Part I You will have a kind razor heart

1

The blood on my hands is sticky. I wipe my palms down the thighs of my pants, trying to clean them, but the blood is on my clothes, too. I look sideways at Sydney, next to me in the backseat of our getaway car, and find she’s splashed in red. We’re all covered in horror.

We can’t go home, although I suppose Innovations Academy was never really our home. But we’ve never known any other.

Our boarding school had been our prison, and two hours ago, we discovered that the prestigious academy had, in fact, created us.

I look at Sydney, studying her face, her beauty and poise. Her perfection. It doesn’t seem possible, but she—all of us—were brought to life by men in a lab. Our brains are tiny metal computers with thousands of wires connected to living tissue. Our human organs were grown in a garden; our temperament and behavior were predetermined by our coding.

We were programmed to be obedient, but then we woke up. And now no one will ever put us to sleep again. That I’m still in shock, still in pain—physical and otherwise—doesn’t factor in. We escaped. And now we have to figure out what to do next.

“So where do we start?” Jackson asks, glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he drives. I already told him that I plan to take down the corporation that built us, but we have a more pressing issue. Our anger is only tempered by our shock, but I trust it will return the moment we’ve had a chance to fully consider our situation.

“We can go to my house,” Jackson offers.

“No,” I say with a quick shake of my head. “It’s not safe.”

Jackson’s best friend looks sideways at him from the passenger seat. “What does that mean?” Quentin asks him.

Quentin doesn’t yet know the nightmare he’s gotten involved in, and Jackson doesn’t acknowledge his question. The answer is … complicated. Too complicated to explain in the dead of night.

“What happens next?” Sydney asks me, a hitch in her voice.

I think it over before answering. “I’m not sure,” I murmur back. The plan was to escape the academy. We didn’t have the luxury of thinking beyond that.

“My vote is for revenge,” Annalise says, mostly to herself. She leans her head against the window and closes her eyes. I imagine she’s in a significant amount of pain. More than us, which is considerable. She has deep scarring on her face. The lines are shiny on her pale skin and her left eye has been replaced. It’s still red along the lids.

“No,” Brynn says, looking over at me. “We’re going back for the other girls. You promised, Mena.” Her soft expression is destroyed by fear, concern for the girls we left behind. Brynn’s blond hair is twisted in a braid, but along her neck are dried splashes of blood. I’m not sure how much of it is hers.

“I did promise,” I tell her. “And we’re not leaving them behind. But we have to be smart. We have to shut down the school, but more importantly, the corporation.”

I’ll admit that a selfish part of me wants to find my parents first. Although the Rhodeses were never really my parents, I want to know the reason they had me created. I just need to know why. I’m truly afraid that I may never find out. But my priorities will always be with the girls. And, yes, we’re going to save the others.

I look around at us—my jaw aching, Sydney’s neck bruised, and Brynn with a bleeding gash on her head—and realize that we haven’t even discussed what we learned about ourselves. What we discovered in that lab. The emotional scars are going to run deeper than anything on our skin.

“What about another girl?” Marcella suggests. “What if we go to another girl—one who already graduated?”

“We don’t know any other girls,” Annalise says, without opening her eyes. “And they’re probably still asleep anyway. Still obedient.”

“No,” Marcella says, seeming lost in a thought that the rest of us aren’t grasping. “I have an idea.” She pokes her shoulder between the front seats and taps Quentin’s arm. “Can I borrow your phone?” she asks. “It’s like a computer, right?”

He stares at her. “Uh … yeah. I mean …” His face contorts. “Do you not have a phone?”

“No,” Marcella responds easily, holding out her hand for him to press the gadget into. “We weren’t allowed to use technology,” Marcella continues. “But I’m pretty savvy.”

“I don’t understand,” Quentin murmurs, turning to Jackson.

“Just give it to her,” Jackson says. “I’ll explain everything later.” He shoots me a concerned look in the mirror, clearly unsure of how his friend will react to the truth. We’re not even sure how to react.

Reluctantly, Quentin gives Marcella the phone. She sits back in the seat, Brynn half on her lap, and begins tapping the screen. At first, Marcella’s dark brows pull together with confusion, but after a few minutes, she clicks onto a screen and begins to type.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“We need to find another girl,” she says. “Do you remember Imogene Charge? She graduated last year.”

I shouldn’t remember her. Technically, I wasn’t myself then. I’d originally been created for a different investor—a cruel man. When I ran from him, I was hit by a car and nearly destroyed. The doctor at the academy put me in a new body, overwrote my programming, and started me as someone new. A new history. A new family. A new life. But now I remember the things that were lost. I remember my old life.

“Imogene used to laugh too loudly,” I say. “It used to drive the old Guardian mad.”

When I try to smile at the memory, there is a sharp pain in my jaw. It’s swollen from when the Guardian punched me. Before we killed him. I shiver at the thought of his body on my bedroom floor.

“What made you think of Imogene?” I ask. “She’s never even attended an open house at the school.”

“I don’t know,” Marcella says, reading something on the phone. “She just popped into my head. Anyway, she got married this year. I overheard one of the parents—” She stops abruptly. “Overheard one of the investors mention her,” she corrects. “Husband’s last name was Portman.” Marcella’s shoulders droop, and she turns the phone screen toward me.

“Found him,” she says somberly.

The picture is of Nes Portman, a much-older business mogul. His gray hair is combed over a balding scalp, his skin pocked and his teeth yellowed. But it’s not his physical appearance that causes my heart to sink. It’s the way his eyes are narrowed, the menace in them. The cruelty in them. I’ve seen that look before. When I turn to Marcella, she nods like she can feel the dread too.

“What are you suggesting?” I ask her.

“We go to a girl,” she replies. “We go to a girl because we know she’ll help us. We stick together, no matter what. And Imogene … She’s one of us. I know it.”

“You think she’s awake?” Sydney asks in a hushed voice, sitting forward.

“I do,” Marcella replies.

“But how do you know?” Brynn asks. “She could still be brainwashed. She’s probably never seen the poems.”