There was a small instant where she saw the murder in his eyes. But then. . . .

The doctor was dropped with a thud.

Romy winced as his head bounced on rock. Houston gasped for breath, too weak to roll out from the dangerous space Atlas occupied.

Atlas was staring at her in amazement. Like he could barely believe his eyes. What had he witnessed in those first few seconds?

“You?” he breathed.

“What?” Romy snapped. What the hell was going on?

“You’re still here.”

He was trying to conceal his reaction, with obvious difficulty. And for the first time, Romy came to understand there must be something unusual in her behaviour—to how she’d reacted to Lucas’s death.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Romy waited, but the answer didn’t come. Not until the safe house, she thought bitterly.

Atlas’s look of amazement didn’t quite make sense, and it was making her paranoid.

Romy ignored the hushed silence and slipped into her sleeping bag where no one could see her. It quickly grew unbearably warm in the space as her breath heated the inside. But she stayed there, hanging on to herself with her fingertips. What would have happened if she’d chosen the wild Romy? She stared at the dark material centimetres from her face.

Gradually, the others quietened.

It was possibly hours later when someone finally spoke.

Houston was whispering. “I told you. She’s the key. I think we’ve finally found it, Atlas.”

The bespectacled man was always cheerful, often excited, and always glib. Which was why Romy held her breath at the desperation in his tone. The anguish. And the longing.

A sharp order to “shut his mouth” came from Atlas.

Several long beats passed and Romy was just about to emerge from the sauna-like temperature in her swag, when the doctor spoke again.

“We need her, Atlas. You know we do.”

Romy strained her ears, shutting her eyes and holding every muscle tight as though if any other sense were open, it would make hearing Atlas’s reply impossible.

Atlas’s words slipped through the dead-calm of night towards her with ease.

“I know.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

It might make her a terrible person, but right then she would have chosen to return to the lie, to the Orbitos. Romy remembered the chocolate cake; she remembered her nanopad and the cadets’ lectures. And if given the choice, in that moment, she would have given up her memory.

Her knot hardly spoke to her as they continued their blind trek through the forest after Atlas. They didn’t know how she’d react. She didn’t either.

There was one change.