I stared at him for a long while, speechless.

How did you survive that life? I wanted to ask. How are you you, and not the monster they would have turned you into?

“After I got out that night I met Hayes, and then Olivia, and then others. We found this place and went to work, and all the while my father couldn’t put a bounty out on me, not without exposing the truth about me and his rehab program. He had to make up some lie about me attending college, to get the press off his back.” Clancy smiled then. “So, you see, I did win in the end.”

He rose from his chair, reaching out a hand. I took it without being conscious of it, feeling some calm wash over me as he squeezed my fingers. My head was silent. I felt myself lean forward.

“When I heard your story, I knew I had to meet you. I had to make sure that you knew the truth about what was going on, so you wouldn’t be caught in the dark the way I was.”

“The truth?” I looked up, startled. “What do you mean?”

Clancy didn’t release my hand; he only sat on the edge of his desk in front of me. “The woman who broke you out of Thurmond—the League agent? What did she tell you about the White Noise they used that day?”

“That the camp controllers had embedded a frequency in it that only Oranges, Reds, and Yellows could detect,” I said. He must have known about that—they used the same method to broadcast the location of the camp. “That they were trying to pick out any of the dangerous ones that were still hiding out.”

Clancy released my hand and reached back to turn his laptop so it faced us. On the screen was a snapshot of my face on the morning they had brought us into camp, but the text beside it wasn’t my history.

“Read the second paragraph aloud.”

I looked up at him, confused, but did as he asked. “‘Camp Controller Harris discovered the discrepancy in the Calm Control at 05:23 the following morning, after noticing an underlying frequency that had been added without his consent.’” I paused, licking my dry lips. “‘Upon further investigation of the recording devices in the Mess Hall, he came to the conclusion that the outbreak of violence there that resulted in the use of the Calm Control at approximately 11:42 was directly provoked by undercover operatives from the terrorist group the Children’s League. He believes these same operatives planted an identification frequency in the Calm Control. Psi subjects 3285 and 5312 who were taken from camp boundaries at approximately 03:34 by a Children’s League operative, are now believed to have been mistakenly identified as Green upon their initial classification.…’”

“Keep going,” Clancy said, when my voice trailed off.

“‘Subjects 3285 and 5312 are believed to be highly dangerous. Orders have been issued for their immediate recapture and reprocessing’—reprocessing?” My eyes flew up again. “But the way this is written…they didn’t know…they didn’t… Are you trying to tell me that they had no idea I was an Orange until after I got out?”