She eventually pulls back and wipes her cheeks. “When Katarina was dead, they tried everything, and I mean everything, they could to kill me—electrocution, drowning, explosives. They injected me with cyanide, which did nothing—I didn’t even feel the needle going into my arm. They threw me in a chamber filled with poisonous gas, and it was like the air inside was the freshest I’d ever breathed. The Mogadorian who pushed the button on the other side of the door, though, he was dead within seconds.” Six takes another swipe at her cheek with the back of her hand. “It’s funny, you know, that I think I killed more Mogadorians when I was captured than I did at the school in Ohio. They finally threw me in another cell, and I think they’d planned on keeping me there until they killed Three through Seven.”

“I love that you told them you were Number Eight,” Sam says.

“I feel bad that I did it now. It’s like I tarnished Katarina’s legacy, or the real Number Eight’s.”

Sam places his hands on both her shoulders. “No way, Six.”

“How long were you in there?” I ask.

“One hundred and eighty-five days. I think.”

My mouth drops open. Over half a year locked away, completely and utterly alone, waiting to be killed. “I’m so sorry, Six.”

“I was just waiting and praying for my Legacies to finally develop so I could get the hell out of there. And then one day, the first one finally did. It was after breakfast. I looked down and my left hand just wasn’t there. Of course, I freaked out, but then I realized I could still feel my hand. I tried to pick up my spoon, and sure enough, I could. And that’s when I understood what was happening—and invisibility was the thing I needed in order to escape.”

How it started for Six wasn’t all that different from how it had started for me, when my hand began to glow in the middle of my first class at Paradise High.

Two days later Six had been able to make herself completely invisible, and when dinner rolled around that day, and the slot on the door was slid open and her meal pushed through, the Mogadorian guard saw an empty cell. He’d looked wildly around and then hit an alarm that sent a piercing wail through the cave. The iron door had been flung open and four Mogs charged in. While they stood there, dumbfounded as to how she’d escaped, she slid by and rushed out the door and down the tunnel, seeing the cave for the very first time.