Feedback by Robison Wells Read Free Book Online

face.
    “There’s a dupe of you?”
    She nodded. “Yep. I told you, they don’t keep you here unless they’ve made a dupe of you.”
    “So where is it? What’s it doing?”
    Before she could answer, the door opened. Cold air blew into the room and people began to walk in.
    I recognized a lot of them. Mason looked at me long enough to open his mouth like he was going to say something, but then passed my bench and moved up to the front. Joel actually waved before moving on, and I wondered whether he knew that I’d been the one who’d killed him—well, killed his dupe after he’d turned on us. I’d stabbed him with a pair of garden shears.
    I noticed that several who were coming in were holding gauze on their arms. Someone must have been at the door, checking everyone with a box cutter.
    Laura entered the room, and I turned to Lily. “Is that the real Laura? The one who went to detention?”
    “She’s true blue, the same one you knew,” Lily said. She lowered her voice even more. “We were in detention together—she showed up the day after I did. The little princess thought she’d get rewarded for what she did to … well, for what she did.”
    Laura wasn’t like Dylan. She didn’t look depressed or guilty. Instead, she held her head high as she made her way to the front of the room.
    I knew she was goading me, but it was working. Dylan thought he was guilty because his dupe had done something, but Laura actually had—she’d been there. She’d tried to kill me.
    Jane put her hand on mine, and I realized it had been clenched in a fist.
    “It’s okay,” she said softly.
    “I was there,” I whispered, my chest tight.
    “So was I.” There was bitterness in Jane’s words, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because of me or Laura.
    Lily leaned over. “Don’t worry about Laura,” she said. “Look.”
    I hadn’t noticed while she’d walked, but as Laura turned to sit, I saw her wrists were wrapped tightly in chains. Mouse strung another chain from Laura’s shackles to a round metal loop in the wall.
    I didn’t have time to ask who had punished her—Maxfield or this town—because Birdman was standing up now, glaring for the room to quiet down.
    I glanced around, getting a full look at the crowd. I counted about forty, and I recognized maybe half from the school. I noticed Jelly and Walnut sitting together in the back, which now made, at most, four people who I actually knew from the school—four people who were humans there, not dupes.
    “Pipe down,” Birdman shouted, and the room quieted almost instantly. He looked at Harvard, who was standing by the door. “Who’s missing?”
    “Carrie. And we’ve got Lance, Chris, Kaitlyn, and Trena out on watch.”
    Birdman nodded and scanned the crowd. He laid a large piece of cloth over the podium and pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket.
    “You all know Benson Fisher and Becky Allred are here. Let’s get one thing clear: no one is going to say a word about them outside this room. They’re valuable, and anyone who screws that up will regret it. Got that?”
    No one said anything, though I saw a few heads nodding.
    “Okay,” he continued. “Let’s hear today’s reports, and we’ll see if he can fill in a few gaps. Anyone pop since last night?”
    One girl, sitting near the front, timidly raised her hand. I recognized her from the Society—Taylor. She was one of the younger ones. The only thing I remembered about her was that she was always smiling. That was how the Society was—they were either smiling and carefree or scowling with disapproval.
    Birdman pointed to her, and wrote on his cloth. “What happened?”
    Her voice was small. “It was late last night,” Taylor started. “I saw it all—I was scared. Everyone was getting herded into the detention room.”
    Lily whispered, “After the fence last night, they rounded up the survivors and sent them back to school. We figured they were going down to detention.”
    “What’s down