to us, it would take time. We’ll be gone by then.
I don’t know, Mila. It sounds incredibly risky.
It’s always been incredibly risky. Look at Lucas—he left his job with Holland’s company, and now Holland knows he’s missing. We have a good chance—possibly our only chance—to bring Holland down. To stop what he’s doing. To give those kids their lives back. We can’t give up now, not when we’re so close. What would Sarah want us to do?
Silence greeted me. And then Daniel’s sigh of defeat.
Tell us what you learned.
I started from the beginning. The virtual-reality room. The testing. The scoring. The chips.
I heard Daniel inhale sharply. Chips? You sure?
I only saw Grassi using them to monitor the kids’ vital signs. But there’s no reason he couldn’t also use the chips to control them. Force them to act against their will. With those implants, the sky’s the limit.
Daniel and Lucas both went silent. They knew as well as I did how dangerous a weapon these kids could be in Holland’s hands. He had planted a bomb inside me, and with it he could wreak terror wherever he chose—but only once. With total control over J.D. and Hannah, Ben and Claude and Sharon—trained fighters—he could do so much more. It could be so much worse.
Lucas was mulling everything over. Here’s what I don’t get, he said. How did he get the chips in? Does Holland visit the school? And even if he does, he can’t be doing surgery. Surely someone would stop him.
Daniel jumped in then. And why these kids? he said. They’re at Montford because they’re high achievers. Why would Holland want to control them? These kids can do so much on their own. Wouldn’t he choose more malleable victims?
I thought back to what Hannah had told me. She didn’t apply for the Watson Grant—she was just chosen. Out of a clear blue sky. But why?
It could be because she had developed amazing apps.
Or it could be because there was something else in her background. Something we hadn’t noticed before. Or something we’d noticed . . . but ignored. Until now.
My brain crunched the data on the grant kids. They were from different places. Different kinds of families. They had wildly different talents and personalities. But they had one thing in common.
Hannah’s appendectomy scar.
Ben’s femur pins.
J.D.’s pain pills, left over from a concussion.
My head began to pound a deep, throbbing beat as a fragile connection began to emerge.
I need to speak to Daniel.
A pause. Here.
Was Sarah ever hospitalized? Before she got the grant offer?
This time, the silence lasted five seconds. Yes. She had meningitis, a few weeks before her offer. She ended up staying three days. Why?
Sorrow washed through me like a river, and I shut my eyes, giving myself a few seconds to grieve. This. This had been the beginning of the end for Sarah. I was almost sure.
I told him about Hannah and Ben’s scars, and J.D.’s concussion.
Let’s hack the hospitals in the cities where the grant kids lived, find their records. Look for evidence of tests that don’t belong.
Because hospitals were the perfect place. All Holland would need were a couple of doctors under his thumb. Identify the kids, implant the chips while they were under anesthesia. When kids were sick, it was easy enough to keep them an extra day. Give them extra tests, just to be safe. Tests that weren’t tests at all . . . but secret procedures. The kids probably had no idea about their implants.
I’ll take the research from here, I said. The more I thought about the implants, the more angry I felt.
Daniel’s reply was swift.
No! If there’s some kind of alarm on those files, we can’t have it coming back to Montford. It’s not safe. As a matter of fact, I still think you should all get out of there, first thing in the morning. We have enough information to go with for now.
For a brief moment, I let the fantasy play out in my mind. I’d return to Lucas’s side and we’d leave Philadelphia. We’d find somewhere to hide. Another secluded mountain cabin, or maybe a tiny island, out in the middle of nowhere.
We’d get away from the world. We’d get to be together.
There was only one problem.
We’d have to accept the fact that Holland was ruining the lives of countless other kids. He’d remain a free man, while I forever remained a prisoner to the bomb beneath my skin.
As far as fantasies went, this one really sucked.
We can’t let