Elites of Eden (Children of Eden #2)(62)

“You just don’t know what this means to us,” he must say a dozen times as we make our way to the surface. “Having real lenses will change everything.”

I want to know how, exactly, but whenever I ask, he’s vague, or changes the subject. I know he wants to infiltrate the highest levels as an elite student, but what else? What next? I feel a swell of resentment. I’ve trusted him so many times—with Lark’s life, with the secret of my lenses. I understand the danger of confiding in someone—look what happened when Lark told people she trusted about me—but when I’m the one shut out of secrets, it hurts.

“The next to last circle,” I tell him definitively as we step out into the blackness. Eden doesn’t respond to him any more than it does to me, and the ground at our feet stays dark.

He looks at me, apparently amused. “So you remember now?”

I don’t know whether to pretend anymore or not, so I only look at him sidelong. “It’s all coming back to me. Slowly.”

He laughs, a low chuckle that warms me. “As long as you’re on my side, I don’t mind if you take your time telling the truth. Believe me, I get it.”

It’s strange how walking around Eden feels almost natural now. True, we sneak and skulk in the shadows, avoiding the few souls abroad tonight. But to be out, to move, to be part of the city now feels normal. The danger exists . . . but that feels normal, too, somehow. My body feels alive, eager, tingling with excitement. I feel ready.

We emerged only one circle away from our destination, and it isn’t long before we cross the radius and head right, toward the east side.

“There’s a modification parlor somewhere around here. Serpentine, it’s called.” Mom’s words are burned clearly on my memory.

“I know that place,” Lachlan says. “It’s very popular with the Bestial crowd. But I had no idea there were shady dealings going on there. It’s not in a great neighborhood, but the place has an air of respectability. Now, if you’d just told me it was the Serpentine in the first place you could be back in your nice safe bed dreaming of a better world.”

“Dreaming gets you nowhere,” I tell him as we walk. “I want to make a better world. Even if there’s not much for me to do.”

“You’re giving up your lenses.” He stops in the middle of the dark street and turns to me. The look on his face is one of respect, and maybe, I think, a little bit of awe. “You’re giving up your chance to be part of a world you must have longed to join all of your life. You could walk away from the Underground, from me, from all of us, and take your chances up here in Eden, with your new eyes and maybe even the family your mom set you up with.”

I look at him skeptically. “I got the impression Flint wouldn’t have given me a choice.”

A hard look flashes across his face, but then he cracks a smile. He makes light of things whenever he can. “I think you’ve gathered by now that Flint and I have slightly different approaches. Your lenses may very well save the Underground, and change Eden forever. But I believe in free will, and self-determination. Those things are at the core of what we’re fighting for. If you had decided that you didn’t want to give up your lenses, I wouldn’t have forced you.” That hard look casts another quick shadow across his face. “And if Flint had tried, I would have stopped him.”

I wonder when this conflict between Lachlan and the leader of the Underground will break into all-out war, and what it might mean for the secret world of second children.

But I can’t worry about that now, or about the dozens of other things plaguing my mind right now. We’ve come to Serpentine.

It is, as Mom described it, a glaringly orange building. Unlike most other structures in this overall squalid next-to-outermost ring, Serpentine is gently illuminated, a golden glow holding back the dark.

In there I would have become normal. In there, I would have found a real life . . . but one away from my family, my first friend. A life, sure, but it would really just be a different kind of a lie. Another kind of hiding.

No, I decide, firmly and absolutely. I don’t want the lenses. I don’t want to be part of a society that doesn’t want me. Since there’s no scenario in my future that doesn’t have me hunted, a pariah, I’d rather just commit wholeheartedly to being what I am: a second child, among other second children.

A sense of relief washes over me. I’d been perfectly willing to give up my lenses to Lachlan and his cause, but that had been a rational decision. Now it was an emotional, gut choice, too. I realize I’m so much happier at the prospect of just being me, with my vivid second-child eyes, not something altered and corrupted by the Center, changing just to fit in some-place I only now realize I don’t really want to be.

The electrified fence around the modification center gives off a low, menacing hum. Lachlan cocks his head up at it. “I wish you’d told me about the electricity ahead of time. It’s going to take me a while to disable it, and I don’t want to be outside here any longer than necessary.”

“I can get us in,” I tell him, and repeat Mom’s instructions. “They turn off the electricity to the third panel from the left on the southeast side.” I have a moment of doubt. “Southwest?”

He gives me a wry look. “You do know the voltage level is very likely fatal, don’t you?”