“HOW DO YOU know about Carrick?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.
I begin to question my instincts again. Is this a setup to try to find Carrick? Crevan has managed to somehow make Mr. Berry and the guards disappear, and now he’s searching for Carrick? Are they using Alpha to find out the information from me? I can’t trust her. This all could be a trick, a trick to catch Carrick, to catch me. I’m not as gullible as I once was. If anything, that attribute was my main flaw. My eyes are open now, wide open to everyone around me, but I also know I need to be smart and try to learn as much about Carrick from her as I can.
“You’re right to be suspicious,” she says. “That’s good. You’re wondering how I know all this. Carrick didn’t receive much, if any, coverage in the wake of you, Angelina Tinder, and Jimmy Child, and it’s safe to say the Guild doesn’t like stories of Flawed At Birth children searching for their Flawed parents.”
Flawed At Birth children? I try not to react to this news, when inside my mind is whirling, my stomach churning.
“I’m sure you know the children are not allowed to search for their biological parents. First, they’re taken away from their Flawed parents and locked up in an institution for eighteen years to ‘teach’ the Flawed out of them. As soon as they reach eighteen years of age, they are released. If they search for their parents, even so much as think about it, they’re branded Flawed. Loyalty to their own flesh and blood is seen as disloyalty to society.” She shakes her head, the anger causing the veins in her neck to pulsate. Despite my fear that this is a setup to locate Carrick, Alpha’s anger on this subject is certainly not fabricated.
I think of Carrick’s file and remember the F.A.B. beside his name. Flawed At Birth. The file also said Carrick received a brand to his chest for disloyalty. This would add up if what she’s saying is true. I decide to believe her, but I’m still not sure if I can trust her.
“Carrick should have waited a few months,” she says angrily, almost as if she’s directing it at me and it was my fault he did this. “They always keep a close eye on their students for the first few months to make sure they don’t search for their biological parents, but he searched for them too soon, almost like he wanted to be caught.…” She trails off, eyes studying me for my reaction. I don’t respond to her. I’m too stunned by what I hear, too moved, feel too sad for Carrick. I want to find him and hug him right now. I wish I’d known this when I was in there, when we were sleeping side by side in our glass cages. I thought he was a soldier, somebody who had done the worst possible act, but really all he had done was the gentlest. The caged animal who paced and fought and looked like he wanted to fight the world had merely tried to find his parents, who were forced to give him up as a child because they were Flawed. Does knowing that Carrick is the son of Flawed parents change my opinion of him?
Yes, it does.
He’d spent years being endlessly brainwashed, being told that his parents were worthless, that he was better than them, only to search for them too soon after his release. His love couldn’t be broken; he won. He is even braver than I’d thought. He is the soldier I believed he was.
The comments Tina made about him in the cells now make sense to me, that he was a “bad egg,” and Judge Crevan’s flippant comment about his being “Flawed to the bone.” It’s true. He never even had a chance. His trial must have been a joke. He was branded as soon as he was born. He was never going to lose that. Maybe Alpha’s suspicions are right, maybe he did deliberately want to become Flawed. Maybe he wanted to be who he really was for better or for worse, and not somebody the Guild had reared him to be. The more I think about him, the more he goes up in my estimation.
Alpha slowly breathes out, trying to calm herself. “Carrick’s was an unfortunate case.”
My heart is broken for him. “Yes,” I say sadly. “Yes, it was.”
She views me again in her studious way, as if realizing what I am slowly learning myself. “You two were close?”
I feel my cheeks go hot and I look away. I’ve felt a connection to Carrick ever since he walked into that cell and turned his back on me. I felt it every second that he was beside me and every moment he was behind me in the courtroom. It seems ludicrous to feel like this about someone I didn’t know, but we experienced something so intense and were the only two people at any time, in any room, who knew how each other felt.