Page 53 of Lessons in Power (The Fixer #2)

Kendrick, what you don’t know could fill an ocean.

Mrs. Perkins reached out and laid a hand on Henry’s shoulder. Henry didn’t stiffen at the terrorist’s touch. He didn’t bat an eye.

We’re all liars sometimes , he’d told me.

We infiltrate. Dr. Clark’s words to Emilia in the library washed back over me. We observe, we influence, we recruit.

“Don’t fight this,” Henry told me. His voice was quiet. I wished he didn’t sound like the boy I’d known. I wish I couldn’t see my Henry in his eyes as he continued. “Don’t fight me.”

Armed men bound my hands behind my back. They bound me to a chair, and Henry watched.

He knew that when I’d been kidnapped, I’d been bound. He knew that I couldn’t even see a roll of duct tape without flashing back, and he watched .

“Leave us,” Henry told the guards.

I thought of the armed man in the hallway, the way he’d looked at Henry as he said: You.

Not you as in now you get on the ground. You as in I know you. You as in what are you doing with this girl?

At Henry’s request, the guards left us. I stared at the boy I’d kissed less than an hour earlier. I forced myself to look at him, to take in every line of his face, features I’d memorized, features I knew —

“Kendrick.”

Full lips, wide jaw, piercingly clear eyes.

“Don’t call me that,” I told Henry. “Don’t call me anything.”

He lowered his voice. “I tried to get you out.”

Anger bubbled up inside me and came out as a strange, dry laugh. “You tried to get me out,” I repeated. “What about Vivvie? And Emilia?” I didn’t give him time to reply. “What about all those freshmen who think you hung the moon?”

Henry’s jaw clenched. “I never meant for any of this to happen. If you understood—”

Understood?

“These people killed John Thomas!” The words ripped their way out of my mouth. I hurt, just saying them. “Emilia accused Dr. Clark, and do you know what she said? She said that it wasn’t her idea. That she’s not the one who pulled the trigger. But she didn’t deny that Senza Nome was behind it.”

“I didn’t know.” Henry’s reply was guttural. I barely heard it. “About John Thomas, about his father. Until this weekend, I never even suspected—”

“I had John Thomas’s blood on my hands,” I choked out. “And you …”

He’d washed it off. He’d given me his shirt. He’d taken care of me.

“I didn’t know,” Henry repeated. “I swear it. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

I heard what Henry wasn’t saying. No one was supposed to get hurt here.

Henry had told me that his grandfather’s death had taught him that the people in power couldn’t always be trusted.

I’d kept the truth about the conspiracy from him for fear of what he might do if he knew.

And when he’d heard me mention the possibility of a fourth conspirator, he’d been devastated.

He’d told me that he wished I’d told him.

Not because he didn’t know , I realized, unable to keep from trying to make sense of how a boy who believed in honor—who believed in protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves—could have let himself be recruited into a group like this.

He already knew the conspiracy wasn’t over. They told him first.

If Senza Nome was trying to manipulate Henry, they might not have told him there were suspects, plural, for the remaining conspirator. They might have led him to believe there was only one.

“The president.” I forced myself to say it out loud. “They told you that the president is the one who had your grandfather killed.”

Henry stood, staring down at me with the same sick masochism that kept me from looking away from him. He didn’t speak—didn’t confirm what I’d implied, but didn’t deny it, either.

They told you the president killed your grandfather. They made you believe they could make it right.

“They just asked for money at first,” Henry said. “Then information.”

Information. I thought of all the times Henry had asked me what Ivy was up to. I thought of the two of us, sitting in the dark on the front porch. I thought of Henry asking me about Ivy’s files.

He’d used me.

The door to the room opened. Headmaster Raleigh, bound and beaten, was shoved in. Henry tore his gaze away from me, turned, and went to secure the headmaster.

“You don’t have to do this, Mr. Marquette,” Headmaster Raleigh told him.

“If I want to stay in a position to keep the people in this school safe,” Henry told him—told me , “yes, I do.”

I turned my head down and to the side. I refused to look at him. I refused to even acknowledge that I’d heard the words.

I didn’t look back when I heard Henry walking toward the door.

I didn’t lift my head until it closed behind him.

I blinked away the tears that blurred my vision. The headmaster came into focus, bound opposite me in this tiny office.

“Whatever they tell you to do,” the headmaster told me, blood crusted to his lip, his face swollen, “you do it, Ms. Kendrick.”

I was surprised by the fierceness in his tone.

“This is my fault,” Raleigh said, as much to himself as to me. “I brought them here. It’s my fault.”

I thought of Dr. Clark, watching, infiltrating, influencing, recruiting . I thought of the headmaster’s secretary, with her finger on the pulse of the school. “They were already here.”

When Henry’s grandfather died, Dr. Clark had tasked the class with choosing a replacement. Because she wanted to challenge us to think critically about the process? Or because she wanted to know what our parents thought? What they knew?

We see everything. We know all of your secrets. And we wait.

I forced my mind away from the memory of Daniela Nicolae’s words and back to the man across from me.

“Why did you take the picture down?” That question surprised me almost as much as it surprised the headmaster.

“The photo of you with the president at Camp David,” I continued.

The photo of you with Vivvie’s father and one of the other men who conspired to kill Justice Marquette. “Why did you take it down?”

I’d thought the headmaster was in bed with the terrorists.

When he’d read out the words they had written, I’d believed they were his.

If it hadn’t been for that photograph, for a lingering sense of suspicion cast upon all the men there, would I have questioned that?

Would I have realized that the person in the best position to influence the headmaster, to silently observe everything that went on in these halls, was someone non-threatening?

Someone who goes largely unnoticed.

“What interest could you possibly have in that photograph?” the headmaster asked, sounding more like the aggrieved man who’d sat opposite me in his office more times than I could count. “Really, Ms. Kendrick—”

“Please,” I said. “I just want to know.”

The headmaster sniffed but deigned to oblige. “I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche.”

I heard the doorknob turn a second before the door opened. My wrists tensed against the ties that bound them to no avail. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fight back. I was helpless.

Henry had left me helpless.

Dr. Clark shut the door gingerly behind her. She knelt down in front of me. “Look at you, Tess.” Her voice was gentle. She murmured the words, like it grieved her to see me like this.

Like she hadn’t shot a Secret Service agent dead while I watched.

“This isn’t how I wanted this meeting to happen,” Dr. Clark told me.

“Moira, get away from that young lady or I will—” The headmaster’s threat cut off abruptly as he realized there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say.

Dr. Clark gave no sign that she had heard him.

Her warm brown eyes were solely focused on me.

“I know how this must look to you, Tess. I know that you cannot begin to fathom what I’ve done here today, or why.

I know that you cannot understand why a boy like Henry would listen to what I have to say—”

“What did you tell him?” I asked, my body tensing against the ties again, causing the chair to jar slightly.

She didn’t jump. She didn’t blink. “I told him what I am trying to tell you. What’s happening here today isn’t who we are. This”—she gestured at me, at the headmaster—“is not what we do.”

Mine is a glorious calling. The tone I’d heard in Daniela Nicolae’s voice in that video was present to the nth degree in my teacher’s. This was what zealotry looked like.

This was a true believer.

“I came to this life when I wasn’t much older than you,” Dr. Clark said softly.

“After 9/11,” I said, cutting her off before she could say more. There’s nothing you can say that will make you anything less than a monster to me. I hoped she could hear that in my voice.

Whether she could or not, she continued, “After the attacks, I wanted to do something. The world wasn’t safe. Everything had changed.”

“So you became a terrorist,” I supplied, my voice razor sharp. “If you can’t beat them, join them?”

“No,” Dr. Clark said vehemently. “No, Tess. I would never—”

I tuned out whatever it was she would never do. She’d killed a man as I’d watched.

“While I was abroad, I was approached by someone. A mentor. He thought that I might be interested in a life of service.” Dr. Clark paused. “He was right.”

“Service,” I repeated dully. “You call this service ?”

“Our organization was designed to infiltrate terrorist groups. We influence their decisions. We stop them from the inside out. We play their game better than they do.”

I was on the verge of asking her how, precisely, the Hardwicke School qualified as a terrorist group . But I decided it wasn’t worth the words.

“To do what we do,” Dr. Clark said, leaning forward and trying to take my hand, “we need eyes and ears everywhere.”

“Eyes and ears?” I jerked my hand back. “I’m bound to a chair, I saw you shoot a man dead, and you want me to believe that you just observe?” She believed what she was telling me. She expected me to believe it, too. “You people bombed a hospital!”