I tried to laugh it off, but Owen took another step closer to me, peering owlishly through his wire-framed glasses at me. My laugh wilted and shriveled under the weight of his disappointment.

“No, no, you’re not,” he said. “First of all, I’d know. I actually care about your progress, Rose.”

“Owen—”

“And second of all, we don’t have any programs running right now,” he continued. “We’re overhauling the organization, which has meant limiting the long-term services we offer for a while. Which brings me, again, to my question: what. are. you. doing. here.”

“I…” I floundered, trying to come up with a plausible excuse for why I would be here, in the middle of the night, if I wasn’t doing a program, and then Owen’s eyes went down to the folder I was still holding.

“You’re not here alone, are you?” he asked, though it didn’t sound like a question.

“I just … I wanted some answers,” I said, clutching the file tighter. “And what you’re doing here, it’s—it’s not okay.”

“I know.” He sighed. I hadn’t really expected the moral high ground to work, but it turned out that Owen Green is exactly the person I thought he was. He’s pretty much the only one.

“But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,” he said.

“All those people you have in the basement,” I said, digging into the righteous argument, “that’s not okay. They deserve to be set free.”

“I agree. And we’re going to do that. But we have to do it carefully.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” I asked. “When—how—you’re the director now? What happened to Wadsworth?”

“A lot has changed in the past month, Rose,” he said. “Joan and I—Dr. Bright—we’ve been working to stop what’s been going on here, to take over, fix things, and we finally did it.”

I just blinked, frozen in place, trying to process what he was telling me.

“We’re going to make this place better, Rose,” Owen went on, the belief shining out of his mouth so strongly for a moment I thought I could see it, that somehow I was in a dream.

“How?” I asked. “How could any place that experiments on people like this be a good thing?”

“It can’t,” he said simply. “That’s why we’re going to stop. Come back in a year—six months, even—and this tier will be gone. All these people will be safe and we’ll be starting something new here.”

“At least let us take Blaze,” I pleaded. “I want to trust you, really I do, but he’s Damien’s friend—”

“Who’s Blaze?” Owen asked, before doing a double take. “Wait, Damien—”