Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

For the first time, I noticed that the footage also played on the rear membrane, but upside down and reversed. Ms. Yee had taught us how pinhole cameras used to work, and it looked like a version of that.

I refocused on the front membrane. Ezekiel’s path continued in jerky fast-forward. Another turn and the ten-yard line flew by. The footage zipped forward at a dizzyingly swift rate, made even more dizzying by the close-up sight of the ground underfoot. Once the field had been covered by the gradually widening spiral, the point of view entered the bleachers, scanning them, then reversing back to solid ground. Like the male Hosts we’d seen in town, it seemed Ezekiel broke from the spiral pattern only when he encountered an obstacle or a redundancy. Then he straightened out, headed for new terrain, and started over from a different center position.

“They’re not just walking in patterns,” Ben said. “They’re covering all the ground. Searching strategically.”

“For what?” Alex asked.

“For us,” Ben said.

“Wouldn’t it be more effective to keep their heads up and scan for movement?” Alex said. “I mean, if you’re on the lookout for kids, it seems pretty dumb to keep your eyes glued to the ground-or your non-eyes or whatever.”

I hadn’t looked away from the membrane. Slowly, it dawned on me what Ezekiel had been doing. The realization made my throat go so dry that I had to swallow before I could talk. “They’re Mappers,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“What do you mean?” Ben asked.

Ezekiel’s lips fluttered as if he were about to say something, but all that came out was an odd vowel sound. The fast-forward stream kept zipping across the membrane covering his eyehole.

“They’re mapping the terrain,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

Ben’s laugh was high-pitched, nervous. “For what?”

I pried my eyes off the sight beneath me, looking at Patrick. “Do you remember Sheriff Blanton?”

Alex spoke before Patrick could reply. “What about my dad?”

I said, “When we came in, he was in your closet with his head tilted back toward the ceiling.”

“Like he was catching a signal,” Patrick said.

“What if he wasn’t receiving?” I said. “What if he was transmitting ? Sending data.”

“Data?” Ben said. “What data?”

“This,” I said, pointing at the miniature feed playing in Ezekiel’s eye membrane.

We watched all that terrain continue to be vacuumed up and outlined as Ezekiel chewed up turf. It was hard to tell where he was heading until he bumped into a wall. The angle crept along the wall, coming to a locked door. Ezekiel’s hand rose into range, clutching his massive janitor’s ring of keys. He tried maybe fifteen keys in the lock, though considering the sped-up view, this took only a few seconds to watch. And then a key fit, the door swung wide, and the scene scrolled through a classroom. It moved through various floors and classrooms, the school’s interior being mapped like the football field.

The whole time Ezekiel’s cheek twitched, his Adam’s apple undulating. Aside from that, his face stayed expressionless.

“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “So you think this thing’s turning people into computers?”

Dr. Chatterjee said, “As organisms we’re not unlike computers to begin with. I mean to say they’re not unlike us . Maybe that’s why the eyeholes go all the way through. Maybe they need to access-or plug into-all parts of the brain.”

I could feel the heat of Ben’s gaze fixed on me, but I couldn’t look away from the footage fast-forwarding across Ezekiel’s eye membrane. It flew into the humanities wing, entering various classrooms and spiraling through them. I felt a chill as the point of view neared Mr. Tomasi’s room, passing the very spot where we stood. It zipped through Tomasi’s room, spiraling out to the perimeter in seconds. As it zipped toward the door, a familiar meaty hand swung into the frame holding a stun gun, the gleaming barrel filling up the screen. A bolt of lightning fizzled across the membrane, the spark so bright it made us jump. The next view was straight up at the ceiling, each tile delineated with those weird blueprint lines, though they were now even more scrambled and staticky than before. Soon enough the ceiling slid into a blur, passing through the doorway into the hall, and then we were looking up at ourselves looking down at us.

Live footage.

“I asked you a question, Chance,” Ben was saying.

“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t lift my eyes. I could barely even speak. “What?”

Ben’s image, even fuzzily captured in the bubble membrane, looked annoyed. “I said, ‘Transmitting to who?’”

Before I could answer, a sudden movement in Ezekiel’s eye startled me so badly I jerked back onto my heels.

A virtual eyeball rolled into the membrane, replacing the view of us. Squirming and veiny, it stared up from the space where a real eyeball was supposed to be.

Alex screamed. I might have as well.

Not Ben, though.

Ben had his stun gun out in a flash. He fired it directly through Ezekiel’s forehead into the brain. All light vanished from the membrane, taking that horrific eyeball with it.

“What the hell was that?”

“And what does it want?”

“Where is it?”

“Are there more?”

“Did it see us?”

“I don’t know.”

The tense voices washed over my back. We were still right outside Mr. Tomasi’s classroom, but I was at my locker, twirling the combination dial.

“Does it know how to get here?”

“Well, it is a friggin’ Mapper, Ben.”

“But why would it think we’d stick around? Wouldn’t it think we’d be long gone?”

“That’s true,” Chatterjee said. “If it saw us, then it knows that we saw it see us.”

“Plus, the signal looked all weak and screwed up,” Patrick said. “Maybe it wasn’t transmitting clearly.”

“Either way,” Alex said, “we’ll have to watch out even more.”

“Meaning what?”

My combination lock clicked open, the battered metal door swinging on its rusty hinges.

Taped to the inside, a photo of me, Patrick, and Alex at the creek. We’d propped a camera on a rock and set the timer before huddling together, Patrick in the middle, one arm around each of our necks. Our only concern that day had been finding flat rocks to skip.

“Ezekiel used keys,” Alex said. “We saw him use keys.”

“Big deal,” Ben said. “They’re using all kinds of things.”

“The big deal is, lots of teachers have keys to the outside fences,” Alex said. “And it’s clear the Mappers want to record everything.”

“Ezekiel already got the school,” Ben said. “We just saw it.”

“But he didn’t finish. And we don’t know what he transmitted.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Patrick said. “They might come back to finish the job.”

“We need to switch the locks and post lookouts,” Alex said.

I flipped through various textbooks in my locker. A pencil box. An old apple, soft and brown. In the back I found what I was looking for: my composition notebook from English. I ran my hand over the battered black-and-white static design of the cover. The corners were worn, dog-eared, the pages nearly filled. I set it aside and reached for the one beneath it, still blank. The one I was gonna use when I ran out of room in the old one.

Behind me Dr. Chatterjee said, “We have a lot to keep track of.”

“Yeah, we do,” I said, elbowing my locker closed as I turned. At the clang, the others looked over at me. I gripped the new notebook. “We need to start writing all this down.”