I try to pull away, rustling in my paper gown.

Her fingers tighten around mine. “Don’t do that. They’ll know and they’ll increase the Symbiosis. You don’t want to be a vegetable, do you?”

“Jamie.” But I don’t know what to say and he doesn’t look up. I’m probably the last person he wants to see but I’m so confused. He was still in Tesla’s lab when they took me to ReProg and I’m pretty sure his pants were blue.

“He can’t hear you. This is a memory.”

Breathing shakily, I stare at her, at Jamie, the black glass walls, darting a sharp glance over my shoulder, expecting to see Knox, Tesla and the Executive glaring down at me from the metal walkway. The glass reveals nothing, nothing but Jamie nodding and alone in the chair.

“We’re vampires.” She chuckles and waves at where her reflection should be in the glass, where my reflection should be. “Spinny, huh?”

My head is spinning. I stagger but don’t pull away, unable to comprehend. This isn’t real. It can’t be real. I’m dreaming. This is a dream.

“Sort of,” the Proxy says … and I know without needing an explanation that that is who she is, though I was expecting the blue-eyed child from Felicity’s memory, the blonde hair and peachy skin.

“I grew up,” she says. “That was an old memory. The goo-tank bleaches everything – you’ve seen Felicity’s hand.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“I thought it would be easier to talk to you like this,” she says, rustling in her paper gown. “You’re very strong and I don’t want to hurt you. Jamie makes you feel safe so I thought here would be a good place.”

Safe? I couldn’t think of a less appropriate word for how I feel about Jamie or where I am right now. “What did they do to him?”

“Don’t worry - they kept to the limits of the reform but, you know, it’s still pretty awful. I suppose it has to be or we’d all just do what we liked.”

I go to reach for Jamie’s hand, stop myself and pull back.

“Everybody pees,” she says again. “Some vomit or bleed, hence the drain, but everybody pees. You think they’d use a catheter but they’d rather you wet yourself. Shame can be motivating too. That’s why Robert had your hair butchered. He’s big into the old ways.”

A sticky sob catches in my throat. “They hurt Jamie because of me.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And your mom.”

My heart squeezes to a stop.

“You have a fascinating family.”

I’m unable, at first, to find my voice. “Then they know everything?”

“I haven’t told them.” She smiles softly. “Not yet.”

Not yet? I search her face but she watches me with her bland smile, not giving anything away. She’s playing with me. She wants something.

She looks away. “Jamie was to deactivate, you know.”

The bruised feeling in my chest throbs. “Maybe he still can.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“We haven’t …”

“I didn’t mean sex. I meant how you got the program shut down.”

Heat flashes up my neck.

“It’s a pity,” she says and there’s a smile in her voice. “The sex, not the program. He’s very beautiful, like Ethan at this age, sort of raw and refined at the same time.”

The potent memory of Tesla strapped to the chair returns to me, and the weird stirring of desire. Was it her in my head, before the Symbiosis started?

“Can you blame me?” she says. “Ethan was gorgeous. Still is, if you ask me.”

I shiver at the thought of how far her powers might reach.

“You’d be surprised,” she says.

“Were you really there when I woke up on the ward?”

“In a way.” She shrugs and cocks her head at Jamie. “He feels wonderful in your mind.”

The shiver becomes a crawling feeling.

“All that electricity.” She sighs. “All that wholeness. I haven’t felt many Synergists. It’s almost intoxicating. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them about that either.”

The sheer creepiness of it stalls me.

She draws closer to Jamie, bringing me with her. “He’s very angry with you, for valuing a stranger’s life more than his sister’s – your best friend’s. You put her at risk, betrayed his trust, his parents’ trust. You’re a liar and a sneak, Evangeline. You only think about yourself.”

It hurts, a winding pain, like being punched in the gut, but it also feels familiar – that cruel voice. Was it her in my head when Knox was questioning me, telling me how selfish and ruthless and cruel–

“Yes,” she says. “But they weren’t my words. I was simply reflecting your feelings back to you.”

I try to stay calm. “So you know everything I’m thinking?”

“Here, in the Symbiosis.” She bites her lips. “Do you know why he’s so angry?”

“Of course I do.”

“He’s afraid.” She touches her forefinger to Jamie’s chest then the flat of her hand and closes her eyes. “An unbearable fear of his own powerlessness to protect the people he loves.”

It seeps into me and expands, fear like tidal waves, earthquakes, forest fires, flash floods, lightning strikes, acts of God. I’m swallowed, shaken, burned, drowned, struck down and devastated by my own uselessness. “Stop it,” I choke, tears on my face.

She slips her hand from Jamie’s chest like a parting caress and instantly the horror lifts. “It’s not rational,” she says. “He has control issues.”

But Jamie’s terror is just like mine and that’s what leaves me trembling.

She nods her head, a slow up and down swing. “If I had a brother, I think I would help him too. Even if he was a killer.”

“Aiden is not a killer,” I say, my teeth clamped together. “You saw the KMT, you felt the change.”

She smiles her small wrong smile. “Jamie doesn’t believe you. Nobody does, except your mother.”

“What about Tesla?”

“Ethan believes in measurable evidence.”

I suppose it’s better than an outright no. I hesitate then ask, “Can I trust him?”

“You’re asking me who to trust?” The Proxy’s smile widens, her eyes ranging over my face. “You have a very pretty mouth. Jamie loves your mouth.”

I snap my lips closed.

She dabs at her lower lip, lifting her shoulders to sigh. “He’s a good kisser, isn’t he?”

I screw my face up. “What?”

“She thinks so too. Deactivation is painful, you know, but even when it hurt she didn’t mind kissing him.”

A coiling feeling tightens my stomach, my joints, and heat grows in my chest. A burst of colour in my periphery and I turn my head, a blooming vision in the black glass. A memory opens up that my brain has no framework for. Jamie’s hands fumble loose the buttons on a woman’s blue blouse, his hands slip the shirt off. A cream lace bra. A tumble of sandy hair over narrow shoulders. His hands slide up behind a slender neck and her face comes into focus. Helena. I remember her from the photo Jamie’s mother showed me. She’s older than me, early twenties, rosebud mouth, blue eyes. Her lips move but I can’t hear her speak.

“I see you,” the Proxy murmurs, her words syncing with Helena’s. “I know you, I choose you, As you choose me and know me and see me as I am–”

“No.” I try to tug away. Inside, it’s like slipping off a ledge, that sudden loss of foundation and the plummet into space. I can’t look away.

“I bind myself to you in trust,” the Proxy continues, tightening her grasp. “This is what I believe, It is the truth that I choose as you choose me.” Helena’s eyes flutter closed. Her lips part and her chin tilts up.

“No!” I tear my hand free.

A lash of pain lights up the back of my skull and everything is black. A squall of static. Pressure swells inside my chest. Fire in my spine. I thrash against my restraints, agony in my wrists and a terrible roar in my ears before my eyes spring open. Back in my body. Back in the chair. Blood in my mouth. Blood on the armrests, smeared and glowing ruby red. The noise in the room hurts my ears. Knox commanding something, Tesla swearing, the sound of my own screaming reverberating off the walls. My tears come. The hot slip of them over cheek and jaw to pool in the creases of my neck. I gasp for insufficient pockets of air, my nose closing from the pressure, my chest buckling with shallow sobs as I try not to stretch my back.