Olivia was playing solitaire in the recreation room when Micah walked in and turned on the stereo at a volume that was almost painfully loud before sitting down across from her and turning his back to the camera. She realized that in his position, he would block the camera’s view of the table. She paused in the middle of dealing herself a card and looked up at him, a shard of ice stabbing at her chest when she saw the look on his face.

  “Have you looked at this?” he asked, placing the newspaper clipping in front of her.

  She didn’t want to look at the clipping. Just thinking about what had happened outside was enough to bring tears to her eyes and she had already cried enough over the last few days “I skimmed it when Jade shared it with all of us,” she replied. “Why?”

  “Look closer. Read it word for word.”

  Frowning, she took the weathered paper from him and began to look closer. The article was heartbreaking to read and her eyes began to fill with tears several times as she worked her way through the paragraphs. She couldn’t see anything strange about the article except for the fact that it hadn’t been edited properly. She came across several painful typos that were almost a relief in that they triggered the analytical editor side of her brain and made her stop thinking of the implications of the words.

  “Well?” Micah said when she looked up at him again, his eyes alight with eagerness.

  “Whoever wrote this needed a better proofreader.”

  She’d expected the comment to disappoint him, but instead he nodded even more eagerly. “Exactly. And what do you think that means?”

  Sighing, she sat back in her chair. “That there weren’t enough people left after the world fell apart for the article to be edited properly. Or maybe this was written by third rate journalists who don’t know how to spell. Maybe they’re all that’s left.” Drifting off sadly, she looked down at the scrap of newsprint with a weight on her chest. Although she couldn’t remember her past, she had a sense that she had a lot of respect for journalists. She didn’t think she was one because the thought of tracking down a story and devoting yourself so deeply to a theory that you would stick with it until you could prove or disprove it with facts simply made her tired. She imagined journalists would find the idea thrilling.

  “But that’s not the point,” Micah said, interrupting her reverie. “Look at those typos again.”

  She was starting to get irritated with Micah now but she didn’t have anything better to do and he seemed so convinced that he’d discovered something important that she was willing to humor him. Returning her attention to the paper, she began to read again, this time making a mental note every time she found an error. The first was a misspelling of the word apocalyptic. The “l” had been left out. Halfway through the article, another word was misspelled, but this time there was an extra letter, a double “i” in the word violence. The last mistake appeared in the final sentence. Existence should have started with a lowercase “e” because it was in the middle of a sentence, but it was capitalized. And the “s” was missing.

  Micah was still watching her expectantly when she looked up.

  “There are four mistakes,” she said. The letters that are wrong are l, i, e, s,” she listed in a bored voice, ticking each error off on her fingers, but as soon as she had finished the list she realized what she had spelled. Lies.

  She returned her attention to the article in shock. How had she not put that together while she was making note of the typos. “But that’s a coincidence, surely…”

  “I find that hard to believe. Especially when you notice what’s wrong with that photo.”

  Olivia was feeling rather dumb now, so she didn’t wait for him to explain before she began searching the photo for clues. She found the mistake right away. The mushroom cloud in the distance had been photoshopped into a scene from a city street. The edges between the buildings and the cloud were obvious when you looked closer. And the street itself wasn’t real either. She recognized a fake ad on a bus shelter for a brand of search engine that was often used in movies as a stand-in for Google.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Why does it look so old?” she asked, trying to answer the rest of the riddle.

  Folding his arms over his chest, Micah leaned back in his chair with a satisfied expression. “It wouldn’t be hard to falsely age newsprint. That stuff practically starts decomposing the moment you print on it.”

  “What about the brochure?”

  “There’s nothing about it that seems false, but there’s also nothing about it that proves that it’s real.”

  “But what are they doing here? Who would plant them here? What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s something else. Zoe found a message written on the inside of the washing machine.”

  That caught Olivia off guard—she also felt slightly left out that she was just now hearing about this message. “What?”

  “This is all it said: NLI LIES. I couldn’t believe it when she showed me. I’d been looking all over that machine in search of the voltage information, but I’d never thought to look inside!” He shook his head in exasperation.

  “NLI,” she repeated.

  “New Life Institute,” he explained, but she’d already figured it out. “The people watching us, the ones who refuse to give us answers.”

  Biting her lower lip, she glanced at the camera behind him and then closed her eyes. “What should we do?” she asked, covering her mouth with her hand.

  He folded his hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward, pale eyes bright with determination. “I’ve been working on a plan for getting the door open.”

  Still hiding her mouth, she scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. Have you looked at that door?”

  “I have. More than anyone else.”

  “Then how do you think you’re going to unseal it? It looks like it has a magnetic lock or something.”

  “Exactly. An electromagnet.”

  “Which means…” She was glad that she was already hiding her mouth because she couldn’t help the smile that blossomed on her lips. “That’s why you were looking for voltage information. But surely it’s on its own breaker?”

  “Probably. That’s why I have to overload the whole system. I’m going to need your help.”

  “What about the others? Shouldn’t we tell them what you’re planning to do? We need to at least tell them what you’ve discovered.”

  “We won’t have much time once our overseers figure out what we’re up to. We don’t have time to explain everything all at once and still put our plan into action.”

  She considered this, trying to think of an alternative. “Then we tell them in writing. We slide a note under their doors overnight and tell them to give us a sign if they’re in or out of the plan. That will keep it hidden from the cameras as long as they keep their mouths shut.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “That could work. It’s our best option.”

  ///

  They decided to split up writing the letters. They had both formed relationships with different people in the nest and decided to draw on those relationships to make a personal appeal. But Olivia drafted the framework for the note and Micah was impressed by her persuasive writing and hoped that it would make the difference for those who were still doubtful. They’d been cooped up in this place long enough and he had no desire to spend another day locked in this dungeon—not when he had proof that their captors were lying to them every step of the way.

  After the lights had dimmed throughout the nest to simulate evening, the residents headed for bed one by one. The two of them stayed up until everyone else had gone to bed and then went their own ways, slipping the notes under the doors as covertly as they could under the camera’s watchful eye.

  The only thing they could do now was wait.

  Micah went to bed and slept fitfully, going over his plan again and again and trying to figure out if he had overlooked anything. The rules from the orientation video kept replaying through his head, but he couldn’t see a way that he would be violating any of them with his plan. Even if they were watching them while they set up their escape, their watchers couldn’t catch them in a breaking of the rules. The overload would be easily fixed after the breaker was reset.

  But he still had no idea what was waiting for him on the other side of that door. He couldn’t plan his exit from the Nest without intel about what was outside. Did he need a weapon of some kind? Would he encounter resistance? What if there was another locked door on the other side? He could think of a hundred different ways that this plan could fail, but he had to try something. Sitting around and waiting for rescue was not an option. Even if the story about the nuclear apocalypse was completely false, there was still a possibility that all was not right in the world outside. He could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

  Even so, he had no hesitation. He had to try or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.