Taken (Erin Bowman)

will not bend. He will be punished for all he’s done, to our people as well as Claysoot’s.”
    Frank pinches the bridge of his nose and I realize that my mouth has gone dry. Too much is happening too quickly and I can’t comprehend it all. I try to picture the divided country that Frank mentioned. Taem seemed large in comparison to Claysoot, and the thought that something even larger exists—land that is exponentially greater than them both—is impossible to fathom. The massive war he speaks of is foreign, too, a concept so different from the carefree game I played as a child: Blaine and me against Septum and Craw, shooting imaginary arrows until someone scolded us to stop. Frank’s story is not a game.
    And then there’s Claysoot, an experiment. The original children that Emma and I had debated over were never stranded in the ruins of a town. They didn’t lose their mothers to a terrible storm. It was just Harvey, picking up people as though they were playing pieces in a game and placing them where he wished. Suddenly, anything I’ve ever done, anyone I’ve ever known, everything I’ve ever said seems like a lie.
    “So the Wall? The burned bodies? The Heist?” I blurt out. “That was all Harvey? It’s all just part of this Laicos Project?” The name feels dirty on my tongue.
    Frank nods.
    “And even though he’s in hiding, you can’t stop it? You can’t just climb over the Wall and free Claysoot?”
    “We’ve tried. But we’ve lost so many men to the thing that patrols the Outer Ring.” I want to ask him what that thing is, but Frank continues before I have the chance. “We have no means of fighting what Harvey set in motion beyond your Wall, so we focus instead on saving the climbers. We spot them from observation towers, but we’ve never reached them in time. You and Emma are the first.” He leans back in his chair and smiles kindly. “But there may be hope, Gray. Marco was an idiot, putting you in a cell, but he did so because you said something very, very interesting. Something he thought too valuable to treat lightly.”
    I’m almost afraid to repeat the statement since it landed me in a cell the first time, but Frank’s voice is so reassuring. He almost reminds me of my mother, calm and concerned.
    “I’m a twin,” I say. “I’m eighteen and I wasn’t Heisted.”
    Frank leans forward and points at me. “Exactly.”
    “What does it mean?”
    “You tell me,” he says. “I find it incredibly fascinating. Not lock-you-in-the-prison fascinating, but this means something. If we can figure out how or why you escaped the Heist, we may have the slightest chance of saving the rest of your people.”
    I could easily tell him what I read in Carter’s notebook, but I’m caught wondering how Marco and Frank already know so much about the Heist.
    “And if you don’t know what it means, that’s fine, too,” Frank says in my silence. “We can figure it out together. I’m extremely busy, but I promise you that Claysoot remains one of my top priorities. You are important, Gray—to unraveling this mystery. I can feel it. You can stay in Taem, right here in Union Central, even. You and Emma. It’s really the very least I can do if you are going to help me crack this. What do you say?”
    What can I say? There is nowhere else for Emma and me to go. I picture Carter behind the Wall, longing to be reunited with her daughter. This is a chance to make that possible. Maybe I am the key to figuring everything out and ending Harvey’s project. I’d be both selfish and dense to not see this through.
    “We’ll stay,” I say. “And thank you.”
    Frank smiles, lines again racing over his cheeks. “The unHeisted boy, staying right here in Union Central. I feel honored to be in the presence of such mystery and hope.”
    When he mentions the Heist, I get that feeling again, the sense that he knows more than I ever shared.
    “About the Heist . . . If Emma and I are the first climbers to be saved, how do you know so much about the Heist?”
    “I told you much of the Laicos Project still continues, running as though on autopilot. We know boys are Heisted at eighteen because they end up on our training field in the dead of night, claiming as much. Poof , and there they are, as though they’ve sprouted from the grass like dandelions.”
    My face must look shocked because Frank chuckles.
    “I don’t understand it, either,” he says. “It’s as much a mystery to you as it is to us.