The very second I knew his eyes were on me, every bone, muscle, and joint in my body snapped to attention. With the faint taste of blood in my mouth, I jumped out of the sliding door, taking in the sight of the van. If it were possible, the car looked worse than before—like a toy that someone had wedged down the sink and run through the garbage disposal. My fingers came up to trace one of the fresh punctures on the side paneling where a bullet had slammed through the thin metal.
Liam knelt beside Zu, who was holding on to the spare tire with everything she had, and went to work cranking the van up on the jack and off the demolished back right tire. I came to stand behind them just in time to watch Liam wave his hand in front of the hubcap. The nuts twirled out on his command, collecting in a neat pile on the ground.
Blue, I registered. Liam was Blue. What did that make the others?
“Okay,” he began. He blew a strand of his light hair out of his eyes. “Take out the shirt you were about to change into.”
“I’m—I’m not changing out here,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Really? You’re worried about your modesty when we’re going to have League agents on our tail in a matter of hours? Priorities, Green. Take out the shirt.”
I watched him for a moment, but even I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.
“Feel around the collar,” Liam said. He set another nut on the ground by his feet. “You’ll find a bump.”
I did. It was small, no bigger than a pea, sewn into the otherwise nondescript shirt.
“Chubs has a little fancy lady kit under the front seat,” he said. “If you’re going to change into it, you need to cut the tracker out of that shirt.”
The “little fancy lady kit” turned out to be a box of thread, scissors, and a tiny piece of embroidery. On a scrap of fabric, someone—Chubs?—had sewn a perfect black square. I stared at the mark, rubbing my thumb over its raised surface.
“Anyway, you should probably change out of the uniform,” Liam continued. “But be sure to check the pants and the sweater, too. I wouldn’t put it past them to use more than one.”
He was right again. I found one sewn into the waistband of the jeans, one in the hem of the hoodie, and even one glued inside the belt buckle—four trackers for one girl, plus one that had been sewn into the lining of the backpack itself.
Liam finished replacing the tire with the spare faster than I thought possible. Zu helped him place the nuts back in their sockets and slowly crank the car back down. When he handed the tools to her, she knew exactly where to put them in the trunk.
“Here,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “I’ll take care of them.” My hands trembled as I handed the trackers to him. He threw them on the ground, and crushed them beneath the heel of his shoe.
“I don’t understand. . . .” I began. But I did, in a way. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble breaking me out if they hadn’t had a method of keeping tabs on me if I got recaptured or separated from them.
Liam’s hand came out toward me, and the sheer panic at the thought of his touch had me jumping back, trying to put as much air between us as I could. It still wasn’t far enough; his hand dropped between us, but I felt the warmth of his upturned palm brush my shoulder as if it had actually rested there. My arms came up and crossed over my chest, and some mangled mess of anxiety and guilt rose up from deep in my guts. I tried to focus on the Psi identification numbers on the top of my shoes to keep from jumping away again.
You are acting like a nervy five-year-old, I told myself. Stop it. He’s just another kid.
“They tell you a lot of lies in the Children’s League, the biggest being that you’re free,” he said. “They talk about love and respect and family, but I don’t know any family that puts a tracking device on someone and then sends them out to be shot up and blown away.”
“But we didn’t have to kill them,” I said. My fingers tightened around the backpack straps. “There was another kid inside. Martin. He didn’t . . . he didn’t deserve to . . .”
“You mean—” Liam wiped the grease and dirt from his hands off on the front of his jeans. “The kind of—” He made a vague motion with his hands, which I think was supposed to indicate Martin’s plump stature. “That guy?”
I nodded.
“The tree didn’t actually hit them,” Liam said, leaning against the minivan’s sliding door. “They might still be alive.”
Liam guided me back toward the passenger seat and whistled to get Chubs’s attention. Somewhere behind me, I heard Zu climb back into Black Betty.
“Look,” he continued, “they all wear the trackers. I’m sure another League agent will be along in a little while to help them. You can go back if you want, or we can take you to the bus station like I said we would.”
My hands were still by my side, my face as blank as a clear sky, but I wasn’t fooling him. He tuned in to my guilt like I had been wearing it plain as day on my face. “It doesn’t make you a bad person, you know—to want to live your own life.”
I looked back and forth between the road and his face, more confused now than ever. It didn’t make sense for him to want to help me, not when he already had two other people counting on him. That he wanted to protect.
Liam opened the back door for me, tilting his head toward the empty seat inside. But before I could even consider the cost of staying with them, if just for a short while, Chubs’s arm shot out and he ripped the sliding door shut in front of my face.
“Chubs—” Liam warned.
“Why,” Chubs began, “were you with the Children’s League?”
“Hey now,” Liam said. “This is a don’t-ask-don’t-tell operation. Green, you—”
“No,” Chubs said, “you decided that. You and Suzume. If we’re going to be stuck with her, I want to know who this person is and why we got chased down by gun-toting lunatics trying to get her back.”
Liam lifted his hands in surrender.
“I . . .” What could I tell them that wouldn’t sound like a complete and total lie? My head felt light; I was almost too exhausted to think. “I was . . .”
Zu gave me a nod of encouragement, her eyes bright.
“I was a runner in the Control Tower,” I blurted. “I saw the access codes to the computer servers the League wants access to. I have a photographic memory, and I’m good with numbers and codes.”
That was probably overkill, but apparently I had sold it.
“What about your friend? What’s his deal?”
The longer they stared at me, the harder it became to not fidget. Get a grip, Ruby.
“You mean Martin?” I said, my voice sounding high to my own ears. “Yesterday was the first time I had ever seen him. I don’t know what his story was. I didn’t ask.”
I wished I didn’t know what Martin’s story was.
Chubs slapped the side of the minivan. “Don’t tell me you believe that, Lee. We knew everyone by the time we broke out.”
Broke out. They actually escaped? Shock left me speechless for several moments until I asked, finally, “Really? All three thousand of them?”