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There was a long pause, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t answer. His eyes were glossy, like some far-off thought had summoned forgotten emotions. He blinked before I could ask, though, and whatever had been there disappeared. “I promise.”
I collapsed onto my back again. “I guess this is what it’d feel like if we were normal, if we’d gone to school together and were about to go to separate colleges.”
“I guess.”
“You don’t have a quote for that?”
He sighed and closed his eyes. “No, but I wish I did.”
On our fourth morning at the cabin, Sam called me outside and handed me one of the Glocks he’d stolen from a Branch agent. He wanted me to learn how to use it in case we were ever separated.
I hadn’t thought about that, and I didn’t want to think about it. If Connor got to me and pushed for information, I’d probably cave easily. Knowing how to operate a gun was a good thing, but would I ever have enough courage to use it? As much as I disliked Connor, I didn’t think I could kill him. I didn’t think I could kill anyone, for that matter. I still felt guilty for helping Sam kill that man in the garden behind the farmhouse.
“Have you ever shot a gun before?” Sam asked. He was wearing an old coat he’d found in one of the closets the day before. It was the color of cut wood and fit him perfectly. The longer we were out of the lab, the more he looked like a real person and not some experiment. He was also standing incredibly close—close enough that the back of my neck tingled with his every breath.
“I’ve never even held a gun before this,” I answered. It wasn’t as heavy as I’d thought it’d be.
“Here.” He took the gun back and pointed to a button on the side. “Press this to drop out the magazine.” He demonstrated, and the clip slipped from the frame. “This is the slide,” he went on, gesturing to the top of the gun. “Pull it back to make sure the gun is empty, or to initially rack a bullet in the chamber. It’s a semiautomatic, though, so you only have to do that once. Got it?”
No. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
Sunshine poured over the treetops, and I squinted in the light. I readjusted my weight as I took the gun and a fully loaded magazine.
“Load the clip,” Sam instructed.
I pushed the magazine in, heard it click. I fumbled with the slide at first, but finally managed it without looking too awkward, and a bullet slid into the chamber.
“Now shoot.” His words hung between us in a cloud of dense air.
I held the gun out in front of me and pulled the trigger without hesitating. I didn’t want Sam to think I was scared. The recoil bounced up my arms, startling me. I squared my shoulders and steeled myself before squeezing off another round, then another. I didn’t hit anything, but that was okay. I wasn’t aiming. Not yet.
I tore through several more bullets, emptying the clip.
“That’s good.” Sam gestured for the gun. I wanted to keep going, to perfect my aim, but our supply of ammunition wasn’t endless. I handed it over.
“How do you even know how to use a gun?” I asked, repeating the question he’d failed to answer a few days earlier.
He pulled a handful of bullets out of his coat pocket. “There are things I can remember doing, physical things. Shooting a gun is one of them. Driving is another.” He replaced the bullets I’d used. Fully loaded. Always ready. “Foreign languages, complicated equations, marking exits, reading people.”
I followed him up the steps to the back porch. He held the door open for me and, once inside, I exhaled in relief at coming in from the cold. Nick had stoked the fire that morning and the cabin was comfortably cozy.
“So what else can you do?” I asked.
Sam set the gun on the countertop, next to the bag of Oreos that Cas had nabbed a few nights before when he and Trev had gone to town.
Trev sat at the table reading a western he’d found tucked next to The Duke’s Plight. The pages were barely holding on to the spine. He was either searching for clues or extremely bored. When we came in, he looked up.
“Are you telling her about the tests?” he asked.
I sat next to him, rubbing my hands together to get rid of the numbness. “What tests?”
Sam leaned against the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area. “In the lab, we ran tests to see what we could do. Trev was in charge of data.”
“But… my dad inspected your rooms every couple of months. Wouldn’t he have found the notes?”
Trev smirked. “Come on, Anna. Look at who you’re talking to.”
I frowned, at first unsure of what he meant—then I realized. “You memorized the data.” He nodded. I knew Trev was good at filing away quotes and poems, but to memorize research results? That was much more impressive.
“So what did you find?”
A log snapped as it burned in the fireplace. The poker dragged against the hearth. Nick. Most likely listening in.
A barely noticeable look passed between Sam and Trev before Trev answered. “Sam is the strongest out of all of us. Cas has the best motor skills, but the worst recall. Nick’s got good endurance, but is nowhere near as fast as Sam—”
The fire poker clattered into its holder. Nick was definitely listening. I wondered where Cas was, and then remembered that he’d gone out to the garage to snoop.
“I seem to have a photographic memory,” Trev went on. “A good memory all around, actually. We all recall driving, shooting, using some technology. Sometimes we have flashes of other memories, but nothing substantial.”
I watched Sam for a reaction. He’d had a flash the other day. Was that not the first? Other than his comment about liking water, he’d never mentioned memories at all. None of them had.
“Sam’s are the worst,” Trev said. “The flashbacks. It’s why he doesn’t sleep very well.”
“You never told me….” I straightened in my seat. All those nights I’d snuck down to the lab, Sam was always awake. “Why didn’t you say something?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “What was I going to say?”
“If you were recalling things, maybe it meant your memories were coming back. I could have helped you, or my dad could have—”
“Unless our memories were deliberately wiped,” he cut in, repeating the same theory he’d shared earlier. “Then mentioning it would have posed a risk to the program, and they would have fixed the problem.”
And by “problem,” he meant him.
“How bad are they? What do you remember? What do the others remember?”
Nick appeared in the doorway. All the boys had found clothes in the closets and changed into whatever fit them. While everything worked on Sam, the blue button-down Nick had on was a tad too small. He was broader in the shoulders than Sam, and maybe an inch or two taller. The shirt was open, revealing a white T-shirt underneath.
Some silent conversation passed between them. Sam ran a hand over the dark stubble covering his face before turning away. “I’m going for a run.”
I lurched to my feet. “Right now? But…”
“I’ll be back later,” he said.
The door shut behind him and his footsteps pounded down the steps. I whirled on Nick. “Why did you do that?”
He cracked a knuckle. “You think you have any right to my memories? To my life before this? You don’t.”
Trev rose behind me. “Anna. Stop.”
“Why do you make me look like the bad guy? Like I can’t keep your secrets or something.”
Nick tsked. His expression turned coarse. “Because what if you can’t? You’re the daughter of the enemy. We never should have brought you in the first place.”
I started for him, not that I even knew what I planned to do. Punch him? Gouge out his eyes? A hard dig of the thumbs, don’t give in, even if it makes you squirm. That’s what my instructor used to say.
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Trev stepped between us. Don’t, the look on his face said. You’re being ridiculous.
I huffed in resignation as Nick cracked another knuckle. The tension felt thick enough to braid. If it weren’t for Trev, I was almost certain Nick would have fought me.
And that was a fight I would never win.
15
THAT NIGHT AFTER DINNER, I ESCAPED into one of the bedrooms with a pencil I’d dredged up from the back of a drawer. The east-facing room had a window seat with a dusty old plaid cushion and one lone pillow. It was enough.
I curled up there, spreading a wool blanket over my lap. The upstairs was warmer than the downstairs, but next to the window there was a faint chill. I opened my mother’s journal to the next blank page.
Spending all that time in the lab back at home, I’d often wondered what the outside world looked like, what it would feel like to draw it. Using a torn-out magazine page for inspiration wasn’t the same as seeing something with my own eyes. Each place has a special energy. Landscapes breathe. Trees whisper.
In the lab, I’d allowed myself to fantasize about leaving my small town one day, but it usually ended abruptly, reality pulling me back—back to Sam. It wouldn’t be the same without him. Outside the farmhouse, I felt like something was missing. Like there were pieces of myself left within those basement walls, tied to Sam and the others.
Now that I was out in the world, with a pencil in my hand, I wanted to immortalize what it felt like. I set out to draw some of the gorgeous Michigan scenery, but a few minutes in, I realized my hand had other ideas. The sketch began to take the shape of my mother. I had only one picture of her, and I’d had to steal it from my dad’s study, but I’d recycled the image in tons of drawings.
In the photograph, she sat at the shore of a lake, a fleece blanket spread out beneath her. A deep purple scarf was wrapped around her neck, and her hair had been tied back in a bun.
I’d analyzed that picture so many times I had it memorized, right down to the angle of the leaves hanging off the trees and the slant of the shadows. In one of my favorite sketches, I’d copied the photo exactly, but had drawn myself in beside her.
I hadn’t thought to grab that sketch before we left. I wished I had.
Now I drew her in the field behind the farmhouse, her dark hair caught in the wind, the grass parting around her. She was running away. Leaving me.
Why did she leave me?
“Anna?”
I started at the sound of Sam’s voice. I hadn’t even heard him come in. Sometimes sketching turned off every other sense I had. It was like my hand drew of its own free will.
“Hey.” I readjusted in the window seat, tucking my legs beneath me. “What’s up?”
In the time I’d been drawing, the sun had set, painting the woods beyond the cabin in various shades of gray. The temperature had dropped, too, and my hands were stiff, my fingertips numb from the cold stealing through the glass.
Sam sat at the other end of the window seat, facing the room, the heels of his hands on the edge of the bench. He didn’t say anything at first, and I thought I could deduce where he was headed.
“I’m sorry about the Nick thing this morning,” I said. “I didn’t mean to yell at him—”
“I didn’t come up here to talk about Nick.”
I ran my thumb over the pencil’s eraser. “You didn’t? Then what?”
“Do you know the names of the drugs your father gave us? Components of the treatments? Dosages?”
I shook my head. “I was never allowed access to that part of the program. I only worked with the tests and logs. Why?”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “It’s nothing. Just something I’ve been meaning to ask.”
He rose from the bench. I dropped my mother’s journal to hurry after him, cornering him in the doorway. “Tell me, Sam. Please.”
I collapsed onto my back again. “I guess this is what it’d feel like if we were normal, if we’d gone to school together and were about to go to separate colleges.”
“I guess.”
“You don’t have a quote for that?”
He sighed and closed his eyes. “No, but I wish I did.”
On our fourth morning at the cabin, Sam called me outside and handed me one of the Glocks he’d stolen from a Branch agent. He wanted me to learn how to use it in case we were ever separated.
I hadn’t thought about that, and I didn’t want to think about it. If Connor got to me and pushed for information, I’d probably cave easily. Knowing how to operate a gun was a good thing, but would I ever have enough courage to use it? As much as I disliked Connor, I didn’t think I could kill him. I didn’t think I could kill anyone, for that matter. I still felt guilty for helping Sam kill that man in the garden behind the farmhouse.
“Have you ever shot a gun before?” Sam asked. He was wearing an old coat he’d found in one of the closets the day before. It was the color of cut wood and fit him perfectly. The longer we were out of the lab, the more he looked like a real person and not some experiment. He was also standing incredibly close—close enough that the back of my neck tingled with his every breath.
“I’ve never even held a gun before this,” I answered. It wasn’t as heavy as I’d thought it’d be.
“Here.” He took the gun back and pointed to a button on the side. “Press this to drop out the magazine.” He demonstrated, and the clip slipped from the frame. “This is the slide,” he went on, gesturing to the top of the gun. “Pull it back to make sure the gun is empty, or to initially rack a bullet in the chamber. It’s a semiautomatic, though, so you only have to do that once. Got it?”
No. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
Sunshine poured over the treetops, and I squinted in the light. I readjusted my weight as I took the gun and a fully loaded magazine.
“Load the clip,” Sam instructed.
I pushed the magazine in, heard it click. I fumbled with the slide at first, but finally managed it without looking too awkward, and a bullet slid into the chamber.
“Now shoot.” His words hung between us in a cloud of dense air.
I held the gun out in front of me and pulled the trigger without hesitating. I didn’t want Sam to think I was scared. The recoil bounced up my arms, startling me. I squared my shoulders and steeled myself before squeezing off another round, then another. I didn’t hit anything, but that was okay. I wasn’t aiming. Not yet.
I tore through several more bullets, emptying the clip.
“That’s good.” Sam gestured for the gun. I wanted to keep going, to perfect my aim, but our supply of ammunition wasn’t endless. I handed it over.
“How do you even know how to use a gun?” I asked, repeating the question he’d failed to answer a few days earlier.
He pulled a handful of bullets out of his coat pocket. “There are things I can remember doing, physical things. Shooting a gun is one of them. Driving is another.” He replaced the bullets I’d used. Fully loaded. Always ready. “Foreign languages, complicated equations, marking exits, reading people.”
I followed him up the steps to the back porch. He held the door open for me and, once inside, I exhaled in relief at coming in from the cold. Nick had stoked the fire that morning and the cabin was comfortably cozy.
“So what else can you do?” I asked.
Sam set the gun on the countertop, next to the bag of Oreos that Cas had nabbed a few nights before when he and Trev had gone to town.
Trev sat at the table reading a western he’d found tucked next to The Duke’s Plight. The pages were barely holding on to the spine. He was either searching for clues or extremely bored. When we came in, he looked up.
“Are you telling her about the tests?” he asked.
I sat next to him, rubbing my hands together to get rid of the numbness. “What tests?”
Sam leaned against the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area. “In the lab, we ran tests to see what we could do. Trev was in charge of data.”
“But… my dad inspected your rooms every couple of months. Wouldn’t he have found the notes?”
Trev smirked. “Come on, Anna. Look at who you’re talking to.”
I frowned, at first unsure of what he meant—then I realized. “You memorized the data.” He nodded. I knew Trev was good at filing away quotes and poems, but to memorize research results? That was much more impressive.
“So what did you find?”
A log snapped as it burned in the fireplace. The poker dragged against the hearth. Nick. Most likely listening in.
A barely noticeable look passed between Sam and Trev before Trev answered. “Sam is the strongest out of all of us. Cas has the best motor skills, but the worst recall. Nick’s got good endurance, but is nowhere near as fast as Sam—”
The fire poker clattered into its holder. Nick was definitely listening. I wondered where Cas was, and then remembered that he’d gone out to the garage to snoop.
“I seem to have a photographic memory,” Trev went on. “A good memory all around, actually. We all recall driving, shooting, using some technology. Sometimes we have flashes of other memories, but nothing substantial.”
I watched Sam for a reaction. He’d had a flash the other day. Was that not the first? Other than his comment about liking water, he’d never mentioned memories at all. None of them had.
“Sam’s are the worst,” Trev said. “The flashbacks. It’s why he doesn’t sleep very well.”
“You never told me….” I straightened in my seat. All those nights I’d snuck down to the lab, Sam was always awake. “Why didn’t you say something?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “What was I going to say?”
“If you were recalling things, maybe it meant your memories were coming back. I could have helped you, or my dad could have—”
“Unless our memories were deliberately wiped,” he cut in, repeating the same theory he’d shared earlier. “Then mentioning it would have posed a risk to the program, and they would have fixed the problem.”
And by “problem,” he meant him.
“How bad are they? What do you remember? What do the others remember?”
Nick appeared in the doorway. All the boys had found clothes in the closets and changed into whatever fit them. While everything worked on Sam, the blue button-down Nick had on was a tad too small. He was broader in the shoulders than Sam, and maybe an inch or two taller. The shirt was open, revealing a white T-shirt underneath.
Some silent conversation passed between them. Sam ran a hand over the dark stubble covering his face before turning away. “I’m going for a run.”
I lurched to my feet. “Right now? But…”
“I’ll be back later,” he said.
The door shut behind him and his footsteps pounded down the steps. I whirled on Nick. “Why did you do that?”
He cracked a knuckle. “You think you have any right to my memories? To my life before this? You don’t.”
Trev rose behind me. “Anna. Stop.”
“Why do you make me look like the bad guy? Like I can’t keep your secrets or something.”
Nick tsked. His expression turned coarse. “Because what if you can’t? You’re the daughter of the enemy. We never should have brought you in the first place.”
I started for him, not that I even knew what I planned to do. Punch him? Gouge out his eyes? A hard dig of the thumbs, don’t give in, even if it makes you squirm. That’s what my instructor used to say.
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Trev stepped between us. Don’t, the look on his face said. You’re being ridiculous.
I huffed in resignation as Nick cracked another knuckle. The tension felt thick enough to braid. If it weren’t for Trev, I was almost certain Nick would have fought me.
And that was a fight I would never win.
15
THAT NIGHT AFTER DINNER, I ESCAPED into one of the bedrooms with a pencil I’d dredged up from the back of a drawer. The east-facing room had a window seat with a dusty old plaid cushion and one lone pillow. It was enough.
I curled up there, spreading a wool blanket over my lap. The upstairs was warmer than the downstairs, but next to the window there was a faint chill. I opened my mother’s journal to the next blank page.
Spending all that time in the lab back at home, I’d often wondered what the outside world looked like, what it would feel like to draw it. Using a torn-out magazine page for inspiration wasn’t the same as seeing something with my own eyes. Each place has a special energy. Landscapes breathe. Trees whisper.
In the lab, I’d allowed myself to fantasize about leaving my small town one day, but it usually ended abruptly, reality pulling me back—back to Sam. It wouldn’t be the same without him. Outside the farmhouse, I felt like something was missing. Like there were pieces of myself left within those basement walls, tied to Sam and the others.
Now that I was out in the world, with a pencil in my hand, I wanted to immortalize what it felt like. I set out to draw some of the gorgeous Michigan scenery, but a few minutes in, I realized my hand had other ideas. The sketch began to take the shape of my mother. I had only one picture of her, and I’d had to steal it from my dad’s study, but I’d recycled the image in tons of drawings.
In the photograph, she sat at the shore of a lake, a fleece blanket spread out beneath her. A deep purple scarf was wrapped around her neck, and her hair had been tied back in a bun.
I’d analyzed that picture so many times I had it memorized, right down to the angle of the leaves hanging off the trees and the slant of the shadows. In one of my favorite sketches, I’d copied the photo exactly, but had drawn myself in beside her.
I hadn’t thought to grab that sketch before we left. I wished I had.
Now I drew her in the field behind the farmhouse, her dark hair caught in the wind, the grass parting around her. She was running away. Leaving me.
Why did she leave me?
“Anna?”
I started at the sound of Sam’s voice. I hadn’t even heard him come in. Sometimes sketching turned off every other sense I had. It was like my hand drew of its own free will.
“Hey.” I readjusted in the window seat, tucking my legs beneath me. “What’s up?”
In the time I’d been drawing, the sun had set, painting the woods beyond the cabin in various shades of gray. The temperature had dropped, too, and my hands were stiff, my fingertips numb from the cold stealing through the glass.
Sam sat at the other end of the window seat, facing the room, the heels of his hands on the edge of the bench. He didn’t say anything at first, and I thought I could deduce where he was headed.
“I’m sorry about the Nick thing this morning,” I said. “I didn’t mean to yell at him—”
“I didn’t come up here to talk about Nick.”
I ran my thumb over the pencil’s eraser. “You didn’t? Then what?”
“Do you know the names of the drugs your father gave us? Components of the treatments? Dosages?”
I shook my head. “I was never allowed access to that part of the program. I only worked with the tests and logs. Why?”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “It’s nothing. Just something I’ve been meaning to ask.”
He rose from the bench. I dropped my mother’s journal to hurry after him, cornering him in the doorway. “Tell me, Sam. Please.”
