Chapter 38 - 37 : Hide and Seek

Chapter 38: Chapter 37 : Hide and Seek

Seventy people in green tracksuits scattered off the central lawn, and the crowd from the bleachers poured out after them. Hendricks’s people stretched caution tape and tried to hold the line. They held about half of it.

Fifteen minutes. The PA counted it down one minute at a time.

Most of them headed for the library and the two classroom buildings. Somebody pulled open a drawer in the old-newspaper archive on the library’s ground floor and folded himself into it. Somebody lay down behind the row of gray recycling bins outside Mercer and turned his tracksuit jacket inside out. A girl with a buzz cut kicked off her shoes and lay down in the dry half of the fountain.

Dylan stuck to Sierra’s heels.

"Let’s hide together," he said, jogging alongside her. "We can keep watch for each other."

Sierra didn’t even turn her head. "Two people make twice the noise. Find your own spot."

She cut into the trees behind the library, picked the jacaranda with the thickest canopy, and was up it in two moves. A green tracksuit in green leaves. From the ground, there was nothing there at all.

Dylan stood under the tree for two seconds, then went and hid in a phone booth.

The countdown hit zero. Twenty volunteers in pelican heads lined up, every one of them holding a red water gun. Hendricks stood out in front with no pelican head and no water gun, hat brim pulled low.

"Nineteen years on this campus," he said. "There’s not a corner of it I don’t know."

The lav mic put that on the PA and on the stream. The chat filled up with OH NO.

In the command tent, half the Bravia wall had switched over.

The gym cameras still pointed at empty tables, but eight screens now showed the campus security cams scattered across central campus. The library ground floor. The hallways of both classroom buildings. The fountain. The drive.

The stream was showing those eight too, rotating every ten seconds.

That was the trick to this round. The form had said the whole game would be broadcast live. Not one of the players had thought about what that meant once they were hiding: sixty thousand people at home were watching them do it.

The chat blew up.

LIBRARY CAM bottom left FILE CABINET theres a guy IN IT

NO SNITCHING let them hide!!!

fountain girl your feet are showing

snitches get stitches

The snitches got out in front first. Within five minutes the other side had organized and started flooding the chat with fake tips. Somebody swore they’d seen three people climb into the pool, and there was no pool on central campus.

Claire watched the text blur past. "They’re fighting," she said quietly. "Sixty thousand people fighting over a bunch of people they’ve never met."

"Not over the players," Rhett said. "Over which side they’re on."

The first five minutes were up. Rhett keyed the mic.

"First tip from the chat." He read it slowly. "’Library. Old newspapers. Bottom-left cabinet.’"

The PA carried it across central campus. It carried it into the library, too.

On the rooftop camera, four pelican heads turned toward the library at once. On the security cam, the cabinet drawer slid open a crack from the inside, then slammed shut again. The chat exploded laughing.

He was red a minute later. He climbed out of the drawer and gave the security camera the finger. It wasn’t clear who it was meant for.

One.

The girl in the fountain was two. Number three was under a campus patrol cart in the drive, and Hendricks found that one himself, no tip needed. He bent down, looked under the cart, straightened up, and crooked a finger at the pelican head behind him.

After that, it slowed down.

Central campus was huge. The smart ones had stayed away from the eight cameras from the start.

The sixty-seven still hidden were spread across a dozen buildings, a few hundred trees and more corners than anybody could count, and twenty people in pelican heads could barely see where they were walking.

Half the tips from the chat were real. The other half were fake, and every fake one sounded more convincing than the truth.

Rhett read one every five minutes. He never picked. He read whichever one his eyes landed on, real or fake, no favorites.

The chat figured that out fast and started spamming harder, trying to get their own tip read. Whenever a tip got read out loud, the person who’d posted it lost their mind in the chat. One fake tip sent three pelican heads into a men’s bathroom, and the chat laughed for two straight minutes.

For the first time, they could touch the game. Not just watch it. Touch it. A line they typed could cost a stranger sixty miles away a thousand dollars.

The viewer count broke seventy thousand.

Nobody saw Mac’s plan coming.

He didn’t hide at all. With two minutes left on the countdown, he slipped around behind the volunteer tent, fished a spare pelican head out of a box, and pulled a yellow volunteer vest on over his tracksuit. Then he just walked out with the seekers.

Only one security camera caught it. Three minutes later somebody in the chat noticed that pelican head number eleven didn’t have a water gun and kept stretching his back.

The message got reposted a few hundred times. Nobody snitched. The snitches and the anti-snitches were finally on the same side.

Rhett saw it in the tent too. He didn’t say a word. He just skipped one tip on his next read, the one that said PELICAN 11 IS MAC.

Dom turned to look at him. "I thought you said no favorites."

"That one was fake."

"That one was real."

"I know."

Four, five, six. The gap between each one kept getting longer.

One guy had hidden inside a grand piano in the music building, and a grad student who’d come in to practice found him. One had fallen asleep in a basement, and his snoring drifted out into the hall. But between seven and eight there was a gap of almost forty minutes.

Out on the central lawn, the crowd had started making its own fun. Some people had beer. Some people had Frisbees. Half the flowerbed by the fountain had been trampled flat. At some point two guys had climbed up onto the roof of Mercer, not in tracksuits, just looking for a better view.

At the edge of the crowd, a middle-aged man in a windbreaker lifted a camera with a long lens. He photographed the trampled flowerbed. He photographed the two guys on the roof. Then he turned around and took several shots of a pile of empty beer cans under the bleachers. He wasn’t wearing a volunteer badge, and nobody paid him any attention.

In the tent, Dom checked his watch, then looked outside.

The sun had dropped to just above the library roof, and the shadows on the lawn were stretched long.

Number nine was a freshman wedged into an air duct in a third-floor bathroom in Halsey. She came out on her own because she was about to die of heat.

Number ten was a senior who’d spent the whole round in the shrubs outside the President’s office window.

Whitman had been watching the stream at his desk all afternoon. In the end he couldn’t stand it anymore. He opened his window and pointed Hendricks to the spot.

The chat lost its mind.

THE PRESIDENT IS A SNITCH

my tuition paid for that window

hes been watching ALL AFTERNOON?? does he not have a job

abusing executive power. most powerful snitch in california

IMPEACH WHITMAN 2006

On the security cam, Whitman gave the lens a little wave and shut his window.

The chat went quiet for two seconds.

HE WAVED

ok fine that was kind of cool

i withdraw the impeachment

The tenth stack dropped into the box. Forty-one thousand.

Sixty people climbed out of their hiding places and headed for the central lawn. Sierra dropped out of the jacaranda with purple blossoms caught in her hair. Pelican eleven pulled off his head, and under it was Mac’s face, pouring sweat. The bleachers came to their feet in waves.

Nobody in the tent was laughing.

"Almost three hours." Dom’s voice was tight. "Ten people, and it took almost three hours. We’ve got maybe an hour of light left, and there are still three rounds. Tug of war is outside. The final’s outside."

"I know."

"The permit says outdoor activity until sunset. Hendricks was crystal clear about it. Once it’s dark, without lights, nothing happens outside."

When he’d filled out the application, Rhett had thought about renting lights. That meant a separate approval, another insurance rider and another week of waiting. He’d run the schedule, decided he wouldn’t need them, and left them off.

Ryan leaned in from behind them. "Then finish tomorrow. I’ll call New York right now. After today, if you want Sunday, they’ll give you Sunday. If you want the gear for another day, they’ll be thrilled."

Kevin’s phone buzzed too. He listened for a few seconds and covered the mouthpiece. "The President’s office. They said if we need Sunday, it’s ours."

Dom turned to Rhett, the relief all over him. "Then that’s it. We wrap tonight and pick it back up tomorrow."

"No."

"Why not?!"

"Because if they go home tonight, sixty people are going to wake up tomorrow with nothing to do but sit in their dorms and study the rules," Rhett said quietly. "Sooner or later, one of them gets to page seven."

Nobody in the tent said anything.

"And," Rhett tipped his chin at Claire’s screen, "seventy thousand people are watching right now. If we start again tomorrow, it’s a rerun."

He’d known from the start that a hundred people wouldn’t go out fast. A hundred people was the biggest thing this video had going for it and the biggest risk it was carrying, both at once. The more people, the bigger every shot looked, and the longer every round took.

He’d built the day with no slack in it on purpose, because a game with slack in it goes soft. No slack also meant every minute of this last hour had to count.

His eyes moved from the rooftop shot to a screen down in the corner. The gym. Rows of white lights burning in the ceiling, thirty tables in perfect lines, two pairs of cards waiting on every one.

"We go inside," he said.

He keyed the mic.

"Sixty left. Everybody, find your safe partner and head to the gym."