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“Are you all right?” he says tentatively.
I am not all right. I was beginning to feel that I had finally found a place to stay, a place that was not so unstable or corrupt or controlling that I could actually belong there. You would think that I would have learned by now—such a place does not exist.
“No,” I say.
He starts to move around the stone block, toward me. “What is it?”
“What is it.” I laugh. “Let me put it this way: I just found out you’re not the worst person I know.”
I drop into a crouch and push my fingers through my hair. I feel numb and terrified of my own numbness. The Bureau is responsible for my parents’ deaths. Why do I have to keep repeating it to myself to believe it? What’s wrong with me?
“Oh,” he says. “I’m . . . sorry?”
All I can manage is a small grunt.
“You know what Mom told me once?” he says, and the way he says Mom, like he didn’t betray her, sets my teeth on edge. “She said that everyone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil in ourselves, so we’re able to forgive them.”
“Is that what you want me to do?” I say dully as I stand. “I may have done bad things, Caleb, but I would never deliver you to your own execution.”
“You can’t say that,” he says, and it sounds like he’s pleading with me, begging me to say that I am just like him, no better. “You didn’t know how persuasive Jeanine was—”
Something inside me snaps like a brittle rubber band.
I punch him in the face.
All I can think about is how the Erudite stripped me of my watch and my shoes and led me to the bare table where they would take my life. A table that Caleb may as well have set up himself.
I thought I was beyond this kind of anger, but as he stumbles back with his hands on his face, I pursue him, grabbing the front of his shirt and slamming him against the stone sculpture and screaming that he is a coward and a traitor and that I will kill him, I will kill him.
One of the guards comes toward me, and all she has to do is put her hand on my arm and the spell is broken. I release Caleb’s shirt. I shake out my stinging hand. I turn and walk away.
There’s a beige sweater draped over the empty chair in Matthew’s lab, the sleeve brushing the floor. I’ve never met his supervisor. I’m beginning to suspect that Matthew does all the real work.
I sit on top of the sweater and examine my knuckles. A few of them are split from punching Caleb, and dotted with faint bruises. It seems fitting that the blow would leave a mark on both of us. That’s how the world works.
Last night, when I went back to the dormitory, Tobias wasn’t there, and I was too angry to sleep. In the hours that I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, I decided that while I wasn’t going to participate in Nita’s plan, I also wasn’t going to stop it. The truth about the attack simulation brewed hate for the Bureau inside me, and I want to watch it break apart from within.
Matthew is talking science. I’m having trouble paying attention.
“—doing some genetic analysis, which is fine, but before, we were developing a way to make the memory compound behave as a virus,” he says. “With the same rapid replication, the same ability to spread through the air. And then we developed a vaccination for it. Just a temporary one, only lasts for forty-eight hours, but still.”
I nod. “So . . . you were making it so you could set up other city experiments more efficiently, right?” I say. “No need to inject everyone with the memory serum when you can just release it and let it spread.”
“Exactly!” He seems excited that I’m actually interested in what he’s saying. “And it’s a better model for having the option to select particular members of a population to opt out—you inoculate them, the virus spreads within twenty-four hours, and it has no effect on them.”
I nod again.
“You okay?” Matthew says, his coffee mug poised near his mouth. He puts it down. “I heard the security guards had to pull you off someone last night.”
“It was my brother. Caleb.”
“Ah.” Matthew raises an eyebrow. “What did he do this time?”
“Nothing, really.” I pinch the sweater sleeve between my fingers. Its edges are all fraying, wearing with time. “I was wired to explode anyway; he just got in the way.”
I already know, by looking at him, the question he’s asking, and I want to explain it all to him, everything that Nita showed me and told me. I wonder if I can trust him.
“I heard something yesterday,” I say, testing the waters. “About the Bureau. About my city, and the simulations.”
He straightens up and gives me a strange look.
“What?” I say.
“Did you hear that something from Nita?” he says.
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“I’ve helped her a couple times,” he says. “I let her into that storage room. Did she tell you anything else?”
Matthew is Nita’s informant? I stare at him. I never thought that Matthew, who went out of his way to show me the difference between my “pure” genes and Tobias’s “damaged” genes, might be helping Nita.
“Something about a plan,” I say slowly.
He gets up and walks toward me, oddly tense. I lean away from him by instinct.
“Is it happening?” he says. “Do you know when?”
“What’s going on?” I say. “Why would you help Nita?”
“Because all this ‘genetic damage’ nonsense is ridiculous,” he says. “It’s very important that you answer my questions.”
“It is happening. And I don’t know when, but I think it will be soon.”
“Shit.” Matthew puts his hands on his face. “Nothing good can come of this.”
“If you don’t stop saying cryptic things, I’m going to slap you,” I say, getting to my feet.
“I was helping Nita until she told me what she and those fringe people wanted to do,” Matthew says. “They want to get to the Weapons Lab and—”
“—steal the memory serum, yeah, I heard.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, they don’t want the memory serum, they want the death serum. Similar to the one the Erudite have—the one you were supposed to be injected with when you were almost executed. They’re going to use it for assassinations, a lot of them. Set off an aerosol can and it’s easy, see? Give it to the right people and you have an explosion of anarchy and violence, which is exactly what those fringe people want.”
