Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(72)

He shook his head wearily. “OK, here it is,” he began. “For what it’s worth. I told you about our mother disappearing. After that, Child Protective Services sent us to foster homes. Asa and Hannah and I ran away. We shoplifted to get by, when we weren’t eating out of supermarket dumpsters. Hung out on the streets when we weren’t stealing. Slept wherever we could. Then one day, I get approached by this guy, out of nowhere. He told me about this amazing experimental program for young people. An awesome opportunity for us all.”

Oh, shit. Dread tightened her belly, but she kept her face sternly blank, and nodded for him to continue.

“He didn’t talk like a pimp, for what it was worth,” Noah said. “And we prided ourselves on knowing how to dodge them and the chickenhawks looking for underage kids. There was something different about him. Even so I figured there had to be a catch. But Hannah was sick. I needed medicine for her. If we’d gone to a clinic, we would’ve ended up in juvenile detention. I couldn’t risk that.”

“Got it,” she said. “And?”

“I figured, I’d go along, check it out. Walk out whenever I wanted to. Lying and cheating and stealing, picking locks, deactivating alarms—I was an ace at all that.”

Caro couldn’t afford to sympathize with Noah’s desperate younger self. He’d tried to parent his brother and sister as best he could, yes. But she had to stay in the center of her own goddamn story. “Go on.”

“So I said yes. Asa thought the whole thing stank. He wanted nothing to do with it. So he disappeared, and Hannah and I went to Midlands.” He paused for a moment, his eyes bleak. “I’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of my life.”

“How old were you?” she asked, in spite of herself.

“Seventeen,” he said.

Shit. Already, she was falling into his trap of feeling sorry for him. He was playing her again. “Finish your story,” she said. “Be quick. I’m not enjoying this.”

“It seemed OK, the first couple of weeks,” he went on. “The food was great. Hannah started getting better right away. As soon as her lips stopped looking so gray, I began to plan how we’d get out. Which was when I realized that the place was a prison.”

She was leaning forward, she realized. Hanging on his every word. Damn him.

“There was no way out,” he said. “I was in over my head. Things proceeded. They got our group organized, told us we’d be a beacon of hope for humanity. They didn’t tell us how much it would hurt. How many of us would die in the process.”

The haunted shadow in his eyes could not be faked. It chilled her.

“What did they . . . how . . .” Caro’s voice trailed off. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to hear the rest.

“Our odds of survival weren’t good to begin with,” he went on. “And if the experiments didn’t go the way they wanted, their plan was to plow us under and start over with fresh meat.”

Caro hugged herself against the inner cold. She wanted to say something, but couldn’t.

“We were ideal subjects. Intelligent, relatively healthy children who weren’t addicts, and about whom no one on earth gave a flying f*ck. My crew all has the same sad story.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Not as many as there should be. I led a rebellion at the research facility when I found out that a bunch of us, including me, were scheduled for disposal. I had to move fast. Before they took out the trash.”

Caro bit her lip and waited for the rest. She couldn’t bring herself to ask any more questions.

“There were twenty-seven of us fighting on rebellion day,” Noah said. “It was bloody. High casualties on both sides. I can think of twelve more who died before that, during the trials. We lost seven in the battle. Twenty of us escaped. Four more died over the next few years. PTSD, depression, suicide. The rest of us are still hanging in there. New names, new lives. Lethal secrets.”

“And Mark?”

“Mark was one of the twenty,” Noah said. “He was in my group. One of the Eyes Guys. Didn’t stay with us long. He wasn’t a team player.”

“I bet he didn’t like taking orders from you,” she commented.

“No, he didn’t. I made rules, about not using our abilities to take advantage of people. Mark found that insulting. After what was done to him, he felt entitled to grab whatever he wanted as payback. But nothing could repay what they took from him. It was driving him out of his mind, even then. He’ll never be satisfied.”

“I see,” Caro said, though she didn’t. She felt numb, and stupid.

“We’ve followed his career,” Noah said. “He changed his name, of course, but so did we all. And he was never hard to find. We just follow the death and destruction.”

“You never turned him in?”

“How could we? He would retaliate, and I’m still responsible for fourteen other people. If Obsidian tracks us down, they’ll wipe us all out. We’re a threat. We could go public, expose them, I guess, but it’s not like the quality of our lives would be improved. Our existence would scare the living shit out of everyone.”

“So Mark is stealing Obsidian’s secrets,” she said. “To punish them.”

“Mark wants to punish the whole world,” Noah said. “And he will never stop.”