But I hesitated, because next to his feet, on the ground between us, was Chubs’s copy of Watership Down. And I kept thinking about this one line, the one that had made me so angry the first time I read it as a little kid.

Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate.

In the book, the rabbits had come across this warren—this community—that accepted food handouts from humans in exchange for accepting that some of them would be killed by the same humans in return. Those rabbits stopped fighting the system, because it was easier to take the loss of freedom, to forget what it was like before the fence kept them in, than to be out there in the world struggling to find shelter and food. They had decided that the loss of some was worth the temporary comfort of many.

“Will it always be this way?” I asked, drawing my knees up to my chest and pressing my face against them. “Even if we find East River and we get help—there’s always going to be a Lady Jane around the corner, isn’t there? Will it even be worth it?”

The will to accept their fate. In our case, that fate was to never see our families again. To always be hunted and chased down to every dark pocket of earth we tried to hide inside. Something had to give—we couldn’t live that way. We weren’t made to.

I felt him drop a heavy palm on the back of my head, but it was a long time before he could piece together his thoughts.

“Maybe nothing will ever change for us,” he said. “But don’t you want to be around just in case it does?”

I don’t know if it was the smoke from the campfire that calmed me, or the sudden reappearance of Zu, who had come back from scouting a nearby campsite, making sure it was deserted. As she wrapped her arms around my waist, the boys began to pool together what was left of the food in Betty.

“So that’s how you figured out the clue,” Liam said. “You saw a memory of it?”

I nodded. “Not so impressive now, is it?”

“No—no, that’s not what I meant,” Liam said, adding quickly, “It’s just I’m trying to imagine what the inside of that kid’s head looked like, and the best I can come up with is a swamp filled with alligators. It must have been terrible.”

“Not as terrible as slipping into someone’s head I actually like,” I admitted.

“Did you?” Chubs said after nearly ten minutes of silence. Liam was busy testing out whether he could use Betty’s car key to pry open the lids of the fruit and soup cans.

“Did I what?”

“Did you ever get inside our heads?” he finished. The way he asked reminded me of the way a kid would ask for the end of a bedtime story. Eager. Surprising—in all of my nightmares about them finding out the truth, I had pictured Chubs taking it the worst.

“Of course she’s in our heads,” Liam said, his arms straining to open the can’s lid. “Ruby is one of us now.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Chubs huffed. “I just want to know how it works. I’ve never met an Orange before. We didn’t have any at Caledonia.”

“That’s probably because the government erased them all,” I said, dropping my hands in my lap. “That’s what happened to them at Thurmond.”

Liam looked up, alarmed. “What do you mean?”

“For the first two or three years I was there, we had every kind of color, even Red and Orange,” I said. “But…no one really knows why or how it happened. Some people thought they were taken away because of all the trouble they caused, but there were rumors they were being moved to a new camp where they could do more testing on them. We just woke up one morning and the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows were gone.” And it was just as terrifying for me to think about now as it was then.

“What about you, though?” Chubs asked. “How did you avoid getting bused?”

“I pretended to be Green from the start,” I said. “I saw how scared the PSFs were of the Oranges, and I messed with the scientist who was running the classifying test.” It was a struggle to push the rest of the words out. “Those kids were…they were so messed up, you know? Maybe they were like that before they got their abilities, or they hated themselves for having them, but they used to do terrible things.”

“Like what?” Chubs pressed.

Oh God, I couldn’t even talk about it. I physically could not speak. Not about the hundreds of mind games I watched them play on the PSFs. Nothing about the memory of having to scrub the floors of the Mess Hall after an Orange told a PSF to walk in and open fire on every other soldier he saw there. My stomach turned violently, and I could taste it, the metallic bitterness of blood. Smell it. I remembered how it felt to scrape it out from where it was packed painfully under my nails.

Chubs opened his mouth, but Liam held up a hand to shut him up.

“I just knew I needed to protect myself.”

And, truthfully, because I was scared of the Oranges, too. There was something wrong with them. With us. It was the constant chatter, the flood of everyone else’s feelings and thoughts, I think. Eventually you learned how to block some of it out, to build up a thin wall between your mind and others’, but not before everyone else’s poisonous thoughts were in there, staining your own. Some spent so long outside of their own heads that they couldn’t function right when they finally had to return their own.

“So now you see,” I said, finally, “what a mistake it was to let me stay.”