“Hey, guys?” I said carefully, because I didn’t quite believe it. “The doors are unlocked. We can leave.”
“Do we dare?” Ladhi whispered, like someone was listening in on us, and maybe they were.
“I don’t care,” Elzabeth said. “I’m going to meet George.”
I heard their door open and slam closed in the hallway.
“Let’s go,” I said, getting up to race after them.
Charles and Ethan joined us, and the six of us ran to the elevator. Elzabeth fidgeted the whole way down.
Me, I was waiting for bombs to drop. “What next?” I said. “Do we call out Stanton?”
“We don’t do anything,” Charles said. “We pretend we don’t know anything.”
“She has to know what we did, she monitors everything—”
“But she’ll pretend she doesn’t, and we’ll pretend that we didn’t.”
“But then why is she doing this? Why set up these disasters just
to see what we’ll do? It’s wrong, she’s crazy—”
“Polly, be quiet, she’s probably listening in on us right now.”
“I don’t care! I hate her and I don’t care if she knows it!”
“She probably doesn’t care how you feel about her.”
“We can call Mom. All of us, we call our parents and tell them what’s been happening—”
“And who are they going to believe?” Charles said, arcing his brow in that maddening smug way of his. “Stanton or us?”
“I don’t care!” I shouted again, as if yelling it to the universe would actually change something.
“Then be quiet and let me handle it.” He was so infuriatingly superior about it all.
“So what, I’m just supposed to pretend this wasn’t all a setup?”
“Yes. You are going to keep your mouth shut.”
“Make me!”
And he just stared down at me. Once again, I felt a shock that he was taller than me, staring down at me.
The others were watching us, pressed over to one side of the elevator, leaving the two of us alone to shout at each other in our hard Martian accents. Well, leaving me to shout. Charles never shouted. Charles had no emotion at all. He was a machine with flesh glued over him.
“What?” I muttered at them.
“Do you guys always argue like that?” Ladhi said.
“Yeah,” I answered, deadpan. “It’s because we love each other.”
“Look up ‘sibling rivalry,’” Charles said. “A well-documented psychological phenomenon. Polly falls victim to it often.”
“Charles!”
“See?”