If Clint knew, Nick knew. Nick more than knew. Nick was probably the one who’d told him. Teddy couldn’t think about what that meant.
“So . . . are we under arrest?” Dara said.
“No.” Clint leaned back in his chair. “Not today. The Whitfield Institute and the FBI have a very productive relationship. A relationship that nobody wants to see undermined by your stunt. And as you can imagine, the FBI is not eager to admit that its files were breached by a group of lightweights too ignorant to avoid detection on the goddamn surveillance cameras.”
He shifted forward in his seat, drilling his forefinger into his desk. “However,” he continued, “the evidence collected against you will remain in the possession of the FBI. And there’s no statute of limitations on some of these felonies, so if any of you ever tries a stunt like this again, I’m confident that you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Now Teddy would spend the rest of her career wondering if tomorrow would be the day the FBI would come knocking. Why did she always get herself into these situations? She thought she was doing the right thing—no, she knew she was doing the right thing—so why did she always end up worse off than when she started?
“And as of this moment,” Clint continued, “you’re all on probation. Break one rule between now and graduation, and you’ll all be expelled.”
Teddy clenched her fists at her sides, silently seething. How dare he act so self-righteous? Yes, they’d acted stupidly. But Clint had ruined the life of an innocent man. Sent Yates to San Quentin for a crime he didn’t commit.
Unable to stand it one second longer, Teddy spoke. “Before you go any further, there’s something you should see. Something Molly risked her life to obtain.” She handed her cell phone across the desk. “Press play.”
The video links cycled through one more time. “What was it you told us, Professor Corbett?” Teddy pretended to think. “ ‘A psychic can never use his power to tamper with evidence or testimony to benefit the outcome of a case.’ I’ve forwarded the link to Yates’s attorney. The video clearly shows someone else committing the murder. Yates was convicted based on a coerced confession. Key evidence that was suppressed. That should be enough to get him a new trial.”
“That’s why—” Clint stopped himself. Shook his head. “How did you—”
“Know where to look?” Teddy realized there was only one way to play this: with the truth. She took a step forward, drew back her shoulders, and met Clint’s eyes. She said, “When I went to interview Corey McDonald in San Quentin, I met a prisoner named Derek Yates.”
Once she started, Teddy couldn’t stop talking. She tried to slow her rush of words, but it all came pouring out. Everything Yates had told her about Sector Three, how the government had experimented on psychics, how her father had fought back, how her mother was still alive. How Clint had forced a false confession—an accusation the videotape had painfully borne out.
She spun around, intending to launch herself out the door and never come back, but Clint’s words stopped her: “If you leave now, you’ll never know the truth.”
“The truth?” she echoed. Her throat felt raw. “The video documents the truth. Coming from you, that’s—”
“Teddy,” Clint interjected. “There were reasons for what I did. Reasons that I don’t have to justify. Reasons you don’t understand—”
“Reasons? There’s no justification for what I saw on that tape.”
He shifted in his chair, obviously uncomfortable. “There are things I haven’t told you, but I wasn’t certain if they were true . . .” He trailed off, looking over Teddy’s shoulder as though staring at some distant image only he could see. “I wasn’t there. I’ve already told you that. But I had friends on base, people I trusted. There were rumors about psychics who were being pushed too far. Subjected to endless psychological tests and physical trials meant to turn them into something they were never meant to be. Psychic soldiers. Killing machines, all empathy destroyed. I heard that your father fought back—that he led an uprising against the people behind the experiments. That would certainly be consistent with the Richard I knew.” He paused, seemingly lost in thought. “The point is,” he finally continued, shaking his head, “the few psychics who survived Sector Three vanished. Including your mother. And a year or two later, a series of inexplicable events began.”
“What do you mean?” Pyro asked.
Clint started as if suddenly remembering there were others in the room. “Assassinations, kidnappings, bombings. Operations executed in broad daylight and with distinct political agendas. Everything that happened had at least one psychic element to it: mental manipulation, clairvoyance, telepathy, something.”
“And you thought these psychics were the ones who escaped Sector Three?” Dara said.
“Yes. Someone was still manipulating them into serving a twisted agenda.”
“You assumed Yates was one of them?” Teddy asked.
“He was with them, I’m sure of it. He’d been involved in at least four cases that I knew of, each more brutal than the last, but I didn’t have enough evidence to tie him to them.” Clint shook his head, looked at her. “But I wasn’t after Yates. I knew what he’d undergone at Sector Three. The Yates I knew was never a killer. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone.”
“But you put him away despite that. He was your friend,” Teddy said.
“My friend was gone. He’d been gone for years.” Clint rubbed his forehead. “I had no option. I decided that if I couldn’t get to the people at the top, I’d start at the bottom. Start arresting psychics like Yates who I believed were being used as weapons. That way I could shut down the entire operation once and for all.”
“But that didn’t work, did it?” Pyro said.
Clint shook his head.
“So when the government started a new school?”
