I know all about the image of me sleeping last night, the image on Berg’s computer. Linus told me his room was private, but the camera that filmed me was right up close. If Linus didn’t take the footage himself, I don’t know who did.
“Why are you looking at me like that? Let me have the keys,” he says.
And I do. What does it matter? I’m fighting some unnamed despair that I can’t yet figure out.
As we pass the dairy barn on our way out of town, I see that a couple of police cars have pulled up. So has a news truck. The ambulances are gone. I hunch down and don’t straighten up again until we reach the open highway. I pluck a tissue out of a box and try to wipe some of the grime off my fingers.
“I’m going to need somewhere to hide,” I say.
“Don’t say any more yet. Please.”
I spit on my palm and wipe some more. The gray prairie speeds by outside, and the silence lets me think.
Anger’s safe. It protects me from needing to care for anybody. Revenge made me strong, but when I saw Berg’s port, when I felt the ugly, desperate way we were the same, it ruined me. I couldn’t kill him, even though he’s the one who destroyed my life. Then, when Thea was suffering in labor, I couldn’t help but care for her. I hated seeing her in pain, and once her baby was born, she was so little in my hands. So helpless. So powerful.
I’m weak now, and lost. I don’t want to care for people. It hurts to trust them and feel for them. If they get hurt, it hurts me, too. I’d rather go back to when I was strong and I didn’t care, but I can’t. I crumple my tissue into my fist and bite inward on my lips.
Linus pulls the car onto a dirt road, and then he turns onto a track that’s hardly more than a dent in the grass. The world simplifies down to a big, gray-pink sky over a long, dark horizon. We ride up a slope and down a curve until we reach another upswell of prairie, and there he finally parks, out of sight of the road.
As soon as I open my door, a soft, sweet wind surrounds me. I catch my hair back behind my ears, and for the first time in hours, I can take a deep, steady breath. The sun will be rising soon. Linus comes around the car, and we walk wordlessly through the grass to the top of the next knoll. A little moth rises out of my way in a flicker of pale wings.
“Okay, here’s good,” Linus says, slowing to a stop.
I know we need to talk. There’s no way around it. If Berg can somehow listen in through Linus, even here, it wouldn’t surprise me. I just can’t say anything Berg doesn’t know already, or couldn’t guess.
When Linus turns to me, the breeze lifts the collar of his black jacket. A hint of stubble outlines his jaw. “First tell me why you think Thea might not make it.”
“She lost a lot of blood,” I say. “She was totally unresponsive to me by the time the medics came. One of them told me she’d probably be okay, but what if she goes into another coma?”
I don’t tell him about the way she talked to me, like she wasn’t herself anymore.
“That’d be bad,” he says. “I’m sure you did all you could for her, though, right? We have to hope for the best. And her baby was okay?”
I nodded. “It’s a girl.”
“What were you doing in the barn?”
“We were in the tunnel when she gave birth,” I say, and I can see I’m going to have to explain. “There’s a tunnel from the barn to the dean’s tower. I found Thea in the vault under the school, in the operating room. Berg locked her in. She was there for hours in the dark with no way to get help, and she was in labor.”
“She must have been terrified,” Linus says. “Why would he do that to her?”
“He’s sick. He wanted to keep her and compare her brain to mine,” I say. Another idea hits me. Berg must have known I was coming to him. That was why he kept Thea so long. “He was waiting for me.”
I look back toward the car, where I’ve left my jacket in the front seat. I still have two syringes hidden in my pocket. I still have Berg’s phone there, too.
“You said you did something horrible,” Linus says. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
I keep thinking about how Berg had a port, too. I could have put a third dose of sleep meds right in there. It would have been so easy, but it became completely impossible. I squeeze my fists together. “I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m not sure.”
“Rosie,” he says, his voice low. “What did you do?”
“He threatened my sister,” I say. “I injected him with some sleep meds. A double dose. I don’t think it was enough to kill him. I wanted him powerless. I wanted him to know what it felt like.”
“Did you just leave him there?” Linus asks.
I nod. I lift my gaze to study Linus, trying to decide if his concern is for me or for Berg. “Don’t you get tired of playing his game?” I ask.
Linus stares at me strangely and blinks against a breeze. “What do you mean?”
My heartbeat ticks up a notch. “Berg had a video clip of me sleeping in your room the other night,” I say. “How did he get that?”
“From when you stayed over?” he asks. He seems honestly surprised. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. It showed you smoothing my hair off my forehead.”
He tenses. “Rosie, I have no idea what that’s about,” he says. “Berg must have rigged it somehow. He has no shortage of footage.”
“It wasn’t rigged,” I say. I try to think of any other logical explanation. “Is it possible he planted a camera in your bedroom? Could he have told Otis to do it?”
He shakes his head. “I’ve gone over my room a thousand times, millimeter by millimeter. I check it every single time I visit, sometimes twice a day just so I can be sure. It’s private.” His eyes change. “You think I’m lying?”
I do. I know what I saw.
Linus squints against the wind, and over our friction, I get an odd prickling. He once said that he could see better out of one eye in the dark. The sky is getting lighter now. I take a step nearer to Linus and peer up into his eyes.
“What are you doing?” he says, his voice defensive.
“Hold still. Look at me.”
His eyes are a clear, caramel brown with dark lashes, and they look completely normal, aside from his anger. I think back to the first day I met him. He was leaning against a giant wooden spool behind the art building. He had an icepack to his eye because the chef had hit him so hard his eyeball was filled with blood. Later, Linus went to the infirmary, and what did he tell me about his eye the next day, after his patch was off?
Dr. Ash did a little surgery to it.
“This isn’t amusing, Rosie,” he says.
“Could Dr. Ash have put a camera lens in your eye?” I ask.
His eyebrows lift in surprise. Then his gaze shifts away, and he closes one eye and then the other, testing his vision. “I hardly notice the difference anymore, except in the dark,” he says. “I thought it was left over from my hyphema.” He frowns. “They wouldn’t do that. A camera?”
“Berg’s capable of anything,” I say. My mind’s leaping. Back at Forge, Berg eavesdropped on our walkie-ham conversations. This is a million times worse. “He could spy on both of us through your eye. He could have done it the whole time we were at Forge. He could be spying on us right now.”