Page 233 of Immune

Maine shakes his head too fast, and then he winces like he realizes what he’s done. “No, not like that. Not Vector. Not NOVAC after it went all to hell. He was trying to save you before there was anything to save you from.”

“That’s a very pretty sentence for something very ugly,” I point out.

“I know.”

“Stop saying that,” I snap and he closes his mouth.

Good.

I stand, and my knee instantly hates me with a burning passion. That’s just great. It can go ahead and form a shitty little support group with the rest of me.

Maine tries to sit up, but I point a warning finger at him. “Move and I’ll let Ellis staple your shitty personality shut while she’s fixing your stitches.”

He stops and I pace two steps away. Then I pace two steps back.

The room has grown too small. The air feels too full. My hair is down, my bandana is loose, my brother is actually alive, and my father might have loved me with a shitload of paperwork I never understood.

Amazing.

Just a normal Tuesday, then.

“I found the notebook,” Maine says carefully, “and then I found a transmitter frequency written inside the back cover. It led me to a field relay. The people there knew Dad’s name.”

“Haven Ridge.”

“Eventually, but not at first. There were smaller groups. Research teams. Supply lines. People trying to keep bits of the old work from turning into weapons,” he says.

“And you joined them.”

“I traded what I had for a chance to keep looking for you.”

I laugh, and it sounds bad even to me.

“You kept looking by not coming back?” I ask bluntly.

Maine’s face shatters around the edges. “If I thought Vector was tracking marker-positive Omegas, if Dad’s work was real, and if you were alive and carrying any of it in your blood, then going back to you with people watching me could have led them straight to you.”

My anger goes still. It doesn’t disappear. It never will. It simply sits and listens while baring its teeth.

“I thought staying away might be the only way to keep you hidden long enough to find something useful,” he explains. “Blockers. Stabilizers. A way to shut the marker down. Anything.”

“You thought wrong,” I tell him.

“I know.”

My stare cuts into him suddenly.

He swallows hard. “I’m sorry.”

I hate those words just as much, because they’re too small. They’re basically a Band-Aid pressed over a severed limb. Like a single stitch trying to hold together a body that has been split open.

“You missed six years.”

“I know.”

“You missed Mom dying.”

His face twists in pain.