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you’ve been taught is wrong. The Chancellors aren’t the bad guys here.”
    Then who is? I want to ask. Instead, I ask something else, something that instantly makes me feel selfish.
    “Will you tell me why I was raised by your brother?” I stumble on the word brother . But my words do nothing to acknowledge his claim of being my father.
    “Yes.” He drops my hand and starts walking. I sigh when he doesn’t elaborate and follow him, because he will give me answers.
    “Why is it so important that I come?”
    A door slams far behind me and I turn to see Julian jogging toward us. Beside another house, kids laugh and run in the dust. They’re all jutting bones and sun-kissed skin.
    Slate takes the time to choose his words carefully. “Gage’s death triggered a lot of irreversible things—including attention that’s zeroed in on you. You’re special, Lissa. No one else can safely breathe oxygen and Jutaire’s air.”
    “But Julian?” I ask. I hold my breath.
    He shakes his head sadly. No. I really am alone.
    “Then, what am I?” I ask softly.
    “Would you believe me?” He counters as we pass another row of houses. We’re almost there. I can see the Tower door. He sighs when I don’t answer. In truth, I don’t know how to answer.
    “You’re half-human, half-Jute. The only hybrid on Jutaire.”
    I stop walking. Half-Jute. Half-Human. Half, not whole. I am nothing.
    I wrap my arms around myself and think of Father, Gage , who said nothing. Who didn’t think I was worth being truthful to. Julian catches up to us and Slate keeps his distance, watching me with his hands fisted by his sides. My limbs weaken at the possibility of him actually being my father. With the possibility of hope. Of not being alone.
    “Tell me,” I whisper.
     
    The day of my birth was supposedly the night of my death. My skin was tinged a sickly blue and my eyes were swollen shut. For as long as they watched, I didn't take a single breath. This was why there were no other hybrids. They all came to this world like I did, blue and unbreathing. They were buried before they had a chance to live.
    Slate set out with Gage to lay me to rest. There was no funeral—I came to this world dead, who was there to mourn me?
    Slate left me there in his grief. He couldn’t bear to look at his dead child any longer. Gage stayed behind. He knew more than anyone on Jutaire and when he checked for my pulse, he felt it. When he rested his ear on my chest, he knew the heart inside was beating, even if barely.
    But Gage never told Slate. When Gage couldn't keep Slate away from his house, Slate saw me. Gage said he had an affair and that I was the result. Though Slate didn’t think such a thing was possible, he believed him. How could he think his daughter was alive when he saw her still body?
    “I never knew until I took him in that day,” he whispers. There are tears running down his cheeks, glistening with the rays of the midday sun. Our shadows waver.
    “Why did you leave me there?” I ask. I'm afraid my voice will break, but it’s smooth and even. Encouraging.
    He closes his eyes. And when he opens them again, he isn't here. He's elsewhere, seventeen years ago. “You were dead. Everyone said you were dead and I…I saw it too. I was young, barely seventeen. I trusted my older brother more than anyone, more than myself, because he was so learned.”
    Julian places a hand on Slate’s shoulder and Slate smiles sadly. I almost forgot Julian was here.
    “He didn’t want to hang,” he says, looking at me. I push away the pain making its way to my heart. If I let it stay, it will grow, spread. Consume me. And there is no turning away from such grief. “He begged me. He wanted me to give him a bloody death.”
    My breath hitches, snatched away by his words.
    “So I did.”
    The confession is whispered. So soft, so inaudible. But in my ears, they boom, they echo and they pound.
    “But why? Death is death,” I force the words from my mouth.