Feast by Jeremiah Knight Page A

version of the Scientific Method, which she called the Survival Method, more than once. She tried to teach him. Tried to make him memorize it and use it the same way Eddie Kenyon had taught her. He turned out to be a bad guy, but the method still made sense. Still worked. But Jakob resisted learning from his little sister. In the safety of Beastmaster , with her mother and father, it hadn’t bothered her much. But here and now, with their lives on the line, she wished he’d taken the lesson more seriously. Especially now that she had to convince a bunch of adults that she wasn’t a foolish child.
    “Question,” she said, “Can we escape? Observation. One, the floor is concrete. We’re not digging out. Two, the gate is chain link, padlocked shut and screwed into a sturdy wooden beam. It’s not going anywhere. Three, the ceiling is made of corrugated metal held together by bolts.”
    All eyes turned upward. The waves of metal siding, used for a slanted ceiling, were indeed held together by bolts.
    “Holy...” Jakob reached up and tried to twist one.
    “Observation,” Anne said. “They’re rusted. It’s humid as a fat man’s ass crack here.”
    Jakob grunted, trying to twist the bolt. He hissed in pain, withdrawing his hand and shaking it.
    “Hypothesis.” Anne raised a finger. “Humidity affects wood, too. Rots it. Especially when the lumber isn’t pressure treated.” She patted the wall behind her. “Like this wood. So, the cell’s weakest point is the exterior wooden walls.” She pointed to the front gate, the side wall behind Carrie and John, and the back wall behind Willie. “There, there and there.”
    “How do you know all this?” Carrie asked.
    Anne shrugged. “I read a lot.” It was true. Before her life in the wild began, she didn’t do much more than read and cause mischief in the ExoGen facility, pulling pranks and spying. But there were a lot of subjects Anne knew a lot about that she couldn’t remember learning. Like with pressure treated wood. Everything back in San Francisco was metal and glass, built to survive the end of the world.
    “Continuing hypothesis,” Anne said, but was interrupted by Alia.
    “The roof overhangs in the front and back, so those walls probably stayed drier during rainstorms.” Alia crawled across the cell, stopping short when she noticed the five-gallon bucket. She winced and reeled back.
    “Found the shitter,” Willie said, leaning up. He took hold of the bucket’s handle and dragged the concentrated filth to the back of the small cell. “Might seem gross now, but sure beats soiling yourself.”
    Alia just scrunched her nose and continued on her way, a little bit slower now, carefully picking the spots she put down her hands. “Hypothesis,” she said, upon reaching the side wall beside Carrie and John. “Of the three outside walls, this one will be the weakest.”
    She reached out and pushed on one of the vertical planks. It bowed, but held strong. She moved down the line toward Willie, testing each plank.
    “Not that way,” Anne said. “The other way. Specifically, behind him.” She pointed at John, who looked more annoyed than surprised.
    Carrie shifted away and swatted John’s shoulder. “Move out of the way.”
    John obeyed, but didn’t move far. Alia had to partially lean over his cross-legged knee to reach the wall. She probed the middle and then moved down. “This feels wet, still. I think—” Alia let out a yelp as the wooden plank folded outward at the bottom. Without the wall’s support, she fell forward, face-planting. “Oww!”
    Alia reeled back from the impact, sliding back across the floor, hand to her face, into Jakob’s arms as he rushed to meet her.
    “You all right?” Jakob asked, trying to look past the girl’s hand.
    She took her hand away from her face to reveal a bloodied nose. “How bad is it?”
    Anne leaned over the girl, reached out and squeezed her nose between her thumb and index finger.
    “Oww!”