And they were part of the Rebellion, but I had the feeling that it wasn’t by choice. There were just too many red flags.

“And so your name is Lyra,” Wayde said, addressing me.

“Yep. Sorry about lying in the first place about my name, people are just hard to trust,” I apologized, holding out my hand.

He shook it and grinned. “I know how you feel.”

“Hey, Nani!” James yelled, waving at a girl sitting by the fire.

She lifted a hand in acknowledgment. There was a girl sitting next to her, with her hand between Nani’s. Nani murmured, then froze, and I saw her slowly grow pale, and then release the girl’s hand.

“There you go,” she said, leaning back.

The other girl smiled and rose. “Thank you, Nani.”

Nani bowed her head as the girl walked off to a tent in the circle.

“How many of you are there?” I asked Way, turning towards him.

“About fifteen? Maybe? I don’t know the exact count. We’ve gone down in number since the shadows started taking some of us.”

“Shadows?” I asked, watching as the other three turned to face me as well.

“A renegade group that takes people like us, and does who knows what with them. Nobody has ever seen any of them before. And, rumor has it that their leader is the most powerful tier one there’s ever been,” Way explained. “I don’t know how you hadn’t heard of them before now.”

“Well, I’ve been in that factory for about three years,” I replied, doing quick mental math to make that fit with the timeline.

“So basically ever since…?” Way asked, trailing off.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Since what?” Sara asked, switching her gaze between the two of us.

I stayed silent. Wayde looked at me as if asking for permission.

“Guys, since what? You can tell us,” Sara repeated, nudging me with a gentle elbow.

“Since a sleeper facility that we were both held at,” Wayde blurted, looking apologetically in my direction.

“No…” Sara breathed, copying James and Speedy’s intake of breath.

“I got lucky, and I was actually a sleeper until there was this whole thing and someone freed over fifty of us. Amber… crap, I mean Lyra… was a test subject,” he explained, gesturing with his hands.

They all turned to me, and I wanted to go hide in a hole.

“How...your healing, right?” Speedy asked, shouldering in between Sara and I and placing a hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah. I got a cut working as kitchen staff one day, and someone ratted me out to the superiors and they took me for tests. I don’t want to talk about it,” I said firmly.

“We understand. But if you don’t mind, will you tell us how you escaped? I mean, that’s pretty rare,” James said, slowly moving toward the campfire.

We all moved with him, drawn by the smell of food.

“I’ll tell it if we can get food first,” Wayde volunteered.

Everyone else agreed, and I stayed silent.