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As Cooper watched, Soren returned to his bunk and lay back down, his expression indecipherable. Beyond the image, there was a flash of purple.

“Go ahead and hit the holo,” Millie said, brushing vivid bangs to cover one eye. “If you want to.”

Cooper took a breath, let it out. “I’ll pass.”

“You could go to my game room. Erik had it designed. It’s the same resolution, but the characters are controlled by a predictive network. You move and the system makes the holos react. He’ll fall, bleed, scream. You won’t actually feel the chair hit, though.”

“Haven’t figured out how to do that yet, huh?”

“They have,” she said. “But it takes a brain implant. You run a cable into it, and it makes you see and feel everything like it’s real. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t like the idea of something in my brain.”

“Me either.” And I shouldn’t have let Soren into mine. Cooper set down the chair, dropped into it, and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I liked it.”

He looked up, surprised. Superficially, she looked like an average eleven-year-old girl. Four and a half feet tall, baby cheeks, rounded shoulders, coltish legs with knees together. The purple hair was unusual, but it was clearly a distraction—look at my hair, not at me—and the bangs gave her cover to retreat behind.

Her eyes, though, were something else. Something older. It was in the way she examined things. There was none of the self-conscious diffidence of a little girl.

And that’s a tragedy, Cooper thought. Because no matter what she’s seen, no matter that her insights help the world’s richest man shape the future, she is still a little girl who should be playing with toys, not diagnosing monsters. He saw a flicker of a smile on her lips, and got the sense she was picking up on his thoughts. To change the subject, he said, “You liked it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand, why would you—”

“Because you’re pure.”

He laughed before he could stop himself. “Sorry, Mills, but pure is about the last thing I am.”

She sat down on the opposite chair, pulled her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them. A little girl’s posture, but like her eyes, the smile she gave him belonged to an older woman. It was a look that said, Aww, aren’t you adorable. I’m going to bat you around for a while. “Why did you hit him?”

“I lost control.”

“No, then you would have killed him.”

“I almost did. Until I realized he was trying to goad me into it.”

“Of course he was,” she said, “but you still want to. It wasn’t just anger. I could see it. You want to kill him because he hurt your son. Because he’s hurt a lot of people. But also because you feel sorry for him.”

“You were here to read him,” Cooper said drily, “not me.”

“I can’t. The way he sees the world, I don’t . . . it’s like looking at someone through a kaleidoscope. What I see isn’t right. It’s warped and blurry and just wrong.” She shrugged. “So I read you instead.”

That was a sobering thought. A reader of Millie’s ability observing him in an emotionally charged scene like that one, well, she’d have all of his true secrets: the impulses he knew he should hate himself for having, the urges that dwelt in the dark places, even the part of him that relished the role he’d just inhabited.

The thought, a voice from his subconscious, shocked him. Is that true? Are you comfortable with being a torturer?

Because you shouldn’t kid yourself. That’s what happens next. Soren knows something that will help you find John Smith. You’re as certain of it as you are of the fact that he won’t willingly tell you.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Is it?” He shook his head. “I didn’t enjoy being the person I was in there. Most of me didn’t, anyway. I know why it’s important, and I’ll do worse if I have to. But I don’t know that it’s okay.”

“Why?”

Her question didn’t sound entirely sincere; it had a leading tone, like it was meant to instruct. Coming from an eleven-year-old, that should have been irritating, but Millie wasn’t just any kid, and he decided to answer honestly.

“Because it’s not his fault. He didn’t chose to be born a freak. He never really had a chance. Everything he is, it’s because of his gift. It put him outside the rest of us, forever.”

As he said it, he realized that the same thing applied to her.

And then he saw her reading him thinking that. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“It’s not. I hate this for you. You deserve a normal life.”