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during the Great Rise and put safely inside EdenWest by his parents, who couldn’t afford to move in themselves. After things settled down, the Cryos were awakened in batches. He and the others lived at Cryo House, which was like a foster home over in the main EdenWest city. All the Cryos came to camp, but then the rest of the kids here were apparently normal, the grandchildren of EdenWest’s original inhabitants, and so this was just another part of their life of luxury. Not that I blamed them for that. It wasn’t their fault they’d grown up in here. They couldn’t be expected to know what it was like outside, to treat the sun like an enemy, to never have tasted spinach.
    I ate that first dinner quietly, thinking, Great, twenty-nine days left and I’ve already been identified, categorized, and labeled . And things only got worse as dinner went on. I sat there mostly quiet except when Todd would ask me a question, and watched as friendships formed around me, everyone gravitating to one another, the natural thing that people did, except for me, a satellite off in my own orbit. It was just like so often back at school, and I never knew how it happened, how you did that magic thing where you became part of a group, and it seemed like, once again, it was already too late before it even started.
    There were ten of us in the cabin. We’d gotten the basics out of the way the first night: Leech, Jalen, and Xane were the Cryos. Mike, Carl, Wesley, Bunsen, and Beaker lived with their families in EdenWest. Noah and I were the outsiders. He was from Dallas Beach, along the Texas coastline. It was kind of like Hub: a little satellite state of the ACF, which basically meant that, other than the military units that came and went to escort supplies, it was on its own. You’d think that would have made us natural friends, but Noah had already made his intention clear to join Jalen and Mike as one of Leech’s minions. I suppose I could have done the same, but it never really occurred to me, and it had been obvious even by the end of dinner that first night that no more invitations for the Leech club were going to be available. Also, I was pretty sure I didn’t like him from the first moment I met him.
    Leech and Jalen had immediately started bonding by referencing ancient TV shows and comic books and junk from way back in pre-Rise, talking in code and making the rest of us feel inferior. When Leech had started tossing out nicknames at dinner, Jalen was the only one who laughed. Xane got the jokes but didn’t really join in. He was the one who’d told me what Turtle meant, later.
    “What happened to your neck?” asked Beaker as I reached the ladder to my bunk. He had the bed below mine. Leech had two cubbies, even though we were only supposed to take one each, and so all of Beaker’s clothes and shoes were stuffed under his bed.
    Just the mention of my neck made the slow itching seem to get stronger.
    I was about to answer when Leech’s voice boomed across the room. “Beaker! I thought I told you: no speaking!”
    Beaker sighed quietly and his shoulders slumped.
    “Good Beaker,” said Leech.
    It had been established that Bunsen and Beaker were on the lowest rung of the cabin food chain, where everything you did made you a target. I seemed to be up on the second level, where you were more just invisible, enough so that you could drown without anyone noticing.
    “You can talk if you want to,” said Bunsen quietly to Beaker. He was lying on the next bunk over, typing up a letter on a computer pad, the blue light reflecting on his big round glasses. The cabin only had one computer. You weren’t allowed to bring your own, to preserve the experience. But you could write a letter home on the cabin pad, and then the camp would send the letters out over the gamma link each night.
    “Hey, bed wetter!” Noah snapped, looking up from an old board game called Stratego that he was playing with Mike. He was talking to Bunsen. Jalen