The Forsaken

passing underneath the projectors. They sit in vertical rows on acres of metal scaffolding, projecting images onto the undulating fabric. This scaffolding appears to surround the entire inland side of the city, shielding it from view.
    Every single building is ugly and monolithic. Rail lines stretch off to our left, heading farther up the coast. I don’t see any sign of landing strips for aircrafts, but they could be hidden too. I also don’t see any feelers—at least not yet.
    Weirdest of all, I don’t see any people. Everything looks deserted. The only sign of life is the smoke that rises from the chimneys and vents, forming low-lying clouds of steam and pollution in the sky.
    “How do we get down there and inside the buildings?” I ask.
    “We hike.” Markus sounds completely wiped out. “David, you know anything about this place?”
    “Not yet.” He’s scanning it with his eyes.
    “See that one building?” Rika asks faintly. “Near the center of the city.” It’s the first time she’s spoken in a while. “The round one with the silver paint on it?”
    We follow her gaze. The building is one of the largest ones I’ve ever seen in my life. Perhaps twice the size of the GPPT scanning arena in New Providence.
    “Yeah,” David says.
    “Well, that’s the one,” Rika replies. “The place we need to get to.”
    Gadya looks at her. “And why do you think that?”
    Rika peers down at the ground, suddenly shy. “Because I’m a fail-safe. . . . In case everyone else died.” I look at her, startled. “Veidman knew I was coming the whole time. He asked me to. He said no one would expect me to know anything. That no one would question me.”
    “Unbelievable,” Gadya says, shaking her head.
    Just as I’m wondering how Veidman could know which building we had to get to—apparently without knowing about the screen and the projectors—Rika adds, “He also wanted me to spy on everyone. Tell him if anyone acted weird.”
    “He asked me to do the same thing,” I confess. I’m starting to realize that Veidman probably asked each of us to spy on one another and report back to him. Maybe he thought that was the only way to figure out who the real spy was.
    “Rika’s correct about the building,” Markus adds softly. “According to all the data we’ve gathered, I think that’s the nerve center of this entire place. We have to get down there and find a way in. From there we can figure out how to locate the aircraft hangars. They could be underground.”
    James is silent, his face grim. He probably thinks we’re all going to die.
    As a group, we start walking down the hill toward the city. I know that we’re exposed out here, but we don’t have another option.
    For some reason, no feelers come out to greet us. Then I have a depressing thought: Maybe there are no feelers here because they don’t need to swoop in and kill us anymore. Maybe whoever runs this island knows we’re going to die anyway, and they just don’t want to run the risk that we’ll destroy another precious feeler.
    As we keep hiking, getting closer to the industrial city, I realize that the central building presents a kind of illusion. It looked so sleek and massive from a distance. But up close, I see cracks and holes in its curved exoskeleton. Peeling silver paint, and white fissures like marbled slabs of meat, run up and down its side. It clearly hasn’t been maintained in years.
    “How can this place be in such bad shape?” I whisper to Gadya, who’s walking right next to me. “What does it mean?”
    “No clue,” she mutters.
    “Me neither,” David adds. “This is uncharted territory.”
    We walk closer, until finally we’re standing on a slab of cracked concrete at the bottom of the hill, several hundred feet from the buildings. The entire place is still deserted and silent, except for the sounds of distant machinery hidden behind thick walls. All of us are on guard.
    We cautiously head toward the massive silver building. When we finally reach it, Gadya moves up to one of the largest cracks in the building’s wall. “Air’s coming out,” she says. She presses her face up to the crack, trying to see inside, but then recoils violently.
    “It’s freezing!” she yelps. I can see a white, bubbling welt on her cheek. A raw blister. “It’s even colder inside than it is out here! It’s like dry ice.” She raises her hand and touches the blister, wincing.
    “Must be some kind of cooling plant