Shades of Gray - By Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge Page 0,67

brain.

A hand on her shoulder. She looked up, blinking away tears, to see Iri frowning at her. “Joannie,” she said softly. “You okay?”

“No.” Jet shrugged off Iri’s hand, grimacing through the echoes of pain. “Whatever their brainwashing was, it …” She took a shuddering breath. “I can’t say their name, not if I’m speaking against them.”

Iri stared at her, her gaze unreadable. “You have to tell the world the truth.”

“Amen,” said Frostbite.

“Don’t you get it? I can’t. I literally can’t say anything about it!” She clenched her fist, and Shadows seeped between her fingers.

“Why not?” Frostbite asked. “I can, and they screwed with my mind more than anyone’s.” He shouted, “Corp sucks ass! Corp can blow me! Fuck Corp!” Then he grinned at Jet. “See?”

Iridium said, “Maybe it has to do with your Shadow power?”

“This is pointless,” Jet snarled. “So what that I can’t say the name? You know who I mean. Moore was a mole. Night had leaked code-black files to Moore for Light only knows how long, and Moore took that information and went to Everyman.”

“Hey,” Taser said. He was looking down at the street below.

Jet ignored him. “And with Everyman, Moore helped develop or maybe even created this serum that he believes will level the field between human and extrahuman. He hates us. He thinks we’re all time bombs set to explode.”

“He might’ve been right about that,” Iri said. When Jet glared at her, she shrugged. “Maybe he was right, and we’re just damaged goods.”

“Hey,” Taser said again.

“No,” Jet growled. “I refuse to believe that all extrahumans are just wired wrong.” She knew she was doomed to go insane, but the others? No. No. She couldn’t believe that.

Iridium said, “You notice what’s been happening with extrahumans lately?”

“That’s because after years, decades, of brainwashing, we were finally free!” Realizing she was shouting, Jet forced herself to take a breath and lower her voice. “It’s finding out you’ve been a slave only after the collar’s come off. This madness will die down,” she said firmly.

“Joannie,” Iri said slowly, “have you stopped to think about why Corp bothered with the brainwashing in the first place?”

That hit Jet like a punch to the gut.

Frostbite rolled his eyes. “You mean other than them being evil overlords?”

Iridium kept looking at Jet, riddling her with that ice-blue gaze. “Maybe Corp knew we were all screwed up, so they made sure that we’d never turn on them.”

“That backs my evil-overlord theory,” Frostbite said.

Jet barely heard him. In her mind, Martin Moore was whispering to her.

You’re ticking time bombs. The lot of you. Some are just wired to blow before others.

She remembered Dawnlighter during Second Year at the Academy, her eyes and ears leaking blood as she tried to destroy Jet and anyone else in her way.

She thought of Slider, of Nocturne and the other Squadron soldiers who’d gone rabid within hours of Corp’s conditioning shutting down.

Some are wired to blow—

Suddenly cold, Jet rubbed her arms. Martin Moore had been given access to code-black Corp files, to records that had been expunged. He’d leaked a portion of those files to Kidder, and after her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Origins” series on extrahumans had concluded, he’d expressed his gratitude by having her kidnapped and used as a guinea pig for the Everyman serum.

wired to—

What else had been in those files? What had caused him to say that the extrahumans were time bombs?

Jet thought of an article she’d found hidden in Lynda Kidder’s apartment—a file that the reporter had never published in the New Chicago Tribune, even though it was marked as the last in her series. The article tenuously linked Corp-Co to the Icarus fertility clinic in the late 1980s, as well as to disease-control facilities in Hong Kong and Mumbai. In her last article, Kidder suggested that Corp hadn’t merely bought Icarus Biological at the turn of the twenty-first century, but instead had played a larger role.

Martin Moore’s warbling old man’s voice: It’s reasonable to assume that Corp-Co sponsored the fertility project …

Just how much did Corp have to do with extrahuman origins?

What did Corp know about the extrahumans that they themselves did not?

She remembered the teenage girl outside of Everyman headquarters, shoving a key into her hand, telling her to go save the world somewhere else …

“Hey!”

Jet blinked, looked over at Taser, who was pointing to the street.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but the rest of the cavalry’s arrived. And they’re going after the sewer-mutant norms.”

Jet raced over to the edge and looked down. Sure enough, there