From what I’d been able to figure out, I had to touch someone for my abilities to take hold, and even then…it was more like I was glimpsing their thoughts, rather than screwing with them. I’d never tried to push a thought into someone else’s head, and it wasn’t like I’d had the opportunity or the desire to try. Every slip of the mind, intentional or not, left my head a jumble of thoughts and images, words and pain. It took hours to feel like myself again.
Imagine someone reaching straight into your chest, past the bones and blood and guts, and taking a nice firm hold on your spinal cord. Now imagine that they start shaking you so fast the world starts bulging and buckling under you. Imagine not being able to figure out later if the thought in your head is really yours or an unintentional keepsake from someone else’s mind. Imagine the guilt of knowing you saw someone’s deepest, darkest fear or secret; imagine having to face them the next morning and pretend you didn’t see how their father used to hit them, the bright pink dress they wore to their fifth birthday party, their fantasies about this boy or that girl, and the neighborhood animals they used to kill for fun.
And then imagine the soul-crushing migraine that always follows, lasting anywhere between a few hours and a few days. That was what it was like. That was why I tried to avoid my mind so much as brushing up against someone else’s at all costs. I knew the consequences. All of them.
And now I knew for certain what would happen if they found me out.
I flipped the clipboard over on my lap, and just in time. The same PSF soldier was back at my curtain again, ripping it aside.
“You’ll be returning to your cabin now,” he said. “Come with me.”
My cabin? I searched his face for any sign of a lie, but saw nothing except the usual annoyance. A nod was the only thing I could muster. My entire body was one earthquake of dread, and the moment my feet touched the ground, the back of my head uncorked. Everything spilled out, every thought, fear, and image. I collapsed against the guardrail, holding on tight to consciousness.
The black spots were still gliding in front of my eyes when the PSF barked out, “Hurry it up! Don’t think you get to stay another night here just by putting on an act.”
Despite the harsh words, I saw the slightest flicker of fear in his face. That moment, the shift from fear to fury, could have summed up the feelings of every soldier at Thurmond. We’d heard rumors that service in the military was no longer voluntary, that everyone between the ages of twenty-two and forty had to serve—most of them in the army’s new Psi branch.
I gritted my teeth. The whole wide world spun under me, trying to pull me back down to its dark center. The PSF’s words returned to me.
Another night? I thought. How long have I been here?
Still woozy, I followed the soldier into the hallway. The Infirmary was only two stories, small ones. The ceiling crept down so low that even I felt like I was in danger of scraping the top of my head on the doorframes. The treatment beds were on the first floor, but the second was reserved for kids needing to go into what we called Time Out. Sometimes they had something the rest of us could catch, but mostly it was for kids that went completely off their rocker, broken brains broken further by Thurmond.
I tried to stay focused on the movement of the PSF’s shoulder blades beneath his black uniform, but it was difficult when most of the curtains had been left open for anyone to peer inside. Most I could ignore, or cast only a brief glance their way, but the second to last stall before the exit doors…
My feet slowed of their own accord, giving my lungs time to breathe in the scent of rosemary.
I could hear Dr. Begbie’s gentle voice as she spoke to another kid in Green. I recognized him—his cabin was directly across from mine. Matthew? Maybe Max? All I knew was that there was blood on his face, too. Crusted around his nose and eyes, smearing across his checks. A stone dropped in my stomach. Had this Green been marked too? Was Dr. Begbie cutting him the same deal? I couldn’t have been the only one to figure out how to dodge the sorting system—who to influence, when to lie.
Maybe he and I were the same color beneath our skin.
And maybe we would both be dead by tomorrow.
“Keep up!” the PSF snapped. He didn’t try to hide his annoyance as I hobbled after him, but he didn’t need to worry; you couldn’t have paid me to stay in the Infirmary, not while I was conscious. Not even with the new threat hanging over my head. I knew what they used to do there.
I knew what was under the layers of white paint.
The earliest kids they had brought in, the first guinea pigs, had been subjected to a whole array of electroshock and brain-chop-shop terrors. Stories were passed around camp with sick, almost holy reverence. The scientists were looking for ways to strip the kids’ abilities—“rehabilitate” them—but they had mostly just stripped their will to live. The ones who made it out were given warden positions when the first small wave of kids was brought to camp. It was a strange bit of luck and timing that I had come in during the second wave. Each wave grew larger and larger as the camp expanded, until, three years ago, they’d run out of space completely. There were no new buses after that.
I still wasn’t moving fast enough for the soldier. He pushed me forward into the hall of mirrors. The exit sign cast its gory light over us; the PSF shoved me again, harder, and smiled when I fell. Anger flooded through me, cutting through the lingering pain in my limbs and any fear I had that he was taking me out somewhere in order to finish the job.
Soon we were standing outside, breathing in the damp spring air. I took a lungful of misty rain, and swallowed the bitterness down. I needed to think. Assess. If he was taking me outside to be shot, and was on his own, I could easily overpower him. That wasn’t the issue. But in fact, I had no way of slipping past the electric fence—and no idea where the hell I was.
When they had brought me to Thurmond, the familiarity of the scenery had been more a comfort than a painful reminder. West Virginia and Virginia aren’t all that different, even though Virginians would have you believe otherwise. Same trees, same sky, same awful weather—I was either drenched in rain or sticky with humidity. Anyway, it might not have been West Virginia at all. But a girl in my cabin swore up and down that she had seen a WELCOME TO WEST VIRGINIA sign on her ride in, so that was the theory we were working with.
The PSF had slowed considerably, matching my pathetic pace. He fumbled once or twice against the muddy grass, nearly tripping over himself in full view of the soldiers high above on the Control Tower.
The moment the Tower came into view, a whole new weight added itself to the ball and chain of terror I was dragging behind me. The building itself wasn’t that imposing; it was only called the Tower because it stuck up like a broken finger in a sea of one-story wooden shacks arranged in rings. The electric fence was the outer ring, protecting the world from us freaks. Cabins of Greens made up the next two rings. Blues, the next two rings. Before they were taken away, the few Reds and Oranges lived in the next rings. They’d been closest to the Tower—better, the controllers thought, to keep an eye on them. But after a Red had blown up his cabin, they moved the Reds farther away, using the Greens as a buffer in case any of the real threats tried to make a run for the fence.
Number of escape attempts?
Five.
Number of successful escape attempts?
Zero.
I don’t know of one Blue or Green who had ever tried to make a run for it. When kids did stage desperate, pathetic breakouts, it had been in small groups of Reds, Oranges, and Yellows. Once caught, they never came back.
But that was in the early days, when we had had more interaction with the other colors, and before they shuffled us around. The empty Red, Orange, and Yellow cabins became Blue cabins, and newly arriving Greens, the biggest group of all, filled the old Blue ones. The camp grew so large that the controllers staggered our schedules, so we ate by color and gender—and even then, it was still a tight squeeze fitting everyone at the tables. I hadn’t seen a boy my own age up close in years.