Martin watched me with glassy eyes. At one point, I felt his hand slip against my arm, like he was trying to help me. I recoiled, slipping down in the space between the backseat and the front. My back was against the door and my knees were against my chest, but we were still too close. When he grinned, it was enough to make my skin crawl.

There were boys at Thurmond. Plenty of them, in fact. But any activity that involved the commingling of the sexes—whether that was eating together, sharing cabins, or even passing one another on the way to the Washrooms—was strictly forbidden. The PSFs and camp controllers enforced the rule with the same level of severity they did with the kids who—however intentionally or unintentionally—used their abilities. Which, of course, only drove everyone’s already hormone-drunk brains crazier, and turned some of my cabinmates into an elite breed of covert stalkers.

Maybe I didn’t remember the “right” way to interact with someone of the opposite gender, but I’m pretty sure Martin didn’t, either.

“Fun, huh?” he said. I thought he was kidding, until I saw the too-eager look in his eyes. The itching came again, the tingling sensation of yet another attempt to peer inside my head, dread trailing down the length of my spine like a freezing fingertip. I pressed up against the door and kept my eyes on Cate, but it wasn’t far enough.

We are nothing alike, I realized. We had been brought to the same place, lived in the same kind of terror, but he…he was so…

I needed to change the subject and distract him from whatever it was he was trying to do. The AC was on, but you never would have known by the heat he was giving off.

“Do you think Thurmond has noticed we’re gone?” I asked, breaking the silence.

Cate switched off her headlights. “I would think so. The PSFs don’t have the manpower to launch a full hunt for us, but I’m positive they’ve put two and two together about what you are.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “That we’re Orange? I thought you said they already knew. That was why we had to leave so quickly.”

“They were on the verge of finding out,” Cate explained. “They were testing the Orange and Red frequencies in that Calm Control. I don’t think any of them expected it to work that quickly—that’s why we had to get you out, and fast.”

“Frequencies,” Martin repeated. “You mean they added something to it?”

“That’s exactly right.” Cate smiled at him in the rearview mirror. “The League got wind of their new method of trying to weed out kids who had been labeled incorrectly when they were brought into camp. You know that adults can’t hear the Calm Control, I’m sure.”

We both nodded.

“The scientists there have been working on frequencies that only certain kinds of Psi youth can pick up and process. There are some wavelengths you all can hear, and others that only Greens, or Blues, or—in this instance—Oranges can detect.”