We emerged only one circle away from our destination, and it isn’t long before we cross the radius and head right, toward the east side.

“There’s a modification parlor somewhere around here. Serpentine, it’s called.” Mom’s words are burned clearly on my memory.

“I know that place,” Lachlan says. “It’s very popular with the Bestial crowd. But I had no idea there were shady dealings going on there. It’s not in a great neighborhood, but the place has an air of respectability. Now, if you’d just told me it was the Serpentine in the first place you could be back in your nice safe bed dreaming of a better world.”

“Dreaming gets you nowhere,” I tell him as we walk. “I want to make a better world. Even if there’s not much for me to do.”

“You’re giving up your lenses.” He stops in the middle of the dark street and turns to me. The look on his face is one of respect, and maybe, I think, a little bit of awe. “You’re giving up your chance to be part of a world you must have longed to join all of your life. You could walk away from the Underground, from me, from all of us, and take your chances up here in Eden, with your new eyes and maybe even the family your mom set you up with.”

I look at him skeptically. “I got the impression Flint wouldn’t have given me a choice.”

A hard look flashes across his face, but then he cracks a smile. He makes light of things whenever he can. “I think you’ve gathered by now that Flint and I have slightly different approaches. Your lenses may very well save the Underground, and change Eden forever. But I believe in free will, and self-determination. Those things are at the core of what we’re fighting for. If you had decided that you didn’t want to give up your lenses, I wouldn’t have forced you.” That hard look casts another quick shadow across his face. “And if Flint had tried, I would have stopped him.”

I wonder when this conflict between Lachlan and the leader of the Underground will break into all-out war, and what it might mean for the secret world of second children.

But I can’t worry about that now, or about the dozens of other things plaguing my mind right now. We’ve come to Serpentine.

It is, as Mom described it, a glaringly orange building. Unlike most other structures in this overall squalid next-to-outermost ring, Serpentine is gently illuminated, a golden glow holding back the dark.

In there I would have become normal. In there, I would have found a real life . . . but one away from my family, my first friend. A life, sure, but it would really just be a different kind of a lie. Another kind of hiding.

No, I decide, firmly and absolutely. I don’t want the lenses. I don’t want to be part of a society that doesn’t want me. Since there’s no scenario in my future that doesn’t have me hunted, a pariah, I’d rather just commit wholeheartedly to being what I am: a second child, among other second children.

A sense of relief washes over me. I’d been perfectly willing to give up my lenses to Lachlan and his cause, but that had been a rational decision. Now it was an emotional, gut choice, too. I realize I’m so much happier at the prospect of just being me, with my vivid second-child eyes, not something altered and corrupted by the Center, changing just to fit in some-place I only now realize I don’t really want to be.

The electrified fence around the modification center gives off a low, menacing hum. Lachlan cocks his head up at it. “I wish you’d told me about the electricity ahead of time. It’s going to take me a while to disable it, and I don’t want to be outside here any longer than necessary.”

“I can get us in,” I tell him, and repeat Mom’s instructions. “They turn off the electricity to the third panel from the left on the southeast side.” I have a moment of doubt. “Southwest?”

He gives me a wry look. “You do know the voltage level is very likely fatal, don’t you?”

“Southeast. I’m sure of it.” Fairly sure. “It’s off between three and four in the morning.”

He checks his watch and nods. “I guess this place has dealings with a few people on the wrong side of the law. Nice of them to give their friends a back door inside.” He leads me around the back of the building, and we count three chain-link superconductive panels from the left.

I lean close to try to listen for the telltale buzz of a charge, but the whole thing is humming and I can’t tell if this panel is deactivated. I look around for some debris to test it with. Maybe if we throw something at the fence we’d see a spark? I’m not really sure how this works.

“Can we . . . ?” I begin uncertainly, but in what I’m beginning to realize is a characteristically Lachlan approach he hurls himself at the fence . . . and doesn’t sizzle to death. He grins over his shoulder at me. “Coming?”

I can’t help laughing. And then . . . I can’t help racing him to the top. Despite his head start, my hand clasps the top before his. I feel strong, capable.

We drop down on the far side and make our way to the back door. As Mom told me, I knock twice up on the high corner of the door, pause for a breath, and knock three times near the bottom. There’s a long, tense wait, and finally we hear footsteps approaching from within.

I don’t know what I was expecting—a middle-aged scientist, a businesslike doctor in a white coat? We’re greeted by a young woman with red hair pulled severely back from her face, her eyes heavily lined in black, in an otherwise bone-pale face. Her paleness is further set off by her all-white clothes. She’s not wearing the traditional doctor’s coat I’m used to seeing my dad in, but rather an edgy ensemble of strange angles, accented with sleek steel fastenings. Against all that stark whiteness her slicked-back hair is like a lava flow, her eyes like burning coals.

She stares—no, glares—at me for a moment, then her eyes widen slightly. “Bikk! Where the hell have you been?” she hisses. “And who the hell are you?” She turns those smoldering eyes on Lachlan.

“I’m . . .” he begins, but she obviously has no patience for an answer. She grabs us each by an arm and jerks us inside.

“I don’t want to know who you are. And Rowan I know quite well. At least from your mother, and from physical schematics of you. I’m Flame.” The name suits her perfectly. “Why didn’t you show up yesterday?” she demands.