I shake off the feeling and push open Hana’s door. She’s sitting at her computer, feet propped up on her desk, bobbing her head and tapping out a rhythm on her thighs. As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud.
She flips her hair over one shoulder and scoots away from the desk. Something flickers over her face, an expression that passes too quickly for me to identify it. “Hi,” she chirrups, a little too cheerfully. “Didn’t hear you come in.”
“I doubt you would have heard me break in.” I go over to her bed and collapse on top of it. Hana has a queen-size bed, with three down pillows. It’s like heaven. “What was that?”
“What was what?” She lifts her knees to her chest and swivels a full circle in her chair. I sit up on my elbows and watch her. Hana only acts this dumb when she’s hiding something.
“The music.” She still stares at me blankly. “The song you were blasting when I came in. The one that almost burst my eardrums.”
“Oh—that.” Hana blows her bangs out of her face. This is another one of her tells. Whenever she’s bluffing in poker she won’t stop fussing with her bangs. “Just some new band I found online.”
“On LAMM?” I press. Hana’s music-obsessed and used to spend hours surfing LAMM, the Library of Authorized Music and Movies, when we were in middle school.
Hana looks away. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” The intranet, like everything else in the United States, is controlled and monitored for our protection. All the websites, all the content, is written by government agencies, including the List of Authorized Entertainment, which gets updated biannually. Digital books go into the LAB, the Library of Approved Books, movies and music go into LAMM, and for a small fee you can download them to your computer. If you have one, that is. I don’t.
Hana sighs, keeping her eyes averted. Finally she looks at me. “Can you keep a secret?”
Now I sit up all the way, scooting to the edge of the bed. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me. I don’t trust it. “What is this about, Hana?”
“Can you keep a secret?” she repeats.
I think of standing with her in front of the labs on Evaluation Day, the sun beating down on us, the way she forced her mouth close to my ear to whisper about happiness, and unhappiness. I’m suddenly afraid for her, of her. But I nod and say, “Yeah, of course.”
“Okay.” She looks down, fiddles with the hem of her shorts for a second, takes a deep breath. “So last week I met this guy—”
“What?” I nearly fall off the bed.
“Relax.” She holds up a hand. “He’s cured, okay? He works for the city. He’s a censor, actually.”
My heartbeat slows and I settle back against her pillows again. “Okay. So?”
“So,” Hana says, drawing the word out, “he was waiting at the doctor’s with me. When I went to have my PT, you know?” Hana sprained her ankle in the fall and still has to do physical therapy once a week, to keep it strong. “And we started talking.”
She pauses. I don’t really see where the story is going, or how it relates to the music she was playing, so I just wait for her to go on.
Finally she does. “Anyway, I was telling him about boards, and how I really want to go to USM, and he was telling me about his job—what he does, you know, day to day. He codes the online access restrictions, so people can’t just write whatever, or post things themselves, or write up false information or ‘inflammatory opinions’”—she puts this in quotes, rolling her eyes—“and other stuff like that. He’s, like, an intranet security guard.”
“Okay,” I say again. I want to tell Hana to get to the point—I know all about online security restrictions, everybody does—but that would just make her clam up.
She sucks in a deep breath. “But he doesn’t just code the security. He checks for lapses—like, break-ins. Hackers, basically, who jump through all the security hoops and manage to post their own stuff. The government calls them floaters—websites that might be up for an hour, or a day, or two days before they’re discovered, websites full of unauthorized stuff—opinions and message boards and video clips and music.”
“And you found one.” A sick feeling has settled in my stomach. Words keep flashing in my brain, like a neon sign going in and out: illegal, interrogation, surveillance. Hana.
She doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve gone totally still. Her face is suddenly animated, as alive and energetic as I’ve ever seen it, and she leans forward on her knees, talking in a rush. “Not just one. Dozens. There are tons of them out there, if you know how to look. If you know where to look. It’s incredible, Lena. All these people—they must be all over the country—sneaking in through the loops and the holes. You should see some of the things people write. About—about the cure. It’s not just the Invalids who don’t believe in it. There are people here, all over the place, who don’t think . . .” I’m staring at her so hard she drops her eyes and switches topics. “And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you’ve ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry. . . .”
Hana’s room is big—almost twice as big as my room at home—but I feel as though the walls are pressing down around me. If the air-conditioning’s still working, I can no longer feel it. The air feels hot and heavy, like a wet breath, and I stand up and move to the window. Hana breaks off, finally. I try to shove open her window, but it won’t budge. I push and strain against the windowsill.
“Lena,” Hana says timidly, after a minute.
“It won’t open.” All I can think is: I need air. The rest of my thoughts are a blur of radio static and fluorescent lights and lab coats and steel tables and surgical knives—an image of Willow Marks getting dragged off to the labs, screaming, her house defaced with marker and paint.
“Lena,” Hana says, louder now. “Come on.”
“It’s stuck. Wood must be warped from the heat. If it would just open.” I heave and the window flies upward, finally. There’s a popping sound, and the latch that’s been keeping it in place snaps off and skitters to the middle of the floor. For a second Hana and I both stand there, staring at it. The air coming in the open window doesn’t make me feel better. It’s even hotter outside.
“Sorry,” I mumble. I can’t look at her. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t know it was locked. The windows at my house don’t lock.”
“Don’t worry about the window. I don’t care about the stupid window.”
“One time Grace got out of her crib when she was little, almost made it onto the roof. Just slid the window right open and started climbing.”
“Lena.” Hana reaches out and grabs my shoulders. I don’t know if I have a fever or what, going hot and cold every five seconds, but her touch makes a chill go through me and I pull away quickly. “You’re mad at me.”