Think, Lucas—Christ, do something, say anything, get the hell out of here—
Killing him won’t help me and Sam get out of here. It won’t help me find Mia who—a wave of nausea passes through me—might not be findable. I can break the jar, use the shards to cut him deep where the Trainers showed us to, but how long before the Control Tower puts together who did it?
“It’s...hey,” the man says, his voice strained, “everyone needs to take a break, get away, right?” He starts to lower his hands. “It’s fine. Go get the kid you brought in and take him—”
His eyes have latched on to the computer screen. He squints at it and my pulse starts beating behind my temple.
“Orfeo?”
The name cuts me like a knife through my spinal cord. I didn’t clear the search field. I shouldn’t have done this, I should have made a plan, a real one, but—I need to get out of here. I need to get Sam out of here. I need to find Mia. My uniform is drenched in hot, clammy sweat and the collar of my vest has me like a hand wrapped around my throat.
The nurse steps closer to it, giving me a wary look as he reaches past my arm. I can’t speak. And not just because I’m supposed to be playing a role.
“Did you search for this?”
Can’t. Breathe.
I want to disappear into my head so badly. The silence that stretches between us is unbearable. I look down. He must take it as a nod.
“There’s no one here by that name,” he continues, leaning over the desk to move and click the mouse around. Another field appears on the screen, and the whole thing refreshes. “But there’s a Natalie Orfeo who’s listed as being in Belle Plain. That’s in Texas, apparently.”
I hadn’t searched right? I catch myself before I can spin toward him. He’s baiting you. He wants to catch you. He’ll turn you back over to the Trainers.
But...if I hadn’t searched right, that meant that there were listings I didn’t see. It meant—
“No? What about a Mia?”
My body reacts before my brain can stop it. My whole body surges toward the computer. Dunn jumps back, both arms up, but I don’t care about anything other than what’s on the screen. Joy crashes into relief. My knees might give out on me if I don’t hold on to the table.
There’s a photo of her next to a profile—her hair is longer than I remember, dark and curling over her shoulder the way Mom’s used to. My throat burns. Weight, height—classified as Blue. God. Thank you, God. She’s alive. She’s not like me. Something brittle in my chest snaps, and I have to keep swallowing back the urge to cry.
Black Rock. That’s her camp. Where is it? I keep scrolling, but it doesn’t say.
“Is that...your sister? A cousin?” Dunn is edging back toward me but stops when I turn and pin him with a glare.
They’re all the same. The Trainers, the PSFs, even these nurses. They are not on our side and they’ll never be. He is going to take so much pleasure in taking me down for this. Was this worth it? I know she’s alive and where she is, but I’m done. Done. I won’t even get to say good-bye to Sam, or somehow tell her that they’re taking me out, back to the Facility, back to be worked over again and again until they figure out a way to turn my head into an empty husk. The thought of the building with its bleach-white walls makes me feel almost manically desperate.
Mia is alive. She’s alive. Any happiness at the thought is smashed into pieces under the weight of knowing that, yeah, she’s alive, but she’s in a place like this. I’ll never be assigned there once the Trainers are told about this. They’ll keep me for months, trying to break me. Would they hurt her in order to hurt me? That would work. God—oh my God. There would be no place safe for that kind of pain.
Dunn leans against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. “They would never ask any of you to look something up in the system, so I have to believe that this was important enough to you to risk getting caught. I’d ask whose log-in you used, but it doesn’t matter. I admire your balls, but if you’re going to try this again, you have to be more careful. Anyone could have walked in.”
I rise to my full height, clenching a fist and drawing it up in front of me like I’m about to...do something. I have enough control over the fire to spark a flame with a small snap.
Dunn flinches. His voice goes tight and high as he waves his hands in front of him, saying, “Wait—wait.”
For some reason, I do. I wait as he turns back to the computer to type something else into the program. When he’s finished, he turns the screen toward me so I can see the profile he’s brought up.
The photo attached to it is a young boy with reddish-brown hair like Dunn’s and a wide, round face. He’s staring at the camera dead-on, with a look of open hatred.
“This is Martin,” Dunn says. “He’s the reason I’m here, and if you really think I’m going to turn around and report you for caring about someone enough to risk your neck then...you can tell the camp controllers that. We’re forbidden from serving anywhere we have a family relation.”
I don’t move. My brain has disconnected from the rest of my body.
“The draft caught up to me just as I was coming out of college and applying for medical schools. I served my four years at a camp in the Midwest, but I re-enlisted. You know why? Because this posting opened, and I’d been able to search our network and see they’d brought my brother here. I also knew that he’d gone into the system with our stepfather’s last name, and I’d kept our father’s—so I applied and, sure enough, they didn’t catch it. I wanted to be a good brother...I thought, if I can’t get him out, I can at least watch over him. It turns out I’m just as powerless now to help him as I am to help everyone else here.”