He flashes her a smile. She gives him a sympathetic one in return. Just like that, so easily, Sammy sets them on course.
I hope it continues to be easy for them. I hope it’s easy and boring and downright effortless. They both deserve a break.
SIXTEEN
IT WENT LIKE THIS: THE team found the water crate Blaine and I dropped in Pine Ridge, and after following the trail, knew we’d been compromised. Back at the bookshop they theorized about how. Bree mentioned her evening with Gage at the pub—how he was fishing for details regarding the mission—and Badger put the rest together.
The team was ready when he arrived later that evening. Gage got just one shot off—which clipped Badger in the shoulder—before he was rendered weaponless. With some persuasion, he gave up the truth: Blaine and I had been taken to the Compound for questioning.
“Badger and Adam decided it was too much of a risk to come after you,” Bree explains. Our team is in dry clothes now, crammed in the wheelhouse with May and Carl, who is steering us back to Pine Ridge. “They said our plan was solid enough to get us inside to poke around, to look and observe, but not to break anyone out. I told them it was a piss-poor excuse, that we had everything we needed to get to you guys and not doing so was cowardly.”
“Charlie’s sister,” Sammy says, pointing at May, “arrived with the Order-disguised boat only to find the mission canceled. Course, Bree wouldn’t give it up. Kept ranting about how it wasn’t right, and we couldn’t leave you. Hell, I thought the same.” Sammy pats his chest like I might have doubted him. “I mean, we’re practically blood at this point.”
Clipper nods in agreement.
I feel this swelling in my chest. I know exactly what they mean. I know all too well, but if I try to put that in words, I’ll choke up.
“So how did you change their minds?” Harvey asks.
“We didn’t. Adam and Badger never approved of this.” Bree gestures at the boat. “I organized it behind their backs. The inspection team was due to arrive late Friday evening, so I decided we should do what we were always planning—infiltrate. The key was to get to the Compound a few hours early.”
“And we couldn’t have done it without Carl and May,” Sammy adds. “Their standin Order boat got us entry, and their trawler was waiting to pick us up once we fled.”
“I’m grateful and all, but I’m still confused.” I look toward Carl and May. “Adam didn’t think this could be done, and he at least knew me and Blaine. Why would you two risk all this for strangers?”
“Just a gut instinct.” May beams, her cheeks swelling up like fresh loaves of bread. “Every minute after I arrived at the bookshop Bree went on and on and it . . . I guess it reminded us of our situation, didn’t it, hon?” She glances up at Carl, who nods. “I once staged quite a production to get Carl out of a bad spot and sometimes it’s worth risks, regardless of the odds. Especially for people you love.”
Bree looks mortified—she might even be blushing—but I’m hung up on May’s words. My mind drifts to a letter I found in a deserted house in Bone Harbor a few months back. A love letter addressed to a man named Carl, begging him to come west, saying her brother Charlie—an Expat—would help stage a boat sinking to cover his trail.
“You two,” I say, still staring between them. “Carl’s from Bone Harbor.”
May touches her chest. “How do you know that?”
“And Charlie, your brother . . . I thought he was a fisherman. That you both were.”
“Our mother passed a few months back and Charlie and I are splitting our time between the sea and the shop now that she’s no longer around.” May asks again how I knew about Carl, and I quickly explain about the letter, how it was one of a few things that led the Rebels to reconsider AmWest’s status in this mess.
It is so odd the way all these lives have overlapped. For some reason, it doesn’t shock me as much as it could. Instead, I just feel incredibly blessed. That Carl cared enough for May to run away with her. That May was moved enough by what Bree kept repeating in Pine Ridge to consider helping with the rescue. That Adam brought us to Badger who worked in Charlie’s shop where it all came together. Such an intricate web of relationships.
“We snuck out before Adam and Badger got up this morning,” Bree explains. “Getting to the docks was easy enough with the boat and uniforms. Clipper set up the explosives—had a wetsuit and everything so he could get around unseen—and then after Sammy and I alerted the Order to the rogue ‘tracking device,’ we went in. Things didn’t get messy until the alarm went off.”
She doesn’t know how much of it I saw in the interrogation room, and plows ahead with the story. I listen to her run through it—the guards, the way Sammy got her out of a bind, finding only Emma in the cells. I barely hear her. I’m caught up in her hand gestures and the way she speaks with such conviction. I want to tell her how it felt to see her on those screens. I want to tell her she is amazing.
“Bree refused to leave without you, so I took Emma to the boat,” Sammy cuts in.
“I still don’t understand why though,” Emma mutters. “I’m a stranger.”
“Um, Gray should probably explain that later,” he says. I don’t blame Sammy for not wanting to break the news to Emma. Who wants to tell someone that their Forgery tried to kill half the people on this boat? She gives me another icy look as he continues. “When I got to the boat, Harvey—who’s supposed to be dead, mind you—was standing there with Clipper in his arms. The boy was hugging him like a teddy bear.”
“I checked his eyes first!” Clipper says. “I knew what he was, but he seemed . . . I don’t know. Something was different about him. And he said he’d been helping Gray.” Clipper spins to face me. “That’s true, right?”