Extracted

Katherine

He nudges me to the other end of the balcony toward another door. I stare down at the row of aquariums. Silky hair floats around beautiful faces with closed eyes and tranquil expressions. A queasiness pulls at my stomach.

At the door, Mitchell pulls his tablet from the back of his elastic waistband of his pajama bottoms.

I peek around his arm to see what he’s doing. The hallways of the school flash one by one on his screen like images from security cameras, before shrinking into smaller image tiles. He has a view of every hallway.

There are two women in those guard uniforms standing and talking in the director’s hallway.

“How are you doing that?”

Mitchell grins down at me. “Just one of their little mad scientist experiments I’ve made my own use of.”

“They don’t know you can do this?”

He chuckles. “Are you kidding? They’d have a coronary. It looks like the guards are moving away. We can go in a few minutes. What did you think you were doing, sneaking out like that?”

“I had to see…” Should I tell him about Jeremy? “I wanted to make sure Gideon was all right.”

He turns to face me. “Why do you care? Why risk it?”

I look down at the slumbering children and teenagers and ask a question of my own. “What is this place? What’s happening to them?”

“Nothing.” He flips his bangs out of his eyes. “They’re not even alive yet.”

“What?” Because…what?

“You haven’t figured it out?”

“No.” That cold feeling spreads into my chest. “They’re just sleeping, right? They’re going to wake up from that disease, right?”

“Katherine.” Mitchell sighs. “There is no plague. That’s just what they tell us so we won’t know.”

“Won’t know what?” Panic prickles inside my belly, pulling tight like a string of barbed wire into the linings of my insides.

“Those—” Mitchell jabs at the glass window. “—are one hundred percent lab-grown.” His brows rise at my blank expression. “Test-tube babies, Katherine. We’re all test-tube babies.”