I dumped my stuff off at my house and took the alley to Jarod’s. There was no answer to my knock at the back door. I decided to just go in. If Jarod wasn’t there, I’d leave his phone and go back home. But there he was, sitting at his dining room table with his back to me, and his silver briefcase was open before him, a pile of silvery disks beside it. Blame the Skarsgards for having such thick carpets that my footsteps were perfectly silent as I came up behind him. I wasn’t hiding or running away again.

            The little boy and the man were on the black-and-white screen again, except he wasn’t so little, maybe fourteen years old. The boy was standing in front of a dummy lying on the floor.

            “I feel triumph at defeating my enemy. What a fool, to think he could get away with blackmailing me! Killing him was a pleasure. The world is well rid of such an insect!” The boy broke off and turned to the man. “I hate this, Sydney! I hate doing murderers, when they do it with their own hands and enjoy it. It makes me feel—sick.”

            Sydney said gently, “I know it does, Jarod, but you have to do it. It’s the only way to catch the murderer. You want to catch him, don’t you?”

            “Yes,” young Jarod said resignedly. “Someone has to stop him, or he’ll kill again. Sydney! He’s going to kill again!”

            “No,” Jarod said to his young self, making me jump. “I can’t let that happen.”

            I put my hand out onto his shoulder, and he jumped higher than I had. He wheeled out of his chair and stared at me, ashen-faced. The recording went on in the background. He snapped it off.

            “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. You left your phone in my father’s office.”

            He took it, saying nothing, his dark eyes watching me, tumultuous with emotion.

            “So, do you want to tell me about it, or shall I tell you?”

            “You tell me?”

            “What I’ve guessed, pieced together, detected. Your psychological profile.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Come on,” and went into the living room, sat down on the couch.

            Jarod sat down, purposefully across the coffee table in an armchair, crossing his arms, his face dark. “Tell me my fortune, Little Dorrit,” he said sardonically.

            “Don’t you mean Mr. Pancks? He’s the fortune-teller. Well, Jarod, here’s what I think I know of your story. You were adopted very young.” Something in his posture relaxed, and I thought, Not adopted? Am I wrong? I hoped I wasn’t making an idiot out of myself. I continued anyway. “Somehow you were adopted by an organization called the Centre. Or maybe it was an orphanage or a school. Whatever it was, it was not a place where children were cherished. It was a place where they were used. They learned you have an extraordinary ability to find out things, solve crimes, understand how people work. They taught you to do the work of adults, and they never let you be a child. You never celebrated Christmas, never went to a circus, never traveled and saw a mountain. You probably never watched TV, so you never learned most of the expressions people all across the country learn. You never had parents or anyone who even acted like a parent. A European man named Sydney raised you and trained you and made you do all this work. You should hate him, but you don’t. And then one day you realized you were a grown man and had never seen what the world was like, so you left. That was fairly recently. And you’re still doing what the Centre taught you to do, solving crimes, while you’re looking for the family who gave you up for adoption. Am I right, or am I completely wrong?”

            “You are more right than you have any business being, but you’re very, very wrong. You don’t know half the story.”

            “So tell me.”

            He stared at me, his face still dark. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, he relaxed, or, rather, seemed to lose his cohesion and collapse in on himself.

            “It’s worse than you think. Far worse. Even you can’t imagine the evil these people are capable of. The Centre isn’t an orphanage or a school—it’s a corporation that solves problems for the highest bidder. And I wasn’t adopted in a neat little legal proceeding. I was kidnapped.”

            “What?” I gasped.

            His eyes showed raw pain like I’d never seen before. “I don’t remember it. I barely remember my parents—she had red hair—he loved airplanes. I must have been four or five, and all I remember is the Centre—a grey, dark place where I learned the things that give me nightmares. I have seen what a normal childhood should be like, but I don’t know what it feels like. They never let me out. I escaped once, just to see what snow was like, and they sent people after me—like I was doing something horrible. I was locked up every night and brought out in the day to perform my tasks. And I—I thought it was normal. I sometimes rebelled against it because I didn’t like it, but I thought it was just the way things were. Some children live with their parents, and experience snow, and some are locked up underground and forced to use their talents for the good of humanity.

            “That’s what I thought it was—and maybe that’s what it was at first. I helped get some astronauts home in safety once, and it was good to know I had helped them, that because of me they came back home to their families instead of dying out there between the Earth and the moon—”

            “Wait. Apollo 13? You got Apollo 13 back? The slingshot around the moon?”

            “You know about that?”

            “Everybody knows about that! They made a movie out of it a year or two ago! How old were you? It was in the late ‘60s, I think—”

            “1970. I don’t know how old I was. I’ll show you.”

            He got up and looked among the silvery discs on the table. I followed him and stood watching as he slipped one in its slot and the picture came onto the small screen. A little boy in a clear bubble, electrodes attached to his head, arguing with the man called Sydney about oxygen and fuel and then, eyes widening, realizing that oh, so simple solution. April 14, 1970, the screen said. JAROD. FOR CENTRE USE ONLY. I stood staring at it.

            “You didn’t like doing it—having all that weight on you, people’s lives depending on you, having to experience all those things—you were a child! No child should have to have that pressure!”

            “I know that now. At that point I thought of it as a necessary evil, part of the great responsibility of having a mind like mine. That was what I was taught. I didn’t know—I didn’t know—”

            “What?” I said softly.

            “That the Centre wasn’t about helping people. It was about money and power, and there’s often more money and power in hurting people than in helping them. The simulations changed after a while. I began doing less solving and more projecting, more research. I would find out the best way to bring a plane down—and they told me the results would be used to enhance security on the planes. Or I would figure out a delivery system for a pathogen, and they said it was so they could be prepared in the case of epidemics. But it wasn’t true. They were selling my results to governments, and the governments were using them in war or to tyrannize people. They were using them to oppress innocent people! People died because of what I thought up. Hundreds—maybe thousands—” He sank down into a chair and put his head into his hands.

            “Jarod! It wasn’t your fault! You were a child!”

            “Tell that to the people I killed.”

            I put my hands on his shoulders and made him look at me. “Jarod, nobody blames children when people force them to do things. They are not responsible, legally, psychologically, or morally. And as far as I know they don’t blame hostages for what they do under duress, either. You’re not to blame any more than—oh, than Oliver Twist was when Sikes forced him to break into that house! Don’t you get it?”

            After staring at me a moment, he leaned forward against me, and I put my arms around his shoulders. Always the Little Dorrit, though maybe this time I was the kind Rose Maylie to his injured Oliver Twist. No wonder he had seen himself on every page of Dickens. How could someone do such things to a little boy?

            “Your Sydney has much to answer for,” I said grimly.

            His head came up. “Don’t blame Sydney.”

            Was that a protective instinct? “Don’t blame Sydney? He keeps a little kid locked up and exploits his talents for money, and you want to blame yourself rather than him? You’re the one who can be a psychiatrist if you want to be. Tell me that’s not pathological!”

            He gave a weak chuckle. “Maybe it is. But that’s not what I meant.”

            I sat down in the other dining room chair. “What did you mean? I want to know about this Sydney. He perplexes me.”

            “He perplexes me, too, and I’ve know him all my life. When I first found out what they were doing with my results, I blamed him. I thought he knew, but he didn’t. His role is that of scientist or researcher; he doesn’t do any administration. He thought, as I did, that our work was being used for good.”

            “And that’s a good reason to keep a little kid locked up? You said he raised you. What kind of monster does to a child what was done to you?”

            “He’s not a monster!”

            I stared at him. He stared back, as surprised by his outburst as I was. He sighed.

            “Sydney is…difficult. I can’t even figure him out, and figuring out people is what I do. He’s all about the science and rarely thinks about the morality. And yet he is kind. He was kind to me, Little Dorrit. He feels something for me—I don’t know what. Some affection, at least. He spent his life teaching me. Don’t look at me like that! I know what he did was wrong. I have been angry and blamed him often enough. But I’m connected to him, and I can’t help it. He’s—he’s the only family I have…for now.”

            “Until you find your real family.”

            “Yes. They’re out there, and they’re looking for me. Would you like to see a picture of my mother?”

            “Yes.”

            From the inside pocket of his jacket he took out a photograph and handed it to me. It was a young woman with red hair and a strong, slender face.

            “She’s beautiful. You look like her. Your bones.” I gave it back.

            “Do you think so? Her name is Margaret. I don’t know the rest.”

            “Not Clennam?”

            “No. Clennam isn’t my name.”

            I stared again. He raised his eyebrows.

            “You didn’t guess?”

            I choked, suddenly giggling. “You opened up Little Dorrit and chose the name of the nicest character!”

            Jarod couldn’t help himself. He laughed, too. “I really did. It was appropriate.”

            “Oh—” I groaned. “You’re not even a Russian literature professor, are you?”

            “No.”

            I shook my head. “But why?”

            The merriment dissolved into the pain in his eyes. “I don’t know my name. I don’t know who I am. All I have is Jarod, and the first names of my parents, Margaret and Charles, and my sister Emily and my brother Kyle. Nothing else. The Centre hid it from me my entire life, and they still won’t let me know. They told me that my parents died in a plane crash. It was only after I escaped that I learned they had just chosen two unrelated dead people to make me stop asking questions. I blamed that on Sydney, too, but he hadn’t known.”

            One word leapt out at me. “Wait—escaped?”

            “Yes, escaped. That’s another thing you weren’t able to see. The Centre is evil. They kidnapped me. They kidnapped other children. In their eyes, they owned us. They think they own me still. I’m property. When I realized that and what they were doing with my results, I decided that was enough, and I escaped. It was like a prison, and I escaped from it like a prisoner, and now they are hunting me like the law hunts an escaped prisoner. Haven’t you wondered why I go from place to place instead of settling down? It’s not because I want to. It’s because my freedom is continually in danger. Sometimes my life. They want me alive, but they’ll take me dead rather than let me be out free in this world. They own me,” he repeated, his face dark, his eyes stony.

            “Jarod. For Centre use only,” I whispered. “This is so illegal.”

            “Legal and illegal mean nothing to the Centre. They act like the CIA, with more autonomy because they’re independent of the government. The government doesn’t know the full extent of what they do, possibly because it doesn’t choose to because what the Centre does for it is very profitable. On the face of it it seems to be a fairly normal research corporation, but underneath it’s a crooked criminal organization.”

            “And you’re in danger wherever you go.”

            “Yes. I have to keep my ties to the Centre because they are the only ones who know who I really am, so they are always able to find me. Every once in a while I’m able to manipulate them into giving me some information.”

            “Is that why you call Sydney?”

            He started and stared at me. I went red.

            “I heard you on the phone in my father’s office today. You don’t just call him because you need him—what he can do for you. You call him because…well, you need him. Emotionally. Is he one of the ones trying to get you back?”

            “Yes,” he murmured. “He helps me and he hinders me. He tells me to come back, and he fights for my well-being.”

            “He’s confused.”

            “I think everyone associated with the Centre is. There are some people who were once my friends who are now tracking me down.”

            “Miss Parker?” I asked quietly.

            He gaped, and his eyes went dark and suspicious.

            “I heard that conversation, too. I didn’t mean to! I swear I didn’t.”

            Jarod sighed. “Yes, Miss Parker is leading the search for me. She’s…she’s like a combination of Mr. Bucket and Mr. Monks.”

            I blinked at that and tried to comprehend that combination. Mr. Bucket, from Bleak House, was a good man doing a bad job for an unjust system. Mr. Monks, from Oliver Twist, was a bad man who existed to deprive an innocent child of his life, family, and inheritance.

            “Confused,” I said.

            “Deceived. There’s as much deception surrounding her as me. Little Dorrit, I should not be telling you all this. The Centre does not hesitate to kill whoever knows too much.”

            I shivered. It was a little like a spy thriller, or a book by Tom Clancy. “No one will ever know I know anything. I’m just a small-town girl, remember? No one would ever look at me and think I’m the sort of person who knows things.”

            He looked like a small and forlorn child huddled up in his chair. He said slowly, “When I meet my sister Emily, I hope she is a little like you. You’re someone I would have liked to have had for a sister in another life.”

            I blinked swiftly against tears. “Jarod, you can be Nicholas to my Kate Nickleby anytime. Haven’t you already promised to thrash my Sir Mulberry Hawk?”

            He smiled a little. “Yes. Yes, I have, Kate.”

            I stood up. “Well, then, Nicholas, don’t we have work to do?”

            “Yes, we do. But first, Kate—” He rose and put his arms around me. I put my head on his chest and blinked against tears again. In a world where it seemed like my family was in danger of shrinking even more and where he didn’t know who or where his was, we’d both take whatever family we could get. If the unsteadiness of his chest was any indication, he felt our pact even more than I did, and for a moment I held him tighter, as if I were the older and he the younger, I Rose Maylie and he Oliver Twist, I Nicholas Nickleby and he the crippled, abused Smike. How often, I wondered, had anyone touched him kindly? Had Sydney ever held him when he was little? Or even given him a friendly pat on the shoulder? In his wandering life without family, how often did he get something as simple and meaningful as a hug? Did he ever dream of a father’s embrace, a mother’s tenderness? He must. He couldn’t cling so desperately to someone who dared offer herself as a stop-gap sister if he didn’t.

            Nor was he ashamed to show that he had been crying, when he released me. He wiped his eyes and said with a broken laugh, “Do you want some tea?”

            “Yes,” I said fervently.

            We went into the kitchen, and while we were waiting for the water to boil, I said, “I never did learn what my father told you.”

            He sighed, crossed his arms, leaned against the counter. “Plenty, and not enough. He doesn’t know who killed Tim Morone and framed him.”

            “Oh, no,” I groaned.

            “Don’t you worry. I’ll find it out before very long. I do believe that what Tim and your father knew about the murderer is the same thing. A month ago, Tim came to school early to work with Don Douglas, as you told me. He knew something about our murderer then. He had learned that someone on the finance committee was cooking the books. Embezzling from the school, in short.”

            I gasped, “From Morrison?”

            “From Morrison. Your Marshalsea. How he knew it is still a mystery to me. We may never know. It’s not something a student would have access to. And he had a confrontation with the person. In an empty classroom underneath your father’s office.”

            “Oh my goodness. The air vents. Dad can sometimes hear what’s going on in the classroom when the teacher’s being especially enthusiastic.”

            “That’s what he said. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he wasn’t usually there, but he’d had some new ideas for one of his classes, and he had to do some research.”

            “I remember that day.” The water was boiling, and I watched as he poured it into our cups. “He was gone most of the afternoon, and when he came back, he was very…abstracted. I thought he was thinking about his new ideas, but later he told me about learning some bad news about someone. He wouldn’t say who.”

            “He didn’t know who. He couldn’t hear the voices from the classroom very well, but he did hear the younger man—he quickly realized it had to be Tim Morone—tell the older man that he knew about the embezzlement and was going to go to the police, and he heard the older man offer him money not to. He remembered the time during his tenure as chairman of the oversight committee when they thought they had discovered discrepancies in the books, but they had later been resolved. He quietly started looking into it, as you said he might. He actually took financial information to go through, which the police unfortunately found among his paperwork and see as evidence against him. Tell me who was on that committee with him.”

            “Let me think. I hardly remember. Jan Bezic, Don Douglas, Sam Leland, Ted Fournier, and a few others in the business office.”

            “Hmm,” he mused over his tea. “Well, I know two things I need to do: hack into the school financial records and the personal financial records of each of those men (it’s definitely a man) and go back to the room we found in the basement.”

            “Why?” I asked with a shudder.

            He set down his tea on the counter. “I’ll never find this man if I don’t become him. And that’s best done in the place where he went through the emotions involved in killing Tim Morone.”

            “It sounds…horrible.”

            “It is,” he said grimly. “I’ll go later, when we’re done here and you’ve gone home.”

            “No. I’m going with you.”

            “After the way that room made you feel earlier? No.”

            “Yes. I’m not going to let you do that alone!”

            “I do it alone all the time.”

            “That’s why I’m not letting you do it alone this time. You do too many things alone too often.”

            His hand curled around his teacup as his mouth flatted out and his eyes went dark with the by-now too-familiar expression of the ache inside him.

            “How long has it been since you escaped?” I asked softly.

            “A year. Almost a year.”

            “So before that you were locked up in that place, but you had Sydney. And now you’re free, experiencing everything you never got to experience, but you’re alone.”

            He drew in an audible breath, like a gasp. “Yes.”

            “Would you go back?”

            “No. There’s hope out here. There’s no hope in the Centre. None for Sydney, either. He’s beginning to understand that. My escape shook him up in ways he’d never experienced before. He asked my forgiveness once. I couldn’t give it to him.”

            “Maybe…someday?”

            “If I ever find it for myself.” He pushed himself away from the counter. “Time to go to work.”

            He opened his computer and got on the Internet, soon accessing more financial files. I couldn’t make head or tail of them and didn’t want to, so I made dinner instead. Stir-fry again. Jarod had nothing in his refrigerator or cupboards but stir-fry ingredients, macaroni and cheese, coffee, and green tea. And four different kinds of ice cream in the freezer, as well as a large box of PEZ refills on top of it. It was true. The man was still a child. He had never had a chance to grow up. He was sitting there eating PEZ from his Shakespeare PEZ dispenser and hacking illegally into college financial records, and I, obviously the only adult in the situation, was just letting him. I shook my head and made stir-fry. Which I was getting heartily sick of. I made macaroni and cheese, too. He grinned when I brought out the odd combination of food.

            “You do realize how unhealthy junk food is, right?”

            “I don’t care. I lived for thirty years on optimized nutritional supplements. I’m probably the healthiest person on the planet.”

            “You lived on what?”

            “Healthy, tasteless glop. I didn’t know you could enjoy eating until I escaped. The first time I tasted ice cream…” He closed his eyes with a blissful smile.

            “You tasted ice cream for the first time a year ago?”

            “It was very good. But PEZ was the first sweet thing I ate when I escaped. I didn’t understand the mouse head on it, but it sure was fun.”

            “Where did you go first?”

            “Alaska. It was as far away from the Centre as I could imagine, and I had always wanted to go there and see mountains and snow. I got rides with truckers—I like truckers. When I got there, it was as wonderful as I had imagined. Have you ever been so happy that you thought your heart would break?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Well, I was. And then I discovered this village where kids were getting sick. Watching kids play for the first time was…indescribable. But I found out that they were getting sick because of some toxic waste being dumped in their water supply, so I went to work for the tanker company, on one of the ships, and exposed them.” He smiled a smile full of sweetness and memory. “And while I was there, I read a newspaper article from the lower 48—”

            “The what?”

            “Now who doesn’t know common, everyday terms?” he mocked me gently. “That’s what Alaskans call the forty-eight contiguous states.”

            “Oh, brother. Anyway?”

            “The article was about a little boy who was in a wheelchair after a surgery, and something about it didn’t sit right with me. So I studied surgical techniques, and after I was done with the tanker company, I went back down to the lower 48 and found out that a drunk surgeon had put that little boy in his wheelchair. I exposed them, too, and got a large settlement for the boy. And it just went on from there. It’s fun.”

            “I’ll bet it is. The dream job, never having to be bored, being able to learn and do whatever you want. But the Centre puts a cramp in your style, doesn’t it?”

            “Actually, the Centre’s half the fun. Stringing Miss Parker along is half the fun.”

            “Oh, I see. You’re the annoying little brother.”

            “I can be, if I want to be,” he chuckled. “But actually I don’t know who’s older, she or I.”

            “Jarod, how do you afford all this? This house can’t have been cheap to rent, for one thing, and you told me you’re not a literature professor because you need the money.”

            His eyes laughed. “I stole $5 million from the Centre.”

            “What?”

            “I did a Wall Street simulation for a client of the Centre once, and I built into my results a backdoor into Centre finances. When the client ran my results, I was in New York. On Wall Street, at the Stock Exchange. I could have taken everything. Instead I took five million. I gave it back, most of it, in exchange for information about my family. Sydney found the picture of my mom and sent it to me. That’s a fair exchange for $4 million, don’t you think? He was going to get me more information, but Miss Parker put a stop to it. I thought at first he betrayed me, but he didn’t. I see the million I kept as a small payment for thirty years of work.”

            “I’ll say,” I muttered. “Speaking of which, did you get anything out of the school’s finances?”

            “Not yet. Whoever this person is, he’s good. I’ll keep at it a couple more hours. Then when no one’s likely to be in the Bailey Building, we can go to the Marshalsea. You’re sure you want to come?”

            “Yes.”

            He smiled. “Alright, Little Dorrit.”