Sometime after we return to our table, Marcus swaggers over. I notice the red bruises on his knuckles. Since no one has complained today about being knocked around by him, I'm guessing he's been practicing his power on something other than human beings. "I hear you three have been busy bees. You found people like me?"

"Who told you that?" I ask.

"I have ears everywhere. With great power comes some pretty great perks."

Willow snorts, holding in a laugh. "I don't think that's how it goes."

"Move over," he says to Carson. "I want to have a word with Rose."

"You can talk without needing to sit down," Carson says.

Marcus hesitates like he didn't think he'd encounter defiance. I expect him to grab Carson by the back of his shirt and toss him out of his chair, but he surprises us by grinning. "Well, look at that. Kid's got backbone."

"Err, thanks. I think." Carson slips out of his seat. "Just make it quick."

"You're coming back with me," Marcus says to me. "The group is starting to wonder why you've been avoiding them."

He makes it sound like I was ever friends with any of them. "I'll pass."

"You'll pass?" he asks, lifting his eyebrows.

"I mean, Rudolph is dead," I say in a neutral, non-threatening tone. No reason to antagonize him any further. "We don't need your protection anymore."

The gloating look returns, which means he thinks he's won somehow. "I'm surprised you'd back out of the deal so quickly. Don't you remember how you threw yourself at me and begged for my attention?"

One of the girls sitting on the other side of our table snickers. Heat rises up my neck. Protesting his ridiculous claim will draw more attention to it, so I settle for a glare. "You're annoying me."

He puts his elbows on the tabletop and leans in. "Stop fighting me, and I won't anymore. Problem solved."

"Is this how you solve your problems? By strong-arming people into agreeing with you?"

"Only when they're wrong."

I don't realize I'm close to grinding my teeth until I catch Willow's expression. She seems mystified by what's happening. I wonder if I look as pathetic as I feel, bickering with Marcus like I do want his attention.

"I get it," Marcus says when I don't answer. "You don't want to break up the nerd pack. But your friends will just have to under—"

"Ahhhh!"

I swivel around just as a tall girl leaps at Marcus. She hacks a butter knife at Marcus's neck. He jumps back and almost succeeds in dodging the attack, but the blade cuts through his upper arm. He loses balance and lands on the floor, but she's not done. She throws herself on top of him, stabbing at him while he tries to restrain her arms.

Buzzcut grabs her by the waist and hauls her off Marcus. She fights him like she's possessed. The fingernails of her free hand dig into his forearm, drawing blood. Buzzcut hisses and releases her, but not before a few other guys leap into action and immobilize her.

Marcus is holding his bleeding arm. He looks like he's in pain, but he also looks furious. "You better have a good reason for pulling that blade on me."

The girl is still except for her heaving chest and her wild dark-brown eyes. Her throat moves when she swallows. "People like you. You don't belong here."

"Is it just me or was that super racist?" Carson stage-whispers to Willow.

My muscles tighten when Marcus steps toward her. Rudolph flashes through my head, spurring me into action. "Don't hurt her," I say. "Something is wrong with her."

"Clearly."

I approach her with slow movements. She watches me, chin trembling. "Are you okay?"

"He's not supposed to be alive," she murmurs. "I have to stop him or something bad will happen to me."

"No one is going to hurt you."

She lets out a sob and resumes struggling. "You're wrong. It's hurting me. It's in my head—I can feel it." She pulls an arm free of the guy holding her and clutches her head. "My head is killing me. It doesn't belong in my body."

"What doesn't?"

"Whatever they put inside me!"

She bursts into tears. Startled, the boys restraining her step back, allowing someone else to reach her side. The newcomer's plump face is etched with sympathy, but there's fear in the back of her eyes. She's afraid of her friend, and rightly so. No one in their right mind would do what she just did.

"It's okay, Harper. You'll be fine."

"You don't understand."

"I do. You just need to rest and then you'll feel better. Come with me."

Harper's face goes slack. She nods, though the glazed look in her eyes suggests she's hundreds of miles away. Her friend circles an arm around her shoulders and leads her away.

"What happened to her?" I ask the friend as she walks by us.

"Beats me," she answers. "Harper was with us all morning. She went to use the bathroom ten minutes ago, and that was the last time I saw her. I don't know what's going on."

"Crazy bitch," Eli mutters when they're gone, bending down to pick up the knife.

One by one, the onlookers drift away. The immediate danger seems to have passed, but worry holds me in place. Marcus scowls after Harper, ignoring the stream of blood running down his arm. It drips on the floor in a small puddle. "How did she get that knife?"

"Probably during kitchen duty," Eli answers.

"That'll have to change. We're going to give people pat-downs any time they're finished with kitchen duty from now on. Make sure no one else is walking around with a weapon." He nods to two of his cronies standing nearby. "Take the crazy girl to the white room."

"She's upset," I protest. "Locking her up isn't going to help her."

He gives me a hard stare. "Did you miss the part where she tried to kill me? Or what about when she started talking like she belongs in the nuthouse?"

"She isn't herself. Let her friends calm her down before you decide to put her in your own version of a mental asylum."

Marcus's features turn even darker. The look in his eyes is a mixture of annoyance and deep-seated anger. He opens his mouth, probably to insult me or maybe sentence me to join Harper in the white room, when a familiar alarm stops his words.

I glance at the clock on the closest screen. It reads 00:00:00. With all the distractions today, I forgot about the countdown and what it possibly means: another trip to the white room. How many more kids will end up like Marcus—or like Harper?

Marcus looks at his bracelet with a perplexed look. It's the only one that's not beeping. "Guess this means I'm off the hook."

It makes sense. If the Takers want to awaken some strange power inside us, they've already accomplished that with him. As everyone rushes toward the gym, I hold back. "Don't do anything while we're gone," I tell him. "Please."

"Now where would you get that idea?"

"Marcus," I sigh.

"For someone who acts like she hates attention, you just can't stop yourself from taking the spotlight, can you?"

He's right. You'd think everything Sam has taught me would make me run from confrontation, but the longer I spend time in this place, the harder it is to be myself. It makes me wonder about the person I am—the person I could've been had Sam not come into my life.

Everyone's almost through the doorway to the gym, their voices fading as they disappear around the corner. My beeping feels louder and more incessant, but I have to make sure that Marcus won't go after Harper while we're gone.

"I'm just saying. Don't do anything you'll regret later."

I don't wait for his response. I slip past him and head straight for the gym, more apprehensive about what will happen while I'm gone than what waits for us in the white room.



The second round of noise treatment is worse. More intense. When the lights go off and the noise overtakes us, I curl up on the cramped floor and pray for it to end. Afterward I have a headache so intense I can't walk straight. It takes several minutes before I regain full hearing and another hour before the nausea wears off.

If the Takers hoped more of us would have seizures, it worked. Nine people this time, but they don't get powers immediately. I know because Willow, Carson, and I spend the rest of the afternoon talking to them.

Marcus doesn't go near Harper, who seems to have calmed down enough to rejoin her friends. He mostly behaves himself the rest of the afternoon, sticking instead to issuing commands and bothering people—especially me—when he becomes bored.

I bear the annoyance for the sake of maintaining peace. So I'm caught off guard when, sometime in the afternoon, Harper's friend races into the cafeteria, screaming hysterically. Blood stains her hands and white t-shirt. "Harper—Oh God, it's Harper," she cries.

I hover on the edge of the gathering crowd, my head spinning with wild scenarios. A skinny guy grabs the girl's arms and shakes her. "What happened?"

"She's dead!" the girl sobs. "I found her in the shower room. I found her body."

The crowd surges as one. I let myself get pulled through the doorway, shepherded down the cramped hallway and to the shower room. I squeeze in after Marcus and circle around to one corner. I need to see her, to make sure her friend is mistaken. She has to be okay.

All hope leaves me the second I lay eyes on her. She's sprawled on her back in the middle of the shower room. Blood pools in the cracks between the vinyl tiles. Her limp hand is holding the silver handle of the knife buried in her stomach.

Murmurs break out as more people squeeze into the shower room. Pablo, one of Marcus's guys, hunkers down beside her body and checks her breathing, then her pulse. His tight features fan my worst fears, but it's his words that confirm them.

"She's dead."

Marcus steps up next to him, his feet positioned apart in a commanding stance. His hard eyes locate Harper's friend as she sobs in a corner.

"Was anyone else in here?" Marcus asks her.

"No. I—I found her alone like this."

"Looks to me like she killed herself," Pablo says.

My skin prickles as I picture Harper sneaking in here, carrying another butter knife she must have stolen from the kitchen. Did she know what she was doing? Or was she so undone by her madness that she thought taking her life was the only way out?

I don't know what could have caused this, but I don't think the Takers planned it. They wouldn't have brought her all the way down here just to drive her to suicide. And if something went wrong with her, it could just as easily go wrong with the rest of us.

Marcus kicks us out of shower room. We go back to the cafeteria and stop near the stairway, huddled together as we watch the kids milling around us.

"What do y'all think she meant when she said they put something in her?" Carson asks.

"Isn't it obvious?" Willow answers, frowning at Harper's friend who is sobbing inconsolably. "She was talking about what the Takers did to us. Her body must have rejected it."

"Or it rejected her," I say.

Carson shudders.

"Either way we have to stick together from now on," Willow says grimly.

I nod. Even if Harper killed herself, there might be more people like her, people whose minds have been twisted by whatever went wrong with her. We can't afford to wander around on our own.

Safety in numbers. There's a concept I never thought I'd embrace.



Marcus strides into the cafeteria half an hour later, flanked by his elite squad, and orders us to file back out of the cafeteria for inspection. Those who protest are quickly subdued with glares and threats from one of the many scary-looking guys with him.

They escort us girls to the gymnasium, and the boys head off to the shower room. I'm glad I'm in the gym group. I can't bear to look at Harper's slack lips or the blood glistening on the floor like fresh paint. My relief deflates when we find ourselves lined up in front of the white room. I know this is for a good cause, but no amount of reasoning can prevent the resurging nausea as I recall that awful ear-splitting noise.

Camille and a pack of her snooty friends take the girls in groups of three into the white room. The door closes each time, and Pablo and another guy I don't recognize stand guard in front of it. Willow and I shuffle closer to the front of the line. I don't know if she's as nervous as I am, but she's not saying anything. I've never realized until now how much I've come to depend on her unending well of optimism.

When Willow and I enter the white room with a third girl, Camille is already in there. I identify the stunning, black-haired one as Janie. She has a smirk that makes me think she'd happily watch someone flay the skin off my back. "Take off your clothes," she says to us.

Willow and I share uneasy glances, but her fingers are already on the waistband of her sweatpants. I steel myself against the dislike directed at me and work on peeling off my clothes. My skin looks splotchy under the intense fluorescent light. Someone giggles. I focus on a black speaker like I've never seen anything more interesting, even though every part of me feels inadequate standing next to Willow's lithe and fair-skinned body.

The girls order us to lift our arms and spin around. They make a pretense of patting us down, pointless since we're standing in our underwear. Janie finally orders us to get dressed. I grab my pants and slide them up past my hips when the door opens. I tense when Eli strides into the room like it's the most natural thing to do, and jerk my t-shirt back on quickly.

"Cap'n wants to know how much longer this will take."

He directs the question at Janie but his gaze is on Willow, who stands with her shoulders bowed forward, focused on flipping her inside-out t-shirt. The barbell in his eyebrow gleams silver under the fluorescent light and draws attention to the darkness in his eyes.

I curl my hands into fists, but before I can say anything, Janie snaps, "Stop fooling around, Eli. Go tell Marcus we're almost done."

Chuckling, he lifts his hands in defeat and slips out of the door. I don't know why Janie jumped to Willow's defense, but I don't question it. Willow and I leave the white room in silence. It's only when we make it into the hallway that I blurt out, "He's an asshole."

She smiles weakly. "You're right about that."

"We have to do something about him."

"No," she replies, her smile dropping. "He hasn't been bothering me lately. I don't want to make this into a big deal. It'll blow over eventually."

I know it's not that simple. But I know she wants me to drop it, so I do.



By the time we return to our blocks that evening, I'm ready to collapse into bed and let everything that's happened today sink in and take mold. Marcus is the last person to enter our block. "Too bad there aren't a lot of places to sleep in this hole or I wouldn't be stuck in here with you people," he says as he walks past us.

He's carrying a butter knife. It's not blood-stained like Harper's was. Maybe he found it on one of the kids during inspection, or maybe he feels the need to keep a weapon handy. Whatever the case is, he doesn't bother explaining himself.

"Try not to hurt yourself," Alec calls after him.

Carson snickers at that. His laughter cuts short, as though he's remembering what happened to Harper and how deadly a butter knife can be.

"Come on, Janie," Camille shouts. "Get in here before the door closes."

Janie peeks out from the block a couple of doors down. She had a seizure today. But that's no excuse to be careless, to mess with the rules the Takers have put into place.

I don't bother talking her out of it.

She makes it inside just as the door slides shut. She and Camille squeal and clutch at each other, thrilled by their act of defiance. Carson rolls his eyes at them and heads for his bedroom. I take a few steps toward mine and stop, my stomach plummeting. There's no way I'll be able to sleep off my headache if Camille and Janie plan to hang out in our room. But putting up a fight over the sleepover means dealing with a bigger headache, so I go to the lounge room instead.

The dent Marcus made when he punched the wall last night has been patched up. I sigh. Marcus didn't break through the wall but the Takers fixed it anyway, as if denying us even the slightest hope. As if reaffirming that there's no way out of here.

"That's a shame," Alec says as he joins me. "I was hoping Marcus's crazy strength would do us some good."

The leather sofa squeaks when I sink onto it. "If only it were that easy."

He takes a seat next to me, his arm draped over the top of the backrest. His fingertips are about two inches away from my shoulder. I grab the TV remote from the coffee table as an excuse to scoot out of range. I flip over to the news stations, but they're blank as always.

I wonder what's going on out there. What the police have dug up about our disappearance. What the world thinks has happened to us.

"How about a comedy?" Alec asks.

"Not sure that'd be appropriate," I whisper, thinking of Harper.

He studies me. I blink back the memories and lay the remote on the space between us. "Your choice."

"You were great today with Marcus and Harper. Taking matters into your hands like that. Maybe you should be in charge."

A laugh escapes my lips. "That's the last thing I want."

"I mean, think about it." Alec turns his body toward me and folds one leg under him. "Marcus listens to you. Most of the people do. You're a natural born leader, you know. You have the smarts, the power to influence others, the strength to lead. If you were calling the shots, I bet a lot of people would follow you. I sure as hell would."

"I can't."

"Why not?" Exasperation saturates his voice, like what he's suggesting is so simple he can't believe I'm not embracing it.

I open my mouth and close it, shaking my head. "Just let it go. Please."

He lays a hand on my shoulder. "You can trust me, you know."

I look at him, startled by the intensity of his green eyes. He looks sincere, but more than that, he looks like every word is resonating from somewhere deep and caring. For such a carefree guy, he seems more genuine than half the people in here.

"It's not that I don't trust you," I say. "It's just . . . it's complicated."

"When life gets complicated, sometimes it's good to unload for a while and just enjoy the simple moments."

I don't know what simple moments he's referring to, other than that it sounds like one hell of a come-on. "Alec, I think you're a good guy, but I can't be what you want me to be. I don't know how to relax or to have fun, so please . . . don't waste your time."

"Is it Marcus?"

I blink. "What?"

"Is he the reason you're pushing me away?"

I give him a confused look. "Marcus isn't exactly someone I try to associate with, in case you haven't noticed."

"You're avoiding the question," he says.

"And you're oversimplifying the situation."

He grins. "Right. It's complicated."

I shake my head again, but a smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. "Maybe I should take a few lessons from you."

"On being amazing?"

"On treating everything like a joke."

He makes a face. "Ouch."

"That's not what I meant," I rush on. "I just don't see you overthinking things."

"Is that what you do?"

I nod. Even admitting this much is a huge step for me. I've never let myself be vulnerable with anyone before, but something about Alec eases my guard, tantalizing me with the promise of companionship and belonging.

Until he leans forward and presses his lips to mine.

It happens so fast I have no time to process it until it's over. He pulls back, looking at me expectantly. "What are you thinking now?"

"I'm wondering why you did that." And without any warning.

"See, there's your problem. You're overanalyzing it." He brings his head closer to mine. "I'm going to kiss you again, and I want you to stop thinking about everything except what it feels like and whether you're enjoying it or not. Though I do guarantee some enjoyment."

"With confidence like that, who could ever say no?" I try to hide my discomfort with sarcasm. Not thinking is going to take more courage than I have. There's too much to consider. Why is Alec doing this? Do I want him to kiss me? Should I let him? How many things could go wrong if he does?

Then I think of everything that's happened since we arrived here: a bunch of people are dead, we've been exposed to dangerous, power-triggering noise, and we're no step closer to finding a way out of here. I spend most of my days tiptoeing around the facility, my muscles knotted with tension because I'm always waiting for something to happen. Something that'll shake the foundation of my world all over again.

Maybe a breather is exactly what I need.

Sam's warnings circle me like vultures, picking at my optimism, but for once, they're not enough to stop me. One thing is, however. "If you're with Camille, I can't do this, Alec. I'm not that kind of girl."

"Nothing's going on between me and Camille," he replies. "I've never touched her."

His eyes are wide and sincere. My gut tells me he's being honest and it's rarely let me down, not about things that matter. Alec is hot and he seems to be attracted to me, and most importantly, I doubt he has ulterior motives. I can't picture him prancing around, bragging to his friends. That seems more like a stunt Marcus would pull.

Alec is grinning when I focus back on his features. "What's so funny?"

"You get this look when you're thinking. Your eyes get squinty and they wander around the room like you're searching for the truth. It's cute."

"You can kiss me."

His grin vanishes. "I—really?"

"Yes," I say gruffly, the tips of my ears burning. I don't know what I'm doing. I've rarely ignored the urge to flee and here I am asking a guy like Alec to kiss me.

I don't resist when he cups the back of my neck and his lips descend toward mine. They're soft and warm. They part against mine as his arm goes around my back, drawing me closer. I rest my hand on his shoulder, not sure if I'm about to push him away or reciprocate the amount of enthusiasm he's putting into this.

Alec sets a slow pace, letting me adjust to the kiss without coming on too strong, but the things he does with his hands and mouth make my stomach flutter. It's unfamiliar and kind of scary, but as I relax more, I start thinking, this isn't so bad.

Until a cold rush of air suddenly replaces Alec's warm embrace. My eyes snap open as he flies off the sofa and crashes onto the floor. Marcus is standing over him, his hands balled into fists and his eyes glimmering with rage. He reaches down and grabs Alec by the collar. "Stay the hell away from her, you cheating bastard."

I'm too stunned to react until he draws back his other arm.

"Marcus, wait," I choke out.

He doesn't seem to hear me. Panic claws at my chest. If he punches Alec in this state, there's no telling what sort of damage he'll do to him.

He just might kill him.