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.“Wait here,” she told Myla.“I’ll be back in a sec.” She walked into Mrs.Habeck’s classroom, and Myla glanced around the quad.There was graffiti all over the short wall that bordered Senior Corner: insults and obscenities, crude depictions of male and female genitalia, symbols she didn’t recognize but that reminded her of Arabic writing.Myla frowned.She was pretty sure none of that had been there before lunch.Rachel emerged from the classroom with Chelsea, a girl Myla had seen around but didn’t really know.Chelsea looked at her coolly but did not say hello.She was wearing a Tyler Scout patch herself, and Myla found herself questioning the girl’s motives.Why had she come to Rachel in the first place? Why was she offering to take a reporter to a training session? She certainly didn’t look like any sort of whistle-blowing ideologue.Indeed, there was something hard and cunning about her, an indefinable quality she shared with all the other scouts Myla had seen.But then she let her guard down, and Myla saw that she was just a scared kid, a regular high school student caught up in something she didn’t believe in or understand.“Thank you for coming,” she told Rachel.“And writing about this.”“Thank you for telling me about it.”Chelsea glanced around the quad.“Come on.We’d better get going.This is the best time to show you what’s going on.”“What if they catch us?”“I’ll say you’re doing a story for the paper on how much better and more well-trained we are than the boys.”“Is there a rivalry between you two?” Rachel asked excitedly.“Are you competing with each other?”“No,” Chelsea admitted.“We just do what the principal tells us.The boys, too.But it might work.”What if it doesn’t? Myla wondered.But she said nothing.They walked through the corridor toward the lunch area.“We’ll take a shortcut,” Chelsea said, hanging a left.She led them past the auto shop, past woodshop and metal, around the side of the shop building to a dirt footpath that led through a narrow trash-strewn section of ground between the building and the fence that separated it from the sidewalk and street outside.They trekked up and down short small mounds of hard-packed earth, kicking aside beer bottles, Coke cans and potato chip wrappers.The path wound around the back of the building and joined a cement sidewalk that passed through an open area west of the sports complex.Ahead was a series of pens and corrals housing a couple of sheep, a few goats and a cow.Beyond that was a barn.Myla had never been on this part of the campus.She didn’t know how that was possible after nearly four years here, but it was.She was vaguely aware that the school had a Future Farmers of America program, the FFA, but she had no idea where they met or what they did, and it was a surprise to her to find this barn and these pens way out here in an area that she hadn’t known existed.What made it seem even more remote was the fact that here the nine-foot wall that would eventually enclose the whole school was finished.They were cut off from the city outside.Neither the houses nor the street beyond was visible, and it reminded her in a way of Disneyland.There was that same sense of being in a hermetically sealed world.From within the barn, they heard female voices.At this distance, Myla wasn’t sure whether they were talking, fighting, laughing or screaming.Something suddenly occurred to her.“This is fifth period,” she said.“Shouldn’t they be in class?”“Yeah,” Rachel agreed.“You’d think they’d practice before school or after school or during lunch.”“We train in shifts,” Chelsea said.Myla still didn’t like that “we.”“Someone is out here all the time.That’s the way Principal Hawkes wants it.Every period of the day, a group of girls is out here practicing fighting techniques.”Rachel had her notebook out.“Who are you training to fight?”“They haven’t told us yet.” Chelsea stopped walking.“From here on in, we have to be quiet.If someone sees us, let me do all the talking.Okay?”Myla and Rachel nodded.“We’ll go around the side of the barn.There’s a window there where you can see in, and it faces the backs of the girls.”“What about the teacher, the instructor or whoever’s training you?”“There is no instructor fifth period.That’s why I picked it to show you.” Chelsea lowered her voice.“That’s also why it’s more dangerous.Now no more talking.”They left the path and hiked around the corrals and pens, crouching low and running across a section of open dirt until they reached the side of the barn.As Chelsea had said, there was a window in the wall, a small square just about eye level next to a hook holding a coiled rope.She peeked in first, then moved aside and let Rachel have a look.Myla went last.There were far more girls here than she’d expected, probably close to twenty, and she did some quick math.Seven periods with twenty girls each.A hundred and forty girls? That didn’t seem possible.There were only three hundred kids in the entire senior class.Maybe this was the peak, though.Maybe other periods had fewer recruits and that’s why Chelsea had taken them here now.Maybe not.She saw a couple of girls who weren’t seniors, and though she’d thought the scout program was open only to twelfth graders, it looked like that wasn’t the case.The girls stood silently in line in the center of the barn, facing away from the window, each of them clutching a spear in her right hand
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