Two Schools Out - Forever

110

An hour later we were almost a hundred miles away. I had no idea what would happen to those kids.

"So, Itex," I said to Fang.

"I told you it was like a deer," Angel said.

"That's ibex," said Nudge. "And they're more goatlike than deerlike."

"Whatever," said Angel.

"It's not ringing a bell," said Fang.

"They have long horns and live mostly in mountains," Nudge explained.

"No, I mean Itex," Fang said. "They said it was a big company, but I've never heard of it. Which doesn't mean anything."

"Yeah, I guess your education has a few gaps in it," I said. Except for the past two months, none of us had been to regular school, ever. Thank God for television.

"Can we look it up somewhere?" Iggy asked. "Like at a library? Are we close to a town?"

I looked down at the incredibly flat land below us. I saw the tiny buildings of a small town, about fifteen minutes away. "Yeah. Good plan. Twelve points west, everybody."

So it turned out that Itex owned, like, half the world. It wasn't just a company. It was a huge multinational, multifaceted conglomerate that had its fingers in virtually every type of business there was, including food, medicine, real estate, computer technology, manufacturing, and even book publishing-so heads up, whoever's reading this.

The more info we found on the Web, the more I started remembering the Itex logo. Now that I recognized it, I realized I'd seen it on a million things in my life, going all the way back to the School where we were created. It had been on test tubes, pill vials, lab equipment-you name it.

I logged off the computer and stood up. "Let's get out of here."

I'd seen enough.