“I know what you’re thinking, Miranda. I know that this looks immoral to you. But you can’t change the world from the kiddie pool. Altus isn’t going to be a company; it’s going to be its own nation, its own world. We are going to give people what they have lost, what they need. For decades, humanity has had nowhere to expand to, but now we’re giving people a new horizon, a new frontier.”

That all sounded pretty gross, and I didn’t know what to say. Then he spoke again, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

“I’ve taken the liberty of having someone pack up your old quarters. Everyone who works in high security lives here. Let me show you to your new room.”

I let out a shaky breath, trying to control my panic, but we both knew the score. If someone had packed up my whole room, they knew about the phone; they had probably even seen my texts. I hadn’t been brought to this new place to work. I had been brought here to be held prisoner.

APRIL

When we walked out of the auditorium, hauling the first round of bags behind us, Maya and I were a little surprised to find that Derek’s pickup truck was gone and in its place was a white moving truck with its rear door lifted and nothing in the back except for a large wooden crate strapped to one wall. Apparently we had arrived on a Friday night, and now we were leaving late Sunday. It felt like it had been much longer. Carl crawled up on my shoulder to watch with me as two people, a man and a woman, stepped out of the van. I knew their faces, but it was dark and the context was off. Then again, my brain could do things now that it couldn’t do before, and suddenly I had access to all the data I needed.

“Jessica?” I asked, in shock.

“April! Oh my god!” She bent over and put her head between her legs for a moment and then continued, “I didn’t believe it was true, but it’s true!”

“What the hell is going on?” Maya said quietly, toward me and Carl.

“We were told that we needed to come up here and get you, so we just … did,” the man said.

“And Mitty!”

“I can’t believe you remember my name,” he said, laughing.

“It was a big day, but also, like, since …” I gestured at my face, though neither of them had made any sign that they’d noticed it. “I’ve been able to remember more or less everything that’s ever happened to me.”

This was something I was just figuring out, but yes.

“Can someone explain what’s going on?” Maya said, looking at Carl. But Carl was being quiet around Jessica and Mitty.

“We each got a book, a few months ago,” Jessica said. She still had the small fighter’s frame and the bright red lipstick. “It was a very smart book, and it had a lot of good ideas that have helped us a lot. With money, but also with some family stuff.”

Here Mitty picked up. “Yesterday, we both got another one. It told us to come up here and rescue April May and her friend and her monkey and her potato plant, and it looks like all of this is coming true. Except the potato. I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t a potato.”

Fucking Carl.

“Maya, this is Jessica, and this is Mitty—they were the ones who helped me on the day that Martin Bellacourt …” I faded out, not sure how to finish the sentence.

“Stabbed you in the back like the fucking bitch that he was,” Jessica filled in.

Maya actually smiled—it was hard not to like Jessica.

“Well, let’s load up,” Mitty said. “We were told to move quickly.”

“Are we going in … the back?” Maya asked, pointing at the empty back of the moving van.

“That’s what the book said. There’s more too. We’ll tell you about it when we get closer.” I looked at Carl. There was a twinkle of excitement in their eye that I did not like, but I didn’t ask them to explain.

We tossed all of our possessions into the back of the truck. Jessica and Mitty sat up front, and the three of us went in the back with the crate. The truck started to rumble. It felt unsafe without seat belts on, but Carl was in charge and they seemed to think it was fine.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise,” Carl said.

“OK, well, if you’re not going to answer that question,” Maya said, “answer this one. How come we can’t be seen by schoolchildren at this high school without risking death, but we can be seen by Jessica and Mitty? Are they just … better people?”

“No, it has nothing to do with who they are. This won’t be possible for me to explain in detail—would you like me to try to do it metaphorically?”

“Yeah,” she said, annoyed, “that would be fine.”

“OK.” The monkey sat with one of its feet crossed over the other, leaning toward Maya and me. The voice came louder to power over the road noise, but the tone didn’t change at all.

“You have millions of nerves sensing your surroundings, but you don’t feel a signal from any of them individually. How cold are you, where are you, do you need to stretch or yawn or sneeze? Those impulses are felt in aggregate. My brother and I are like that. We can see and feel, but if one nerve stops working, we have no idea, it’s too much data. We aren’t looking out of every eye and monitoring every camera. We have tremendous processing power, but the systems that make the data understandable are fairly opaque to us, just as your systems are to you. You don’t know how your body decides you have an itch. You just know you do, and you scratch it. If a bunch of people at this school noticed something weird, that would increase the chances that my brother would notice. As long as we stay off predictable paths and do not look exceptional, we should be fine.”

We shifted around in the back of the truck as it made a turn, Maya letting her bag slide but holding on to Tater (which is what we had named the potato plant) with one hand. There were no seats for us, just our stuff and, latched to the side, a four-foot-high wooden crate.

“Can your brother control people,” Maya said, “the way …” Then she looked at me and finished, “The way you can?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“He can, but it is difficult. Operating a body is complex, especially if you have not spent time operating it. It takes time to get to know the body.”

Maya looked concerned. I had no idea what was going on.

“So, when you offered to use April’s body to drive us to the school, would you have had to learn then? Or …”

“When you offered to do what?” I said, my heart speeding up.

“I will explain. It is not sinister. It is not a broken taboo.” Even with the increased volume, it was a little hard to hear them over the noise of the road, so both Maya and I were leaning in.

“When your bodies are unconscious, they can be used and manipulated to keep them healthy and safe. That is all I have done. And yes, April, I did it while you were unconscious, to use the bathroom, to eat food, to keep clean, to keep your muscles strong. I’m sorry, I know that it is creepy, but it was necessary to optimize your health and speed your recovery.”

Somewhere inside of me I had already known this. There were no bedpans in that bar. My muscles looked more toned after months of unconsciousness when the opposite should have been true.