Feedback by Robison Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

there?”
    Lily smirked. “It’s where the magic happens. You go there and they stick an implant in your head and make your dupe.”
    Taylor spoke again, her voice quavering. “Not everyone could fit in the room at once, so they were taking them down in shifts.”
    “Who was?” Birdman asked.
    “Ms. Vaughn was there,” Taylor said. “And the other dupes who had popped. Tapti, Hog, Mash … and I think Grace? Anyway, everyone had gone to detention and I was in the final group. There were about ten of us. It was … It was scary.”
    Birdman was taking notes on all this, and there was no emotion in his voice when he talked. “Then what?”
    “One of the dupes went down to detention with each group, so only Mash and Ms. Vaughn were left with us. Four of us—of them—tried to jump the dupes.”
    “Who?”
    “Me and three V’s,” she said.
    It felt like the air got sucked out of my lungs. Jane’s grip on my hand tightened.
    “Hector, Anna, and Catherine,” Taylor said.
    Birdman wrote the names on the cloth, and then looked up. “And?”
    “Anna had a knife. I don’t know where she got it. She stabbed Ms. Vaughn.” Taylor paused. The room was completely silent. “That’s all I remember. That’s when I popped.”
    He nodded, jotting down more notes while the room waited. Shelly raised her hand, and when Birdman finally looked up he called on her.
    “Hector is dead,” she said.
    Lily swore. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. As far as I could tell, Hector—the Hector who I’d known—had been human. He died for real.
    Even Birdman looked shocked. “You’re sure?”
    Shelly nodded. Taylor turned, the horrified look on her face obvious. She was wondering whether she’d done it. Birdman spoke before she could.
    “You haven’t popped?”
    Shelly shook her head. “Not yet. My dupe is still down there.”
    “How’d Hector die?”
    It took her a long time to answer, and after several seconds Taylor stood and left the meeting.
    “It wasn’t really Taylor, though,” I said, whispering to Jane. “It wasn’t even her emotions making the dupe do it, right? She’d popped, so it was just the artificial intelligence.”
    Jane nodded. “That doesn’t help much, though.”
    “It should.” I could feel the rage building inside me. The school wasn’t just imprisoning people anymore, wasn’t just killing them. It was tearing apart their minds.
    Lily responded instead of Jane. “It’s like what we said about losing your dupe. It sucks. Taylor just lost hers last night, and now she knows it killed her friend.”
    “Hector wasn’t her friend,” I said angrily. “She was Society.”
    Jane’s look was dark and cold. “You can drop that crap right now,” she hissed. “The gangs don’t mean a thing here.”
    She was wrong. No matter what Jane said, this town was divided. Birdman kept the people he could trust in the fort with him, and didn’t believe anyone was human unless they proved it with a blade. Maybe there weren’t gangs, but this wasn’t a utopia.
    Birdman tapped his pencil on the cloth again. “Who else is still active?”
    Seven people, including Shelly, raised their hands. I knew who they all were, though none of them well. Only one was a V. Most were Havoc kids.
    “Anyone want to report?”
    Mucus, a fat Havoc kid, raised his hand. “We’re all underground now. I was in the second group sent down to detention, and they took us to the cells.”
    “Individual or group?” Birdman asked without looking up.
    “Group.”
    Harvard spoke from the back of the room. “I don’t think there’re enough individual cells to handle that many people.”
    I turned to Lily. “How do they know that?”
    She smiled. “That’s the whole point of these meetings. Everyone who’s in this town has gone down the detention elevator and into the big underground complex beneath the school. When I got here they grilled me about it. They’ve made a whole map.”
    “What’s the point?”
    Lily