Queen (The Blackcoat Rebellion #3)(22)

“What kind of strange?” I said, confused.

“Quiet. Stared at his blocks for hours instead of playing with them. Didn’t speak like I did. Always seemed a little behind.” Knox shrugged. “I don’t remember the details much, and my mother rarely talked about it.”

“What happened to him?” I said, almost afraid of Knox’s answer. But maybe that was the point.

“Most of the time, when there are—moderate deficits in a child, they’re given a chance to take the test at seventeen anyway,” said Knox. “But because my father was concerned about the family’s image, and because my brother eventually stopped communicating altogether, the process was—sped up.” He cleared his throat, his expression growing pinched. “When we were six years old, they declared that by keeping him within our society, we were only delaying the inevitable, and—the sooner he was declared a I, the easier it would be on me. So they took him away.”

I stared at him in horror. I had never met a I before I’d arrived in Elsewhere. Somewhere in my mind, I’d expected vegetables—faceless, comatose people who had no sense of self or place. Not real people with real lives. Not a little boy who was too quiet for his father’s liking and didn’t play with blocks the way he was supposed to.

“I’m so sorry, Knox,” I said softly, because there wasn’t anything else to say. I couldn’t imagine that level of pain, either for Knox or his mother. And selfishly, I didn’t want to. “Did you— Have you looked up his records inElsewhere? Maybe he’s still—”

“He’s not,” said Knox. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he never made it to Elsewhere to begin with. A young child like that...his organs would have been valuable and needed.”

A wave of nausea hit me, and my grip on the armrest tightened. “But—he was your brother—your father’s a Minister—”

“Not even Ministers’ children are immune to genetic or developmental anomalies,” said Knox. “I didn’t fully understand what was going on. I still remember my confusion the day they took him away and I was told he would never be coming back. My mother was a wreck. She never recovered, and she—” He cleared his throat again. “Anyway. She’s the reason I got to this point. My father never said my brother’s name again after they took him away. All the pictures of him disappeared, and if you’d met my family after, you would never have known there should’ve been one more of us. I think he was hoping I would forget about my brother.

“But my mother made sure I didn’t,” he continued. “She used to tell me stories about how we played together when we were young. That was one of the few times I ever saw her happy after that. And once I was old enough, she usedto tell me about what the country was like before the Harts took over. I began to see injustice everywhere I looked, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And I couldn’t ignore it, regardless of the privileges and advantages I would have had if I did. She’s the reason I do this. My brother is the reason I do this.” Finally Knox looked at me. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I wanted to hear the truth, that’s all,” I said, at a loss. Something inside me felt hollow, and instinctively I started to reach across the space between us, needing to offer him some form of comfort. But he shifted awkwardly and crossed his arms, hiding his hands. I dropped mine back in my lap. “I just—I never understood how you and Celia and Lila could risk it all when you had everything to lose. It wasn’t like that for me.”

“Yes, it was,” he said quietly. “It was almost exactly the same. The only difference between us was the fact that you knew what it was like, having nothing. You knew the value of what you were betting, and yet you did it anyway.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. He must have known what he had to lose, too. We all did, and yet we all chose to do this. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For trusting me. I know I’ve given you every reason not to.”

“Yeah, well. We’re in this together,” he said with a sigh. “And since you’ve decided to stick around, it’s the least I can do until you prove I can’t anymore.”

“That’s not going to happen. Not this time,” I said, and that ghost of a smile returned.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Kitty. We both know eventually you’re going to directly disobey me and do something monumentally stupid, and once again, I’ll be the one cleaning up the mess.”

“I’ll try my best not to, then,” I said. He nodded.

“That’s more like it.”

A moment passed, and we could have easily slid into comfortable silence. Instead, I watched him, and he held my gaze, and in that moment, I felt as if I could ask him anything and he wouldn’t say no.

“What was your brother’s name?” I said, before I even realized I was speaking. But I didn’t regret it, unlike most things I blurted out, and while his eyebrows twitched upward, he didn’t shut me out like he could have.

“Maddox,” he said. “I called him Max, because I couldn’t pronounce Maddox. He couldn’t say Lennox, either.”

“And that’s where Knox came from?” I said, and he flashed me a tight smile.