THE STAIRS ARE narrow and uneven and creak hard underfoot. I brace myself against the walls as I make my way down, feeling both better and worse with every step. Better that the knife is farther away, worse that we are getting more and more trapped inside this house. And I realize then that it doesn’t even matter if Kendall was telling us to come here because he truly believed we should. Doesn’t matter if he was telling the truth. Kendall had no way of knowing exactly what would happen once we got here. What that kid would do. How I would respond. How Jasper would.

Outlier Rule #4: Someone telling the truth—isn’t the same thing as them being right about what will happen.

Behind me, Jasper is breathing hard.

“I’m so sorry,” I manage. “This is my fault.”

Though the choking is on Jasper, that’s for sure.

“Yeah,” he says, more angry than I had expected. “It is.”

Eventually, the stairwell opens up on one side, and when my head clears the ceiling, I lock eyes with the person seated at the desk below. It’s the blond guy from the camp with the beaked nose and the dark circles under his eyes. The one with the game board on his pale, ashen arm. It’s obvious he recognizes me, too. And not in a good way.

“Shit,” he says, annoyed, exhausted. Like I am yet another human spill he will now be forced to clean up.

Beyond him there are a dozen young women and men sitting at a long table in the center of the room, headphones and hooded sweatshirts on, hunched over laptops. And beyond them is a partial wall, a light in the corner as though there might be another desk there out of view. If the people at the laptops notice us, they pretend not to. They don’t even look up. It is stuffy and dim down there, and there’s a distinctly sour smell—too many pairs of jeans worn too many times.

“I don’t know why the hell you’re here,” the blond guy says, sizing Jasper up as he comes into view, “but we’re done with you. Period. That comes straight from her.”

I am close enough now to read the newspaper clippings taped above his desk—Emails Surface Proving FDA Fast-tracked Profitable Painkillers over Lifesaving Cancer Meds and Servers Down at Oil Giant Following Spill. There’s a big white bedsheet tacked to the opposite wall with the game board spray-painted below the words: Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. Amelia Earhart.

“What ‘comes straight from her’?” a girl shouts from behind the partial wall.

“I’m handling it!” the blond guy shouts back with an edge. Like he and the girl are already in a fight about something else. “You don’t want to come out here. Trust me.”

“Oh, please,” comes the snorted response.