He’s clutching his nose, the words muffled by fingers and blood. He fumbles for the small White Noise machine at his side and I lash out with my foot, kicking it away. I feel a thousand feet high, like I could land another hit on him before the soldiers in black reach me. So, I do. I haul my hand back and slap him as hard as I can across his face, curling my fingers at the last second. The nails I’ve broken working day after day in this Factory cut into the slick, fleshy part of his cheek. The breath goes out of him like a blown-out tire; the blood dribbling down his lips sprays out, sending a fine mist of it onto my sweatshirt.

He is scarlet with rage as he stumbles toward me, swinging his free arm to try to club me with his meaty fist. The girls around me have crawled under the tables; I’m dimly aware of the voices and wait for the White Noise, the gunshot, the end to my story. It’s been so long since any of us tried this that I wonder if they’ve forgotten what they’re supposed to do.

They come out of the stunned haze soon enough. The swing of a nearby baton registers as a change in the flow of the air around me. It whistles as it swings down. By the time it’s there to connect with my skull, I’m already falling forward. The weight that’s slammed into me from behind drops me to the floor. My chin connects with the concrete and I taste blood. There is not a single part of me that isn’t throbbing in pain, but somehow I’m not done yet. The figure on top of me is feeding the fire. I kick back, trying to catch him—he can’t have me, I won’t let Tildon do this.

My hands are wrenched from under me and pinned with difficulty against my back. The hand that closes around them is large enough to capture both wrists at once and secure them with plastic binding. I toss my head back, rearing up like a bucking horse, and the warmth at my back shifts, leaning closer to my ear. He breathes out one word.

“Sammy.”

TWO

LUCAS

HE IS going to kill her.

You spend time living inside anger, you start recognizing its varying violent shades. He huffs and puffs like the Big Bad Wolf, and he’s so slow to recover from that first blow to his chest, he can’t avoid the back of her skull as she sends it sailing straight into his face. Between the blood that’s rushed to his face, and the blood that’s come rushing out of his crooked nose, the PSF’s skin looks blistered by his own rage. This is the kind of anger that cracks bones. Crushes windpipes.

It’s not until she turns around and claws him across the face that the realization sinks my heart like a stone. The trickle of recognition turns into a roar as the girl turns back in my direction, breathing hard, harsh lines turning a beautiful face defiant. She looks like some kind of warrior with her thick, honey-blond hair falling out of its tie, her face flushed with grim satisfaction. This is the face of a girl who once jumped out of our tree and broke her arm, just to prove to me she wasn’t scared like I was.

This is Samantha Dahl.

You f**king idiot, I think savagely, my hands pressing tight against my legs to keep from curling into fists. Shit, shit, shit. I’ve seen her before as she was walking toward the Factory—well. Before that. I saw her this morning going into the Mess. I saw her inside the Mess. I saw her every step of the walk over here, feeling every bit as creepy as I must have looked hovering nearby. My eyes kept skipping back to her, drawn to her face like a lone candle flame in the dark. I’m so damn stupid that even when I saw the faint scar above her lip, curved toward her nose, I thought, She must have had a cleft lip like Sammy. I was so damn busy looking around, searching for one particular face, that I missed the one right here.

He touched her. I watched him do it. Draping himself over her like that—I thought he wanted to intimidate her, push her around like they do with all the kids here. But the look on his face was like a snake’s—eyes glassy, mouth in a permanent, smug smirk, skin gleaming under the milky lights. He looked drunk on the feeling, turning his face toward her ear. I had to concentrate on controlling my breathing. Up in the rafters, the PSFs hovered like hawks, unsure whether or not to intervene with the hunt happening below. I don’t know what they thought when they looked at each other, but I do know they didn’t do one damn thing to stop it when he got a hell of a lot bolder. Useless pricks. I know what “search” means. He was going to strip her right here, in front of everyone. Use it as an excuse to demean her. Control her totally.

And Sammy—she was never going to let that fly. I see it in her face. She knows exactly what’s going to happen to her, and she just doesn’t care. She is a fighter against the ropes, ready to go down swinging.

I can’t do a damn thing.

They haven’t given me the order to move. To restrain her. To do anything other than stand here like a scarecrow, trying to keep the fluttering kids at bay with nothing other than their own fear. To the camp controllers and PSFs, our minds have been drained of will, of impulse, of that fluid connection between the head and the heart that lets you make decisions. The Trainers know the fire in us is bottomless. They took care to beat the flames out early into the program, leaving us little piles of embers that respond only to their hands adding fuel to turn sparks into a blaze.

The PSFs need to think I don’t feel a thing as I watch the scene play out like a car crash in front of me. I’ve survived this long under the government’s “care” because I have followed the only rule I have: Don’t react. I must stand as blank-faced as the others even as the temperature spikes to a thousand degrees in the center of my chest, and I sweat with the effort it takes to control myself to be still. I can’t throw years of work away in an instant, let them drag me out back and put me down like a dog—the way they did to the other kids who didn’t take to their training methods. The ones who burnt themselves out, too hot, too volatile for even the most skilled Trainers to approach. Some resisted the training for weeks—months. I could see the light moving in their eyes when everyone else was checked out, vacant, scratching at their lives like dull pencils until the Trainers handed them a sharpener. I am the last one. I know it. The others are standing right in front of me, but they’re gone.