Pete looked me dead-on. “Because I need you to cut out the microchip I have imbedded in the back of my neck.”
My jaw dropped. The gun drooped a little more. Out of all the words in the world, that particular combination did not once cross my mind. “Now those aren’t words you hear every day,” I said.
He snuffled out a humorless laugh. “Neither is ‘I love you’ from a girl you’re about to make hate you.”
“You-you weren’t gonna kill me?” I edged around his other statement for now.
“Do I strike you as the type of guy who would use a kitchen knife to stab an innocent girl to death? One whom I was just considering making love to two minutes before? Really?” He hit me between the eyes.
I stared at him, unblinking afraid I might be falling for another trick. Tears blurred my vision.
“Would I really be so careless as to leave my fingerprints all over the place?” he continued. “Not to mention the amount of blood a stab wound produces, and the amount of time it would take to cover up such a vicious crime. And my DNA is all over you from our brief . . . interlude.” He looked at me like he was mortally wounded. “Think back, Kate, to all the times we’ve spent together. Use your God-given intuition.” His serene voice went up a pitchy octave. “Do I really appear to hate you or be capable of such malicious violence?”
Pete was either really hurt, or else he was the best actor in the world. It did scare me, because he was so good at everything. My arms were shaking, being both cold and tired. The gun dropped to the point of about his kneecap now. I didn’t want to kill him—even if he was here to murder me.
“If I were really going to kill you, I would’ve shot you up with an overdose of codeine, left the empty bottle of Vicodin on your bedside table, then typed up a suicide note. Everyone knows how crazy you’ve been over losing your brother to The Academy . . . how depressed you’ve been over me leaving. That’s the route I would’ve taken, had I really come here with the intent of killing you.” Pete leveled me with a look. “And you never would’ve seen me coming, nor would you have felt a thing.”
I sank the gun all the way to the ground, crying. My gut was telling me he was telling the truth. My gut better be right.
He swore and tore the hem from his shirt, holding it to the gash in his head.
“You want me to cut a microchip out of your neck, using a paring knife?” I repeated it out loud, just to make sure I got it right.
He nodded at me woefully. I dropped the gun altogether, and my hands, now lightened of their load, were trembling from the enormity of what almost happened. We both stared at them. It was really cold out here, but I was shaking from shock. The wind had picked up, howling mournfully and swaying dead-limbed trees and skeletal bushes around eerily. We stared at each other for a long moment, the bonds of trust quickly regenerating.
“How old are you, really?” I demanded.
A little huff. “I guess that’s as good a place to start as any.”
Pete walked back a few paces to where we’d just tussled in the dirt and slumped down heavily against the elm tree. I followed behind with the gun and set it down before lowering myself, in the same cautious manner, next to him, in case he flinched back or yelled at me. I had hit him pretty hard— a sharp pang of remorse hit me back. But I wouldn’t apologize just yet. There was still that little matter of him saying I would hate him to attend to first. So I waited, teeth chattering in the pale moonlight. He unzipped himself out of his coat and draped it around us both, so I had no choice but to snuggle in.
“Twenty-three this month,” he admitted.
I processed this quietly, doing some swift mental math. Six years older. Not a catastrophe. Not exactly legal either. Honestly, I was a little relieved; he seemed even older than that to me. But I already hated to think of our relationship—precious to my heart—as being illicit.
He had quietly settled into the tree, still as a statue, so I prompted him. “Why were you really sent here? Is there even really a mentoring program?”
“I was sent here to vet your brother for The Academy,” he began, “and there is a mentoring program. But it’s only for a highly specialized sector— PGCs, which your brother was thought to be . . .”—he spared me a sidelong glance—“but no longer is.”
“PGC?”
“Potentially Gifted Civilian.”
“What do you mean by gifted exactly?”
“I mean gifts above and beyond the physical and mental ones that Andrew has,” he said.
“You mean like super-natural stuff?” I was no longer thinking about the cold.
Pete looked at me. He nodded gingerly, one hand holding the dampening rag to his head. I swallowed, my mind reeling with frantic thoughts and questions.
“Like what?”
“Like being able to tell when someone is lying, just by looking them in the eye. Or having really strong feelings about things that usually . . . ”—he shot me an exasperated look—“sway your actions in the right direction.”
“You mean like havin’ intuition about stuff? But everybody has that,” I dismissed.
“Your intuition, Kate, is a mite sharper than the average Joe’s.”
I set that bit of information on the back burner for now. I already knew that about myself, although I never considered it to be supernatural. “Is that why your academy is no longer interested in Andrew . . . because bein’ super-smart and super-talented isn’t enough to earn you a one-way ticket to Elitesville?”
“Pretty much,” he confirmed. “That used to be enough, but more recently, The Academy is after people like you, kids preferably, because it’s easier to indoctrinate and manipulate them.” The disgust in Pete’s voice was unmistakable. “And The Academy is still interested in your brother . . . just not as much. Andrew’s tests for giftedness were negative. He’s just a regular, straight-up golden boy with no extra-special gifts, apart from the obvious intelligence and athleticism.”
We were quiet a moment. The cold came back to me—from the inside. “But what if k-kids,” I stumbled over the word, hyper-aware of our age difference now, “like me don’t wanna sign up for the gifted program?”
He stared into my eyes and said, “They have no choice in the matter.”
“So-so . . . y’all just take them? Snatch them from their beds in the middle of the night?”
“Something like that. If we can’t get them to sign with us—which is highly unusual but does happen from time to time—then we have to go the, er . . . extra mile. As you see, we’re very persuasive. Running into holdouts like you and your father is rare.”
“Isn’t that a little suspicious?—snatching kids from their families. Don’t the parents . . . I dunno . . . alert the police, call the FBI or something? Don’t y’all ever get caught?”
Pete sighed as though I still weren’t getting the gist of it. “Kate, The Academy is a very old and very secretive government institution. It’s also one of the most powerful. If there ever was a whisper of something negative directed our way, it would quickly be squashed.”
“Friends in high places and all that,” I said, trying to grasp the magnitude of what he was saying.