“Yeah. You’re always right,” I say. “Were you right about running into dangerous situations without weapons? Were you right about lying to me and going on a death march to Erudite headquarters in the middle of the night? Or about Peter, were you right about him?”
“Don’t throw those things in my face.” She points at me, and I feel like I’m a child getting lectured by a parent. “I never said I was perfect, but you—you can’t even see past your own desperation. You went along with Evelyn because you were desperate for a parent, and now you’re going along with this because you’re desperate not to be damaged—”
The word shivers through me.
“I am not damaged,” I say quietly. “I can’t believe you have so little faith in me that you would tell me not to trust myself.” I shake my head. “And I don’t need your permission.”
I start toward the door, and as my hand closes around the handle, she says, “Just leaving so that you can have the last word, that’s really mature!”
“So is being suspicious of someone’s motives just because she’s pretty,” I say. “I guess we’re even.”
I leave the room.
I am not a desperate, unsteady child who throws his trust around. I am not damaged.
Chapter twenty-six
I TOUCH MY forehead to the eyepiece of the microscope. The serum swims before me, orange-brown.
I was so busy looking for Nita’s lies that I barely registered the truth: In order to get their hands on this serum, the Bureau must have developed it, and somehow delivered it to Jeanine to use. I pull away. Why would Jeanine work with the Bureau when she so badly wanted to stay in the city, away from them?
But I guess the Bureau and Jeanine shared a common goal. Both wanted the experiment to continue. Both were terrified of what would happen if it didn’t. Both were willing to sacrifice innocent lives to do it.
I thought this place could be home. But the Bureau is full of killers. I rock back on my heels as if pushed back by some invisible force, then walk out of the room, my heart beating fast.
I ignore the few people dawdling in the corridor in front of me. I just push farther into the Bureau compound, farther and farther into the belly of the beast.
Maybe this place could be home, I hear myself saying to Christina.
These people murdered your parents, Tobias’s words echo in my head.
I don’t know where I’m going except that I need space, and air. I clutch my ID in my hand and half walk, half run past the security barrier to the sculpture. There is no light shining into the tank now, though the water still falls from it, one drop for every second that passes. I stand for a little while, watching it. And then, across the slab of stone, I see my brother.
“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.”