Текст книги "Never Fade "

Автор книги: Alexandra Bracken

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“A totally reasonable response,” Chubs assured her. “Even more reasonable if you had done it slowly, with much fire and ice picks.”

Somehow, Olivia didn’t find that funny.

“Imagine my surprise when they dragged me in front of that hick,” she said. “The very first thing he told me was that the only way I’d get out of his tribe was if they decided to dump my body in the river.”

I shook my head, trying to dispel the angry buzzing between my ears and focus on the here and now, rather than what I was going to do to the bastard. “What’s his story?”

“Knox’s?” Olivia glanced around, but we were alone. “I can’t get a straight one. Supposedly, he broke out of PSF custody a few years back and was holed up in different parts of Nashville until the flood. I don’t know how he convinced the first kids here to join up, but I can tell you that most of us didn’t join the tribe by choice.”

Jude’s thick eyebrows were drawn together. “Why does he hate the other colors so much? What happened?”

Olivia lifted a shoulder. “Who knows? No one’s willing to risk his anger by asking. We already have to fight for every scrap of food as it is.”

“I was wondering about that. It seems like he doesn’t even treat the Blues he has here all that well,” I said. “Are they staying because they’re scared?”

She nodded to the trees at the other end of the parking lot, past the tents. “If you were to try to make a run for it, you’d run into the patrol he set up, and if you run into the patrol, you don’t come back. It’s already hard enough that he takes everything you own and forces you to ‘earn’ it back, but if you don’t work hard enough, or suck up enough, or entertain him, you get sent out here. Or you get traded.”

“Traded…?”

Olivia was as close to tears as I had ever seen her. “He… That’s how he gets food. You saw the blockades around the city, right? All the soldiers? He brings in the kids he considers worthless, and he trades them for smokes and food. Only now they’ve been asking for more kids and giving him less and less stuff to balance it out. I’m surprised they haven’t just raided us, but I guess he’s managed to keep this place a secret.”

I thought she was the one trembling until I looked down at my own hands.

Olivia bit her lip. “And of course—of course, he takes the kids in the White Tent, the ones no one would know to miss. He knows I can’t do anything about it and that they can’t fight back. The one time I tried, he took two kids out instead of one.”

“What about that kid—Brett?” I asked. “He stood up for you. Could you…”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Olivia said. “He’s different than Michael, but Michael’s second in command. Brett might bring me things for the kids here every once in a while, but if Michael were to catch him…he’d be the next one gone.”

The White Tent was exactly that—a large, crooked tent strung together with stained white tarp, set off from the others. The stench of it reached us almost before the sight of it did. Olivia lifted the red bandanna hanging around her neck to cover her mouth. The air was heavy, so thick with the stench of human waste that breathing became almost impossible.

“You just have to take him and get out while he still has a chance,” Olivia was saying. “As long as your friend is in the warehouse, you won’t be able to get her. But you can take him, at least. I can help you. You might be able to overpower the patrol together.”

Jude’s hand clenched around my upper arm. “It’s okay,” I told him. “It’s not an option. We won’t leave her behind.”

He nodded, his face pinched with worry as he glanced back over his shoulder to the warehouse. “Are they going to hurt her?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’m a lot more worried about what she could do to them.”

“Olivia?” Chubs called softly. “Are you okay?”

She had stopped just outside of the tent, her hands bunching up the fabric. She bowed her head forward, resting it against the flap.

“He’s…I’m sorry, I tried, I’ve tried so hard, but…” Olivia’s voice was anguished. “I’m the only one who will help them. He tried for a while, but…”

“He,” I repeated, feeling my heart go very still. “Who?”

Olivia blinked, her confusion marred by the scars on her face. “Aren’t you… You aren’t here for Liam?”

I don’t remember pushing past her, but I do remember my hands, as pale as the fabric of the large tent, shoving aside the old bedsheet serving as the door. The stench intensified inside, combined with the sickening scent of mold and foul water. I blinked, forcing my eyes to adjust to the low light. The pallets underfoot creaked and groaned as I stepped inside, one snapping altogether.

There were so many of them—at least twenty-five kids, in rows on either side of the tent. Some were curled up on their sides, others tangled up in the thin sheets around them.

And there was Liam, right in the center of them all.

I lied before.

To Cate. To the others. To myself. Every day. Every single day.

Because here was the truth. Here it was, tearing up and out of me, drawing my feet toward the far corner of the tent, rising like a whimper.

I regretted it.

Seeing his face now, the way his cracked and bruised hands curled softly around the pale yellow blanket draped over him, I regretted it so much, with such a sharp ache, that I felt myself begin to double over before I had taken a single step toward him.

For months, his face had lived only on computer screens, his scowl captured forever in digital files. It was locked in my memory—but I knew firsthand how memories warp and fade as time passes. It was so selfish of me, so terrible and sick, but for three long heartbeats, all I could think was, I should have kept him with me.

I missed him. I missed him, I missed him—oh my God, I missed him so much.

The tent was still and so quiet around us. I brushed a finger against the edge of his blanket’s pilling fabric. Someone had stripped him down to a gray T-shirt. His bare feet stuck out toward me, pale, tinged the faintest blue. I felt my breath go out of me in a single blow. The last time I had seen him, his face had been mottled with bruises and cuts courtesy of one bad escape attempt from East River.

But this was the face I remembered, the one I had seen that first day in the minivan. The one that could never hide a single thought. My eyes drifted aimlessly from his broad, clear brow, along the edge of his strong, unshaved jaw. That full bottom lip, chapped and cracked from the cold. His hair matted and darker—too long, even for him.

The air that filled his chest went out in a terrible, wheezing rattle. I reached out, trying to stop my hand from shaking as it settled against his chest. I wanted to count the space between breaths, reassure myself the shallow movement was still movement. It was only a faint touch, but his eyes blinked open. The sky blue had taken on a glassy quality, fever-bright against his otherwise dirty face. They drifted shut again, and I could have sworn the edges of his lips curled up in a faint smile.

If a heart could break once, it shouldn’t have been able to happen again. But here I was, and here he was, and it was all so much more terrible than I ever could have imagined.

“Lee,” I said, pressing my hand against his chest again, harder. I brought my other hand to his cheek. That was what I was afraid of—they weren’t red from the biting cold. He was hot to the touch. “Liam—open your eyes.”

“There…” he mumbled, shifting under his blankets, “…there you are. Can you… The keys are…I left them, they’re…”

There you are. I stiffened but didn’t move my hand.

“Lee,” I said again, “can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”

His eyelids fluttered open. “Just need a…”

The pallet creaked as Chubs knelt beside me. “Hey, buddy,” he said, his breath hitching in his throat as he reached over to place the back of his hand against Liam’s forehead. “This is some mess you’ve walked your idiotic self into.”

Liam’s eyes drifted over to him. The tension in his face seemed to drip away, replaced by a goofy expression of pure joy. “Chubsicle?”

“Yeah, yeah, wipe that dumb-ass look off your face,” Chubs said, despite the fact he was wearing an identical look on his own.

Liam’s brow wrinkled. “What…? But you’re… Your folks?”

Chubs glanced over at me. “Can you help me sit him up?”

We each took an arm and tugged his deadweight into an upright position. Liam’s head lolled back, his head falling into that curve between my shoulder and neck.

My fingers skimmed the lines of his ribs, catching on the bones. He was so thin; I pressed my fingers to the knobs of his spine and tried very, very hard not to cry.

Chubs pressed his ear up against Liam’s chest. “Take a deep breath and blow it out.”

Liam’s right hand flopped over, giving his friend’s face a few clumsy, affectionate pats. “…love you, too.”

“Breathe,” Chubs repeated, “long and deep.”

It wasn’t long, and it wasn’t deep, but I saw his white breath fan out.

Sitting back, Chubs straightened his glasses and motioned for me to help ease him back down. I thought I heard him mumble, “Here?” but Chubs nudged me out of the way to pick up his wrist and count off his pulse.

“How long has he been like this?” Chubs asked.

It was the first time I found myself able to look away from Liam’s face. Olivia was hovering behind us, her face splotchy from her scars and the freezing cold. Jude was frozen in the doorway, mouth open in a look of total and complete horror.

“He was caught about a week and a half ago, and he had a really nasty bug he couldn’t shake,” Olivia explained, her voice trembling slightly. “I knew something was wrong right away. I kept asking him questions about you guys, and he just seemed so disoriented. It turned into a fever, and then…this.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Jude asked. “Why is he acting like that?”

As if to answer for himself, Liam suddenly twisted to the side, his face screwing up with the effort it took to cough. Deep, wet coughs that shook his entire frame and left him gasping for air. I kept one hand on his stomach, reassured by the slow pulse I felt there. God, his face—my eyes returned to it over and over again.

“I think he has pneumonia,” Chubs said. “I can’t be sure, but it seems the most likely. If I had to guess, most of the kids here have it, too.” He stood on unsteady legs. “What are you treating them with?”

From the moment we had entered the tent until now, my shock and horror at the sight of Liam had been enough to make me forget even my anger. But the bitter reality was solidifying around me, and I could feel the heat rising in my chest, twisting, and twisting, and twisting until it felt like the next breath I released was tinged with fire.

Olivia’s words spilled over one another. “Nothing. There’s nothing. I have to beg for food, we’re surrounded by water, we are drowning in water, and I can’t even get a drop of the fresh stuff!”

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Liv, it’s okay. I know you’re trying.”

“Do you have anything in the car?” I asked, looking up at Chubs.

“Nothing strong enough for this,” he said. “We need to get them warm, dry, and hydrated before anything else.”

Olivia was still shaking her head. “I’ve tried so many times, but he won’t move the sick ones into the warehouse. Most of them aren’t Blues, and they only got this bad because he refused to give them work, and if you don’t work, you don’t get food. You can’t come into the warehouse. I honestly think he’s trying to hide them from the others.”

Well. He couldn’t hide them from me. He couldn’t hide what he had done to Liam. I felt a pure, unflinching fury grip me. I couldn’t have shaken it, even if I had wanted to. I was on my feet, storming toward the flap, and there was only one thought in my mind, streaming through again and again, driving the anger deeper until I felt like I would explode with it.

“Where are you going?” Jude asked, stepping in my way. “Ruby?”

“I’m going to take care of this.” It was a stranger’s voice. Calm, certain.

“Absolutely not,” Chubs said. “What happens if someone catches you swaying him? What do you think he’ll do to you?”

“Sway him? Like the way Clancy would have?” Olivia asked. Her eyes went a touch wider at my nod. “Oh. I thought…I wondered why he was so interested in you. Why he fought so hard to keep you from leaving.”

“Jude,” I said. “Help Chubs. You guys need to figure out if there’s a way to get a fire going in here without burning the place down. You remember how to do that, right?”

He nodded, his expression still screwed up in misery. “You have to do something. We have to stop him, make him see this isn’t right. Please.”

“Ruby,” Olivia called. Her voice was clear, each word cut from stone. “Ruin him.”

My mind was buzzing, waking from a long, unwelcome sleep. It had been a while, hadn’t it? My right fist clenched at my side, as if each finger was imagining how it would feel wrapped around his throat. It would be easy—all I needed to do was get close to him.

I knew it was what Clancy would have done. He thought it was our right to use our abilities, that we had been given them for a reason. We have to use them, he had said, to keep the others in their place.

The silky quality of his voice slipped through me, a shudder following like an echo. His dark eyes had been wild when he said that, burning with conviction. I had been terrified of him then. At what he could do…and how easily.

I had those abilities, too. For whatever reason—whatever science was locked away on Leda Corp’s servers—I had a way to right almost every wrong Knox had brought upon these kids. And Jude, he had turned to me without hesitation, with full faith. Like it was the most natural thing for me to take care of this. I was beginning to see how it was.

Ruin him. I’d do more than that. I was going to humiliate him, bring him low, leave him an empty shell whose only memory was my face. I would chase him into sleep. I would make him regret the moment he’d decided to keep Liam here and leave him outside to die.

“Be careful,” Jude whispered, stepping aside to let me pass.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “See if you can find a black coat around here. Check his pockets to make sure he didn’t find the flash drive and take it out, too.”

“Later, gator,” he said.

“In an hour, sunflower,” I murmured.

I could feel Chubs’s eyes on my back, but I didn’t turn around; I couldn’t, not without the fear that I’d be forever frozen in this exact spot, watching Liam waste away into nothing in front of me.

I am here, I thought as I stepped out into the rain. He is here. We are all here.

And we would be leaving together. Today.

FIFTEEN

THE BOY GUARDING THE DOOR into the warehouse couldn’t have been older than me, but he did stand a good deal taller and wider. A few months ago, that would have been a real obstacle.

“Stay where you are,” he called out, watching me stalk toward him. “You’re not allowed inside no more, not until Knox says so.”

They had given him a gun, but I could tell by his grip he either didn’t know how to use it or he didn’t want to. I reached out and brushed my fingers against his outstretched hand. I stopped the memories before they could bubble up; anger made my abilities sharper somehow, more efficient.

“Sit down and stay down,” I snapped, and I shoved the door open.

Our combat instructor had once told us that, when you were trying to settle a dispute without violence, the least “productive” emotion you could give in to was anger. No one can reason with another person so furious she can barely see straight. Well. I thought it was pretty productive to getting my way. I let the wind slam the door shut behind me.

I stood in the dark, blinking to adjust my eyes to the light. I felt a movement at my side—a solid, thick shoulder appeared directly in front of me, blocking both my path and line of sight. I followed the line of green coat up to Brett’s grim face.

“You can’t be here,” he whispered. I felt him try to press something into my hands and glanced down. He’d taken his hat off and stuffed it with tiny packages of saltine crackers. “Take this and go back before he sees—”

I had just wrapped my fingers around his wrist when the eyes up on the platform finally picked me out of the shadowy crowd.

“Well, well, well…” Knox called. “Look what the wind went and blew in.”

I glanced around, surprised to find nearly twice as many kids scattered around the space as before. Most were up near the platform, seated on the ground in circles with bags of chips and cereal boxes out in front of them. They were dressed in shades of gray and white—hunters, back from their hunting? The boys and girls at the far end of the warehouse were stretched out on the cement, moving just enough for me to see that they were breathing. I didn’t see any food or fire near them.

I forced a deep breath in, relaxing my face into a fake smile. I had to work this slower, get him to drop his guard so I could get closer. Every nerve in my body was screaming for me to move, run, grab him. My heart throbbed with the refrain: now, now, now. But there were too many bodies between us. Too many hands with guns.

Knox leaned forward in his chair. “Something you wanna say?”

I noticed Vida then, her shock of electric blue hair shining over his shoulder. She moved carefully, long limbs graceful as she swerved and slid through the bodies on the stage.

The look on her face told me everything I needed to know. If Knox made the mistake of leaning back in his chair just then, she would have gladly found a way to break his neck.

Okay? I mouthed to her. Vida nodded, her eyes flicking down to Knox, then back at me. I knew what she was telling me to do.

Michael stood from where he’d been pawing at some poor shaking girl’s chest, and he blocked Vida from my sight again.

“I was just wondering what it would take to convince you to let me go out on hunts,” I said. I slipped my frozen hands into the back pockets of my pants as I walked up to the stage. “To let me go out and get supplies for everyone?”

Knox threw his head back and laughed. Several of the girls and younger boys sitting on the platform around his feet forced out breathy laughter of their own. My skin prickled; it sounded like a pack of dogs with sliced vocal cords was trying to bark.

I felt a body move behind me, coming up at my back, but I didn’t turn to see who it was. These kids weren’t about to force me out through intimidation. Michael could hit me, Brett could haul me back outside by force, but what I could do to them went beyond the physical.

“You?” Michael scoffed. “A Green?”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid I’ll prove there’s nothing special about you Blues after all. I’ve always heard you guys were all brawn, no brain.”

Just like I thought—he definitely wasn’t used to being spoken to this way. The bully in him was fascinated and very, very angry all at once. Most likely because everyone around us looked like they were starting to wonder why I couldn’t go out and get them the supplies they obviously needed.

Knox stood slowly, tapping the ash from his cigarette out on the ground.

Come here, I thought. Come here and let me end this.

The trickle began at the back of my mind, turning to a full-on roar. I could do this. One step closer, and I’d show him why they ranked my kind as Orange, and his only as Blue.

I would tear him down.

Knox’s hair slid forward, past his ears. When he pushed it back, I saw he had woven together bright pieces of paper into rings around each finger. They almost looked like… They almost looked like the project a bored kid would make with a candy wrapper. I didn’t know what the hell they were or why he was wearing them, but it gave me an idea.

“How about a trade?” I asked. “No work, no food, right? You let me join one of those hunting teams so I can eat, and I provide enough food to feed everyone for the winter.”

Knox scoffed, rolling his eyes.

“I’m not lying,” I said. “You saw what we had in our packs. That’s just what we could fit in our bags. We had to leave tons of it behind.”

Vida’s full, petal-pink lips parted, a silent question dripping from them.

Of course I was lying. She knew that. Come on, I thought. He’d have to accept. I could feel the mood of the kids around us shifting in eagerness. They watched me with a new light in their eyes.

“There was canned food, walls of it—and gallons of clean water. Toilet paper, even,” I added, because, let’s face it, there are some things you want but don’t necessarily need. “Clothes, blankets, you name it. You could stock this place nicely.”

By the time I finished speaking, it was so silent I could hear the plink, plink, plink of water dripping from a nearby leak in the roof.

“Oh, yeah? And where is this wonderland? Half past nowhere, straight on into your imagination?” Knox was pacing across the stage again, still blocked by the kids sitting at the edge of it. If he didn’t bite soon, I was going to have to jump up there myself.

“Why would I tell you?” I asked. “When you won’t give me what I want?”

That was how relationships worked these days. No one did anything for each other unless it benefitted them in some way. Knox had clearly seen enough of the world we lived in to have figured this out, too.

But he didn’t like it.

Come on, I thought, fuming. Come on!

With one jump, he was off the platform and I was shoved back by an invisible set of hands onto the cement. My teeth clacked against each other, and I just missed losing the tip of my tongue between them. Michael’s laughter boomed around me, like it was echoing off the timid, silent figures circling us.

“You think I need to trade you something?” Knox spat. “You think I don’t have other ways of making you and your friends talk?”

My hands pressed flat against the ground, wrists throbbing from the impact. This kid had more pride than greed—something I hadn’t expected. He didn’t even see that more food and supplies at his disposal meant more power for him. All he saw was a little girl who claimed to know better than him, who was giving him a solution to a problem he had created and stirring up unwanted questions in the kids around him. Even if the kids didn’t believe me, they wanted to.

“Sure you do,” came Vida’s voice. “But are you willing to risk waiting when the National Guard is going to be back to clear the joint out?”

She had made herself comfortable in Knox’s seat, to the visible horror of every kid nearby.

Michael whirled back around, fury rising from his shoulders like steam. “Knox! You gonna take that from her?”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared of a few little soldiers,” Vida continued, inspecting her broken fingernails. “Is that why you keep trying to prove her wrong? Because you’re scared of what’ll happen if she’s right?”

“C’mon,” came Brett’s voice somewhere near my right. “You have to admit it sounds too good to be true. We’ve been up and down the river a million times looking for food and never found so much as an empty bag of chips.”

“So you’d blow an opportunity like this?” I asked. “After you already saw the proof?”

For his rough exterior, Brett was surprisingly reasonable when it came to hashing things out. “I could go with her—make sure she’s not trying to pull a fast one. I’d be happy to take another trip back with a team and get the supplies—”

“Oh, you could?” Michael snarled. “You’d be happy to? Whose team are you talking about—mine? You think I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, dickhead? That I haven’t been watching your weak-ass attempts to steal my game—?”

Knox held up a hand, stopping them before they could start circling each other like starving feral cats. “The answer is no. Not now, not ever.”

“I should have known,” I said, pushing myself onto my feet. “You left those kids out in the freezing cold to die. Why would you ever care enough to give everyone here the food and supplies they need?”

You can push someone’s button over and over again to get what you want, but there comes a point when your finger slips and you finally hit the wrong one.

“Michael,” Knox murmured, suddenly very quiet. Vida had worked enough of a spell over the room that it took calling his name twice to get him to snap out of it. “Take these two…pearls of girls outside.”

“Knox,” Brett began. “What about the supplies…?”

Knox’s fist flew out fast, clipping the other boy under the chin. “Take them outside. If they’re so damn eager to be hunters, then they can prove it at initiation tonight, like everyone else had to.”

Vida pushed herself up off the chair and dropped onto the floor next to Knox. Whether he meant to or not, his eyes flicked down over her face and body, over every exposed inch of rich, dark skin. “If you get through it, you’re on. But if I see your faces one more time before I send someone to get you, I will burn them off myself.”

“Shake on it,” I demanded, fighting to keep the smirk off my face.

I stuck out my hand, my head trilling with anticipation of how it would feel, of what, exactly, I would do to bring him as low as he had brought everyone around him.

Knox came toward me, his face steeled, jaw clenched. He raised a hand toward mine, and just when his fingers came into reach, he shifted to grab the ends of my loose braid. It came down to him being just a second faster than my instincts. He pressed the burning red end of his cigarette into my palm, snuffing it out against my skin before shoving me away.

The pain was raw and blinding; I didn’t cry, didn’t so much as give him a gasp. But I knew, from the moment he glanced back over his shoulder at me with that smirk, I hadn’t gotten my hooks into him, either.

They brought us around to the other side of the warehouse, out of sight from the tents and door, to a caged-in area where dead power generators and AC units were locked up.

Vida took one look at our future habitat and began to kick and snarl, struggling against the two guys holding her. With one ear-splitting shriek from her, they lifted Vida into the air and tossed her in. I was in such a state of blind pain, all it took was a nudge from the guy holding my arm for me to walk into the chain-link cage.

I waited until they had secured the locks and were making their way back to the building before dropping to my knees. I pressed my blistered palm into a puddle of freezing slush, swallowing back the whimper. The burn had sliced through every other thought in my head.

Next to me, Vida pushed herself up, dragging her legs over so she could lean against the fence. She took a deep breath in, closing her eyes.

“Let me guess,” she said after she had steadied herself. “You found Prince Charming in the White Tent?”

“Him and about twenty others,” I said, hating the way my voice shook. My entire hand felt like it was on fire. I tried shaking it out, but the burn felt like it was tearing its way down through each layer of skin.

“Show me,” Vida said. When I didn’t flip my palm up, she did it for me. I was surprised to feel her vibrating with her own kind of rage.

“Damn. I’ll kill him.”

She carefully placed my hand palm down in the slush again.

“I blew it,” I said. “I was right there. He was right there. I should have just…used my other hand or…”

“Bitch, please,” she said. “If you had been able to recover fast enough to do something, then you really wouldn’t be human.”

“As opposed to what?”

She shrugged. “A mannequin? An unfeeling, heartless bitch who feeds on others’ misery and is physically incapable of crying, unless it’s tears of blood?”

I flexed my good hand in my lap. “Is that my rep at HQ?”

“They call you Medusa,” Vida said. “One wrong look and your brain turns to stone.”

Creative. Also, fitting.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“In the White Tent outside,” I said. I sat back against the steel AC unit so I could look at Vida. “They’re all really, really sick. Half of them look like they’re already dead.”

“They’re that bad?” she asked. “Stewart, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn,” she muttered. “That explains why you looked so pissed.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling my anger start to prickle again. I’d had him—he was right there, and I had been too stupid and too slow to end it. “It does.”

“Hey, boo,” she said. “I’m in this now, too, and I got a lot of experience playing ass**les like they’re f**king harps. You need backup, I got you. Stop trying to convince yourself that you’re in this alone.”

I looked up, surprised.

“But just so you know,” she said, sounding like herself again, “if it turns out that we have to fight each other for this initiation shit, I’m still going to kick your ass.”

SIXTEEN

WE WERE LOCKED UP LONG ENOUGH that what little sunlight there was seeped into winter’s early night. Long enough that hunger started to set in, for a fine mist of rain to turn to flurries of snow, and a worried Jude to leave the shelter of the White Tent and come looking for us.

Without any kind of electricity to pump through the light poles in the parking lot, it was damn near impossible to make out anything other than someone’s or something’s general shape. I gave up looking for a friendly face and turned my full attention back to the kids standing at the corner of the warehouse, about a hundred yards from where we were locked up. I was so absorbed in the horrifying conversation they were having about Knox putting down a wild dog, I didn’t see Jude until he popped up at the other end of the cage.

“Roo!” he whispered. “Roo!”

Vida whirled around, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. “How did you…?”

“Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. I had to go the whole way around the building to get by without them seeing me.”

I cast one last look over my shoulder at our “guards,” and then moved toward his glowing face. To his credit, he knew to duck down so Vida and I could block him from the other kids’ sight.

“What happened?” The chain-link fence rattled as he pressed himself up against it. “I thought you were just going to chat with him, but you were gone so long, oh my God, why are you in there, what did you do? Chubs was—”

“Jude,” I tried to interrupt, “Jude—”

“—and then I was all, ‘no way; Roo wouldn’t let anything bad happen,’ but Olivia started saying all of these terrible things that Knox has done, and we couldn’t find the flash drive on him, which means it still must be in that jacket—”