Priyanka’s eyes shifted back over to the device, locking onto it. The soldier holding on to her used her free hand to touch the Taser at her side, giving me a meaningful look. The Knocker snapped a photo of the little girl’s face.
“Ah…a Green. Excellent.” Knocker smiled. “We’re running short on them this month.”
The other soldier returned for the young girl.
“This one’s going to the hold,” Knocker instructed. The soldier nodded, gripping the girl’s arm.
“No! I want my sister! I want my sister!” She sank to the floor, screaming, curling into a protective ball. The bare walls echoed with her pain. She was still fighting when the soldier bent down and lifted the girl’s slight form over her shoulder.
Priyanka’s dark lashes fanned against her cheeks. Behind her eyelids, her eyes darted back and forth, her mind already linked and working.
Shit! If they had already scanned Roman before she’d amended our listings to include the lie that we’d undergone the cure procedure—if the adrenaline overcame Priyanka—
I didn’t see Knocker move until the tablet was pointed at my face, the flash burning into my retinas. The silver thread reached out, touching the device’s batteries, primed to fry them.
Can’t.
It would be too suspicious, especially after the Taser failed. It would give me away.
“Anna Barlow,” Knocker read, then looked at me again. She took a step closer, her brows lowered in thought. Her lips parted. She recognized me. If not from camp, then from the news. Something sparked in her eyes.
Context.
I didn’t think. I just spoke, in my best impression of Liam’s accent. “Do I have something on my face, darlin’?”
She blinked in surprise, but recovered quickly. Her top lip pulled back as she said, “Nothing but a smart-ass look I don’t like.”
Knocker turned her attention to Priyanka, nodding first to the soldier gripping her arm, then to me. The soldier nodded in response, a thin strand of red hair falling out of her neat chignon. Without any other warning, she released Priyanka and seized the collar of my shirt, drawing me forward down the hall.
I spun back, trying to catch Priyanka’s gaze again, but we were moving too fast. It took all of my concentration just to keep my feet from tripping over each other. For one horrible second, I was positive the soldier—GILBERT, her tag read—would take me through the same double doors marked SURGERY she’d dragged the others into.
Instead, she marched me further down the hall, into the room labeled DECONTAMINATION.
I’m fine, I told myself. I am fine.
My nose burned with the smell of rubbing alcohol and fake lemon. I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the intensity of the room’s exposed fluorescent lights and white walls. Half the room was covered in sterile ivory tiles that stretched from ceiling to floor. Their simple pattern was only broken up by the showerheads mounted on the wall. The other half of the room was lined with metal shelves. Racks of them, all at full capacity with stacks of clear storage tubs. As Gilbert led me by them, a trickle of dread turned into a roar.
Piles of clothing. Shoes. Personal effects that would be destroyed before they could ever be returned.
I remembered this.
“Stand right there. Don’t move,” Gilbert said, pointing to the nearest showerhead. I stepped over the slight lip of the tile.
I wanted to drag my broken nails along the walls of the room. I wanted to rip the faucets off the wall, tear at her Kevlar vest, burn out every light overhead until they exploded into a hailstorm of burning shards.
I had never hated myself more than when I stood there, my face turned down, my shoulders slumped, my hands still tied behind my back. A posture of submission. Surrender.
All the poise I’d worked so hard for over the years was gone. The clever words and carefully sweetened disposition abandoned me. We stood in a silence that suffocated me more with each passing second.
I’m supposed to be fine.
Caledonia was years ago. It was a lifetime ago. I knew that, but I remembered all of this. My body did, too. It shook, even as I fought it, clenching my hands behind my back to try to restore feeling to them. The door opened behind me, but the sliver of relief I felt at seeing Priyanka standing there disappeared with Gilbert’s next words. “Strip down. Put your belongings in the bin—”
She pulled an empty one off the shelf behind her. It slammed onto the floor in front of us, loud enough to make me jump.
“Now.”
Priyanka took a step forward, taking advantage of the extra inches she had on the soldier. Her eyes had that feverish look of too much adrenaline, and it looked like she was trembling with the effort to keep still. “You expecting us to put on a show, or are you going to turn away?”
Gilbert bypassed her Taser and baton and went straight for the pistol. She unholstered it, aiming at our feet. “I expect you to shut the fuck up and do as you’re told.”
The soldier escorting Priyanka moved behind me, cutting the zip tie binding my wrists.
Don’t fight, one of the girls at Caledonia had whispered to me as we waited our turn to enter. It’ll be worse. It’ll be so much worse.
There are moments in your life where your consciousness just…fades. You disappear into some dark place inside yourself that protects you, even as your body goes through the motions. It’s pure survival, that quiet place. It had kept me from breaking at Caledonia, and it was the only thing keeping me from it now as I slowly unlaced my boots, as I stripped off my jeans, my shirt, every layer until I was nothing but shivering, bare skin.
I remembered this.
I crossed my arms over my chest as I moved beneath the faucet. Up close, I saw that Priyanka’s pulse was jumping at the base of her throat, the muscles of her neck bulging with the effort to remain still. To not react.
I couldn’t watch as the soldier cut Priyanka’s zip tie and she repeated the process, never breaking her hard gaze at Gilbert, never losing that look of furious defiance.
How could I get back to that? I tried to drop my arms, to mirror her stance, but it felt impossible. All I could think of was the processing at the camp, how they had shoved ten of us girls under the same showerhead and laughed as we screamed at the icy temperature. Our feet had slapped against the cement, trying to dance away from it.
My body locked into place, and my heart was pounding so hard I thought it might actually burst. As I stood there, trapped in the silence of fear, that last fraying thread of denial I’d knotted around my heart snapped.
All that was left was a single truth:
I’m not fine.
The cold water hissed on overhead, soaking us in seconds. Priyanka grunted at the first icy blast, but I couldn’t get a sound out. My body tightened, bracing itself against the stinging onslaught. The cold water felt like knives carving up my skin, but as the seconds passed, even that pain began to ease.
The pink chalk washed out of my hair slowly, painting bright streaks over my shoulders and arms. Instead of rinsing clean away, it flowed into the tile grout like blood through veins, staining them. It held on. It didn’t fade. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it.
I am not fine. The words floated through me, crackling with power as they surged into something more. Something new. I don’t have to be fine.
There was a vase at my parents’ house, one that had been in my family for years. I could picture it sitting on the shelf in the living room, glowing in the warm afternoon sunlight. It didn’t look like any of the other art pieces in the house. Years before, my grandmother’s grandmother had knocked it to the ground, smashing it into pieces. Rather than sweeping them up and throwing them out, the vase had been sent away. It had come back months later, whole, the pieces rejoined by kintsugi, a method that uses liquid precious metal or lacquer with gold powder to seal cracks.
The scars of what had happened were still there, not glued together to try to minimize the appearance of them, but glowing with thin
rivulets of gold—more beautiful for having once been broken.
I remembered thinking, when I was so little, that if our scars could be mended the same way, we would never try to hide them, or erase them. Back then, I hadn’t understood that we didn’t always wear our scars on our skin; some ran deep beneath it, unseen by the rest of the world, aching even as we wore happy masks, even as we assured others we were fine.
My family abandoned me.
I escaped the rehabilitation camp that tried to kill me.
Skip tracers, PSFs, soldiers, car crashes, raids, death—I had outrun them all.
I had survived, when so many other kids hadn’t. And if I couldn’t at least acknowledge what I had gone through, I was never going to truly be able to prevent another nightmare like it from crashing into the lives of more kids.
I was still on my feet. There was still breath in my lungs. I wasn’t fine, but I was strong. And I was going to use every ounce of my power to get us the hell out of here.
The water shut off, drizzling to a stop. Priyanka shivered with the blast of cold air, but I wouldn’t give Gilbert the pleasure of seeing me suffer, not again. The other soldier shoved two identical sets of tan scrubs at us, as well as slip-on sneakers. No towels. My scrubs were drenched by the time I had them on and was in the process of rolling up my sleeves and pant legs. Priyanka looked like she was wearing child-size clothing.
“These shoes don’t fit,” she complained.
“Doesn’t matter,” Gilbert said. “You’ll be lucky if the ferals outside let you keep them.”
Priyanka and I exchanged a look.
The woman only laughed.
Gilbert walked us to the double doors on the other side of the room, kicking one open and nodding her head toward it. She never re-holstered her gun. I felt the end of its barrel graze my damp shoulder as I passed her and stepped into another dim hallway. My mouth twisted at the vile smell that greeted me—manure and something rotten.
At the last second, she threw out an arm, blocking Priyanka’s path. “We may have orders not to kill you, but it doesn’t mean we have to stop your kind from trying to do the same. Remember that.”
“Lady, you have your whole life to be an asshole,” Priyanka said. “Don’t be afraid to take a day off now and then.”
I dragged her through the door before Gilbert could whip the gun across her face. Both of us startled when, instead of following us, the soldier slammed it shut and locked it.
The cameras on the ceiling sputtered with intermittent power. Priyanka must have sensed them, too, because she kept her face turned down and her mouth shut. I looked her over, checking for any fresh cuts or bruises, but aside from the burning anger still radiating off her, she looked unharmed.
“Okay?” I whispered.
“In control,” she whispered back. “Still feel like I could punch a hole in the cement, though.”
With the door shut behind us, there was only one way to go. We followed the corridor as it began to slant up. I searched for any kind of door or window—any place where Roman might appear.
The walkway ended abruptly at the start of what looked like a field of gummy black mud, a cage of chain-link fencing separating us from the hell beyond. With the walls stretching high above us, it gave the false impression that we were in a stadium of some kind. But there were no seats, and only two levels: the mud-ridden ground and a series of interconnected metal walkways a few hundred feet off it. Armed men and women patrolled the upper level. A few had taken up stationary watch positions, tracking the comings and goings of the imprisoned Psi through the sights of automatic rifles.
There was hardly anything to watch. There were no permanent structures, only filthy white tents—the kind the UN had distributed to homeless families before they transitioned back into “traditional” living situations. There were groupings of them here and there, including a sizable one that looked as if it had mutated and absorbed all the others nearby.
Psi stood on the other side of the cage, most still sporting a fresh buzz-cut and new surgical scars. Whoever had done these clearly didn’t have the time or didn’t care about making the small incisions most surgeons used to insert the cure device. These scars were long and jagged, following the curves of their skulls.
One of them began to rattle the fence. The others quickly joined in, until the metal sounded like the chattering of wolves excited for their next meal.
I ignored them, reaching out to grip Priyanka’s arm. “Roman—”
“I know,” she said.
“Did you change his record?” I breathed out.
“I did, but I don’t know if I was fast enough. They took him in through the other door when we came in, so they must have a separate processing section for boys, but I don’t know if they moved him through it faster, or if there was anyone else there to slow the process up. I just…I don’t know.”
“Inmates,” a soldier shouted down through a bullhorn, “stand back from the gate!”
The kids at the gate were small, just on the cusp of being teenagers. Their thin uniforms had been ripped and reworked; the sleeves were torn off, or the pants had been cut into shorts. Others had woven strips of the faded uniform fabric through their hair, or used it to tie their hair back. The older kids stood a few dozen feet behind them, laughing up at the soldiers. For one wild second, I wondered if they were trying to intimidate us or just prevent the people controlling the fence from sending us in.
Where is Roman?
The teens and smaller kids at the gate bought us a minute, maybe two, to look for him before we were ushered inside. I turned quickly, mud sucking at the soles of my shoes as I surveyed the rest of the cage, then the back of the building we’d been brought in through. And there—rising out of its foundation, was another tunnellike opening, identical to ours.
“Look,” I said, trying to subtly angle my head toward it.
Here was the lesson you learned quickly in places like this: if the people in charge saw that you wanted something, they would use all their power to make sure you never, ever got it. Even now, I felt the weight of those eyes looking down at us as surely as if they had dropped something onto my shoulders.
No one stepped out of the tunnel. I strained my ears, trying to catch the sound of approaching footsteps, but it was impossible to hear anything over the hooting and screaming of the kids at the gate.
The rattling of the fence grew frenetic. The older Psi whistled and jeered up at the hired soldiers perched on the rafter-like walkway over the gate, and it only grew louder as they pointed their rifles down at the kids. A silver-haired soldier muttered something into the ear of the one with the bullhorn.
“Step away from the gate!” he bellowed again. There was a new confidence in his tone, but the other Psi didn’t seem to recognize the danger in that.
I turned back toward the other opening, waiting. I forced air in through my nose, out through my mouth.
He wasn’t coming.
The thought of him down there, being dragged into surgery like the girls had been—I squeezed my eyes shut, tasting bile and blood in my mouth.
Too late.
“Come on,” Priyanka breathed out. “Come on…Jesus…I know I don’t pray to you, but Roman does, and he’s one of your good ones…and okay, yes, I shouldn’t have made that joke about the sandals one of your reenactors was wearing, sorry about that….Who knew Birkenstocks would come back into style? Well, you probably did…but I mean…why? Why did they have to?”
A sudden surge of electricity flared behind us, firing through the fence—through the hands of the kids still hanging on to it.
“Holy shit!” Priyanka said, whirling around. The kids screamed as they fell back, convulsing as the shock continued to move through their systems. The silver thread in my mind lashed out, spreading over them one at a time, redirecting the flow of electricity racing across their bones—away from them, away from the damp mud.
The other Psi scattered, bounding toward the tents like spo
oked rabbits.
“What’s going on?” a deep voice asked from behind us.
“They electrified—” My brain caught on a second later.
Roman’s brow was creased with worry, his arms crossed over his chest. A new swollen knot was forming at his right temple. The small cut was trickling blood down the high planes of his cheek and onto his uniform.
Priyanka looked like she wanted nothing more than to collapse into a puddle of relief. “I thought I was too late.”
“You probably were,” he said. “I heard one of the guards mention the procedure testing on the way down and head-butted the tablet out of his hands. We had to wait for them to find another one.”
“I’m so proud of you and all your baffling first instincts,” Priyanka said.
“Are you all right?” I asked him, reaching up to dab at his cut. I caught myself at the last moment, dropping my arm back to my side.
“Inmates!” the same soldier called down, this time to us. “Stand at the gate and wait to be admitted. Any show of resistance will be met with force.”
“I’ll live,” he said as we made our way over to the entrance and lined up in front of it. The lights posted at its two corners flashed red. Just as the gate began to drag itself open, Roman turned toward Priyanka. “But if we make it out of here, I am going to kill you.”
ALMOST AS SOON AS WE stepped through the gate, the same horde of older kids drifted back toward it. A dozen kids. Two dozen. They came in waves, encircling us.
“Personalized Independent Training, eh?” Priyanka said, glancing at me.
“He’s not going to get away with this,” I muttered.
I let out a hard breath through my nose, studying the kids as they studied us. Most had been reduced to rail-thin states; a bite of hunger moved through me just looking at them. But it was the expressions on their faces that told their story. Suspicion. Curiosity. Resentment. The heat and dire conditions had baked those raw feelings into them. Here and there, I saw a nervous or worried shift of eyes. Those must have been the newer arrivals.
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