I'm dressed in a short, gold dress, with white gems circling my neckline and over my stitches. Jane said she would be back soon to get me ready for day one of Cooper's brainwashing seminar, my first full day as a Comforter, and I dressed myself so she would only have to worry about my make-up. I haven't learned how to do that on my own yet, but I can handle putting on a dress.

From the long, shut windows in Daniel's room, I watch as black birds fly over the estate wall. It's high—high enough to keep Prowler droids patrolling the yard—but not high enough to keep me from seeing the mountains. The peaks are pointier and rockier than the ones back in Pennsylvania. Daniel told me last night that we're in Wyoming, near what used to be Yellowstone National Park. I'm not supposed to know that, though. He said the other leaders don't trust me with any information.

My eyes focus on a reflection in the glass: Daniel buttoning up a black shirt over his chest. He's still thin, but he's definitely gained some muscle since before he was taken. He comes up behind me until all I can see in the reflection are his eyes on me in the foreground and the mountains beyond him.

"Can I... teach you how to skip stones?" he asks, resting his hands on my hips, and I catch him smile in the reflection.

"Shut up," I laugh.

He smooths his hands over my arms and turns me around to face him. "Are you going to tell me what your nightmares were about?"

"I didn't have a—"

"C'mon, Isla. I can tell you didn't sleep last night. I used to have night terrors too, after we were taken and my parents were killed. You can tell me."

The truth is I was up most of the night in fear of the Prowlers beneath us and the people among us, but Daniel's partially right. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same faces flash in my mind. Faces of people we've lost, looking to me for help.

I don't want to talk about it, I don't even want to think about it, so I lie, "I didn't have any nightmares. I was just so excited about my meeting with the girls, I couldn't relax my mind long enough to sleep."

He examines my face, waiting for me to give in and tell him the truth, like he used to when I'd fib to him back home. "Fine," he concedes, "don't tell me. But if you decide you did have nightmares after all, you can tell me. You know that, right?"

I nod.

There's a knock at the door.

"That'll be Jane to get me ready," I say, slipping past him and crossing to the door.

"Good morning, Ms. Blume," Gunther says, as I open the door, two drones buzzing at his side.

My heart lurches in my chest. "Gunther... what are you doing here?"

Jane emerges from behind him and walks past me into the room, her head down.

"Jane is going to put some make-up on you, and then you and I need to take a little trip down to the infirmary."

"Why?"

"Time to take those stitches out."

***

"Don't you think the restraints are a little overkill?" I ask Gunther, who is leaning against the door frame of the exam room.

I'm lying back on an exam chair beneath the most painfully bright light I've ever seen. The doctor, Dr. Wilkes, is tightening a belt around my legs after he has already fastened one around my torso.

"All this for stitches?" I ask.

"Nope," Gunther says, pushing himself off the wall. "Dr. Wilkes will also be taking some blood while we're here."

"Why? What do you need my blood for?"

"The drones reported that you were in the bathroom for an hour last night with... how do I put this delicately?... digestion problems. If that's the case, you must be pretty ill. We'll need to check on that. Unless, of course, you weren't spending the hour in the bathroom."

His eyes are nearly as painful to look at as the light. "Where else would I be?"

"Actually, Dr. Quail," the doctor interrupts.

"What is it, Joe?"

"I just wanted to let you know that I can attest to Ms. Blume's whereabouts last night. She was in the bathroom. Some of the Comforters told her to wait there while they called me. I came up to check on her."

Wait, what? Why would he lie for me?

"The drones didn't record that," Gunther says.

"That's probably because I used my passcode to turn their sensor off."

"Why would you do that?"

"I was in a hurry. I didn't have time for their questions."

"I will check into that."

"Please do. But I can assure you, Isla was sick last night."

I can barely see their faces over the blinding light, but finally, Gunther's breaks through the glare. "Why didn't you mention that you already knew Dr. Wilkes when I introduced you?"

  Just play along, right?

"You didn't give me a chance to," I say, "but I was sick. Bad scallops, I think. A few other girls were in there vomiting too."

"You're a vegetarian," he says with suspicion.

"I thought they were fruit. They don't look like meat."

Gunther storms out of the room; but the door remains open, and I can see him typing things into a keypad on the side of one of the drones.

"Why did you lie?" I whisper to Dr. Wilkes.

"Rumi Patel would have asked me to."

My muscles tense at the mention of his name, and I want to cry for this man. He was Dr. Patel's friend. "Do you know what happened to him in the bunker?"

"I know," he replies in a low voice. "His brothers welcomed his rebirth, and now he is deathless."

It's such a strange thing to say, but it sounds familiar. Where did I hear that? Then it hits me: the poem General Sato made me read at the pile of Deathless. How does he know it?

Before I can ask him, Gunther returns to the room. "The drone confirmed your use of the code. I'm sorry—there are so few people I can trust anymore. You understand."

How did the drone confirm it? If this doctor is going to go out of his way to create an alibi for me, why wouldn't he give the Caregivers simple medicines?

"I do. Would you still like me to give her a blood test?"

"Yes, just to be sure. She could have lied to you too, Dr. Wilkes. Then give her some pills, take out her stitches, and we'll be on our way."

"Done." Dr. Wilkes sits on a stool beside the exam chair with a pair of tweezers ready in his hand. "This won't hurt, Isla. It will just feel a little strange."

He presses the metal tips together over the end of my stitches, and unlaces the string from my skin. I watch the doctor put his tweezers on the countertop, and open the top drawer of the cabinets beneath it. He pulls out a bottle and gives me a large, round pill.

"Chew it," he says, and I do. Not because I trust him yet—there are still too many questions—but because he wouldn't lie about last night only to hurt me now.

As I chew the pill, I feel a quick sting press into my upper arm. Dr. Wilkes draws a small amount of blood from my veins and sets the syringe on a silver tray of tools. He removes his gloves, unstraps me from the chair, and motions for me to sit up. "All taken care of, Dr. Quail," he says.

I stand up from the chair and pull the dress back over where the stitches used to be and where a little clot of blood now hardens; but I don't take my eyes off of Dr. Wilkes. He's a tree of a man—tall and solid—with dark skin, like hickory wood, darker even than Ben's. He stares at me, smiling, and says, "Feel better," as I follow Gunther out of the infirmary and back into the hall.

Gunther doesn't speak to me—maybe he's embarrassed that his attempt at threatening me failed—but I don't push it. Poking a bear never helps.

We walk down the hallway toward the ballroom, and stop at the grandfather clock. Gunther checks the time on the clock's face and rechecks it on his wristwatch. "That appointment with the doctor didn't take as long as I had planned. Would you like to see the labs before go to class? You were a scientist with the Deathless, right?"

"I'm still a scientist," I say, "but, sure, let's see the biology lab. See how it compares."

"They're incomparable," he says, smiling sneakily.

We turn around and walk back through the sitting rooms, through the foyer, and into the Hall of Science, which is completely covered in a golden brown wood, down which all of the labs are located. We pass Daniel's lab, then the Mechanics lab, which has a doggie door for drones and must have some sort of station outside for the Prowlers, because I can feel them stomping outside.

As we approach the chemistry lab, Alexander emerges, his nose in a file, oblivious to our presence.

"Alex," Gunther says.

Alexander looks up, pushing the glasses up the slant of his nose.

"Alex, how are you, brother? I was just showing Ms. Blume around. How is your morning shaping up?"

"Productive," Alexander says without elaboration.

"Find yourself a Comforter yet?" Gunther asks, nudging his shoulder.

Alexander looks at me, his hollow eyes searching my face in disappointment, and shakes his head. "No, I don't think I'll be needing one."

A wave of disgust rolls up my spine, and I can't stop myself from shaking it away from my shoulders.

"Are you cold, Isla?"

Before I can even answer, Alexander removes his lab coat and drapes it over me. "The dresses you girls wear aren't very heavy."

"No, I suppose not," Gunther adds.

I slip the coat from my shoulders, even though I'm much more comfortable with it on, and return it to him. "I'm fine."

He quietly puts the coat back on and changes the subject. "Have you reconsidered what we discussed last night?" Alexander asks, turning back to Gunther.

Gunther smiles, but it's not as convincing as it usually is. "I've made up my mind, Alex. Remember what we've always talked about?" Alexander dips his head in recognition. "I'm working on it. This will be our time."

Alexander hangs his head. "Just... please remember who you are."

Gunther smiles. "As Nietzche said," he says slowly, "whoever fights monsters should see to it that they don't become monsters too. That's it, right?"

"Something like that." Alexander doesn't look up, but finally sighs and returns his focus to the papers in his hand. "I should take care of this. Good day, Isla," he says as he walks away.

What was that about? Gunther's experiments? I have no time to contemplate the horrible possibilities, because as soon as Alexander is out of sight, Gunther continues the tour. "Moving on," Gunther grunts.

When we reach the Biology lab, Gunther turns back to me, his smile and energy restored. "Here's my lab. I suppose it would be our lab, if Cooper weren't so adamant about women not working."

"Why is that?" I ask.

"Women give life, they nourish, and they are the beauties of our species. He believes their jobs here should adhere to those three principals." He turns a key into the lock on the lab, and cracks it open. "That's why you have the Carriers, giving life; the Caregivers, nourishing all of us; and the Comforters, as... eye candy." He looks back at me and whispers, "All starting with the letter C... Cooper's self-involvement on display for all to see. He's a narcissist."

Takes one to know one, I think, but all I say is, "That's a little simplistic, don't you think? All the women I know are incredible, but we can't show our strengths if we are just placed into those three categories."

"I didn't say I believed it too, did I?" He opens the door and steps into the lab. "Follow me, Ms. Blume."

The biology lab here is so different than ours on the Immortal—white walls and tiled floors, lab tables striping the room, and men in white coats working meticulously at microscopes and at computers.

"Over here we have our lab rats," he says, leading me to a section of the lab to the left, where I see four standing bins spaced out in the four corner quadrants of the area. Each bin is packed full of rats, all clustered on top of one another in smelly heaps of fur. I think of Misty, of the love and care Declan and I gave her and the other rats on the Immortal, and I feel sick. I'm sure none of these scientists could even distinguish the individual rats if I asked, let alone explain how to properly care for them. They are just objects to them, but I see hundreds of living beings crying out for space and care. I want to scream at Gunther, but I have to keep my cool.

Above the bins is a winding metal track, cups, a pail, and a long string attached to a nearby wall. "Watch this," he says. He lifts a hammer from the side of one of the bins and uses it to hit a lever on the wall beside the tightened string.

As the lever collapses beneath the hammer, a knife swings from a slit in the wall, severing the string, and it forces the pail, which had been held upright by the string, to topple, spilling water into the cup hanging below. The increasing weight of the water pulls the cup down, until it nearly touches the metal track, where I now see a small metal ball is poised to release. Once the cup hits the track, it knocks against the ball, sending it spinning down its path. It rolls and careens over our heads, and as it passes over each of the bins, the ball knocks down a peg holding a cup of food upright, until the food spills onto the clusters of rats.

The rats clamor and scratch at each other for the pellets and seeds that have landed in the bedding and on each other's fur. In their hunger, some of the rats even mistakenly bite each other. A number of the rats are spotted with pink patches of raw skin where fur once protected them. The sight of it makes me sick.

Finally, the ball hits the opposite wall, stopping its trajectory, and I turn to look at Gunther. He's beaming in pride.

"Clever, right?"

"What was that?"

"That's how I feed the rats when I need a pick-me-up."

"It's disgusting."

"No, it's a Rube Goldberg machine. When I was a little boy, I was enthralled with these machines," he explains, resetting his machine's cogs. "I would sit in my room for hours, building machines out of Lego's and Lincoln Logs, and watching them go. They are what got me into science in the first place. I loved creating things. If it weren't for my brother's disease, I probably would have been an engineer, like Phoebe, but Hugh inspired me to begin my focus in genetics."

He cuts a new string, and weaves it back into place around the pail before tying it to the hook on the wall. As he fills the pail with a watering can, he continues, "We all become our future from our past, Ms. Blume. I forged ahead in genetics; Phoebe went ahead in engineering because some jerk told her she couldn't; Winston studied physics because he jumped off his garage in middle school and wanted to figure out how hard he fell when he broke his arm; and Alexander is a chemist because his mom made meth and he wanted to redeem his family's name in chemistry. We are all our pasts."

He takes a step back to make sure all of the necessary pieces of his machine are back in place. "Anyway," he says, brushing his hands of excess water and rat food. "I always wanted to build a full-sized, functioning Rube Goldberg machine in one of my labs, but they aren't practical. Good thing Cooper can't leave his room and the ballroom, otherwise, he would probably yell at me for not using our resources efficiently."

I distract myself from the sounds of rats clawing at each other, and attempt to take advantage of Gunther's momentary vulnerability. "I liked what you said about our pasts," I say. "I'm a botanist because I took care of our garden back home. My mom's in mechanics because she had to engineer new things to help us survive the blast. She's battling cancer, you know. Like your brother battled his disease. She's an amazing woman."

He sits down at one of the lab tables and folds his hands in his lap. "You're concerned."

"Shouldn't I be?"

He purses his lips. "We all want things from the new world, Isla. But if the Deathless continue as they are, nothing will change. Babies will still be born with genetic impurities, especially with mothers being subjected to so much radiation. People will still get cancer and suffer from genetic disorders. But if I engineer the next generation of births, we can eradicate nearly all of the impurities and deformations that traditional birth can yield. And if I can create human beings who will work toward cleaning the earth of pollution, radiation, and rebel forces without complaint, I can create a perfect world and a perfect species."

"Perfect isn't possible, Gunther."

"I disagree. It is. But I can't do that with the Deathless fighting me at every turn."

"What are you saying?"

He leans toward me and whispers, "I'm saying that the time will come when you will have to choose a side. You either live with us, or die with the Deathless."

"It doesn't have to be like that," I say as steadily as I can.

He shoots me a quick grin. "You're sweet. But the world isn't how it's written in fairy tales. Not everyone can have a happy ending."

"Like me if I continue to support the Deathless? Is that what you're saying?"

"No, like the human race if they don't choose my side. Now enough of this talk, I still have things to show you. Over here."

I follow him to the back of a lab, to a locked closet. He pulls a key from the front coat pocket of his suit and opens it for me.

"After you," he says, gesturing for me to go first.

I peek my head through the doorway. A standing case illuminates blue light from the back of the closet.

Gunther laughs. "You'll like this. Go inside."

I enter the small room and look into the case. From what I can tell, the case holds a pair of half-constructed pink lungs.

"Lungs," Gunther confirms. "I created them from stem cells."

I have to admit, they are beautiful. The newly formed veins are like blue and red vines, but it is still upsetting to see. This is how Gunther sees human bodies: parts to control and function as he needs. "Are these for Hugh?" I ask.

"Declan told you about him?"

I nod. "You both love him very much."

Gunther lets his calm resolve crack, and I see sadness in his blue eyes before he swallows it down and checks his watch. "Time to get you to class, Ms. Blume. You have a new group to join."

***

*Note: I chose the video for this chapter, because (1) it features one of the coolest Rube Goldberg machines I've seen, and (2) I always imagine Gunther enjoying OK Go's music, specifically the song "A Million Ways to be Cruel." Enjoy!*

This is one of my favorite chapters in this series, to be honest. First, because as much as I want to hate Gunther, I really like his character. This is a great chapter between him and Isla, where we get to see both the similarities and the differences between the two of them and how they view science. Science as something beautiful is a motif that reoccurs throughout the series, and here we see it again. Where Gunther sees beauty in the engineering and manipulation of science, Isla sees it in the natural processes of science.

When I first wrote the chapter, I thought maybe Gunther was showing Isla all of this to actually upset her. But as I let the characters lead me through the scene and as I got to know them better, I realized that Gunther is actually proud of what he's done. I think, for as smart as he is, he is actually taken aback in this scene by some of Isla's responses to what he's done and said.

So, here is my question to you (that we can discuss in the comments):

Keeping in mind that the topic of Hugh is basically the only thing Gunther is vulnerable about, why does Gunther show Isla the lungs he's constructing for Hugh?