He’d always wondered why the other children were treated differently, but now Chase suspected those other “special” kids had lived on the Farm with their mothers. Maybe they’d been born on the Farm to high-ranking Community fathers. Apparently, the plan to breed psychics to birth multitalented kids hadn’t been limited to the Black family.
At the time, he hadn’t questioned it. Community indoctrination had started at birth, and it had never occurred to him to tell his father about what Jasper did to him. He’d thought it was what everyone endured. Besides, complaining about the Community got you punished, and after all—even his own mother had left him, so who else would take him if they kicked him out?
He’d accepted that until the first time Holden had shown up, twelve years old and already snobby in a peacoat and slacks, and looking at Chase like he was an alien.
That’s when Asshole Chase had been born. But even Asshole Chase had continued to believe his father didn’t know . . . couldn’t know . . . the extent of it all. Except he had. Richard had visited Chase in the cottage with his Real Son every once in a while, before the decision had been made to let Chase attend school. That had lasted for a year before the NYC DOE had attempted to put him into a special school for emotionally disturbed children because all he did was fight. And use his gifts to fuck with his teachers.
The Farm had changed since then.
The cottage had been remodeled sometime in the past few years to look like a dormitory. Door after locked door lined the hallways of the three-story structure, and he wondered who was behind each one. People like Elijah—literal prisoners who were there against their will—or people who had chosen (if real consent could be given when the brainwashing was so strong) to put themselves through realignment. There was no way the women who lived there, and the other kids who’d been born to unknown fathers, had agreed to live in a drugged stupor. The very idea made Chase sick.
It made him want to march down the hallway and throw open every door to figure out who would be with him when he started the fucking rebellion. Would it be people like him and Elijah, or the Holdens of the world who’d trusted in the Comm before meeting Six? Would his potential allies need to meet their special someone before they opened their eyes?
Either way, there was no way to rescue everyone at once. There were way too many people to sneak off unnoticed. That plan was for later. Right now, he was most concerned with Elijah. And the brief moments they would have together before Jasper convinced Richard that allowing them to talk in private, prior to realignment, was a bad idea.
The two guards stopped by one of the rooms, the one now meant for Elijah, and glared at them as they walked in. Chase waited for the sound of their retreating footsteps before he locked the door and turned to Elijah. He was immediately met with a smack. It landed with enough force for his head to turn and his ears to ring. He blinked away the balls of light dancing before his eyes.
Rubbing his cheek, he looked at Elijah. “Belated response to my ass slap?”
“Yes. And for not fucking warning me that you were fa—”
Chase grabbed the front of Elijah’s shirt and hauled him away from the door and around the bed. “Careful.”
Appearing genuinely chagrined, Elijah sank down onto the carpet. Instead of seeking comfort on the bed, he wedged himself between the wall and the empty side table. He’d always felt safer in small secure places. It was why, before his first full show with the Dreadnoughts, Chase had found him hiding in the storage closet while trying to tamp down an anxiety attack. Imposter syndrome often made Elijah its bitch.
Fondness swelled inside Chase, and he despised it. But he still knelt on the floor next to Elijah, glanced at the door and then at the window, and then crossed his legs in front of him.
“There’s no surveillance inside these houses, but you won’t be here for long.”
“Why? Am I going back to the silo? I thought they were going to let you . . . work on me. What does that even mean?”
“I don’t fucking know.”
“What?” Elijah sat up straighter. “You said you were all Mac Daddy Realigner guy!”
Chase’s mouth twitched. Leave it to Elijah to be totally ridiculous even when they were being held captive by a fucking cult. “Yeah, I was bullshitting so they wouldn’t hand you over to Jasper.”
“Who’s Jasper?”
“My nightmare.”
Elijah’s mouth sank at the sides. A shudder went through him, prompting him to cradle his arm and hunker down lower to the floor. “They told me this place was awful, but I had no idea . . . I just . . . I didn’t know what you were going through.”
“Who’s they?”
“Ex-Comm.” Elijah’s voice lowered to a whisper when he said the word, and his big eyes flew around the room despite the reassurance that there were no cameras. “After the thing with Beck, and after you were taken away, Lia finally told me about . . . everything. All the things I didn’t know before.”
Chase’s lips mashed together, discomfort working its way through him. “Don’t fucking leave me in suspense, kid. Just tell me what she said.”
Elijah’s bruised face creased in a scowl. “She told me about the missing psychics, and how she thinks it’s connected to whatever goes on here—at the Farm. And that there were a group of people who’d been aware of the problems with the Community for years, and were slowly getting other people to work with them to change things.”
“Which things?”
Elijah leaned farther back against the wall. His curly dark hair had grown out and was hanging all over his face and in his eyes. The urge to brush it away was stronger than it’d been in the past, but Chase didn’t succumb to it. As always. Instead, he kept his hands to himself and waited for Elijah to keep talking.
“Everything starting from the membership fee, to the rules and indoctrination, to the secrecy, and the consequences when someone toes out of line . . . the fucking board of directors none of us had a hand in choosing or electing. Basically, they think of the Community as a fascist cult or something. They think people become brainwashed and end up blindly devoting their lives to an organization that’s corrupt—and they also suspected the Farm was where people were sent for punishment. Not just . . . readjusting or realigning or whatever.”
Chase stared at him, expression unmoved, and tried to sort through how he felt about this load of bullshit.
“Who else knows about Ex-Comm besides the Dreadnoughts and Jessica Payne?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think Ex-Comm is an organized group like the Community. More like . . . the principles behind Ex-Comm are held by separate small groups. All of my information came directly from Lia, who is in contact with one of those groups.” Elijah hugged his arm closer to him, chin dipping to his chest as he peeked at Chase through his hair. “Why are you questioning me like this?”
“Because number one—I’m pretty goddamn unimpressed that enough assholes know this shady shit and have never actually, y’know, done jack squat about it.”
“Well, Lia tried—”
“And speaking of Lia, I’m starting to wonder if the Dreadnoughts were ever really just a band formed by two mostly void queer musicians, or if they’re a fucking plant in Evolution by Ex-Comm to keep an eye on Holden.”
Elijah went still. “I didn’t think about that. Lia claimed she didn’t know about Ex-Comm until Jericho joined the band and warned her about the Comm.”
“Right. That just means he may have been the plant.” Chase scoffed and shot a look at the door again. “Regardless, I don’t believe anything these people say. If there are enough of them to spread the word that something is off about this whole outfit, then why hide in a corner fucking whispering to each other? Why not act?”
“They did act. Lia and Holden—”
“They came here to get Jessic—Ex-Comm’s figurehead and Holden’s mother. Stop acting like it had shit to do with us. In the grand scheme of it all . . .” Chase sneered. “We ain’t nothing but a
baby psy with weak precog abilities and a freak who everyone is convinced will go off the deep end one day.”
Elijah leaned forward so abruptly that he winced, cradling his arm more carefully. “How can you say that? Holden was worried about you. He had nightmares about you.”
“He had visions about me. ’Cause I sent them.” Chase’s nostrils flared, hating to admit the rest. “It was the only thing I could do to . . . to sound an alarm. Trying anything else triggers a massive fucking shutdown in my brain because of all their brainwashing.”
“If that’s the case, then why isn’t their brainwashing working now? In the past, you couldn’t even tell me anything. You’d try and then you’d lock up. I didn’t put it together at the time but after you disappeared . . .” He cringed, hands balling into fists. “I rethought everything I thought I’d known about the Community and you, and I remembered. But you’re nothing like that now. Drugged? Yes. Brainwashed?” Elijah shook his head. “No.”
Chase had nearly interrupted Elijah to refute the claim twice during his speech, but it was true. Even the night of the showdown with Beck, Chase had lacked the agency to tell Elijah why he needed to get the hell out of town. Every attempt to get the words out had resulted in pressure and tightness and pain spreading through him before he was paralyzed with fear. The fear the Community had ingrained in him of what would happen to him if he betrayed them or if he left.
If he thought back to the past couple of months and his incarceration inside the Farm, he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that stranglehold had begun to fade. Yet he knew it had something to do with his father. With knowing that all this time, there had never been a safe person inside the Community. Jasper wasn’t the only bad guy. They all were. It was the Community he should have feared all along.
“You’re right,” Chase said after a beat. “Guess brainwashing doesn’t work if the threat of being cast out starts looking like a good thing.”
Elijah nodded and reached for Chase’s hand. He didn’t look surprised when Chase pulled away.
“And now you know you have people outside the Community who care about you. You don’t need them.”
Chase barked out a laugh. “Like who?”
“Like Holden. He risked everything when he came for you—”
“Trust me when I say this. I’m convinced the only person who gave a damn about my narrow white ass while busting into this place was Nate, because freaks in the Black family stick together.”
“You’re not a freak.” Elijah’s voice came out loud, so he lowered it and hissed, “What the fuck is the matter with you? You don’t sound much different than you sounded in the other room in front of them. I thought that was just a performance.”
“Yeah, you would.”
Elijah searched his face, dismay written in every line of his own, before putting a hand on Chase’s knee. “You don’t really believe all that stuff you said, do you?”
Chase pushed his hand away and started to climb to his feet. Elijah pulled Chase down and winced. It shouldn’t have been possible for Elijah to manhandle him, especially while wounded, but Chase was weakened from being holed up in the silo with Jasper. He already felt fatigued from this much activity.
“Chase,” Elijah said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me is that you’re being an idiot as always. You never listen to me, Elijah. You didn’t listen the twelve fucking times I told you to get out of the city, you didn’t listen when I said to hop on a bus and not tell anyone in the Community a damn thing, and you’re not listening to me now.” Chase slapped Elijah’s hand away once again. “It’s easier for you to believe that Ex-Comm is good and the Community is bad, and Holden is a hero, and some day we’re going to be saved? But guess what—it’s not like that. You’re naïve.”
“If I’m so naïve, then tell me the reality,” Elijah snapped back. “Tell me what I’m missing if I’m so stupid.”
Chase’s automatic response was to say he wasn’t stupid, and to comfort Elijah even though he’d been the one to inflict the hurtful blow, but he bit back on it. “The reality is that you can’t trust Ex-Comm, just like you can’t trust the Community. They’ve been sitting on this info for how fucking long? And yet they waited with their thumbs up their asses and their dicks in their hands, and it took the inbred squad from Texas to actually try to put a stop to everything that was going on at Evo.”
Elijah flinched, but kept his chin up.
“Also,” Chase continued, in full rant-mode, “they’re trying to dismantle the whole community. We don’t know if it’s bad as a whole or if there’s a few—”
“Oh my God, if you give me the few-bad-apples speech . . . I swear I’ll start believing this is really a realigned version of my Chase.”
His Chase. Chase’s lip quirked, but he ignored the throwaway comment. “So, you think everyone who works at the CW is evil? They didn’t really help you?”
“They did, but it was mostly individuals, not the organization as a whole. That’s the whole point, Chase! I know you were born into it, but now that my head is less in the clouds, I can see so clearly why all of this is messed up.” Elijah gripped Chase’s forearms again, leaning in until their faces were less than a hand span apart. “Babe, think about it. The structure prevents anyone from ever democratically picking leaders, they crack down on anyone who speaks against them, they have this perfect face of how they want their organization to be viewed and like . . . shepherd special psys into key positions to have influence even outside of the Community. Not only that, but this shit with the Farm? It’s nuts!”
He was right. He was right about all of it. But there was something deep inside Chase that rejected the idea that all parts of it were bad, and not just the little coalition run by his father, who’d convinced himself he could use psychic vampires to create a perfect psychic army to take over the government.
“At this point, we don’t know shit,” Chase growled. “And I’m not going to take the word of a group of people who’ve done nothing to change the situation.”
Elijah deflated a little. “That’s fair, but Holden—”
“I don’t want to hear about Holden. And this little conference has gone on too long. I have to pretend like I’m setting you up to be fucking brainwashed in the silo for a few days before you’re allowed to come back here for good behavior.”
Elijah didn’t react, but realization slowly trickled into his expression until he grew paler and his eyes had become blank with horror. A tremor went through his slight frame, and this time Chase didn’t stop himself from reaching out to touch him. For three years now, he’d wanted Elijah. To touch, to care about, to fuck, to comfort—and he rarely allowed himself to do it. But now . . .
“I’m so scared, Chase,” Elijah whispered. “I want to be strong like you, and be able to pretend, but what if it works? What if days of being locked away in a white room with nothing but a droning monologue about the Community having saved me, and them starving me or dehydrating me, and then them questioning me and . . . and confusing me, or that Jasper guy torturing me—what if it works?”
“Elijah, just listen—”
“No, you fucking listen.” Elijah jerked him closer and did nothing to hide the dampness in his eyes or the trembling of his full lower lip. “Look how brainwashed I was without even being on the Farm. How hard could it be to get me back to the point? Or worse . . . like one of the drones who do nothing but exist on this Farm to procreate . . .”
Chase’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen them?”
“Yes. Men and women. Multitalented. They’re . . . breeding them.”
Chase had known it, but the confirmation churned his stomach. And the fear sweeping over Elijah like a wildfire clenched his heart with a tight fist.
“We have no control, Chase. It’s like everyone I’ve ever met, all the people who took me in and showed me that there was more to life than constantly running and doing last resorts to survive, were liars. I feel like they
tricked me, and now I don’t know who to trust.”
The tears spilled from his round eyes and caught in his lashes. Elijah’s breath hitched.
“For fuck’s sake. Calm down, all right? This isn’t gonna solve—”
“And now you don’t even trust Holden or Lia,” Elijah went on miserably. “You think no one gives a fuck about a freak like you or a little Mexican boy like me, and that they’ll never come back for us.”
Chase wrapped his hands around Elijah’s upper arms and leaned down so their faces were pressed together. “Listen here, jackass. You just said you feel like everyone you’ve ever known has lied to you. Well, guess what? I feel the same way, which is why I’m not so quick to trust Ex-Comm.”
“And what about me?” Elijah reached up to press his hand against the side of Chase’s face. He didn’t let go even when Chase tried to turn away, brow knitting and nostrils flaring. “Do you trust me?”
Fuck that question. Fuck Elijah for demanding an answer.
“This ain’t the time.”
“This is exactly the time.” Elijah pressed their foreheads together. He searched Chase’s gaze with soulful brown eyes, so beautiful that Chase never failed to get lost in them. Even though he’d rather choke than admit it. “If you want me to trust you, and whatever your plan is, I need to know where we stand.”
“I want us gone,” Chase gritted out. “But we have to play along first. They’re gonna be watching us, so we have to make it look good. And believe me, baby. Next time it won’t be a shot in the arm. People have died here.” Elijah’s sharp inhale didn’t slow Chase down as he continued in a hiss. “You’ll go to the silo for a couple of weeks so they can try to get your mind right, but it won’t work. Know why? Because you’re strong as fuck. You survived your mother and her boyfriends, and your grandparents and their religious bullshit—”
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