And Liam…his expression seemed to dissolve entirely.

I felt the hair on my neck begin to prickle, my fingers twist the fabric of my uniform shorts. The absolute last thing—the last thing—I wanted was to be pitied by a bunch of strangers. Regret washed down through me, flooding out even my anxiety and fear. I shouldn’t have said anything at all; I should have lied or dodged the question. Whatever they thought Thurmond was like, whatever they believed I’d gone through, it was bad enough to mark me as pathetic in their eyes. I could see it in their faces, and the irony stung more than I expected it to. They’d taken in a monster, thinking it was a mouse.

“Sixteen, then,” I said, once Liam had confirmed the year. Sam had been right after all.

Something else was bothering me. “They’re still creating new camps and sending kids to them?”

“Not so much anymore,” Liam said. “The younger set—Zu’s age—they were hit the hardest. People got scared, and the birthrate dropped off even before the government tried banning new births. Most of the kids that are still being sent to camps are like us. They escaped detection during collections or tried to run.”

I nodded, mulling this over.

“At Thurmond,” Chubs began, “did they really—”

“I think that’s enough,” Liam interrupted. He reached past Chubs’s outstretched arm and opened the sliding door for me again. “She answered your questions, we answered hers, and now we’ve gotta hit the road while the going is still good.”

Zu climbed in first, and, without looking at either boy, I followed, heading to the rear seat, where I could stretch out and hide from any more unwanted questions.

Chubs took the front passenger seat, throwing one last look back at me. His full lips were pressed so tight together they were colorless. Eventually, he turned his attention to the book in his lap and pretended that I wasn’t there at all.

Black Betty purred as Liam hit the accelerator and my entire body vibrated with her. She was the only one willing to speak for a long time.

The rain was still coming down, casting a gray light around the car. The windows had fogged, and for a minute I did nothing but watch the rain. Car headlights were flashing through the front windshield, but it was nowhere near dark.

Chubs eventually turned the radio on, filling the quiet space with a report about America’s gas crisis and the drilling that was happening in Alaska as a result. If I wasn’t already halfway to sleep, the droning from the humorless newscaster would have put me there.

“Hey, Green,” Liam called back. “You have a last name?”

I thought about lying, about making myself into someone that I wasn’t, but it didn’t seem right. Even if I let these people in, they’d forget about me soon enough.

“No,” I said. I had a Psi number and the name I’d inherited from my grandmother. The rest didn’t matter.