“Why don’t you go grab a coffee, Rob,” Dr. Davidoff said. “We’ll take over.”

He turned to me as the guard left. “You’ll be seeing more of the building later. For now”—he waved at the screens—“consider this the one-stop tour.”

Did he think I was stupid? I knew what he was really doing: showing me how well guarded this place was, in case I was planning another escape. But he was also giving me a chance to study what I was up against.

“As you can see, there’s no camera in your room,” he said, “nor in any of the bedrooms. Just in the hallway.”

Two hall cameras, one at each end. I scanned the other screens. Some flipped between cameras, giving multiple angles of halls and entryways. Two showed laboratories, both empty, the lights dim, probably because it was Sunday.

An older model monitor was propped on the desk, cords every which way, like it had been quickly set up. The tiny picture screen was black-and-white and showed what looked like a storage room, all the boxes shoved along the walls. I could see the back of a girl in a beanbag chair.

She was slumped, sneakers stretched next to a game console, long curls spilling over the beanbag, the controller held between dark hands. It looked like Rae. Or maybe it was an impostor set up to convince me that she was okay, playing games, not locked up, screaming for—

The girl in the chair reached for her Diet 7UP and I saw her face. Rae.

“Yes, as Rae has informed us, that GameCube is terribly outdated. But once we promised to replace it with the latest model, she resigned herself to playing it.”

As he spoke, his eyes never left the screen. The expression on his face was…fond. Weirdly, the very word he’d used earlier for Derek seemed to fit here.

When he turned to me, his expression rearranged itself, as if to say I like you well enough, Chloe, but you’re no Rachelle. And I felt…bewildered. Maybe even a little hurt, like there was still part of me that wanted to please.