Halfway across, I heard voices in the next room.
“You should be thanking me.” Rudd.
“Thanking you.” Dean Atwater.
“Yes,” Rudd replied, but he sounded less certain than before. “I solved our problem.”
We’d reached the edge of the archway. Liam paused and looked at me. I held up a finger. One minute. He nodded slightly. I could tell he was as curious as I was.
“And how, exactly, did you do that?” the dean asked coolly. “Was it by sleeping with a sixteen-year-old girl?”
Liam’s eyes shot to mine, his eyebrows arched like question marks. I quickly shook my head. Not me.
“You thought I didn’t know?” the dean asked when Rudd didn’t answer. I hadn’t heard Tarsus speak yet. Was she even in there? My stomach squeezed at the thought that she might not be. She was my only hope.
“It was an error of judgment on my part,” Rudd said finally, weakly.
“Indeed. Which is a problem, you see. Because it suggests there was an error of judgment on mine.”
Incomprehensibly, I felt bad for Rudd. He’d miscalculated this.
There was a rustling behind one of the couches to my left. But just as I turned my head toward the noise, Liam’s hand gripped my elbow. The dean’s talk of poor judgment had reminded him whose side he was on, I guessed. With a jerk, he pulled me through the arched door.
“But if it weren’t for my relationship with her, we wouldn’t know about Rory,” Rudd was saying as we stepped into the room. He was defensive now. Pleading his case. All at once I knew who Rudd had been sleeping with. Hershey’s mystery boy wasn’t a boy after all.
“And what about what she knows?”
“She doesn’t know anything. Not that it matters anyway. After they commit her—”
I stumbled a little, and three heads turned toward us. Dr. Tarsus was there after all. Unlike the first two rooms, this one was lit with mounted torches that cast a menacing glow on the three figures in its center. They stood apart from one another, in a triangle, the alliances unclear. Liam seemed unsure of who to approach. He’d gotten his orders from Rudd, but it was obvious who was in charge.
“Liam,” Rudd said, gesturing for him.
Liam hesitated then headed for the dean. The old man looked at me, not my escort. “Thank you, Liam,” he said, his eyes on mine. “You can return to your dorm.”
Liam’s hand was still on my arm, so I felt his surprise. He dropped my elbow like it was hot. “Yes, sir.” Without so much as a glance in my direction, he turned and left.
The dean was still staring at me. There were only a few feet between us, and his gaze felt hot, like a spotlight. Beads of sweat sprung up on my lips and hairline.
“Hello, Aurora,” Dean Atwater said. Revulsion ripped through me when he spoke my name. I despised him in that moment, with such intensity that I thought my skin might catch fire. I managed a confused smile.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” the dean replied. His free hand was in his jacket pocket, as if he were holding something there. Something like a gun. The cold sweat at my hairline began to slide down my forehead.
I gave my head a tiny shake. More confusion. Another smile. I glanced back at Dr. Tarsus. In the flickering light, her ebony irises were inky and opaque and completely inscrutable. “I don’t understand. I thought— Liam told me you’d decided to move up my initiation.”
“So you’re ready to take your vows then?” the dean asked.
“Of course,” I said smoothly. “I just have some questions first.”
The dean looked amused. “You have questions.” He pulled his hand from his pocket. The thing he held looked like a gun, but not like one I’d ever seen before. There was a vial of blue liquid where the barrel would be. “I think you’re confused, Aurora, about who owes who an explanation.” He tightened his grip on the trigger.
“I’ll answer whatever questions you want,” I said, stalling. “I just want to know what happened to my mom.”
“From what I understand, your mother died of a blood clot,” Dean Atwater said coolly. “A common complication after a cesarean section.” Fury shot through me.
“I’ve seen the death certificate,” I shot back, too angry now to be afraid. “I want the truth. Was it nanobots? Did you kill her the same way you killed Griffin?”
The dean’s eyebrows shot up.
“Yes, I know about Griffin,” I said, as smoothly as I could. “His death I understand. He was the CEO of Gnosis. You couldn’t let him destroy what the Few had built. But my mom was a high school girl. How was she even a threat?”
“She wasn’t,” Dean Atwater spat, as cold as ice. “Even if she’d gone public with what she thought she knew, no one would’ve believed her.” His lips twitched into a smile. “Not with her medical history.”
“So why kill her?”
He sighed. “Because she was an inconvenience, Aurora. Because she’d gotten in the way.”
The tears sprung to my eyes without my permission. I tried to blink them back, but it was too late. I knew he’d seen them. I fought to keep my composure. He saw that, too.
“Yes, it was nanobots that did it,” he said, baiting me now. “They came in through an IV bag, into her veins, making it very difficult to predict how the clot would travel through her body. It was luck, really, that it worked as well as it did.”
Luck. I wanted to rip his eyeballs out. But I knew it was exactly the reaction he was fishing for. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I kept my gaze steady.
He went on. “These days, our solution is more elegant,” he said, raising his gun. “We use straightjackets and padded rooms.”
A shiver shot down my spine, but I didn’t flinch. “So whatever’s in that dart . . . it’ll make me crazy?”
“No, your brain will do that all on its own,” Dean Atwater replied with a sick smile. “Once these nanobots reach your temporal lobe and begin their cacophony. Roars. Explosions. Screams. It’ll be the sleep deprivation that ultimately gets you, but we’ll make sure you’re institutionalized long before that.”
“You’re acting like we’ve already made our decision” came Dr. Tarsus’s voice. I heard the sharp click of her heels on stone then felt her beside me. “It seems to me, Robert, that we ought to give our initiate the benefit of the doubt.”
“The benefit of the doubt,” the dean repeated. “What exactly is the benefit of doubt, Esperanza? There’s certainly no benefit to the Doubt, which is what we’re really talking about here, isn’t it?”
“It’s Kyle’s word against hers,” Tarsus replied. She took a step forward so she was a few inches in front of me now. She was standing on her toes, I noticed, like a cat preparing to pounce. “We have no evidence that she’s afflicted.” Afflicted. Like the Doubt was a curse.
“Are you kidding me?” came Rudd’s voice behind me. “It’s so obvious. I hope neither of you are buying this little act.”
“It’s not an act,” I said, as convincingly as I could. “I’m not my mother.”
“Is that so?” said the dean.
“Don’t be a fool, Robert,” Rudd said derisively.
The dean’s eyes snapped past me to Rudd. “Leave. Now.”
“But I—”
“Now,” he bellowed. Rudd stormed to the door.
“So you don’t hear it?” the dean asked me when Rudd was gone, his finger tight against the trigger. “You don’t hear the Doubt?”