Taken by Erin Bowman Page B

lot of things. Why we looked so identical. Why I felt half of me had been ripped from my chest when he was Heisted. Why we could read each other so well, know what the other would say before the words even escaped our lips. It explains a lot of things and I can almost accept it. Almost. Except for one small, tiny detail.
    “Gray, if this is true, you shouldn’t be here,” Emma says. “If you’re really Blaine’s twin, if you’re actually eighteen, you would have been Heisted weeks ago. With him.”
    “I know.” It’s the piece that doesn’t make sense, the element I cannot fathom.
    “Maybe the journal’s wrong,” she says.
    “Why would it be wrong? Would your mother write down something that didn’t really happen?”
    “No,” she agrees. “But why would she record one thing in her notebook only to return to the Clinic and record something completely different in Sara’s scroll?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Do you think this is what your mother was about to tell Blaine in the letter? That you are twins?”
    I think of the last few words of the letter, which, from reading over and over, I have practically memorized. And so I share this with you now, my son: You and your brother are not as I’ve raised you to believe. Gray is, in fact—
    Gray is, in fact, your twin. This must be it. It fits so perfectly. This is the answer I have been looking for, the secret that’s been kept from me. I accept it as if it were fact. The idea takes hold of me, drills itself deep beneath my skin and penetrates marrow. I am a twin, still here—the only boy over eighteen to ever beat the Heist. But why? Because it was kept secret?
    “We have to ask your mother,” I say finally. “She wrote that note in the journal, and I want to know why she changed it when she copied things into the scrolls.”
    Emma shakes her head frantically. “No, we can’t do that. She’ll know we were snooping around in her personal records.”
    “Emma, this is so much bigger than that. I might actually be eighteen, and if I am, I think everyone here deserves to know that I wasn’t Heisted.” I can feel my pulse gaining velocity in my chest.
    “But that’s just it, Gray,” Emma says sadly. “If you are really eighteen, you would have been Heisted. The journal is wrong.”
    “If we ask your mother, we’ll know for sure.”
    “Ask me what?” Carter is standing in the doorway of the Clinic, her gear bag in hand.
    “Nothing,” Emma says quickly. “Gray and I were just stopping by to get out of the sun.” And then she grabs my arm and pulls me toward the exit, dropping the book on Carter’s desk while her back is turned.

NINE
    I SPEND THE MAJORITY OF the next two days in the woods, alone with my thoughts. I hike to the northernmost points simply to stare at the Wall. I imagine the answers sitting on the other side, waiting. They tug at something in my core, urging me to climb, telling me that everything I want to know lies just beyond that towering structure. The idea of the truth, the fact that there could be more to this place than any of us know, begins to drive me mad. What if the Heist really isn’t as straightforward as we believe, as consistent and unavoidable as death from old age? Aren’t I proof that there is something greater at work?
    When not in the woods, I pore over parchment. I reread my mother’s letter time and time again. I visit the library and study every historical scroll in the place. I replay my conversation with Emma that day in the fields and I keep thinking of Blaine, how he had winked at me when we’d said our good-byes. Was he trying to tell me something?
    The longer I sit with my thoughts, the more I am convinced that something is not right. It’s Claysoot. Everything about it now feels wrong: the Wall, the Heist, the original children. How did people living in an enclosed space have no memory of how they got there? How did they arrive when the thing enclosing them cannot be crossed? And why does the