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hand.
    “Your father sent me,” he says. “To get you to safety.”
    “Safety? He tried to kill us.” And he’s dead now. Either dead or a Shredder.
    Burn towers over me, but I square my shoulders.
    “You’re lying. What do you really want?” I narrow my eyes as my curse starts to build.
    “Glory!” Cal’s voice travels down the alleyway, and I spin to see his lean silhouette at the mouth of the Hub.
    “Down here,” I call out and he runs toward us.
    I turn back to Burn but he’s gone. Vanished. I spin and look up to see a shape near the top of one of the ladders, but it’s impossible for him to have climbed so quickly. A shadow moves near the roof of another building. That can’t be him, either, so I look farther down the alley. It’s like he evaporated—or I imagined him in the first place.
    The expunging must have brought back bad memories of my father, not to mention the shame and horror of discovering my own curse. I had to have been hallucinating. The alternative’s much worse.
    I’m still searching for evidence of Burn when Cal slams into me, wrapping his long arms around my body, engulfing me in his salty scent. Releasing built-up tension, my body collapses into Cal’s, support.
    My mind and body are at war. My mind knows I have no one to rely on but myself, that I’m cursed, that I can’t trust Cal—but my body wants to believe he can love me, accept me, protect me, share some of my burden.
    “Are you okay?” he asks. “I saw you run off. I was worried.” As he holds me, his hand strokes my back, comforting me like my parents did when life was normal. I don’t want Cal to ever let go.
    I push back. “Are you going to turn him in?” I blurt, then draw deep breaths to regain control.
    “Who?” he asks.
    I snap my gaze up. “My brother.”
    He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it into the warmth of his. “No, Glory. Of course not.” He pulls me forward. “Is that why you ran off?” He shakes his head. “I would never turn him in.”
    “But…” I don’t want to say too much. I can barely list all the policies Drake’s breaking and certainly don’t want to reveal them. My brother doesn’t have a current employee number, he hasn’t attended training for three years, and he’s failed to report his injury to Health & Safety. Plus, he’s a Deviant. All these broken policies are written in black and white in the manual, which we all had memorized before we could read.
    I need to know how Cal found out about Drake, but must tread carefully. I’ve liked Cal ever since I was little—he never picked on the younger kids like some of the bigger boys in GT—and he’s always formed a major part of my fantasy for the future. It’s hard to imagine he’d willingly hurt me, but I’mno longer sure what to believe. When I woke this morning I wouldn’t have believed he’d join the Jecs.
    Cal tightens his grip on my hand. “I would never do anything to hurt you. Never.” He looks down. “I trusted you with my secret. I want you to trust me, too.”
    “I do trust you.” I wish .
    “Why doesn’t your brother go to GT?”
    My throat closes. Before the Comps took him, the last thing my father told me was: never trust anyone. That, and tell everyone Drake’s dead. Not that I felt any obligation to follow my murderous father’s orders. The need to hide Drake was obvious.
    “Is your brother a slow learner?” Cal asks. “Blind?”
    Lips squeezed tight, I shake my head.
    “Never mind. I don’t need to know right now.” Cal’s hand is getting sweaty on mine, and he wipes the back of his other one across his forehead. “But I hope you’ll tell me some day.” He actually sounds worried, and I’m not used to that tone from Cal. “I’d like to meet him. I can’t even picture the kid.”
    “Maybe.” There’s no way I can take the risk .
    “And please, don’t think badly of me about the Jecs.” His thumb strokes the back of my hand. “Just because I want a better