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you've been too sheltered to see it. But you're finally growing up, I heard about you getting caught with that girl of yours in her room." Conviction laughs, and opens one eye at me, as if a wink will explain his position.
    "I wasn't ... Lucy was ... I never thought...." The words stumble out. I don't want to begin discussing Lucy with him, I want to talk about the abuse and getting to Refuge Two.
    "Relax, son. I meant it as a compliment. If you are finally ready to settle down with a Vessel, maybe you will begin to see things in a new way, begin to understand what we are really doing here at The Light. You'll like what you see, I promise."
    Conviction finally opens both his eyes and looks down at my tightly clenched fists. He threw a curve ball at me I wasn't expecting.
    "What will I see?" I ask, hoping any information will help me understand my power better.
    "Have patience. Right now I need something else, are you going to tell me what really happened with this power outage and this Lucy girl?
    I don't want to tell him about her. I don't want him to know how much she means to me, how I will do anything to be with her. I don't want that information used against me. And I know it will. I remember myself as a seven year-old, sitting in the Energy Room telling Conviction how I was too tired to work that night. He told me if I wanted my mother to live I needed to stop crying and do my job.
    Or another time, when I was five, Charlie wanted to play. I couldn't because I had been in the chair all night and needed to lie down and rest. I told Conviction that night how I wanted to work less so I could play with my brother. He told me Charlie would starve to death if I didn't give enough energy to The Light.
    He drove fear into me every day, with threats against people I cared about. I won't let him do that with Lucy, instead I will lie to protect her. I hope pretending she is nothing to me will give her more time to get help for all the people at the Refuges.
    "She has nothing to do with the outage. And she must have been mentally insane to run off in the night. She probably drowned with that helper of hers. Or got hypothermia."
    "So your announcing to the Refuge that you were being Bound to her, and you being with her in her room, that was...?" He looks at me, squinting his eyes, as if searching for the truth that way works better.
    I don't want to give him any leverage over me, but I do need him to believe I'm working with him, not against him. There is too much at risk to say what I really think, tell him how I really feel. I have too much riding on this, Lucy of course, but also the protection of the Vessels and children here. If I go off the deep end now, I'll never have the chance to save them. And if I can't do that, what is the point of any of this?
    "She was beautiful. That much is true," I say honestly before I derail once more. "But lots of Vessels are. Maybe she was just more willing, you know? Who knows what her life was like before she came to the Light? And besides, I knew if I wanted to be with her like that , she would have to be my Vessel-mate. But it's probably better she ran ... she wasn't all there, if you know what I mean." I know I'm insinuating a lot, but I can't have Conviction threaten me with her. I have to keep her safe.
    "So what you're saying is the power outage was a fluke and this girl should have been put at Refuge Two with the rest of the mentally deranged. Your involvement with her was merely a sexual attraction?" 
    "Exactly." I meet his eyes, without pause. Knowing in my heart she is everything but that. Knowing in my heart she is everything.
                  "In that case, I know exactly what we need to do to remedy the situation."
                  "What situation?"
                  "The situation of you wanting to be intimate with a Vessel, this Refuge being under-powered to the point of an outage, and needing to avoid people asking questions about where that