I pushed back a sweaty strand of hair and dropped the knife to my side.

   Stellan was watching me, his arms folded across his chest. “Is it starting to feel better?”

   My fingers tightened around the bloodied knife, and I nodded.

   “You cringe every time you talk about training. Or fighting. Or if you so much as look at a knife.”

   “No I don’t.” A single fly buzzed along the surface of the mangled rack of ribs, settling on one end.

   “You do. It’s perfectly normal,” Stellan said. He flicked the fly away with the tip of the stick he still held in one hand. “You don’t have to be ashamed about being afraid to stab somebody. Or of getting hurt.”

   “I’m not afraid—” I started to say, but stopped myself. If fear wasn’t my problem, would this little therapy session really have worked so well? I took my knife to the edge of the water, where I knelt and let the waves lap at the blade.

   When a more powerful wave soaked the bottoms of my leggings, I jumped up. I wasn’t surprised to find Stellan standing quietly next to me, his boots making hard indents in the wet sand. “When I first came to the Circle, the Dauphins sent me straight into training with the older kids,” he said. “I had no idea what I was doing. My childhood was . . . sheltered. Easy. I had never so much as gotten in a fistfight. And here I was, twelve years old, straight from the hospital, most of my family dead, and they had me learning to kill people. There was no pretense of it being self-defense. It was a declaration that you would be doing jobs for the Circle, and some of those jobs would involve killing.”

   We both watched a seagull skim the water, then dive and come up with a fish flopping in its mouth. “What happened?” I asked.

   “The first time I—” He paused and scratched at one eyebrow. “I had a full-on panic attack. I almost compromised the whole mission. I was in danger of being terminated if I couldn’t pull it together.”

   “What?” A wave lapped at my toes. “They’d terminate a kid?”

   “I was a liability. It’s how it is.” Stellan turned the stick over and over in his fingers. “I’d just started my tutoring with Fitz. He was the one who brought me to the Circle, so it was his responsibility if I turned out bad. And he did this with me.” He gestured to the slab of meat. “Classic desensitization therapy. After that, I didn’t panic anymore.”

   I thought again about the Order’s attack at Prada. Stellan had driven that knife through the guy’s heart like it was nothing. “Are you sure detaching is a good thing?”

   He looked down at me now. His expression was unreadable, searching. “You shouldn’t forget that question.”

   I shook the last drops of salt water off my knife. “Why didn’t Jack ever have me do this?” I said, casually bringing him back into the conversation. Back into our consciousnesses.

   We headed back up the beach, and Stellan wrapped the paper around the meat. “Fitz probably never had to give him remedial lessons.” There was an unexpected note of bitterness in his voice, but when he saw the question in my eyes as I pulled my sneakers back on, he continued. “Jack grew up in the Circle. He didn’t have to learn to be okay with it.”

   I would have laughed at the thought of Jack being more acclimated to violence than Stellan, but I could see that he was telling the truth. I realized that Stellan would probably tell me the truth about anything I asked. He had this mysterious air about him, but his secrets sat close to the surface.

   “I’ve never shot a gun, either.” I looked at the bulge at the back of Stellan’s waistband.

   He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not teaching you to shoot on a beach. We’ll get arrested.”

   “Obviously,” I said. But I was feeling brave now. Curious. “Can I just hold it for a second? Show me how to do that? Just in case.”

   “You’ve never even held one? Jack didn’t do that with you?”

   I shook my head.

   Stellan looked up and down the beach and, seeing that we were still alone, pulled the gun from his waistband. I held out one hand.

   “This is the safety,” he said, flicking a switch back and forth. “This is on; this is off. I’m leaving the safety on. You don’t turn it off, ever, unless you’re going to shoot the gun.”

   “I’m not stupid,” I said, and he set the gun in my hand.

   It was heavy, warm. Stellan showed me how to wrap my hand around it and where my fingers rested when I wasn’t about to shoot. Told me this particular gun was too big for my hands, and that it would feel better if it was the right size.

   It felt okay.

   “Jack hopes you’ll never be forced to defend yourself. That’s why he tries to keep you so sheltered. But if you had to—” Stellan leaned over to show me where to sight the target. “I’m sure he thinks you’d be a natural. That’s why he didn’t see you flinching with the knife.”

   I lowered the gun from my line of vision. It suddenly felt heavy.

   “He has you on such a pedestal,” Stellan continued. My thumb skimmed the handle of the gun as he took it away. “It’s . . .” He trailed off.

   “He believes in me.” I scratched my nose. My fingers smelled like metal. “That’s not a bad thing.”

   Something flitted across Stellan’s face; then his expression went blank and he turned away. “Or maybe he thinks you’re bad at fighting and doesn’t want you to kill yourself. He’s probably right. We shouldn’t do this again.”

   Stellan stashed the gun and pulled his sweatshirt back on as I watched, taken aback at the abrupt change of tone. He tossed the mutilated slab of meat onto the rocks at the edge of the cliff, and a cluster of scrawny cats appeared.

   “You coming, or are you going to stand there feeling sorry for yourself?” he said over his shoulder.