Forged(27)

“Easy, Gray,” Blaine said, like I was livestock he could tame with enough patience. “Easy.”

I think with anyone else it would have been impossible to relax in that moment, but something about the way Blaine was looking at me told me he was going to make everything fine, that the worry was a weight I could pass to him. He would carry it for us both.

I looked up at the trees’ limbs, bony fingers scraping a white sky, and tried to steady my breathing. Blaine sawed me free of the branch with his pocketknife. Then he pulled one of my arms around his neck and together we staggered out of the woods and into town, a small spike of wood still wedged in my chest.

Blaine took me directly to the Clinic. Carter ushered us in with anxious eyes but steady hands, and not much later I was bandaged and well, being told the branch hadn’t been long enough to puncture my lung, but it had drawn plenty of blood. There would be a scar. And a tender recovery period.

“Why’d you help me like that?” I asked Blaine. He was beside me on an empty bed, our reclined positions mirrored. “Right after I said I hated you?”

“Because you didn’t mean it.”

“How’d you know?”

He sat up. Even back then Blaine was good at big brother looks. “If it had been flipped—me saying it to you—what would you have thought?”

I understood, but still felt like I had to make it obvious and undeniable. What if I’d been hurt worse? What if my lung had been hit and this conversation never happened?

“I don’t hate you at all,” I insisted. “Not the tiniest bit. Even if you are boring sometimes.”

“Rat,” he teased.

“Slug!”

And then we went back and forth, tossing every insult we could imagine at each other until we were shooed home and Ma became our audience instead of Carter.

As I bang my head against the cell wall, tears still streaming down my cheeks, it’s this memory that haunts me. The puckered scar on my chest, and how Blaine saw me to the Clinic, and the indisputable truth that I could never truly hate him. I love him. I love him with the deepest parts of myself, and I’m horrified—ashamed—by my final words to him.

Screw you, I said in Pine Ridge.

I wish I could make it right. I wish I’d had the chance to speak the truth, even if he already knew it.

I don’t sleep, but I cry.

Even after I am empty of tears, the ache remains, overwhelming and endless, like my bones are built of grief.





THIRTEEN


SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT, I unfold the paper from Harvey. Like it matters. Like there’s anything he could possibly say that will make things better.

Using the sliver of light seeping beneath my door, I can barely make out a list of names. I recognize two. Christie, the woman who swiped us through to the vaccine when we stole it months ago, and Sammy’s father, who forged water ration cards in Taem.

There’s a note from Harvey at the bottom: All already deceased, so you can give them up without consequence. Destroy once read.

Leaning against the door, I wonder if I should trust him. We’ll finish this later, he said yesterday. I thought he meant my examination, but after his words to me in the production lab, the pain that registered on his face as though his thoughts were conflicting with his programmed orders . . . Was my mention of Clipper, paired with the music the boy had helped Harvey select, enough to jolt his senses?

I don’t understand how it’s possible. Not unless . . .

The Forged version of Emma could have been one of the first fives. Perhaps the only five at the time she joined our group. A test, a trial. Frank wouldn’t have wanted to risk something going wrong with Harvey. Ironic in hindsight, because it’s the fours that are flawed. If Harvey is an F-Gen4, he could be like Jackson—changing his motives, fighting his orders. Malfunctioning.

I clench the paper in my hand. I’m positive two of the people are safe to disclose. If Harvey hasn’t cracked, if he isn’t trying to help me, why would he give me even one name that might help me avoid torture?

I study the list until I’ve committed it to memory. Then I fold the paper back up and swallow it like a pill.


Harvey acts as though nothing has changed overnight. I’m back in his interrogation lab, strapped down to the chair, the tool tray waiting. It is only when Forged Me enters that there is any indication of new loyalties. Harvey grows very interested in double-checking my restraints. I hope for the both of us that he doesn’t give something away.

Forged Me flips a switch and the mirrored wall flickers to life. Glass that only reflected the room during my previous visits is now alive with video of the entire Compound. I can make out the glowing aisles of the production lab, the busy docks of the shipment center. In another feed, Order members sit at workstations in a control room, punching buttons, jabbering into headsets, and examining surveillance feeds. No wonder I was caught so easily when I tried to escape.

“Looking sharp, Gray,” he says, eying the Order uniform I’m still wearing from when I switched our outfits yesterday. He hasn’t bothered to change either. It’s a reminder, probably. A way to pull the image of Blaine’s murder before my eyes without saying a word.

“A new day of questioning,” he continues. “Today you will cooperate, or everything Harvey does to you”—he walks to the glass wall and taps a feed that shows Emma slouched in her cell—“will also be done to her. Understood?”