“Yeah, well, if I’d fought harder, maybe your mom wouldn’t be missing. Maybe Deacon wouldn’t be half dead in some six-by-six cell none of us can find. Maybe—”
I interrupt her with the most absurd idea I can think of. “And maybe I’d grow a superpower or two. Anything is possible, Reb, but you can’t live in a world of what-ifs.”
I twist in my chair to face her and make sure she’s looking at me before I continue because it feels really important that she understands what I’m about to say.
“I could sit here making up a million scenarios about what might be different. What if I’d bought into Jeremy’s conspiracy theories years ago? What if I’d listened when you’d tried to tell me things weren’t what they seemed? What if I hadn’t left my mom alone, sleeping, totally vulnerable, while I went to the lab to check things out?” I huff out a tight breath, the weight of all those what-ifs crushing my chest.
“If any of that had happened, everything could be different right now. But it’s not. There’s no going back, no power of time travel. So we just have to work on the problem, you know? We have to deal with what is, not what might have been.”
Rebel sits silent for a long time. She’s totally withdrawn, totally locked inside of herself, and there’s a part of me that wants to break her out, to smash through the walls she’s putting up in self-defense. But I don’t, because I get what she’s going through. With everything I’ve had to process during the last couple days, I never stopped to think that finally discovering the truth, finally learning that she’s been right all along, must be weighing on her.
Feeling alone led her to seek out villains. I won’t let her feel alone ever again.
“You’re right,” she says with a grimace. “Still, sometimes I wish I could be more like you. More like Riley.”
“Riley? You want to be more like your brother?” I ask incredulously. “Okay, who are you and what have you done with my best friend?”
“It may sound crazy, but it’s true. Yeah, my brother drives me nuts, but everything is easy for Riley. The world makes sense to him. He sees the superverse in black and white, good and bad. So do you, Kenna.”
I think back to the supermarket and how nothing seemed black and white anymore. How complicated everything was and how I didn’t know what to think—what to feel—about any of it.
Nothing is easy anymore.
I don’t know where this upside-down path we’re on is headed, and I sure as hell don’t know where it’s going to end up. But I’m certain that Rebel is the one person in all of this who shouldn’t be beating herself up.
“But you were right,” I tell her. “Good isn’t always good, and bad isn’t always bad. You’ve always seen the shades of gray.”
I think about Draven, about what a good guy he is deep down, under the long hair and villain tats and that ridiculously obnoxious smirk. Under his screw-the-world attitude. He may be a total badass, but that doesn’t mean he’s bad. How can he be when he spends so much of his time trying to do the right thing?
“Seeing in black and white is highly overrated,” I say.
She gapes at me. “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a brave new world, isn’t it? And what do they say about new worlds? Adapt or die?”
She looks at me strangely as she echoes my earlier question. “Who are you, and where’s the real Kenna? What have you done with my best friend?”
“That seems to be the question today, doesn’t it?” I reply with a forced laugh.
Too bad I don’t have an answer anymore.
Chapter 17
“Dude, are you sure this is going to work?” Dante asks.
“Absolutely,” Jeremy answers as we inch forward on our stomachs. “Thanks to the codes on Mr. Malone’s computer, I disabled the villain sensors and the perimeter alarm. There should be an entrance to one of the evacuation tunnels a little bit ahead.”
“Should?” Draven echoes.
“Just how confident are you that there is an evacuation tunnel? It wasn’t on the blueprints,” Rebel hisses at Jeremy.
“Totally confident. There has to be at least one, if not more.” Jeremy squints into the shadows. “I’m, like, eighty percent confident—well, maybe seventy-five percent—that we’ll find it. But—”
“Seventy-five percent?” Draven whisper-yells. “We’re betting my cousin’s life on a seventy-five percent chance that you’re right?”
It’s dark so I can’t see his face, but I can all but feel the anger radiating off him. Not that I blame him. Seventy-five percent odds just aren’t that great, especially when that’s just to get into the facility. God only knows how difficult things will get once we actually set foot in the lab to rescue Deacon.