“Yeah, no problem.” The sound of friend rings nicely in my ears after the talk Jay and I just had. It still lands pretty false, but we’ll get there. At least with Jay, I feel like I can trust him. He’s hard to read, but patient and earnest. I can work with that. Besides, now that we’ve talked, I actually want to get to know him better.
Jay glances at me and Lai before reluctantly following Amal down one of the hallways. He probably thinks the two of us will be at each other’s throats as soon as he’s gone. He might not be wrong.
“We’re holding a core group meeting in an hour,” Seung says before Jay and Amal are even out of sight. “We’ll catch you up on everything. We need your input on a number of matters, so it will likely take some time.”
“Got it,” Lai says. Suddenly, she looks a lot more tired. I don’t know what all she has to give her “input” on, but if the number of people who stopped us on our way here is anything to go by, she’ll probably be in that meeting for the rest of her life. “I’m just going to show Al around a bit and then I’ll head over.”
“I’ll let the others know.”
“Thanks.”
Seung nods, then heads off down one of the hallways.
Lai turns to me. “I’ll give you the grand tour, then. Just stop me if you have any questions.”
For the next half hour, she leads me through the confusing maze of underground tunnels as she explains more about the Amaryllis Order and their goal of establishing peace between the gifted and ungifted and how they’re trying to do that, but honestly, I barely listen. I’m too distracted by the place and trying to remember where to go for food and the bathroom. Besides, the main point is they want peace, right? It’s not like the details have anything to do with me.
Lai sighs the sigh that means she’s trying to hold back her anger. “Could you at least try to care?”
“Is there a reason I should?” I ask. “You kept something this huge a secret from me for so long, dumped it on me all at once, and now you expect me to be impressed or something? You should’ve just taken us here from the beginning—so why didn’t you?”
“Because I knew better than to trust you with this,” Lai snarls. It’s not like her to get so angry so fast. “You’re mad at me for not telling you about the Order, but then when I try to tell you about it, you won’t even listen. You don’t get it, do you? How important all this is to me or how different it is now without Paul here—” She clamps her mouth shut and turns her back on me. “Look, just don’t get in anyone’s way while you’re here.”
Guilt rings through my chest. Paul isn’t here because I went back to try to kill my brother at that ambush—which I failed to do, and then Paul was killed when he and the others came to help me instead of retreating.
No, I remind myself, I didn’t ask any of them to come back for me. Their decision, their fault. But even as I think it, I know it’s not true. If it’d been Lai or Jay or Mendel, I would’ve stayed, too. It isn’t fair for me to blame anyone else. It was my fault. And it wasn’t even worth anything in the end.
I follow Lai through the tunnels. Neither of us says anything, and I don’t know if I want either of us to. The silence sucks, but I know I’ll only get angry again if we try to talk.
We end in a small bedroom. There’s just a cot in the corner, and a dresser and desk. Everything looks like it’s about a good kick away from collapsing into a pile of tinder.
“You can stay here,” Lai says. Her back is still to me, and I wonder if she’s dealing with the same problem of speaking without letting her emotions explode out. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the room next door, and Jay will be on the other side. It’ll take a while to get used to this place and remember how to get around, but you’ve got time.”
“Right,” I say. “And now?”
“Now nothing.” She crosses her arms, still facing away from me. “I’ve got business to take care of. Jay is helping with the startup of our new underground farm, and I don’t know how long he’ll be, so just stay here and don’t cause any trouble.”
“You expect me to just sit around and wait until you come get me?” My fury sets my words on fire.
She finally turns around to look at me. “I don’t have time to show you around any more than this—especially when you were hardly paying attention to begin with. You can’t go anywhere without getting lost, and we don’t have the people to spare to babysit you. I said not to get in the way, didn’t I? I didn’t have to bring you here, so stop acting upset when I’m giving you a safe place to go and all I ask in return is that you don’t be a nuisance.”
“Oh, so I should be thankful to you, is that it?” The fire that had been in my words before runs wild through my blood. It nearly bursts to the surface, but I hold back my gift. “Thankful you didn’t abandon me, thankful you’re telling me to just sit around and wait for nothing, thankful you’re finally letting me in on something this big after hiding it for so long? You really are a conceited piece of work.”
“I never claimed to be otherwise. If you don’t like it, you can get out.”
I don’t say anything. I’m having a hard enough time holding back my gift—and trying not to storm out of this room and never come back. Because she is right about one thing: I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know how much I could get away with without actually pushing her far enough to kick me out. And if that happened, I’d be as good as dead.
“I’ll come back in a few hours with lunch,” Lai says. She brushes past me on her way to the door. “Don’t do anything reckless until then.”
“Isn’t that your thing?” I ask.
She slams the door shut behind her. Good riddance.
But almost as soon as she’s gone, my anger burns out into unhappiness. I miss training with Lai and laughing with her over stupid things and being able to say whatever I wanted. I miss knowing I could trust her with my back and feeling invincible when we fought together. Why did things turn out like this? Why do I have to question every single little thing she does? Why does it feel like she never trusted me with anything even once? Even after I told her about my past and the fact I was a girl pretending to be a boy for years, she didn’t tell me anything. Not about her gift of telepathy, not about her past with the leader of the rebels, not about this place—nothing.
Then it turns out Mendel’s been hiding his memory loss and was a former rebel. And even though I’m excited to become better friends with Jay, the truth is that he was in on at least some of this Order stuff all along—even if he was just keeping it secret for Lai’s sake, he was still hiding it.
I slam the door back open and storm into the hall. Like hell I’m just going to sit here waiting for Lai to order me around. I’m no one’s dog.
I rush through the halls in an angry haze. It takes a while for me to realize I haven’t been keeping track of where I’m going. When I look back at all the twisting tunnels, I know I’m screwed. Shit. Why’s this place gotta be so confusing?
Whatever. It doesn’t matter.