I SAT ON THE EMPTY dirt road, between the beams of the two headlights. The same dust we’d kicked up speeding down the deserted country lane still floated lazily in the air, as if unable to settle itself. With the light blurring out the dark landscape, I could almost imagine that this was what it would be like inside an electrical current. Everything was aglow. Everything was simplified. I watched the hypnotic dance of the dust particles as they drifted down again and ignored the tide of dark thoughts as long as I could.

All along, I’d felt like I was missing at least one piece of this mess. So many aspects of it hadn’t made any sense, even after I found out about Lana. Some parts of it still didn’t.

I told myself that was the reason I hadn’t already left them on the side of the road. For a few minutes, I’d been angry enough to seriously consider it. The only thing more powerful than the suffocating feeling of betrayal, though, had been the need to know. To force the last few answers out of them, if I had to.

The air was fresh and dry here, and for a while, all I did was listen to my breath wheeze in and out as the smoke finally left my lungs. I’d hoped it would carry some of my humiliation out with it, but the momentary peace didn’t last, and I couldn’t hold back the torrent of thoughts. All my questions seemed to shift with the wind. Why did they lie? became Why did you believe them?

Their desire to help Lana had explained everything I needed to know, and their willingness to help save the Haven kids had told me everything else that mattered.

Was I really that desperate for friendship, for any real connection, that I’d stopped questioning and analyzing everything that was happening? Had it been worth it to trade control and survival for a few minutes of laughter and living?

This has only ever been about using you.

That was truth of my life, wasn’t it? For a long time, I hadn’t been able to accept it, never mind do something about it. I’d had friends once, but lately, people only pretended to care about me as long as I could do something for them. Even Mel had been assigned to me. It hadn’t been a choice.

I couldn’t separate the thought of Mel from that of her death, and I couldn’t stop crying once I’d started. I leaned forward, bracing my arms against my knees, letting the tears drip off my face into the dirt.

“You’re—” The words locked in my chest. You’re so stupid. How could you be so stupid?

I wasn’t stupid. I had never been stupid. I was just…alone.

Wiping my face with my shirt, I took in a deep breath. Somehow, in the last few minutes, I’d become smaller, folding down into myself. I straightened. My hands toyed with the loose gravel on the road.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” I said, repeating it until the words became stronger, a command. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

I didn’t have time for this. The killers were still out there. My name was soaked in blood. The kids at Haven were counting on me to find Ruby and Liam.

“You didn’t leave.”

I hadn’t even heard the door open, or his footsteps—but that was just Roman. For all his strength, for all his deadly training, he moved through life like a whisper. Standing outside the headlights, his outline was only a bit darker than the night sky behind him, a shade away from disappearing.

Despite everything, his voice still made my heart lurch. “Is that disappointment I detect in your tone?”

“Zu—Suzume,” he corrected himself. I didn’t understand why that formality, of all things, cut me.

“Where could I have gone?” I asked him seriously, looking back. “What could I have done that wouldn’t have involved dumping your unconscious bodies on the side of some road?”

He moved unsteadily toward the hood of the car, sitting on it.

“You would have been within your rights,” Roman said. “I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

“Is Priyanka awake?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Are you worried about it at all?” I asked, unable to keep the bitterness from edging into those words. “Or is that something I don’t get to know either?”

“I wanted to tell you—”

I pushed up onto my feet. “It doesn’t matter what you wanted to do. It matters what you did. Which was lie to me.”

Roman, at least, didn’t try to dispute that. I came to stand in front of him, crossing my arms over my chest. His eyes found the bruises on my neck and stayed there, until what little color there had been in his face was gone.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Not really.”

Roman didn’t look away. His hands turned up in his lap in a pose of supplication.

“Will you hear my explanation?” he asked. “I understand if you want to leave. But I need you to hear this, because it affects you. Your safety.”

“I’m willing to hear your explanation, but I can’t promise I won’t interrupt you with a hard punch,” I said. “Right now, that’s all I really want to do.”

You made me like you.

His gaze had fallen onto the sedan’s hood. At that, he looked up again. “You can. If it’ll make you feel better. Priyanka tells me there are moments I am highly punchable.”

I wanted you to like me, too.

I shook my head. “Just talk.”

He released a long breath.

I leaned a hip against the hood of the car, letting the night seep into my skin. Waiting. Roman seemed to need a moment to gather his thoughts, or, at least, construct a story in his head. It should have been my first indication there were no easy explanations.

“Have you heard of an organization called Blue Star?” he asked.

“You mean the organization you actually worked for?” His eyes widened as I said, “I heard Priyanka saying the name in the house. Your sister charmingly filled in the details for me.”

He blew out a hard breath. “Then you know that it’s a crime syndicate. A family. Run by Gregory Mercer.”

“I’ve heard of him,” I said. “He’s a smuggler. Mostly weapons.”

Roman nodded. “Running guns is a lucrative part of his business. When he was first starting out, building his name, he would take on hired work—assassinations, art thefts, bribes, money laundering. But his business didn’t expand until he started developing new drugs and flooding the market with them.”

“Whadda guy,” I said flatly.

“The drugs weren’t originally meant for market. They were the byproducts of another one of his schemes—finding a way to re-create the chemical that induced the Psi mutation in children.”

“Agent Ambrosia,” I supplied.

“Right. Agent Ambrosia.” Roman took one last deep breath. “Years ago…when I was only five, and Lana was three, our mother fell on very hard times. I told you about my father.”

I nodded.

“She wouldn’t take that money from him. She tried to keep us fed and safe and warm on her own. She tried.” It seemed important to him that I understand that. “We were living in Tolyatti—in Russia—when we started to hear about the troubles in America. How they were cursed with illness and their children were dying. It frightened everyone when there were a handful of cases in our country. We were no longer sent to school. We were no longer allowed outside to play with the other kids in the nearby flats. But the worst came when the economy in America crashed. The illness did not spread like we expected, but the collapse of businesses did. The car manufacturer our mother worked for closed. She lost her job, and we nearly lost everything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and somehow, it didn’t feel like enough. “But…how did you end up here in America?”

He tilted his head, letting it lean toward his right shoulder. “Our mother would work odd jobs at all hours of the day and night. We were left to ourselves most of the time. One day, when Lana and I were outside playing, a police officer approached us. He said that our mother had been in a horrible accident, and that we needed to come to the hospital with him.”

I straightened. “Was that true?”

“No. We were loaded into a van with a few other kids and told to be quiet, or they’d kill us. We were going to a new home. They took us to an orphanage thousands of miles away, in Ukraine. They—these men”—Roman’s hands tightened around the hood—“they tried to separate me and Lana, but she was so sick. She was sick all the time. They quickly realized I would take care of her and keep her alive. They didn’t care how it was done, they just wanted their money. We were only at the orphanage for a year before Mercer bought us.”

“Bought you?” I repeated.

“The United States had closed its borders. He couldn’t legally bring us in. He couldn’t legally adopt us. The man in charge of the orphanage was willing to secretly work with him. Times were bad, and he needed the money….” Roman shook his head. “Mercer purchased me, Lana, and six others. They brought us to the country inside a shipping container. One of the boys who was traveling with us died—he froze to death, it was that cold. Occasionally, someone came to trade out the waste bucket or bring us food, but for weeks, we lived like that. When they put the three of us in that shipping container in Pennsylvania…that was Mercer. That is the level of detail in his cruelty.”

The words locked in my throat. I could only stare at him, absorb the pain radiating from every inch of his body.

Roman’s face fell. “You don’t believe me. I understand why—I know. It sounds impossible.”

“You’re not that good of a liar,” I said. “I believe you. I’m even horrified for you. But what I’m struggling to get over is the fact that you knew who was behind the kidnapping all along.”

He shook his head. “I swear, I didn’t. Priya and I wondered, but we didn’t recognize any of the kidnappers. We didn’t know for sure until we saw Lana. Mercer would never have let someone else use her, even for a job. She is his and his alone.”

“Then you’ve known a few days,” I pointed out. “You knew when we found Ruby’s car. You knew when we went to see Gray. You knew when we went into that house. You saw how much I was struggling with not knowing who was behind the bombing and kidnapping, and you still didn’t tell me?”

His face went tight with pain. “I wanted to. But until we had the information to prove it, to expose Mercer, it was too dangerous.”

“I decide what’s too dangerous for me,” I said sharply. “That wasn’t your call.”

“It’s more than that,” he said. “We’re not the only ones in danger.”

“Well, we’re the ones in immediate danger,” I said. “Did you know Priyanka was the reason Lana and that team found us?”

He scrubbed at his face, making a sound of frustration. “Really?”

“She took the tracker from that drone,” I said.

“Priya…” Roman’s face was pained. “She doesn’t want to wait until we find Ruby. She wants Lana out now, so she can protect her. It’s not that she won’t listen to reason, it’s just that her love is stronger.”

“What happened to her in the house?” I asked. “Before you gave her that cocktail of drugs it was like she went superhero. Or took a hit of PCP.”

Roman opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. “I have to back up again to explain it. Is that okay?”

I nodded.

“Okay…” he began. “Priyanka arrived about three years after we did.”

“Mercer brought her into the country, too?”

“No, she was already in America. Priya’s father was a rival of Mercer’s, and Mercer kidnapped her as leverage. It didn’t work. Mostly because if there is one man alive more ruthless than Mercer, it’s Priyanka’s father.”

Oh God.

“Anyway, it doesn’t feel right to tell the whole story for her.” I nodded again, and he continued on. “For a while, nothing much happened. Mercer kept us all in a compound together, just outside New Orleans. We had survival training. Lessons on how to fight and shoot. Mercer acted like a benevolent father, always showering us with attention and praise when we did exactly as he asked. Then, one day, when Priya and I were twelve and Lana was ten, he brought in a man named Wendall—Jonathan Wendall. He worked for Leda Corp, in their research and development sector.”

Leda Corp—the company responsible for both the creation of Agent Ambrosia and the years of testing that went into what caused IAAN. Even just the mention of their name sent anger shooting through me.

“That’s when the experiments began,” Roman said, rubbing at his forehead. “Every day, Dr. Wendall would take one of us into his lab. Do blood work. Scans. Inject us with something or other. Record the results. It made us violently ill, but nothing more. Two years of this. Then, finally, when the camps were closed and the United Nations swept in, things changed. Kids fell through the cracks in the system, and Mercer was able to get his hands on actual Psi. Unclaimed Psi.”

Unclaimed. Those kids whose parents had abandoned them to the government all over again by not retrieving them after the camps fell.

“That’s where the real money was. He hired all those skip tracer types to find kids, then he’d turn around and sell them again to other countries looking to study or use them. But some he kept for Dr. Wendall. He became obsessed with one Psi in particular, the one whose power he wanted more than anything else. Ruby Elizabeth Daly.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“She was in the newspapers. On the television. He tried to take her from a park once, but his men were repelled by the UN protection detail she had. One of them injured her father.”

“I remember that,” I whispered.

“Because of his background with Leda, Wendall knew, before the wider scientific community confirmed it, that the mutation couldn’t be passed on naturally from parent to child. Using Agent Ambrosia on women he could hire to act as surrogates was too inefficient, and the results were too unpredictable. Mercer wanted Wendall to find a way to induce a specific Psi mutation in us, otherwise clean slates.”

“What?” I managed to get out. “You didn’t have the mutation to begin with? None of you?”

“None of us had Psi abilities at the start of this,” he confirmed.

I took a step back, shaking my head. That was impossible. They were mutations that had developed while we were all in utero.

He made us. Lana had meant that literally.

“Just listen, please,” Roman said. “Once the cause of IAAN was confirmed and Wendall had Psi to study, he became increasingly more effective. He came up with a chemical compound that was one part Agent Ambrosia, a thousand parts poison. To induce the mutation in our minds, he force-fed us the chemical and conducted operations. Most of the kids who’d been brought to the States with us died in different phases of the trials, until there were only four of us left. At one point, when she was only twelve, Lana went into cardiac arrest, too.”

“What?”

“Her body never fully recovered from her illness as a child. Wendall managed to revive her, but…from that moment on, I just had this feeling, this sense that she’d somehow suffer worse for having survived. Priyanka’s power manifested immediately, and mine soon after, but Lana went nearly two years without showing any ability. The truth was, she just didn’t know how to access it. Up until that point, we had been able to find some sense of normalcy outside of the testing and experiments. That changed once Mercer understood what she could do.”

“When did her personality start to change?” I asked. “Priyanka said it happened slowly.”

“When Lana was sixteen, and the rest of us eighteen, we were sent out to do work on Mercer’s behalf. But someone caught Priya and Lana slipping away together and exposed their relationship to Mercer. He made it clear relationships were not allowed. When they were caught a second time, he made good on his threat to separate them. He pulled Lana onto his personal security detail and began working with her. Shaping her. They traveled when we were at the compound, we traveled when they were. He had become paranoid that his rivals would use Psi to assassinate him. Lana was his guarantee they couldn’t. She’s a Limit.”

“I don’t fully understand how her ability works,” I told him. “In some ways, it does remind me of Ruby’s ability. Lana is obviously suppressing the part of our mind that controls and regulates our abilities, the way Ruby might suppress someone’s memory.”

“And she can do it with enough force for it to be painful,” Roman finished. “None of us became Ruby. None of us were what he wanted, so he found uses for us and continued the experiments. Priyanka can use her mind to infiltrate complex machinery, like computers, and assume control of them. She calls herself a Hacker.”

I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath. “The highway cameras and drones…”

“The phones did nothing,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “She switched them on and off while we passed under them. Priya is the reason we’ve managed to stay undetected by Mercer for so long. He used to use her a lot for thefts. She can get through any security system and any electronic safe.”

“And what about you?” I asked.

“Mercer’s garbage, mostly,” he said with a humorless laugh. “Priyanka calls me a Mirror. I can mimic another Psi’s abilities for a short time through touch, but not without consequences. Mercer had to find other uses for me.”

“Wait…” I began. “In the truck after we were taken…I didn’t have enough power to kill the engine. You grabbed me, and there was a surge, like I’d tapped into another source of power. I thought it was because you were a Yellow.”

“I wish,” he said, smoothing his hands over his knees. “I just amplified what you were already doing.”

“Is that what causes your migraines?” I asked. “Using your ability?”

“Yes. We all have side effects—well, everyone but Lana.”

I blew out a sigh. “Of course. But what happened with Priya?”

“She explodes. Her adrenaline spikes along with her heart rate, and it’s too much for her body to handle if it goes on too long. She loses all sense of fear. Her mind is telling her that she’s invincible. The drugs are to counteract the adrenaline and to sedate her, so she doesn’t go into cardiac arrest or experience a seizure.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Most of the time—for instance, when she was turning the cameras on and off—she’s fine. It gets her going, and makes her anxious to move and get things done. But controlling those servers was too much this time.”

“Why did she do it, then?”

“She doesn’t…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “She wants to help, but that feeling, that surge, is like an intense high. For a while, she was addicted to getting to that point. Mercer loved it. He thought it made her extra effective, so long as we could bring her back down.”

“How did you guys finally get away from him?” I asked.

“We were on a job we couldn’t finish,” he said simply. “It got to be too much, and we ran. I was so sure I’d be able to get to Lana within a few days. Mercer was always traveling. We could extract her while he was busy with his meetings. But after Priya and I left, he kept her back at the compound. Haven was the first time I’d seen my sister in almost six months. And tonight…”

He clenched his right hand. Roman looked crushed, absolutely obliterated.

“You saved my life,” I said softly.

“She wasn’t going to stop,” he croaked out. “I saw it in her eyes. She wasn’t going to stop.”

My hand reached for one of his, closing around the warm, calloused skin. “She’ll understand when she’s herself again.”

“All I can do is hope,” he said. “That’s all I have left.”

“That’s not all,” I assured him.

Roman looked up at me, his fingers squeezing mine. “The reason we didn’t tell you about ourselves, about Mercer, is because he is still experimenting on kids.” I opened my mouth but he pressed on. “And I know what you’re thinking, but we can’t report it to the government. Can you honestly tell me that they wouldn’t do even more experimentation on them? That they wouldn’t send them to live with foster families, or in one of those privatized training institutes that Moore keeps talking about? They would never be allowed to return to their families.”

“You didn’t trust me,” I said, letting my hand slip out of his.

He shook his head. “No. I didn’t want to put you in the position of feeling you had to withhold information from the government. And the truth is, you’re exposed to a real risk now that Mercer knows you’re with us. He keeps such a tight lid on his business dealings, he will do just about anything to keep you from talking to someone with enough power to stop him. You wouldn’t even see him coming.”

A little shudder worked through me. After a moment Roman added, “But I am sorry. I’m sorry about the lies and the partial truths. I can’t say it enough.”

I tilted my head back to look at the sky. The headlights didn’t dim the blanket of stars. “Limit, Hacker, Mirror…I can’t believe I thought you were part of the Psion Ring.”

“That’s another thing,” he said. “The Psion Ring doesn’t exist.”

My gaze shot back over to him.

He shook his head. “There’s no proof of them anywhere. Logic dictates two options: they are incredibly good at covering their trail, or they don’t exist. Believe me, Mercer investigated. He sent me out on a thousand dead ends looking for them. He put real resources behind it, and each time, he came up with nothing.”

“I saw reports, though,” I said. “The Psi Council reviewed information about them at their monthly meetings.”

“Who were those reports created and compiled by?” Roman asked.

“A lot of agencies,” I said. “The UN, the FBI, intelligence services…they all have people who could have been monitoring them and feeding the information back to someone in Cruz’s administration.”

“Even if a ring managed to form in the months since Priya and I left Mercer, there’s no way they could pull off a job like the airplane bombing. The planning alone would take months. The way they’re using your name has me more convinced than ever that it’s a cover for something else.”

Something worse.

“How do I fit in? You were going to approach me at the speech, weren’t you?”

“Yes. The plan was to separate you and force you to take us to Daly, where we’d plead our case.”

“Kidnap me, you mean?” I clarified, almost amused.

He looked a little sheepish. “Kidnapping is a strong word for it. We were hoping you’d just agree to help us. All of my research made it seem like—”

“Like what?” I asked. I raised a brow.

“The reports I accessed, the newspaper stories, the documentaries, it all made you seem so…docile. Vulnerable. Compliant,” he said. “Within moments after the explosion, I knew that wasn’t who you are at all. They had crafted an image of you that erased all of your strength and capabilities.”

My stomach churned.

“I couldn’t appear dangerous,” I said softly. “I couldn’t be a threat to anyone. Mel used to say that people would use me as a token to represent all Psi kids. My actions, the way I conducted myself, would shape the public’s opinion of us.”

So I’d nodded, accepting the things they’d told me were important. I subdued the parts of me that focus groups felt were “too bubbly.” Too “erratic.” I molded myself to be calm and composed. Reasonable.

“I was stupid enough to underestimate you because of all that I’d read and seen. But, to be honest, I think the men who took us did as well. You were able to save our lives because of it.”

“It was Priyanka who sent the message on the teleprompter, wasn’t it?” I asked, slowly putting it together.

“To try to disturb your usual procedure,” he said. “We studied your security protocols for a full month, and thought that an emergency would be the best time to try to get you alone.”

“That would have been the best time to get yourselves killed,” I corrected. “I don’t know that I would have helped you find Haven, even if you’d been up front at the start. It’s not just about protecting Ruby’s location. After what she went through, I feel the need to protect her. She will always help others. But her ability hurts her more than she lets on. Not physically. She sees the trauma, the pain, the ugliness everyone keeps locked away.”

Putting it that way, it reminded me of Roman. Someone who said yes, who never failed to help, and suffered all the inward consequences of it.

“Is that why you believed she willingly left Haven?” Roman asked.

“That’s part of it,” I said. “Everyone has a breaking point, and she’s been storing up so much pain over the years, it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d finally reached hers. But now I’m sure she didn’t leave—that she didn’t walk away from this of her own volition. Something happened.”

“I agree,” he said. “Blue Star set the explosion at Penn State. It might have been so that they could take in me and Priya, and they only framed you to take any suspicion off themselves. But you said one of the Defenders was going to fire on you, right?”

“Right,” I said. “It had to be a setup from the jump. Blue Star causes the explosion…frames me to avoid suspicion…and someone else decides to pile on with the attack on Moore’s campaign plane?”

Roman hesitated.

“Just say it.”

“You’re not going to like this theory, but it could be someone in the government who has a grudge against you, the Council, or Cruz—or all of you. If that Defender uniform was real, it points to some greater conspiracy.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Is it…is it possible that Mercer’s the reason Ruby’s vanished? That he has her?”

“I think it’s more likely that she caught on to his interest and went into hiding,” Roman said.

“She would have found a way to communicate with us,” I told him. “We have a few different systems she could have used. I think someone has her. And it has to be Mercer.”

“I really don’t know,” he said, running a hand back over his hair. “I hope like hell he doesn’t.”

I pressed my hands to my face, drawing in a deep breath. “Where is Ruby?” I whispered. “Where is she?”

There was a knock on the windshield. Priyanka stared back at us. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “I think I know.”