Reyes goes still. “Evelyn talked,” she says, talking more to herself than to us. “Of course she has.” Silence stretches, then Reyes exhales. “What do you want to know?”
“Start simple,” Cam says. “The Cicada program. In your own words.”
Reyes closes her eyes for a second, like she’s choosing which nightmare to pull first. Her eyes are steady when she opens them. “Cicada was never just a boarding school with a hospital. It was a behavioral conditioning project. The goal was to engineer obedience.”
My hands curl into fists. “And the kids, they kept underground?”
“Pair-bond trials, they called them dyads. Controlled pairs were matched as closely as possible for genetic markers. They wanted to see what kind of bond they could create under stress.”
Kiera scoffs, “That’s one way to say torture.”
Reyes doesn’t bother denying it. “Stressors included isolation, pain, deprivation, intermittent reward,” she says flatly. “The usual tools. But the variable they cared about most was choice. Given a chance to save themselves or their dyad, what would a subject do?”
My jaw clenches. “And if they chose wrong?”
“Depends on who you ask,” she says. “The investors would say the subject failed. The lead scientists would say the pair wasn’t viable.”
“And you?” Kiera asks.
“I would say…” Reyes hesitates, “We broke another child in the name of science.”
“This matches what Evelyn said,” Kiera mutters.
I keep my focus on Reyes. “How many boys before me?” I ask. My voice comes out quiet, edged. Her eyes flick to mine.
“Sterling…” Cam warns under his breath.
“How many?” I repeat.
Reyes licks her lips. “Officially? Three. Unofficially… more. Some never made it to the logs. They were cut during preliminary screening.”
“And what happened to them?”
“Some were reassigned to other projects. Some were… terminated.” Her voice lacks any emotion, as if these kids were specimens rather than human beings.
Kiera’s hand finds my knee under the table and squeezes hard enough to hurt. I let the pain root me. “And me?” I ask. “Where do I sit on that list?”
Reyes swallows. “You were a dyad candidate before Wade removed Kiera from the program. You arrived after a fatality. They brought you in as the Subject’s replacement before the files were fully updated.”
The new information sits heavily on my chest. “So I was never 012-B; I was the stand-in.”
“You became 012-B."
Kiera’s thumb is still digging into my knee. I cover her hand with mine. “You kept watching us after we left. Why? The program should’ve cut its losses when Wade took me home.”
“The program doesn’t like losing assets,” Reyes says. “Wade took you out of the Nesting House, but he didn’t take you out of the data set. He didn’t remove you to keep you safe. There were complications. You were the only dyad that showed long-term stability. They wanted to see what happened when you were separated from your pairs.”
“We weren’t exactly neighbors with them.”
“No,” Reyes agrees. “But the bond markers persisted on your scans. That alone was enough to keep you on the grid.”
My skin crawls. “Scans taken where?”
“School physicals. ER visits. Routine checkups,” she clarifies. “Anyone tied into the Cicada network could access them.”
Kiera laughs, a sharp, broken sound. “So every time I thought I was getting away from Wade, from them, you were all still reading my charts like a weather report.”
“We didn’t control Wade; half the time, he was the one trying to control us. He needed you to be domesticated before he could sign the finaltransfer. We needed you to be reactive enough to study. It was a constant negotiation.”
