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immune?”
    “Most of you—” Leavitt broke off, sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Never mind. Just…please don’t go through that curtain again. Is that understood?”
    Thomas nodded.
    “Now. I need to start prepping you.” Leavitt held his hands out and looked around the room as if getting his bearings. “The surgeon will be here in half an hour.”
    A bubble of panic had been growing for some time in the pit of Thomas’s stomach. “So that kid…Minho…he was telling the truth? You’re going to do something crazy to my head?”
    “Not something crazy,” Leavitt said, the strain of forced patience clear in his voice. He opened a drawer and pulled out a linen gown. “Something
vital.
And again, Minho was just having a reaction to the medicine we gave him—it happens only rarely. We’ll take care with your dosage, I promise.” He paused, turned toward Thomas. “Listen, you know the stakes. You know that you’re immune to the Flare. You also know that the human race is in serious trouble. Am I right? Do you know all this?”
    Thomas had only one answer for that. “Yeah.”
    “Then you understand why it’s so important that you cooperate.” Leavitt tossed him the hospital gown. “We’re studying the killzones of the immune so we can find a cure.
You
are immune. And all we’re doing today is placing a small instrument in your head that will help us understand what makes you different. I promise you’ll recover quickly, and you’ll be glad that we can monitor your vitals more efficiently. You won’t have to get your arm pricked quite so much!” He made this last statement with forced cheerfulness. “Now, that’s not all so bad, is it?”
    Thomas kind of shrugged and nodded at the same time. The man made it sound so reasonable to cut open a kid’s brain. He looked down, turning the gown in his hands.
    “There’s a bathroom right over there.” Leavitt pointed to a door in the corner. “Why don’t you get dressed, then get in bed. I give you my word that everything will be just fine. You’ll be knocked out, won’t feel a thing. Maybe a headache for a couple of days. And we have pills for that. Okay?”
    “Okay.” Thomas took a step toward the bathroom, when he heard a girl scream out in the hallway. He looked at Leavitt, who met his eyes. For a long moment they stood like that, waiting to see who’d act first. Thomas did.
    He was at the door in an instant. He threw it open and practically jumped into the hall, feeling Leavitt right on his tail. Just a few dozen feet away, a familiar scene played out in front of him. Two nurses—a man and a woman—were dragging a girl with brown hair down the hallway, and she was kicking and screaming the whole way. It was her. The girl from room 31K. Teresa.
    There was no sense in what Thomas did next. He ran after her. The anguish on her face and the fear in her eyes had finally burst that bubble of panic swelling inside him.
    “Let her go!” he yelled at the same time that Leavitt shouted at him to come back.
    The nurses turned to look at Thomas and stopped, curiosity crossing their faces, maybe even a hint of amusement. That just angered him all the more. He picked up speed, already realizing that the entire thing was a lost cause. At least he would show Teresa that he tried.
    At the last second he jumped, arms outstretched, as if he’d become a superhero, ready to take down the two—
    One of the nurses swung a forearm in defense, connecting with the side of Thomas’s head. Sharp pain ignited along his cheek and ear as his world turned upside down and he landed hard on the ground; his nose banged into the wall just hard enough to stun him. He rolled over and looked up. Both nurses stared down at him as if to ask
What’s
wrong
with you?
Even Teresa had stopped struggling, though her face expressed something completely different: Awe. Wonder. Could that be almost a
smile
?
    Thomas suddenly felt on top of the world.
    Leavitt appeared,