“Well, then, find out.”

“How?” Luke asked.

The man sighed, and rolled his eyes.

“What’s your name?” he asked, slowly, as though Luke might be too stupid to understand the question.

“L—” Somehow Luke couldn’t bring himself to claim his fake identity. “I know my room number. One fifty-six. I just don’t remember where it is.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” the man growled. “Up those stairs and around the corner.”

Even with the man’s directions, Luke got turned around and had to search and search. By the time he finally saw the engraved 156, his legs were trembling with exhaustion and his feet were blistered from walking in the stiff, unfamiliar shoes. Luke was used to going barefoot He was used to sitting in the house all day, not walking up and down stairs and through labyrinth-like halls.

He stepped through the doorway and headed straight for his bed. It had a spread on it and looked like all the others now. All Luke wanted to do was fall into it and go to sleep and forget everything that had happened that day.

“Did you ask permission?” someone barked at him.

Luke looked around. He was so tired, he hadn’t even noticed that seven boys were sitting on the floor in a circle, playing some sort of card game.

“Per-Permission?” he asked.

One of the boys — probably the one who’d spoken— threw back his head and laughed. He was tall and thin, and older than Luke. Maybe even as old as Luke’s brother Matthew, who was fifteen. But Matthew was familiar, known. Luke couldn’t read this boy’s expression. He had a strange cast to his dark eyes, and his face was oddly shaped. Something about him reminded Luke of the pictures he’d seen in books of jackals.

“Hey!” the boy said. “They sent us a voice replicator. Amazingly human-like form. Voice is a little off, though. Let’s try another one. Repeat after me: ‘I am an exnay I am a fonrol. I am a lecker. I don’t deserve to live.’”