I nodded.
“You mean you want to send an extraction team into a secure facility, manned by a hundred trained ex-soldiers who specialize in torture and terror...because you have a theory,” Cole said.
“If she’s not there, then at least we’ll find answers about where she is,” I said. “It’ll be a quick in-and-out. It’s not like we don’t know where Kansas HQ is. Two of us could go, survey the situation. If it seems too dangerous, we’ll back off. It’s worth the risk. If we find her and I can fix her, we’ll have answers about the cure. If not, then...we’ll have someone to trade for Cate.”
Vida’s interest in the Op shot way up at that. “Promise me that we’ll eventually trade her for Cate, and I’m in. You and me, we can do this. It’s nothing we haven’t done a dozen times before.”
Chubs groaned, putting a distressed hand to his face. “Don’t tell us that. That makes it worse.”
“It can’t be Ruby,” Cole said, “she’s needed here. To deal with it.”
I opened my mouth to protest.
“Wait—wait, wait, wait—” Liam interrupted, “slow down. A few hours ago you were worried about Agent Conner revealing the location of the Ranch, but what if they spill their guts about Kansas HQ? What if they’ve already packed up and left?”
“Then we’ll follow their trail,” Vida said. “Though I’ll put a hundred bucks on the smug assholes feeling too invincible and secure to beat a hasty retreat. They’re still there—a hundred bucks.”
I turned to Cole. “If anyone is going in to bring him food, it’s going to have to be you. I can pretty much guarantee he’s not going to want to see my face for a while.”
Cole looked intrigued by this, but ultimately shook his head. “No, you’re needed here. If not for that, then to lead the camp hit.”
“It would just be for a few days,” I protested.
“No. I mean it.”
The others shifted uncomfortably as Cole and I stared each other down.
“I’d offer, but I told the others I’d start organizing a search for the tribes,” Liam said, running a hand back over his shaggy hair. “I want to go out and try to find Olivia’s group myself. I think I have an idea of where they are.”
“Really?” I asked. Olivia and Brett and all of the other kids we’d met at Nashville had some experience with fighting. They’d be invaluable if they were willing to help.
Chubs straightened his windbreaker, zipping it up with a startling amount of conviction. “I’ll go with Vida.”
There was a moment of total and complete silence.
“Uh, no thanks,” Vida said. “Pretty sure it would be more helpful to bring a dish towel.”
“I still have my skip tracer credentials—it’s just a matter of stopping somewhere to get a new ID made,” he said, more to her than the others.
“You? You were a skip tracer?” Cole started to laugh, only to realize the rest of us weren’t. “Wow, okay then. Why not? Continue.”
“I can access their network and GPS system to make sure we steer clear of them.” He swiveled toward Vida. “Also, screw you—maybe you can be all stealthy and break into their building to get the woman out, but I can get us there and back safely. I did this for months and never got a second glance from anyone, including PSFs.”
“Probably because your ugly-ass face blinded them on the first look,” she muttered.
“Really? Ugly jokes?” he hissed. “Don’t tell me you’ve finally emptied out your arsenal of wit.”
Liam stepped between them, blocking their view of each other—and still they kept slugging words to each other under their breath.
“Look, Vida, I’m happy to agree to the trade you want, but the odds of pulling this off really aren’t that great, kid,” Cole said. “I can’t even begin to predict what would happen if they caught you. How would you even play it?”
“By saying I was sick to death of how chickenshit everyone here is, and that I was ready to take an actual risk if it meant a huge payoff,” she said, pointedly. “The ‘payoff’ in their minds being that I want to enlist with them.”
“That’s actually pretty plausible,” I offered.
To Vida, this wasn’t about getting the cure; her investment was a hundred percent in the fact that this was a real avenue to getting Cate back. I wish I could have had her confidence. I wish I could have let myself believe that they’d keep her alive long enough to matter, but what was the point? It was easier to feel the numbness of certainty than live along the burning edge of hope.
“All right, Vida. All right. You can go, as long as you take Skippy the skip tracer here with you. Unnecessary risks aren’t an option. Do you understand?”
I almost told him that the two of them had pretty much opposite definitions of “unnecessary risks,” but kept my mouth shut. I didn’t like the idea of either of them being out of my sight for that long, let alone what could happen along the way. But if we were going to take a big risk, it needed to be for something like this.
“You got it,” Vida said. “If you think I’m going to blow any chance to get Cate back then you must be smoking the good stuff.”
“Darlin’, I wish.”
Cole, Liam, and I worked silently, hauling in one crate of weapons at a time. For once, I was grateful for the uneasy silence; no matter how unbearable the tension was, another fight would have been infinitely worse. There was a moment when I’d leaned forward to pick up a rifle and place it up on its proper rack in the weapons locker, and my sweatshirt had gaped. Liam had reached over and pulled the fabric down out of the way. He didn’t comment on the bruise on the side of my neck, only smoothed the collar back up and turned away. When we were finished, he was the first one out of the room, disappearing through the double doors, heading, if I had to guess, back to the garage.
I followed the route he’d taken, stopping to check our bunk room first. Most of the kids had checked out for the night, but the door to our room was open; only Chubs was inside, passed out on his bed with all the lights on, a book resting across his chest. I smiled and reached for the light switch when I noticed the colorful, small box on Vida’s bed.
It took less than thirty seconds to figure out where she’d gone. The top of the hair dye box had been ripped straight off, meaning one thing.
The ventilation in the bathrooms was bad enough that we had to prop both of the doors partly open to keep the spaces from feeling like the South in late summer. The steam had been thick enough to make me light-headed.
“That’s okay, you know,” Vida was saying, “but Z, that’s a really shitty way to live.”
I paused outside of the door, one hand pressed against it as I leaned forward, catching the one-sided conversation.
“Yeah, but doesn’t it bother you?” she continued. “Aren’t there things that are important enough to say—I know you can write it out, don’t get me wrong, but how are you ever really going to get this shit off your chest if you can’t talk it through? I mean, look, Z, you know I feel you, but the only person that’s being hurt with this silence is you. Don’t give them that power. Don’t let them trap you into never saying anything. There are people worth remembering, speaking up for. You’re important. You deserve to speak and have people shut the hell up and listen to you. You’re smarter than ninety percent of our population.”
I closed my eyes, pulling back to lean against the wall.
“Oh, girl, I get scared, too,” Vida said. “I’m always a little scared when I go out on an Op. Not, like, shit-my-pants scared, but I’m afraid of what could happen to the others if I screw up or don’t cover them well enough. Our friend Roo owes me about five years of my life back.” She paused, likely waiting for Zu to write something. “Thing is, though, fear is worthless. It stops you when you need to keep moving most. And it only exists inside of your head. You can hate yourself for being scared, but that’s still letting it control your life. Aren’t you tired of that same old shit? It’s just going to keep dragging you down.”
There was another pause; long enough that I started to open the door again.
“People come in and out of our lives all the time,” Vida said, her voice tight. “They can promise that they’ll be right back, but you might never see them again. We got a good unit here, and you know why it’s so strong? Because we chose it. We made it. My sister, she wasn’t like your parents, but she still left me. The bitch called in my location for a reward, but I won’t let her win. I won’t give her the satisfaction of not letting myself trust anyone ever again. She didn’t choose me, and now I’m choosing a different family.”
I waited until Vida was back to humming a little song before slipping inside.
“Hey girl, what’s doing?” Vida glanced over.
For once, the smell of bleach wasn’t coming from the cleaning products we used to scrub out the showers, but from the thick cream Vida had combed through her short hair. There was an old ratty towel over her shoulders to catch the gooey mixture before it hit her sports bra. For a second, I couldn’t see anything other than the scar tissue on her shoulders from the burns she’d gotten in Nashville, fighting Mason. It made my stomach go sour.
Zu sat perched on the counter next to her, swinging her legs back and forth, little white socks bobbing up and down through the air. She held up two different boxes in her hands for me to see—one blue, one red—then gestured toward Vida.
“I made Boy Scout stop on our way back from Oregon,” Vida explained, taking the towel from her shoulders and wrapping it around Zu’s much smaller ones. “Glad I did, too. Had to get my war paint on to go into battle tomorrow.”