The Lost Code Read Online Free Page B

of like seeing the panels of the dome from underwater, a glimpse backstage. To the right was an antique-looking brown door with a square frosted-glass window. I headed through it, into a dark room with warped, wood-paneled walls.
    There was a door in each wall, each with a similar window. One led outside. The others had gold, stenciled lettering that read OFFICE and DIRECTOR . The one I’d come out of said INFIRMARY . There were cracked leather chairs in the corners, and coffee tables piled with old paper magazines.
    It was like being in one of those exhibits that you’d find in the history museum back in Yellowstone, the ones that explained about the United States pre-Rise, before the War for Fair Resources when the United States invaded Canada and created the American-Canadian Federation. That name was supposed to sound peaceful, like the two countries had happily joined forces, but my dad said the name was a lie. The invasion and occupation had really been bloody and terrible.
    I pushed through the director’s door. There was a wide desk on the far side of the room, a tall black chair behind it, and two fabric chairs in front. The desk was antique, but its top had been replaced with a glass table monitor. Files glowed on it. On the wall behind the desk, a bulletin board was covered with maps that looked like they were expertly hand-drawn, showing intricate coastlines and mountain ranges. I wondered if the director had drawn them himself.
    There was a large fireplace in the left wall, built from giant gray stones that were scarred by black soot. The head of something I was pretty sure had been called a bison was mounted above it. Along the right wall were high shelves of frayed books and a leather couch. The room smelled like soot and pine, a scent I vaguely remembered from my clothes and sheets back during the Three-Year Fire, which erased the last forests of the American West. It had started when I was four, and during the middle year and a half of it, we barely saw the sun.
    The wall behind me was covered with framed photos on either side of the door. They were all-camp photos. Each one had a year beneath it. The earliest ones were in black-and-white, then they switched to faded color. Groups of wild-haired boys and girls. Not much separated the decades, except the size and color of the kids. They went from skinny and mostly white to chunkier in the middle, with more varieties of skin color. Then, in recent photos, the kids got thinner again. And in the last few photos they were no longer sun-bronzed, their skin instead tinted purple by NoRad lotion.
    “Fascinating, isn’t it?” A man was peering through the door. He stepped in and extended his hand. “I’m Paul. I’m the director. And you . . . You must be Owen.” He said it almost like I was a celebrity or something.
    “Hi,” I said, shaking his hand. It was cool, the skin smooth-feeling.
    He was a little taller than me and old, maybe in his fifties. Like Dr. Maria, he was dressed retro, I guess like the director of a summer camp would have been, in jeans and a blue button-down shirt and a black vest with the overlapping E -and- C EdenCorp logo embroidered on it. Everything was relaxed except for a striped tie that was done up tight, the knot perfect. He had wavy gray hair and a thin face, lots of freckles and dark spots on his tanned skin from time spent in the sun.
    The only thing about him that was modern were his square, black-rimmed glasses. Their lenses flickered in a tinted shade that indicated Rad protection. I was pretty sure that the tint could be turned off on glasses like that, or at least lightened, but Paul still had it full on, even though we were indoors, and so I couldn’t see his eyes. He seemed to be smiling, but the glasses made the smile strange, incomplete.
    He closed the door and pointed to the photos. “Almost two hundred years of campers have come to this very spot—well, not counting the fifteen-year break while the dome was