a fire. Find a stairwell, I told myself, moving forward slowly with my arms outstretched. A few seconds later my palms hit a surface. A cold, almost damp surface that felt like stone.

Confusion stalled my next thought. If this building was on fire, the walls wouldn’t be cold, and they certainly wouldn’t feel damp. Had I missed something she’d said?

Now that my eyes were adjusted to the semidarkness, I could make out the shape of something jutting out from the wall above my head. I reached up for it and felt something smooth and cylindrical mounted on a small platform. My fingers creeped up to the cylinder’s rounded edge then dipped down as I slid them over the top. Something stiff crunched beneath my middle finger and suddenly it registered. A candle with a burnt wick, mounted on a stone wall.

I was in the Few’s tomb.

It took effort not to obsess over the why—why had Tarsus put me in the tomb and instructed me to escape?—and instead to focus on the how—how was I going to get to whatever was beneath the reservoir? The clock at the bottom of my screen was ticking.

Now that I knew where I was, it took me only a few seconds to determine that I was in the room where the initiation had been held. I could make out the shape of the altar on the far wall. I’d seen the doors at opposite corners, so I moved through the one closest to me. The room I stepped into was smaller than the one I’d been in, which told me I was moving toward the center.

I turned and sprinted back through the altar room, toward the other door. I guessed that I was in the third or fourth square in the sequence, so I had six or seven more to go until I reached the arena and another four to get to the reservoir.

Since I knew where the doors were—at opposite corners on opposite walls—I could move through the rooms quickly, slowing down only when I passed through the narrow doors. When I ran into the arena, I stopped for a moment to catch my breath and to marvel again at the sheer size of the space, standing completely still so as not to lose my bearings. It was so dark that if I got turned around, I’d be running in circles to find the opposite wall.

When my breathing slowed, I started moving again, jogging toward the other end of the massive circular stage, praying for another door. My heart leaped when I felt an opening in the rock. It was a tunnel.

The timer at the bottom of my screen had hit 10:00:00. I had ten minutes to get to whatever was under the reservoir. I clung to the wall at my right, keeping one palm on the stone and the other out in front of me as I fell into a steady jog, the wall curving into the shape of a spiral. Even though I was only running in place in my pod, I’d never make it the whole way if I tried to sprint.

I figured it’d take me at least seven minutes to cover that much distance, but just shy of six I ran smack into a wall. In the darkness I didn’t see it coming. It was made of stone, like the one beside me, and I felt around for an opening, refusing to accept that it could be a dead end. My hand slid across a stone that protruded from the rest. Instinctively, I pressed it, the wall slid away.

Behind it was another wall, this one made of glass and lit from behind. I blinked rapidly, blinded by the bright light. On the other side of the glass was a smooth steel wall with a vault door in the center, engraved with a giant G. The Gnosis logo. Beside the door was a mounted wall mic with a red button beneath it and a rectangular screen above it. To the right of the mic was a control panel with rows of green lights.

I touched the glass in front of me to get a sense of how thick it was, and the glass became a touchscreen with a keypad. Twelve boxes appeared, with numbers inside the first four.

It was a password sequence. My brain went to work to find a pattern. Two plus three equaled five, and five plus three equaled eight, but eight plus three didn’t equal four. Damn it. My eyes flicked to the bottom of my screen. 2:59:45 remaining. I felt my mood dip. The time was going to run out while I was still standing here.

Think, Rory, I told myself. My mom had thought of everything. She had to have left me a clue for this. My mind raced over everything she’d wanted me to have. The necklace, the note, the blanket.

The blanket. With its mathematical pattern.

In a flash, I saw it. It wasn’t 2, 5, 8, and 4. It was 2,584, the twentieth number in the Fibonacci sequence. I’d calculated it last night. What was the next number in the sequence? My brain stalled. I couldn’t remember. I’d have to start at the beginning. The first two numbers were zero and one, and every number after that was the sum of the two before it. Doing the math, the number right after 2,584 was 4,181. I quickly typed four, one, eight, and one into the next four boxes. Now for the last four: 2,584 + 4,181 = 6,765. I added these, took a breath, and touched the enter button.

Clang.

I jumped at the loud sound, metal against metal. A lock lifting out of place. A moment later there was a sound like a puff of air, and then a whoosh as the glass retracted and slid away. My eyes darted to the timer: 1:45:00 left.

I stepped inside the chamber. As soon as I did, the glass resealed behind me. There was a sucking sound as it resealed, trapping me between glass and steel. Now what? I scanned the small chamber. The red button beneath the mic was blinking, as if the mic were recording. Was I supposed to say something? If there was a password, I certainly didn’t know it. I watched as the screen above the mic lit up with a moving wave pattern, as if I was speaking.

Then I heard a beep as the lights on the control panel flashed from green to red, followed by a loud metallic snap as the lock on the vault door disengaged.

It was letting me in.

As I reached to pull open the vault door, I noticed for the first time that the skin on my arm was black. I surveyed the rest of me and realized why the system was letting me in. It thought I was someone else. All this time, I’d been Dr. Tarsus in this simulation and hadn’t realized it. No wonder I’d gotten here so fast. My virtual legs were twice as long.

With only ten seconds left on my timer, I darted through the heptagonal opening and into the biggest room I’d ever been in.

It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Lit with an eerie blue light. Stacked with rows and rows of identical machines, from floor to ceiling. So cold, it felt like a freezer.

The floor beneath me was grated and raised several feet off the ground beneath it, which seemed to be cut from sparkling stone. I looked up at the ceiling, more than a football field away. The size, the machines, the temperature. This was a server room. It had to be.

Look to your right!

The words were a boom, like thunder, bathing me in fear and relief. The voice was here, helping me, and, from its tone, it cared about this as much as I did. I spun to my right and saw a machine that looked different than the others. Tri-panel screens suspended above a glass desk sitting inside a copper-colored cage. I took a step toward it and my screen went black.

“No,” I blurted out. “Not yet.”

But the timer had run out and the simulation was over. A few seconds later, my screen lit up with our class roster, ranked by escape times. My name was at the middle of the list. Inconspicuous. As far as anyone else in the class could tell, I’d done the same simulation they had. Only Tarsus and I knew the truth: that, for some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, she was trying to help me. She’d not only let me loose in the tomb, she’d showed me how to access Gnosis’s server bank.

Our teacher spent the rest of the class period going over the various mistakes my classmates had made in their sims. I didn’t hear a word of it. I just stared at my pendant.

Had she left that copy of my mom’s transcript under my pillow? Had she written Dr. Hildebrand’s name in North’s book? I heard the voice loud and clear then, not a boom like before, but more of an echo. Two words, resounding in my head.

Trust her.