As slowly as I worked and despite all the extra things I found to do, I could only hide behind my computer screen for two hours. It was almost nine p.m. when I leaned my head back and closed my eyes for a minute.
Talking things out with Matt was the last thing I wanted to do. I refused to admit it to myself, but I was afraid--afraid of what he would think, afraid I would lose everything I'd gained in the past three years. It had taken me months to rebuild my life and myself. I didn't want to have to repeat the process all over again. But I'd always scorned being held back by fear, so I opened my eyes and slapped my laptop shut.
Matt looked up from his spot across the room. Wordlessly, I plugged my computer in and returned to my spot on the bed. We had a thirty-second staring contest before I gave in and spoke.
"What is it you want to know?"
Matt regarded me with an expression I couldn't read. "How are you, Reaghan?"
"You aren't allowed to ask questions like that," I snapped.
"Fine."
More to break the silence than anything, I said, "I'm fine."
"That's a relief."
I couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or serious. Both, I suspected.
"So what have you been up to?"
"Getting into trouble," I answered. "I thought we established that already."
"Did we?"
The conversation had already had enough awkward pauses for my taste. I started talking.
"So I'm assuming you know what happened with Messing and the Republic after you left. What are they saying out there?"
"Nothing, really. They pretty much ignore you." Matt shrugged. "I want to hear about you, Reaghan."
"Is that the only reason you're here?" I asked, irritated.
I certainly hadn't expected him to say, "What do you think?."
After a moment that I used to try and seal my shell around me, I said, "Okay." It sounded weak even to me. Especially to me. But I didn't go on. I felt my security crumbling.
Matt leaned forward. "I'm sorry. I--Reaghan, I spent two years trying to get in. I had no clue where you were, no way to get in touch with you. I finally make it through and they tell me to find someone there's a process and paperwork and a waiting list...I took off on my own. I find you completely by accident and I think everything's finally okay, and then I realize that you're not the person I thought I would find. Try to see it from my perspective. I missed you, okay? What happened to you?"
I had never hated him more than I did in that moment, and I couldn't tell myself why. "You want to know what happened to me? I got arrested. Someone broke me out. I had to stay low-profile after that, which is why you wouldn't have found me if you went through the application and waiting list junk."
"What did you get arrested for?"
"Protesting."
"That's how far..." Matt didn't finish his thought. "Reaghan, I'm sorry," he said again.
"Don't be."
We sat in silence for a moment. "So," I said finally, "we've got to get you out as soon as we can."
"Why?"
"Because there's no reason for you to be here!" I exploded. "You're putting us in danger by being here, Matt. The guard is going to be looking for you. You're an un-accounted-for immigrant. If you're not where they left you, they're going to find you and make sure you stay where they can see you and you're not going to like that."
"Right." Matt considered for a second. "Who's we?"
I blinked. "Me. And the people I work with."
"And they are?"
"Do you need to know everything about my life?"
"I'm just saying, I should know who I'm trusting to get me out safely."
"Whatever. I'll bring you down tomorrow." I thought he would take the hint that I wanted to stop talking, and he did.
"Okay."
It was a long night. Matt leaned back against the wall and fell asleep--I heard his deep breathing--within minutes, but I wasn't so lucky. That night, I relived the past four years.
I'd woken up late that morning, cut my ankle in the shower, stabbed myself in the eye with my mascara brush, and discovered that we had no Lucky Charms. It never occurred to me to check the gas gauge of my car, and I used up the last fumes six blocks from my high school. Of course that was when Matt pulled over to help me, waited while I called a gas station, and walked into school late with me. We exchanged numbers and then we were dating. It wasn't the kind of relationship where we were both obsessed with each other and texted non-stop. I liked him and he liked me, and we hung out together. Our dates included movies on the couch, since neither of us liked theaters, pizza, motorcycle rides, and an occasional picnic. We were casual. He was my best friend. I knew we were for each other.
It was like that through my junior year. He graduated a year before I did and worked to save for college while I finished my senior year. When I graduated high school, he moved out of state to go to college and I started going to a community college for a journalism degree. Three months after we started our freshman years, everything started happening.
Edward Messing, the governor of California, decided that we were suddenly a state separate from the United States. He also decided that we weren't big enough by ourselves, so he forced Oregon and Washington to join what he called the Republic of California. It was then that my life started to fall apart, because when Oregon started fighting back, my mom was killed. Our town was on the border of California and Oregon, and one day it turned out to be the scene of a stand-off. I came home from school at three in the morning when they finally let us out and I found her body by the mailbox. As long as I had been around it had just been her and me, and she was gone. That was the day I decided that I personally would be a thorn in Messing's flesh until I irritated him so much that one of us killed the other.
When the fighting finally died down and Messing had somehow talked D.C. into leaving us alone, I started living two lives. I was a college student during the day, and at night I went out and did stuff. I spray-painted "SCHWARZENEGGER" all over the town hall once; another time I ripped down the stop signs over half of the next town. They were all stupid things, but they were a pain to the people high up and that made me feel good, if not happy. There were sometimes protests outside schools and post offices and I was always a part of those until the day when the guard decided it was their duty to break us up. That was also the day I started spiting Messing for real.
We were outside the town hall on that day, and the guard thought that it would be a good object lesson to arrest several people in the crowd. It happened, like it would, that I was one of the several people. A guard came up behind me and grabbed my arms. I started fighting back, and a few people around me joined in. Paul was the one who finally knocked the guard out. I noticed him because he had been the one to wrench my arm out of the guard's grasp, and he asked me afterwards if I was okay. After that the rest of the guard obviously had to swarm us and take us away, me and Paul and some people around us.
The night I spent in jail was the worst night of my life. It was dark and filthy and the stench was unbearable, but we stood it because we had to. The jail was already a little overcrowded, which was why they made the mistake of throwing a few of us into each cell. Nobody bothered to divide up men and women. Somehow I ended up with Paul, and at two-thirty a.m. Savannah and Brian showed up to break him out. They took me too.
Turned out the three of them spent their days--and their nights--doing something better than spray-painting town halls. They were smugglers, and their business was people. It wasn't hard to get on the wrong side of the government. Things like tax evasion, robbing gas stations, and saying the wrong thing to the supermarket clerk could get you in big trouble. Paul, Savannah, and Brian somehow identified some of the people who were unlucky enough to get caught and snuck them out of California. Of course I joined them without a second thought.
Over the next year, I was integrated as a part of the team. Paul was the unelected leader; he wasn't the oldest, but he was the most qualified. He was somehow the best at locating people who needed to be shipped out, he could get us all to pay attention to him, and he genuinely cared about the three of us. Brian, a curly-haired goofball who was both the oldest and the least mature of us, was the computer freak. He hacked and organized and located. Savannah was the talker, the person who told our shipments everything they needed to know and made the crucial arrangements with the guy who flew the shipments into the U.S. The guy who flew the shipments was a commercial pilot who was somehow always busy, despite the fact that the process to get in and out of California took years, and he knew everything about our business. Apparently he had been a friend of Paul's dad. Then there was me. I became the undercover person. I would sneak the Lists from the guard stations and get them to Paul, break people out of jail when needed, and generally collect useful bits of information. I was also the go-between when we needed to get a message to Holt, the pilot. I wasn't necessarily happy, but I was satisfied.
Matt's appearance was majorly disturbing on a very simple level. I had completely erased my life from before, and he had been erased too. It had taken me a long time to get used to the idea that I would never see him again. My emotions regarding Matt had only just been balanced, and they were still a little raw. But it wasn't just that he threw my working life off. He threw something else off too, and it had to do with a few moments that I was never sure about. I always wondered afterwards whether I'd imagined it, but then it would happen again. A look, a word that could mean more than it maybe did, a touch that was a second longer than it absolutely needed to be. The emails after I left the office, making sure I got home safely.
I wasn't sure how to react to all this at first. Paul had saved me from I don't know what. Rotting in the city jail while I waited for a trial that most likely would never come, exposed to everything you're exposed to in jail. But I wasn't the type of person who considered people as love interests automatically. It hadn't occurred to me with Matt, and it hadn't occurred to me with Paul. But I started to get to know him a little better and I realized how he genuinely cared about me--about people in general. How he was completely devoted to what he did, not because he had a bone to pick with Messing but because he wanted to help whoever he could. And I started to think I could like him a little the way I'd liked Matt. Neither of us had said anything, but I think we were both heading in the same direction. Until Matt showed up.
I wanted to scream in frustration, and the worst part was that as irritated as I wanted to be with Matt, I couldn't help realizing that there was a tiny part of me that was not exactly happy to see him, but that got a warm feeling when he was around. That liked having him near me, looking out for me, smiling at me, and being annoyed at my naivete and stubbornness. By itself, that would have been horrifying. What was even more horrifying was that it made me wonder whether my new self, which I'd thought was cemented for good, was only glued in and that it might fall off sometime soon and expose the old vulnerable Reaghan.
I couldn't let that happen.

I snuck out half an hour earlier than usual the next morning, at four a.m. Matt was still sleeping when I scrawled a note for him warning him to stay put and swung out the window. I hoped he would stay asleep long enough for me to get back, because I didn't trust him to follow my instructions. He was the type of person who thought things through before he did them but didn't necessarily do the thing he was told to do.
The street lights were lit up for the people who went to work early, but there was no one around yet. In my mind, it was a waste of electricity to light up the roads an hour before anyone began stirring, but at least I had light for my pre-dawn walk to the office. The few minutes between when I left my apartment and when I arrived at the office were my favorite moments of the day. It was the time when I was completely alone, without having to worry about hiding my face or being alert. I could be a normal person for a few seconds, walking to work.
Alone and at four in the morning.
The air was sharp and clear. It smelled like the city was barely asleep—quiet, but with the buzz of energy that never quite stopped. I started to jog, waking up my legs, the breeze stinging the inside of my nose as I sucked it in. It only took five minutes to get to the office and barring Matt's disturbing presence in the back of my mind, I would have thoroughly enjoyed every second of them.
The office wasn't actually an office, but we called it that for convenience's sake. Paul's uncle had owned an auto repair shop, before, but when he was killed in the border war the shop just sat there unused. Paul took the back room and turned it into a base of operations for us. Anyone who casually looked in would see an abandoned auto repair shop, but when I stepped into the back room I stepped into the place I thought of as home.
"Hey."
Savannah didn't bother to turn from her computer screen. "Hey, Reags."
"Hey Nan," I said.
Brian spun around in his swivel chair, leaning back and spreading out his arms. "Reaghan Foss! Welcome, baby."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Where's Paul?"
"Paul," Brian said, still grinning mindlessly, "is at the warehouse checking up on our next shipment."
"Again?"
"He's just double-checking everything," Savannah said, finally sending a glance my way. "It's our biggest shipment so far and he wants to make sure it all goes smoothly."
I nodded. "Makes sense. Does that mean I'll have to go down to see Holt again?"
"Shouldn't," Brian said, becoming serious again. "He's more concerned that the items know what they're doing and everything."
"Sure," I said, seating myself on a folding chair and pulling my knees up to my chest. "I was sort of hoping that we could add another item to the shipment, actually."
Brian and Savannah both turned and looked at me in mild incredulity. I shrugged apologetically.
"That's five items in one shipment," Savannah said finally.
"I know," I said.
"It can't wait?"
I winced. "Not really."
"What's the situation?" Brian asked.
"Uh…" I hesitated before hitting on the reason. "Guest gone missing."
Savannah narrowed her eyes. "Let him--her?--him take care of it. He can say he didn't understand all the rules. They won't do anything worse than follow him around for the rest of his visit."
"Yeah, that would be a problem. It's, um, kind of a long story."
Savannah and Brian were both looking at me expectantly, so I took a deep breath. "So back when, you know, before, I had this boyfriend."
Savannah immediately rolled her eyes. Brian obviously needed more explained. I continued. "He was in college out of state when the borders closed. Apparently he spent two years trying to get back in, and he might possibly have shown up yesterday when I was on my way back from the office."
My revelation had little effect on Savannah, who had seen what was coming, but it earned a frown from Brian. “So why do you need to get rid of him so fast?”
“Brian,” Savannah said. “He’s a visitor gone missing. As soon as Messing’s people figure out he’s not where they left him, they’re going to go looking for him. They will find him. That means they will find Reaghan, which means they will probably find us too. Make sense?” She threw me a glance which clearly said she understood that I had reasons besides the one she had just listed, and I mentally thanked her for not voicing them in front of our clueless companion.
“Oh. Gotcha.” Brian blinked. “Um, I guess we’ll have to talk about how we can add him to the shipment then.”
“Great,” I said, unfolding my legs. “When will Paul be back?”
Savannah glanced up at the clock hanging on the wall. “Soon, I’m thinking. Maybe twenty minutes?”
Twenty minutes would give me time to run back and check on Matt before I had to face Paul.
“Cool. I left him...uh, Matt...in my apartment, so I should probably go make sure he’s still there.” I tried to put a hint of levity in my tone, but it didn’t work.
“Bring him down,” Savannah said. Her back was to me again.
“I’m sorry?”
“Bring him down.” She turned slightly. “We can discuss it all with him. If he’s someone who had the guts to date you, I’m sure he’d appreciate knowing what we plan on doing with him.”
Bringing Matt down to the office was the last thing I wanted to do. If it was at all possible, I wanted to keep him and Paul as far away from each other as possible. But I heard Savannah continuing. “He can stay at the warehouse while he’s waiting to leave, anyway.”
Of course. He would have to stay at the warehouse. He couldn’t stay with me, and there was nowhere else.
I felt my jaw tighten in frustration. “Yeah. See you in a few.”
The walk back to my apartment was not a good one. The air, contrary to everything I’d ever heard, did nothing to clear my heated thoughts; I was getting angrier by the second. When I swung into the window from the rickety fire escape, I felt like there was a volcano in my stomach.
Matt was sitting against the wall where I’d left him, wide awake and with my note sitting on the floor next to him. “Hey.”
His casual greeting did nothing to calm me. “Listen up,” I snapped.
He met my eyes questioningly and was silent.
“I’m going to take you down to the office. You’re going to meet the people I work with and we’re going to decide what to do with you. As soon as we can ship you out, we will. But you have to promise to do exactly what I tell you to, got it?”
“Sure.”
I glared at him. “You better.”
He got to his feet with a sigh. “Reaghan, I’ll behave, okay?”
“Do that.”
We were silent until we landed on the cement outside the building, when Matt spoke again. “So what exactly is it that you do? Since I’m about to meet your coworkers, you know.”
“Not here,” I said.
He rolled his eyes, but his dropping of the subject signalled to me that he understood--at least a little. He had obviously picked up the fact that whatever I did wasn’t perfectly legal, but he’d refrained from passing judgment before he knew the whole story.
Just like he used to.
I shook my head. “Come on.”
It was almost five now, and there was barely a light on the eastern horizon where the sun was lurking. I watched out of the corner of my eye as Matt glanced around, taking in the filthy street, the abandoned buildings, the rust and dirt everywhere. “Yeah, pretty much,” I said in answer to his look. “Not like they care, as long as we behave.”
“Wow.”
“It’s not worth a wow.”
He gave me a funny look, like the one he’d given me last night. I glanced away. “Here.”
Matt followed me into the auto shop silently. “Hey, listen,” I said uncomfortably on a sudden decision, “I would love it if you wouldn’t reference what things were like before, you know?”
“Sure, Reaghan.” His voice was suddenly weary. I ignored the stab of guilt in my gut and pushed the back room door open. Thank goodness Paul wouldn’t be here yet, at least.
Savannah was standing in the middle of the room. Brian was still seated at his computer. And Paul turned to face me.

I saw all three of my friends' facial expressions in half a second. Brian's was all amusement; Savannah's flickered between apology and something that clearly said, "Just deal with it." Paul's only held surprise for an instant before he masked it smoothly.
"Reaghan," he said.
"Hey." I slipped into the room and Matt followed. "Sorry, Paul." Before I continued, I watched his face for a second. He didn't show anything but a little curiosity. "Uh, has Savannah mentioned anything about our conversation a while ago?"
"No." Paul looked past me at Matt, who was standing silently. I hoped he felt at least as awkward as I did.
"Oh."
Matt broke the pause that followed by holding out his hand to Paul. “I’m Matt.”
Paul shook his hand. “Paul. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah, this is Matt, guys,” I said.
Savannah gave me a look that said, “Just why do you want to get rid of him again?” I glared at her. “Matt, Savannah and Brian.”
I hated the moments when I couldn’t come up with a way to continue the conversation. Savannah was the one to rescue me, which surprised me even though it shouldn’t have. She brushed a strand of dark copper hair away from her face and intervened. “Paul, she’s wondering if we can add him to the next shipment.”
Matt’s eyes were immediately on me. So were Paul’s. For some reason I felt like I was being pulled in two different directions by their gazes. I turned to Matt in sudden anger and said, “Can I just explain, please?” It was Paul who responded. Matt only gazed at me in something like hurt, something like disappointment, and something like wistfulness.
“Yeah, Reaghan, explain. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to add another item to the shipment.”
This was not going in any way like I’d wanted it to. I wanted to be able to introduce Matt to Savannah and Brian and then talk to Paul by myself. I knew he was reading things into the situation, even though he said nothing. He was leaning against the wall like nothing was wrong, but we could all feel the tension in the room. It was emanating from Matt, from Paul, from me. Brian looked indescribably amused and not a little curious. Savannah was the only one who was completely calm. I met her eyes and she raised one eyebrow.
“So Matt, uh, needs to leave with the next shipment because he’s been MFR for at least two days.” I reached back and twirled my hair around my index finger, dropping it a second later when I realized what I was doing. I hated the little things that gave away my nervousness. “They’re going to be looking for him, and when they find him they’ll probably find us.”
There were three seconds of silence before Paul shifted. “Why can’t he just leave?”
I blinked. Why couldn’t he? I looked at Savannah, who was still watching me with a “Figure it out” expression. She was my closest friend, but sometimes I hated her.
He couldn’t just leave because I couldn’t just kick him out. He was something I hadn’t had in years and hadn’t wanted either, but there were endless reasons. I’d found him--or he had found me, but the difference wasn’t that important--and I had protected him for a few hours. He had trusted me. He still trusted me, despite the fact that we hadn’t seen each other in three years. I’d fallen far since I’d last seen him, but I couldn’t betray a friend who trusted me. And no matter how much I wanted him gone...
I wanted him to stay.
Unbelievable.
“Uh, because I knew him before,” I said quickly. “And I dragged him off the street last night.”
“You knew him before?” Paul’s eyes flashed with sudden interest. As far as I knew, I was the only one of us four who referred to the time when California was still part of the United States as simply “before”, but the other three seemed to have picked it up from me.
“Yeah. We went to the same high school.” If Matt or Savannah or Brian said anything about us dating, I would murder them.
Paul nodded. “I don’t know, Reags. We’ve never done a shipment this big before and I’m a little nervous about a few of the items.” He was right. The current shipment was a family who’d gotten in trouble for messing up on the taxes for their diner and giving the government an attitude about it. I’d met all four of them. Grace was seventeen, the youngest, and she seemed to be the most on top of things. Her brother Daniel, who was if possible even more sullen than I, was twenty. Elizabeth, the mother, reminded me a little of my own mom, which is why I tried to avoid interacting with her, and her husband Stephen had completely lost his drive with his diner. The two times I’d seen him, he had been slumped in a corner staring at the wall, responding only to his wife. I could see why Paul was concerned. He was going to be shipping out with them to make sure they got safely over the border. But Matt was smart. He could take care of himself.
I begged Paul with my eyes.
“We’ll talk about it,” he said.
So we talked about it, and the end result was that Paul turned to Matt and said, “Sorry, but Reaghan’s right. It’s too dangerous for you to be here--for us and for you.”
Matt nodded easily. “Whatever you think is the best idea. I don’t know my way around here like you do.” He looked at me just as I looked at him. “I don’t want to put you in a dangerous position.”
Our eyes met and I saw that he was angry. Live with it, I thought. You can’t be angrier with me than I am with you.
“I’ll bring him down to the warehouse,” Brian said.
“No worries, I’ll do it,” Paul said. “I’ll introduce him to the Hannas and everything, give him the basics. Reaghan, you come too.”
“Sure,” I said, instantly realizing that I’d have a chance to talk to Paul alone on the way back.
The sun was barely up now, along with more people. We made our way to the warehouse slowly, barely speaking, Matt walking about ten feet behind Paul and me ten feet behind Matt. It was about a ten-minute walk, which was ten minutes too long to have to myself. I didn’t want to have quiet to think about the situation. It was too confusing, too frustrating, and I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to go back in time and break up with Matt in high school so he wouldn’t be here now.
If I had broken up with Matt, would I be sorting out my feelings for Paul now? If I’d tried love in high school and it hadn’t worked, would I even be willing to try again? I didn’t want to know.
Live with it, idiot, I told myself. You can’t change it, so make it work.
My mind went back to the last time I’d seen Matt. It was the day before he flew out for college. We said goodbye casually--we did everything casually, even the high school prom. He gave me his high school ring, which he hadn’t done while we were in school together. It had his birthstone, a ruby, and on the inside he’d had our initials engraved. I remember the half-nervous, half-excited feeling that twisted my stomach because it was the first hint that he wanted our relationship to be more than the spontaneous, informal dates we’d always had. “Hey, try not to get into too much trouble,” was the last thing he said to me. Jokingly, of course.
There was about a year between my last meeting with Matt and my first encounter with Paul, which was in the middle of the whole protest thing when the guard grabbed my arms to drag me away as an object lesson. I made a startled noise and started fighting, and Paul, who had been standing a few feet away, looked over. I met his dark brown eyes for an instant before I turned my head to keep struggling. Immediately he moved forward and began wrestling the guard away from me, and then a bunch of other people jumped in. But I remember him wrenching my arm out of the guard's grasp, and I remember the genuinely concerned expression on his face as he held my wrist for a second and asked, "Are you okay?" I'd nodded breathlessly and he had stepped away before I could thank him. I suddenly realized that somehow I still hadn't thanked him, despite the two years we had been working together. I'd been too dazed at first, and then it became history.
The thing that stood out to me the most about Paul was the way he sincerely cared about people. He cared about me, about Savannah, about Brian, about the people we rescued. He wasn't some ninja stealth superhero. He was just a nice guy.
I turned up the walk to enter the warehouse, which wasn't literally a warehouse. Actually, it was Paul's house. He was the only one who had anything close to a place we could keep the items before they were shipped, but he would have refused to let any of the rest of us risk keeping the items at our places even if we could. his place wasn't big, but it had a finished basement where the items could be stored and it was on a quiet out-of-the-way street.
Paul's voice was coming from the kitchen. I found him there with Matt and Daniel Hanna, one of the items currently on schedule to be shipped. The three of them turned when I entered.
"Hi."
"Reaghan," Paul said, "would you fill the Hannas in on the change of plans while I give Matt the grand tour?"
"Sure," I answered and followed Daniel downstairs.
I liked the Hannas a lot. Stephen frustrated me, but Elizabeth was incredibly strong. Although it was easy to tell that she was shaken by their situation, she took everything in stride. Daniel and Grace were resilient too, although Daniel seemed to think the whole thing was an adventure out of a novel. Grace took things more seriously. If she wasn't leaving with her family, I would have liked having her on our team. She had a fragile look, pale and petite, but she was like a rock inside.
"Hey," I said as I entered the basement. Stephen, on the couch in front of the television, didn't respond. Elizabeth came over and gave me a hug. Grace looked up from her book and grinned at me, returning the greeting.
"I have news for you guys. You've got a new travel mate."
Elizabeth and Grace both blinked. Stephen was silent. “I thought the four of us together were too risky,” Grace said.
I took a deep breath. “Yeah, but something came up and... He’s MFR and since I was the one who picked him up, we’re concerned that when they find him they’ll find us.”
“Why can’t he just go back?” Grace asked.
“They’ll ask him where he was.”
“Let him figure something out,” Daniel said. Elizabeth gave him a mildly reprimanding look. Grace openly glared at him.
“Um, I can’t do that. We went to high school together,” I answered. Daniel shrugged. Elizabeth gave me a questioning look which I pretended not to see. “So,” I continued, “he’s going to be staying here with you guys for a few days until you leave.”
They didn’t seem as disturbed or surprised as I’d expected them to be, which made my job that much easier. I didn’t have to worry about reassuring them or telling them that it was perfectly safe--because it wasn’t. But it wouldn’t have been even if it was only one person travelling alone. We had a short conversation about meaningless topics, which Stephen didn’t participate in, and then I went back upstairs. Matt and Paul were in the kitchen again.
“So this is your house,” Matt was saying as I arrived.
“Yep,” Paul confirmed.
Matt glanced from me to Paul. "Why can't I just stay with Reaghan?"
"No offense, Matt, but you being here is pretty risky for us all," Paul said. "I don't want Reaghan at the middle of that."
There was a pause while the two of them held each other's gazes. "So you'd put yourself there instead," Matt said finally.
Paul shrugged.
"Thanks for looking out for her."
His sentence took me aback, and I saw it surprised Paul too. "I'd do the same thing for anyone else.”
Matt gave him a strange smile. "Yeah, of course." His tone was perfectly natural and sincere. He reached out and brushed my cheek for an instant, as casually as he would tie a shoe. Paul stiffened beside me. Matt looked at him with that strange expression again. Something silent passed between them that I didn't understand, and Matt was the one to drop his eyes first. He looked at me, not staring or anything, but it struck me that he was trying to memorize my face, his blue eyes taking in my features. There was something behind his calm mask that I couldn't stand looking at. The silence stretched on endlessly.
I was the one to snap out of it first. "So, um, if you're all set here, Matt, I should probably head back to the office."
Matt glanced down at the beige floor tiles, up at the kitchen cabinets, and back at me. "Yeah, you should." He stood up abruptly, looking like he didn't exactly know what to do with himself. Paul put a hand on my shoulder.
"I'll walk you back."
I glanced back at Matt as we left. He was leaning against the counter, his arms folded, studying the floor. I couldn't help feeling like his dejection was my fault.

Paul waited until we were at the end of his street before he broke the six a.m. silence. “So Reaghan, you went to high school with Matt?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And he came back looking for you.”
“Uh-huh.”
Paul glanced at me and I met his eyes. “He was my boyfriend.”
“Thought so.”
I laughed uneasily. “Came back looking for me and everything.”
We walked in silence for a while.
“So does that mean you’ll be leaving with him?”
The question was so abrupt and unexpected that I actually stopped moving. “Leaving with him?”
Paul halted too and turned to me, searching my expression. “He didn’t bring it up?”
“No.” He wanted to give me time, I thought. Because now that it occurred to me, of course he would ask me to leave with him. Why else did he come?
Something in Paul’s attitude relaxed slightly. “If he did, would you go?”
“I don’t know.” It was the only answer I could give, because I didn’t know. My first reaction would be to say no--I couldn’t just be uprooted a second time. But did I really want what I had? A life of running and hiding and biting Messing’s toes? Maybe it would be better to leave, to start over again one more time. Would I be able to do that if I left with Matt, or would I be stuck in the mindset of my past?
I rubbed my forehead. Paul watched me for a moment.
“I’d want you to stay.”
“What happened back there between you and Matt?” I asked.
Paul hesitated. “Back where?”
“In the kitchen. You had some sort of telepathic conversation.”
“Telepathic?” Paul laughed. I elbowed him.
“I’m serious. We left and he looked like he just buried his best friend.”
It sounded like Paul said “He did,” but he said it so quietly that I wasn’t sure. “What?”
“Reaghan.”
“What?”
Paul rubbed the back of his neck a little nervously. “There’s something I want to talk to you about before we get back to the office.”
His tone made me look up quickly. Something skipped in my chest. What was wrong with me?
“Yeah,” I said.
"How do I say this," he muttered to himself, and I grinned despite my misgivings because Paul is rarely at a loss for words.
"You never asked me why I took you with me when Savannah and Brian broke us out of jail way back when.”
I shrugged. “I always figured it was because you couldn’t afford to leave me behind so I could rat on you.”
“Actually, I didn't think you would. You're not that kind of person. And you're too into annoying Messing."

"True. So you would have felt bad leaving me behind?"

Paul grinned. "Well, yeah, that too. But I don't know, Reaghan. You just made an impression on me. When I heard you squeal when the guard grabbed you and I looked over and saw you kicking around and generally being a cat and I don't know. You stood out."

"Anyone would have fought back if a guard grabbed their arms, Paul." I don't know why I didn't see where this was going. The old Reaghan from before would have seen it immediately. But somehow the now-Reaghan didn't.

"Yeah, but there was something in your face that made you different. Maybe it was the eye contact. It looked like you were going back and forth between wanting help and wanting to kill the guy yourself. I took a chance and helped you because I knew there was no way you could kill him yourself, and then when we ended up in the same cell…you sitting in the corner looking so vulnerable and so rough at the same time. I had to take you along."

I had a feeling by now that this should be making me feel warm and fuzzy, or something like that. But instead I felt cold. There was a twisting feeling in my gut like this shouldn't be happening, not now.

"So you dragged me with you because I looked like I was trying not to be scared."

"No, not exactly--" Paul broke off and met my eyes with a small grin. "You're trying to make this hard, aren't you?"

"Make what hard? What are you saying, Paul?" There was no way to describe the mix of emotions I was feeling.

His eyes registered surprise and then determination. "I like you, Reaghan. A lot, actually. In a different way than I like Savannah or Brian. You mean more to me, if that makes sense at all."

It didn't make sense at first. I stared at his half-hopeful, half-apprehensive expression for five full seconds before it finally clicked. The anger that boiled up inside of me startled me once everything was perfectly clear.

"So that's what happened with you and Matt," I said slowly.

"What?"

"You figured we'd been together before and you were telling him to back off."

"Reaghan--"

"Unbelievable, Paul." I took a step back and bumped into someone's front yard fence.

"Reags, that's not what happened."

"It is! It's why he was so down when we left. Like I said, like he just lost his best friend…" I trailed off, realizing exactly what that meant. "And don't call me Reags."

"So you still care about him."

The simple statement hit me harder than a fist. It was true. I still cared about Matt. If it was possible to hate someone and care about them at the same time. And I discovered that it was. I wanted him to be safe, was angry when someone hurt him. I was already used to having him around again.

We had a ten-second staring contest before I broke eye contact and sprinted down the street, away from Paul, in the direction of the busier street where the office was. Paul called my name. I ignored him. The sound of his footsteps behind me made me instinctively move my legs faster, putting all the distance I could between him and me. I made it to the corner of the next block, down the sidewalk to the right, and up the next street before he caught my arm and pinned me against the side of a building. My struggling was useless; both of us were breathing hard, but he was still stronger than I was.

"Listen to me, Reaghan," he gasped. "Just listen for a second."

I kicked him in the shin, silencing him. "How are you going to explain that?"

Paul dropped my wrists, which he had been holding against the wall. "I didn't--"

He whirled as a vehicle pulled up beside us, his body automatically moving in front of me. I stepped to the side to see what had caused him to stiffen and met the narrowed eyes of the street guard on morning duty. "Run," Paul whispered.

~*~

We took off in opposite directions, me to the right and him to the left. The guard car's motor growled uncertainly. I heard a door slam and looked back to see a second guard climbing out of the back seat.

If I'd ever developed a habit of swearing, I would have been spewing the most incredible profanity I could think of just then. But my mom had "Fosses don't swear" drilled into my head more firmly than left and right, which was a good thing at the moment because it meant I had more breath for sprinting.

The guard was heavier than I was, but his legs were much longer. I wasn't weighed down with a uniform, but I had just dashed down a street I was completely unfamiliar with. We went for a while at stalemate, without him gaining or falling behind. I had been interrupted in the middle of recovering from my previous sprint and was about to start thinking about finding a place where I could duck under cover and remain stationary for a while when I risked a glance behind me and realized that the guard hadn't followed me down the last turn I'd taken.

I stopped running instantly and started looking around. I was in the industrial area of town, surrounded by tall brick buildings with damp rusty alleys in between them. There were more than enough places for me to hole up for a while until I felt ready to find my way back to the office. Was the office even the best place to go? I didn't want to have to explain showing up without Paul.

Where was Paul? The remembrance that he was in equal danger came crashing down on me. I forgot about recovering from my run and straightened up, taking a step in the direction I'd come from. But that was as far as I got, because the guard reappeared suddenly and a heavy object in his hand moving quickly towards my head was the last thing I saw.

My head ached.
Scratch that. My head really hurt. It felt like something was pounding on the inside of my skull trying to get out.
For some reason I thought that if I opened my eyes, the pain might subside. I was wrong.
“Reaghan.”
“Unnggg,” I said.
“Reaghan, come on.”
The voice sounded vaguely familiar. It was insistent, pulling me back out of the darkness into the light and the head-throbbing. I reached out and blindly waved my hand in the direction of the voice in an attempt to swat it into silence, but something caught my wrist.
“Reags, look at me.”
“Reags” brought back feelings and images. Blue eyes, something soft brushing against my cheek. Brown eyes, a look that said “No worries, I’ve got you.” It was a name that meant safety.
Don’t call me Reags.
I was suddenly awake and kicking. Paul snatched at my arms and pinned them to whatever I was lying on. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re okay. Relax.” Recognizing his voice was the final thing bringing me back to the present.
“What?”
I focused on his face, which was a little difficult with the headache. He was looking down at me with nothing but worry.
“Listen up, Reaghan. Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I mumbled.
“Okay. We’re in jail.”
“Again?” For some reason this statement was extremely confusing to me. Why were Paul and I in jail? Had the past two years never happened?
“Again.” I heard a faint smile in his voice, which struck me as mildly insane. “We were arguing on the street and the guards caught us.”
We were arguing on the street?
I wrestled my wrists from his grasp and sat up, glancing around. We were in a room that was maybe ten feet square with a six-foot ceiling. I was sitting on a narrow shelf that protruded from the wall and Paul was squatting in front of me. Everything was painted a light gray shade. There were no windows. The door was on the adjacent wall and its hinges were so that it would open towards me.
My vision was clearing quickly and the pain in my head had subsided. I turned to Paul. “Can you say that all again?”
“We were arguing about something in the street,” Paul said. “Actually, we were fighting.” Something vaguely regret-like colored his tone. “The street guards on duty pulled up and we both ran, but they caught us. We’re in jail.”
I blinked. “I’m not sure if I remember any of that.”
Paul brushed his fingers against a spot on my forehead that felt hot and tender, causing me to wince. “You probably have a concussion.”
“Great.”
I tipped my head back against the wall and closed my eyes to block out Paul’s face and the gray walls surrounding me. The last thing I could recall clearly was being in Paul’s kitchen. Talking to Matt and Paul. A silent communication between the two guys that I didn’t follow but definitely felt uneasy about. We had walked down the street and then Paul...told me he liked me.
“Oh, I remember now.”
Paul’s eyes flicked to my face uneasily. I met his gaze and held it until he looked away. “Say something,” I told him after a moment.
He shook his head. “I didn’t tell Matt to back off.”
“Then what did you do?”
Paul was silent. “I hate you,” I said, turning away so I didn’t see his face.
A few hours dragged by slowly. My head still ached and I spent a lot of the time staring at anything that was gray--meaning anything that was not Paul--and trying to keep up with the thoughts racing through my brain. They were mostly about Paul and Matt, Paul vs. Matt, Paul, Matt, and how much I simultaneously abhorred and cared about them. I wanted them to have never entered my life. I wanted them to both go away and never talk to me again.And at the same time I wanted them around me, making me laugh and feel protected. The whole thing gave me a headache worse than the one from when the street guard knocked me out. I even tried to decide which guy I liked better, Paul or Matt. If Messing was about to have both of them killed and I could only save one, who would it be? But I had no answer for that question. Then I wondered which one liked me better. Matt had spent two years getting back into California on the wild hope of somehow finding me. Paul had put himself at risk by wrestling me away from the guard back when and then deciding to trust me enough to take me with him when he left jail and make me part of the team. There was no resolution for that question either.
That was how the day went, although of course we had no way tell time. Eventually my thoughts turned to how we would get out of our situation. It was a given that Savannah and Brian would come break us out like they had two years ago, but what happened after that? When the guards found we were missing, they would find Paul’s address in their files and track us down there. They would probably look at the office as well. It was no use going to Savannah and Brian’s houses, because there was sure to be something somewhere that linked Paul and I to them. That only left my apartment, which wouldn’t be under my name because I wasn’t officially renting it. It was the attic of a building no one used. We would have to go there. After we somehow got Matt and the Hannas out of Paul’s house and through the streets without being noticed. No large groups of people walked around at night anymore.
I wasn’t sure if my headache was actually getting worse or if it was all psychological. There was no use in talking to Paul. I knew he would have already thought through all this, and if he had a plan he would let me know after we were safely out of jail. Besides, I knew the cell would be bugged.
I stared at the gray wall.
It was a while later that I found myself standing in the middle of an enormous group of people. We were in front of a tall building that I recognized as the old state prison. There was a man standing up on a high platform, dressed in the dark blue uniform of a guard captain. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear him because of the crowd’s quiet murmuring all around me. Cursing my short height, I stood on my toes, and when that didn’t get me anywhere I started weaving my way through the mass, squeezing between hips and elbows until I came close to the front. At the last second I remembered not to push to the very front because I’d just gotten out of jail, so I stayed back a few rows and found a place where I could see between shoulders. The area in front of me was familiar--it was always on TV. The courtyard of the prison was the place where Governor Messing addressed the Republic, where state ceremonies were held, and where criminals were executed. Messing liked to hold object lessons for everyone to see. It sickened me.
I peered into the courtyard. There were three seven-foot poles set up four feet from each other, and secured by their wrists between the three poles were two male figures. The Republic’s elite firing squad was lounging a hundred feet away, its members joking with each other and toying around with their guns. The man in uniform continued speaking, and now that I was closer I could make out some of his words. He was droning on about terrorism and its horrible consequences and how the Governor put these two guys out as examples for law-abiding citizens who might be harboring rebellious thoughts and all the jazz they went through every time they held an execution. Then he was done. The crowd hushed as two men stepped forward from the firing squad, done messing around. They raised their weapons and as they did so I knew, like I’d known all along, who the two prisoners were.
The urge to scream was almost irresistible. The sound welled up inside of me, collected in an enormous knot just behind my tongue, and pressed forward against the insides of my lips. I felt a surge of adrenaline rush through me, making my limbs tingle and my stomach turn. Any second now I would shriek aloud, shove past the people blocking my way, leap over the barriers, and dash into the courtyard to make some wild attempt at saving Paul and Matt.
But I didn’t.
I stood and watched while my two closest friends were executed.
The men from the firing squad squeezed their triggers. The sound echoed around the brick courtyard. Everything slowed down. I could see the bullets drifting through the air.
Paul and Matt slumped from the handcuffs that held them in between the poles. Some people cheered halfheartedly. More guards came to take away the bodies. The guard captain started talking again. But I couldn’t have stood stiller if I was made of granite.
My vision was suddenly filled with gray and I was aware of my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest. I was lying on my back on a cold metal slab in a jail cell. My head throbbed.
I sat up and took a slow breath, trying to calm my racing heart, and looked around to make sure it had all really been a dream. Paul looked up at me questioningly from his seat on the floor against the wall. I shook my head dismissively, telling him everything was good.
But it wasn’t. Not when I’d just passively watched my best friends die.

Eventually the door opened, like I knew it would, and Savannah slipped in. She was wearing a guard uniform. Paul and I let her handcuff us and shove us through the building to the lobby, where Brian was waiting with the unconscious desk guards. I raised an eyebrow at him and he returned the gesture as we started down the hallway to the side door.
Savannah un-cuffed Paul and me in silence. We waited while she changed out of her uniform in silence and we would have gone all the way to Paul’s house in silence if Brian didn’t try to make things a little easier.
“Honestly, you guys. What did you do this time?”
“Shut up, Brian,” I said.
We walked in silence after that.
We had worked together enough to know that we were all thinking the same thing: get the shipments out of the warehouse, run to the office to save everything we could, and get to my apartment as soon as possible. Pau and I could be discovered missing at any time, although no one should notice anything unusual for a little while because we had been silent all day, so the silence all night wouldn’t be an issue. It was a half-hour walk to Paul’s house. We made it a walk because walking was quieter and less attention-drawing than running, but we made it a fast walk because we had no clue how much time we had. When we reached the house, Savannah handed Paul the key. He unlocked the door wordlessly and we slipped in.
Paul broke the silence finally, speaking in a whisper. “Reaghan and Nan, go get them downstairs. Brian, come with me.”
Savannah and I crept through the kitchen and opened the basement door. I winced as it creaked on its hinges. We glanced at each other and I went down first. I heard deep breathing coming from the dark room, but I had no idea whether they were all asleep or not. I found the answer when I reached the bottom of the stairs, turned the corner, and was snatched and pinned to the wall by hands that came out of nowhere.
“It’s me,” I croaked.
Matt stepped back. “Reaghan!” Daniel and Grace materialized behind him. “Sorry,” he said a bit sheepishly.
I shook my head, rubbing my arm where his grip had crushed my bicep. “No, no, no problem.”
“Is something wrong?” Grace asked apprehensively.
“Yes,” Savannah said. “Get your parents and your stuff together. We’re leaving.”
“I thought that wasn’t till next week,” Daniel began.
“Change of plans,” I interrupted. “Hurry.”
Daniel and Grace stared at us for a second longer before disappearing into the dark basement. “No lights,” I hissed after them.
“I’m going to give them a hand,” Savannah said, leaving me alone with Matt.
“What’s going on?” he asked me.
“Um, nothing much,” I said. “Paul and I got arrested and now we have to get everything out of his house and the office before the guards come looking for us is all.”
He stepped closer to me in the dim light. “Reaghan...”
“What?”
It looked like he was going to say something and then changed his mind. “What’s that on your forehead?”
I’d forgotten about the welt. “Is it still there?”
Matt raised an eyebrow. “Very much so.”
“Hm.”
“Where did it come from?” He brushed it with his finger and I winced involuntarily.
“Uh, I just happen to be so formidable that the street guard had to knock me out before he dragged me off.”
“Very funny, Foss. Maybe you should try being a little less formidable.”
I gave him an impish grin. He narrowed his eyes at me.
“Reaghan, little help over here.”
Savannah’s voice jolted me out of my mood. I’d forgotten I had that grin in me. I wasn’t playful anymore--I hadn’t flirted since before. Not that I’d been flirting with Matt. But what just happened between us was something that hadn’t happened between me and anyone since before. I shook my head and picked my way through the dark basement, Matt on my heels, to find Savannah.
She was trying to pry away the floor tile that covered the hole where we kept our records. My fingers were smaller than hers, so I shoved her aside and pulled up the tile. Savannah lifted out the ancient metal cash box with the records--some printed, some sloppily put together by hand. Paul, Savannah, and Brian had been keeping records of their shipments long before I joined. When I brought it up, we had a long discussion about whether it was safe and eventually decided that it was probably a better idea than a worse one. If our records were ever discovered, Messing couldn’t hurt the people we’d shipped out; they were long gone. And we were in enough danger ourselves as it was, doing what we were doing. We could be discovered any day. So we kept the records, and when things were depressing or life was boring we would sit down on Paul’s basement floor and sift through them together, remembering the different people we’d shipped out and reminiscing about the incidents they had put us through, the struggles we’d had with some of their personalities, the guy who decided at the last minute that he was afraid of flying and the forty-year-old woman who had panicked just before she left the warehouse for the last time because she didn’t have her lucky orange scarf with her. It was about the only method of having fun we had, and if I ever laughed for real now--which I didn’t--it was when we went through the records.
Savannah took the box from me, her fingers gripping it until they turned white. It meant a lot to us, this little metal cash box full of beat-up paper.
“You guys ready?” I asked, turning to face the rest of the room. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could clearly make out the four forms in the room. Daniel was standing idly, his thumbs hooked into the straps of his backpack. Grace was zipping her own backpack shut. Elizabeth had her hand on Stephen’s shoulder, leading him across the basement. I watched him follow her without question and felt bad for her suddenly. If I ever got married--which was highly, highly unlikely--I’d want someone I could depend on no matter what. Obviously Elizabeth Hanna hadn’t gotten that.
Grace bent over to pick up a duffel bag. I assumed it was her dad’s, because he was the only one not carrying anything. We let each person we shipped bring one bag with them because any more would be too risky. I couldn’t count how many complaints we had gotten about that in the past, but the Hannas hadn’t put up a fuss. I assumed they just wanted out as soon as possible. Grace grunted slightly as she heaved the bag up onto her shoulder and gave Daniel an exasperated look that he didn’t catch. I felt Matt move past me.
“I’ll take it, Grace.”
“Thanks.” She handed the duffel bag to him with a relieved look and Daniel seemed to wake up, glancing over with narrowed eyes. Grace stuck her tongue out at him and he rolled his eyes. She grinned impishly at Matt. I watched the whole exchange with something burning vaguely in my middle, something I didn’t want to recognize as jealousy. First of all, Grace had no business flirting with my--with Matt--not that she was flirting, but still. Second, how was she having fun when her life had just been wrecked by Messing? I liked her, but in the two weeks or so that I had known her I had harbored an acid bitterness toward the way she seemed to bounce up from every misfortune. She laughed, for heaven’s sake, she laughed when Brian made stupid jokes. I never found anything funny. She smiled for no reason. I only smiled when I was being sarcastic, mainly.
“Let’s move,” Savannah broke in.
“I’ll run up and see if I can find Paul and Brian,” I volunteered quickly. Savannah nodded at me in the darkness and I scooted up the stairs silently. The kitchen was empty. I peered into the empty living room before slipping up to the second floor. At first I thought there was no one there, but then I heard muffled voices coming from down the hall. I followed the sounds to the doorway of what I assumed was Paul’s room and was about to go in, but I heard my name and stopped just before the open door.
They were whispering, so I couldn’t hear their tones, but I recognized the way they formed their words. Brian was the one who’d said my name. “...what she’s thinking.”
“She’s got some internal battle going on,” Paul said. “She acts like she hates him, but when she thinks I hurt him she hates me too.”
Only Brian would be chuckling in the situation we were in. “Relax, man. She’s twenty. She doesn’t know what’s going on any more than you do.”
“I don’t know. I’m worried about her,” Paul answered. “She’s different.”
Brian snorted. “Reaghan is different. That’s an understatement.”
“You know what I mean. She’s even more reserved than she was before. She acts like a cornered animal sometimes.”
“Maybe she feels like one.”
Paul moved around a bit. It sounded like he was putting something into a box. He heaved a sigh. “Yeah, sometimes I think we all do.”
“Huh?”
“There’s only so much we can do before we’re found out,” Paul said. “Sooner or later they’re going to figure out what’s going on and end it. Probably end us too. It’s only a matter of time. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother, if we have no clue when it’s all going to be over.”
Brian was silent for a while. I waited in the darkness, hearing the Hannas and Matt and Savannah coming up from the basement. Finally Brian answered. “I think we’ve all thought about that. And I think we all know it’s worth it.”
Something clacked around, like a small piece of plastic coming into sharp contact with a bigger one. When Paul replied his voice was strained. “You’re right.”
They stopped talking and focused on whatever they were doing. I waited for ten seconds before stepping into the doorway. “Hey.”
Paul and Brian both jumped. Brian was the one who returned my greeting. “You guys ready?”
“Yeah. Can I help you out at all?”
They glanced at each other. Paul’s arms were full of folders. There was a cardboard box on the floor, the kind paper reams from Staples used to come in, with more folders and a laptop. “Nah, I think we’re good,” Paul said, dumping his load into the box.
Even in the darkness I could see that something in his face wasn’t right. “You okay?” I asked, frowning, like I’d missed the entire conversation they had just had.
He glanced up at me quickly, his shadowed eyes searching my face. “Yeah. I’m good.”
Brian bent down and lifted the paper box. “Let’s out of here. We’re running a pretty tight schedule.”
I turned wordlessly and led the way downstairs to where the rest of us were waiting in the kitchen. We looked around at each other, waiting for someone to take charge. Of course it was Paul who spoke up.
“Okay,” he said. “Everyone okay?”
Everyone nodded except for Stephen, who was staring blankly at the dark walnut cabinets.
“Here’s the deal. We can’t stay at the office because it can be traced to me. And we can’t go to Savannah or Brian’s houses either because they could be connected with me or Reaghan. There is one place that doesn’t have any of our names attached to it, though, and that’s Reaghan’s apartment.” He glanced at me.
“Yeah,” I said quickly. “It’s the attic of an old apartment building. No one lives there anymore. I’m just borrowing the space from nobody.”
“So,” Paul continued, “that’s where we’re going. But we need to pick some stuff up from the office first, because if they go there they’re going to search it. Here’s what’s going to happen.”
This was why Paul was our leader. He was always calm, always in charge. He always knew exactly what we were going to do. He never faltered.
“Savannah, you and I are going to Reaghan’s place right now, with the Hannas. Give me the stuff, Brian.” He took the paper box. “Reaghan, Brian, and Matt are going to the office to grab everything we have there.”
Matt glanced at me and I glanced at Brian, who was looking at Matt. “Are you sure, Paul?” Brian asked.
“Yes,” Paul said. “Hurry up. We’re running on borrowed time here.”

“Here, Reaghan, take this.” Brian dumped a load of folders into my arms as he pulled open the back door of the office. I staggered slightly, thrown off balance.
“Why do we have so much stuff?”
Brian glanced around. “Guess we never really felt like cleaning up in here.”
Matt’s lips curled into a smile. “I wouldn’t call this a ton of stuff, Reags.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Yeah, but you’re a spoiled outsider.”
Brian raised an eyebrow at me, but Matt’s grin grew wider. “Oh yeah?”
I could tell he was about to challenge me, take the discussion further, and I panicked suddenly. What was it about Matt that suddenly gave me the capacity to flirt and joke? I wasn’t like this. I was quiet and sullen, not coy and smiling.
“Yeah,” I said to Matt, and turned away. I felt two pairs of eyes on my as I bent down to put the folders I held into Savannah’s old backpack, but I ignored them.
It had taken us a little under an hour to clear out the office. Most of what we had was old lists that we didn't need, scrap paper, records we only kept because we didn't know what else to do with them. We had dumped everything we didn't need into an old paper ream box--incredible how many of them we had around--to throw in a trash bin somewhere on our way to my apartment. Hopefully they wouldn't be found, and if they were, hopefully they wouldn't be connected with us. I knew better by now than to use the word hopefully, but the chances were small enough this time.
I slung the backpack over my shoulder and glanced at my companions. Brian was in the act of handing a duffel bag to Matt. “You ready?” I asked.
Both of them looked at me. “Yeah,” Matt said. Brian hefted the discard box.
“Let’s roll then.”
We took the long way back, through the back alleys where the buildings provided shadow enough so that we could barely see each other at times. Somewhere along the way we heaved up a sewer drain and threw the discard box down into the darkness. There was a shallow splash. At one point we heard deep men’s voices and had a rough few minutes while we tried to slow our breathing and stay perfectly silent and hidden. The ten-minute walk felt like at least an hour to me. The little bit of Paul and Brian’s conversations that I had overheard kept playing in my head.
She hates him... She hates me... I’m worried about her. She’s different.
Reaghan is different. That’s an understatement.
She’s even more reserved. Like a cornered animal.
Maybe she feels like one.
I think we all do.
Did we?
Paul was right; it was only so long before we were going to be found out. Eventually one of us was going to slip too far, we wouldn’t be able to recover, they would find us, and they would take care of us. Quickly, thoroughly, and permanently. I hadn’t really thought through what would happen if--when, actually--we were discovered before, but now I did. They would put us in jail, like they had twice for me already. We might stay there for a day or two and then we might have a fake trial, or we might not. But I knew for sure that before a week had passed we would be out in the courtyard of the old converted jail I’d dreamed about, cuffed in a row to a bunch of poles, watching the firing squad goof off with each other before they got down to business and took us out. I imagined what it would be like, chained in front of thousands of people, listening to a guard captain list off what we’d done and why it was wrong and how we must therefore be eliminated. I tried to conjure up the thoughts that would be running through my mind, the feelings, the adrenaline. I pictured myself between Paul and Savannah, standing while my arms dangled from two posts, feeling Paul’s fingers brush against mine. He would be trying to reassure me even then. I would flick his fingers away. He would look at me and I would grin at him and he would grin back, still teasing. The speech would end, we would make eye contact for the last time. I would look straight in front of me, staring down the firing squad member, gazing into the little black hole that would spit out the tiny piece of metal meant to end my life. It happened in slow motion, in my head; the man’s finger squeezed the trigger. I watched the bullet drift toward me. I watched it getting closer. The spot between my eyes started tingling.
“Reags?”
I shook my head quickly, clearing the images. “Yeah.” The word caught halfway up my throat. I hemmed and tried again. “Yeah.”
Brian’s and Matt’s faces filled my vision. One of them had a hand on my shoulder. I blinked, realizing that I had stopped walking and was leaning with my back against a building, staring straight ahead.
“You okay, Reaghan?” Matt’s voice was concerned, puzzled, curious. In that order.
“Yeah,” I said a second-and-a-half time. “I’m fine. Sorry.”
Brian held my shoulder for a moment longer. “Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh.” I took a step forward to prove it. “It’s all good.”
The two of them backed away, allowing me to move forward. “Well,” Brian said, “we’re here.”
I looked up. We were standing at the bottom of the fire escape leading to my apartment. “Oh. Great,” I answered.
The rusty metal structure shook. I squinted into the darkness above and saw a figure with Paul’s build shimmying down to us. For some reason it reminded me of Spider-Man, which I hadn’t seen since I was twelve. I gave my head another shake. What was with me these past few days? In five seconds Paul was on the landing just above our heads.
“You made it.” The relief in his voice was easy to pick out.
“Yep,” I replied, handing Savannah’s backpack to Brian and pulling myself up on to the landing beside him. “Here, hand me that,” I said to Matt. He swung the duffel bag to me. I handed it to Paul and reached down for the backpack. We climbed up the fire escape in about thirty seconds, making a human ladder when needed to lug the bags up to the top.
“I had no clue paper was so heavy,” Brian said as we reached my window. I smacked him lightly in the arm.
“You thought that was heavy?”
He squinted at me.
I ignored him and handed the duffel bag in through the window to Savannah. We didn’t dare turn on the light once we were all together, since we were at the top of the world and in the middle of town, but I put my laptop on the floor and opened it up. The glow was more than enough to make out each other’s faces. I glanced around.
Stephen was sitting in the corner, exactly where Matt had spent the night before. Elizabeth was hovering around between him and the rest of us, who were grouped around the laptop. I was squatting on the floor next to it. Paul stood behind me. Brian was on my left, seated with his legs folded Indian-style. Savannah was kneeling, already going through the contents of her old backpack. There was a pile of folders beside her. Matt was sitting opposite me. Daniel was behind him, standing a little uncertainly. Grace came over and found a place beside Brian.
I saw her glance at Matt as she sat down. Her movement caught his attention and he was looking at her, so they made eye contact. It was only for a second, but it was enough to make the barest flush creep to Grace’s face. Matt’s gaze flicked to me, as if he was checking whether or not I had seen. My eyes shot down to the stack of folders on the ground as soon as I realized he was looking at me, which was in the same instant that Paul’s hand landed on my shoulder. I twitched in surprise and he immediately took it away.
Brian let us know he had seen the whole exchange by clearing his throat loudly into the uncomfortable silence. “So, um, since we’re all here, what next?”
I took a deep breath as Paul squatted next to me. “Uh, I’m still working on that.”
“Could we move the shipment up at all?” I asked.
Savannah shook her head. “That would mean an extra trip for you down to see Holt and endless maneuvering and rescheduling. Definitely enough to grab someone’s attention.”
“So we all have to stay in Reaghan’s apartment until Sunday,” Brian said. “What’s today again?”
“Wednesday,” I muttered. “Well Thursday now. Wonderful.”
Paul touched my shoulder again. “We’ll figure something out.”
“What did you guys bring back?” Savannah asked.
“Just everything with our names on it,” Brian said. “Record back-ups, stuff from Holt, the fake payments we made to him. And your laptop and mine.”
“What did you do with the old lists and stuff?”
“Down the drain,” I said.
“Huh?”
“It was Brian’s idea.”
“We put them in the sewer,” Brian explained.
“Gross,” Savannah said.
“Whatever.”
“Guys,” Paul broke in. We all looked at him.
“It’s two a.m. We should all take a power nap or something. In the morning we’ll talk, okay? It’s safer if we wait.” Meaning no one outside would overhear us during the day because it would be noisy anyway.
“Good idea,” Savannah said. She looked at me expectantly.
Oh. We’re in my apartment. Right. “Um, yeah. Everyone find a corner or something,” I said. “Elizabeth, take the bed if you want.”
The cluster we’d been in melted as Daniel backed away. Elizabeth shot me a grateful look and curled up on the cot, Grace next to her. Matt leaned back against the wall where he was. Savannah curled up in the corner opposite Stephen. Brian stretched out underneath the window and Paul sat down by Brian’s feet.
“Lights out,” I said, and shut the laptop.

I woke up to a sound and a touch. Someone was snoring and someone else had a hand on my shoulder.
“Reaghan.”
I opened my eyes to Matt’s face and bodies draped at random around my apartment. “What?”
“Can we, um, talk?”
I sat up, wincing as my neck muscles tightened in a cramp, and glanced around. Everyone was still asleep. It was still dark--couldn’t have been past five in the morning. Twenty-four hours after I’d brought Matt to the office for the first time. Could it really have been such a short time since this all started?
“Sure,” I said in my early-morning voice, stretching in my limited space. “About what?”
“Can we, um, talk outside?”
I blinked and frowned at Matt. “I guess.”
“Great.” He took my hand and pulled me gently to my feet.
I followed out the window and down the fire escape into the frigid morning. When we stood at the bottom of the rusty ladder, Matt turned to me. I leaned back against the mildew-covered brick and folded my arms against the cold. “What’s up?”
“We never really finished our discussion the night I got here,” he said.
“We didn’t?” I felt my shoulders sag. Not this again.
Matt studied my face. “Not really.”
I rubbed my upper arms. “What do you want to say?”
“Well for starters, I was wondering if you still had my high school ring.”
I stared at him for a second before I realized what he was talking about. “Your ring? Uh, yeah, I think it’s up there. In my backpack somewhere, probably.” I knew exactly where it was, actually--it was in my backpack, in the right outside pocket, zipped safely into its own compartment. But I hadn’t thought about it in months. “You can have it back, I guess. You should probably take it with you. Remind me to get it for you before you leave.”
Something in Matt’s face fell, almost imperceptibly. “I was going to ask if you still wanted to hang onto it for me.”
“Why?”
Matt rubbed the top of his left shoulder with his right hand and I immediately recognized the gesture as one of his nervous ticks from before.
“Stop.”
Confusion spread across his face as he dropped his hand. “What?”
“Never mind. Why?”
He rubbed his shoulder again. This time I reached out and snatched at his wrist, lifting his hand away. “Cut it out!”
“Reags.”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped.
“Can you stop?”
“Stop what?”
“Making this so hard!”
We were whisper-shouting at each other now. “Making this hard? What is this? What do you want to say to me, Matt? Spit it out. And hurry. I’m freezing.”
Matt rolled his eyes, peeled off his jacket, and handed it to me. I pulled it on, the warmth from his body heat sending shivers up and down my limbs, and tried to ignore the Matt-smell that immediately enveloped me. He stood in front of me in his t-shirt and began again. This time he came straight to the point.
“When I leave, Reaghan, will you come with me? I came back to get you.”
I was a little surprised not to feel surprise at his question. It was as though I had been expecting this to come ever since I found him two days ago. I was genuinely surprised that I wasn’t sure of the answer I gave him.
“I...I don’t know. No.”
“Why not?”
My face began to warm up as I tried to contain my anger and frustration. “I have a life here, Matt. I have work, I have friends. I have a reason for being here.”
“But you don’t know how long that life will last,” Matt said. “Any day it could be over. It’s dangerous.”
“Duh, it’s dangerous. Do I look like I care?”
Matt sighed. “Reaghan, I just want you to be safe. Okay? I want to know you’re somewhere people can’t hurt you. That’s all.” He hesitated, rubbing the toe of his shoe on the rough concrete, and met my eyes. “And like I said the other night, I missed you. I still miss you.”
“I’m right here,” I said after a pause, more to fill up the silence than anything.
Something I couldn’t read colored his eyes. “Yeah, but you’re not the same.”
His statement hung in the air between us for a moment before my anger flowed over. “Of course I’m not the same, Matt. What would you expect? I walked home from school after a lockdown one day and found my mom dead in the front yard. Dead. As in, gone. No longer living. You couldn’t even see her face, it was so messed up from all the bullets. She bled all over the grass. And there were bodies all over the street, people killed in the crossfire. The side of the road, where the rain runs down to the drains? There was blood there instead. You think that made me a little different? You think it wouldn’t have made you a little different? And then I was arrested for something that wasn’t even technically wrong. As an object lesson for everyone to see. And after that I was broken out of jail by complete strangers. Everyone I ever cared about was gone. My world literally flipped. I had to survive somehow, and maybe when I came out the other end I was changed. But that makes sense to me, you know? I guess it doesn’t to you.”
I was breathing quickly when I finished my rant, partly because I’d spewed the whole thing out in one breath and partly because I was wrestling with my anger and irritation, trying to decide where it came from and why it was suddenly so hard to deal with after three years of controlling it. Matt’s dark blue eyes held me in a gaze I couldn’t escape and couldn’t understand. I refused to look at him, refusing to see his pity, refusing to acknowledge the fact that I had just poured things out to him that I had never poured out to anyone before--not Brian, not Savannah or Paul. Because I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking to my left at the gray morning buildings down the alley, and because I was looking to my left I didn’t see him move forward so much as feel him move forward. My eyes immediately snapped to his chest.
He’s going to hug me.
My body tensed.
Don’t hug me.
I can’t handle it.
He must have sensed what I was thinking, because he didn’t hug me. Something disappointed and wistful flickered in his eyes and he reached out and touched my arm softly, his hand lingering for only a second. “I’m so sorry, Reaghan.”
That was all he said, but I could tell he meant it--he was really sorry for everything I’d been through, sorry he hadn’t been there, sorry it had been me and not him. For an instant I was warmed by his tone. Then something warned me to back away. It was almost an instinct.
“Don’t be,” I said. “Wasn’t your fault.”
I saw hurt flash across his face before he nodded slowly. “So...you’re sure you don’t want to come back with me.”
“Yeah. I’m staying here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I said because there was nothing else to say.
“Okay,” Matt repeated slowly.
We stood there awkwardly for a moment, looking everywhere but at each other.
“So I guess all I have to do now is go home and forget about you,” Matt said finally.
That hurt me worse than I wanted to let him see. “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like we’re ever going to happen now.”
“We could happen,” Matt insisted. “Reaghan, I want us to happen. You don’t know how much I want us to happen. If I thought it would help, I would stay here.”
I looked up at him in shock. “You would stay here?”
Why in the world would he choose to stay in California when it would be so easy--well, relatively easy--for us to slip him over the border in just a few days? Was I really worth it? Of course not. There was no way I was going to let him stay in this pit for my worthless self. Things didn’t work that way. Just because I had a life I tolerated didn’t mean he had to tolerate it too. Matt needed something more. He deserved something more.
“Yeah.”
“You can’t stay here, Matt.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t let you.”
Hurt registered on his face. He didn’t reply, probably because he thought I only wanted to get rid of him. I knew I hadn’t given him reason to think anything but that I wanted to get rid of him. I did want to get rid of him. But not just because I never wanted to see him again. He didn’t know that, of course, and I couldn’t tell him; he wouldn’t let me make him leave. He had to leave. For me, but for himself too.
“So this is it then,” he said. “I can stop trying to talk to you, stop trying to connect with you. I leave you alone until Sunday, and then I wave at you and never see you again.”
“Pretty much,” I answered, pressing the sole of my four-year-old Converse against the rough brick wall behind me. “Sorry, Matt, but that’s how it has to be, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We should go back up,” I said abruptly. It came out a little funny-sounding, because I had started saying it gently and then remembered that I didn’t know what gentle meant anymore and besides, Matt should be able to handle things like this without me handling him like he was made of something fragile. But I didn’t wait to see how he reacted to my statement; I turned my back to him and swung up the fire escape. I was three quarters of the way up before I felt him climbing after me.

I smelled the smoke before I heard the flames.
When I peered around the side of the building that stood between my eyes and the office, I knew what I would find. The building going up glory style.
As I stood there, eyes watering because of the smoke, dizzy with memories, I heard the sirens in the distance. People were gathering at the front of what used to be my second home, muttering and shouting and jostling each other to get a better view. I wondered who had started the fire. Most likely the guards. They were going to leave us nowhere to go.
Satisfied, I turned away to go check on Paul's house. I assumed I'd find the same thing, but when I turned down his street and came within sight of his property, everything looked the same. I walked past the house slowly, like I was just out for air, because I had no clue who was watching, but nothing happened. I glanced casually at the windows and saw that the shades were drawn, but that could have meant anything, because they were always drawn.
the last place I checked was the guard building, which was attached to the jail Paul and I had stayed in. It hadn’t been in the itinerary Paul gave me before I left--as a matter of fact, he had cautioned me against going past the place, which was mostly why I did it. But it was quiet, looking like it normally did. No unusual activity at all. On my way back, I passed the back of the office again. The fire had been put out and all that was left was a shell of black brick. A sign was posted on the back door claiming the burnt-out building as under investigation and cautioning trespassers. I took a long way to the apartment, just in case.
I touched the fire escape and then pulled my hand back, hesitating. Turned out I didn’t feel like rejoining the others just yet. I was starting to feel seriously suffocated, like there was a huge curtain coming down over my head and slowly squeezing closer until it was just inches from pressing against my face. I hated feeling smothered. So instead of climbing back into my apartment, where I wouldn’t be able to breathe in between bodies, I kept walking down the alley. A part of me thought about how they were all waiting for me and would start to worry eventually, but I pushed that thought away. Let them worry. I needed fresh air.
City air.
I huddled into my jacket against the cold breeze that seemed to be trying to reach my core. It was an old coat that I’d already had for two years before things fell apart. I hadn’t wanted to get a new one because I liked this one so much--it was warm and comfortable and my favorite shade of brown. If I had known what was coming, I would have gotten two new jackets. But there were a lot of things I would have done differently if I had known.
Of course that reminded me of Matt and how I’d just been wondering whether I would have dated him at all, had I known. I was inclined to say “no” and say it strongly, but that could have been simply because I didn’t feel like dating anyone at the moment, much less think about dating anyone. I just didn’t have that capacity anymore. It wasn’t in me to be around people, to have fun, to allow myself to like a person in that way.
I evaluated this with total objectivity, and I didn’t even think about how strange it was that I could weigh my own emotions like I would weigh those of a total stranger. It should have frightened me, I guess, that I was so detached, but it actually pleased me. I hated emotions, I hated feelings. Life was so much easier without them.
I turned a corner at random, not noticing and not caring that I was getting farther from familiar territory, continuing my mental self-evaluation. I had become a pro at locking away my emotions over the past few years, bundling them up into weightless, volume-less packages and locking them into a storage closet at the very back of my mind. During the past few days, though, they were leaking out, oozing out of their waterproof packages and under the locked door. To be honest, it frightened me. I had always been more scared of emotional injuries than of physical injuries, and this was getting out of hand.
I relived the moment when I had nearly crashed into Matt’s chest on the street. I’d been walking like I always did on the way home from the office, head down, like I was now, watching the ground in front of me and letting my thoughts wander. That day I’d been thinking about how guard cars never bothered me anymore. I’d been mentally congratulating myself, as a matter of fact, on my ability to tap my emotions and instincts down into obscurity when I ran into Matt and lost it all.
It was his fault, all of it.
The fact hit me so hard that I stopped walking. Matt was the reason I’d started losing control. He was the reason things between Paul and me had gotten mixed up. He was the reason I had spent the day in jail, and it was his doing that we had had to empty the office and let it be blown up by the guard. It was because of Matt that we were in this mess, and it was because of Matt that the mess was just going to get worse. We were going to have to ship five people out on Sunday, more than we’d ever done before. It was already risky enough shipping four, and then he had to come along and make it even more complicated.
My back hit a wall, another brick one--was every stupid building in this stupid city brick?--and I sank down into a sitting position, my knees against my chest. Tears of rage filled my eyes. Why had I dated Matt? Why did my car break down that day? He had to be dumb enough to blunder back into my life when I was done with him. I had to be dumb enough to date the guy who was nice enough to blunder back in and stay there even when it was obvious that I didn’t want him. He had to be dumb enough to mess things up with Paul. I had to be dumb enough to let him.
The furious tears leaked out and I tipped my head back in frustration, banging the back of my head against the bricks, which made me even angrier. My hands were shaking, I was so full of rage. I hated Matt. I wished I had never met him, I wished he had never been born. I wished I had never been born.
Without warning, the memory door opened in my mind. I had been sitting in my car that day, curled into the driver’s seat in almost the same position I was in now. I was on the brink of breaking down in irritation. My cell phone was in my hand, but I was trying to gain control of myself before I called for gas. When the unfamiliar car pulled up behind me I’d had a momentary panic attack, because for some reason I thought it might be some creep who was going to try and take advantage of the situation--teenage girl stranded on the side of a near-empty road with no way to drive away. I stared in the rearview mirror, watching as Matt climbed out of his car. Since I wasn’t the kind of girl who remembered faces very well, and I wasn’t the kind of girl who worshipped the popular guys in school, seeing him didn’t help calm me down, and so when he tapped on my window I looked at him with something that must have been a mixture of defiance and terror. And it must have been funny, because I remember that he looked totally amused. About then was when his face started to look familiar, so I cranked my window down (I had one of the ancient cars that required cranking the windows).
“Need a hand at all?” he asked. I looked from the phone in my hand to his face and blinked.
“Uh, yeah. I ran out of gas.”
“Huh,” he said. “You called a gas station already?”
I felt my face heat up. “No, not yet. I was about to.”
Matt grinned, and I suddenly realized that he was kind of adorable. “I’ll wait with you.”
Actually, scratch that thought--he was really attractive. A wave of awkwardness hit me. My past experience with attractive guys equalled exactly zero.
“Um, that’s okay,” I stuttered. “I’m good.”
He glanced around. “I’m not saying you’re not. I’m just saying...this isn’t really a populated area. If anything happened to you, there’d be no one around to know. And you’re a cute girl, so...”
I raised my eyebrows. “So you have no problem hanging around?”
Matt laughed outright. He had an amazing laugh. “Well, sure, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Whatever.”
There was a silent moment. “So,” I said after a few seconds, “are you going to, you know, give me some privacy to make a phone call?”
It was Matt’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “You need privacy to make a phone call?”
“Do you like it when people listen to you talk on the phone?”
Later, he told me that he decided he liked me when I asked if he had no problem hanging around because I was cute. I don’t know when I started to like him, but I definitely liked him a lot. He had been the friend I desperately needed, a guy figure in my life to make up for the dad and brother I never had. And then he had started to be a different kind of guy figure, one I thought I might have been able to hang out with for the rest of my life, if I ever had the opportunity.
But then life happened, and long story short, things were the way they were now.
Did I wish I had never met Matt? He had given me two great years, two years of friendship before everything fell apart.
I hated myself suddenly. Because no matter how much I wanted to hate Matt, I couldn’t. My brain persisted in bringing up all the reasons why he was impossible to hate.
What about Paul?
If my brain was another person, it would have felt my fist, and sharply. I felt like it was a totally different being, trying to make my life hard on purpose.
What about Paul?
When I thought of him, I was flooded by a bunch of different feelings. I felt what you feel when you get a text from that friend who’s willing to talk to you about whatever you feel like talking about, the friend who thinks you’re great no matter what you do. Immediately after that I felt what you feel when you think everything’s okay but suddenly remember something that makes everything completely not okay. And then there was a rush of something that I thought must be pity, although I couldn’t figure out why.
I pulled Matt’s face up in my mind. Protection, safety, smiles, confidence, being able to talk about anything and everything. Security. Contentment.
Now Paul’s face. Warmth, care, trust, caution because that was who I was now--someone who was cautious about every new person I met. Tentative friendship, barriers slowly being brought down, gentleness.
The reason I couldn’t compare them was that they were from two different phases in my life. They might have even been from two different lives altogether. It was like I was two different people--Reaghan Foss from before, and Reaghan Foss from now. Same name, different characters entirely. But neither the before-Reaghan nor the now-Reaghan could hate Matt, and neither of them could hate Paul.
I knew suddenly who I hated. The only person worth hating, really, because he was the only person who had ever hurt me on purpose and not regretted it later, and therefore the only person who deserved my total, unrestricted hatred.
Edward Messing.

Brian found me curled into the wall, my legs pulled up to my chest and my head resting on my knees, glaring at the ground between my feet. I heard footsteps coming down the narrow street, but I recognized them as his, so I didn’t lift my head. He sat down next to me silently, waiting for me to be ready to talk about whatever it was that I needed to talk about.
That was something Matt would do, I thought. He would wait for me to spill whatever was bothering me; he knew me--had known me--well enough to know that I would start talking eventually. Paul, on the other hand, would wait a few minutes and then ask me a completely irrelevant question, something he knew could have nothing to do with what I was upset about. They were two completely different people, but I liked the differences between them.
But it turned out that Brian did neither what Matt would do nor what Paul would do. After maybe two minutes of silence, during which I didn’t move and neither did he, he finally shifted a little uneasily and said, “Neither of them are trying to make your life harder.”
“I know,” I mumbled.
“You haven’t been very nice to either of them.”
“What would you do?” I asked, lifting my head and looking at him. He shrugged.
“Honestly, I don’t know. I might be even worse than you are. But I’ve never had an opportunity like this. No two girls have ever liked me at the same time and been antagonistic to each other about it.”
“Huh,” I said. "Antagonistic?"
"It's not like they're being discreet about it."
I blinked. "Really?"
"You didn't see the way they looked at each other when you first brought Matt to the office? Paul knew something was up right away. And he gave Matt the death stare."
"The death stare?" Somehow I couldn't see Paul giving anyone a death stare. Brian tilted his head, conceding a little.
"Well, maybe not the death stare. But the Paul equivalent, whatever that is."
I frowned at the ground, flooded by the memory of the other day when I had been so angry with Paul...for using the Paul equivalent of the death stare, I guess. Brian watched me for a moment. "Don't be too hard on him, Reaghan. He's had a tough life."
"You knew him before?" That was news to me.
"No, not me. But Savannah did. They grew up together. Neighbors."
That was also news to me. But if I thought about it, I could see it. It was obvious in the way they were able to predict each other's thoughts and emotions, the way they worked together, the way they spoke to each other. Not like people who were destined to be together, but like people with a long, deep-rooted friendship--like a brother and sister.
"Paul told you that?"
Brian shook his head. "Savannah did once when he wasn't around. Apparently their moms were friends in college or something like that, and they ended up living on the same street because Paul's parents moved there after he was born. So Paul and Savannah grew up hanging around each other all the time. Nan said that Paul's mom told her mom that she...Paul's mom...moved to that neighborhood so she knew Paul would have a place to go if he needed to. But I guess Nan's mom didn't know what that meant until Paul showed up at the back door one day when he was five, scared out of his mind and with his face all bruised up."
My breath hissed in through my nostrils. "What?"
"Don't know why his mom never left the guy. Maybe she really did love him. But Savannah said that happened all the time through elementary and high school--Paul would randomly show up at their back door, all beat up. She said it just got worse as he got older, because he would get in the way when his dad tried to hit his mom. Once they had to take him to the ER with a broken collarbone. There were times when he would stay at their house for days, just sleeping on the couch at night. She said he hated it, but there was nothing else he could do because his mom wouldn’t let him come home."
I thought of the slight dip in Paul's left shoulder. I knew he had broken his collarbone when he was a kid, but I always assumed it had happened through a normal kid accident.
"His mom died when he was seventeen. Breast cancer. Never got treated or anything. And that's when he left. Savannah has no clue what happened to his dad and she doesn't think he does either."
I swallowed, processing this new information. “So...wow.”
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s why he’s so protective of us all the time,” I said. “He grew up protecting his mom.”
Brian nodded, pressing his lips together. “Yeah. I never thought about that, but yeah. I guess it’s like instinct for him now.”
Instinct. Because he had been forced to protect someone all his life. Sacrificing himself in the process. If that was me, would I be able to come through it like Paul had?
I wasn’t sure what to say, or what to think. As far as I knew, Paul had been a normal kid. But then I knew next to nothing about my teammates’ lives, and they knew next to nothing about mine. I had liked it that way. No questions to ask, no questions to answer--it was a way to start over again. Matt’s arrival, however, seemed to have gotten rid of most of the walls I lived behind. I guess it made sense that the others’ walls should come down a little bit too.
“So,” I said, deciding I needed to change the subject, “how many girls have liked you?”
Brian shrugged again. “None that I know of.” He offered an impish grin. “I’m too immature.”
I slid my feet across the ground, bringing my knees down from my chest. “You’re not immature.”
“Well, that’s what I was told. First time I asked anyone out in high school.”
“You poor thing,” I said, grinning at him. “Maybe if you didn’t try and make people think you were immature, they wouldn’t see you that way.”
Brian frowned at me in mock irritation. “You say I try to make people think I’m immature?”
I squinted in thought. “Well, you’re constantly saying things that are supposed to be funny in situations where they’re totally un-called for.”
“Oh, you mean the other night, when you told me to shut up?”
“Exactly.”
“Hum. Well, the next girl I asked out told me I was too short.”
I glanced at his feet. “Well, you are that.”
“And not attractive enough. She said I was cute, but in a little kid sort of way.”
“You are that, too.”
Brian narrowed his eyes at me. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
I stood up. “It’s neither. I’m just telling the truth.”
He stuck his tongue out at me.
“See? You’re so immature. Childishness oozes from your pores.”
“I guess we’re feeling better, then.” Brian scrambled to his feet. “Seriously though, Reaghan, I didn’t know you were capable of joking around.”
His comment surprised me, but when I thought about it I realized it was true. Had been true for the past three years. “I used to be,” I said slowly, and discovered that I didn’t want to talk about it. “So which way do we go to get home?”
Brian heaved an exaggerated sigh, looking up at the sky helplessly. “I don’t believe this. Here she is calling me childish and immature and she’s the who runs away and gets lost because she’s mad. What am I supposed to do?”
I watched him in silent amusement. He turned in a slow circle, arms spread out. “Someone tell me. Please.”
I smacked him in the shoulder. “Get over yourself.”
He turned to me with a hurt expression. “Hum.”
“Hum yourself.”
“Double hum.”
I started walking down the alley we were in. Brian chased after me and snatched my arm. “Not that way, idiot. How long have you lived in this city, anyways?”
“Uh, three years.”
“And you don’t know your way around?”
“Hey, I’m a wanted criminal. I don’t just go walking around.”
“I’ll give you that.”
I pulled my arm out of Brian’s grasp and elbowed him. He shoved me, sending me stumbling sideways. And for the first time in I don’t know how many years, I actually laughed out loud for a simple reason: I was having fun.

It was a slow weekend. Thursday dragged by. Thursday night dragged by. On Friday Paul decided that Savannah and Brian should go back to their respective homes and everyone should be split up. We talked about it for a while, and finally Savannah left with Elizabeth and Stephen. Paul, Daniel, and Matt went to Brian's house, and Grace stayed with me.
I was definitely happy to have the crowd out of my apartment, but I couldn't say that I was thrilled about being left with Grace. All Thursday I had watched her have a crush on Matt. She didn't flirt, didn't make it obvious at all, but I saw it in the way she looked at him and the way she talked to him. She liked him. At least I wouldn't have to watch that until Sunday, which made me feel a little better.
At two a.m on Sunday morning Savannah climbed into my apartment. Grace and I were both awake, both sitting in opposite corners of the room. She was perfectly still. My foot was tapping the desk leg.
Matt’s high school ring was a small bulge in my jeans pocket.
"You ready?" Savannah asked.
It was a twenty-minute walk in the darkness to Brian’s house. When the three of us jogged up the driveway, Brian’s ancient Chevrolet Suburban was sputtering exhaust out of the tailpipe and everyone else was already in the vehicle. We climbed in. Savannah took the passenger seat next to Brian, and Grace and I glanced at each other. The only empty seat was in the back, between Matt and Daniel.
I knew what would happen. After a moment of hesitation, I would plop down on the floor and sandwich myself between Paul’s knees and the back of Brian’s seat. I was about to start the process when Grace pushed past me and did exactly what I was about to do, except that it was her mother’s knees and the back of Savannah’s seat. I blinked at her. She offered a small grin and jerked her head toward the back of the truck.
“Come on, Reags, in,” Brian said, evidently oblivious. I squeezed in, past the middle row of seats and into the back, and seated myself between Daniel and Matt. Daniel looked, if anything, like he was irritated to even be on the earth. I don’t know what Matt looked like because I avoided meeting his eyes, even though our shoulders and hips were touching and I had nowhere to go.
It was a one-and-a-half-hour ride to the airstrip where we were going to meet Holt, the pilot who flew our shipments across the border along with legitimate items like produce, and the first forty-five minutes weren’t too awful. The only sounds were the grating rumble of the Suburban’s engine and the muted tones of Paul’s voice as he filled the Hannas in on last-minute details and reiterated important points. He had a soothing kind of voice, and it was completely dark outside. It was also three a.m. and I was exhausted. So I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me when Brian hit a bump and I suddenly found that I had fallen asleep leaning against Matt’s arm. I glanced up at him quickly without moving my head. He was staring out the window--at what I’m not sure--and not looking down at me, and I decided it would only be awkward if I tried to sit up and ignore him, so I didn’t move. I could feel the muscles in his shoulder tense and relax against my cheek as Brian hit another rut. Evidently he was wide awake, and I could tell he was upset about something. Part of me wondered whether that something was me. Part of me knew that that something was me.
Paul had stopped talking, so the truck was silent. I heard deep, even breathing around me, meaning that I wasn’t the only person who had fallen asleep. My eyes traveled around the dark interior of the vehicle, trying to pick out who was still awake. As far as I could tell, Daniel and his parents were both sleeping. Grace was out of sight below the seat in front of me. Savannah’s head was leaning against the window. Paul was sitting upright. And Brian was driving, so I assumed--I hoped--that he was awake.
There was a cramp in my neck and I readjusted my position without thinking. As soon as I realized what I had done, I glanced up at Matt. He hadn’t moved. I relaxed, but a second later he turned his head to look down at me.
I sat up quickly. The movement caught Paul’s attention and he turned. I met his eyes neutrally, and after a second he returned to his former position. As soon as he was no longer looking at me, my hand went to my jeans pocket. Matt’s ring happened to be in the pocket that was between his hip and mine. It took me a second of squirming to get it out while Matt watched me without expression. When I finally had the thing in my hand, I found his.
He stiffened as we touched. I hesitated for half a second before dropping the ring into his palm and then pulled my hand away as his closed around the warm circle.
Matt remained motionless, looking down at his fist for what seemed to me like a long time. Finally he looked at me. It was too dark to really make out his expression, but I knew what I would see on his face if there was light and I was incredibly thankful for the darkness. We stared at each other in the non-light for five seconds and then I tipped my head back against the top of the seat, closing my eyes. I wasn’t sure what else to do.
Something brushed my mouth. Something warm, simultaneously rough and soft, impossibly gentle, and slightly hesitant. I froze.
For what felt like ages, I wasn’t sure what to do. So I stayed motionless the way I was, arms folded across my chest, head back against the seat, eyes shut, until I felt like it might possibly be safe to move. Finally I opened my eyes. Matt was staring out the window. My eyes unconsciously moved to Paul. He was watching the back of Brian’s seat. Something in his posture, in the set of his back and shoulders, told me he hadn’t been watching the back of Brian’s seat the whole time.
But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because Brian suddenly slammed on the brakes, throwing us all forward. Something inside the truck crunched loudly. I glanced out the window and made out the trees surrounding the airstrip. It was really no more than a long clearing in the woods, one that had been used during the border war. No one used it anymore, so we adopted it.
“We’re here,” Brian announced unnecessarily.
Savannah stepped out of the truck, sighing. “Brian, how long ago did you pass your drivers’ test?”
Brian climbed out, slamming his door shut and opening up the trunk. “Don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
“It must have been,” Savannah answered.
Eventually we were all standing outside the truck in the cold darkness. I glanced around the airstrip, which was still empty. “Where’s Holt?” I asked no one specifically.
Paul glanced around. “He should be here any minute.”
“So what, we just wait?” Daniel asked.
“Yep,” Brian said, coming around the side of the truck. “Shouldn’t be longer than fifteen minutes.”
As he spoke, the plane came screaming over the airstrip. “See?” Brian asked. “How about that?”
“How long have you known this pilot guy?” Matt asked.
“He’s actually Savannah’s godfather,” I answered. “So she’s known him for forever.”
“Come on, guys,” Brian called as the small plane landed. “Get your stuff and you’re outta here!”
As Holt climbed out of the cockpit, Paul jogged over. I followed him for no reason--it was sort of an unspoken thing with the four of us that we didn’t conduct business one-on-one if we could help it. The pilot turned around as we approached. And it wasn’t Holt.
Paul stopped abruptly beside me, catching my arm. My skin tingled at his touch. His touch was light, but I could feel the tension spiking through each of his fingers as they circled my forearm. Holt was tall and lean, with iron-covered hair and a carriage that made his limbs look like they swung from loose hinges. His eyes twinkled and his face was covered in wrinkles. This person was a bit shorter, definitely more muscular, and dark-haired. He moved with much more control than Holt did.
Paul moved around me so I was standing behind his right shoulder as the man approached. Every muscle in his neck and shoulders was tense.
The stranger smiled. “Paul, right?”
“Who are you?” Paul asked.
“Holt didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
The man tipped his head to the left. “His mom had a stroke. He wanted to be with her, so he asked me to take over for him this once.” His dark eyes searched Paul’s face, then mine. “It’s okay. I can be trusted. Holt filled me in on the basics and I promise, I’m safe.”
Paul seemed at a loss for words. I stared at the stranger. “What’s your name?”
“Dave Rubbey.”
“Holt never mentioned you.”
Rubbey shrugged.
“No offense, Mr. Rubbey,” I said, “but we’ve never seen you before, much less heard of you. We weren’t expecting this at all, in fact. So we’d appreciate if you would give us a second, okay? Please wait by the plane.” I put my hand on Paul’s shoulder, turned him around, and walked with him back to where the others were standing.
When we reached them, Savannah shot out an arm and pulled me closer. “That’s not Jim.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“Who is it?” Brian demanded.
Paul told them what the stranger had told us.
“Jim’s mom is still living,” Savannah said. “He said she wasn’t doing so well last time we talked.”
Brian’s eyes flicked from from my face to Paul’s. “So what do we do?”
Paul rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know.” We were silent for a few moments before he repeated, “I don’t know, guys. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not like we can say, ‘Sorry, we changed our minds, no shipment today,’” I said. “That’s definitely more than suspicious.”
“Plus it’s sort of obvious what’s going on,” Savannah pointed out. “I mean, we don’t have anything worth shipping except for...people.”
“We could...” Brian began. The three of us looked at him. “Sorry, I don’t have anything.”
I sighed.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Paul said. “We still make the shipment.”
He paused, allowing that to sink in as Savannah, Brian, and I watched him.
“And I’ll go too.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” Brian said.
“Are you crazy?” Savannah asked.
Paul held up a hand. “I’ll fly back with this Rubbey guy after the Hannas and Matt are safe on the other side and see you guys in a few days. Think about it. It’ll be easier for you because you can all go to your places without worrying about where I’ll stay, I’ll be able to monitor Rubbey, and we’ll be able to know for sure that they’ve made it to the other side safely.”
“I’ll go,” Brian said. “You can stay at my place.”
“No,” Savannah said. We all looked at her. “This is the only thing to do.”
Paul was nodding. “It’s going to be fine, guys. I’ll see you in a few days.”
“You’d better,” I said.
Paul looked at me, met my eyes and held them. “I will.”
“Okay,” Savannah said. “Let’s do this thing.”

Once we’d decided what to do, we did it. Quickly, quietly, and efficiently. Brian told Rubbey he had two extra passengers, Matt and Paul. I helped unload the Hannas’ stuff from the back of Brian’s truck and lug it over to the plane, where Matt stowed away. Savannah and Paul were at the front of the truck, talking in voices too low for me to hear.
Dave Rubbey ended his conversation with Brian and sauntered over to where Matt and I were under the plane. “So which one of you is coming?”
“I am,” Matt said, lifting his hand briefly.
Rubbey’s eyes flicked to me. “You’re one of the inside group?”
An uncomfortable feeling twisted my stomach. “Yeah.”
“And the guy I just talked to, and those two over there.” He gestured to Paul and Savannah.
“Yup.” I stepped forward, away from the plane and deciding to turn the questions into something logistical. “All four of them are going with you.” I motioned toward the Hannas. “Plus him--” jerking my head toward Paul-- “and this guy. Is six too much?”
Rubbey shook his head. “I was planning on four, but I can fit two more in. Not a problem.”
“Sweet,” I said, moving away to end the conversation. “If you’re ready to go, I’ll go get Paul.”
“Sure,” Rubbey replied. “The sooner we leave, the better.”
I left Matt’s side and jogged across the grass to the truck. Paul and Savannah both turned to me wordlessly. Each of them looked a little agitated. I glanced uncertainly from one to the other before deciding that I was going to have to speak first.
“Uh, they’re ready to leave.”
They both seemed to snap back to life. “Great,” Paul said, stepping away from Savannah. “Come on, Nan.”
Savannah’s eyes were unreadable as she turned to follow him. Paul chose not to address whatever she was upset about, instead wrapping an arm around my shoulder. “So, Reaghan, a couple things.”
I forced myself not to shrug away his arm, a little uncomfortable under his touch. “Yeah.”
“I don’t want you guys anywhere near my place, especially not you. Okay? Stay away from the office site, stay away from the guard station. Keep a discreet cover. When I get back we’ll figure out what to do. For now, lay low.”
“Okay.”
“Savannah’s going to go check on Holt and his mom,” Paul continued. “She’ll swing by and let you know what’s going on. I shouldn’t be gone for more than three days.”
“Okay,” I said again. Paul gave my shoulder a slight squeeze.
“Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Right.”
Just before we were in earshot of the people standing around the plane, I stopped. Paul’s arm slipped from my shoulders involuntarily as he turned to face me. “What?”
“Be nice to Matt on the way, okay? He wasn’t trying to...” I let my voice trail off, realizing I didn’t know what I was going to say.
Paul studied me for a moment. “Don’t worry, Reaghan.”
“I’m not worried,” I said, meeting his eyes. “I trust you.”
I think he realized what a step it was for me to actually say those three words out loud. He didn’t know everything about me, not by far, but he knew how thick my walls were. He knew how long it had taken me to become barely friendly with him.
“Thanks, Reaghan.”
We stood still for a second longer before I broke the eye contact. “Just be careful.”
“I will.”
The rest of it whizzed by in a blur. A few things stood out--stupid things, like Elizabeth’s honey-ish hair in the window of the plane and Paul’s hand cradling the side of my jaw for less than a second and Matt’s hand brushing mine and Rubbey’s black hair against the white of the plane making him look like some science fiction villain. Then the plane was gone and Savannah, Brian, and I were climbing in the truck again. Savannah claimed the front seat. Brian got behind the wheel. I slid into the second row of seats and stretched out across the bench, curling toward the back of the seat back. My eyes shut automatically and I drifted in and out until someone woke me up completely by saying my name.
I sat up slowly, pulling my brain out of its sleepy cocoon. “Yeah.”
Brian squinted at me in the rearview mirror. “You want me to drop you at your place, or do you want to walk from mine?”
“I’ll walk,” I said. “It’s just easier.”
“Sure.” He spun the wheel and pulled into Savannah’s driveway.
Savannah hesitated in the passenger seat before opening the door. “I’ll let you guys know as soon as I see Jim, okay?”
“Okay,” Brian answered. “See you.”
“See you.”
We watched her trudge in through the front door. “She looks exhausted,” Brian said.
“I’m exhausted,” I replied.
The truck backed out of the driveway. “I can walk you home.”
I shook my head. “Nah, I’m good. But thanks.”
We drove in silence for a few minutes before Brian spoke again. “It’s going to be fine, Reags.”
“Yeah?”
“Paul knows what he’s doing.”
I leaned forward in sudden agitation. “Does he though, Brian? Does he really know any more than we do? Because then why is Savannah so freaked out? She knows him better than either of us do.”
“Reaghan--”
“You want to know something, Brain? I’m scared. Terrified, actually.” I barely had time to wonder why in the world I was saying all this before I rushed on. “What happens when it turns out that Rubbey isn’t legit? What happens if he turns them all in? What do we do then, break all six of them out? We probably won’t even be able to find them.”
Brian was silent as he stopped the truck in his driveway. “See you later,” I said, and climbed out.
The sun was up as I climbed through my apartment window. I stretched out across the cot and buried my face in my pillow. There was a pit in my chest, a new one that housed a vaguely uneasy feeling I couldn’t shake. I didn’t know whether it had to do with Matt, with Paul, or with Rubbey--unless it had to do with all three.
But there was nothing I could do until Savannah came back with her news about Holt, which didn’t happen until the next afternoon. I’d been hanging out in my apartment all day, playing Sudoku on my laptop for lack of anything else to do, which said a lot because I typically wouldn’t play Sudoku if my life depended on it. I had finished an intermediate puzzle after three hours and was just about to start another one when I heard the fire escape rattle against the side of the building below. I was more than usually jumpy because of everything that happened the previous morning, so I immediately pushed my laptop off my legs, stood up, and picked up the loose table leg I always had beside me when I was home. I knew it had to be Savannah or Brian, but I moved to the wall with the window anyways so that I wouldn’t be immediately visible when whoever it was climbed through. The person was climbing rapidly, more rapidly than I ever climbed.
A second later Savannah burst into the room. “Reaghan.”
I tossed the table leg onto my cot. “What’s up?”
Savannah grabbed my arm, dragging me to the window. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” I wrenched my arm free. “Savannah, what’s going on?”
“We’re going to find Brian.”
“Wait.” I snatched at her shoulder and turned her around to face me. “Nan, chill. Tell me what’s going on first.” I was feeling anything but chill myself, but I wasn’t about to go sprinting across the city until I knew why.
Savannah relaxed under my grasp, barely. “I went to see Jim yesterday. He wasn’t in his house, so I went to see his mom. She’s at her nursing home, absolutely fine, didn’t know where he was at all. I poked around a little and found out that they’d picked him up two nights ago. That would be the night before we saw Rubbey.”
My hand fell from her shoulder. “Holt is in jail.”
“Yes.”
I stared at Savannah, who was staring back at me. “Reaghan, we have to find out exactly where he is.”
“So we can break him out?”
“Exactly.”
“Savannah, it’s not that simple.”
I had never seen Savannah this distressed before. “It is that simple, Reaghan! He’s obviously the reason they know about us at all. If we can get him out of there before he tells them anything else, things could be okay after a while. And Jim’s not just the kind of person who gives up information like that. I don’t even want to think about what they might have done to get our names out of him.”
“Listen, Nan.” My mind was whirling in a million different directions at once, my words almost tripping over themselves as they passed my tongue. She needed to think past her godfather. “Rubbey must be taking Paul and everyone else to Messing’s people. I don’t think there’s any way we can help them, but if we want even a chance at getting them back, we have to stay as low as we can until it’s time. If we go after Holt now, they’ll automatically that it was us.”
She stared at me. “So you’re saying it’s one or the other.”
I scuffed my toe against the floor. “Well, yeah.”
We stood in silence for two minutes before I spoke again. “Let’s go get Brian.”

“I had a feeling,” Brian said.
“We all did,” I answered.
Savannah was silent. We were all silent.
“So I guess...we have to choose.” Brian said finally, rubbing his chin with his palm. “And I guess...the choice is...obvious.”
I said nothing, watching Savannah. Her back was to me, but her neck and shoulders were rigid. Brian and I glanced at each other and then back at her, waiting for her to agree.
“Yeah,” she said finally, her voice rough. “Yeah, that’s what Jim would say.”
“Okay,” I said. “So now we have to, uh, find out where they are, I guess.” I knew I wasn’t being very sensitive, but I didn’t know how else to handle the situation. We had to keep moving. And because we had to, we did. How many things had I done simply because I had to?
“Something like that,” Brian said, and in an instant we had shrugged off our mood and were strictly business.
“I can sneak into the guard building and pick up some lists or whatever,” I said, “but I don’t know where to look first. I know they don’t keep records for other offices here, but I can go to a bigger one. It’s only twenty miles away.”
“Let me try hacking in first,” Brian replied. “All I need you to do is snag me a laptop from the office or something. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t have a tracking device in it.”
“I can get it out. Just bring it to our old office first and I’ll take care of that there. Then we can bring it to my place and I’ll break in.”
“Okay.”
“Savannah, you can go back to Holt’s mom and see if she’s heard anything yet. Don’t tell her if she hasn’t.”
Savannah glanced at Brian dubiously. “Should we go see him at all?”
Brian chewed on his bottom lip. “I don’t know, Nan.”
“I want to,” she admitted. “I really want to see him one more time. He’s like my dad. Or an uncle.”
“You and I will go,” I said. “We’ll sneak in and tell him what’s going on.” Brian looked at me uncertainly and I shushed him with my eyes.
“Thanks,” Savannah said.
“Yup.”
“So when are we pulling all this off?” She clearly wanted to change the subject now.
“ASAP,” I said quickly. “I can grab the laptop tonight.”
“Great,” Brian said. “I’ll meet you at the office at two a.m.”
“Sweet. Just any laptop, right?”
“Yeah, just grab the first one you see.”
“Nan, tomorrow we’ll go down to see Holt’s mom and tomorrow night we’ll sneak in and see him.”
“Thanks.”
After a minute, Brian asked, “How much of a chance do you think we really have at getting them all out?”
Neither Savannah nor I spoke. We all knew the answer.
“Right. I hate to say this, guys, but we need to prioritize when we find them. Who to go in for first.”
I’d known this too, but I hadn’t actually put it into words. I’d been hoping we could avoid it, even though I knew we couldn’t.
“Paul and Grace,” Savannah said immediately.
“Yeah,” Brian agreed.
I looked from one to the other of them. “Paul and Grace.”
“Obviously Paul,” Savannah said patiently. “And Grace because she’s the youngest and has the most potential.”
“Right.”
“Then Matt and Daniel,” Brian continued. “And then Elizabeth and Stephen.”
“It sounds so easy when you put it like that,” I said. “Like all we have to do is waltz in there and unlock the door and waltz back out in a procession.”
“I wish,” Brian said.
Neither Savannah nor I were in the mood to go back to our respective dwelling places, so we stayed with Brian as the sky darkened and the street lights began to go out. At midnight everything was completely black. We had long since turned out the lights in the house when I snuck out and headed for the guard office at twelve-thirty. The streets were deserted, and I had no problem getting to the building. I’d expected the security to be a little higher after Paul and I had slipped out in the middle of the night; however, nothing seemed to have changed. I followed the procedure I always had--going around the side of the building to the window that let me into the actual office room where all the paperwork was done. The room was empty; the window was locked. I fished my mini screwdriver out of my pocket and popped the latch with no problem. As always, I waited a few moments to make sure no one was immediately outside the door listening for someone popping the window latch. When no one burst through the door, I slipped in. There was a laptop sitting on the desk and I grabbed it, climbed back out the window, closed it, and walked away. It was the easiest snag I’d ever pulled off.
Brian was waiting at the old office site among the ashes that still were blowing vaguely in the breeze. I handed him the laptop and my screwdriver and waited while he opened the bottom of the laptop.
“Nothing here,” he reported.
“Awesome.”
We took the laptop back to his house. Savannah was curled up in an overstuffed chair, sleeping, so I draped myself over the couch. Brian was clicking away at the laptop in the other room. At some point I did fall asleep, but it wasn’t a restful sleep. I drifted in and out, losing consciousness for five minutes at a time. At around three a.m. I got up to use the bathroom.
Standing in front of the sink, I glanced up at myself in the mirror. I was a disaster. My hair was limp, tangled, little pieces fraying and flying away from my forehead. I had a fresh sprinkling of stress zits on my chin. My eyes were a dull shade of grayish-blue and the bags underneath them were so pronounced they looked like enormous purple bruises. I had a sullen, tired-of-life-and-everything-in-general expression on my face. Nothing worth coming back for, and nothing worth running into a trap for. I wasn’t anyone attractive on the outside or the inside.
So why did I have two people competing for me? Why not Savannah, who always had it all together, or Grace, who was cute and bright and cooperative?
I could come up with no reason except that I was probably the one who needed someone watching out for me the most. In their minds, at least. Grace was sweet and would do whatever you told her to do; Savannah was practical and cautious. I was unpredictable, wild, and subject to fits of bitterness that would leave me sulking for days. Was that really it? They wanted to keep an eye on me? It had to be more than that. They felt sorry for me, pitied me. I hated being pitied. Couldn’t stand the thought of someone feeling sorry for me.
I would have taken this train of thought much further and probably ended up where I had started--detesting both Matt and Paul--except that Brian called from the living room, bringing me out of the bathroom and my meditational shell and Savannah out of sleep. We both dashed into dining room, where Brian had been working, and found him bending over the laptop. “I found them, guys.”
“Where?” Savannah and I leaned over him.
“They’re in the big pit.”
The big pit was the place I’d dreamed about, the place where they put all the worst criminals, the murderers, the terrorists. The place where they held executions.
“Wonderful,” I said.
“I don’t...I don’t...” Savannah allowed her voice to trail off as she stared at the screen with a blank expression.
“Same here,” Brian said.
I felt like I needed to pick up the threads of our frayed selves and put them back together quickly. “Okay. Scratch seeing Holt tomorrow night, Savannah, we’re going to go do that right now. Brian, you can drive us there. As soon as we’re done, we need to get to the pit. They don’t keep people there very long.” And we all knew what happened to people who were kept in the pit.
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Yes. Let’s go.”
We left the laptop sitting on the dining room table and in three seconds we were in the truck, driving.

"So what exactly did you find?" I asked after we'd been on the road for half an hour.
"No specifics," Brian said, "but last night there was a group of six brought in, and I doubt there are many other people it could be, you know?"
"It's them," I said.
"It has to be," Savannah added. "Who else could it be?"
"Exactly," Brian answered. "It's all good."
I think we were just trying to reassure ourselves, because we knew there were obvious major holes in our plans. There was no way to fill the holes, though, so we had to make the best of what we had, cheer ourselves up somehow. If that was possible. But our trip to Holt's prison was mostly silent. Brian and I knew how upset Savannah was, and we didn't want to accidentally make things worse in trying to make them better.
The two-hour drive dragged by. My brain was whizzing with everything that had happened in the past few days, wondering how everything in the next few days would work out. I felt sick to my stomach about Holt. They would kill him, and there was nothing we could do about it without leaving the other six to be killed instead. I knew that there was only one thing we could do, one option for us, and that Holt would tell us to do exactly what we were doing. That didn’t make it any easier. I found myself wanting the ground to open up and swallow me--I couldn’t imagine that it was very comfortable being swallowed by the ground, but it was bound to be better than what was happening to me now.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke up with a jerk when Brian stopped the truck. The area outside the windows was empty except for the road and the sidewalk and a few buildings. “Where is this?”
“Few blocks away from the guard building,” Brian said. “You going with Nan while I wait here?”
“Sure.” I stretched my legs and climbed out of the truck as Savannah followed. “See you back here in a few, Brian. If we’re not back in an hour, keep going, okay?”
Brian blinked at me. “Um...”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
I started down the sidewalk to the guard building with Savannah. It turned out to be a big brick thing, pretty much exactly like the one back home. She followed me around the rear of the building, where we stopped by the back door.
“So,” I began quietly, “no need for disguise if we’re just going to run in, run out, right?”
Savannah made a face. “Yeah, I don’t really feel like knocking anyone out and stealing their outfit, you know?”
I swatted her shoulder. “Great.”
“So...”
“So here goes.” I picked the door lock and we slipped inside.
The layout of all Messing’s guard buildings was pretty similar. It was no difficulty finding our way down the hall and through the corridors that bypassed the front desk and the offices. We came around through the maintenance area, which was empty because it was the middle of the night, and found ourselves in the back of the holding wing.
We found him eventually, in the middle of the holding wing. It wasn’t hard to pick the lock of his cell, either, because the guards weren’t expecting anyone to get past the door to the holding wing without official clearance. When we opened the door, he was sleeping. Savannah stepped forward quickly to wake him, but I pulled her back by her shoulder and waved my finger in a circle, tapping my ear and then placing my finger on my lips.
Listening.
She nodded slowly.
I slipped a memo pad out of my back pocket with a pencil and handed them to her. She flashed me a glance of gratitude. I nodded and then stepped inside, closing the door behind us. Savannah woke Holt with a hand on his shoulder; I was surprised at how quickly and silently he came to consciousness and sat up. He didn’t look startled to see us.
Savannah began scribbling on the paper while he looked over her shoulder. I knew what she was writing by watching his face--she was telling him about everything that had happened. He had already guessed that our cover was blown because here he was, in jail. I watched anger flash across his face before resignation took its place. Like us, he had known all along that this would happen someday. But I think it sunk in more quickly for him than it had for us. For me, anyway. I still felt like I was walking through a bad dream, doing things automatically and mechanically because I knew it was what I was supposed to do, expected to do, but not believing it was really happening. Holt, on the other hand, looked very much awake, alive, and alert.
At some point he took the memo pad from her and began writing himself. They went back and forth for a while before the tears formed in her eyes and I had to look away, my own eyes burning. I could never stand to watch anyone cry--I hated being around crying people. And seeing Savannah in tears was too uncomfortable. A week ago, I would never have been able to picture her as anything but fearless.
After half an hour Holt stood up, running a hand through his hair. Savannah stood up too, the tears running freely down her face. He wrapped her in a hug and she clung to him so hard that I thought she wasn’t planning on letting go, but finally she did. She handed me my notebook as she brushed past me through the door, moving quickly, like she knew that if she stopped she wouldn’t be able to go on.
I looked at Holt. He nodded at me, somehow managing to convey friendship, determination, and reassurance through a simple motion. So I nodded back and followed Savannah through the dimly-lit hallways, out the door, and down the street to where we’d left Brian. He had the sense not to speak to Savannah, even when she took the backseat instead of claiming her usual spot in the front. I climbed into the passenger seat and glanced down at the notebook I held as Brian started the truck back up again.
Savannah had started right in. A stranger came to the airfield the other day and picked up the cargo. He said he was a friend of yours and you sent him in your place because your mom was in the hospital from a stroke or something. Paul was nervous about sending them with someone we didn’t know, so he went with them. I went to check on you the other day and figured it all out. Brian just found a delivery of six to the pit. We’re on our way there to try and get them out.
Holt had broken in here. Who was the pilot?
Told us his name was Dave Rubbey. He was kind of short and lean, black hair.
Don’t know him.
How did you end up here?
They picked me up two days ago. Didn’t tell me why, but I guessed. I’m sorry Nan.
Jim, I don’t know what to do.
Go to the pit and get them out.
They’ll kill you.
There was a wet stain on the paper here.
I closed the notebook suddenly, realizing that I was intruding on a conversation that I might not have been meant to overhear. Brian glanced at me questioning lay, startled by my quick movement. I just shook my head at him, leaning back against the seat. Even with my eyes closed and the world blacked out, I couldn’t help listening to Savannah’s barely-audible hiccups in the back seat. She had just willingly let go of the person who had raised her since she was five, and as much as I wanted to say that I understood, I’d lost a parent too, it didn’t work the same way. I’d come home and found that my mom had been ripped from my arms whether I liked it or not. There was nothing I could do about it, no choice I could make, no way to say good-bye. Nothing. She was there and the next second she wasn’t.
I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Savannah to voluntarily choose that pain.
I didn’t notice the exact moment when her sobs faded away, but at some point I realized that the truck was quiet. We had about half an hour left of the trip, according to the dashboard clock--which miraculously was still working even though the truck itself must have been loaded into the lowest levels of Noah’s Ark--and I realized that we had no plan. None to speak of, anyways. I didn’t want to break the silence, but I had to, so I did.
“Guys?”
Brian was the only one who answered. “Yeah.”
“What exactly are we planning on doing when we get there?”
Savannah shifted behind us, but again Brian spoke. “Um, good question.”
“It might be smart to go in with some sort of an idea of what we’re doing, you know? I mean, I was just thinking...” I allowed my voice to trail off.
“Do we even know where in the building they are?” Savannah asked.
“I have a pretty good idea,” Brian answered. “Lowest level, block D. But I didn’t get specific cell numbers.”
“That’s good enough,” I said. “Shouldn’t be too difficult...depending on how big block D is.”
“How big is it?” Savannah asked.
“I have no clue,” Brian answered. “But there weren’t a lot of people there. So it’s either very small or max security. Or both.”
“Great,” I muttered.
“Yup.” Brian blew out a long breath. “So...who’s going in?”
“You and Reaghan,” Savannah said immediately. I glanced at Brian and met his eyes across the front of the truck. Both of us agreed silently; if Savannah wanted to stay, she stayed.
“So,” I said after a minute, “I’m assuming curfew doesn’t apply here. Like it’ll be all lit up, probably. Which means it’s most likely a good idea to go in through the...back? Side? Top? Walking in through the front door isn’t an option because A) we’re wanted criminals now, and B) there’s no guarantee visitors are allowed. In fact, I’d say it’s a good bet that visitors aren’t allowed. This is the pit we’re talking.”
“Let’s try the back first,” Brian said. “Solid classic option.”
I couldn’t help snorting in morbid amusement. “Sure.”
“Savannah, we’ll leave the truck with you,” Brian continued. “I doubt we’ll all be coming out at once, so you’ll probably get a trickle every five minutes or so if everything goes as planned. If anything happens to make you think we’re in trouble, take off. Don’t even think about it. Take whoever you have and get away, okay?”
“Go where?”
“Uh...” Brian tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.
“The library,” I said. “For now. Until someone has a better idea.”
“Sure.”
“I can’t believe we’re just now coming up with a plan,” Brian said.
“Hey,” I inserted, “at least we have one.”
“Sort of,” he continued. How about you and me?”
“Uh, we’ll make it up as we go along.”
“You’re so encouraging.”
“Shut up,” Savannah said. “Let’s stop here.”
As Brian pulled the truck to a stop, we could see the sky lit up a few blocks away. We were right about no curfew in the pit.
“Okay,” Brian said. “Nan, stay here and wait. You ready, Reags?”
“Yup.” I opened my door. “See you, Nan.”
Savannah slid up into the front, taking the driver’s seat as Brian vacated it. “See you in a few.”
I followed Brian down the sidewalk. “Ever been here before?”
“Nope,” he said. “I’ve seen it on TV. That’s it.”
We moved in silence for a moment before he spoke. “What about you? Got a secret life or anything, Reaghan?”
“Hah,” I answered. “No.” But of course my mind flashed back to the dream I’d had in our old guard building, the only time I’d been remotely close to being at the pit, and what had happened there.
“Just try really hard to get everyone out safely, okay?”
Brian flashed me a funny look. “I thought that was the plan.”
“Oh. Right.” I grinned at him, but even he could tell that the grin was forced.
“You okay?”
“None of us are okay, Brian.
“Forgot about that.” Brian took my arm and pulled me into the shadow of the brick wall surrounding the outdoor prisoners’ recreation area in the back of the pit, and my only thought was as cliche as thoughts get, which disgusted me. And then I felt disgusted at myself for being disgusted at something as trivial as a cliche thought. But all I could think was, Here goes absolutely nothing.

It was surprisingly easy getting inside the pit, but as it turned out, everything went wrong from the beginning.
The prisoners' yard was empty, obviously, because it was the middle of the night. It wasn't lit—I guess they felt they had no reason to light it up, since no one would be there. So I boosted Brian to the top of the wall, he hauled me up after him, and we jumped down into the yard. Once on the ground, we glanced at each other with something like relief; we'd penetrated the first layer. It wasn't hard to get across the yard to the side of the building, and once we were there it wasn't hard finding the door we needed, since they were all marked up. We found the door that led to Blocks D and E quickly.
In the darkness, I saw Brian glance at me. "There's probably someone right inside of there," he said.
"If we take them out quick enough we have a free pass in a few levels," I answered.
"True."
We both hesitated. "Okay," he continued finally. "On three."
As he counted slowly, I remembered watching Iron Man 2 with Matt back when in high school, admiring Scarlett Johansen's mad ninja skills. Yup, and take a trip to the moon while you're at it, Reaghan, I thought. What would I not give to have taken a martial art. And Brian opened the door, which was unlocked. I guess they hadn't counted on anyone trying to get in from the outside.
We surprised two guards who stood just inside the door. Brian immediately subdued one of them with a fist to the jawbone that I hadn't knew he had in them. The guard I found myself facing was tall and skinny and looked extremely shocked. I didn't trust myself to punch him without extensive damage to my own knuckles, so I slapped him in the face instead. While he tried to regain his balance, I slammed him against the wall. Brian took over from there and in three seconds flat, he and I were standing over the guards' motionless bodies.
"'Kay," Brian said. "Sweet. Hang on a sec." He bent over one of the guards and stripped off the guy's shirt, buttoning it over his own. "Turn around, Reags."
I gaped at him.
"I can't walk around in a guard shirt and jeans, idiot," he said. "Turn around." Finally comprehending, I whirled to face the wall. I heard him shuffling around behind me.
"What about me?"
"You're my prisoner," he said. "We're going to Block D."
"Ah, the classic ruse," I answered.
"Exactly." His hands closed around my wrists. "Let's move, kiddo." And he shoved me forward down the hall.
Surprisingly, our ruse worked, even though I was expecting to be apprehended by the first person we met. However, the first person we met was another guard pushing a legitimate prisoner ahead of him in exactly the same way Brian was pushing me. He nodded to Brian, who nodded back, and we went our separate ways.
For some reason I'd expected everything to be white. I was wrong; it was gray, like the cell Paul and I shared back at the old guard building. Everything was a different shade of gray—the doors were dark, the walls were light, the floors and ceilings were somewhere in between. The only things that weren't gray were the signs posted on the walls to indicate which direction everything was in. They were black with white lettering. We followed the signs through Block E to an elevator, which took us down a floor to Block D. There were any number of things I wanted to say to Brian as we moved through the pit, from snarky comments to serious worries. But whoever built the place had no issues about placing security cameras and listening devices out in the open for everyone to see; there was a camera on every corner, mics throughout the halls, and even in the elevator they were clearly visible from the corners by the ceiling. So I couldn't communicate with Brian at all, but I could feel the tension in his fingers as he gripped my left arm and I knew he was as nervous as I was.
Maybe it was the fact that I was so nervous that prompted me to pay attention to every detail in that trip through the pit: the way my sneakers made barely any noise on the dark tiles, the way Brian's fingers dug into my bicep, the rare scratches on the perfect gray walls, the eerie silence that made you wonder whether you were the only ones in the entire building or whether there was a squad of guards waiting for you to turn around the next corner so that they could jump you and take you down to wherever they stored intruders.
Brian leaned forward slightly as we boarded the elevator, pretending to stumble over the slight lip between the floor of the hallway and the floor of the elevator. He took the opportunity to whisper into my hair, "So far so good, Reags." I took a deep breath through my nostrils in response as he punched the button to bring us down to Block D. The elevator descended silently, without the irritating music and faint whir I had been used to in old elevators. The ping that announced we had reached our floor made us both jump a little. We stepped off as the doors opened and stumbled into complete chaos.
Afterwards, I realized that I had been half-expecting something to go wrong as soon as the doors opened. Everything up till then had been so perfect, so easy, that something was bound to go wrong. Murphy's Law, Matt would have said. He would have laughed while he said it, though, and what we had stepped into was nothing to laugh about.
It wasn't immediately evident that there was trouble. We actually made it off the elevator and a few steps down the hall before the guard we'd passed upstairs came tearing around the corner, followed by a girl and two other guys. One of them was the prisoner he had had with him earlier. He yelled something at us as he whipped by, something about the uniforms being bugged. I glanced at Brian and then down at his guard shirt. He was already peeling off the badge on the front pocket. I watched his face change as he looked at the back of the badge. I grabbed it from him and glanced at it myself, seeing the small black device attached to it.
"Sorry, Reaghan," he said, and then he snatched my hand and yanked me down the hall in the direction the non-guard had come from. We sprinted around the corner into the middle of Block D and into the middle of complete and utter disorder, a mass of bodies mostly in gray prison suits, although there was a steadily-increasing number of bodies in dark blue guard uniforms. Brian swore and I slapped him without thinking. He shot a dirty look at me and dragged me into the crowd. I barely had time to wonder what in the world he was thinking before I was scanning the frenzied faces around me, searching for any sign of Matt or Paul or the Hannas or even Rubbey. Brian shouted something in my ear; it was a few seconds before my brain processed what he had said.
"Hurry up and find them so we can get out of here!"
It didn't help that I was shorter than nine-tenths of the people and that everyone was shouting. The only thing I could think of that might have happened was that the fake guard had come down to rescue someone and had somehow and for some reason managed to let all the other prisoners out of their cells before anyone had shown up to stop him. I had no time to think Good for him, though, because three gunshots echoed rapidly throughout the area and froze everyone.
Someone shoved me to the ground. I only realized it was Brian because he landed on top of me a second later, hiding my civilian clothes. "Don't move," he hissed into my ear. His heavy breaths coated the side of my face in warm air and I felt his chest heaving against my back. All around me, people were falling to the ground. There were more gunshots. I squeezed my eyes shut, sure that everyone could hear my heart thundering against my ribcage. I realized my hands were shaking and balled them into fists.
Now I could hear people moving around me, guards rushing into the room and barking orders at each other. Then I heard bodies being dragged around and I opened my eyes a slit to see uniformed people dragging people up and shoving them through doorways, into cells I assumed, while other uniformed people kept their guns trained on the floor to make sure everyone stayed put. After a second my brain began racing at triple the speed it was used to, trying to come up with any semblance of an idea as to how we were going to get out of this mess. But it all stopped when I realized that the shoulder of my jacket was wet and looked down to see something red and sticky dripping through the brown fabric to the gray floor.
My first thought was, How in the world did I not feel that? My second thought was to realize that it wasn't my blood, because I knew that as soon as I noticed a wound I would start feeling pain radiating from wherever it was. Which brought me to my third thought. Brian.
He must have felt my level of tension change beneath him, because he whispered, "It's okay. Not serious. I'm okay." That didn't calm me at all, because I knew he wouldn't tell me if it was serious. But there was nothing I could do but lay there and breathe and panic. My thoughts began whirling again, but they made absolutely no sense. There was no way I was going to get out of this. No way. We were going to die, and so were Paul and Matt and Grace and Daniel and Elizabeth and Stephen, and so was Savannah, and so was Holt, and nothing would be left of us except for what we'd taken from Paul's house and the office, which was all in my apartment, and no one would ever find that because no one even occupied that building, and I thought, At least we accomplished something by helping all those people, and then I felt Brian being hauled up off my back and I automatically rolled over, which probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but it turned out not to really matter. I stared up into the face of the fake guard who had started it all in the first place.
The girl who had raced past us with him earlier reached down and grasped my arm, pulling me to my feet. She glared at me with caramel-colored eyes before turning to the mystery guard. "She's wounded too."
The stranger nodded and called across the room. "These two need medical attention, sir. I'll take them up to the hospital."
He received an answer in the affirmative and dragged Brian away, but not before I'd gotten a look at Brian's bullet wound and discovered that it really wasn't serious, just a flesh wound directly below his right collarbone. I might have collapsed in relief except that I was being dragged after Brian. We made the elevator and rode up in silence. Walked down the halls in silence. Reached the door to the prisoners' yard in silence. I noticed that the two guards Brian and I had knocked out earlier were gone.
It wasn't until the strange guy was about to open the door that he spoke. "Once we get out there you're going to have to sprint as fast as you can. Don't stop even after you're over the wall. Got it?"
I was still in shock, but Brian nodded. "Got it."
"Good." And he disappeared with the girl in tow.
Brian's fingers closed around my wrist. "Like coming in. You boost me up and I'll pull you over. Okay?"
When I didn't respond, he shook my shoulder. "Okay?"
"Okay."
"Ready?"
"Yeah." No, but now's as good a time as any.
"Here goes." He threw the door open and dashed out.
The first thing I noticed was that the entire yard was illuminated with a harsh white glow from floodlights far above us. The second thing I noticed was that no one was shooting at us. I guess I'd expected to be pelted with machine gun fire or something, but none of that happened. The third thing I noticed was that there were people chasing us, and I forced my legs to pump faster, faster than that, faster than I thought they could. I imagined myself running so fast that my legs weren't even visible. We reached the wall in five seconds flat, and I know that because I was counting. It felt like five days.
Brian pushed me down to my knees. Somehow I cupped my hand for him to step in and then stood up, making him tall enough to scramble over the top. He dropped his hand down and I grasped it. Then we were on the other side, sprinting again, down the street and around the corner. I would have sprinted right past the truck and on for another ten blocks if Brian hadn't reached out and snatched at my shirt, stopping me. He opened the door and stuffed me in, climbing in after me and yelling, "Go!" to Savannah. I was forever amazed that she didn't question him. She only dropped her foot on the gas and sent the truck lurching down the street.
It was only after ten minutes of gasping and trying to get my brain to catch up to my body that I asked, "What was that?"

Brian didn’t answer immediately and I glanced over at him to discover that he had taken off the guard shirt, balled it up, and was now pressing it against his left shoulder with his right hand.
“Brian, I’m so sorry! I completely forgot.” I immediately scooted across the seat and bent down to scrutinize his wound as well as I could in the darkness.
Savannah slammed on the brakes, throwing us both forward and causing Brian to hiss in pain. “What? What happened?”
Brian used his legs to push himself back onto the seat. “Nothing, Nan. Settle down.”
She twisted around. “Oh no. Brian, tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m okay!” He raised his eyebrows defensively.
“He’s okay. It’s not serious,” I said. “Really. Just a flesh wound.”
Savannah’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “All right.”
There was a moment of quietness before she spoke again. “So...where are the others?”
It amazed me that she could say it with such calm--and it amazed me more that such a simple phrase carried such meaning behind it, such emotion and weight.
Brian heaved a sigh and took another deep breath before he spoke. “They’re not there.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “There were so many people down there, it was crazy. There was no way to know.”
“It was a different group of six,” he insisted. “The guy who got us out, he was going in for them.”
“What?”
“He told me when we were on our way back up. Not sure how he knew, but as he was pulling me down toward the elevator he said something like ‘If you’re here for the six people, they’re not yours.’”
I stared at him. “But when he passed us when we got out of the elevator he only had two people with him. Other than the second guy that went down.”
Brian shook his head. “I know. I don’t know what happened. And I don’t know who in the world they are. But Paul and the others are still out there somewhere.”
The amount of tension that lifted when he said that was incredible, but it settled immediately after. “So where are they?” I asked, knowing that there was nobody who could answer me. And because no one had an answer, no one said anything. We drove back to Brian’s house and spent the rest of the day there. Not that we did anything other than sit around and sleep. I was at a loss--a total loss, not just the kind of loss where you wonder what to do with your day. The kind of loss where you wonder what to do with your life. My brain felt totally numb, like someone had zapped it with too much electricity and it was dead. I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. We were at a dead end, and we couldn’t turn around and go back to where we’d started because we hadn’t started anywhere. There was nothing we could do, absolutely nothing.
At ten p.m. I decided to go back to my apartment. There was no reason for me to stay at Brian’s house, and I had an overwhelming need to go make sure everything was the way I left it. I guess it was the one point of stability I could cling to, the idea that I had a place to go to where my laptop would still be sitting on the floor where I left it and my creaky bed would be in the corner and the lightbulb would flicker and go out and I’d have to scrounge around until I could find one, unless I could beg one off Savannah or Brian. So I got up and left. The streets were empty; no one wanted to be out in the freezing evening. I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and tucked my chin into the collar like I normally did before realizing that I hadn’t washed Brian’s blood out of the shoulder. I contemplated going back and doing it at his house, but I really wanted to get back to my attic.
If I had been more alert, I would have noticed that part of the railing halfway up the fire escape had been knocked away. I might have seen the new scratch in the rust on the third landing. I might have sensed the presence in the room before I climbed through the window and almost fell back out again.
Actually, I think I might have tipped backwards far enough to lose my balance and tumble through the rusted metal ladders until I hit the pavement below if Matt hadn’t reached out and snatched a handful of my jacket, because I wasn’t completely through the window when he materialized in front of me. As it was, I barely held back a scream. It came out as a strangled squawk that was half wordless and half his name.
“Reaghan!” He said my name in a whisper-shout. I clawed at his arm, pulling myself back into the room.
I made sure that I was standing firmly on my own feet before I pulled away from him. “What in the world are you doing here?”
He looked at the floor for a second and his overall appearance finally resonated with me. His face was covered with scrapes and bruises--so were his hands--and his left arm was in a makeshift sling. My eyes flicked up and saw where his collarbone was bent at a sickening angle. There were smudges and rips scattered over his clothes. He looked like he had been through a war. A car crash. A...crash.
“Matt, you...what happened to you? What happened to Paul? Where is everyone?” With each question my voice rose, as well as my panic level.
He caught my arm with his right hand. “Reaghan, wait.”
A movement on the side of the room caught my attention and I snapped my head in its direction. Grace Hanna was sitting on my bed, leaning back against the wall like she was exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes and there were dark rusty blotches staining the perfect pale color of her hair.
“Wait? Wait for what?” I wrenched my arm away. “Matthew Turner, you talk to me.” My heartbeat was thundering in my chest; I knew people on the street could hear it.”
“The plane went down,” Matt said quietly. “I don’t know why, I don’t know what happened. It just went down.”
I felt like someone had slammed into my stomach hard, knocking all my organs back into my spine. “When?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Where is everyone? Where’s Paul?”
Matt rolled his lower lip into his mouth, biting it hard. I stared at him, my brain refusing to comprehend.
“Matt.” I didn’t recognize my own voice. “Matt, where--is--Paul?”
Matt lifted his hand, put it on my shoulder, moved it up my neck and cupped it around the back of my head, fingers twisting into my hair. “Reaghan, he’s...it’s just Grace and me.”
My lungs suddenly screamed for air and I sucked in a breath through my nostrils because my jaw refused to move. My eyes refused to leave Matt’s face. My mind refused to function. I stood there dumbly, statue-like under his eyes and Grace’s.
“Reaghan...”
Matt’s whisper broke through to my consciousness. I stumbled backwards stiffly, away from his touch, my back crashing into the wall. “No...no no no. Matt, I...what are you...stop it.”
I half-expected him to reach out for me again, but he didn’t. He knew me.
Against the wall, Grace caught her breath raggedly.
The world seemed frozen around me. Someone had pressed a button and stopped time.
The plane went down.
The plane went down, it just went down.
And it had taken Stephen, Elizabeth, and Daniel down with it. It had taken Rubbey down with it. It had taken Paul down with it. The plane was gone, and so were they. Wrecked, torn, killed. Gone.
The grief I’d experienced when my mother died came back in full force, and suddenly it was like I was standing in my front yard again staring down at her body at three a.m. I could see the smashed mess that had been her face, the dark stains that covered the front of her blouse. I saw her hand thrown out into the grass like she had been desperately grasping at something in the last few seconds. It was so real, so convincing, that I almost thought that whoever had stopped time had done more than that, had taken me back and put me where I was all those years ago, and I stood there and waited for the hysterical tears to come back again. But nothing happened.
You’ve changed, Reaghan. A lot.
Yeah, I’ve changed. I’m not even Reaghan anymore. I can’t even cry for my best friend. The friend who I would never see again because a plane had gone down with him and killed him.
I vaguely felt something sliding across my back--no, my back sliding across something--and realized that I’d slipped down the wall into a sitting position, my knees up against my chest and my palms pressed to my face. I was alone in a huge black void, alone with my dry eyes and my heaving lungs and my empty, tortured soul.
But there were noises around me. Whimpering sobs, ragged breaths. A little surprised at discovering that I wasn’t the only one present, I opened my eyes and glanced around. I was in my apartment and Grace was curled up on my bed, crying softly, tears leaking through the thin fingers that covered her face.
She had lost her entire family, I realized. She was like me now: nothing left.
“Grace,” I said. She flinched and glanced at me in surprise.
“I’m sorry.”
Grace stared at me for a second before nodding slowly, accepting what I had said. Our eyes actually met for a second and immediately I was filled with a sudden craving for companionship, for a human touch, for someone to hold me and tell me that it was okay. “Matt,” I whispered.
He looked down at me as I looked up at him. I opened my mouth to say something and shut it again because I didn’t know what I was going to say. It turned out that I didn’t have to try; Matt knew me. In less than a second he was crouching beside me and I was enveloped in one of those hugs that were so familiar--even though this one was one-armed--and from so long ago. The sensation of safety that spread through me was utterly foreign. I hadn’t felt so secure in years. I buried my face in his chest as the tears finally came, silently and slowly and steadily. I was soaking the front of his shirt, but I didn’t care and i knew he didn’t either when I felt his face in my hair. But I did snuffle, too loudly, before my nose started running too. His arm tightened around me at the sound.
I gave myself five, six more seconds before I pulled away. Matt let me go quickly. I met his eyes, conscious that my face was tear-smudged and streaked with emotion.
“I’m so sorry, Reaghan,” he whispered.
“No, I am,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry for everything.”
Matt gave me a lopsided grin. I realized that his eyes were shinier than usual. The moisture glittering in his lashes brought the tears back up to my own eyes, and I cried. And cried and cried. Deep ugly sobs that made my shoulders heave and my hands shake even though they were balled up into fists. I heard myself from what seemed like a long distance away and was struck by how wild my own sounds seemed, like I was crying for everything I’d ever lost and ever would lose.
I guess I was, in a way. Because I had lost so much and was discovering that I had so much more to lose.
At some point I decided that I hadn’t hit rock bottom yet, which was more frightening than it was relieving. But the thought brought me back out of the dark void where there had been nothing but me and my tears. I realized that I was curled up into a tiny ball, balanced precariously on one foot and leaning into something warm and solid--Matt. I lifted my head and saw him looking at me. My eyes were blurred enough that I couldn’t identify his expression, but I gave him what was supposed to be a smile but probably looked more like a grimace and said, “I’m okay.”
“Okay,” he said.
I looked past him and saw Grace standing uncertainly a few feet away, having abandoned her spot on the bed. All at once I felt inexplicably awkward. I pulled away from Matt and blinked the remaining moisture from my eyes, scrubbing at my face with the sleeves of my jacket. Matt looked me over and suddenly seemed to realize that I had blood on my shoulder.
“Reaghan! What happened?” He reached out and gingerly touched the dark stain.
“Ah, no, it’s not mine,” I said quickly.
“Whose is it?”
So the whole story of the past few days came out.
It only took a minute. When I finished, Grace tipped her head to the side. “Reaghan, there’s no reason you can’t go rescue Holt now.”
I blinked at her. She was right.

We broke Holt out of jail that same night. Savannah told him the whole story in the truck, breaking down at random throughout it. Grace and Matt came along and once we had Holt we brought them to a homeless clinic so Grace’s head would could be cleaned up and Matt’s collarbone set. The two of them told us about the crash after Savannah was done talking to Holt.
Apparently the plane had gone down just fifteen minutes after they’d taken off. They had all been in the small cabin--except for Paul, who was in the cockpit--and there were only two seats, which Grace and her mom had. They had just unbuckled when the plane started jerking around in the sky, and after a few minutes of ignoring it, they realized something was wrong. And a few seconds later, they crashed. Daniel had tried to shield his parents, and Matt had done the same for Grace, but it was Daniel, Elizabeth, and Stephen’s side that hit first and hardest.
After everything had stopped moving and flames began licking at the wings, Matt sent Grace into the cockpit to find Paul and Rubbey while he pulled her family’s bodies off each other. Stephen, Elizabeth, Paul, and Rubbey were gone immediately; Matt and Grace dragged Daniel outside and away from the plane before the flames completely took over it. But by the time they got far enough away to be safe from any explosions, Daniel was gone too.
Matt and Grace found a road and made their way back to my apartment because they had nowhere else to go.
There was silence in the truck for a long time after they finished their story. Matt had been doing most of the talking because Grace couldn’t put together more than five words coherently, and he had recited the entire thing as though he had rehearsed it before hand, in a completely dead and toneless voice.
When we got back to Brian’s house we talked about everything in as few words as possible and came to the conclusion that Holt would stay with Savannah. The two of them, along with Brian, knew that they might not have much time before guards came looking for them and they would have to move, but I don’t think any of them were up for packing everything up and looking for a new place to live right then. We settled as much as we could and then Savannah left with her godfather and Brian put Grace in his guest bedroom.
I felt completely numb, like a robot, doing everything automatically. It was almost as if I was in a dream. I wondered idly whether I was, and whether I would wake up in a few seconds or a few days, or whether this was a permanent dream that I would never wake up from, or whether the times I dreamed in my sleep were the only real things that happened to me, my only respite from the long, terrible dream that was my life. At some point I must have drifted into sleep, because the next thing I remember is being jolted awake as someone flopped down on the soft leather couch next to me.
“So, Reaghan.”
I blinked the blur out of my eyes and shifted, stretching out my legs to shake the sleep out of my limbs. “Yeah.”
“I think you and Matt and me need to talk.”
I sat up. A movement across the room caught my eye and I saw Matt sitting in the chair under the lamp. “Okay.”
“We’re not going to be able to keep doing what we’ve been doing here,” Brian said flatly. “At least not for a long time.”
“Right.” I knew that, of course. I just hadn’t thought about it.
“But we can move on and do it somewhere else.”
Somewhere else. California was a big state. It would be easy to just up and drive south and restart our operation. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that yet.
“I mean, there are a couple of knots to untie, like getting a new plane and finding new places to stay and work and everything, but it can happen. I talked to Savannah and Holt for a while in the driveway before they left, and they want it to happen. And before Grace went to bed, she told me she wanted to stay and join up if she could--if we let her.”
I should have been surprised that Grace wanted to join our daily life-risking business after everything that had just happened, but what surprised me more was that Brian slipped so easily into the role of leader. He had always been the extra guy, the tech support, the back-up. I would never have envisioned him taking over so quietly and effectively. But it made sense when I thought about it. And I knew instinctively that Paul would have put him in charge. Now that I thought about it, I saw that Paul had given Brian everything he would need as Paul’s successor--experience, trust, friendship, confidence. Brian’s act of immaturity was a front, the levity we all needed, but he was much more than he appeared to be.
The person in question was watching me, waiting for an answer. I searched my brain for the last thing he had said. “Um...you should keep Grace, Brian. She’d be good.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Great,” I said lamely after a short pause, because it seemed like the thing to say and because the silence stretched out between us. If there was anything I didn’t want at the time, it was silence. There was too much to think about that I would rather not dwell on.
“So,” Brian said. “So, I just thought I would let you know. So you don’t need to feel bad about leaving if that’s what you want to do.”
“Leaving?” What?
He turned to me, sitting sideways on the couch with his elbow resting on the back and his head resting in his hand. “I can get you two legit plane tickets. You and Matt can leave.”
I looked at Matt, remembering suddenly that he was in the room. “You’re still planning on leaving?”
“I have to. I have my parents, I have school...”
Oh. Right. Outside, where Matt came from, people actually had lives.
“How soon I leave depends, though. If you come, we can go now. If you don’t, I want to stick around and make sure you’re okay.”
“So...” I frowned at him. “Basically, you’re going to keep bugging me until I do what you want me to do.”
Brian looked like he wasn’t sure whether to think I was joking or serious. Matt only nodded.
“Pretty much.”
So it happened that a week later I was sitting in a plane next to Matt, looking out the window as the objects on the ground got smaller and smaller. Brian had somehow gotten two plane tickets illegally for us. I asked why he couldn’t have done that for all of our shipments, and he had gone into a long and detailed explanation of the underground black market and why it wasn’t really a safe place, even online, and how you should only use it once or twice a year to avoid detection, but how he would risk his neck for me out of the magnanimosity of his heart and because we went way back, he and I. I shut him up after about thirty seconds.
“Brian,” I said, “you’re just getting me to try and change my mind.”
He made his eyes huge and innocent. “Reaghan,” he answered, mimicking me, “how could you think that?”
The thing was, I was terrified that I would change my mind at the last second. The reasoning behind my agreeing to accompany Matt wasn’t complicated. There was nothing left for me in California; I had always felt like working with Paul, Savannah, and Brian was temporary, and there were too many bad memories to haunt me if I stayed.
But I had found friendship. As much as I had tried to make my walls impenetrable, I had formed ties.
So I refused to let Savannah and Brian accompany us to the airport. I refused to let them hug me, refused to take anything with me that would remind me of them. I was always the kid who would rip a Band-Aid off right away rather than peeling it back slowly.
And I left.
I did it.
I left.
Matt and I boarded the plane without any trouble--Brian had done his work well--and I caught myself smirking mentally as I wondered how long Messing’s people would be looking for us before they gave up.
Matt had a window seat, but he gave it to me when I asked for it. I leaned my head against the glass as the plane took off, watching as more and more land crowded into the tiny space I had to look through. I could pick out landmarks for a while, the library and the court building and the guard office, but when I could no longer distinguish individual places, I pulled my head away and stared at the back of the seat in front of me. Some tall bleach-blond girl was sitting in it, loudly smacking her chewing gum. I could smell the mint from behind her.
I glanced out of the window one more time and told myself that I was never going to be back.

I hesitated outside Reaghan’s closed bedroom door. If her yell had woken me up, I knew it would have woken her up too, but I didn’t know whether she wanted me intruding. I didn’t know how the old Reaghan would have reacted to waking up from a nightmare, and I didn’t know how the new one would react either. So I waited, listening for any sound from the other side of the door. A full minute passed in silence. I knocked.
“Yeah.”
I opened the door slowly and poked my head through. Reaghan was sitting up against the headboard of her bed, hugging one knee to her chest, with the pillow squashed into a heap behind the small of her back. She was wearing sweats and one of my t-shirts, and her hair hung loosely around her face. I remembered her saying once that she couldn’t stand sleeping with her hair held back.
I searched for something to say and found nothing, so I just stood there for a few minutes. She watched me without moving. Finally I stepped into the room, swinging the door shut behind me but letting it hang open a centimeter or two. Reaghan kept her eyes on me and said nothing as I sat down on the end of her bed. I knew that she would start talking eventually if I waited long enough or else let me know if it was something she really didn’t want to talk about. So I sat there and waited. After maybe three or four minutes, she shifted and let go of the knee she had been clutching.
“Sorry for waking you up.”
I glanced at her sideways. “Not a problem.”
“I don’t think I’ve yelled before.”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
We sat in silence for a minute longer.
“What was the plane crash like? What were you thinking when it went down?”
I paused, caught off guard by the question. The crash was something I tried my hardest not to dwell on, and I hadn’t thought of it in a few days. But I dreamed about it sometimes and woke up sweating afterwards because I’d jerked a limb in my sleep to keep me away from whatever I was hurtling toward.
“It’s hard to remember,” I said slowly. “When I’m awake, I mean.” I looked at her again and saw understanding in her face. Understanding, not sympathy. “I think...I was mostly thinking about all the things I would never get to do, all the people I would never get to see again, all the things I’d wanted to say and couldn’t. And then after we came through, I was focused on getting somewhere safe without losing Grace.”
A new expression flashed across her face and was gone so quickly that I couldn’t identify it, but she said nothing. After a few seconds I started talking again, more to fill up the silence than anything else.
“I haven’t dreamed about it for maybe a week. I guess that’s a good thing.”
Reaghan shifted again, almost restlessly, lifting her hand to toy with a strand of her hair. It was a nervous habit she’d always had, playing with her hair. I don’t think she even noticed it.
“I dreamed about it tonight.”
I must have looked surprised, because she hurried on almost apologetically.
“I’ve never dreamed about it before, but it was like I was there with you guys. Like it happened to me too. We were just kind of sitting there...” She let her voice trail off and I got the feeling that she was deciding to skip a part of the dream. “And some of you were talking, you and Grace and Daniel I think, and then it felt like there was a gravity shift and all of a sudden we were falling. People started screaming. And my mind just went blank. All I could think of was how to survive the crash, what I needed to do to stay alive.”
Her eyes flicked up to meet mine and then dropped just as quickly. “The window broke. I don’t know why it broke, it just did, and a ton of air started blowing in. It was freezing. That’s weird, because when I dream I don’t think I feel physical things. I feel emotion and I see and hear, but I never dream about tasting or smelling or feeling anything.”
I didn’t recall ever having thought about that before, but when she said it I realized that it was true. I never dreamed tastes or smells or touches either.
“I think I woke up because I ducked when a piece of window came flying at me. I must've yelled too."
"You did," I said, "but it wasn't that loud."
I'd been expecting at least the ghost of a grin, but I got nothing except for her eyes, which were bright and dark at the same time, searching mine.
"Well, the window never broke. And I don't remember anyone screaming."
Reaghan was still silent.
"Hey," I said, "everything's fine." But I knew that was a lie, and she knew it was a lie, and we both knew that the other knew it was a lie.
"I was worried about staying alive," she said at last. "I wasn't worried about anybody else, you or Paul or anyone. All I thought about was whether I'd make it."
That was what was bothering her. She was afraid that she was becoming callous, selfish, the kind of person who didn’t think about the safety of others until her own safety was secure. I wanted to tell her that there was too much good left in her for that ever to happen, that she would always care because she was human and humans cared, and because she was Reaghan Alison Foss and Reaghan Alison Foss would always care. But I didn’t want to penetrate the thin shield she had put up between her deepest fears and the rest of the world, and to tell the truth, I didn’t know that she would ever or never be that kind of person. I had seen a different Reaghan since I found her five months ago, and I didn’t know her. I didn’t know what had happened to her to make her afraid. I didn’t know.
"There's no guarantee that that's what you would be thinking in real life," I offered. "You aren't really about to die in a dream. If it actually happened, who knows what would be going through your mind."
She shook her head. "No."
The one word was all she said, but with it she somehow managed to convey all the desperation, exhaustion, and fear she had inside of her. Her face looked more lost than I'd ever seen it before as she sat there in the darkness. I had the sudden urge to pull her into a hug and erase all of the last three and a half years. But something in her expression held me back.
After a minute she pulled both of her legs up and rested her chin on her knees, clasping her hand around her ankles. "So you graduate in two months."
I had almost been expecting the abrupt shift in subjects. "Yup. And then I have to enter the real world." I put enough stress on the words "real world" to let her know that I was entirely kidding around, but I still saw the half-angry expression that shot across her face before she schooled it.
"Your 'real world,'" she said in a low tone.
The irritation rose in me, even though I knew what she had been through in the past few years and that for her, the real world was darker than it would ever be for most of the people outside of California. "My real world is very real," I replied. "It's not any less real than the world you came from, and it's not any less real than all the places that are even worse than California."
That was all it took to antagonize her. "The world you call real is so fake it sickens me. You don't know anything about what it's like to wonder whether you'll be alive in a day, or to have the lives of innocent people resting on your head. You don't know what it's like to know that people will die if you get caught or to be ducking around dumpy Mexican convenience stores in the middle of the night because you don't have a job and can't buy a can of refried beans with real money. That's as real as it gets, Matt, and you have no clue about any of it."
"My real sickens you? Your real is nauseous," I snapped, aware that we were bickering like three-year-olds about subjects that world leaders couldn't agree on and not really caring. "You're so wrapped up in your misery that you can't accept the fact that some people have easier lives than you. Yes, you had it hard. But that doesn't mean that everyone who hasn't had it as hard as you doesn't know what real is. Everyone has their own reality. Yours is yours and mine is mine. And you know what? You can keep your real if you want, but I wouldn't take it for a million bucks."
Reaghan sat up and shoved her feet down until her legs were straight out in front of her. "You wouldn't? You had my reality for a few days, Matt. You know what I'm talking about. Are you too sheltered to handle it? Too soft? You've never lost anyone, have you?"
I hesitated.
"No, of course not, or you would understand. It's scarring, okay? It's hard. And you have no clue. You never did. Even when we were both stuck there, even when you saw, you didn't know, and you didn't understand."
"How could I understand, Reaghan? That's not fair."
"Oh, so now you want to talk about fair, huh? I can tell you about fair. Fair is everything I've never had. Can you give me fair?" She waited a second, three seconds, before continuing. "Then don't you dare say fair to me."
When she actually got up and walked out of the room, I realized that we'd nearly been yelling. I jumped up and went to the door as her feet thudded down the stairs. To the left, both of my parents were standing in the doorway of their bedroom, looking at me in confusion and a bit of accusation.
“She had a nightmare, I went to check on her, we started arguing,” I said. “I’ll go get her.” As I ducked down the stairs, I heard the front door slam. Great, I thought. Now I have to look for her outside. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to go far. She was standing where the grass of our yard met the cement of the sidewalk, by the sapling that separated our property from the neighbors’.
I jogged toward her, stopping abruptly when I saw that her forehead was pressed to the slender tree trunk and her shoulders were shaking. Instantly all of my frustration vanished. She was small, fragile, and hurt, and it was my fault; I had yelled at her. I approached her slowly, giving her plenty of time to know that I was there. Finally I reached out and touched her shoulder tentatively.
Her back stiffened and then relaxed.
“Reaghan, I’m sorry,” I said. “You were right.”
“No,” she mumbled into the back of her hand, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Matt, you shouldn’t have to put up with me.”
I tugged on her shoulder until she turned around. Her face was dry, but her eyes glittered with tears that she refused to let fall. “I don’t have to,” I replied.
“Then don’t.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t deserve me. I’m not the person you thought I was.”
“What kind of person did I think you were?”
Reaghan shook her head hard and a tiny drop of water landed on her temple. “I don’t know. Someone with feelings?”
“You have feelings. They’re right here,” I said, brushing away the tear with my thumb and holding it up for her to see.
“The good kind of feelings. That’s a bad feeling.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s such thing as a bad feeling.” I had no idea what I meant; I only wanted to convince her to come back inside and finish the rest of the night with no nightmares.
But of course she asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Um...” I fumbled around mentally for an answer. “Um, I don’t know.” I looked at her, half-laughing, and found her giving me a tiny grin. “Oh, I see how it is. You staged this whole thing so you could one-up me in a philosophical dispute.”
She smacked my shoulder lightly. “Of course I did. That’s why I’m here. So you don’t get too high on your own so-called genius.”
“So-called? Who calls?”
Reaghan opened her mouth, looked at me blankly, and then shut it again. “Whatever.”
“Well I’m glad we’re arguing about something stupid,” I said. “Stupid I can handle.”
“See? You just admitted that you’re not a genius.”
“Yeah, but I’m still waiting to hear who called me one in the first place.” I slipped an arm around her back and started leading her back up to the house, slowly. I had to be so slow, so careful with this person I was barely acquainted with, and if I was slow and careful enough I could find bits of the girl I used to know.