“But… what do you do, as Outsiders?” I asked, sitting abruptly on a hay bale before my legs gave out.
“Mostly we try to learn what we’re not being taught.” That was a voice I didn’t recognize. A girl with straight black hair, shaved off on one side of her head, stepped out of the shadows.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Tara Nightwing,” she said. “And guess what—I’m not from your cell.”
I’d never met anyone who wasn’t from our cell. Not in seventeen years. “Uh… where are you from?” I asked.
“B-97-4270,” she said. “It isn’t that far from here. It’s a manufacturing cell. We made your moped, and most of the tractors here. Kitchen appliances.”
Obviously I knew that people went to the store and bought new ovens or whatever, but I’d never wondered where the ovens came from.
“I know,” Tara said, nodding at my expression. “I never wondered where our bread came from.”
“I
never wondered where our cars or our bread came from,” said another voice.
Now that my eyes had adjusted, I saw at least a dozen kids standing among the rusting equipment and old piles of bales. I recognized six of them from school. But the others I’d never, ever seen. I’d remember someone with such dark skin, or such different-looking eyes.
One by one they stepped forward and introduced themselves. Two of them came from the same cell as Tara. One came from B-97-4274, practically next door. One from B-65-1001. And one girl, tall and skinny with a mostly shaved head except for a tightly curled broad stripe of hair that ran from her forehead to the nape of her neck—she came from Cell F-14-27.
I’m supposed to be so smart—not smart enough for higher schooling, I guess, but I usually get the best grades in my classes. But it had never occurred to me that B-97-4275 wasn’t just a name. It was a designation.
“The United is divided up into six big sections, from A to F,” a guy named Jefferson explained. “Each section is divided up into a hundred smaller sections. Those smaller sections are divided up into anywhere from sixty to five thousand cells.”
All I could do was stare as connections started to click in my brain. How could I not have even thought about this? How had I never wondered? Everyone thought—we were all taught—that the cell was everything. We were cells united. But all I knew about was mine.
“How come you shot paintballs at the Provost?”
“We’re slowly educating people,” Tara said. “Showing them that the cell way isn’t the only way. That they can dissent. They can rebel against the Provost. Like by shooting paintballs at him, for starters.”
“What good is it for them to be bad citizens?” My whole worldview was shifting, and I felt like I was going to fall off the face of the earth.
“Bad citizens aren’t always bad,” a girl named Cecily said. “Sometimes they are—if they steal or hurt a neighbor—but sometimes the United calls someone a bad citizen just because they want to know more than the United wants them to know, because they won’t blindly accept everything that they’re told.”
Like I’d always done.
All this was fascinating and overwhelming, but really, the only thing I wanted was my sister back, safe and sound.
“But why am I here? What does any of this have to do with Becca?” I asked Nathaniel.
He looked surprised. “Because Becca was an Outsider, of course.”
35
BECCA
IT FELT LIKE I HAD just closed my eyes to sleep when I was awoken again by the all-too-familiar clumping of heavy guard boots coming this way. Swearing bitterly helped me to not start weeping in despair, so I pulled myself to a sitting position and started screaming inside my head.
These 2:00 a.m. classes/torture were killing me, probably literally. My chest and stomach were a pincushion of painful dots, relics of my last failure to execute a successful push-up.
Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet. I hadn’t given up yet. I wouldn’t give in. When they came to get me, I’d be ready.
Sure enough, the guards stopped in front of our bars. My fists clenched as I prepared to have my wrists cuffed.
“Robin Wellfleet!”