Blaine was running late.

As he descended the atrium staircase on his way to the senior commons, his mind was cluttered with lists of things to do—and accompanying things to worry about. The sectionals competition was coming up, and foremost on Blaine's mind was testing the Warblers. Would people outside of Dalton, like the competition audience and judges, suspect anything? Would they be able to tell that just about all of the Warblers were, in effect, machines? Or even better, would he be able to shift enough attention onto himself so that they wouldn't be suspicious at all?

Blaine hoped to get answers today, as a result of a rather informal experiment he'd planned. The Warblers were about to give a performance, and there would be an audience. Not a real audience, but an audience nonetheless—one he'd been working on programming. This audience was going to go wild, and Blaine was curious about how the Warblers would react to that. He didn't know if they would get distracted, or confused—or if they would just stop singing altogether. Mostly, he was worried that they would behave in some way that didn't seem human.

Blaine entered the commons, and seeing as it was a sunny day, stepped through the French doors to stand out on the terrace and think.

The truth was, the Warblers had never actually performed for anyone. Sure, they'd typically stake out space in the senior commons, a room that was large enough to accommodate the entire group. Sometimes they'd sing and dance in some of the larger hallways as choreography demanded. But for the most part, no one else cared about them. After all, the other students weren't designed to stop and join in the spectacle, really, as sophisticated as they were. And how could Blaine program spontaneity? How could he recreate that pull he used to feel when he would hear fellow junior high choir members start to sing, when he would feel drawn to join them as if he were a puppet and they held the strings?

Dalton students didn't quite work that way.

Given a new situation, they had a decision tree that guided their reactions, but they were more complicated machines than that. They could learn new things, add to their menus, Blaine knew. He supposed real people weren't that different. He understood all too well the difference between fight or flight, and wasn't that a kind of menu of options, too, a basic decision to either hold one's ground or run for it? As he looked out onto the campus, at all the students moving from class to class, he wondered about his own responses to things, and why, so often, one of those two actions seemed to take priority over the other.

Usually the students' priority was to stick to their schedules, and they operated according to their priorities. So over the last few weeks Blaine had spent his days inviting students to the lab one by one—not every student, but enough in total to make up a good-sized crowd. He'd written new algorithms, he'd tweaked heuristics so the students would respond differently, so they'd be drawn to the performance instead of their next class. It wouldn't create that feeling Blaine was familiar with necessarily, but it would perhaps create the illusion well enough. Normally he'd ask his father for help with the technology, but since Blaine was sure his father would be upset with him about registering the Warblers for sectionals, he'd kept his activities completely to himself. It wasn't the first time Blaine had taken charge of what his father referred to as The Dalton Project.

The last time that happened, in fact, the Warblers had been the result.

Actually creating the Warblers had been his older brother Cooper's idea. Cooper, who didn't have a clue about programming. Cooper, who'd barely been home since Blaine's life had been forever changed. And yet the first time Cooper got the Dalton tour from Blaine and his father, inspiration had struck.

"Squirt," he'd said, "you can't just spend all your time programming your team of bodyguards." At his last word he coughed into his hand, sneaking in "boyfriends," before coughing again. "You need to be singing. And dancing—you need to work on your dancing. Take the advice of my acting coach. She says you've got to 'take your passion, and let it happen.'"

Blaine rolled his eyes as they walked into the senior commons. "Stop calling me that, and your 'teacher,'" he air quoted, "is just feeding you a line from a Flashdance song." And then in a softer voice, so his father wouldn't hear he added, "And they're not my boyfriends. They're basically robots, remember?"

"That doesn't make it less true," said Cooper, as he flopped onto the leather couch in the center of the room. He spread his arms wide and leaned back, resting his head. Closing his eyes he asked, "Why don't you form a glee club or something? Remember how much you liked choir at your old school?"

Blaine crossed his arms and sat on the couch across from Cooper. "A glee club?" he said. "Here?"

Blaine and Cooper's father, who'd seated himself at a nearby table, was busy recording notes and making lists in a Moleskine. He finally spoke up, even as he kept his eyes fixed on his work. "I don't see how that's possible, Coop. You know how complicated that would be? To have them sing? And actually dance? I don't even know where we'd begin with that one. It's not what they were originally designed to do." He looked up at them and added, "Singing and dancing aren't really high on the list of skill sets for military cyborgs."

Blaine caught Cooper's gaze and both boys smiled. Their father never did understand their love of music. Or performing. He mostly tolerated it. His father's relationship with Cooper had been and still was full of battles, over college, over the direction Cooper's life had taken since he'd earned a degree. Cooper was a free spirit who dreamt big. Even if Blaine sometimes hated the attention Cooper could so easily pull onto himself, he secretly envied the ease with which Cooper could just do what he wanted.

But in that moment, as he sat and watched Cooper, Blaine knew he was right. Not about the robot boyfriends part, but about singing again. Because Blaine spent plenty of time at the grand piano in the music room, especially during the evening, when his mind was uncluttered, where he could take songs he loved and reinterpret them with 88 keys. But having a project like this, a group where he could work not just with song but dance, too, where he could layer their voices and build not only machinery but art . . . That could be a good use of his time.

So he plucked up some courage and announced simply, "Dad, I like Cooper's idea. Like, I really like it."

"You said 'like' three times," his father replied, his face buried again in his notebook. But Blaine noticed the slight smile forming on his lips as he wrote. "And I'm already working on some ideas for how to do this," Mr. Anderson continued, looking up now to meet Blaine's gaze.

All three of them laughed at that, Blaine most of all.

They ended up in the laboratory soon after, where Cooper had proved less useful once the conversation moved to more technical matters. As Blaine and his father brainstormed, the younger son marveled at how he fit into this strange family. At times like that day in the lab, he felt like the glue. Because Blaine had an affinity for both men, an interest in his father's work (at least the mechanics of people, not cars, as they'd discovered one disastrous summer) and a love for music and song. If anything, he and his father understood tinkering. Blaine's bedroom at home was filled, actually, with all sorts of machines, with robots and cameras and even toy roadsters.

Maybe what connected him to both his father and brother was that with both men, he could create things.

It was the maintaining things that was hard, Blaine thought, rooted in the present again, the school bell pulling him out of his reverie. The campus was quiet as students were now in their classrooms. He supposed he should go too—he did actually have a schedule. But as both master and student, he had a hard time keeping up that particular part of the Dalton facade.

Blaine spent the rest of the morning in the headmaster's office, where he sat at the desk researching the sectionals competition while Headmaster Edwards sat in a corner chair. Blaine wanted to familiarize himself with the rules of high school show choir, because, well, someone needed to know them. The last thing he wanted was to be disqualified on some technicality. Like having a team composed of cybernetic organisms. Was there anything in the rules about that? he thought uneasily.

Blaine using the office computer had become, in recent months, a common occurrence. Partly it was due to the Dalton Project, which required special sensitivity as far as any communication—or online connectivity—was concerned. After all, his father worked under government contract, and Dalton Academy was made possible thanks to that. Dalton, in the end, was much more than an Anderson family project; it was tied to national security in ways that even Blaine wasn't privy to, even if he knew, vaguely, that it involved the military.

But Blaine wondered sometimes if his frequent trips to use the computer had more to do with the company Edwards provided, since he wasn't a "student" like the others. Edwards was programmed differently (he had an additional set of security subroutines the others lacked), and he looked different too. Older, with graying hair just like his father. Even though Blaine often made excuses to use the computer and office here, he kind of liked talking to the headmaster. He was a good sounding board, especially in recent months as his father's visits became more rare.

On this particular morning Headmaster Edwards kept looking up from his own work periodically to glance at Blaine. "What?" Blaine asked finally. The headmaster regarded Blaine evenly and said, "You're father won't be pleased."

Blaine's heart sank at that. His thoughts immediately went to the show choir competition. How did Edwards even know? But then he checked himself, and thought, Oh. It's not about that. Meeting the headmaster's gaze Blaine countered, "He already knows I don't go to class anymore."

"That's not what I was referring to, but yes, he does know you don't attend class, not like you used to."

"Wait. So what are you referring to then?" Blaine asked, trying for nonchalance. He had enough on his mind today as it was—he didn't need to be worrying about his father, too. But the headmaster's position here was an oddity, like many oddities of Dalton, just a part of the texture of the place. Part of the verisimilitude Blaine and his father had tried to achieve. And yet, Blaine often wondered if there was something special about Edwards' program in particular, not that he thought his father would necessarily spy on him. He found his heart racing anyway.

"You entered them in the Western Ohio Show Choir Sectionals," the headmaster said. "And so I wonder, how do you plan to actually attend a competition? Unless, of course, I've misread this situation and your father is working on a solution as we speak."

"Er . . ." uttered Blaine, who really was taken aback. "How did you, um, know?"

Edwards stopped to observe Blaine. Suddenly, he seemed to be scrutinizing his body language, his gaze, his everything. "Your father doesn't know, does he?"

"Edwards."

"Blaine, Sir, you can't possibly—"

Blaine held his palms up at Edwards and said, "It's all under control. I've got this, okay? I know what I'm doing." The trouble was, he really didn't know what he was doing. Just that he needed to do it.

Edwards looked conflicted. Come to think of it, Blaine didn't think he'd ever seen him look this way before.

Just as the headmaster seemed ready to speak again, Blaine cut him off. "I'm going to tell Dad. I just—need to be able to show him what I have planned. It's going to be okay. Really."

Blaine noticed the clock then, and realized that the Warblers were probably already warming up for the performance. "I have to go," he announced, practically jumping up from the chair. "I'll explain more later."

"You say that a lot," replied the headmaster, walking back to his desk to resume doing whatever it was that he did throughout the day.

Blaine walked out into the atrium and immediately noticed from his vantage point atop of the staircase that something was different. Instead of the usual orderly movement during the passing period between classes, certain students (familiar because he'd had them in the lab recently) seemed to be flocking toward the same location: the hall that led to the senior commons. Blaine smiled and bounced on his feet. The tweaks he'd made were actually working. As he made his way down the steps so he could join the group and finally start the performance, he realized he hadn't felt this full of anticipation in a long, long time. It felt good.

But as he made it to the bottom of the stairs, he was interrupted by a voice calling out to him. The strangest part was that it was a voice he'd never heard before.

"Excuse me. Um, can I ask you a question? I'm new here," a boy said, and Blaine turned to look upon him with nothing short of wonder.

He had no idea who the boy was.

"My name's Blaine," he got out, remembering to smile, his mind racing as he tried to process what was happening.

"Kurt. So what exactly's going on?" the boy inquired, and Blaine found himself fixating on the notion that this boy was real. Somehow, he'd gotten onto Dalton grounds. Somehow, he'd found his way inside. And somehow, he just happened to find the only other real boy in this entire place. At that point, Blaine felt several, very different things, all at once.

Delight, because this boy was wearing bermudas with boots and a blazer—he didn't look like anybody else here.

Elation, because this boy could help Blaine test the Warblers today. Would he suspect anything about the others? Would he be able to tell?

Panic, because something could go very, very wrong.

Excitement, because here was someone who looked to be his own age from some other school with, presumably, actual people attending it.

Awe, because . . . this boy was beautiful.

His heart racing now, Blaine remembered Kurt had asked him what all the chaos around them was about. He quickly lied, "The Warblers. Every now and then they throw an impromptu performance in the senior commons. It tends to shut the school down for a little while."

"So wait. The glee club here is kind of cool?" Kurt asked.

Blaine was giddy and eager to have Kurt see the performance. "The Warblers are like rockstars," he lied again, wanting so much to impress the boy. "Come on. I know a shortcut." Impulsively, Blaine took Kurt by the hand, partly so that he could remember what it felt like to touch someone, to feel skin (Kurt's was smooth and warm and wow). Blaine was so distracted, in fact, that he missed the actual shortcut he'd meant to take and instead took Kurt down a longer corridor before arriving at the commons. As they ran, the other boy's awestruck expression made it seem as if he'd just stepped into a fairy tale, which confirmed for Blaine that this boy had never been here before.

When they entered the commons, the Warblers were already waiting for Blaine, and many students had gathered around them. Blaine was thrumming with anxiety and tried hard not to show it. As he took his place with the rest of the group, he had only vague recollections of saying something to Kurt about his attire (he'd actually patted Kurt's lapel), and then the Warblers started in with their "dun dun dun dun's."

Blaine found that in spite of what he'd planned for today's experiment, in spite of all the things he needed to observe, all he could actually focus on was Kurt.

And performing for him was nothing short of exhilarating.

Watching Kurt respond, the way his eyes seemed lit up due to their clever treatment of the song, the way nothing could hold back his smile was, for Blaine, as if he just found the very thing he needed in his life, the thing he was trying to escape Dalton to experience. At the same time it impressed him how much he needed it, how much his life was missing. And he didn't even know quite what "it" was. Just that it was important. Necessary for survival.

When the song ended, and all the Warblers were excitedly patting Blaine on the back, he finally registered the energy that had exploded around the room. It actually distracted him, once he noticed it, because it felt so real. As fellow Warblers patted Blaine on the back, Blaine realized he'd never seen them so electric. When he remembered Kurt and turned to find him, though, to see what he'd thought, the boy was gone.

Teenage Dream, indeed. Blaine actually panicked for a moment, wondering if he'd imagined the whole thing since he'd put himself under so much stress that day. All those doubts were erased once Wes and David approached him, however. "So who was that kid watching you?" they asked. "He didn't seem like one of us."

"One of you," Blaine corrected, softly. "And I have no idea," he added.

Later than night, as Blaine wandered the upper floors of the dormitories in the dim light cast by a few lamps, he was haunted by images of a boy, a boy with a clean voice and kind heart.

And he wondered, as he gazed out the window past the darkness, where the glow of town lights far off in the distance reminded him of how alone he was, whether he would ever get to see him again.