My throat was almost too tight to speak. “You can’t really expect me to just sit back and give up.”

“Your friends do not respect you,” she said plainly. “Any escape plan will fail not just from our attentiveness, but from mistrust from within. The universe teaches us all a lesson, Mr. Wren. Some humans do not live long enough to learn it. And others dig in their heels after the lesson has been taught, and refuse to accept it. Your sacrifices for them will not be returned. And you are alone in this.”

Memory shuddered over my skin, the silence of Itaka after the attack, the way the Ministers had not hesitated to slaughter, the way the Republic had left us behind. The way Benny had not come to me that day on Kystrom. I had stumbled across him unexpected, pure indifferent chance. The loneliness of it, a loneliness that lingered, like a dark bell struck and still reverberating through me.

She was a soul seven hundred years old. I was no longer sure whether she was trying to help me or harm me, or if there was a difference to her. I remembered Indigo, suddenly, and the press of his blade to my cheek, turning my face away from my friend’s body. Was this what passed for kindness to a Minister?

“I do not have Number Two’s sense of mercy, Mr. Wren,” One said. “If you, or your friends, try to escape again, I will kill you.”

My second-grade teacher had scared the hell out of me at the time. The man had been grimly committed to teaching us all times tables, and wanted us to memorize the multiplication table by any means necessary. For me, I didn’t see the reason. I had a perfectly good way of doing multiplication. Nine times three was nine plus nine plus nine, and I already knew addition.

It drove the teacher nuts. “What will you do when we start to multiply with bigger numbers?” he’d demanded, his voice a piercing crack of sound that penetrated every corner of the classroom. “Eighty-one times nineteen—you’re not going to add eighty-one nineteen times, are you?”

“Sure, if I have to,” I’d said.

He’d opened his mouth and I’d known he’d been on the verge of shouting, but he’d swallowed it down and walked away. That restraint, I’d thought, was more frightening than if he’d just yelled.

He’d taken me aside after school that day to talk.

“You’re smart enough to memorize the table easily,” he’d said. It occurred to me now that I had forgotten his name, sometime in the years that separated me now from him then. “I know abstract methods are difficult for you, but your life will be easier if you’re not stubborn about this.”

“Right,” I’d said, and kept on doing what I’d been doing, which was not memorizing the times table. I’d passed the lesson anyway.

I’d had to learn it eventually, when we did more complex multiplication, but I’d learned it in my own way, which was not the way he’d taught it: instead of memorizing the table, I’d memorized the patterns in the table, and then brought those out when I needed a quick solution.