******
The three of them walked into the classroom together just as the bottom of their Lenses began to blink with the time. Most of the other students, all in the same, dreary gray uniforms, were already in their desks.
“Please be seated, children.”
The voice had come from the clean-shaven, average-height man at the front of the class.
“That’s Mr. Watts,” whispered Annie, sitting down. “He’s the strictest teacher I’ve had.”
Vincent wasn’t surprised; the man’s posture was rigidly straight, as if someone had tied a sturdy pole to his back.
Annie tugged at Vincent’s sleeve and flicked her head toward the seat directly behind her. Vincent sat down, and Jessica followed suit in an open seat to their right.
“The day will proceed as usual,” said Mr. Watts. “The morning sim, then trade work.” His eyes scanned the classroom as he spoke, but he seemed bored. “Please accept my invitation.”
A string of text appeared on the bottom of Vincent’s Lenses. He may have been back in the Seclusion, with Mrs. Farring at the front of the room instead of the rigid, keen-eyed man there now.
Knowing the process all too well, Vincent selected the text and prepared to engage the sim. Before he did, however, he allowed himself a look around. The others had already engaged, but their heads didn’t sway this way or that, and no one was facing the wrong direction. Nor even was there the familiar air of nervous excitement as there always had been in the Seclusion. Here, the room was stale. The necks of the students were straight, their posture stiff, their eyes empty.
Next to him, Vincent felt Jessica kick his foot under the desk. Mr. Watts was looking at him. Turning back to the front of the room like everyone else, Vincent engaged the sim.
He was standing next to a window as large as a wall, staring down at a maze of plain, rectangular skyscrapers. Then the sky blazed red. A streak of white came hurtling toward him. The glass shattered and he went soaring back, knocking into something behind him, pushed there by the force of the explosion. He felt the heat in the air, on his chest. He felt the flames…
The simulation changed. He was running. On a street with cracked pavement, and alongside men and women he didn’t recognize. Above them loomed the same skyscrapers he had seen from the window, most of them aflame. The air around them was polluted with smoke. There were sirens coming from all directions, but the sirens couldn’t quite mask the constant rumble coming from above. Vincent looked up as he ran – fighter jets, zooming by far too close overhead, some dropping cylindrical loads as they flew, others launching them from their front ends, their aims trained on every building they could reach. Vincent started to cough as the tidal wave of smoke behind him licked at his heels. He increased his pace, but only toward a similar wave of smoke just ahead. The rumbling was louder now. There was a whistle, an explosion…
The simulation changed again. For several seconds, Vincent watched from a bird’s eye view as dozens of jets dropped their loads over the towers of the city he had just been inside. He watched as a final, flashing white blaze split the clouds above…
The simulation changed once more. Vincent was on the street again, but he was standing now, and the sirens and jet engines had fallen silent. The smoke had cleared, and the street was still – what was left of it. Chunks of pavement were missing in giant craters, and the cars that had once lined its surface were overturned, their windows shattered, their hoods and side doors bent inward. Through it all, the stench of rotting meat hung in the air like a disease. It wafted up into Vincent’s nose from the pavement, where, aside from the overturned cars and jagged craters, the people he had been running alongside now lay. They lined the curbs twisted at odd angles, sometimes piled atop one another, other times completely alone, abandoned in the ash and debris and blood like hunted game too small to collect.
Somewhere, a narrator began to speak.
“The Order has terrorized our cities for far too long.”
It was a deep voice, a man’s. The tone was angry and harsh.
“The Order is the enemy of the state, the enemy of freedom. Apart, we cannot survive. Together, we cannot fall.”
The street disappeared, and the simulation ended. They were back in the classroom. The posture of the students around Vincent was no longer so straight, the eyes of them no longer so empty. A girl to Vincent’s left was crying; a boy to his right was shaking all over; Annie seemed prepared to punch someone.
From the front of the room, Mr. Watts began to speak. “Let us not forget who is to blame,” he said. His hands were trembling slightly – he no longer looked so bored. “Who are we fighting?”
In unison, as a monotone, obedient choir, the class answered. “The Order.”
Vincent looked around him. Everyone but he and Jessica had joined in.
Mr. Watts nodded in approval. “Very good. Now let us begin our–”
Vincent’s vision went black. By the gasps and whimpers around the room, he knew the same had happened to everyone else as well. For a fraction of a second, he thought their Lenses had gone dark, just as they had in the Seclusion, but the darkness didn’t endure. A room appeared before them, small and cramped, and with a chair in its center lit only by a single lamp. They were in another simulation.
“Stay calm, children,” Mr. Watts called out to them. “Remember the first attack. It’s just another message from the Order.”
This didn’t quiet the whimpering.
Vincent tried to turn to Jessica, but instead of seeing her, he saw only the room with the lamp, viewed as if from a camera set on a tripod.
There was a soft rustling – someone had walked in front of the camera, blocking the feed. It was a man, and he was lowering himself down into the seat. His face was pale and his hair was wiry and unkempt. His eyes were bloodshot, with perfect circles of red around where his Lenses ended, and the skin of his cheeks was flat against the bone. He looked different, but Vincent would recognize the man anywhere.
Next to him, Vincent heard Jessica draw in a sharp breath. Vincent merely scooted forward in his seat, and listened. His father was beginning to speak.