I realized all at once what had been bothering me. The thing I couldn’t put my finger on. The dean made that comment the first day of school about my not letting history deter me. But my real history wouldn’t have deterred me. I was the daughter of a valedictorian, not a dropout. He knew that. But he assumed I never would. He was the one who’d altered my mom’s file.
I pulled up Griffin’s Panopticon page on North’s tablet. The “Early Life” section said that Griffin had been raised by his mother and a stepfather but didn’t mention a name. His biological father was killed in a boating accident off Cape Cod two weeks before Griffin was born.
“How are you feeling?” North had emerged from the closet, carrying a plastic trash can. I groaned, covering my face with my hands.
“Mortified,” I said from behind my palms. “You cleaned up my puke.”
“I must really love you,” North replied.
I bit my lip, keeping my face hidden. Love. Was that what this was? I wanted the brain space to think about it, but every ounce of gray matter was focused on the Few and how to take them down. I let my hands fall and nodded a little, the corners of my mouth turning up just a bit. It wasn’t a response, exactly, but North didn’t seem to be looking for one.
“How are you feeling, really?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “None of it feels real. Even the part about Griffin being my father in the first place. It’s like I’m living someone else’s existence. And yet, the one I had before, it never really felt like mine either.”
“I know what that’s like,” North said. “Feeling like you don’t belong in your own life. That’s how it was for me growing up. My dad was my real dad, but we might as well have been strangers.” North hesitated for a second. “So why not leave? I mean, what’s keeping you at Theden, knowing what you know about the Few? If it goes as high up as the dean, then the whole school is under its thumb.”
“It’s more than being under its thumb,” I said. “The society is the whole reason the school exists. Theden is their breeding ground.”
“Then why stay?” He knelt down so we were at eye level. “I have an apartment in New York City. Paid for in cash. You and I, we could—”
“I can’t leave,” I told him. “Not until I stop them. Not after what they’ve done. If I’m right, then these people killed both my parents, North. And they’ve brainwashed my best friend. Not to mention hundreds of millions of other people.” I shook my head. “I can’t just run away.”
North sighed. “I knew you were going to say that. But I can’t let you go back into that place, their godforsaken tomb, by yourself.”
I knew better than to argue with him. But I was going back in. Whether or not I had a way out.
I left North’s apartment not long after that. Our conversation had come to a standstill. He felt how he felt, and I wouldn’t budge. There wasn’t much else to say.
The courtyard was quiet when I got back, no doubt because of the cold. The temperature had dropped ten degrees since last night, and the wind had picked up. It was now whistling through the dry leaves of the maple trees that lined the campus sidewalks, ripping them from their stems and tossing them in the air. I tilted my head back and looked up at our window. Our light was on. I was almost certain I’d turned it off.
The main door was propped open with a rock, so I hurried inside out of the wind. I took the stairs two at a time, digging in my bag for my Gemini. But it wasn’t in my bag. It was in the belly of the dining hall’s trash bin.
Crap. I was locked out of my room.
“You accidentally threw it away?” Izzy was looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
“It was on my tray at dinner,” I said, refusing to be defensive. “I must’ve dumped it with my food.”
“And you’re just now realizing it?”
“I’ve been at the library,” I lied. “I thought it was in my bag. So can I borrow yours? I need to call the janitor.”
“Sure,” she said, unsnapping her Gold from her wrist. “Unlock,” she said to the device before handing it to me. I gave her a quizzical look. “It’s tethered to your voice,” she explained. “It won’t work for someone else unless you unlock it first.” Oh good, I thought. So your phone won’t activate the nanobots in someone else’s brain.
I didn’t even want to hold the thing, much less put it near my head. But I took it from Izzy and quickly dialed the campus help line. The janitor was at my door five minutes later with a key card. He, too, seemed confused about how a person could lose their handheld and not realize it for several hours. “When does your new one arrive?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I lied, and thanked him for his help.
The moment I stepped through my door I froze. I’d left Dr. Tarsus’s yearbook on my desk, open to her senior photo. The yearbook was gone. Its disappearance reminded me that this wasn’t the first time someone had come into my room. I checked under my pillow, then grabbed Paradise Lost and began flipping pages, looking for another handwritten clue. But there wasn’t any.
I sighed and stepped out of my shoes, climbing into bed without bothering to wash my face or brush my teeth. It was hard to care about zits and cavities at this point. “How far I’ve come,” I muttered, yanking my blanket up to my chin. As soon as my fingers touched the crisscross orange stitching at the top right corner, I bolted upright in bed. There were two of them in the design, one at the top right corner, by itself, away from the tiled square design and the other in the center of the smallest square. Liam had told me that the entrance to the tomb was in that smallest inner room, exactly where my mom had sewn an orange X.
X for Exit.
My eyes jumped from that X to the other one, seeing for the first time what my mom had left me.
A map.
Flinging off the covers, I sprung out of bed then smoothed my blanket back down. Liam had said that the rooms of the tomb were laid out the way the squares on my blanket were, so if I could figure out where the entrance was, I’d be able to pinpoint where the other X would be. Maybe it was my way out.
I grabbed my tablet off the desk and launched my map. I started with my current location then scrolled over to the edge of the woods, toward the cemetery. When the fence came into view, I switched over to satellite mode and zoomed out. Almost immediately, I gasped. It’d been there all along. I just couldn’t see it from the ground.
The stone sidewalks of the cemetery were laid out in the same tiling pattern as the squares on my blanket. My eyes went to the innermost square. It enclosed the patch of lawn where I’d seen the apple tree, right across from North’s mausoleum hideout. The mausoleum was also surrounded on all four sides by stone. It was the second square in a Fibonacci sequence. The spot where my mom had put the first orange X.
My heart picked up, each beat crashing into the next, as I stared at the aerial shot on my screen. The mausoleum was the entrance to the tomb. It had to be. It explained why there was no body in the coffin, and why the lid was so light, and why the floors were swept every week. It also made sense that there would be a lone apple tree in the innermost square. The iconic symbol of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.