222.2.28 | 9:36 a.m.
“Please hold still.”
The doctor wasn’t mean, but he wasn’t kind either. He was just kind of there, stoic and professional. Also forgettable: middle-aged, average height, medium build, short dark hair. Thomas closed his eyes and felt the needle slide into his vein after that quick pinprick of pain. It was funny how he dreaded it every week, but then it lasted less than a second, followed by the flood of cold inside his body.
“See, now?” the doctor said. “That didn’t hurt.”
Thomas shook his head but didn’t speak. He had a hard time speaking ever since the incident with Randall. He had a hard time sleeping, eating, and just about everything else, too. Only in the last few days had he started to get over it, little by little. Whenever a trace memory of his real name came forward in his mind, he pushed it away, not ever wanting to go through that torture again. Thomas worked just fine. It’d have to do.
Blood, so dark it looked almost black, glided up the narrow tube from his arm and into the vial. He didn’t know what they tested him for, but this was just one of many, many pokes and prods—some daily, some weekly.
The doctor stopped the flow and sealed off the vial. “All right, then, that does it for the blood work.” He pulled out the needle. “Now let’s get you into the scanning machine and capture another look at that brain of yours.”
Thomas froze, anxiety trickling in, tightening his chest. The anxiety always came when they mentioned his brain.
“Now, now,” the doctor chided, noticing Thomas’s body tense. “We do this every week. It’s just routine—nothing to fret over. We need to capture regular images of your activity up there. Okay?”
Thomas nodded, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. He wanted to cry. He sucked in a breath and fought the urge.
He stood and followed the doctor to another room, where a massive machine sat like a giant elephant, a tube-shaped chamber at its center, a flat bed extended, waiting for him to be slid inside.
“Up you go.”
This was the fourth or fifth time Thomas had done this, and there was no point fighting it. He jumped up onto the bed and lay flat on his back, staring up at the bright lights on the ceiling.
“Remember,” the doctor said, “don’t worry about those knocking sounds. It’s all normal. All part of the game.”
There was a click and then a groan of machinery, and Thomas’s bed glided into the yawning tube.
Thomas sat at a desk, all by himself. In front of him, standing by a writing board, was his teacher, Mr. Glanville—a gruff, gray-toned man with barely any hair. Unless you counted his eyebrows. Those bushy things looked like they’d commandeered every follicle from the rest of his body. It was the second hour after lunch now, and Thomas would’ve given at least three of his toes to lie down, right there on the floor, and take a nap. Just a five-minute nap.
“Do you remember what we talked about yesterday?” Mr. Glanville asked him.
Thomas nodded. “FIRE.”
“Yes, that’s right. And what does it stand for?”
“Flares Information Recovery Endeavor.”
His teacher smiled with obvious satisfaction. “Very good. Now.” He turned back to his board and wrote the letters PFC. “P…F…C. That stands for Post Flares Coalition, which was a direct result of FIRE. Once they’d heard from as many countries as possible, gathered representatives and so forth, they could start dealing with the spectacular disaster caused by the sun flares. While FIRE figured out the full ramifications of the sun flares and who had been affected, the PFC tried to start fixing things. Am I boring you, son?”
Thomas jerked upright, completely unaware that his head had dipped. He might’ve even nodded off for a moment.
“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Sorry. FIRE, PFC, got it.”
“Look, son,” Mr. Glanville said. He took a few steps, closing the distance between them. “I’m sure you find your other subjects more interesting. Science, math, physical fitness.” He leaned down to look directly into Thomas’s eyes. “But you need to understand your history. What got us here, why we’re in this mess. You’ll never figure out where you’re going until you understand from where you came.”
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said meekly.
Mr. Glanville straightened, glaring down his nose. Searching Thomas’s face for any sign of sarcasm. “All right, then. Know your past. Back to the PFC. There’s a lot to discuss.”
As his teacher returned to the front of the room, Thomas pinched himself as hard as he could, hoping that would keep him awake.
“Do you need me to go over it again?”
Thomas looked up at Ms. Denton. She had dark hair and dark skin, and she was beautiful. Kind eyes. Smart eyes. She was probably the smartest person Thomas had met so far, as made evident by the puzzles she constantly challenged him with in his critical thinking class.
“I think I’ve got it,” he said.
“Then repeat it back to me. Remember—”
He cut her off, quoting back what she’d said a thousand times. “ ‘One must know the problem better than the solution, or the solution becomes the problem.’ ” He was pretty sure it meant absolutely nothing.
“Very good!” she said with mockingly exaggerated praise, as if shocked that he’d memorized her words. “Then go ahead and repeat the problem. Visualize it in your mind.”
“There’s a man in a train station who’s lost his ticket. One hundred and twenty-six people stand on the platform with him. There are nine separate tracks, five going south, four going north. Over the next forty-five minutes, twenty-four trains will arrive and depart. Another eighty-five people will enter the station during that time. At least seven people board each train when it arrives, and never more than twenty-two. Also, at least ten passengers disembark with each arrival, and never more than eighteen…”
This went on for another five minutes. Detail after detail. Memorizing the parameters was challenging enough—he couldn’t believe she actually expected him to solve the stupid thing.
“…how many people are left standing on the platform?” he finished.
“Very good,” Ms. Denton said. “Third time’s the charm, I guess. You got every detail right, which is the first step to finding any solution. Now, can you solve it?”
Thomas closed his eyes and worked through the numbers. In this class, everything was done in his head—no devices, no writing. It strained his mind like nothing else, and he actually loved it.
He opened his eyes. “Seventy-eight.”
“Wrong.”
He took a couple of minutes then tried again. “Eighty-one.”
“Wrong.” He flinched in disappointment.
It took another few tries, but he finally realized the answer might not be a number at all. “I don’t know if the man who lost his ticket got on a train or not. Or if some of the others on the platform were traveling with him, and if so, how many.”
Ms. Denton smiled.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
