“You came.” He waved me inside and guided me toward his desk. Sitting down in one of the chairs, I had a fleeting look at the other side of his room, where the curtain had been restrung.

Clancy took his usual seat behind his desk, rocking the chair back as he smiled. “What made you change your mind?”

“It’s…like you said,” I mumbled. “There are so few of us left.” And I want to know how I can be around the people I love and not be terrified of erasing myself.

“I read on the League’s network that they weren’t able to find any other Oranges aside from you and Martin,” Clancy said. “Most of the Reds were killed, apparently. That puts us at the head of the pack.”

“I guess,” I said. Another thought occurred to me. “How do you have access to the League’s network? And the PSFs?” I gestured around the room. “Any of this?”

“I have friends everywhere,” Clancy said, simply. His fingers drummed against his desk. “And my father leaves me alone because he wouldn’t be able to stand the outrage if I expose the fact that there is no rehabilitation program, not for people like you and me.”

“Me and you,” I repeated.

Clancy ran a hand through his hair. “The first thing you need to understand, Ruby, is that we’re not like the others. Me and you…everyone classified as Orange. We’re different. Special. No—no, wait, I see you rolling your eyes, but you have to listen, okay? Because the second thing you have to understand, is that everyone—my father, the camp controllers, the scientists, the PSFs, the Children’s League—they’ve been lying to you this entire time. We’re special not because of what we are, but what they can’t make us into.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said.

He stood up and came around the desk to sit next to me. “Would it help if I told you my story first?” My eyes flicked up to meet his. “If I do, you have to promise that it stays between us.”

Keeping secrets. That, I could do.

“All right,” he said, “give me your hand. I’m going to have to show you.”

When I had slipped into other minds, there had always been a queasy feeling of sinking involved in it. More often than not, I found myself dropped in the middle of a swamp of dimly lit memories and unrestrained feelings with no map, no flashlight, and no easy way of finding the way out.

But there was nothing frightening about Clancy’s mind. His memories were bright and crisp, full of blooming images and colors. It felt like he had taken my hand there, too, and was guiding me down a long hallway of windows into his past. We only stopped long enough for me to glance inside each of them.

The office was plain, stuffed full of gunmetal gray filing cabinets, but little else. It could have been anywhere; the white paint was fresh enough that it bubbled on the wall. But I recognized the beginnings of crescent-shaped machine in the back corner and the man staring me down from across the card table serving as his desk. He was plump and balding at his hairline—and a permanent fixture in the Infirmary. I watched his lips move in a soundless explanation, my eyes drifting down to the crisp stack of papers on the desk in front of him. My eyes kept drifting down to his hand resting against the table, weighing down a sheet of once-folded paper that was trying to curl back in on itself. There at the top of it—the White House emblem. The words went into crystal focus, and I felt my eyes jump over them, drinking them in with disbelief. Dear Sirs, You may have my permission to run tests and experimental treatments on my son, Clancy James Beaumont Gray, provided these do not leave visible scars.