I read the words again, and a third time trying to make sense of them. Because the words were ones I knew, I recognized I was reading sentences, but my mind disengaged. It up and left the picture before my heart could make the connection.
Ruby can take your memories...
It was a note to himself—to a future self, one he apparently was so sure would fall victim to my mind again. This was a cheat sheet. Security; because, clearly my word wasn’t going to cut it. I could promise him over and over again that I’d never touch his mind again, but it meant nothing. I had done it once. The trust between us was already broken.
I went cold to the core. The shock of it—jumping from his warm touch to this—it was too much. I was the ash brushed aside after the fire had finally been blown out. You are so stupid, so stupid, so stupid. He doesn’t trust you, no matter what he says.
“Stop.” The world broke me out of the free fall I dropped into, and all at once the sensation of falling, sinking eased. I said the word again, forcing my heart down out of my throat, stilling my thoughts. I said it again, and one more time, until my voice sounded like my own again, not some dry rasp.
I paced the length of the room, trying to stop the torrent of thoughts shooting through my mind. Quick steps were moving down the hall, bare feet slapping against the tile. I panicked, shoving the note inside of the CD case just as Liam swept back into the room.
He was drenched in random places—his left shoulder, down his right side, the back of his sweats, the fabric below his knees—and the expression on his face was the resigned look of someone nominated for sainthood against his will.
I plastered a smile on my face, holding my breath in the hope it would keep me from crying. Just seeing his face was enough to start unraveling the binding I had wrapped around the hurt.
“Soooo,” he said, wiping his damp hair off his face, “apparently I have to stop telling people I know a little bit about plumbing. Because a little bit is how to twist the knob to get the water to turn on and off—what? I look that pathetic?”
“No—no, not at all,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” He took a step toward me. “Your voice sounds—”
“I just realized it’s almost seven,” I said. “Cole wants us upstairs to talk through the plan for the camps. We should—we should go.”
His brow creased but he stood back from the door, opening it for me. Just as I passed, he caught my shoulder and turned me back toward him. A droplet of water worked its way down from his hair, mapping out a trail on his cheek, over his jaw, down his throat as he swallowed hard. I couldn’t meet his eyes as he studied me, and managed not to cringe as he leaned forward and pressed a sweet kiss to my cheek.
The others were only just starting to mill into the computer room, joining the Greens who were rearranging the desks out of their usual, tidy rows and dragging them against the walls so they lined the room instead. Nico had reclaimed the laptop and was sitting at one of the desks along the rear wall, his back toward us. Everyone else faced the old, marker-stained white board and the map of the United States taped up next to it on the opposite end of the room.
Chubs was standing in front of the map, pushing in small red pins as Vida read something—city names?—off a printed list.
“Nicely done with the brain voodoo, boo,” she said when she saw us. “Consider your ass forgiven for not coming down to help us haul shit around the garage.”
Chubs glanced back over his shoulder, one hand still splayed out on the map. “If we’re going to try picking some of these groups up, we have four good options. There are at least ten kids in Wyoming alone.”
“If they haven’t already moved on,” Liam pointed out.
“Now who’s Mr. Doom and Gloom?” Chubs shot back.
Whatever Liam was about to say was preempted by his brother sweeping into the room like a tornado of energy, a visibly pleased Senator Cruz at his side. The rare glimpse of happiness on her features made her look ten years younger. She smiled when she caught my gaze, giving a small, affirmative nod.
She’d done it, then. She’d managed to secure some supplies for us.
Zu, Hina, and Kylie were the last to appear in the doorway, and carefully made their way through the field of kids on the floor to come sit beside us.
“Okay,” Cole said, clapping his hands together. “So. Thank y’all for all of your ingenious planning and scheming. I reviewed everything, and I think we’ve landed on a winning strategy.”
He walked back toward the white boards, picking up one of the markers. A blue line was drawn down the middle of the board. At the top of one half he wrote, THURMOND. On the other, OASIS.
Without any other preamble, he started in. “We’re going to be making two hits: one, Oasis, is in Nevada. It’ll serve as a kind of test run for our big hit on Thurmond in five weeks’ time. In addition to getting those poor kids out, think of Oasis as an opportunity to work out the kinks in our strategy.”
I crossed my legs and rested my elbows on my knees, hands gripped in front of me. Calm. Something in my mind clicked into place at the familiarity of this—being debriefed on an upcoming Op. The other League kids, Vida included, appeared to feel the same way, leaning into the moment when everyone else seemed to edge back, unsure.
“One or two volunteers will enter Oasis ahead of the actual hit.” He turned to face the cluster of Greens sitting together. “We’re going to need to install a small camera in the frames of someone’s glasses, and it can relay back to us here. We need to get a sense of the compound’s layout to fine-tune our timing.”
“Why glasses?” Senator Cruz asked. “Won’t those be taken when they’re brought into the camp, too?”
“No, they’re considered essential items,” I piped up. “They’re probably the only things that won’t be taken.”
If Liam recognized that that had been lifted from his original plans at East River, he didn’t show it. He sat with his legs sprawled out in front of him, leaning back on his hands. He watched his brother with wariness.
“The catch is, the kids who volunteer can’t have been previously in a camp. PSF policy dictates that kids be returned to the original camp they were processed through, and Oasis is a relatively new camp. There is absolutely no pressure to participate. Like I said, this is purely volunteer.”
Zu glanced between Liam and Chubs, but it was Vida who smoothed a tuft of her hair down in silent reassurance.
“That aspect of the plan won’t be necessary for Thurmond, as we have three people who have been inside of the camp and are intimately familiar with its layout. The other difference between this and the big hit is what we’re doing with the kids we free. From what intel we have”—otherwise known as what intel Clancy let us have—“Oasis has approximately fifty kids, all of whom I’d like to have return with us. Depending on how willing they are to fight, we can ask them to join us in the Thurmond hit, or we can slowly return them back to their parents, a few kids at a time.”
“Are we still going to go out and try to round up the tribes of kids?” Chubs asked, jerking his thumb back toward the map.
Cole nodded. “We’ll start sending out cars once we have supplies. We need as much manpower as possible if we’re going to pull this off ourselves.”
He moved through the other parts of the plan quickly; they were sketchy at best until we had actual images from inside of the camp’s walls. It would be a small team, no more than ten of us, armed but with the order to avoid a firefight if we could. With only fifty kids, there would be maybe twelve PSFs there at most, and one or two camp controllers. We would pose as a military convoy bringing in the weekly supplies; I would be out in front, of course, because I’d have the job of influencing one of the camp controllers. He or she would continue to report that everything in the camp was fine while we drove the kids out using the camp’s own transportation, whether it be SUVs, trucks, or a bus.
The kids were silent, processing this, until Liam finally said, “Fifty kids is a hell of a lot different than three thousand kids.”
“Better to run this through on a scaled model,” Cole said, smiling but somehow not smiling.
“Okay, that may be true, but other than giving us practice, and rescuing a small group of kids, what is this going to accomplish?”
Cole put his hands on his hips, one brow raised. “That’s not enough for you? Really?”
“No, I mean—” Liam ran an agitated hand back through his hair. “The plan is good, but couldn’t it serve as something else, too? Are we going to release the photos or video that’s taken so people can actually see what conditions are like in there?”
A few kids murmured in agreement, including Lucy, who added, “I like that idea a lot. People should have the opportunity to see what it’s really like.”
“Do you have the means to do that without Gray tracing their source, swooping in, and blowing this place sky high?”
Liam’s face was still hard, but I could sense him retreating under Cole’s look.
“Whose plan was this?” Chubs asked. “I read through all of them, and I don’t recognize it....”
Cole’s jaw set, just for a moment. “It’s a combination of a number of them. I pulled the best elements from each.”
Actually, it was the exact plan I had handed him, and he knew it. I faced the front of the room, refusing to turn when I felt Chubs’s gaze fall on me. There was no reason to fuel the fire by pointing it out to them.
“Senator?” Cole motioned for her to step up.