Rebel by Amy Tintera Page B

looked younger suddenly, closer to twenty than thirty. He was letting down his guard for me. “I don’t know. I did, at first. But, you know.” His eyes met mine. “After a while the guilt goes away.”
    “Yeah,” I said softly. It did. Callum had made me more aware of that than ever. “But revenge. That didn’t go away.”
    “No.” He leaned forward, resting his palms flat on the wooden table. “I was only seven when I died. I had to spend five years in a holding facility, and for a couple years I got to be part of a special group they experimented on. They’ve been shooting us up with drugs and running crazy tests from the beginning, you know.”
    I shook my head. “I didn’t know.”
    “They had some nasty stuff in the works. Stuff to make us weaker, crazier, all kinds of shit. Half the kids there didn’t even make it to a full facility. It was worse than the large-scale experiments they’re doing now.”
    “My friend died from one of their experiments,” I said quietly.
    His face softened. “The recent one meant to diminish brainpower? Make us more compliant?”
    “Yes. It almost killed Callum, too.”
    “And that still doesn’t make you want revenge?”
    I paused, truly considering it. “Maybe.”
    “I always wanted to get even. I used to stare at Suzanna every day and plot how I would kill her, down to the last detail.”
    “Suzanna Palm? The HARC chairman?”
    “Yeah. We spent a lot of time together.”
    “You did?” I asked in surprise. I’d only seen the chairman of HARC a handful of times during my five years at the Rosa facility. I’d known she was in charge of all HARC operations, but was never totally clear on her role.
    “She runs most of the important experiments herself. She’s the controlling type, can’t delegate.” Micah leaned closer to me, his face serious. “You can’t even imagine the things they’re working on, Wren. And I’ve been gone for years. Those drugs they were developing, they’re probably farther along now. Or ready.”
    “What were they working on?” I asked.
    Micah sighed. “I got a little bit of everything. One of them slowed my reflexes down to where I could barely move. One made everything I saw purple. One made me want to eat humans alive. One slowed down my healing so much it was hours before a wound closed.”
    I swallowed. I’d never considered how lucky I was to have died at twelve, and not earlier. I’d never bothered to ask the other Reboots what they did all those years in the holding facility. “So, after I escaped, I decided it needed to stop. We can’ttrust the humans. Even those rebels who claim to be helping us are just using us so they can get rid of HARC. I mean, they made it pretty clear they didn’t want us hanging around after they helped us escape, right? Who cares if we had families or lives in the city before? Now that we’re Reboots, we’re just supposed to leave and never come back.”
    I nodded.
“I’m not dying for them.”
Desmond had said it to me a couple nights ago, when he tried to convince the other rebels not to help us.
    “I didn’t come to this decision lightly,” he said. “When I got here, I tried to focus more on the reservation, to let go of my anger, but the human attacks were constant. Not even just from HARC. Human stragglers in the area would try to raid the reservation and kill as many as possible. They weren’t scared of us out here like they were in the cities. They hadn’t seen what we were capable of. We put up those signs to deter them, to warn them, and they didn’t listen. The Reboots who left, the older generation? They didn’t want to fight HARC. That’s why they left. They wanted to go live somewhere peacefully and leave the humans alone.” He ran a hand over his face. “And HARC killed every one of them, because they could. I moved the reservation out here so they would know we weren’t hiding or running, but it wasn’t an aggressive move. They showed up and attacked us