I don’t know if it was the smoke from the campfire that calmed me, or the sudden reappearance of Zu, who had come back from scouting a nearby campsite, making sure it was deserted. As she wrapped her arms around my waist, the boys began to pool together what was left of the food in Betty.

“So that’s how you figured out the clue,” Liam said. “You saw a memory of it?”

I nodded. “Not so impressive now, is it?”

“No—no, that’s not what I meant,” Liam said, adding quickly, “It’s just I’m trying to imagine what the inside of that kid’s head looked like, and the best I can come up with is a swamp filled with alligators. It must have been terrible.”

“Not as terrible as slipping into someone’s head I actually like,” I admitted.

“Did you?” Chubs said after nearly ten minutes of silence. Liam was busy testing out whether he could use Betty’s car key to pry open the lids of the fruit and soup cans.

“Did I what?”

“Did you ever get inside our heads?” he finished. The way he asked reminded me of the way a kid would ask for the end of a bedtime story. Eager. Surprising—in all of my nightmares about them finding out the truth, I had pictured Chubs taking it the worst.

“Of course she’s in our heads,” Liam said, his arms straining to open the can’s lid. “Ruby is one of us now.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Chubs huffed. “I just want to know how it works. I’ve never met an Orange before. We didn’t have any at Caledonia.”

“That’s probably because the government erased them all,” I said, dropping my hands in my lap. “That’s what happened to them at Thurmond.”

Liam looked up, alarmed. “What do you mean?”

“For the first two or three years I was there, we had every kind of color, even Red and Orange,” I said. “But…no one really knows why or how it happened. Some people thought they were taken away because of all the trouble they caused, but there were rumors they were being moved to a new camp where they could do more testing on them. We just woke up one morning and the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows were gone.” And it was just as terrifying for me to think about now as it was then.

“What about you, though?” Chubs asked. “How did you avoid getting bused?”

“I pretended to be Green from the start,” I said. “I saw how scared the PSFs were of the Oranges, and I messed with the scientist who was running the classifying test.” It was a struggle to push the rest of the words out. “Those kids were…they were so messed up, you know? Maybe they were like that before they got their abilities, or they hated themselves for having them, but they used to do terrible things.”

“Like what?” Chubs pressed.

Oh God, I couldn’t even talk about it. I physically could not speak. Not about the hundreds of mind games I watched them play on the PSFs. Nothing about the memory of having to scrub the floors of the Mess Hall after an Orange told a PSF to walk in and open fire on every other soldier he saw there. My stomach turned violently, and I could taste it, the metallic bitterness of blood. Smell it. I remembered how it felt to scrape it out from where it was packed painfully under my nails.