The Treatment (The Program #2)(38)

“I’d rather die.”

Realm turns away. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” He’s quiet for a moment; his posture slumps. With complete exhaustion, I sit down in my chair, too tired to fight with Realm anymore. Too tired to make excuses for our behavior.

“What do I do now?”

“We have to leave,” Realm says. “Right now, before the doctor, The Program, whoever comes back. We’ll leave this place behind us.”

I pause, his intentions becoming clear. “Us?” He looks up. “Just us.”

He isn’t listening, not about James, not about what I really want. “Realm, I don’t have The Treatment anymore,” I say quietly.

His lips part, and he looks absolutely stunned. He runs his hand through his hair. “Well, f**k,” he mutters. “Did you take it?”

“No. James has it. When we were in my room, he put it in his pocket. He still had it when he left. I . . . I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

Realm looks around the room like he’s trying to gather his thoughts. After a quiet moment he nods his head definitively.

“James won’t take the pill,” he says. “Of course he won’t take it.”

“I just want him to come back,” I say, holding up my hands helplessly. “I don’t care about The Treatment.”

“You should care about it,” he says, righting his chair and collapsing into it. “The Program does. Arthur Pritchard does.

It changed my life.” He glances away, and I can’t tell if he’s feeling nostalgic or tormented. “Sloane,” he says. “When we met, it wasn’t my first time in The Program. Evelyn Valentine had been my doctor, and she chose me to go through the testing—

she gave me The Treatment. You see, the depression had started creeping back in, and she’d thought she found the answer. But there is a drawback to the pill. Only the truly strong can survive the crash of memories. Evelyn got me through it with therapy, but she couldn’t save all of us. I don’t think she could handle the loss.

“She disappeared soon after. I showed up at her office and it’d been ransacked. Evelyn was gone—along with her research, our identities. She kept us a secret from The Program, saving me one last time. As a precaution, they put every patient she’d come in contact with back through The Program, but the pill protected my memories, cemented them. There are only four people who know I’ve taken The Treatment—no one else, not even my sister. It nearly drove me insane. I wish I could tell you getting it all back was worth it, but you have no idea how awful it is to remember, Sloane. You have no idea how cancerous it can be.” I’ve seen the scar on Realm’s neck from when he’d tried to kill himself. But I never had to picture it before. It always seemed like it happened to someone else. Now I imagine what it must be like to have all of your dark thoughts descend on you at once. Even if Realm thinks I am, I’m not sure I would have been strong enough to handle that.

“How did The Treatment protect your memories?” I ask.

Everyone is so bent on getting this pill, and I still don’t even know how it works.

“It made my brain like Teflon,” Realm says with a somber smile. “The dye The Program used couldn’t stick. It just slipped away. None of my memories could be targeted for erasure, but of course, the doctors couldn’t see that. I learned to become a very talented liar. The good news is: I’ll never forget. The bad news is: I can never forget.”

“Protection against The Program,” I say, a small glimpse of hope finally breaking through my otherwise gloomy existence.

What would it be like to have that worry gone?

“They could still lobotomize us,” Realm says. “But I can’t imagine they would want to do that. It’d be a PR nightmare for them to send you—a recognizable face—back as anything other than well-behaved and complacent.”

“What about Arthur? Would he really mass produce it?” Realm shakes his head. “Evelyn was a smart lady. I don’t know what she put in the pills, I really don’t, but I’m not sure it is reproducible. Thing is, she never meant for The Treatment to go public. She wouldn’t want Arthur to get his hands on the pill; be responsible for the mass suicides she’d been trying to prevent. It broke her heart when Peter died.” The house is eerily quiet around us, and I lean my elbows on the table, glad Realm is finally sharing his secrets with me.

“Peter?”

Realm presses his lips into a sad smile. “Peter Alan was my friend, but his memories—he couldn’t survive them. He ingested QuikDeath.” Realm looks down. “Evelyn destroyed the files after that. She said the risks were too great—one in four. She didn’t like those odds.”

A new worry spikes as I consider James’s reaction to The Treatment. If he takes it . . . I swallow hard, unable to finish the thought. I have to find him.

“What about the others?” I ask, hoping for better news.

“Who were the others patients?”

Realm bites down on his lip. “Well, you’ve met Kevin.”

“My handler?” Kevin was supposed to be here with us, but he disappeared. Lacey thought The Program got to him, and I know she’s right. But if he took The Treatment, then they can’t erase him. He’ll be okay. Thank God he’ll be okay.