I awake to voices arguing low in the next room. I hear them over the screech in my head, which has eased up a little. Maybe I’ve already grown used to its constant presence. I keep my eyes closed and listen to the new voices, the real ones, because I know they’re talking about me. “It’s not him,” the first says. A man, probably around my own age. Why does he sound so familiar?
“How can you say that?”
I know that voice—it belongs to the man I saw in the fields, the one who knew my name.
“Ashe, it’s him. How can you not see?”
“See what?” Ashe asks. “That he’s a soldier now? He was culled, Tobin. Culled. One doesn’t just recover from that. They took him apart and put the pieces together again into something new. It may look like Joah, talk like him, act like him…but it’s not him. It’s
