“Like I’m a criminal.”
Except he is. He’s wanted. We all are. “We’re all criminals,” I say. Casey laughs and Cameron kind of grunts before turning around and heading toward the building, gun in hand.
While he’s gone, Casey says, “It’s not his fault. He and Ava kind of got sucked into a shitty group.”
It still sounds kind of like his fault. A shitty group does not equal blackmail or coercion. A shitty group does not dictate your entire fate.
“But you didn’t?” I ask.
“I got accepted to a high-tech boarding school across town. The whole programming thing. I didn’t go to school with the same people. Not since middle school, anyway. I was only home on weekends, and in summers I’d take any internship I could find, just to get away from that house. It only got worse after our grandma died. God, I couldn’t wait to leave.” She pauses for a moment, lowers her voice. “When Ava disappeared … at first the cops didn’t even look too hard. ‘Oh, she ran away,’ they’d say. Or ‘She fell in with the wrong crowd.’ ” She turns to face me, her eyes wide and piercing. “But she was so close to getting out of there. We were going to get a place where we could go to school together after graduation, take Cameron with us. We had a plan—”
The sound of a gunshot cuts her off, and we jump. My hand is on Casey’s arm. Her muscles are tense and frozen.
I picture a thousand different possibilities: Cameron stumbling upon security and firing the gun into the air—or worse, firing the gun at him; Cameron stumbling upon security and the guard firing the gun into the air—or worse, firing the gun at Cameron.
Casey grabs my hand, and I make a thousand silent pleas in my head. And then I hear footsteps.
I see him, through the trees. Not bleeding, not even running. Just strolling toward us. “Your entrance is ready,” he says.
“Tell me you did not shoot out a window,” Casey says, but I’m hoping that’s exactly what he has done. That seems the best possible outcome of the gunshot.
His silence is the answer, because Casey pulls him down to crouching. “Are you stupid? How quickly, do you think, will the cops show up?”
Cameron shakes his head. “You can always get away with one shot. People don’t give it a second thought. An engine backfiring, a firecracker. If there’s not a reason to think it’s a gun, they don’t think it’s a gun.”
But Casey makes us wait, not trusting this information. We wait a long time, maybe thirty minutes, and still nobody comes. “I hate that you know that,” Casey says, standing up.
Cameron only smiles, leading the way to the school. I hate that he knows that, too.
Chapter 16
The window he shot out belongs to the gym office, he says, and it’s just out of our reach. It’s wider than it is high, and honestly I’m concerned about Cameron’s ability to squeeze through. Cameron laces his fingers together and crouches down, and Casey steps into his hand. “Watch the glass,” he says. He pushes her up until her elbows are wedged at the base of the window, and her feet scramble against the brick for a moment before her upper body disappears inside. Her legs follow a second later. “All good,” she calls.
“Incoming,” he says, tossing her backpack inside.
“Ready?” Cameron asks, lacing his hands together again.
I place my hands on his shoulders as I step into his grip. “Thank you,” I say, as our eyes meet. I am thanking him for this, and for everything before, and everything to come. I am thanking him in spite of who he was, and who he might still be. And in that moment I believe in telepathy, because he freezes—his shoulders frozen beneath my hands, his hands frozen beneath my foot, his eyes frozen on mine.
“You’re welcome,” he says. And then the words jar us out of the moment, and he lifts me up, my elbows wedging into the sides of the open window. I let out a noise of weakness as my waist rests against the ledge, the rawness of the skin that was grazed by the bullet rubbing against the windowsill, and then I am through. Casey half catches me as I land on the carpeted floor, my arms bracing my fall. She has a cut on her hand—I imagine from the glass as she tried to brace her own fall.
She sees me looking. “It’s not deep,” she says. But she balls up her fist, and I wonder if she’s telling the truth.
She laughs as blood drips out the bottom of her fist, staining the carpet, a permanent trail of us. “God, we’re a mess.”
Cameron lands on his feet behind us. “Seriously, how do you do that?” she asks.
“Trade secrets,” he says. And then he focuses on her hand.
“No worries,” she says. “I’m sure there’s a first-aid kit. It’s the school gym. Band-Aids are sure to abound.”
Casey assesses the room. A computer, a desk, a phone, her backpack. She opens the drawers to find pens, some coins, and a few wires. “This could work,” she says.
Cameron pushes open the office door leading to the school gymnasium, which is dark despite the daylight. The doors to the outside are sealed, and the windows are high up, which is why we had to come through the office. Every step we take echoes. Doors labeled for locker rooms line the same wall as the office, and there are blue mats stacked up and pushed against the far wall.
“I doubt there’s anyone watching the security cameras, but they’re probably still running. So let’s keep out of the hallways,” Cameron says.
Cameron flips a switch, and a few panels of the ceiling move aside, revealing skylights. “Safer than turning on the lights,” he says.
There’s a basketball hoop directly over my head, and when I look through it, up to the skylights—at the clouds moving beyond them—it gives me the feeling of motion. When I look back, Casey has her hand in the water fountain, watching the watery blood circle down the drain. She wipes her hand on the side of her shirt, then guzzles the water from the fountain. She runs the back of her hand across her mouth, then puts her hands on her hips. “Okay, well, guess I’ll get started.” She strides back into the office, leaving the door open, so I can see her opening the bag of hard drives we found in June and Liam’s hideaway.
Cameron motions for me to follow him, and we check out the closets and storage areas attached to the gym—we find a bunch of team uniforms and a box of lost and found items, which we drag into the open gymnasium.
There’s a tall toolbox on wheels behind a net full of basketballs and a stack of cones, and Cameron rifles through it. He pulls out a screwdriver and something that looks like a set of pliers but smaller. “Casey!” he calls, and her name echoes loudly across the gym. I cringe.
“Yeah?” she calls back, and nothing happens. No alarms sound. Nobody comes. It’s just us.
“Tools in the closet if you need anything.”
“Okay,” she says.
He points out a map—a labeled fire-evacuation plan—hanging on the open closet door, and we see a layout of the school with an X marking our location. His finger traces the rooms. “Looks like the cafeteria should be attached somehow, through whatever’s on the other side of the locker rooms.” Then he grins. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” I admit.