Theo leaned towards me, but they yanked him back. He struggled, but they were too strong, and they were moving him towards the door. “Leanna,” Theo said. My brow scrunched. He repeated, “Leanna.”

  The room went silent just as I understood what he was trying to tell me. Leanna knew his secret, it was why they had met back in Eres, and why he wouldn’t tell me. She had seen him when he was fifteen and snuck into city hall where his parents were, and they must have seen him, too—that’s how she knew they would believe him if he Linked in as proof of the Marked kids. She had gone to the King with this information, so he knew Theo existed, so when we were here he would know his son was alive. His secret hadn’t died with his brothers. With the trackers Em had placed in us, they could still find us. We could still get out of here.

  I clung to that tiny bit of hope as Allard pulled me back to my feet and shoved me into another waiting guard. “Take her to her room.”

  “I want to see Vic,” I said, my voice quieter than before and without any wrath or anger I usually possessed.

  “No,” Allard said simply, and my head dropped as we exited the room.

  The hallway was stone on one side and stark white on the other. It curved around itself as we moved farther. There was a chill as we continued walking, seeping in from the cracks in the stone, and the earthy smell of the mountain surrounded me. Lights strung in intervals from the roof made the place feel less like we were under a mountain and more like we were walking through the DEZ. I shuffled my feet, my mind reeling. None of what we had planned had worked out, and now I was being taken to a separate room while Theo was being brought before Governor Grayson. I knew I should have been counting my steps, watching the hallways for any signs of an exit or an escape, but somehow I didn’t have the energy to do that. The serum Allard wouldn’t explain had taken so much from me, and my body was weak, but mostly my heart hurt. Theo had lied to me, from the very beginning.

  How could he have kept this from me for so long? And why didn’t he think to tell the others? This could have swayed his father’s help a long time ago, and we might not even be in this situation if he’d just been honest with us. I was so pissed at him for keeping things from me. My heart pounded in my skull, causing a ringing sensation to fill my ears. Tears pricked in the back of my eyes and made the room blurry. We always trusted each other; it was the one thing keeping us going. He lied to me. Now, I didn’t know what to believe, who to believe. All I knew was something had broken inside of me, and Theo was the reason. My chest tightened as it became difficult to breath. He lied to me.

  We reached a hallway intercepting the curved one and filled with doors along both sides. Finally, I blinked myself out of the fog and glanced over to the guard pulling me. His grip had already loosened around my arm when I’d stopped resisting, and his gaze was fixed on the door we approached rather than my hand grazing his side. The guard pulled out his ID Card and opened the door we stopped before, motioning for me to step inside. I brushed past him as I moved into the tiny room, my fingers clenched around the ID card he’d just dropped into my waiting hand unknowingly. Only a mattress on one side covered the small space.

  The door shut behind me, and I fell to the mattress, tears flowing freely down my cheeks. My mind was filled with everything and nothing all at once, and I didn’t know what to do. I had trusted him, just as I trusted Gunner, and I’d been betrayed. Why would he keep something like this from me? It felt like the room was caving in on me and as I sucked in another breath, a sob escaped my lips. The one thing I thought Theo and I shared was the DEZ, our life there and everything we’d gone through, only that wasn’t his life. He’d grown up in a Palace, likely loved by his mother and father, the king and queen. He could have been safe, he could have protected all of us, got me and Vic out easily, but he’d stayed. Why?

  I swallowed back the tears, sitting up and wiping my face. Despite everything threatening to pull me down, this was a mission I couldn’t fail. I would find out the truth from Theo—the whole truth, and if we had to use his father to get us out of here, then we damn well would. I needed to tell the others as soon as I could; it may be our only chance now. I quickly checked for camera bots around the room, finding it empty, before I pulled the ID card I’d stolen from the guard out of my pocket.

  It was time to get Vic back.

  GUNNER

  Grayson kept true to her word. For two days now, Vic was left alone. She sat in her bed across from me with her knees curled into her chest, watching me toss an apple up and down. They rarely gave us anything outside of the slop we had three times a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which tasted like it was three days old. Today, however, we’d each been given apples. Vic’s food sat uneaten at the end of her bed.

  “Do you think we’ll ever get out of this place?” she asked. Her voice was so small and childlike it pained me to hear. Despite not having to leave the room for testing, she’d still been quiet and slept most of the time. I could tell she was losing faith that either Sienna or Caspian would come or if I could get us out, even with this positive change.

  “I think we will,” I said. “You’ve got people out there who promised to get you back… and I get the feeling Caspian keeps his promises.”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Guilt swept through me but I nodded.

  “It’s okay, I’m glad you came. At least one of us should live.” Vic stared at her knees.

  I swung my feet around and leaned on my thighs. “Vic, you’re going to get out of here. You’re going to live, I promise you will.”

  “Even if I do, I won’t be free,” she whispered.

  “Yes you will, and we’re going to make sure of that right now.” I stood up, holding a hand out. “Come on.”

  “What are you doing?” Vic tucked herself in tighter.

  “They want to make you a monster, a weapon for them to control? Well, I say we give them a taste of their own medicine.” I smirked.

  “How?”

  “We’re going to teach you to control this thing inside of you, without them telling you what to do.”

  “How can we do that?” Vic asked.

  “There was a girl in Grayson’s office. She looked just like when you were under their control only there was nothing there controlling her… nothing I saw anyways. But her eyes were black, and she looked ready to kill me if I made one wrong move, so that tells me it can be controlled without the artifact,” I said. I’d been thinking about it since I saw the black-eyed girl. There was a chance I was wrong or that something else controlled her, but then why would she have been the only one with Grayson in that room? She was different. I could tell.

  Vic began shaking her head. “No, it’s not safe. You could get hurt.”

  I carefully pulled her hand away from its death grip around her knees, guiding her towards the edge of the bed. “You won’t,” I assured her. “You’re so much stronger than you give yourself credit for, Vic. And you’re smart, even a bit stubborn. Plus, I know you don’t want to hurt me, which means you won’t.”

  Vic let me pull her to her feet, but she stood slumped with her arms wrapped around her upper body. “What if I can’t control it?”

  “We’ll keep trying until you can,” I said, taking a step back. Only about a foot of space spread between the beds and not much more at the ends, but it would have to do. “We’ll start with something simple.”

  Vic looked ready to crumble back into her bed, but she gave a small nod. “Okay.”

  “We’ll start with going over what you feel when it happens.”

  Instantly, Vic started to tremble and looked to the ground. I pulled her chin back up. “You can do this, it’s okay. I’m right here with you.” She released a breath. “Okay, when you feel the change, what’s it like?”

  “It’s kind of… itchy. I can feel a tingling through my body, crawling up my skin. Then I get really angry, like so mad I just want to scream and scream.” Vic’s eyes widened more and more with each word. “There’s always a ringing in my ears until I give into the madness, and it just kind of feels like a calm chaos.”

  “All right, that’s a good starting point,” I said. “What makes you mad?”

  “I don’t know,” Vic whispered.

  “Well, I make you mad, don’t I? Or I did once.” I smirked. “What if I told you more about how I royally screwed up and nearly got your friends killed?”

  Vic shook her head. “I don’t want to hear that.”

  “That’s because it makes you mad, that’s good,” I said.

  Vic frowned. “It doesn’t make me mad, because I know you’re not a bad person, and you didn’t mean for them to get hurt.”

  “What if I did?”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “What if I was sick of dragging them along, and the first chance I got, I betrayed them and looked out for myself instead.” I could feel a bit of anger grow in Vic. It was a physical thing, it filled up the room with warmth, and black swirled in her eyes turning them from silver to dark grey. “I didn’t care about them—that was all a lie. A lie to get them to help until I no longer needed them.”

  Vic’s hands curled, and her lips were a thin straight line. She blinked and her eyes went black.

  “Shit,” I mumbled.

  She took a step forward and instinctively I stepped back. That small flinch snapped her out of whatever had just happened, and she blinked away the blackness in her eyes. Still, there was a swirl of dark grey lingering even as she stepped back and wrapped her arms around her body once again.

  “I’m sorry.” She winced.

  “Don’t be, that was exactly what I was trying to get you to do,” I assured her.

  She was shaking again, and I knew that was enough for one day. I motioned for her to sit back down, and she did with a little sigh.

  “We’ll work on it, but that was good. I’ll try to find ways to make you mad without bringing up stuff you probably don’t want to hear.” I sat back down on my own bed, taking a bite of my apple. “But for the record, none of that was true.”

  She gave me the smallest of smiles. “Good,” she said, slid back on her bed, and leaned against the wall, pulling her pillow into her lap. “I think deep down I knew that, but I was still so angry.”

  “You can feel free to think the worst of me if it will help.” I winked.

  Vic shook her head and closed her eyes, as if that small transition took a lot out of her. “I was mad because I knew it was a lie.”

  After two days, we figured out anger wasn’t the only thing that helped the transition; fear worked equally as well. And I learned the hard way that when Vic was afraid, she turned way faster, and she was a lot stronger. My shoulder still felt bruised after she slammed me into the wall before quickly blinking out of it and apologizing profusely for the next two hours.

  “Its fine, relax,” I said. “I asked for this, remember?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do this here,” Vic suggested.

  “And where exactly will we practice?”

  Vic shrugged.

  “You need to learn this, so you can get out of here. That’s the whole point.”

  “Tell me about your marks,” Vic said suddenly.

  I bristled. “My marks? What’s there to tell?”

  “Why’d you start them?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess it started as a way to remember the kids I grew up with. We went into the Void together, and every one of them died.”

  Vic was quiet, just watching me with this soft look in her eyes, nothing like what we experienced a few hours ago.

  “I just kept it up, trying to remember the name that went with each mark until there were too many names and too many marks.” I recalled the first mark I added. Her name was Tila, and I had a huge crush on her for all five years before graduation. She was quiet, the complete opposite of me, and she was kind to everyone, much like Vic. Maybe that’s why I immediately felt a need to take care of Vic when we’d first met, even though it became clear she didn’t need my help, even if she didn’t realize yet.

  “Do you know how many there are?” she asked.

  I looked down to my forearms and the marks going up my body all the way to my back. I’d started them myself with a needle and makeshift ink I made in one of the Camps. When I found the Guardians of Venzier, they began helping fill the spots I couldn’t. Each mark hurt terribly, there was no numbing gel or way to ease the pain, but I endured it so I would remember. And I did. I remembered them all.

  “Nearly five hundred last I counted.”

  Vic’s eyes widened. I leaned forward, lifting my shirt so she could see the marks covering me from my waist to my collarbone. Then I turned and revealed my back, also completely covered from top to bottom. She placed a hand on my back. It was gentle and cold and bounced slightly over the small ridges some of the marks had formed. She rested her hand there for a moment, and I closed my eyes, not realizing how long it’d been since I felt another person touch me. My heart was beating too fast, and I pulled my shirt back down, shifting back to my bed and leaning against the wall.

  Vic’s hand seemed to hover where it had just been touching my back for a moment before she, too, moved back to her seat.

  We were quiet for some time before she said, so softly I almost didn’t hear it, “If the time ever comes, I will remember you with a mark as well.”

  JAYLA

  When we arrived a few days ago, we’d been led by Allard’s guards to a bank of rooms, all centering on one big mess hall. We were directed to the back where there were stalls with showers where we could clean up and change into a new set of clothes. Large bowls of stew were left on the table for us to eat when we returned.

  We’d slept fitfully the first night, unsure what was happening with the rest of the team. When we’d woken the next morning, we found the mess hall empty again, except for the one female guard who had survived the train trip here with us.

  “Nice warm welcome,” I mumbled.

  “You’re not likely to receive any of that here,” the female guard said between bites. “I’ve only stayed here once, and it was for less than a day, but I noticed how they keep the guards here busy. Usually, they set us up in single rotations and never the same place for more than a day or two.”

  “Why?” Caspian asked.

  “So we don’t notice anything we’re not supposed to.” The girl shrugged. She paused, as if realizing what she was saying could be construed as negative. “Only because that’s not our job here. They want us to be focused on keeping this place and those kids safe, not whatever they’re doing to them.”

  Cas and I exchanged a look. Not really keeping the kids safe when they’re using them. I didn’t know where they’d taken Em, Theo, and Sienna, and I needed to find out as soon as I could. I worried what might happen to them if we weren’t quick.

  “Let’s just hope they have that train back up and running soon,” I said, finishing my food and pushing my bowl away. “So what do we do now?”

  “We’ll be expected to report to Governor Grayson for assignments,” the girl said.

  As if hearing her words, two guards rounded the corner and entered the mess hall. “Come with us.” The guard jutted his chin towards the hall.

  Tentatively, Caspian and I stood, following behind the other two guards. I adjusted my hair to fall over my face more and pulled up the collar of my jacket. This would be the real test, to see if Grayson would recognize us right away or not.

  Caspian was walking a bit labored. I’d noticed the bruises across his ribs last night and had a feeling he might have broken something, but he didn’t complain or even mention them.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor first?” I whispered to him.

  He shook his head. “Better to see her in a group than on our own. Maybe this way we can hide a bit.”

  I doubted that would happen, but I also knew we needed to go to this meeting. We needed access cards and more information than what we currently had, which was nothing. The only way for that to happen was for us to be assigned a position within the Black Prison.

  It’d been nearly twenty-four hours since we arrived, and I had no way of knowing what they had done with Em, Theo, and Sienna. I just hoped Em would be able to get access to their security system fast, so we could get the hell out of here.

  We turned down another hallway before stopping in front of a door half opened. The guard pushed it the rest of the way, and we found a few more guards waiting in the room for us. Caspian and I slid to the back while the female guard followed to the front.

  I kept my head down, letting my shoulder-length hair cover my face and my eyes staring at the floor. Caspian slouched and stood behind a taller guard.

  “So you were on the train that exploded?” Grayson’s voice came from the front of the room. I didn’t look up.

  “Yes, I was one of the guards on the train,” the female guard said. I saw her turn around, looking for me and Caspian before she continued. “Only three of us made it out, along with three genetic kids.”

  “That’s disappointing,” Grayson said. “We’ve been told the person who planned the explosion has been taken care of, but I have some questions still.”

  “Yes ma’am,” the guard replied obediently.

  “How much do you know about Mr. Cortez?” Grayson’s high-heeled shoes clicked across the stone floor as she circled the girl. “He was acting Commander for the Watchers, was he not?”

  I dropped my gaze back down, feeling a pinch in my chest. Why was she asking about Cortez?

  “Yes, ma’am, he was. I knew him to be loyal to the Watchers—and to you, of course.”

  “Was he?” Grayson hummed. “It seems his loyalties have shifted, if they ever were on our side that is, as he was the one who planted the explosive on the train.”

  I knew it was a lie, knew Cortez would never do that, which meant Grayson knew who really did it. And now she was covering up.

  “I… I didn’t know him well. If he betrayed us…” The guard trailed off.