“Yeah, well, that Kenna’s mother hadn’t been kidnapped, and she still had some faith in the system.” Was it only yesterday that I was arguing with Rebel about how crazy her antihero rant sounded? It feels like a lifetime. “Now they’re both gone. Why wouldn’t I stoop to working with villains?”
“So flattering,” Draven says to me, sarcasm ripe in his tone.
“It wasn’t meant to be flattering,” I answer, flipping him off, even as I keep my attention fixed on Jeremy. “Just truthful.”
“Well, I’m not too thrilled to be working with a hero girl,” he throws back.
“Then you shouldn’t have let your cousin start dating one.”
“She’s your best friend.” He jerks his head in Rebel’s direction. “You didn’t even know they were dating.”
“Because she knows how much I hate villains.”
“Yeah, almost as much as I hate heroes.”
“Enough!” Rebel shouts.
Suddenly, my feet lose contact with the floor and I find myself looking down at her. Hands outstretched, Rebel’s face is a mask of irritation as she holds Draven and me three feet off the ground.
I glance over at him just in time to see panic flicker across his face. Looks like someone is afraid of heights.
Rebel lowers us gently back to the ground. She shakes out her arms, clenching and unclenching her hands in a tell that means she’s only a couple small steps from losing it completely. If we thought Dante losing it was bad, wait until someone pushes Rebel to the breaking point. Like during the last big throw-down with her dad. He had to resod the entire lawn behind her house.
“If you two are done fighting, we need to make a plan,” she says. “And quickly. We have to get Deacon out and find Kenna’s mom.”
The reminder shuts down our bickering.
“Is it safe to talk here?” Rebel asks, casting a wary glance at the smoking microwave.
“My sweep caught all the live bugs,” Jeremy says. “But there could be dormant devices or voice-activated transmissions or heroes with super hearing trained on this address or—”
“Jeremy…” I warn before he launches into another stream of paranoia—more out of impatience than disbelief because, really, at this point his theories make more sense than not.
He smirks. “I can shield the house.”
I look around at the destruction in my kitchen and have to admit, “I don’t feel safe here.”
“Then we’ll go somewhere else.” Rebel wraps an arm around my shoulders.
“Somewhere no one expects us to be,” Jeremy offers.
The guys’ house is out, because if my house is bugged, then surely the home of the head villain is also being watched. And Rebel’s house is no good for obvious reasons.
Jeremy adds, “If it’s outside, that would be even better.”
“There’s a park,” I suggest. “About a half mile from here.”
Dante pulls out his keys, ready to drive.
“We should walk,” Jeremy and I say at the same time.
Draven scowls, and Dante shoves his keys back into his pocket. If my house had that many bugs, I don’t even want to think about what kind of tracking devices might be in our cars. And we need Jeremy’s focus on something other than keeping eavesdroppers out of our business—like figuring out how to break into one of the most secure facilities in the world.
Ten minutes later, we’re settling at a picnic table in the park. As far as war rooms go, it’s not great, but any port in a storm and all that…
I pass around the six-pack of soda I pulled from the broken fridge and a bag of chocolate chip cookies from my secret stash. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
Jeremy settles his backpack on the table and pulls out his laptop. He shrugs out of his leather jacket, revealing a T-shirt that says There’s no place like 127.0.0.1.
Draven and Dante exchange a WTF look.
I don’t get it either. Jeremy has an odd sense of humor. But he’s a freaking computer wizard. Only a couple of minutes pass before he’s got a schematic of the lab, which is a million times more detailed than the one I drew on the whiteboard in my garage.
It’s multilayered, like blueprints, including everything from the ductwork to tech and security wiring. We crowd around him, even Dante and Draven forgetting their distrust long enough to pore over the plans.
“This is too complicated to read,” I say after a minute. “How do you even know what we’re looking at?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time studying the lab schematics and security systems over the years. I memorized the layers.”
“Why?” Dante demands, suspicious again. “Did you have a reason to break in?”
Jeremy tsks. “Are you kidding me? Do you know the kind of experiments that go on in that lab? Irradiating rabbits to give them cognitive thought? Weather bombs? Bacteria that can realign the Earth’s tectonic plates? With shit like that going down, I want to be ready to act. It pays to know the best ways in—and out.”
“So what is the best way in?” I demand, cutting a glare at Dante. Are they trying to send him off on a rant?