Chapter 12

chapter Twelve

I recoiled almost instantly at her tone more than her words. The way she said that-they'll live-was so dismissive, I half expected to see a hand come up into the air to wave me off. Don't worry. Don't worry at the way they've been mistreated, don't worry about their punishments, don't worry about the guns constantly trained on their backs. God, I wanted to throw up.

I had left them behind, all of them. I had left Sam, even after I promised we'd get out together. After everything she had done to protect me, I had just left her there.

"Oh-no, Ruby. I'm sorry, I didn't even realize how that would sound," she said, turning back and forth between me and the road. "I just meantI don't even know what I'm saying. I was there for weeks, and I still can't begin to imagine what it must have been like. I shouldn't act like I know what you went through."

"I just-I left them," I told her, and it didn't matter that my voice was breaking, or that my hands had come up to clutch my elbows to keep from grabbing her. "Why did you only take me? Why couldn't you save the others? Why?"

"I told you before," she said softly. "It had to be you. They would have killed you otherwise. The others aren't in danger."

"They're always in danger," I said, and wondered if she had stepped a single foot beyond the Infirmary. How could she not have seen? How could she not have heard it, felt it, breathed it in? The air at Thurmond was so coated in fear that you could taste it like vomit at the back of your throat.

It had taken me less than a day in that place to see that hatred and terror came in circles, and that they fed off each other. The PSFs hated us, so they had to make us fear them. And we feared them, which only made us hate them even more. There was an unspoken understanding that we were at Thurmond because of each other. Without the PSFs there would be no camp, but without the Psi freaks there would be no need for PSFs.

So whose fault was it? Everyone's? No one's? Ours?

"You should have just left me-you should have taken someone else, someone who was better-they'll be punished because of this, I know it. They'll hurt them, and it's my fault for going, for leaving them behind." I knew I wasn't making sense, but I couldn't seem to connect my thoughts to my tongue. That feeling, the heart-swallowing guilt, the sadness that took hold and never let itself be shaken free-how did you tell someone that? How did you put that into words?

Cate's lips parted, but no sound came out for several moments. She took a firm hold of the wheel and guided the car over to the side of the road. Her foot came off the gas and she allowed the car to roll to a hesitant stop. When the wheels finally ceased spinning, I reached for the door handle, a spike of total and complete grief cutting through me.

"What are you doing?" Cate asked.

She had pulled over because she wanted me to get out, hadn't she? I would have done the same thing if our situations had been flipped. I understood.

I leaned back away from her arm as she reached over, but instead of pushing the door open, she slammed it shut and let her fingers linger over my shoulder. I cringed, pressing back against the seat as hard as I could, trying to avoid her touch. This was the worst I'd felt in years-my head was humming, a sure sign I was dangerously close to losing control of it. If she had any thoughts about hugging me, or stroking my arm, or anything my mom would have done, my reaction was more than enough to convince her not to try.

"Listen to me very carefully," she said, and it didn't seem to matter to her that at any moment a car or a PSF could come charging up the road. She waited until I was looking her in the eye. "The most important thing you ever did was learn how to survive. Do not let anyone make you feel like you shouldn't have-like you deserved to be in that camp. You are important, and you matter. You matter to me, you matter to the League, and you matter to the future-" Her voice caught. "I will never hurt you, or yell at you, or let you go hungry. I will protect you for the rest of my life. I will never fully understand what you've been through, but I will always listen when you need to get something out. Do you understand?"

Something warm bloomed in my chest, even as my breath hitched in my throat. I wanted to say something to that, to thank her, to ask her to repeat it again just to be sure I hadn't misunderstood or misheard her.

"I can't pretend like it never happened," I told her. I still felt the vibrations of the fence under my skin.

"You shouldn't-you should never forget. But part of surviving is being able to move on. There's this word," she continued, turning to study her fingers gripping the wheel. "Nothing like it exists in the English language. It's Portuguese. Saudade. Do you know that one?"

I shook my head. I didn't know half of the words in my own language.

"It's morethere's no perfect definition. It's more of an expression of feeling-of terrible sadness. It's the feeling you get when you realize something you once lost is lost forever, and you can never get it back again." Cate took a deep breath. "I thought of that word often at Thurmond. Because the lives you had before-that we all had before-we can never get them back. But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh."

I did understand what she was saying, and I understood that her words were coming from a true, caring place, but after having my life broken down into rotations for so long, the thought of dividing it up even further was unimaginable.

"Here," she said, reaching inside the collar of her shirt. She pulled a long silver chain up over her head, and the last thing to reveal itself was the black circular pendant, a little bigger than the size of my thumb, hanging from it.

I held out my hand and she dropped the necklace into it. The chain was still warm from where it had been kept against her skin, but I was surprised to find that the pendant wasn't anything more than plastic.

"We call that a panic button," she said. "If you squeeze it for twenty seconds, it activates, and any agents nearby will respond. I don't imagine you'll ever need to use it, but I'd like you to keep it. If you ever feel scared, or if we get separated, I want you to press it."

"It'll track me?" Something about that idea made me vaguely uncomfortable, but I slipped the chain on anyway.

"Not unless you activate it," Cate promised. "We designed them that way so that the PSFs wouldn't be able to accidentally pick up on a signal being transmitted from them. I promise, you're in control here, Ruby."

I plucked the pendant up and held it between my thumb and index finger. When I realized how dirty my fingers were, and how much dirt was still packed under my nails, I dropped it. Me and nice things didn't go well together.

"Can I ask you another question?" I waited until she had finally nudged the car back onto the road, and even then it had taken me a few tries to get the words out. "If the Children's League was formed to end the camps, why did you even bother getting me and Martin? Why didn't you just blow up the Control Tower while you were there?"

Cate ran a hand over her lips. "I'm not interested in those kinds of operations," she said. "I'd much rather be focused on the real issue, which is helping you kids. You can destroy a factory, and they'll just build another. But once you destroy a life, that's it. You never get that person back."

"Do people have any idea?" I squeezed out. "Do the people know that they're not reforming us at all?"

"I'm not sure," Cate said. "Some will always live in denial about the camps, and they'll believe what they want to believe about them. I think most people know there's something off, but they're in too deep with their own problems to call into question how the government is handling things at the camps. I think they want to trust that you're all being treated well. Honestly, there arethere are so few of you left now."

I sat straight up again. "What?"

This time, Cate couldn't look at me. "I didn't want to have to be the one to tell you this, but things are much worse now than they were before. The last estimate the League put together said that two percent of the country's population of ten- to seventeen-year-olds were in reform camps."

"What about the rest?" I said, but I already knew the answer. "The ninety-eight percent?"

"Most of them fell victim to IAAN."

"They died," I corrected. "All the kids? Everywhere?"

"No, not everywhere. There have been a few cases of it reported in other countries, but here in America" Cate took a deep breath. "I don't know how much to tell you now, because I don't want to overwhelm you, but it seems like the onset of IAAN or Psi powers is linked to puberty-"

"How many?" They really hadn't learned anything new in all the years I was trapped in Thurmond? "How many of us are left?"

"According to the government, there are approximately a quarter of a million children under the age of eighteen, but our estimate is closer to a tenth of that."

I was going to be sick. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned forward, putting my head between my legs. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cate's hand come down, as if she was going to rest it on my back, but I twisted away again. For a long time, the only sound between us was the tires turning against the old road.

I kept my face down and eyes shut long enough for Cate to worry. "Are you still feeling queasy? We had to give you a high enough dosage of penicillin to induce seizurelike symptoms. Trust me, if we could have done it any other way we would have, but we needed something serious enough for the PSFs to actually bring you back to the Infirmary."

Martin snored behind us until eventually even that faded into the sound of the tires rolling down the old road. My stomach twisted at the thought of asking exactly how many miles we were from Thurmond, how far away the past really was.

"I know," I said after a while. "Thank you-I mean it."