27

27

I was out of breath from running, and the gash on my arm was starting to ache. My heart pounded frantically in my chest.

I couldn’t stop thinking about my doorless room. It made sense that Mom and Dad took the door completely off. I’d destroyed it beyond repair.

But I kept hearing what Julian had said—Guess they didn’t think you were coming back.

It took me a moment to identify the emotion I felt when he said that. I wasn’t sad. Or guilty.

I was proud.

Dad didn’t go out and buy a tough, sturdy door that locked from the outside. Mom didn’t put another cheap one in because she’d feel too guilty asking me to sleep in a room without a door. They didn’t bother, because they knew I wasn’t coming back.

And maybe they just thought I was going to die. Dad had made it clear that he thought that was my fate when I left. But maybe there was a little more to it also. Maybe they knew that I was done, that I was never going to live the life that they’d chosen.

“Are you close?” Julian’s voice was in my ear, the phone still pressed to my cheek. He’d insisted on staying on the phone with me until I arrived.

“Yes,” I lied.

Ahead of me, Adriana pulled open the door of an apartment building. We’d run several blocks to it. Priya and Laila followed her inside. Maddie held the door open for me.

We followed her to the corner of the building and up the stairs, through the door that said it was alarmed. No alarm sounded. We stepped onto the roof.

Adriana pointed. She’d said that she came up to the roof of this apartment building all the time, and you could clearly see my house from here. She was right. I could see the brown roof, the huge tree in the neighbor’s yard, our dead grass. The bars on the windows.

The street was torn up—a scrab hole, cars overturned, even a dead body on the pavement. I spotted several people standing on the roofs of their houses.

“I’m looking out the window and I don’t see you,” Julian said.

“I’m almost there,” I said, still out of breath. “We’d gotten a good distance away, and I don’t have a car.”

Priya pointed at something, and I turned to look. It was a huge black SWAT truck turning onto the street. The vehicle stopped in front of the scrab hole, unable to go around it. Armed police officers piled out.

“Is that . . . ?” Julian’s voice went cold. “I told you what would happen if you called the cops.”

“You did,” I said. “But I don’t think you actually have two-hundred-and-fifty scrabs waiting somewhere.”

“That’s one hell of a bet, Clara. All those people will be dead because of you.”

“No, because of you. But you don’t have them. I saw how sick some of the scrabs are out here. There’s something wrong with MDG’s scrabs, isn’t there? All that stuff they put in their brains is killing them.”

He didn’t reply.

“You said it yourself when you asked if I’d seen the destruction that hundreds of scrabs could do on a neighborhood. That would be catastrophic in a populated area. What I just saw here, in my neighborhood, was maybe fifty scrabs, at most. But you said that you released half of them.”

I watched as the officers surrounded the house.

“I’ve been fighting these things for six months, Julian,” I said. “Do you think I can’t tell when a scrab is sick or wounded or somehow not at full strength? Do you really think I don’t know what it looks like when a nest of over a hundred attacks? More than half would have immediately tunneled underground when you released them at Laurence’s apartment, and there aren’t enough holes for that. Not to mention that I’m extremely dubious about this claim that you can just push a button to release scrabs in some unknown location. Where did you put them? How did you hide them if they’re in a highly populated area? Are they just hanging out somewhere and miraculously no one noticed? I’m not an idiot, Julian.”

The sound of his breathing was the only noise I could hear from his end.

“Tell me the truth, Julian. You don’t have any more scrabs, do you?” I held my breath as I waited. I was so confident that he was bluffing, but my heart still pounded.

He was silent for a long time. “No,” he finally said quietly. I let out a rush of air. “But you didn’t know that for sure. You really just risked the lives of hundreds—maybe thousands—of people on a hunch? You really could have lived with yourself after that?”

“I took a risk, yes. And it could have been a disaster. But it wouldn’t have been my fault. You’re the one making the decisions here. And I’m certainly not going to let you manipulate me into being alone with you.”

“You can make all the excuses you want, but you know that you could have prevented this,” Julian said, his voice shaking. “I came to you for help after my parents died and I apologized to you and I tried to make things right. But you wouldn’t even listen—”

“So you only meant the apology if I accepted it and forgave you for everything? That’s not how apologies are supposed to work.”

I heard a sniffle. “I was drowning and I just needed someone to pull me out and tell me everything was going to be OK.”

“I’m not responsible for you or your choices,” I said. “I am not here to save you.”

“You can’t—”

“Bye, Julian.” I ended the call.