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“I’ve done this tons of times. We’ll get out.” Probably wasn’t a good time to mention he’d done it mostly as part of a team, with less surveillance on the package.
    “How old are you now, Matt?”
    “Twenty-three. Almost twenty-four.” He felt stupid tacking on the “almost,” but couldn’t stop himself.
    One of those snorts from James. “How many times’ve you done this?”
    “I’ve done seventeen extractions bringing people out of the Red.” People always asked, so he kept track. If you were trying to escape you put a lot of trust in the people helping you. The consequences for getting caught were too high.
    “Yeah, seventeen. That’s good,” James said somewhat absently. “Listen, if we’re going to escape there’s something you need to know.”
    “That’s usually my line.”
    “Yeah, I’m sure it is. You need to know this, though. In re-education camp they did something to my head.” Then he paused for so long Matt thought he might be finished.
    “Um, shaved it?” Not that it looked like it had been recently. It was long enough that James had some curl in his honey-gold hair. Those curls would just wrap around his finger.
    “No, the Blue did that,” James said, deadpan. Finally he looked up. James looked clear-eyed, if a little tense. “Actually, the Blue did other shit that I think led to this. But re-education fucked up my head. I’m not always… right, I guess.”
    Matt gently touched James’s hand. “No one can be right all the time.”
    “Smartass.” James finally showed some emotion, one corner of his mouth quirking up. “I mean, my head just… works differently.”
    Completely confusing. “Huh?”
    “Ah, fuck,” James muttered. Then he stared at the wall across from him for a minute. “Okay, I’m going to tell you some stuff that’s need-to-know. Actually, I think it’s not even supposed to be need-to-know, but I’m not sure I care anymore.”
    “Goody. I love being embroiled in conspiracy.” Not.
    James shot him an annoyed look, and changed the subject suddenly. “How’re you going to recode me without my tracker picking it up?”
    “I have a dummy. We can do it almost anywhere, but we should do it at your house so they don’t come looking for you as soon. It’ll look strange if you sit in a café all day, but they might buy you sleeping twelve hours.”
    “What about the trackers in my clothes?”
    Matt stared blankly. “They track your clothes?” Was that standard?
    “This pink triangle isn’t just a fashion statement, you know.” James’s lips quirked up on both ends. It was cute. No, not cute. It was, um, strange. Unique. Shit .
    “Shit,” Matt echoed his internal dialogue. “We have to cover that up too. It’s not going to be safe for you—or me—if I’m seen in public with you much. If they type me we’re both fucked.”
    “You have the gene too, huh?”
    Whoa. Looked more likely James was gay. If he had the “gay” gene he had about an eighty-two percent chance of being on the queer spectrum. Scientists hadn’t isolated other genes in play, but there had to be at least one or two. But the “gay” gene was taken by Red states as proof positive that someone needed re-education.
    How they caught the other thirty-five percent of homosexuals that didn’t have the gene was by good, old-fashioned finger-pointing.
    “That how they get you?”
    James nodded. “One of the guards thought I hung out with another POW too much, and sent us both for typing. The other guy didn’t have the gene, so he’s just in regular POW hell. Not enough guards to testify against him.” For anyone who didn’t have the gene, it took three “witnesses” to testify that they knew someone was queer for the charge to stick.
    Matt tried to keep himself from asking, but he’d never been that great at impulse control. “So, was he?”
    “Yeah, he was. And yeah, I know because we were fucking around.” James looked him in the eye. Matt tried to decipher