“It’s a far cry from a guy who builds spaceships,” I say, and he smiles softly.
“True,” he replies. “Hell, we couldn’t even afford a Tesla.” He turns back to the house, examining it with more scrutiny. The idea that his dad hid wealth must be bothering him, because I watch as he searches the house from top to bottom, as if there’s a big clue that he’d missed his entire life.
“Do you think there was something else?” I ask. “Something other than money that your father could have offered in exchange for investments—information? Technology?”
“No,” Jacksons says, shaking his head. “My father didn’t know anything like that. My mother was the…” He stops then, and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard. “My mother knew how all that stuff worked,” he adds quietly. “Um…” His eyes quickly grow glassy and he has to turn away from the house.
He’s realizing the same thing I am. Maybe Jackson’s mother didn’tloseher information to Roman Petrov. It’s possible theheadmaster didn’t steal her tech at all. What if Jackson’s father gave it to the corporation willingly in exchange for a large stake in the company? Sold out his wife to buy a girl.
“Mena?” he asks softly. He lowers his eyes to his lap, and when he lifts them to mine again, they’re filled up with misery.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Will you still care about me if I murder my father?” His voice cracks, and I think part of me cracks too. Jackson was always rough around the edges, but he’s also endlessly kind. Soft. I can’t decide if I’ve done this to him by being in his life, or if life did this to him so that I’d be part of it. Who’s at fault? Fate or the person who brought that fate to your front door?
Either way, the next moments are likely to end with him learning the truth about his father… and possibly end in violence. Violence I’d hoped to avoid. If there wasn’t a clock ticking, a bomb counting down in our brains, we could make a better plan. A longer plan. But we have no idea when or if Petrov or the corporation could throw a switch and burn us from the inside out.
Raven installed these firewalls, but if Winston is right, if she’s been working with Anton, we have less time than we thought. I’ll have to tell the other girls. We need an alternative if the investors won’t listen. My heart races, panic rising in my chest.
Jackson is watching the house again, his brow deeply furrowed. I lean forward to study the darkened two-story. There is nothing remarkable about it, nothing out of the ordinary other than the power outage on the entire street. Small taps of rain start to dot the windshield and it immediately drags me down. I forgot howoften it rained here, how it always rained. The street is so dark, the dots of water ominous as they begin to fill up the windshield insulating us from the outside world.
“Jackson,” I say quietly, “what’s going on in this town?”
“It was the school,” he says. “Or the corporation, whatever you want to call it. They’ve done something. They own this place. I never thought of it that way, but it’s obvious now.”
“How long have you lived here?” I ask. “I know you were around when your mother worked for the company, but were you always here?”
“Yeah,” he says with a short nod. He doesn’t flick on the windshield wipers, watching instead as the rain runs down the glass. “I’m a small-town kid, grew up with Quentin, getting into trouble. Then Innovations Academy opened, bringing in all these men with fancy cars and piles of cash.” He pauses, looking over at me. “My mother was dead, but the town accepted the academy and the money that came with it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I thought about this after… after I found out the truth about what they were doing there,” Jackson says. “When the corporation started operating, they brought jobs with them. Didn’t matter that those jobs paid pennies compared to the billions filtering through the school—people needed to work. The corporation brought in a kind of tourism; they purchased acres of land and a few older buildings downtown. Fuck, I think they even owned that gas station where we met. They grew roots in our community, and it was so insidious that many of us couldn’t evensee it. They paid the police department. They probably even own the mayor.”
He turns to me, sympathy in his eyes. “They made it so you could never escape, Mena. The town was in on their secret, at least to some extent. They saw you all come out with your Guardian. No one stepped in to protect you. No one called for help.”
“You did,” I say.
He waves away my sentiment. “Even my reasons were suspect,” he says. “I was looking for information. And I’m glad, I’m so glad I found you. What was going on at that school is unforgivable.”
“And the adults in this town allowed it,” I say, lowering my head. I don’t feel a connection to these people; we were never allowed to interact with the public on our field trips from Innovations. But in truth, the people would stare at us as if they didn’t want us around. Whether they knew we were robots or thought we were pretty girls, they left us with people who were abusing us. They willingly did that. How much did their silence cost?
“Where are they now?” I ask Jackson, anger prickling my skin. “Why is everything closed or boarded up?”
“My guess?” he offers. “The school is gone; that means so is the money.”
“This quickly? That doesn’t make sense,” I say. “People don’t just leave a town when they lose their jobs. At least, not the same day. Right?”
Jackson nods along, thinking about it. But then a dark look crosses his expression, and he turns toward his father’s houseagain. His eyes quickly dart to the neighbor’s front door and then the one next to theirs.
Without another word, he throws open his driver’s side door. He hops out and grabs the crutches from the backseat. He blinks the rain away when it drips into his eyes, his black hair getting matted to his forehead.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “We haven’t even made a plan yet.”
But Jackson is already boldly crossing the street toward his father’s house. When he gets onto the sidewalk, he pauses, looking up at the darkened windows. He stays there a moment, rain pouring down around him, and then he begins to wave his arms back and forth.
I get out of the car, cold rainwater sliding down my neck into the collar of my shirt. Icy fingers down my back. I cross the street and stop next to Jackson.
“The floodlights are off,” he says. “They’re battery operated. Power may be cut, but these should still work. You should get back in the car, Mena.” But when he turns to me, the words die on his lips. Obviously, I’m not leaving him to face this alone.
