“You have some bruised ribs,” she said.

I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest was too tight to inhale anything more than a choked gasp. She must not have noticed because she was looking at me with those kind eyes again, saying, “May I ask a few questions?”

The fact that she asked my permission was amazing in and of itself. I studied her, searching for the hatred buried beneath the layer of pleasantness on her face, the fear hovering in her soft eyes, the disgust caught in the corner of her smile. Nothing. Not even annoyance.

Some poor kid started to throw up in the stall to my right; I could see his dark outline like a shadow against the curtain. There was no one sitting with him, no one holding his hand. Just him and his bowl of puke. And here I was, my heart skipping beats out of fear that the fairy-tale princess sitting next to me was going to have me put down like a rabid dog. She didn’t know what I was—she couldn’t have known.

You’re being paranoid, I told myself. Get a grip.

Dr. Begbie pulled a pen out of her messy bun. “Ruby, when they turned on the Calm Control, do you remember falling forward and hitting your face?”

“No,” I said. “I was…already on the ground.” I didn’t know how much to tell her. The smile on her face stretched, and there was something…smug about it.

“Do you usually experience this much pain and bleeding from the Calm Control?”

Suddenly, the pain in my chest had nothing to do with my ribs.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

I couldn’t see what she was writing, only that her hand and pen were flying across the paper, scribbling as though her life depended on it.

I always took the White Noise harder than the other girls in my cabin. But blood? Never.

Dr. Begbie was humming lightly under her breath as she wrote, some song that I thought might have been by the Rolling Stones.

She’s with the camp controllers, I reminded myself. She is one of them.

But…in another world, she might not have been. Even though she was wearing the scrubs and white coat, Dr. Begbie didn’t look much older than I was. She had a young face, and it was probably a curse to her in the outside world.

I had always thought that people born before Generation Freak were the lucky ones. They lived without fear of what would happen when they stepped over the border between childhood and adolescence. As far as I knew, if you were older than thirteen when they started rounding kids up, you were home free—you got to pass Freak Camp on the board game of life and head straight on to Normalville. But looking at Dr. Begbie now, seeing the deep lines carved in her face that no one in their twenties should have had, I wasn’t so sure they had gotten off scot-free. They’d gotten a better deal than what we ended up with, though.