Across her forehead are three pale green patches. One word on each patch.

Follow the leader.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” Doc asks. When I don’t answer, he adds, “This was murder. Someone killed Lil. For you.”

“For me?” I can’t take my eyes off her body. It seems to melt into the bed.

“Follow the leader. It’s a warning to others—to those who don’t.”

“But Lil wasn’t rebelling. She wasn’t involved with Bartie’s group, and she never spoke against me—”

“She wasn’t working,” Doc says. He sits beside Lil on the bed, peeling the patches off one by one. They cling to her skin, lifting it up a little and making a schlick sound as they pop off her. “Anyone not working, anyone not fulfilling the needs of the ship . . . they’re not following you.”

Doc waits until I tear my eyes away from Lil’s body. “She was murdered for you,” he says clearly, slowly, as if to make sure that I understand the weight of her death rests on my shoulders.

Chapter 34

34

AMY

I CAN’T KEEP STILL. I MAY HAVE GIVEN UP RUNNING, BUT I can’t think cramped up on the cryo level, with all the locked doors mocking me. I have to move. When I get to the Hospital lobby, though, I’m surrounded by shouting patients, angry nurses, and a crowd that seems to grow by the minute.

“It’s safe!” Doc’s apprentice, Kit, tells a woman loudly. “Just one is fine!”

“How do I know that?” the woman asks. Her voice is thick, like she’s been crying.

“Well, look at yourself,” Kit says, exasperated. “You’re fine, aren’t you?”

“I think so . . . but . . .”

Kit growls in frustration and marches off, nearly crashing into me.

“Sorry,” she says.

“No prob. What’s going on?”

“Those frexing med patches. People are worried they’re dying, but if they’d had the overdose, they’d already be dead. Try to convince them of that, though.”

“What med patches?”

Kit reaches into her lab coat and shows me a square green patch. “Doc developed them for the depressed patients. Works, too. If you have only one. Problem is, word’s gotten out that three or more will kill you.”

“What’s in them?”

“Phydus.” She says it matter-of-factly, but she waits for my reaction before continuing.

Phydus. I thought we were through with that.

Part of me is angry. Very, very angry. I thought Elder and I agreed. I thought he had promised. No more Phydus. But another part of me can’t forget the crowd that turned into a mob in the City.

“We’re all going to die!” the woman Kit had been arguing with shouts. She grabs Kit by the lapels of her coat, her knuckles turning white.