“What does that mean, Kori? How hard did he push you?”

She turned slowly, still clutching the key card, and looked right up into my eyes, her pale hair the only spot of light in an otherwise dim room. “There are some questions it’s not okay to ask. You just found one.”

I held her gaze so she could see the truth in mine. “Fine. I can respect that.” She didn’t trust me, and why should she? “But you left out part of the story. In my school, that kid who tripped and fell? Or maybe got pushed? He got back up and fought until there wasn’t another kid left standing, and he didn’t do it out of courage or a need for retribution. He did it because that’s who he was. He was a fighter, and fighters never back down.”

“Fighters die young, Ian.” She sounded older—she looked older—when she said it.

I nodded, watching her, my blood boiling in fury at whoever had hurt her, in spite of the fact that what I’d come prepared to do would hurt her even worse. “Yeah, sometimes,” I agreed. “But they die fighting.” Yet even as the words tumbled from my lips—words I’d been saying to myself for years—I remembered what she’d said earlier.

Sometimes dying is the coward’s way out. Sometimes living takes guts.

She blinked, but her gaze never wavered. “What the hell are you doing here, Ian? You don’t belong here.”

I could see what it cost her to say that—another difficult truth that probably skirted the very edge of what she was allowed to reveal to a potential recruit. “Neither do you.”

Kori frowned and turned away from me, reaching for the chord hanging down one side of the blinds. “This is what you’ll be helping him do,” she said, her voice hard again, as if she’d turned off whatever I’d seen in her. Like flipping a switch. As if it was that easy.

She pulled the chord and the blinds rose, clattering, to reveal a long observation window looking out over row after row of beds. Gurneys, really. Narrow, thinly padded carts on wheels, each of which held a single body. Or patient, as the hospital gowns seemed to suggest.

“What the hell is this?” Why were they all asleep? Or unconscious? The chills running up my back were so cold and ruthless my spine could have been carved from ice. “Who are they?”

They were alive. I could see the closest of them breathing, chests barely rising and falling. And they were all—every single one of them—attached to an IV bag hanging from a stand to the left of each cart.

“They’re donors,” Kori said, and I glanced at her to find her jaw clenched as she stared out at the sea of bodies. “And that’s all I can tell you.” There were dozens of them. Easily one hundred or more cots, and at the far end of the room was a single nurse in green scrubs, checking the IV bags one by one, stopping occasionally to lift an eyelid and check for…something.

“Can he see us?” I asked, staring at the nurse, who didn’t seem to know he was being watched.

“Nope. One-way glass. He can’t hear us, either, unless you push that button.” She pointed to an electronic panel on the right side of the window. “So, don’t push that button. This is an observation room. I can’t get us in there.” Kori nodded at the glass. “I never had that kind of clearance, and without Abbot’s password, this is useless.” She dropped the key card on the table.

“Donors…” I couldn’t seem to make sense of what I was seeing. “What are they donating?”

“Look back there. The last two rows.” She pointed, instead of vocalizing what she was obviously forbidden to say. And I looked.

“Carts.” They were no higher than the beds themselves, but the one on the end of the second to last row was unobstructed, because the person on the bed next to him was too small to block the view. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.

I squinted a little more and made out something on the cart. A bag of something dark, with something connecting it to the donor’s right arm. A wire or a tube.

Yes, a tube.

“Blood,” I said softly, horrified by the thought. “They’re donating blood.” Blood was dangerous. Blood was power. Putting any of your blood in someone else’s hands was like turning over the key to your home and inviting the monsters in.

“Not just blood. What comes with blood sometimes?” Kori said, and I had to struggle through a fog of confusion and horror in order to look beyond her words to their meaning.

“They’re donating Skills? How is that even possible? Why the hell would anyone ever donate Skilled blood?”

She lifted both brows in surprise. “I never said they were volunteers.”

Words deserted me. The entire concept was unthinkable. “They’re not… They didn’t…?”

“Wake up one morning and decide to open a vein for Jake Tower? No. They were delivered here, for this specific purpose. After being identified and screened by a staff of specialists.”

The implications were revolutionary and terrifying. The methodology was inhumane and unconscionable. The fact that she was showing me this at all…it made no sense. “Jake will kill you if he finds out you brought me here.” She started to argue, but I spoke over her, whispering, as if the chances of us being overheard had suddenly increased, now that I better understood the stakes of the game. “Don’t bother. I know you’re risking your life by bringing me to see something that would send most recruits fleeing. What made you think I wouldn’t have the same reaction?”