He kisses my hair and holds me until I grow still. “I should go.”

I pull back, sniffing and wiping my eyes, unable to look right at him. “I can drop you home.”

“I’d rather run,” he says, his voice rough. He touches his fingers to the thin scar at the top of my brow where he marked me in childhood – pushing me into the river – then drops his hand.

“I’ll get your things.” I suffer a brief glance at his face and make my way upstairs, half-blinded. When I reach the landing, I hear the back door click and I know he’s already gone.

RESPONSIBILITY

We sit in the car, buffeted by gale-force wind, sleet hammering the passenger windows. Spectators making their way to an interstate hockey final clog the Sunday traffic, flags and scarves and excited honking, unfazed by the weather. Today I hate hockey. I hate fans. Miriam taps her thumb on the steering wheel, glaring at the back of the tour bus in front of us. She checks her watch for the hundredth time. It’s two and half hours from Burton to the detention centre in Roxborough. I google-mapped it. Our visiting slot with Aiden is for three. It will be the first time we’ve seen him since the hospital.

Miriam tried for an appointment after Tesla and his team left yesterday, but it had been too late in the afternoon. I doubt I could have pulled myself together anyway, having fallen apart completely after Jamie left. I had put myself to bed, refusing to speak or acknowledge Miriam when she came in to check on me. I’d only gotten out of bed today because she said we could go and see Aiden. My head swims from sleeplessness and exhaustion. I’m weak from hunger but too nauseous to eat, too anxious, the bagel Miriam brought for me still on the dash in its paper bag.

I pump the volume button on my iPod until the sound hurts my ears, shifting in my seat, trying to ignore the cramp in my abdomen and the clamped feeling in the base of my skull. Benjamin’s procedure left two rash-like marks on the skin above my ovaries. The wound from the tracker implant has knitted closed. I can touch it, the pea-shaped thing, but it makes me squeamish; a foreign presence in the back of my head. I worry when my heart beats too hard that my anxiety will cue a call from Tesla. My paranoia has him sitting at a monitor, interpreting incoming data about my Electro-Telepathic whatever hand poised over his phone, ready to deploy Davis and his baton at the hint of a blip on the readout.

I hug my jacket closer around me, ignoring Miriam where she sits gripping the steering wheel, straight-backed, knuckles white. The traffic crawls and I use my cuff to wipe a porthole in the condensation and glare out the window. I’m supposed to be on the lookout for the off ramp. My sigh mists the glass and I have to wipe it again.

A light touch on my arm. Miriam gestures; she wants to talk. I steel myself and pop my earbuds out.

She looks pent up. “We’ll need to find a shopping mall or something after we see Aiden. They’ll have a record of our movements, geographically speaking, and if we’re out here I don’t want our only stopping point to be a psych unit at a detention facility.”

“You think they’re spying on us right now?”

She sighs. “It’s not like that. No one’s sitting and watching you on live GPS. They respond to extreme fluctuations in your reading. Remember their Primary Objective is to protect their Assets. They want you safe and out of trouble. I’m just saying it’s sensible to avoid a record of questionable movements.”

“So we’re just being careful?”

“Listen,” she says, gritting her teeth. “I’m not going to pretend we’re visiting Aiden without an agenda, but it’s not up to you. I have connections–”

“Who?” I stiffen, immediately on alert. “The German guy? Tesla won’t even help me. He sure as hell isn’t going to help Aiden. You can’t tell him, Miriam. You can’t trust any of them.”

Her mouth thins. She knows I was eavesdropping on their conversation in the hall. “I didn’t mean–”

“They’ll never let Aiden live.”

She exhales through her nose. “I don’t want you involved.”

“I’m already involved. Besides, if they find out you’ve tried to help him, it’ll make things worse when you face the Executive. It makes more sense if it’s me. Aff–” I cut off at Miriam’s warning glance. Forbidden words. I clench my teeth before trying again. “They can’t throw the book at me if I haven’t been through training. You’ve told me that before.”

“You’re underestimating them.”

“You’re underestimating me!”

“No!” She thumps her hand on the steering wheel. “I’m not! I know exactly what you are capable of and that is why I am telling you to stay out of it!”

“He’s my brother.”

“He’s my son!”

I clamp my mouth shut and dig my nails into the upholstery, willing myself to calm down, but I’m not done. “What exactly does discipline look like?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“So you go before the Executive, give an account of your actions and then what, they slap you on the wrist?”

“I said, you don’t need to worry.”

“Do they strap you in the chair in the room with the black glass?”

She blanches. “How do you …? Felicity. You saw that in Felicity’s memories?”

“And the girl in the goo tank.”

Her voice grows weak. “You saw the girl?”

I nod.

“I’ve never seen her,” she says, a hint of awe in her tone. “She’s young?”

I shrug. “She was, in the memory … but Felicity looked younger too, so I don’t know. Is she the Proxy?”

Miriam brings the side of her fist to her mouth, looking shaken. “That’s what they call her. She’s a telepath. I don’t really understand how it works but they use her for advanced Harvesting. Interrogations.”

A chill runs through me. I thought it was something like that, but it also means they plan on interrogating me. Tesla said as much, didn’t he?

“She’s a – a booster too. She amplifies the Wardens’ signals before they go out on sweeps. It wears off but without a Proxy there would be no Wardens, no way to police the districts.”

“Right.” I don’t know what to say, the whole idea of the Affinity Project being dependant on one spooky little girl strikes me as alarming. “Will they use her on you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been through ReProg before.”

“ReProg?”

“Discipline,” she says, deflating.

I never truly comprehended the risk when we were violating Affinity protocol left, right and centre to keep Kitty safe. The thought of Jamie and Miriam facing the Executive – it makes my stomach churn. “Discipline” has to be a deterrent and the only thing that can mean is pain. I think of the terrified young man strapped to the chair in Felicity’s memory. I didn’t get to see what happened. I can’t imagine Felicity physically torturing the guy, but what if it isn’t about being stretched on a rack, or waterboarding, or a white-hot poker to the feet? What if it’s messing with a person’s mind? Psychological torture?

“He has to run,” I blurt. “We have to convince him.”

She doesn’t answer at first, frowning at the wet road. “That would only be a temporary solution.”

“The sooner he goes, the further he can get before they find out.”

“Where would he go? Does he have a passport? Money? How will he live? He’d need documents, a new ID. It’s not simple, Evie.”

“And you have connections who can get all that?”

“I didn’t say–” She makes an impatient sound. “I don’t want you involved. We shouldn’t be talking about it. I don’t want it in your mind for them to dig out and hold against you.”

I make an impatient sound. “Then what the hell are we going for? What are we going to tell him?”

Miriam bites her lip. “The truth. That they’ll come for him. That he needs to decide what he wants to do.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Aiden is my responsibility, not yours.”