Free The Lost Code by Kevin Emerson

against Paige’s back. She turned around, her magenta-streaked ponytail flipping over her shoulder. She was chewing a thick piece of gum. It smelled like the Citrus Blast bug juice and combined with a soapy clean smell that always seemed to be around the Arctic Foxes. She was tall and glanced slightly downward at me.
    “Sorry,” I said immediately.
    The two girls to her right were looking back at me, too. Pairs of eyes ringed by thick blue and lavender makeup.
    Paige spoke in between chews. “It’s all right.” She squinted at me, almost like she was trying to figure out what I was. “What happened to your neck, anyway?” She kind of scowled when she said it, like my wounds were a bad fashion choice.
    “It’s from when I drowned,” I said quietly, thinking that I shouldn’t feel embarrassed but then feeling that way anyway.
    She turned away. The three Foxes ducked together and conferred. The girl next to Paige, her black hair striped with glittery teal and held up in a swirl by two sticks, shot a glance back at me again with her thin, dark eyes.
    More huddling, then they all cracked up. I looked around for a place to move, but we were packed tight.
    The girls turned back around. Paige looked me up and down while talking to the others. “I don’t know. . . .”
    “What?” I asked.
    “Mina thinks you have CP,” said Paige, cocking her head at the girl beside her. Other Arctic Foxes cracked up now. She looked me over again. “I guess it’s possible . . . .”
    “Him?” Leech suddenly called from nearby. “That’s the Turtle!”
    Paige whipped around to him. “You are so mean!” she snapped, but with a smile, and she punched him in the shoulder and then she and Leech were the center of the universe again, and I was alone in my slice of space against the back wall, having no idea what Paige had meant.
    “CP means ‘Cute PoTENtial,’” said Xane from nearby.
    “Oh,” I said.
    “Lucky,” he added.
    Knowing what that meant only made my nerves hum faster. I felt my face starting to burn. What did you do if you had CP? Were there ways you were supposed to act? Things you had to start saying? Was I now expected to work my way up to “real” cute? It felt like another thing I had no idea about and I wondered if I’d been better off when I thought I was invisible to the Arctic Foxes.
    A blinding light speared through the windows, making us all squint. We were passing a bank of SafeSun lamps, ten enormous round bulbs. You could see the heat shimmering around them.
    Above that, things got darker. The roof of the dome arced overhead, and now we could see the giant triangular panels and the crisscrossing girders. We were above the hazy atmosphere of the place. The ground was lost from sight. The light up here was pale and electric and almost reminded me of being back underground at Hub.
    The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open and we stepped out into a metal-floored room. To our right were clear doors. We had just filed out when a tiny tram arrived. We boarded, and the tram shot ahead. Out the front window, I could see the little track, suspended in a steel superstructure that hung down from the dome roof.
    “EdenWest was completed in 2056,” said Paul, extending his hand toward the window and sounding moderately bored. “It took fifteen years to build, a colossal effort, like we were the Egyptians building a pyramid. But, that’s what happens when you get enough people who want to save themselves”—Paul said this with more interest—“and a board of directors with a vision. ”
    “How big is the dome?” Noah asked.
    “The base is six kilometers in diameter,” said Paul. “It’s home to two hundred thousand people, not including those currently enrolled in our Existential Services program.”
    I wondered what this was. Then I heard Leech explaining it to Noah: “When you’re gonna die in Eden, you can opt to be frozen until we figure out how to cure diseases and live