“So I waited it out, and when the rest of the group decided to go one way, I went the other. I’d just stopped to take a piss when your Recruiter conked me out, and then, well, then I was here.”

“And did anyone notice you were not with them?”

“Probably not,” I answered truthfully. “They were too busy with the newcomers.”

“Describe these newcomers for me.”

This part was tricky. I wasn’t prepared for it, so I hoped I was convincing. I couldn’t give up the nurses who had helped Isaac and his fellow runners. Nurses might still be a way out, if not for me, then for others. If the Agents didn’t know about this network of allies, I wasn’t about to reveal it. I had already tried to keep the group in my rendition small, to leave out the resistance camp we’d joined, but they already knew about them. That omission had gotten me two hours in the siren room. I’d almost pulled my own teeth out that time, trying to distract myself with a different kind of pain, the kind that lives in meat and nerve. I couldn’t risk that happening again, so I decided that instead of leaving out the nurses, I would recast them.

“Indians. Six of them. All adults. Scared but in good health.” I knew these were the details they wanted.

“And mentally?”

“Sound. Dreamers, obviously.”

“Fantastic.” She typed faster.

“I needed a way out. Nothing made sense anymore. Why were we always running? And why did we stay in groups? If I had to run, which I thought I did, then why take on the extra responsibility of others? I had my own rifle. And skills. I could hunt, I could get by. I figured I might as well do it on my own.”

“It seems that maybe your family felt the same way about you,” Mellin offered in a conversational tone.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, come on.” She folded her fingers in front of her face, then opened them up as if she were offering me something. “If they really felt the way about community and family that you say they did, wouldn’t they have kept a closer eye on every single person, yourself included?”

That thought, casually dropped before she asked me to go on, stayed with me all day. I woke the next day with a pit in the bottom of my stomach. It felt like I could fall right inside it.

It was on day fifteen that I finally saw Mitch again. After so many hours spent stitching careful words around electric panic to keep myself from shorting out, I was genuinely happy to see him. He must have seen it on my face when he came to get me that morning, because he smiled back, big and genuine.

“Hey, little brother,” he called in the open door. He hadn’t knocked. No one did around here. They didn’t want people thinking they had the privilege of privacy, after all. That would’ve meant they might’ve have other rights, too.