“… just out of the blue,” Mason is saying.
“But why would he contact Sydney?” Cassie asks. “She’s not even active anymore.”
I hold my breath at the mention of Sydney’s name.
Cassie wasn’t always Mason’s partner. Sydney was with us for five years, until I was almost ten. I loved her like the mother I never had, but she fell in love with another Disciple and got pregnant. She left the program and her fake family for a real one, and I haven’t spoken to her since.
According to the rules, when you’re out, you’re out.
Even knowing that, I skulked around the house for months after Sydney left, pretending to be okay with everything but crying into my pillow at night and begging Mason in private to bring her back. Even fully briefed on the rules, I felt discarded like an old pair of shoes.
Feeling icky for eavesdropping, I start down the stairs again, but this time I stomp loudly so they have a little warning. Mason shares most things with me about the program, but even so, the look on his face when I enter the lab tells me not to ask questions. At least not right now.
“Can I go to Audrey’s house?” I ask instead.
Mason raises his eyebrows, and the usually emotionless Cassie looks my way, surprised.
“This is the girl you went to lunch with?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“She invited you over?”
“No, I’m going to show up unannounced,” I say sarcastically. “Of course she invited me!”
“Okay,” Mason says, looking around at the explosion of papers and science stuff on his workspace. “What time?”
“Now-ish,” I say.
“Give me twenty?”
“Okay.”
I head back upstairs, where I text Audrey, then shower without washing my hair. I throw on shorts and a ratty T-shirt and flip-flops because apparently Omaha didn’t get the memo that it’s fall.
Mason makes me agree to eat something before we leave the house, so I inhale half of a sandwich and crunch a few baby carrots. On the way out, I grab a handful of red grapes. The grapes are sweet and delicious; I can’t help but shovel them into my mouth as Mason chauffeurs me to Audrey’s. I don’t really feel like talking—not like I could, anyway—so I let my mind wander. Grapes in my cheeks, I end up remembering the third time I died.
I was five and a half years old, and I went to full-day kindergarten because Mason read some study that said it was better for kids. Anyway, there I was at kindergarten, and maybe I skipped breakfast, maybe I burned through my energy at recess, or maybe I was just a weird kid. All I know is that I was famished at lunch that day. I wolfed down my PB&J, then started in on my grapes, stuffing more than a handful in at once.
A monstrous red grape got lodged in my windpipe.
Since I was at a table alone—my one semi-friend was home sick that day—no one noticed. Apparently, the sounds of a choking girl are no match for a rowdy elementary school cafeteria. I was on the floor by the time a fifth grader happened to pass by.
Sydney arrived in her paramedic outfit to load me into the borrowed ambulance, where Mason was waiting to Revive me. I don’t remember most of it, of course.
I woke up freezing and wheezing, throat sore from whatever Mason used to dislodge the grape. My lungs burned from the sudden return of oxygen, and for the first few minutes, I was completely confused as to what had happened. Mason hugged me for the first time when he told me that I’d died again.
For that, I remember death number three, strangely, with a tinge of fondness.
“This probably goes without saying, but you have to be incredibly careful with new friends,” Mason says, interrupting my thoughts.
“I know,” I mumble around the grapes in my mouth.
“She’ll want to know about your background… your parents… where you lived before.”
I swallow my food. “I know what to say.”
“I know you do,” Mason says.