“About four.” He lifts a small black pack and drops it on my knees. My backpack from the night of the breakout. “Think most of it’s there.”

I loop my hand through the strap and we sit in silence for a bit. I don’t try to look out the window. We won’t be far from home. They’re good with dosage and timing travel. I look to see who’s driving but I don’t recognise the guy. “Any news on Benjamin?”

Davis links his fingers together, his elbows on his knees. “Trial should be soon. Ethan says they take longer when they hand out reprieves, just to make you sweat.”

“Sounds right.”

The corner of his mouth goes up, not really a smile.

“It wasn’t his fault.” I say it easily enough. Admittedly it’s an expressionless line-up of words, but I’ve practised it a lot in the last few weeks and it’s true. I don’t look for Davis’s reaction. I don’t want to see pity, though under different circumstances, Davis exhibiting an emotion as complex as pity would be noteworthy.

“When are you back?” he asks.

I shrug. “Ethan doesn’t want me doing district sweeps.”

“Fair enough.”

I click my tongue. “He’s being over-protective.”

“They’ll manage.”

“Right. No Proxy. No Wardens. Why bother?”

He gives me a hard look. “You’ve only just been cleared by psych. You should be taking it easy. Besides, I thought you hated all that company policy stuff.”

I do. I hate that Affinity exists. I hate that it ruins people’s lives but I know there are innocent kids out in the world, like walking time bombs, with the synthetic gene in their DNA about to blow. When it does, someone has to help them. Knowing Ethan’s behind the scenes trying to make things better gives me a little hope. They’re not all like Counsellor Knox. “Four weeks in psych would make anyone crazy.”

“Quit your complaining. Benjamin’s still sitting in a cell. You get to go home and drink eggnog with Richie Rich.”

Jamie.

I only have patches of memory from after the paralysis. Kitty’s God-awful screaming. Jamie, his whole body shaking, lifting me out of my brother’s blood. Ethan descending like a deus ex machina to halt the invasion of Affinity agents pouring into the house. Then a big blank thanks to industrial-strength sedation. Apparently I went full apocalypse in medical. They had to get Ethan to talk me down from blowing the place up. After that they kept me in a no-glass zone.

I’ve had four weeks to think about Jamie, to imagine what he must be thinking, what his family must be thinking. At least he and Kitty were released the day after the “event” and their folks didn’t have to wait so long. Ethan says Jamie will have to go back for Benjamin’s trial but he’s in the clear with the Executive. I’m glad one of us is.

I feel bad for Ethan, “stepped down” from his position on the Executive because of me. Forced to spearhead a “negotiation” with the European division for a substitute Proxy. He put it off as long as he could but he finally left for the UK this morning and thinking about it gives me a sick, curdling feeling. For one thing it’s punishment, Robert making him participate in the thing that Ethan despises the most about Affinity’s perpetuating horrors. For another, I can’t stand the idea of him being so far away. I can’t stand the idea of Miriam alone at the compound with no one to visit her bedside, no one to scan the silence in the bandwidth for a glimpse of her signal. I shake my head, not wanting to picture her or the breathing tube.

Ethan. It frightens me, the sense of exposure and vulnerability I feel without him, after four weeks of seeing him every day, his constant presence like a comforting buffer.

I ask before I mean to, “You see Ethan before he went?”

Davis looks up. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“He made you come?”

“He asked.” Davis sits back, crossing his ankles.

“You didn’t have to.”

He lifts one eyebrow then drops it again and looks away. “I know.”

The swoop and plunge hits me, a minor grief wave triggered by Davis’s backhanded kindness, a compression in my head and chest that makes it hard to fill my lungs. I stare at my fingers, waiting for the tremor to lift. The psych team says it’s post-traumatic stress. They say the experience with the Proxy was like living through a natural disaster, a tsunami or city-levelling earthquake. Apparently we all live in this delusion of safety when really none of us is ever truly safe and we could all die at any given moment and the “Proxy event” shattered that delusion. I’m not sure I buy their theory. Don’t Shields already know there are no guarantees in life?

Ethan says no one knew what the Proxy could do or, more accurately, the magnitude of what she could do outside of the Symbiosis. Her reach and strength were always attributed to her compatibility with the chemical conductor, and in the constantly monitored environment of the compound even the slightest sign of anomaly would have been jumped on. She’d been careful to keep her trump cards hidden and bide her time.

Davis coughs, bringing me to the surface. “They must be pretty confident you’re … you know, okay. To let you out, I mean.”

I peer at him through my fingers. “Must be.”

“It’s just … I’ll be pissed if I’m back out here next week with a taser because you’ve gone postal at the mall.”

I roll my eyes. “Burton doesn’t have a mall.”

He scowls but I can see him trying not to smile.

The effort to joke leaves me hollow. My thoughts swing back to open wounds. The one I pick at the most, the one I camp around, build a shrine and light incense to, is my part in boosting the Proxy’s signal, allowing her to paralyse everyone in the house. I replay the moment of stepping into the lounge over and over, focusing specifically on my total failure to suspect or react. Sometimes, I re-imagine the moment with me on full alert, anticipating her presence, breaking her wrist or driving my fist into her face. That way Jamie isn’t paralysed and his foot shatters Benjamin’s hand and sends the gun careening across the room, the trigger intact. I picture Kitty stumbling into Aiden’s arms, whirling to see they’ve had a terrible near miss, clinging to his chest, his heart still beating beneath her hands. If I really go to town, I play out this whole touching scene where Jamie apologises to Aiden for being such a colossal ass. They shake hands or do that back-slapping man hug thing, though I can never get the dialogue right.

I’m not supposed to dwell on it or the fact that everything, everything is my fault and if I had only listened to Miriam and stayed out of it, Aiden would have lived.

The psych team has this thing about “identifying the lies we believe” and “replacing them with the truth”. Like me believing it’s all my fault and that there’s something essentially broken in me that allowed the Proxy to use me is “a lie”. That my carelessness and ineptitude, my pathetically weak mind and utter, utter uselessness is the reason my brother is dead, is also “a lie”. I’m not supposed to tell myself that Felicity’s death is my responsibility, nor should I think that Benjamin becoming a murdering puppet at the Proxy’s hands is my fault. Kitty nearly dying because of my cosmic selfishness and irresponsibility, exactly as Jamie feared, apparently not my fault either. Of course these “lies” are the truth I live and breathe but I learned quickly the right noises to make to keep the medication humming, the restraints unbuckled and the psych team happy.

“Here we are.” Davis taps my foot and chucks a duffel coat at me. “You’ll need this.”

Columbia Avenue is beautifully bald. Tree limbs naked, wet and black, glistening in the eerie afternoon light. A few of the houses twinkle with Christmas lights. I’m glad it’s Davis dropping me off because the sight of Miriam’s house makes me fluttery in my stomach. If it were Ethan, I might be tempted to cry, bury my face in his dad-shaped chest. I rummage in my pack but can’t find the house keys. “Um … no keys?”