“So you’re trying to say that we’re all dying? That this is just some big, over-elaborate plot to kill us?”

Ex shook his head and sighed with frustration. He stabbed the steak in front of him with his fork and left it there. “I’m not trying to say that this is just some…big…murder or something. I’m trying to say that whether they want us to or not, we’re dying.”

“Why would they let us die?” Axie asked. As she wiped a milk mustache with the back of her hand, she kept talking. “They want us to live, so they can keep testing on us right?” She paused and took another gulp of milk, letting the milk mustache return. “That makes us sound pretty used, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ex said exasperatedly. “They are using us, but that’s not the point!” He pulled his fork from his food and tapped it against the edge of his plate. “Or maybe it is.”

Axie raised an eyebrow. She was sitting across from him at their table. It was breakfast, and everyone was slowly, ever so slowly, returning back to normal. Everyone was still shaken up, but they weren’t quite as fearful. They were managing, even with the death lingering over their head.

“Where’d you get that idea, anyway?” Cari asked, poking the would-be waffle in front of her. It jiggled a little in protest, like something that definitely wasn’t edible. A little disgusted, she pushed her plate away from her and turned to face Ex. “It doesn’t seem like something you’d be thinking of.”

“Yeah,” Kibo chirped, much more like his cheerful self than he had been the day before. “You’d be thinking more about my hot ass, not some conspiracy!”

Everyone gave a little laugh, and even Ex had to crack a smile. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there wasn’t anything going on. Maybe there weren’t hundreds of children like them who had died in the name of science. Maybe Forty-Nine was just completely off his rocker.

Pushing it to the back of his mind, Ex tried to relax. Everything his friends were saying was logical. Yesterday, he had just been spooked because of the death. That was all. It led him to believe in things that didn’t make sense. Things that weren’t real. Things that couldn’t be real.

Ex shut up and stuffed the waffle into his mouth, listening to Cari and Kibo argue about the new shampoo they had been given. He sighed. The scientists wouldn’t let them die, would they?

Everyone was crowding around some hidden Forty in the cafeteria that lunch. Cari raised an eyebrow and walked in. “What’s going on?” she asked, shoving her way through two boys. “What’s everyone looking at?”

Someone pointed at Forty-Six, sitting in the middle of the crowd like a princess. She was grinning from ear to ear, holding some odd circular device. Although she had never seen one before, Cari instantly knew what it was. Portable Compact Disc Player. It even came with headphones, and what looked like a CD case. Everyone was making noises of excitement and jealousy and awe as they tried to get a closer look.

“What CD did it come with?” Rave asked, sitting next to Forty-Six. His eyes were bright with longing, and his fingers almost snatched it away from her lap themselves. His personality, it seemed, was the one of the musician. He craved sounds; any sound. He walked through the corridors singing, or humming, or whistling. During lunch, he drummed his fingers on the table to an unknown song in his head. Now that music was staring him straight in the face and he couldn’t have it, he was dying inside.

Forty-Six smiled smugly, holding the CD player up a little higher for everyone to see. “Professor Gideon said it’s the classics. You know, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. All those guys.” The crowd around her murmured in acknowledgement. They had all been given that knowledge before they were born.

“Why did you get something as cool as that?” Cari asked, finally standing in the front of the throng now. “Did you do something special or something?”

Apparently, this was the question that Forty-Six had been waiting for. All the ‘may I see?’ ‘Can I hold it?’ ‘Is it yours?’ ‘Where’d you get it?’s simply did not amuse her. She made a show of putting the headphones around her neck. “They gave it to me specially, because I…” She paused dramatically, scanning the eager faces around her. “I agreed to have pneumonia tested on me, even after the…failure.”

There was a collective gasp from everyone standing around. It had only been a day since Forty-Five had died, and already someone had agreed to take her place? Axie turned away, disgusted. She grabbed Kibo’s hand and pulled him away from the still ogling crowd.

“She’s such a bitch,” she hissed as she dragged Kibo along the hallways. When they were far away from the cafeteria, she finally let go of the death grip on Kibo’s wrist. She tore a little hair band from around her wrist and angrily put up a ponytail. “She’s parading that stupid CD player around like she’s the queen of Sheba. She doesn’t even care that her best friend just died! Geez louiz!”

Kibo shrugged and started to say something, when a voice out of nowhere cut him off/ “They’re giving us better toys to amuse ourselves with.”

Axie and Kibo turned around to see Forty-Nine casually walking out of the boy’s bathroom. He let the heavy bathroom door swing back and forth behind him. He gave them both a polite, if eerie, smile.

“After that death, they definitely need us to turn a blind eye to our coming deaths. The more we don’t think about how are bodies are so much weaker, the better.” Forty-Nine laughed out loud at the dumbfounded expressions on the two older experiments. “Forget I said anything,” he said and walked away, his hands in his pockets.

After he turned the corner and disappeared from sight, Kibo gave Axie and odd glance. He whistled and twirled a finger in the air, near his ear.

Axie smiled a little and nodded. “Yeah, he does seem pretty crazy. I guess we know who Ex has been talking to, huh?”