I sit up (it hurts, it hurts, my body hurts) and grab her hand in mine. She startles; I haven’t been touching her at all lately. I don’t like my hands anymore. I used to think they were pretty. Now they look like they belong on someone else’s body. Someone who kills people. “Listen to me. Do not tell them. Don’t tell them you’re seeing more. Don’t tell Clarice. Don’t even think about what you’re seeing.”
“Why? Fia, you’re scaring me. Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Promise me you won’t tell them!”
“I won’t! I promise! What’s going on?”
I drop her hand. “Nothing. And stop trying to see me. You won’t like it.” I walk out of her dorm room.
Down the hall.
Down the stairs.
Doesn’t matter where I go.
Outside the entrance hall I nearly bump into a boy. He’s wearing a coat and he is tall and he belongs black-and-white and shirtless on the wall of a clothing store and his warm brown eyes are completely glazed over. I simultaneously want to kiss him and to get as far away from him as possible. He feels wrong, he feels dangerous; my heart speeds up the same way for him that it did for the stun guns.
Everything here feels wrong all the time. But he feels exciting wrong.
“Hey,” he says, grinning, his eyes tracing over me without apology.
“Hey.” There are no boys here. Not teenagers, anyway. Only men. With weapons. (It hurts, it hurts, my body hurts.)
“James. Keane. James Keane.” He sticks out his hand for me to shake it.
I keep my murderer hands to myself. “Keane as in the Keane Foundation?”
“The very same!”
“I should bash your brains in right now,” I say, but I am too tired to do it.
“You’re the third person to say that to me today!” He winks, then takes my arm and links it through his own. “Why don’t you take me on the grand tour of the secret school.”
“Why don’t you take a walking tour through rush-hour traffic?”
He laughs. “I like you. What did you say your name is?”
“Sofia.”
“Sofia. Soooofia. Sofia, I have done something very bad.”
It is wrong to go with him as he pulls me down the hall toward the empty classrooms. I go anyway. “I’ll bet I’ve done something worse.” Tap tap goes my finger.
“I would love to hear it if you have. But I get to go first. I have”—he looks both ways down the hall in exaggerated caution, then leans in and whispers right in my ear (wrong, wrong, but it doesn’t stop the shivers from going up and down my spine; he is gorgeous, I have never been this close to a gorgeous boy)—“broken into a boarding school for special teenage girls.”
I shove him back, glare. “That’s it? That’s pathetic.”
“It’s not! It’s very, very bad. You see, I brought whiskey with me. Stolen whiskey.”
I yawn, patting my hand over my mouth.
“Stolen from the dean of my college.”
I check the watch I am not wearing for the time.
“After he expelled me.”
I look him straight in the eyes. “I delivered a package bomb that killed two people.”