Beta

What's a slut?" I ask him. "A girl who puts out too easily." "Puts out what?" I imagine Greer putting out dinner and don't understand what Iwan wouldn't like about that. "Puts out, you know..." His face, already beet red from our run, turns a darker scarlet. "Sex." I wonder where Greer puts the sex out.

Everyone on this island wants something kept quiet. I want to roar

These humans—they are cruel monsters. Liars. Deceitful. For the first time, I want to hurt them the way they hurt me. This is so unfair. My body feels numb, my energy spent, my mind deceived and angry.

Maybe your unspeakable defects give you power too?

The humans create life, and senselessly cause death. For nothing.

Danger is a state of mind." Farzad informs me. "Conquer it, and you ride heaven.

I shouldn't, but I do. I trust.

What's better, I wonder - to be a toy for the humans, or to control your own destiny , even if the only way to do so is suicide?

Whoever invented adding melted cheese over starchy goodness was surely the most brilliant human ever.

Father says we are all Defects, in our way. Humans and clones. He says the word is really just a scare tactic to incite disobedient beings into subservience. He says that's all it really is—just a word.

When the time is right, when these feelings of rage and unfairness once again overcome me, I will not faint. I will fight.

Beneath the water, I can know her. She was fierce, uncompromising. When she loved, she loved deeply, passionately. She loved the blue-eyed water god. She owned him. His heart. But then she felt betrayal, she hated, and she was feared. Hate gave her power.

The desert adapts. The people adapt. Live. Die. Struggle. Suffer. Create. The people in the real world beyond Demesne's ring are not all manufactured perfection. They deal.

I want to be the girl Zhara once was. Hellbeast Maybe I am, already. I go to Astrid's drawer. I take: her knife. In the siding of the drawer, I notice her scrawl carved into the wood. She wrote: To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. —Isaiah 42:7 Amen, sister. Someone should pay for their sins.

We will go Awful and die together. But we will do it as free Betas. Not as puppets of the humans.

From a distance, a clone's luminous eyes are meant to draw in humans and make them feel safe. Up close, the eyes appear hollow. Because of that, humans tend not to look into our eyes too closely, which I've been told is socially preferable, as eyes without souls behind them can be frightening.

I know she is scared of this simple task even if the fear is something she can't—or won't— acknowledge. Fear, perhaps, is not based on the chemical component of adrenaline alone. It acts also on inexperience, or venturing into the unknown, even if that unknown is as uncomplicated a thing as a swimming pool. At least, the pool feels uncomplicated to me, a natural extension of myself. To Xanthe, who has never been in one, it might seem like the great wild unknown.

Someone should pay for their sins. I'll show you Awful, humans. I can't even see what I'm doing. All I know is rage, and panic, and darkness.

I start to lose consciousness, and only desperation and fear keep my heart pounding, hard. Darkness descends, as Awful rises. Ivan has no idea what's coming. Neither do I. Last time I did not fight hard enough. This time, I will.