to do comforting and supportive. It’s not your forte.”
Barclay chuckles, a smile breaking over his face. “No, I guess it’s not. But be serious. Why are you upset?”
I realize my tears have actually stopped. Typically, Barclay had managed to piss me off quickly enough to make me stop crying. But now, thinking about Ben and the way he looked, leaning over and caring for someone else, my eyes sting and I feel the pinch in my chest all over again.
Barclay takes another step closer and reaches out, putting a hand on my arm. He’s not tentative, he’s not afraid I might hit him like someone else would be. I’ve hit him enough that he should be, but he’s not. He’s just here. And Barclay as a normal, caring human being is what makes the dam break.
“The way he was looking at her.” My voice sounds foreign, too high pitched, like it belongs to someone else, some other girl stupid enough to get her heart broken.
“She looks just like you,” he says, pulling me into him. His arms are strong behind my back. “You have to be able to see how this could have happened. IA grabbed another version of you, maybe she was even already in custody. They put her in front of Ben, said she was you, and threatened her if he didn’t help them.”
“I never would have wanted him to help them in order to save me. I would rather have died.”
“Tenner, come on. You think that matters?” Barclay whispers, his hand rubbing my back. “He wasn’t thinking about what you wanted. He was just thinking about you—about the fact that he thought you were being hurt, and it was his fault.”
“And now?” I say. “Why didn’t he save Elijah, and his parents—his brother?”
“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Barclay says. “But you’d better believe we’re going to ask him. We’ll figure this out.”
The words fall out of my mouth—the ones I’ve been keeping inside since we got here. “He didn’t say anything. When he saw me . . . nothing.”
Barclay doesn’t tell me I’m crazy. He doesn’t make excuses for Ben, and he doesn’t agree with me either. He doesn’t even point out the most likely truth—that Ben was in shock and confused. He just lets me be upset.
I don’t know how long we stand there like that, but after a while, Barclay clears his throat. “There’s something I didn’t tell you.”
I’m too exhausted to do anything but slump a little in his arms.
“Here, sit back down,” he says, lowering me back onto the bed. “And get rid of this stupid rabbit. Who knows what kind of radiation it’s got.”
I let him take the stuffed animal from me and toss it back onto the floor, but I notice he’s not wearing the scarf around his face anymore. As if he knows what I’m thinking, he says, “I used the charger to check the radiation levels, and we should be pretty safe if we’re only here a few days, but try not to touch everything.”
I nod. “What do you need to tell me?”
Barclay takes a deep breath. “Weeks ago, Hayley told me she’d heard someone say they had you in custody,” he says. “It was hearsay, and I couldn’t get the clearance to get into the prison and find out whether it was actually true.”
I think of the way Hayley looked at me when we were at Barclay’s mother’s house—like she recognized me. “You knew this might be a possibility?”
“No,” he says with a shake of his head. “I hacked into the database and there was no arrest record, which meant she had to have heard it wrong.”
“And it would just be in the file?” Bad guys don’t always keep records of all the bad stuff they’re doing. Or at least the smart ones don’t. What better way to get caught than to have all your secrets on a server?
“After Eric died, I went to your world, I looked around, and I saw you passing out bottles of water and bags of food with a couple of poor excuses for soldiers. You were there, doing whatever it is you were doing, which meant you couldn’t possibly be in an IA prison.”
I nod, but I don’t know what else to say. Sure, I can be pissed Barclay didn’t know that this is what we might find when we found Ben, but it isn’t his fault. He checked the files and then he checked in on me and saw