Текст книги "In the Afterlight"

Автор книги: Alexandra Bracken

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Cole glanced at me once as I stood behind him, then turned back to the screen. It was as much of an invitation as I was going to get. He started the video again from the beginning, and it was that much worse to hear the Red’s guttural sounds and screaming mixed with the scientist’s calm, dry notations to the camera.

“They were testing the kid to see what kind of emotional response triggers his abilities,” Cole said, staring at the last, frozen close-up of the boy’s face, streaming with sweat and tears. “Trying to map the way his mind processed it.”

“Ruby,” he said, turning so his face was in profile, “after tonight...after we have our Op strategy...I want you to do everything in your power to find Lillian Gray. Everything. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, finally finding the words as he started the video over again. “I do.”

10

I LEFT THE COMPUTER LAB in another glassy daze, walking and walking with nothing but the images of all of those kids trapped inside of my head. Burns. Surgeries. Blood being drawn. Questions. So many variations of What’s happening? And Why are you doing this?

Even if my mind was checked out, my body at least knew where it wanted to go. This whole day had passed like a year spent underwater. I just wanted to go to sleep for a little while, and try surfacing again later.

The others had claimed one of the empty bunk rooms on the lower level—I had my own creaky bed and everything. Truthfully, though, I would have curled up in the corner of one of the halls on the cold tile, as long as it meant shutting my eyes for a little while.

Someone clearly had the same idea. The overhead light was off, but a smaller, desk-sized one was on, perched on top of the crappy little dresser on the other side of the room. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to see him until he was there, and a little glow lit at my center. Liam was sprawled across one of the bottom bunks on his stomach, his face turned away, his hands tucked up under the folded sweatshirt he was using as a pillow. His hair and back were still damp from the shower he must have taken.

“Hey,” I said, coming toward him. A small test of sorts to gauge his mood. If he wanted to be left alone, I’d turn and go without a second’s hesitation. Instead, his shoulders, then the rest of his body, visibly relaxed. I dropped my knee on the free space at the edge of the bare mattress. His hand automatically moved to hook his arm around it.

“Hey yourself,” Liam mumbled. He didn’t sound sleepy, but he did sound wrung-out. “Time for dinner?”

“Not yet. How’s the garage looking?”

“Getting there. You can see half of the floor now. That’s an improvement, right?” he said, finally lifting his head and turning toward me. “Present for you.”

I followed his gaze over to the dresser, where there was a square of clear plastic to the left of the lamp. I picked it up and laughed—it was a CD case, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. I popped it open, smiling at the liner notes and disc inside.

“It’s like our song is following us everywhere,” he said.

He meant “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the opening track. I smiled. “Our song?”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older...” His soft voice trailed off into a hum. “I figured you could use some pleasant background music to drown out the sounds of you and Cole beating the shit out of each other, if it’s going to be an every-morning kind of thing.”

The warmth at my center evaporated. I closed the case, pressing it against my chest. “How did you know?”

“The two of you were the only ones that showed up to breakfast with new bruises. It’s not that hard to put two and two together.” He finally looked up at me. “Please...please be careful. The thought of him hitting you, pushing you around...it just makes me want to kill him.”

“It’s just sparring. I have to train.”

“And you couldn’t ask Vida?”

I felt myself heat up. “Are you...implying something?”

I didn’t want to explain this to him. I shouldn’t have to explain. It had nothing to do with him. I started to pull back, but his hand reached out again and caught mine.

“No, dammit, of course not. I’m sorry. That’s not the reason.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I found it in the car they’d stripped, its glove box. I brought it because it made me think of you.”

I reached over, placing it on top of the nearest dresser.

“Sorry. I’ve got a real knot in my tail today,” he said, turning those blue eyes up on me again. I felt frustration retract its claws from my stomach. “And I know you can take care of yourself, but it still drives me crazy to think about it. I guess I’m being a hypocrite, considering how close I came to hitting you this morning.”

He’d spent the whole day hauling junk around, trying to put it into some kind of order—and that was after having his brother read him the riot act. Of course he was entitled to be short with me.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t hurt me. Hey—I mean it. Not even close. I wouldn’t have jumped in if I didn’t know I could block you.” I picked up his hand, folding his thumb toward his palm and the other four fingers over it. “Plus, you had your fist like this—and that’s a good way to break your thumb.”

I pressed my lips to his knuckles to show I was just teasing. Finally—finally—I was rewarded with a smile.

His soft cotton shirt had ridden up his back slightly, exposing a sliver of skin. I wanted to touch it, so I did. I dragged his shirt up that much farther as I worked my fingers up and down his back in soft strokes.

“Feels nice,” he whispered. “Will you stay? I don’t want to see anyone but you for a while.”

He moved back toward the wall, a silent invitation to slide into the small bunk beside him. It felt so good and easy now; I knew exactly how we fit together, as if we’d been cut from the same pattern.

“You okay?” I asked, fingers worrying the front of his shirt. Liam wrapped an arm around my waist, drawing me closer. Everything that came out of the laundry practically reeked of detergent and bleach, including the shirt he wore, but underneath it all was this scent that was all warm skin and evergreens and mint toothpaste. And that was Liam.

The scent had a drugging effect on my system. I took in one steadying breath after another.

“Just dog-tired, darlin’.”

The silence that followed was the first true spell of calm I’d experienced in months. It was the dim, shadowed light, the steady rise and fall of his chest against my cheek, his warmth pressed against mine. All of these things conspired against me; one moment I was awake, Liam’s fingers carefully stroking the loose hair back out of my face, the next I was slipping into a slow, sweet doze.

The soft kiss was the only thing to bring me out of it.

“Dinner time,” he said, his own voice sounding rough from sleep. “They just shouted down the hall.”

And yet, neither of us moved.

“What did you do today?” he asked after a while. “I didn’t even ask...”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

He leaned back at that, the focus in his eyes sharpening.

“I got us into Clancy’s private collection of files. Besides a list of the different tribes and their last known locations, it basically was a digital scrapbook of nightmares.”

“How did you get access?”

Now it was my turn to fix him with a look. “The usual way.”

I watched his reaction carefully, already feeling the words settle between us, add to that space. They were an unwelcome reminder. This is what I do. This is who I am.

He took it in stride. “Was there anything about the cure on there?”

“A bit about the testing they did at Thurmond to find the cause. But...it turns out that they’re going to close Thurmond down at the end of March.”

“Oh, damn,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Cole still wants to plan a hit.”

“Well...I guess two months is better than two weeks,” he said. “We’ll figure it out. But can I ask you something, and can I get an honest answer out of you?”

I bristled a bit at that.

“This quartermaster thing you suggested, me being in charge of supplies...is it a consolation prize?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is this a way to keep me here? Keep me behind, I mean. When things get rolling with the camps, am I going to be left waiting here, hoping everybody comes back in one piece?”

“You mean, exactly what we’re all going to be doing while you’re out looking for supplies?” I said. “No. And for what it’s worth, Cole was only panicking because you didn’t tell him where you were going. It was the same for me—you were just gone. I know you can fight if you have to, but I don’t know that he does.”

“He has no idea what I’ve been through...what I’ve had to do. He acts like I don’t even know how to use a gun.” His hands bunched up the back of my shirt. “I do, though. Harry taught me before I left home. I just don’t want to shoot one unless I have to.”

“That’s the way it should be,” I told him. “Sometimes I can’t believe that this happened to us, and I wonder when it became so natural to pick up a gun and act like it’s nothing. I have to teach the other kids how to shoot, and I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I don’t know how to show them how absurd and terrible it is that they even have to learn.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said, quietly. “Maybe we don’t have to actually show up with guns blazing.”

I’m not sure I could have been more surprised if he’d suggested we should just go straight to the top and assassinate Gray. I’d based my camp liberation plan on the one he and the others had come up with at East River. And both involved considerable use of force.

“No, it has to be a real fight,” I said. “They have to take us seriously. The thing is...what I can’t get over is, how the kids will take it. What’ll happen if they find themselves in the position to kill and pull the trigger. We can train them to steady their nerves and we can give them targets to practice with, but it feels like forcing them to drink poison that’ll never leave their system. I know it’s a sacrifice and that they’ll be the ones choosing to make it, but I worry about the cost. I’m afraid of what we’ll be at the end of the road.”

Look at what it’s done to us. Zu’s crying face the other night floated to the forefront of my mind, only to be replaced by the memory of Chubs’s confession about the requirements of becoming a skip tracer; him being shot; Liam’s battered face—all of these were linked in my mind now. They’d never fade, not even in the afterlight of all of this.

“I think they understand more than you’d think,” he said, tracing a finger along the edge of my ear. “The kids who aren’t League have been out there running—for years. No one is innocent here. They want it just as bad as we do. We’ll figure out a way to keep them as safe as possible. We’ll take care of them.”

“Is that enough?”

“It will be.” Liam’s kiss was unbearably tender. “I missed this. Us talking, I mean.”

A bolt of guilt shot through me at his words, at how content he sounded.

“Everything else seems crazy,” Liam said, one hand threading through my loose hair, “Let’s just stay here, you and me, and not let anyone or anything else in for a while, okay?”

This was the danger of him. In an instant, he could lift everything off my shoulders and set it aside. He became the answer to every doubt and lingering question. My world refocused, settling on him—beautiful, perfect him. I didn’t have to think about what I’d done, what would happen to us even five minutes from now.

Maybe he would never forgive me, not fully, but there was no thinking in this. If I couldn’t bare every secret to him, unload everything in my heart, at least I could be close to him this way. He wanted comfort, and so did I.

I nodded and brushed my lips as soft as a breath just behind his ear. The response was instant—a shudder ran through him and it became a challenge to get that response from him again and again. He rolled over on top of me and I shifted to draw my legs around his. He pressed down to capture my mouth and I froze at the friction between us.

Liam pulled back, bracing his elbows on either side of my head, his brows drawing together as he studied my face. I felt myself flood with color, the way it spread down my throat, across my chest. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt how much he wanted me, but here, in this room, on this bed—it felt like more of a decision that needed to be made. One I wasn’t ready for.

“It doesn’t have to be anything more than this,” he said, softly. “I don’t want you to think it has to be. This is actually pretty damn great.” Fingers skimmed against my ribcage, ran along the edge of my sports bra. Every last ounce of his attention focused on my lips again. “But if...when I went out, I made sure to get...” The words were flustered, tangled up in one another, but I understood his meaning and it sent a small, growing spiral of happiness through me. He wanted this enough that he’d thought ahead; he would take the necessary precautions. “Days, weeks, years from now...when you’re ready, so am I. Okay?”

I wondered if he could feel how quickly he’d dialed up my heartbeat with only a few words. I was close enough to see the pulse at the base of his throat, if the trembling in his hands hadn’t already spoken for him.

I wrapped my arms around his waist, drawing him down to me again.

“What am I going to do with you?” I asked, only half joking.

That tiny smile grew as he lowered his face toward mine. “Oh, you could try out a thing or two...”

“Like what kinds of things?” I teased, pulling back as he came forward. He made a small, impatient noise. “Things that’ll get us in trouble?”

“You are trouble,” he said. “Capital T and everything—”

I pulled him down, cutting his laughter off before it had the chance to start. My kiss eased off under his touch, becoming slower, a sweet kind of lazy. It made me feel, for the first time in my life, that I actually had time. We could take that soft pace. Explore.

“Can we not go to dinner every night?” I asked as his lips left mine and started to work toward my throat.

“Okay,” he whispered, “works for me.”

I didn’t feel shy or clumsy when my hands slid under his shirt again and began to draw it up, off. I heard him whisper my name, the sound of it breathy and raw, and it was like a hit of a drug to my system. I wanted to hear it again. Again and again and again and again...

There was a tentative knock on the door.

Liam pulled back, breathing hard. It was hard to tell which looked more wild—his hair or his eyes.

Don’t make a sound, I thought, they’ll go away...

They seemed to. I let out a soft sigh as Liam settled back down over me, blocking the rest of the room with his broad shoulders.

Then, the door cracked open.

Liam shot up so fast, he nailed his head against the top bunk and actually half tripped, half fell onto the ground. Cold air hit my skin and I looked down, realizing that at some point, my own shirt had mysteriously vanished, only to reappear on the other end of the bunk’s thin mattress.

“Hang on!” Liam barked. “Just a sec!”

I shoved the thing back over my head just as he bent to scoop his up off the floor. A small piece of folded paper fell out of his back pocket, fluttering to the ground softly. He stumbled over himself to get to the door before it could open the rest of the way, catching it in his hand. Liam filled the doorway with his body, preventing whoever was there from looking or coming in.

“Hey sorry,” came the timid voice, “but the showerhead is going crazy. Do you think you could fix it?”

Liam’s whole posture relaxed. “Now’s not really a great time...”

“The whole bathroom is flooding and, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean for it to happen—”

“It’s okay,” Liam said, glancing back at me. His face was a portrait of apology. He held up one finger, motioning for me to wait.

As soon as the door shut behind him, I set my mind to remaking his bed, refolding the top blanket one or both of us had managed to kick off at some point. My heel brushed something warm—something that wasn’t the cold tile.

I bent down, retrieving the piece of paper that had fallen out of Liam’s pocket. It had been folded over once into a smaller square, but it had opened as it hit the ground. My eyes were already taking in the neat letters carefully printed there before I could spare a thought to it being wrong.

Your name is Liam Stewart. You are eighteen years old. Your parents are Harry and Grace Stewart. Cole is your brother and Claire was your sister. You were in a camp, Caledonia, but you broke out. East River did burn. You were lost. You’re in Lodi by choice because you want to stay with Chubs, Zu, and Ruby. You want to be here, helping them. Do not go, even if they tell you to. DO NOT GO! Ruby can take your memories, but what you feel is the truth. You love her, you love her, you love her.

I read the words again, and a third time trying to make sense of them. Because the words were ones I knew, I recognized I was reading sentences, but my mind disengaged. It up and left the picture before my heart could make the connection.

Ruby can take your memories...

It was a note to himself—to a future self, one he apparently was so sure would fall victim to my mind again. This was a cheat sheet. Security; because, clearly my word wasn’t going to cut it. I could promise him over and over again that I’d never touch his mind again, but it meant nothing. I had done it once. The trust between us was already broken.

I went cold to the core. The shock of it—jumping from his warm touch to this—it was too much. I was the ash brushed aside after the fire had finally been blown out. You are so stupid, so stupid, so stupid. He doesn’t trust you, no matter what he says.

“Stop.” The world broke me out of the free fall I dropped into, and all at once the sensation of falling, sinking eased. I said the word again, forcing my heart down out of my throat, stilling my thoughts. I said it again, and one more time, until my voice sounded like my own again, not some dry rasp.

I paced the length of the room, trying to stop the torrent of thoughts shooting through my mind. Quick steps were moving down the hall, bare feet slapping against the tile. I panicked, shoving the note inside of the CD case just as Liam swept back into the room.

He was drenched in random places—his left shoulder, down his right side, the back of his sweats, the fabric below his knees—and the expression on his face was the resigned look of someone nominated for sainthood against his will.

I plastered a smile on my face, holding my breath in the hope it would keep me from crying. Just seeing his face was enough to start unraveling the binding I had wrapped around the hurt.

“Soooo,” he said, wiping his damp hair off his face, “apparently I have to stop telling people I know a little bit about plumbing. Because a little bit is how to twist the knob to get the water to turn on and off—what? I look that pathetic?”

“No—no, not at all,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” He took a step toward me. “Your voice sounds—”

“I just realized it’s almost seven,” I said. “Cole wants us upstairs to talk through the plan for the camps. We should—we should go.”

His brow creased but he stood back from the door, opening it for me. Just as I passed, he caught my shoulder and turned me back toward him. A droplet of water worked its way down from his hair, mapping out a trail on his cheek, over his jaw, down his throat as he swallowed hard. I couldn’t meet his eyes as he studied me, and managed not to cringe as he leaned forward and pressed a sweet kiss to my cheek.

The others were only just starting to mill into the computer room, joining the Greens who were rearranging the desks out of their usual, tidy rows and dragging them against the walls so they lined the room instead. Nico had reclaimed the laptop and was sitting at one of the desks along the rear wall, his back toward us. Everyone else faced the old, marker-stained white board and the map of the United States taped up next to it on the opposite end of the room.

Chubs was standing in front of the map, pushing in small red pins as Vida read something—city names?—off a printed list.

“Nicely done with the brain voodoo, boo,” she said when she saw us. “Consider your ass forgiven for not coming down to help us haul shit around the garage.”

Chubs glanced back over his shoulder, one hand still splayed out on the map. “If we’re going to try picking some of these groups up, we have four good options. There are at least ten kids in Wyoming alone.”

“If they haven’t already moved on,” Liam pointed out.

“Now who’s Mr. Doom and Gloom?” Chubs shot back.

Whatever Liam was about to say was preempted by his brother sweeping into the room like a tornado of energy, a visibly pleased Senator Cruz at his side. The rare glimpse of happiness on her features made her look ten years younger. She smiled when she caught my gaze, giving a small, affirmative nod.

She’d done it, then. She’d managed to secure some supplies for us.

Zu, Hina, and Kylie were the last to appear in the doorway, and carefully made their way through the field of kids on the floor to come sit beside us.

“Okay,” Cole said, clapping his hands together. “So. Thank y’all for all of your ingenious planning and scheming. I reviewed everything, and I think we’ve landed on a winning strategy.”

He walked back toward the white boards, picking up one of the markers. A blue line was drawn down the middle of the board. At the top of one half he wrote, THURMOND. On the other, OASIS.

Without any other preamble, he started in. “We’re going to be making two hits: one, Oasis, is in Nevada. It’ll serve as a kind of test run for our big hit on Thurmond in five weeks’ time. In addition to getting those poor kids out, think of Oasis as an opportunity to work out the kinks in our strategy.”

I crossed my legs and rested my elbows on my knees, hands gripped in front of me. Calm. Something in my mind clicked into place at the familiarity of this—being debriefed on an upcoming Op. The other League kids, Vida included, appeared to feel the same way, leaning into the moment when everyone else seemed to edge back, unsure.

“One or two volunteers will enter Oasis ahead of the actual hit.” He turned to face the cluster of Greens sitting together. “We’re going to need to install a small camera in the frames of someone’s glasses, and it can relay back to us here. We need to get a sense of the compound’s layout to fine-tune our timing.”

“Why glasses?” Senator Cruz asked. “Won’t those be taken when they’re brought into the camp, too?”

“No, they’re considered essential items,” I piped up. “They’re probably the only things that won’t be taken.”

If Liam recognized that that had been lifted from his original plans at East River, he didn’t show it. He sat with his legs sprawled out in front of him, leaning back on his hands. He watched his brother with wariness.

“The catch is, the kids who volunteer can’t have been previously in a camp. PSF policy dictates that kids be returned to the original camp they were processed through, and Oasis is a relatively new camp. There is absolutely no pressure to participate. Like I said, this is purely volunteer.”

Zu glanced between Liam and Chubs, but it was Vida who smoothed a tuft of her hair down in silent reassurance.

“That aspect of the plan won’t be necessary for Thurmond, as we have three people who have been inside of the camp and are intimately familiar with its layout. The other difference between this and the big hit is what we’re doing with the kids we free. From what intel we have”—otherwise known as what intel Clancy let us have—“Oasis has approximately fifty kids, all of whom I’d like to have return with us. Depending on how willing they are to fight, we can ask them to join us in the Thurmond hit, or we can slowly return them back to their parents, a few kids at a time.”

“Are we still going to go out and try to round up the tribes of kids?” Chubs asked, jerking his thumb back toward the map.

Cole nodded. “We’ll start sending out cars once we have supplies. We need as much manpower as possible if we’re going to pull this off ourselves.”

He moved through the other parts of the plan quickly; they were sketchy at best until we had actual images from inside of the camp’s walls. It would be a small team, no more than ten of us, armed but with the order to avoid a firefight if we could. With only fifty kids, there would be maybe twelve PSFs there at most, and one or two camp controllers. We would pose as a military convoy bringing in the weekly supplies; I would be out in front, of course, because I’d have the job of influencing one of the camp controllers. He or she would continue to report that everything in the camp was fine while we drove the kids out using the camp’s own transportation, whether it be SUVs, trucks, or a bus.

The kids were silent, processing this, until Liam finally said, “Fifty kids is a hell of a lot different than three thousand kids.”

“Better to run this through on a scaled model,” Cole said, smiling but somehow not smiling.

“Okay, that may be true, but other than giving us practice, and rescuing a small group of kids, what is this going to accomplish?”

Cole put his hands on his hips, one brow raised. “That’s not enough for you? Really?”

“No, I mean—” Liam ran an agitated hand back through his hair. “The plan is good, but couldn’t it serve as something else, too? Are we going to release the photos or video that’s taken so people can actually see what conditions are like in there?”

A few kids murmured in agreement, including Lucy, who added, “I like that idea a lot. People should have the opportunity to see what it’s really like.”

“Do you have the means to do that without Gray tracing their source, swooping in, and blowing this place sky high?”

Liam’s face was still hard, but I could sense him retreating under Cole’s look.

“Whose plan was this?” Chubs asked. “I read through all of them, and I don’t recognize it....”

Cole’s jaw set, just for a moment. “It’s a combination of a number of them. I pulled the best elements from each.”

Actually, it was the exact plan I had handed him, and he knew it. I faced the front of the room, refusing to turn when I felt Chubs’s gaze fall on me. There was no reason to fuel the fire by pointing it out to them.

“Senator?” Cole motioned for her to step up.

“Ah, yes,” she said, “I was able to secure a promise of supplies from my contacts in Canada. Food, gasoline, technology, and a limited supply of guns. The issue is that they refuse to bring them across the border into California. They want to bring them in by boat to Gold Beach, Oregon. Is that doable?”

Liam spoke up before Cole did. “I just need a map and a car, both of which I can find around here.”

“And at least three kids as backup,” Cole amended. “Kylie, Zach, and Vida.”

“And me—” The words were only just out of my mouth when there was a bang at the other end of the room. I turned around in time to see Nico stumble backward and trip over the chair he’d been sitting in. He pressed both hands against his mouth as his knees gave out under him. The noise that escaped him was a high, keening moan.

I was up and moving toward him before I could stop myself, gripping his arms to steady him and stop his rocking. “What? What is it?”

By then, Cole and the rest of the room had already surrounded the laptop, blocking my view of whatever was on the screen.

“Cate,” Nico cried, “Cate. Ruby, they took her—they took Cate.”

Gasps flew up around me like a flock of birds. I released my grip on Nico and pushed to the front of the kids, who folded against each other to create a path for me. Vida was gripping the laptop, had lifted it off the desk, and it was only because Chubs was there to grab her arms that she didn’t get to slam it down against the hard surface.

“You son of a bitch!” she spat at Cole. “This is on you, ass**le! God dammit—dammit—” Chubs wrapped both arms over her chest, pinning her arms to her side as she lashed out with her feet, not caring who she kicked. She thrashed around, trying to headbutt him off, and only succeeding in knocking his glasses off his face. Zu rushed to pick them up before they could be trampled.

The video on the screen was looping on the homepage of a news site, fuzzy and shaky, as if it had been shot from a distance. A long line of men and women with black hoods and bound hands and legs were lying on the side of a highway, with smoking car wreckage nearby. They were loaded onto the back of a military truck one at a time, overseen by soldiers armed with assault rifles that reflected the late afternoon light. The headline running beneath the pictures was Children’s League Agents Captured in Colorado.

My head throbbed as I watched it play through again, searching for her, trying to see what made Vida and Nico certain. Nearly all of the prisoners were dressed in black sweats or Op gear, the same things they had left the Ranch in—some were easy enough to identify. Sen’s long braid. Instructor Johnson’s imposing height.

Maybe she hadn’t reached the other agents in time to try to turn them back—maybe she was the one who had recorded the video, and was safely on her way back to us—maybe she—

Cole paused the video on a shot of the prisoners lining up at the truck, and pointed to a smaller figure at the end. I leaned forward, bringing my face close to the screen. When he moved his finger, I saw the traces of white-blond hair escaping from beneath the hood. The figure was standing calmly despite the awkward angle at which they’d bound her arms. The other agents bucked and bumped the soldiers, hassling them even on their way into imprisonment. Cole unpaused the video and she walked forward, head down, not so much as shrugging off the touch of the soldiers who lifted her into the back of the truck.

No.

I felt a painful crack down my center. The shapes and faces around me seemed to blur as I stepped back, wrapping my arms around myself. Blood pounded through my veins, making my legs feel light, my head lighter. I couldn’t calm the sensation, couldn’t get the jitters out of my nerves long enough to think a whole, coherent thought. Cate.