The Truth Club only has three members.
The equation goes like this: if X is the percentage chance of someone in a secret group talking, as Y—the number of people in the group—gets bigger, X approaches 100. X is your acceptable risk of a blabbermouth. You can reduce X by trusting only trustworthy people, swearing everyone to secrecy, or eliminating members.
That last one’s not realistic. It’d be nice sometimes, though.
But somewhere between one and seven is the sweet spot where the Truth Club’s members won’t talk. The math gets funky. I didn’t believe it the first time I solved it, but it happens every time I run the numbers.
Faith, Hope, Charity. Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato. Snap, Crackle, Pop.
Claire, Sora, Keith.
----------------------------------------
Outside Victoria, British Columbia - May 23, 2043, 12:45 PM
- - - - -
{Stability 7/10}
{Skill Acquired: Physical Anomaly Resistance 1}
The Halcyon System’s telling me I’ve learned a skill. I don’t have the energy to care, though. I collapse onto the wooden benches in the gym’s second-floor spectator seating, sucking in air and rubbing my burning right eye. Tears run down my face: tears of pain, tears of anger. I was wrong. So wrong.
James did lie to me.
“That is Mr. Roberts.” My teeth grind together as I watch the thing that isn’t quite Mr. Roberts return slowly to the bleachers. He stands on them, looking almost exactly like he always does when he puts me through another set of laps or makes me re-do my push-ups because I’m not going low enough. It’s an almost perfect copy, but not quite.
“It’s not Mr. Roberts,” James says in my ear, and in that moment, I hate him. He ignores my glare—maybe he doesn’t even know I’m giving him the stink-eye—and keeps talking. “Mr. Roberts ceased to exist due to overexposure to R-389’s merge with R-0. Think of what you’re looking at as a photocopy turned upside down, set at an angle, and recopied. SHOCKS is working on identifying the specifics for this Type Three Incomprehensible, but all you need to know is that it’s not Mr. Roberts.”
I push down my anger; it seethes and bubbles, but it’s not helpful right now. I understand what James is doing. He’s giving me a lie to tell myself to make the thing that isn’t quite Mr. Roberts make sense in my mind. I won’t use it, though, because that thing was him. So, James’s lie? It’s a friendly, protective lie. He doesn’t mean to hurt me with it. But it’s still a lie. I’ll remember that it’s happened, and it’s not forgivable. James: Three—or maybe four? Mrs. Helquist: Zero. Alice: Too many to count.
But when I open my mouth, it’s not to argue. “He’s not coming up here, right?” My voice is shaky and pained, but I ask it without stumbling.
“T-3 Incomps typically mimic their hosts’ behavioral patterns, so you’d know more than me.”
I relax. Mr. Roberts never chased students who walked out of PE. I know; I’ve done it enough times to be sure. Still, the revolver feels warm in my sweaty hands. The salt stings my cut.
“Then I’m safe up here?” I ask.
“No. You’re safe in the shelter,” James replies. My heart drops, but it’s the truth. “Inside’s better than outside, but you need to get moving. R-389’s unreality level is going to wear at R-0. Your area’s third merge point is still out there as well.”
I don’t have a reply, so I pick myself up and keep moving. The upstairs is only eight classrooms long—four sets of two, with a bathroom and water fountain between the second and third sets. The other wall is empty except for a couple hundred lockers. But it’s also the Language Arts wing, which I’ve always hated. Language Arts doesn’t have rules; it has poetry instead. This wing’s ‘unreality level’ is probably higher than the rest of the school, except for the theater club.
Those kids are weird.
I step out into the long hallway, and the moment I do, my ears start ringing. “Let me filter that out. Expect an increase in heat,” James starts to say, but I interrupt him.
“No. Leave it. It’s a good warning, and it’ll just overheat.”
James hesitates. He knows something’s up, but if he won’t be honest with me, I won’t be honest with him. Besides, not telling him about the whispering I hear isn’t a lie. It’s just not telling him, right? Then he clicks his tongue in my ear. That’s going to get annoying fast. “Understood.” His voice is terse and clipped, like he’s working on something else at the same time as he talks to me.
I walk down the hall. As I approach the first doors, James speaks again. He’s still short. “Claire, check the rooms on your left.”
“Why?” I’m tempted to ignore him.
“SHOCKS wants additional data on R-389, and the school’s blueprints show wide windows. When you’ve cleared the first room, take a good look outside. Go quickly, though.”
“So I’m a science experiment, then?”
“No.” Before I can call him on that lie, he walks it back. “Kind of. You’re our only eyes inside the R-389 merge. Be quick.”
His mic goes dead in my ear like he’s muted it. I push into Room Two-Oh-One, my freshman Language Arts class, with Mrs. Lightsen. She doesn’t call it two hundred and one like a normal person: Two-Oh-One or nothing.
Mrs. Lightsen’s room is probably why the Language Arts wing’s ‘unreality levels’ are so high. All four walls in her room are different colors: green, pink, navy blue, and yellow. Instead of motivational posters or guides to writing a book report or something, you know, helpful, she’s decorated the walls with mirrors and tree faces. Yes, tree faces—the plastic or ceramic kind you hammer into a tree’s bark so it looks like some old tree man. There aren’t any desks, just a pile of beanbags and a weird three-tiered stage you can sit on, and nothing is in a clean, straight line.
Room Two-Oh-One is the opposite of Mrs. Helquist’s math room. It’s so far from being honest that it makes my skin crawl. And the alien twilight filtering in through her wide windows doesn’t help, either.
James still isn’t back. As mad as I am at him for lying, It’d be nice to have someone watching my back in the haunted, fairy-tale realm that’s Mrs. Lightsen’s room, but he’s not here, and there’s no one else. The windows are just across the fake-fur bear rug—twice the size of a real bear—that covers the floor, so I quickly look around, confirm there are no thinlings or things that aren’t quite Mrs. Lightsen, and dash for the window.
Nothing jumps out to eat me. The bear rug stays dead—and also fake. And I peer out at the yellow clouds, seeing for the first time that they’ve descended, forming walls of fog that cover the main road, the playground, and half of the soccer field, as well as every view of the ocean or, far away, the Olympic Mountains. Despite the clouds, the white sun’s faint light doesn’t change; it stays pale, without a hint of mustard tint. And outside, just inside the cloud wall, are thinlings. A dozen, maybe more. They move from one…lumpy blob on the ground to another. I’m not lying to myself about what they are, I’m just refusing to look at them.
The ringing in my ears stops. Either the last thinning didn’t merge, it’s happening right now, or it was fast like the Revolver. My mind rockets to the equation, and I try balancing it for each possibility, but the tree faces stare at me, and I can’t do math in these conditions. Too many variables, not enough—
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“Got it,” James says suddenly, and I jump. I hadn’t heard his mic turn back on. “Head back to the hall and check the next classroom.”
He’s still terse—still impersonal and monotone. Something’s changed wherever he is, I decide. When my heart stops pounding, I walk quickly back to the hall.
I’m happy to leave Mrs. Lightsen’s room behind.
----------------------------------------
I push open the next door, and the out-of-control chaos of Mrs. Lightsen’s classroom greets me again.
{Stability: 6/10}
“What the fuck?” I say. Now that I’m not panicking and fighting for my life, I remember that I’m not supposed to swear until I’m sixteen. Dad’s going to kill me if he finds out. Then again, I’m not sure I’m supposed to be firing handguns in West End High, and that seems like a bigger problem.
“One moment,” James says. I hear keys clicking. “Got it. You’re in a spatial anomaly. Turn around and keep moving down the hall. Doublings are common, but they don’t usually duplicate living beings, so you should be fine.”
I don’t feel fine. I can hear something moving near the bean bag pile. No. Under the bean bag pile. It’s not the whispers I’ve been hearing, though those don’t stop either. Bean bags start shifting, and I level the Revolver at them as first one, then a second, then more slide off the pile in a whispering shhhh sound. “Don’t move!” I say, not expecting the thinling or the thing that’s not quite Mrs. Lightsen to listen.
It stops. Then it says, “Claire?” in a voice that rises with hope and cracks with fear but still sounds familiar. It takes me a minute to place it. Then it hits me.
“Keith?”
The rest of the beanbags surge off the pile in a tidal wave of pellets and canvas that only slightly dwarfs the heavyset kid beneath them. Keith is the third member of the Truth Club, and he wasn’t supposed to be on campus today. It’s Saturday, and he doesn’t have any older siblings.
“Claire, don’t let him in close,” James says.
I keep the Revolver trained on him. “What’s the first Truth you shared?” I ask.
“I can’t…I can’t tell you that,” Keith says. His shaggy, curly brown hair half-covers his eyes, but they look confused. “The first rule we made was that we can’t share Truths outside the club.”
James squawks something in my ear, a warning to stay back, but Keith's passed my test as far as I’m concerned. Besides, he offers something James never can. I rush him. He manages to take one step back before my arms wrap around him in a massive bear hug. I’ve never hugged him before—we don’t do that kind of thing in Truth Club, and he and I aren’t good friends outside of it, not really—but he’s a person, not a thing that’s not quite Keith, and that’s good enough for me right now.
He returns my hug in that awkward, Keith-like way he does everything. Sora and I didn’t invite him to the Truth Club because he’s our closest friend. We picked him because, like us, he’s an outcast—an ‘other’—and because he proved he knows the value of a good secret in eighth grade.
I cough. My throat still feels raw, and my lungs still hurt from getting my breath knocked out of me and screaming. “What are you doing here, Keith?”
James and Keith talk at the same time.
“Claire, you need to get moving. R-0 is collapsing, and the shelter has a working stabilizer,” James says.
“I’ve never seen a commencement, and I wanted to see what it was all about. Then, when the alert came in, I got separated just after the main door. Something came inside and chased me upstairs, and I hid in Mrs. Lightsen’s room. She had the most hiding places, and I picked the bean bags. I thought you were it until you started talking. Whatever it was, it couldn’t talk.”
I ignore James again. He’s right; we can’t stay here. But I’m still mad at him for lying. “It’s probably a thinling. Did it give you a headache when you looked at it?”
“Yes.” Keith mumbles on and on about how he couldn’t tell what it looked like and how he ran, but it stalked him and sawed through doors, and then it couldn’t get inside Mrs. Lightsen’s room. I half-listen until the last bit.
“It’s the mirrors,” I say knowingly. “We’re…I’m going to the shelter. If you stay close, I’ll try to keep you safe.”
Keith stares at the Revolver in my hand, then nods slowly. “It’s better than up here. I already feel weird. Where’d you get that? How do you know so much about all of this?”
“Don’t tell him,” James says. The professional, clipped tone is still there, but I hear something else. “SHOCKS is already overwhelmed with containment, and cleaning up this mess will be hard enough without the Service’s name getting tied to everything.”
I hesitate. Why does he feel okay about telling me, then? Then I gesture to the air. “I’ve got a friend telling me what I need to know, and this isn’t my first rodeo.” I think about telling Keith the Truth I made the club for, but using it in service to deception feels wrong, so I bite my tongue. I’m not a liar, though. Nothing I’ve said is a lie.
We hurry back to the hall—I go first, with Keith trying to hide behind me. I’m not a slim girl, but even so, he’s far too big, and the effect feels comedic, not stealthy. I hurry to the next classroom over. “Check it,” James says.
I open the door, and the far-too-familiar tree faces and technicolor walls of Mrs. Lightsen’s room greet me a third time.
----------------------------------------
‘This just got a lot more complicated,” James says.
After Keith’s initial shocked babbling, he and I fall into an uneasy silence. He’s propped up against the lockers while I stand in the middle of the hall, slowly spinning my head to watch the ten classroom doors, two bathrooms, and each end of the long hallway. There’s an extra set of rooms ahead of us, so James stopped us here while he figures out what’s going on.
“Don’t tell your friend any of this. He’s not cleared. You are. This is a Type One Spatial Anomaly. They’re replicators. They find a pattern and repeat it until something stops them. That’s bad for us. Really bad. So here are your choices. You can keep doing what you’re doing—clearing the rooms carefully but moving purposefully. If you’re quick enough, you’ll get ahead of the anomaly and reach the far side. But I’d give it a 53% chance of the anomaly growing faster than you can clear rooms.”
He keeps talking, not giving me a chance to interrupt. “Or you can retreat, fight or run past the Type Three Incomp—“
“Mr. Roberts,” I whisper.
Keith looks at me, and I shake my head. He doesn’t get the hint. “What about Mr. Roberts?”
“In a minute,” I hiss.
“—the window like I suggested and find a way to the cafeteria that way. Based on what you’ve seen, you’ve got a 76.4% chance of making it, but your friend’s only got a 32% chance. He’s not armed, and you’ve got a remarkably high reality level in your profile. And finally, you can make a run for it. Don’t check the rooms, don’t cover your backs, just run for the far side of the hall. I don’t know the odds on that one, but your friend said there was a Type Two Incomprehensible up here, so it has risks. The more of that classroom, though, the less risky it’ll be because of her mirrors.”
I wait until he’s finished talking. Then I close my eyes for a moment and run my own equation. The new variables seem impossible to solve for, especially his slip about my profile. How can he have information on my ‘reality level?’ I table that for now, but I’m coming back to it later. Even if I wanted to get past the thing that’s not quite Mr. Roberts, leave Mrs. Helquist’s room, and make a break for it across the soccer field, I’ve got Keith now. I can’t—
“Claire, the Type One Spatial won’t wait for you. Make a choice.”
James is right.
I clear my throat and stick out my hand. “We’re running down the hall. Don’t waste your time looking in the rooms. They’re probably all Mrs. Lightsen’s. Get to the stairs, get down them, and then we’ll be at the shelter.”
“What about the—“
I interrupt him. “We’re running. If something tries to get us, we run. That’s the only plan I’ve got. Let’s go.”
He clasps his hand in mine, and I hiss in pain as his grip tightens around my paper towel bandage. I can feel it start bleeding again, but we’re not stopping at the second-floor bathroom to fix it. We start running.
I’m not feeling great, and Keith didn’t work any harder than me in gym class. It’s not a mad dash so much as a quick jog for both of us. We pass Mrs. Lightsen’s room, and I risk a quick peek to see if there are any thinlings inside. It’s empty, so I glance next door inside Mrs. Lightsen’s room. It’s also empty. I don’t check the door after that one, but I catch a glimpse of a tree face.
Then we’re to the four bathrooms—two girls’ and two boys’ rooms. The Type One Spatial Anomaly adds to my migraine, which is back with a vengeance. I want a cigarette.
We’ve been running for ages. For an eternity. For twenty seconds. I stop Keith so we can breathe.
When I first came up the stairs, there were eight rooms. We’ve passed six rooms, counting Mrs. Lightsen’s first room and Mrs. Lightsen’s room where I found Keith. There are still six rooms ahead of us; I’m sure at least two will be Mrs. Lightsen’s room.
One breath.
Two breaths.
{Skill Learned: Endurance 2}
Whether it’s the breaths or the message, I feel a little better. There’s no way the Halcyon System can know everything, though—is there? I force the thought out of my head while Keith pushes himself back to standing, hands on his knees. Later. I’ll deal with it later.
We keep running. We pass Mrs. Lightsen’s room for the seventh time. Mirrors and tree faces peer out of the safety glass window at us. Then we’re past it, and the next room’s not Mrs. Lightsen’s drug-induced hallucination of a classroom. I notice its door is ajar as my feet pound the linoleum faux-tiles. Desks sit in squares—groups of four, the standard my whole school career. It’s almost a normal classroom.
But not quite.
As we pass the room, something surges toward us. I don’t have a mirror, so I can’t see the Truth, but it flickers and shimmers between animal/monster/machine. A thinling—the one Keith ran from, maybe? “James, does the…can this spatial copy living things?!” I shout breathlessly as the thinling pushes/shoves/jams the classroom door open. He’d said something about it earlier, but I couldn’t remember what.
“Type One Spatial Anomalies don’t usually, but there’s no—“
“Good enough!” I scream at the boy in my aural aug. Then I yell at Keith. “Keep running!”