His humming picks up but then slowly, very slowly, turns into words.

“It happened so fast,” Ryan whispers into his chest. “Everything went up,” he snaps his fingers weakly, a quick upward glance at me, “like that.”

I close my eyes and there are flames at the edges.

“And you started moving under the sheets, and I knew I had to get out of there. You were awake.” He gives me a pleading look. “I thought you were right behind me. I swear—I heard you on the stairs.”

I shake my head, smoke clouding my vision.

“I waited,” he tells me, “until I saw the firefighters. I knew you’d be okay.”

I fix him with a stare, and he melts back into the couch. Swallowing proves difficult. The light shifts, and the walls go shapeless.

“Who told you to do it?” I ask again, my voice as sharp and brittle as broken glass.

“No one,” he whispers. “No one told me to. It was my idea, me…”

And there it is, the flicker of something he’s been hiding with his tears. It was my idea—look what I did for my brothers—me.

“I just didn’t think—” His voice breaks and there’s that distressed look, the tears again, the humming.

And still, the question remains: Why? Even if no one told him to do it, why did he want to scare me? What are they hiding at Kap-O that’s so damaging, so bad that Ryan thought he had to keep me away? I grit my teeth. Oliver already thinks I’m biased. And despite him presenting Ryan to me as a gift—Look what I got you, the fire starter, pleased as a cat that’s left a tangled mess of a bird at your doorstep—I know Oliver will call Truman once I’m gone and tell him everything that was said here. So I bite back my questions and chew on them in silence.

Oliver waits. A part of me wonders if this is what he wants, for me to prove I’ve lost my objectivity, to lay it all out like I’ve got nothing to lose, but when I remain silent, he nods.

“Let’s go.” He puts a hand on Ryan’s arm. I see the faded burns, but they don’t move me the way they did when we brought him in this morning.

Ryan sits for a moment. His eyes are still wet, but he stares at both of us now as if fully recognizing where he is and what’s about to happen. His lips part, but just hang open. Oliver ushers him out of the room.