Chapter 55: 55 Dreamers Often Lie, Part Three

Jin was halfway through writing down his list when Angharad sat down at the table in front of him, pushed all her hair off her face like she'd learned how to do that from a shampoo commercial, and said, "Is it true that all the weird gases and stuff the crafts released on impact were somehow sucked away and don't seem to be lingering around the crash site?"

Jin put down his pen. "Where did you hear that?"

"I eavesdrop. Whatever, how I heard it is not the point. What I want to know is if it's true."

"I don't know. I heard something about glass debris from the lights in one of the cabins from the Colonel. So I... There must have been mercury vapour and some noble gases. How would we know where they went? Do we have anything to measure that? Did Rod Spark just happen to bring along something to make sure we're not all dying of mercury poisoning?"

Her face crumpled up in horror. "I hope so, because some of those lights broke in my craft when I crashed."

"You're fine." He was weak in the face of her sceptical eyebrow movements. "You're not fine. You we're in a coma. You have terrible damage. Does that feel better?"

She scrunched up her face. "No, that feels zero percent better. You're the worst."

"I bet fuel leaked out of some of the craft, too. And corpses are full of gas," he said.

"Okay, well, then it's a good thing we're not investigating that. Just my best friend and a bunch of random guys in sub par safety equipment."

He gave up on his notes, and slammed the notebook shut over the pen. "Was that all you wanted?"

She sighed and looked away, but he was pretty sure that just meant she was building up to it. She pressed her hands like two stacked starfish against her knees, which she would probably stop doing if he told her it just made him look at her legs.

Then she took a deep breath, flicked her hair about again, and said, "I feel like me and all the other people who were supposed to go to that stupid leaders of the future camp were lured here. But then I'm like, okay, maybe I'm just paranoid. But then I remember that I'm here and paranoia is a totally valid reaction to literally everything here. And also, then I think, okay, but is it that specifically we were lured here or was it just luring anyone? Or what if it's a coincidence?"

"You think it was preying on your vanity."

She scrunched up her mouth and looked away. "I guess," in a small voice.

"Maybe the evil in charge was preying on your ability to pay for it."

She sent him a sharp look. "Oh, no, daddy did not have that kind of money lying around to send me to summer camp. I mean, gate travel costs tens of thousands of dollars. It was a grant. They sent out a letter saying the sponsors were willing to pay for gate travel for any attendees willing to try it out. Did you actually think that, like, Gemma and Eleanor and Josephine could actually afford that? Come on! That's ridiculous."

He unfolded his right hand from the fist it had formed.

"That was a lure. You were lured here," he said.

"I thought so."

"We have to tell Josephine."

"Or you can do that, now I've told you, and I don't have to do anything. In fact, I think I'm going to investigate more with your hot friend Freya."

"Why didn't you bring up this lure thing earlier?"

"Mmm, you know, I was in a coma two and a half months ago. I hear that gives me an excuse for being slow about stuff forever."

And then she patted the notebook – her notebook, she had to have noticed – stood up, and walked away.

*

Of course, nothing could ever go right for him, so the Major ambushed him on the way out. She stood outside the end of the entrance hall at one end of the building, with Colonel Huppert on one side of her, and her friend from the wrong side of their war on the other.

He could put up with Tabitha, but having the rest of them invade his space was almost too much to bear.

"Sir," he said, a second later than he should have, and tightened his grip on the notebook in his hand.

"I'll expect to hear about whatever you talked about with that girl tonight," the Major said.

"If I tell you, are you going to tell you why you're hanging out with the enemy and this guy?" Jin asked.

The Colonel sighed. "I've told you to call me Antoine, Jin. I think we can all be friends here."

The Major was less kind. "You're lucky I don't care to discipline you. The war is over. Maria is not my enemy, any more, nor need she be yours. We can all work together to solve our problem here."

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He didn't think his, "Yes, sir," convinced anyone. But they let him pass. That wasn't nothing.

*

Josephine was in her room, just as he'd expected. What he didn't expect was the moping. Normally Josephine seemed like someone who didn't want to sit still when she could be exhausting everyone around her with constant exercise instead. She wasn't someone he expected to find lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, with half her face covered by a crumpled up hat.

He knocked on the door frame. "Where's your girlfriend?"

"At the library," she said, voice glum.

"Why are you sad about it?"

"Oh, but I have no sadness about Eleanor's continual quest for knowledge and entertainment. It is only right that she—"

"Then I'm going to sit on her bed because you don't have a chair."

He made the bed properly before sitting on it, of course. By the time he sat down Josephine had finally sat up. She faced him, her expression anxious.

"Is there something wrong?" she asked.

"There's always something wrong here," he said. "Do you feel like you were lured here and your invitation to that summer camp was just a trick?"

She looked down at her hands and in a soft voice, said, "No, I have to believe that place was real. I have to believe it was a real invitation to a camp that happened without me and not just a trick."

"Why?"

"Why? Well, it's just that, without that, there's the worry that Ken is at home thinking he fell for something. I'm sure it's hard enough for him that I went missing. I don't need to imagine him hurting more than that."

"Then it's an emotional thing. You made an emotional decision to believe this. You don't have any real logic behind it."

"Are we not all emotional beings?" she asked.

"Of course, but..." That was a little too intense for before noon. "Except for Neo. I don't think that guy gets emotional. But the rest of us are very... Speaking of emotional beings, I'm going to find Freya and Angharad and make sure they're not getting in trouble."

Josephine's general shape went rigid. "Did Angharad mention me?"

"Why would she mention you?"

"Ah, of course there is no reason. Please forget I asked."

He was already halfway out the door when he said, "I've already repressed it."

*

It took too long to find Angharad and Freya. He looked in the library and Eleanor Kim looked up, curious-eyed, as Gemma and Mac lounged behind her. Looked in the crafts room, and it was empty but for piles of coloured paper. Found one weird shed after another, devoid of people but filled with useless stuff. A gymnasium, a stationery shed to match the stationery closet in the crafts room, a shed full of worn out mechanical parts.

And then he got lucky, before he looked in too many people's rooms – a narrow two-story cabin with bunk beds, and the girls sitting on the floor. Looking at them, heads leaned together, he could easily have believed the rumours they'd done their best to start if he hadn't known better.

"I think I found where the sound for the PA system originates," he said, not bothering to introduce the subject as he walked in the door.

"Ooh, you found the communications hub," Freya said.

"We should go look at that!" Angharad said, her voice on the edge of an excited squeal. Her tights were balled up next to her feet, but the rest of her was covered by a blanket halfway dragged off one of the beds.

"We can do that tomorrow," Freya said. "First I have to make sure everyone is properly equipped. Jin, we've had the walkie talkies on this side the whole time."

"Seriously?" he asked. Why couldn't that have been brought up earlier? And when were people going to stop talking about Zapville in terms of sides?

"And close the door before people start gossiping about what naughty, naughty Jin is doing alone in a room with two girls," Freya said, her voice like a song.

He stumbled, as his brain froze on an image thrown up by what she implied. They laughed at him, of course.

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