turned to tell Yanis not to go in but caught himself—all he’d do is strengthen Yanis’s resolve. He balled his fists in his pockets, thinking as fast as he could, squeezing up his chest—
“Yanis,” he said, stopping him. “I need to tell you something. I lied. I didn’t actually see her.”
Yanis came a few inches back toward him, his head jerking up in confusion.
“I wanted to find her so bad that I thought if, for some reason, you guys came looking for her, it might make me feel better.” Aiden looked sideways at his watch: 1:53 a.m. “So you can punish me however you see fit. If you have to take me in right now and write me up, I understand.”
Yanis considered it for another moment longer, then shrugged. “Well, that does explain a lot.” He turned back toward the church.
“Wait, why—” Aiden scrambled toward him. “You’re just gonna let me off? Without doing anything about it? I lied to the school!”
“Maybe we can figure out some kind of help system,” Yanis said, moving toward the door. “So you don’t feel tempted to try it again—”
“I don’t want any help,” Aiden tried shouting. “I’ll just keep lying to you . . . stupid . . . assholes—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Aiden,” Yanis said.
“Seriously?” Aiden shouted after him. “You’re not gonna do anything about all of this? You’re just gonna let me walk away?”
Yanis stopped at the door of the church. “Aiden, I’m afraid something bigger might be going on here,” he said, whipping the doors open.
Aiden watched them close and said a silent prayer, then charged in after.
Evan.
THEY STOOD FROZEN in the doorway. Evan could feel the cold, sterilized laboratory air spilling out, smelling like Lysol and metal.
Emma wasn’t lying. The ARC was real.
It was cold, polished white metal. The top expanded out into the ceiling and it was impossible to tell where it went from there. The bottom was rounded into a soft edge, just an inch across at its tip, where three holes were populated with a mess of exposed copper wire.
Emma walked up to it slowly, placing her hands against it.
The computer system around it was just as incredible. There was a control station directly in front of the machine, but the screens stretched all the way up to the ceiling, covering every corner of the walls in the circular room.
“Let’s get the picture,” Evan whispered, “and go.”
Emma nodded, her hands shaking as she raised the Polaroid camera to her eye and snapped a photo. The flash popped like a gunshot around them.
Immediately, he grabbed her by the hand, pulling her away, out of the room, through the office, and back to the lobby. The Human Lounge was still empty in front of them, and unless instructors decided to break their routine and police the common rooms this late, their path to the front gate would be unblocked.
“Wait,” Emma said behind him. “Wait, no, this doesn’t—this can’t—”
The words caught in her throat. In her hands, the Polaroid was developing slowly, the colors fading in from white to form indistinguishable shapes.
It didn’t look like anything. From the picture, the ARC looked like an ice cream machine, or a dentist’s office.
“Okay,” Evan said, snatching the camera from her hands and sprinting back into the room. He tried several different spots, different vantage points, and through the scope, none of them could capture the size of the ARC. He scanned the room, settling on the large stack of computer processors and monitors face-to-face with the machine. “What if we get up there?”
Emma stared at it, frozen in soft shock. “I—I can’t climb that. I can barely walk.”
Evan ran to the base of the machine, hoisting his leg over the first railing, ignoring the buttons he might be pressing along the way up. He threw his right leg over, but couldn’t find anywhere to counterbalance without reaching his right arm—
“Ah!” He fell to the ground, his busted arm flopping outside the sling uselessly. The camera hit the ground next to him.
“We have to go,” he said, regathering himself, ignoring the pain shooting up into his shoulder. “We have to go without the picture.”
“What about everyone else?” Emma asked.
“They’ll be fine,” he said. “If we don’t get out of here—”
“If we can’t prove what’s happening here, they’re all dead. I’m not leaving without it.”
Evan held his breath for a second, then searched the room for options. On the computer desk, buried in the back, was one of the school’s closed-circuit radios. He grabbed