He ignored my rant and leaned even closer to me, pressing the side of his face to mine, so that my mouth—my one weapon left—didn’t have anything within biting range. When he spoke, his voice was low and so close I could feel his breath warm on my ear.
“Stop it! You just left the Dean’s office. No one walks out of there alive. No one’s supposed to, anyway. So it’d be great if we could get undercover before a dozen or so Collabs find us and drag us back there. Let me explain.”
His words were slow and steady in my ear, seductive almost, because I couldn’t not listen. He made it sound like he was in danger, too. And there was a note of real urgency in his voice. It made me want to believe him.
I tried to push down my fear and panic over Mel, that choking sense of betrayal. I tried not to notice that he smelled good—damn it! Something woodsy with just a hint of mint. Not that long ago, Scruffy had had me pinned to the ground. I’d felt trapped. Panicky. With Carter, it was different. I felt safe.
I could not let myself do this. I needed to get a little perspective here. A little distance. Like, a little distance between his body and mine so I could think again.
“Okay.” I bit out the word. “Explain.”
He stepped back, freeing me from the cage his body had created. “Sebastian isn’t like them. He isn’t—”
“He isn’t what?” I sneered. “A collaborator? Someone who would hand kids over to save his own life?”
“He isn’t what you think he is. Neither am I. This is what we do. We travel from Farm to Farm. He convinces the Deans to let him come in and overhaul their computer systems. To delete the files of any Greens that have escaped or haven’t made it or whatever. In exchange, we get to walk out with Greens. It’s how we get paid. We’re rescuing people. We aren’t Collaborators.”
My instincts roared at me not to believe him. He’d shot me in the back, for God’s sake. But at the same time, he looked disarmingly serious, his gaze meeting mine, his eyes begging me to listen to him.
What if he was being honest? What if getting out of here was as simple as putting my trust in him? What if I didn’t have to do all this on my own?
I wanted to believe that. There were a lot of things I wanted to believe right now. I wanted to believe that Mel was safe. I wanted to believe that Carter was trustworthy and that maybe, just maybe, he could help us. I wanted to believe those things so badly that I couldn’t trust myself to see the truth.
When it came to Carter, I had a history of deluding myself. I couldn’t make the same mistakes I’d made in the Before. I needed to be stronger than that. More logical.
“If you can get me and Mel out of here, if that’s your big plan, then why didn’t you just let us go?”
“Because on your own, they’d hunt you down and kill you.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I protested.
“Yes, I do. Trust me. I know more about the security measures on a Farm than you do.”
“I’ve been watching—”
“Okay, you know about the chip in your neck.”
My hand went to my neck, to the spot that was scanned four times a day when I entered the dining hall. “Of course. It’s how they figure out when we miss meals and what our blood—”
“Each chip has a micro GPS locator. They start sending out a signal the second you leave the Farm. They’d catch you ten minutes out. Escaping from a Farm is a crime punishable by death, punishment to be administered instantly at the discretion of the local Dean. And that’s if it’s the Collabs who catch you. I don’t know for sure, but I think the chip’s frequency bugs the Ticks. Or at least attracts their attention. People with active chips usually don’t live long enough for the Collabs to find them.”
At his words, my heart started pounding in my chest and a wave of nausea washed over me. It had never—not once—occurred to me that the chips might be anything other than dehumanizing storage devices.
I sagged against the wall, dropping my elbows to my knees as I struggled to pull air into my lungs. Bile filled my throat and I had to concentrate to keep from puking right there.
I felt Carter’s hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
“I could have killed us. We would be no better off than those Greens outside the fence. Mel would be dead.”
“You didn’t know.” He crouched down beside me and tipped my chin up so that I looked him in the eyes. His touch was warm and solid. Reassuring. “You see now why I had to stop you? If I’d let you escape, I would have been sending you to your death.”
“But now that I know”—my mind was racing again—“about the tracking devices, I mean, now that I know, we can try again. We can—”
I broke off abruptly. Mel was still in the Dean’s office. There was no way I could get her out on my own. Whatever else happened, I needed Carter. And—it seemed—Sebastian.
Carter was shaking his head anyway. “It’s more complicated than that. You’re just going to have to trust me.” He blew out a breath. “Look, I’m not going to talk about this here. We’re too exposed.”
“Too exposed? Who talks like that?” I asked.
His mouth twisted into a little smile. “Military school. Remember?” He scanned the area then nodded toward one of the buildings sitting off the quad, maybe fifty yards away. “I’m taking you over there. You’re not going to bolt again, are you?”
He shook his hand absently, rubbing his thumb over the spot where I’d bit him. I had to shift my gaze away from him, almost ashamed that I’d done that. Besides—after so long on the Farm, so many months of being invisible, of having almost no human contact—it was seriously weird being the center of someone’s attention. Being touched at all.
I felt a little shiver go through my body. I pushed that aside, too, burying it even deeper than the anger.
When I didn’t answer right away, he kept talking. “Look, just trust me, okay?”
Then abruptly Carter stepped away from me. He flicked open his blue Collab jacket and pulled out my shiv. Flipping it over in his hand, he held it out to me, handle first.
It was the second time he’d given me back my weapon.
“Here,” he said, nudging it toward me. “Take it. If you have this, will you come with me? Just somewhere I can really explain. If I don’t convince you, I’ll let you walk away.”
I took the shiv, holding it close to my side. “I’d feel better if I had the tranq gun, too,” I muttered.
“Bet you would.” He actually chuckled. “But a Collab and a Green walking across campus after curfew is suspicious enough, even if she’s not the one holding the rifle.” He swung the rifle off his shoulder, popped open the chamber, and removed the dart. “Look, I’ll take the dart out, then you know I can’t tranq you again.”
I snatched the dart out of his open palm, dropped it onto the sidewalk, and crushed it beneath my shoe before he had a chance to stop me.
He just looked at me, flabbergasted. “What the hell, Lil? What if I need that later? Collabs are only issued two at a time.”
I smiled. “That’s how I know I can trust you not to shoot me in the back again.”
He gave a beleaguered sigh and gestured for me to start walking.
I felt better with him weaponless and with the shiv in my hand. I still couldn’t beat him in a physical fight—not without trying to kill him—but at least things were a little more equal now. Still, I kept a couple of feet between us, but he didn’t try to grab me again. He led me to a drab building squatting on the edge of campus, just past the water tower. It wasn’t far from where we’d been, but the walk felt interminable. With every step, my logical mind took back a little more real estate in my brain.
At this moment, the only thing I could do was hear him out. The first door he tried when we reached the building didn’t open, but he walked around the side, tried another, and jimmied it somehow, and it swung open. I didn’t see exactly what he did to the knob, which was frustrating, because that might have come in handy later.
It turned out to be some sort of maintenance building. A hallway led to an enormous open room filled with massive equipment chugging away in the background, all pipes and steam and meters and whatnot. It must have been the air-conditioning building for the whole campus. By the door we entered, there was a deserted break room.
Carter reached around and flicked on the overhead fluorescents, which flickered dully to life to reveal a sink and cabinetry along the outside wall, some storage lockers, a time punch, and a long, scarred table surrounded by cracking vinyl chairs. Against the far wall stood a pair of vending machines. The light on the Coke machine was still on, as it dutifully chilled the drinks inside, patiently waiting for some long-dead maintenance guy to come plug in his buck for an ice-cold can of soda.
After all these months on the Farm, I’d assumed that every corner of the place had been picked clean of anything valuable. A swarm of locusts had nothing on us Greens. If there was something we could eat or trade or use, I thought we’d found it. But apparently, much as we had Dr. Estleman’s stash of birth control pills, we’d overlooked the maintenance buildings.
Entranced, I crossed the room to stand before the machines, for a moment all the angst and fear of the past twenty-four hours receding into the background of my mind.
Some emotion that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in months—nostalgia maybe—clutched at my heart as I stared through the glass at the neat rows of sodas and snacks. I pressed my hand to the glass, feeling like I was looking through a portal to another world, one sweetened by candy-coated chocolate and high-fructose corn syrup.
We had junk food aplenty on the Farm, but it was the same thing every day. I’d eaten so many damn corn chips they didn’t even taste right anymore.
I heard Carter moving to my right and I jerked away from the machine. Carter slid out one drawer after another, digging around for something. After a few minutes of searching, he triumphantly held up a clear plastic cup with change rattling around in the bottom. Walking toward me, he poured the money out into his palm, picking over it.