Even my head hurt by the end of that, but Carter appeared to be having the time of his life.
Jin’s mouth opened and closed a few times, as though he couldn’t even string together a coherent response before he shook his head. “That notwithstanding, you’ll be expected to attend a few meetings just for scouts. Check your phones—you’ll have the dates and times. They are mandatory.”
Carter offered a mocking salute, which must have reached Jin’s threshold because he turned and walked away without another word, fast enough to constitute fleeing.
Even after he left, Carter’s smile didn’t dim. “Well, that doesn’t bode well. If he came to tell us that, we were a newer addition to the scouts. I think you might just be right, Shear—they want us dead.”
“I told you,” Shear answered, the deadpan response saying he wished people would just listen to him more often instead of arguing.
I expected Carter to say something about that not being good, about it being a problem, but instead?
He just grinned wider, appearing honestly pleased for once. It wasn’t his sarcastic smile, not the one he used when hiding his true feelings. Instead, it made it seem as though he’d found something that made him happy for once. “Finally, some fun.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Yun
I really hated this asshole. The crook of my arm hurt from another vial of blood, and despite the fact they’d given me supplements, I’d grown more fatigued over these damned sessions. Each time, they took more blood. Never enough for Kenyon to notice, of course, but just enough for me to gradually turn anemic.
The blood tests weren’t fun, but they were hardly the worst of it. Instead, it was the way he screwed with my head, it was the corruption he tested on me that got to me.
He had me guide test cubes, even past the point that my powers easily handled them, as though trying to find my threshold.
“Interesting,” he said as I staggered backward, barely catching on the exam table to keep me from ending up on the ground.
I knew for a fact Mr. Yorn wasn’t about to help me—not that I wanted him to. The idea of his hands on me in any way turned my stomach.
Funny that people thought of Shear as being empty, when the man before me epitomized that. He might look more normal, have the ability to hide his brokenness, but seeing him as I had, I knew he lacked anything real or human inside of him.
Had it ever been there? It was hard to think that someone could reach this state if they ever had something warm or kind inside them. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that, becausethat made me think anyone could turn into that, given the right circumstances.
I preferred thinking that he’d been born damaged, that he’d never had a shot, that a monster like this was an anomaly and nothing more. Even Corsa had been broken by corruption, doing what he’d done because he’d changed at a fundamental level.
Mr. Yorn?
I had no idea, and I was pretty sure no answer would truly make me feel better.
“You appear to take in corruption at an exceptional speed. At first I thought it made you stronger, as though perhaps you were a higher rank than S.”
“There aren’t higher ranks.”
“Of course there are, but they are rare, and so far we’ve only observed them in espers, not guides. You’re not stronger, though, simply different.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He turned toward me, holding another blasted testing cube in his hand. He didn’t give it to me, though. Instead, he shifted it in his hand, rotating it using his fingers like some fidget toy. “Think of it like a lake. You can measure the depth of a lake, correct? And if there was a lake where you dropped a measure and it went down, much farther down than you thought, you might at first assume that lake was simply far deeper than other lakes, far deeper than you expected. That would be like thinking you are a higher rank than S.”
“But I’m not just a deep lake?” I didn’t think I was keeping up, but I tried.
“Exactly. Instead, picture that lake has a cave system beneath it. It has a basin, that contains a normal depth, but there is a crack inside of it, and that crack leads deeper in a twisting, turning space. That doesn’t make the lake deeper overall. You have a cave system inside of you, a broken space placed thereby the corrupted you guided. His energy caused it, and because of that, corruption doesn’t pool normally in your ‘lake.’ It sinks beneath there, into that fractured space inside of you. That is why it rushes so quickly and why you can take so much more.”
I frowned, trying to work out what that meant. I thought I understood it, and in some—absolutely horrible—ways it made sense. I recalled the pain from guiding Corsa, the way it had burned, like he’d seared me, like a flame had licked along every nerve ending inside of me. Was that when it had happened?
When he’d fundamentally changed me at such a basic level?
We’re bound.
His words haunted me, how true it seemed, how every piece I discovered led me to think we were far more entwined than I had ever wanted.
