Take a breath, I ordered myself. A real one. I tried shaking out my arms and hands, but the heaviness remained. Closing my eyes, I listened to a distant helicopter slice through the air, moving at a furious pace. Instinct—insistent, baiting instinct—was nudging me to swing an early right on Bay Street, not stay on Alameda Street until I hit its intersection with Seventh Street. The latter was a more-direct route to our current base on Jesse Street and Santa Fe Avenue; the quickest way to give the others the details, form a plan, and get out.
But if someone were watching or tracking me, I’d be able to lose them on Seventh Street. My feet took charge and pushed me east toward the Los Angeles River.
I got a block and a half before I saw the shadows moving up Mateo Street toward Seventh Street. My punishing pace came to an abrupt stop—my hands flew out to catch myself against a mailbox before I spilled out into the middle of the street.
A sharp breath blew out of me. Too close. This is what happened when I didn’t take the time to slow down and actually make sure the street was clear. I felt the echo of my racing pulse behind my temples and reached up to rub them. Something warm and sticky smeared against my forehead, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
I kept my head and body low as I moved, trying to see which direction the troops were headed in now. They were already way too close to our base—if I doubled back, I might be able to outrun them to the warehouse and warn the others to bail.
But they had just...stopped.
At the corner of the intersection, they’d walked right up to the smashed-in facade of some kind of hardware store and stepped over the busted windows and into the building. I heard a laugh, voices—and my blood slowed to a crawl in my veins.
They weren’t soldiers.
I moved up the street toward the store, running a hand along the side of the building until I reached the windows and dropped down into a crouch.
“—where did you find this?”
“Good shit, man!”
More laughter.
“Oh, God, I never thought I’d be so damn happy to see bagels—”
I looked over the ledge. Inside, three of our agents—Ferguson, Gates, and Sen—were hunkered down, a small spread of food in front of them. Gates, a former Navy SEAL, tore into a bag of potato chips so hard he nearly split it in half.
They have food. I couldn’t get my head around it. They’re eating food here. The disbelief was so numbing I had to work it through one thought at a time.
They aren’t bringing the food back for the rest of us.
Was this what was happening each time a group went out? The agents had been so insistent on going to scout for supplies themselves; I’d assumed it was because they were afraid if any of the kids got picked up, they’d immediately rat out the group’s current location. But was this the real reason? So they’d get first dibs on whatever they turned up?
A cold, icy fury turned my fingers into claws. My broken nails cut into my palms; the sting of pain only added to the churning in my stomach.
“God, that’s good,” Sen said. She was a beast of a woman—tall, with muscles packed under taut, leathery skin. There was always this expression on her face like...like she knew where all the bodies were buried because she’d put them there herself. When she deigned to speak to any of us kids, it was to bark at us to shut up.
I waited through the silence that followed, anger flaring with each second.
“We should get back,” Ferguson said, starting to rise.
“They’re fine. Even if Stewart beats us back, Reynolds is there to make sure he’s not shooting his mouth off again.”
“I’m more worried about...”
“The leech?” Gates supplied, with a belly laugh. “She’ll be the last one in. If she even makes it back.”
My brows went right up at that. Leech. Me. That was a new one. I’d been called so many worse things, the only part I found offensive was the idea that I couldn’t handle a trip back and forth across the city without getting caught.
“She’s far more valuable than the others,” Ferguson argued, “it’s just a matter of—”
“It’s not a matter of anything. She doesn’t obey us, and it makes her a liability.”
Liability. I pressed a fist against my mouth to keep the bile down. I knew how the League handled “liabilities.” I also knew how I would handle any agent who tried.
Sen leaned back, bracing her hands on the tile. “The plan stays the same regardless.”
“Good.” Gates balled up the bag of chips he’d just demolished. “How much of this are we bringing back? I could go for another bagel...”
A tub of pretzel sticks and a bag of hot dog buns. That’s what they were bringing back for seventeen kids and the handful of agents that had been stuck behind babysitting while the others went out to collect food and intel.
When they started to climb back onto their feet, I flattened myself against the building, waiting for them to step through the window and glance each way down the intersection. My hands were still clenched when I stood and started trailing them, keeping a good half block between us until the warehouse finally came into view.
Before they crossed that final street, Sen held a lighter up above her head, a single flame that the agent posted on the roof could see. There was a faint whistle in response—the signal to approach.
I ran, closing the last bit of distance before the woman could start climbing up the fire escape after the others.
“Agent Sen!” My voice was a harsh whisper.
The woman’s head swung around, one hand on the ladder, the other reaching for the handgun tucked into the holster of her combat gear. It took me a moment to realize I’d had my own hand clenched around the gun in my jacket pocket the whole time I’d been stalking them down the street.
“What?” she snapped, waving to Gates and Ferguson to continue up the fire escape.
Not happy to see me, are you?
“I have to tell you something....It’s...” I hoped she’d think the trembling quality in my voice was fear, not anger on the verge of exploding. “I don’t trust Cole with this.”
That had her interested. Her teeth flashed in the dark.
“What is it?” she asked.
This time, I smiled. And when I slammed into her mind, I didn’t care if it broke apart. I ripped through memories of bunks, training, HQ, agents, tossing the images aside faster than they could solidify in my mind. I felt her jerk, tremble under the force of my attack.
I knew when I had what I was looking for. She had imagined it so vividly, plotted it all out with a malicious efficiency that even I’d underestimated. Everything about the idea had an unnatural luster to it, like warmed wax. Cars dripped into the scene, faces I recognized as belonging to the kids upstairs were half-hidden by gags. Dust-colored military fatigues. Black uniforms. A trade.
I was gasping for air by the time I surfaced, unable to get oxygen into my chest deeply enough. I had just enough thought to twist her memory, to plant a false one in the place of the last few minutes. I didn’t wait for her to recover, pushing past her to get to the ladder.
Cole—my mind was firing too fast, black fading into my vision. I have to tell Cole.
And I had to get away from the agent before I gave in to the terrifyingly real temptation to put a bullet in her right here and right now.
Because it wasn’t enough for her to withhold food, to levy threats about leaving us behind if we weren’t quieter, didn’t move faster, didn’t keep up with the rest of them. She wanted to be done with us once and for all—to hand our leashes off to the one group she thought could actually control us.
And she wanted the reward money we’d bring in to fund her next strike.