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  ******

  The four of them pushed through a thick metal door at the bottom of the stairwell. When they were outside, Vincent drank in great gulps of air – he had never climbed down so many stairs in his life.

  “Abigail, you want to take the young lady?” asked Jack. “I can take the boy in the truck.”

  They were standing on a sidewalk next to two, four-wheeled chunks of metal. The first was rounded and enclosed all the way round. The second was longer and open at the back.

  “Why can’t we just follow you in our transport?” asked Vincent.

  “The transport died on the way here,” said Jessica. “They found us a few blocks over.”

  “But like Jack said,” joined Abigail, “we can take you. We have some spare room.” She turned to Jessica. “We’ll take the van. Jack and Vincent can follow in the truck.”

  “We’ll see you in a minute, then,” said Jack. He tried to lead Vincent toward the half open vehicle on the left. Vincent didn’t move.

  “It’s ok, Vincent,” said Jessica. “It’s not far.” She gave him a reassuring look, then started for the other vehicle with Abigail.

  “She’s right,” said Jack. “Come on.” He didn’t touch Vincent this time as he began walking toward the truck. After a pause, Vincent followed.

  Jack rounded the front of the vehicle and pulled open the driver’s side door with a jerk. Cautiously, Vincent approached the side opposite. He grabbed the handle of the passenger door and gave it a good yank. When it opened, he had to hike his leg up to climb inside.

  “I almost ran into your little Newsight bike when you came flying in,” said Jack. “You’re lucky I saw you in time.”

  Vincent nodded absently as he looked around. The inside was far different than that of Simon’s transport, darker for one, and more complicated.

  Jack pulled a small, jagged strip of metal from his pocket and inserted into the dash. Vincent jumped when the vehicle roared to life.

  “The Hole isn’t too far,” said Jack. “But it is in the city.”

  “You mean toward the towers?” said Vincent.

  “The skyscrapers,” said Jack. “Yeah.”

  Vincent looked out the windshield. He could still see the tips of the skyline he had seen from Jessica’s room. There was a single, taller building among the others, the top of which climbed upward like a giant staircase.

  Vincent’s concentration was broken when the vehicle lurched forward. He grabbed onto the side of the door in spite of himself. Simon’s transport had been one thing – that ride had been smooth and quiet – Jack’s machine was quite another.

  “Who were you running from?” asked Jack.

  Vincent turned to him, confused, his eyes still darting out the windshield at their now vibrating surroundings.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before your transport died,” said Jack. He was ignoring the road – his eyes were on Vincent. “Your friend was driving like a bat out of hell. You had to have been running from someone.”

  “We weren’t running,” said Vincent. He wasn’t sure what made him lie. For some reason, though, it seemed the only option.

  “Ah,” said Jack. He turned to the road. “Of course not.” He pressed a button to his left. The window next to him slid down into the door, like a transport door into a pod. He propped his arm against the frame where the glass had just been. Almost instantly, Vincent’s nose was filled with a pungent, sticky scent. It seemed to follow them wherever they went.

  “Does this not run on a power cell?” asked Vincent.

  Jack snorted. “Power cell?” He removed his eyes from the road for several seconds at a time to look at Vincent. “They don’t teach you anything in the Seclusion, do they?”

  “Yeah they do,” said Vincent, indignant. “The simulations teach us all sorts of things.”

  Jack nodded, the same way he had when Vincent had told him he and Jessica weren’t running from anyone.

  “I know about injections,” pressed Vincent. “My mother works in Incubation back in the Seclusion. She was in charge of giving sick newborns their injections.”

  Jack breathed out, short and sharp. His mouth hung open. “I think you might be talking about a different kind of injection.”

  Vincent frowned, confused, but he didn’t argue. “Well I know about the cities,” he said. “I know about the Order attacks.”

  Jack lifted his eyebrows at this. “Really? They told you about the warnings?”

  Vincent nodded, trying to hide his confusion. Jack wasn’t fooled.

  “Other cities have been attacked,” he said, “but not ours. Not majorly, at least. Our first large scale contact with the Order was just a few days ago. In the outskirts, they dropped enough bombs to wipe a whole continent off the planet. The city itself wasn’t hit with a single one. We just got the pamphlets.”

  “Pamphlets?”

  Jack nodded. “The warning pamphlets.”

  “And what did they say?” asked Vincent.

  Jack shrugged, as if it were obvious. “The same thing as always: Leave. All the off-network cities have gotten them.”

  “Off-network,” repeated Vincent. “You mean the cities without Lenses?”

  Jack kept his gaze fixed forward as they drove. His eyes were fogged over with the same haze that had covered Abigail’s back in the room. “Washing was one of the few,” he said. “No one here wanted anything to do with Lenses. Thought they were too much. Too intrusive. But no one has a choice after the Order drops their pamphlets. They have to go to a standard city for protection.”

  Vincent tilted his head.

  “Cities that require Lenses,” said Jack.

  That sounded more familiar to Vincent, more like a Seclusion. “But why is that where people have to go?” he asked. “If they have to leave, why not go somewhere else?”

  Jack laughed, gruff, humorless. “People have tried. Some have tried to travel to a different off-network city, but somehow they never seem to make it. People try staying sometimes, too. The first city the Order dropped the pamphlets on, nearly everyone stayed. That turned out to be a mistake.” Jack bit down, hard, clenching his jaw as he stared straight ahead. “But we’re different,” he continued. “We’re prepared.”

  Vincent was silent for a while. He remembered his father talking about the cities after the first attack on the school. He had said the cities had it worse. Now, that seemed like an understatement.

  “So what happens to the others?” asked Vincent. “The ones who leave?”

  “They get their Lenses,” said Jack. “That’s the price of admission to get into a standard city. They won’t let you in without Lenses.”

  “But why?” pressed Vincent. “Why are they mandatory?”

  “For protection, mostly,” said Jack. “From the Order. They’re required for the simulations, too, but people seem to like those.”

  “Simulations?” said Vincent. “What are people trying to learn about?”

  Jack frowned for a second, then, seeming to realize something, he shook his head. “You’re thinking of the Seclusions. In the cities…” he turned back to the road, eyes fogging over once again, “…the simulations are different.”

  Vincent waited for him to continue, but the only sounds that followed were the sputters and kicks of the engine. Sighing, and feeling more lost than before, Vincent turned to the window. He leaned against it so his forehead vibrated against the glass, and he watched the road.

  Several minutes later, the towers that had once been silhouettes against the sky now blocked the horizon completely. As the vehicle – the truck, Jack called it – drew closer, Vincent felt like a mouse approaching the edge of some great jungle. His mouth was locked in a perpetual open position as he stared upward. The towers were in denser proximity than he had thought, clustered in blocked-off groves and flanked on all sides by gray-stone paths. Only a little ways down the first of these paths, Abigail rolled the van to a stop in front of them. Jack came to a stop as
well.

  “Are we here?” asked Vincent.

  “Close as we can get in the vehicles,” said Jack. He opened his door and jumped out. “We’ll walk the rest of the way. The Hole is only a few blocks up.”

  Pretending like the bulk of the sentence made sense to him, Vincent climbed from the truck. The pungent smell that had hit him when Jack first rolled down his window struck him again, this time stronger than before. In front of them, Abigail and Jessica climbed from the van. Jack took the lead without a sound. There was an eerie silence on the street that didn’t seem to want to be broken. It extended indefinitely ahead, no transports, no gray-suited men, no movement. The only noise was the unfailing echo of their own footsteps as they walked.

  They continued like that until they had crossed two roads running perpendicular to theirs. Jack brought them to a stop in front of a wide, open air structure with stone ramps lining the inside. He turned around.

  “This is it,” he said, looking at Vincent and Jessica. His tone seemed far too grave to reference the unimpressive five-story building in front of them. “Let me do the talking.”

  Vincent nodded, and Jessica followed suit. Satisfied, Jack turned around. He took the lead once again, this time heading for a vehicle-shaped opening in the building’s side. The hair on Vincent’s arms began to rise. He felt suddenly cold – something about the building’s unlit interior and damp stone walls made him uneasy.

  “What is this place?” he asked, his voice low, as they approached.

  “It was a parking garage.” said Jack. “Now it’s our shelter. We’ve been working on it for years, fortifying it. It’s where all the stayers live. The ones who want to survive, anyway.”

  Vincent said nothing back. They had entered the opening, and the dark, soil-scented air of the place seemed to hold the words in his throat. The echo of their footsteps was even louder now, but it was distorted, too, altered by the vehicles that scattered up and down the ramps. They faced the walls, pulled in at angles, parked and deserted.

  “We’re headed down,” said Jack, pointing to a stairwell to their left. “The Hole is on the two basement levels.”

  Vincent noticed that Jack had lowered his voice as well. The usual gruff tone there had been replaced by something more cautious.

  Vincent kept his head on a swivel as they started for the stairs. It was all too easy to imagine a swarm of ashen-suited men rushing from the shadows. Jack seemed equally alert, though Vincent wasn’t sure what the man was watching for.

  They pushed through a solid metal door into the stairwell. Even though it was nearly noon, the space was almost completely devoid of light. They had to pause for a moment on the top step to let their eyes adjust. When the pitch black had turned into more of a murky gray, they started down the first flight. It reminded Vincent of the climb down into Simon’s cellar. He was no keener on the idea of going underground now than he had been then. He stayed as close to Jack as he could without kicking the man’s heels.

  “Stand next to us,” said Abigail when they had reached the bottom platform. “So they can see you.”

  Unquestioning, Vincent and Jessica stepped forward so they stood between their escorts. They were staring at a door exactly like the one they had pushed through above, only this one, instead of having a pane of glass over the knob, was completely solid.

  Jack knocked on the door three times, with a slight gap between the second and third knocks. There was a pause, then the darkness gave way to a blinding light. Vincent brought his hands up on instinct, shielding his eyes. He thought the light was coming from above, but he wasn’t sure.

  “The newcomers?”

  A woman’s voice, stern and unyielding, called out to them.

  “Vincent and Jessica Wright,” said Jack. “Our niece and nephew.”

  There was silence while the lights continued to shine. Vincent managed to open his eyes long enough to see the door. A slit around eye-level had opened to expose a narrow, squinting set of eyes.

  The lights above them dimmed, and the door swung inward, instantly filling the stairwell with an inescapable, mechanical racket. Vincent lowered his arms and blinked several times in a row. When he could see again, the outline of the previous image, though fading, was overlain against the open door.

  “In,” said Jack – he had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound – and he started inside. Vincent followed. The space they stepped into was, in layout, exactly the same as the story above them, but in all other ways completely different. It was much better lit, illuminated in every corner by the white, fluorescent bulbs strung to the reinforced ceiling. The main ramp was lined with cubed structures made of burnt orange metal and covered at the doors with tattered sheets. Left of the structures was an array of tables (most with tents over them to catch the leaks), each with shoes or food or some other necessity on display. It wasn’t until Vincent turned to the right side of the ramp that he realized what was making the racket. A pointed, rotating machine was burrowing into the rock of the far wall. It filled the room with the grinding of metal on stone, and provided every other sound – those that could be heard, at least – with a constant backdrop.

  “I’ve paged Kendra!” The woman who had spoken to them through the stairwell door was standing right in front of them, but she had to shout to be heard. “She will have to approve them!” She flicked her head toward Vincent and Jessica. Next, she waved at an idle group of dust-covered men next to the machine burrowing through the wall. When they saw her, they started over. “Stay here!” She yelled once again, then turned away. A plume of dust rose off her tattered brown shirt as she went.

  Vincent turned to Jack, but the man wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were locked on the half dozen rough-looking men walking in their direction.

  “Jack?” shouted the man at the front of the group. He shook Jack’s hand. “Who are your friends?” The man turned his gaze on Vincent. Vincent felt the man’s eyes roam over the scratches on his face, then the splatters of blood on his clothes.

  “This is my nephew, Vincent,” said Jack, curling his hand protectively around the back of Vincent’s neck. “And this is my niece, Jessica.” Then, when he saw the man’s gaze lingering on their bloodied clothes, added: “They were in a car crash.”

  The man snorted. “Lot of traffic out there, that’s to be sure.” He brushed his dust-covered hands off on his equally dust-covered pants, and he stepped forward. He held out his right hand to Vincent. “Name’s Bill,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Vincent.”

  Vincent hesitated for a moment, then stepped forward and took the man’s outstretched hand. But they didn’t shake. Bill had frozen. A look of horror had begun to spread across his face, prying his mouth open in disbelief.

  With surprising speed, Bill thrust his free hand into the waistband of his pants and removed a black, L-shaped strip of metal. It had a hole on its front end and a crescent-like curve at the bend. Bill’s index finger hovered just over this crescent.

  Jack and Abigail stepped forward, but two of the men behind Bill held them back.

  Jack struggled to keep his tone level. “Put the gun down, Bill.”