I wasn’t tired in the slightest anymore, and I had a feeling he wasn’t either, not really. I kissed the scar at the corner of his lips, running my hands up his neck and burying them in his hair. His pale blue eyes seemed to darken as he leaned down to meet me halfway.
Someone coughed behind us.
And coughed again.
Liam said something uncharacteristically vulgar under his breath as he pulled back, his face flushed and his eyes a bit too wild. “Yeah?”
It was the girl who’d been working at the table—she was a Blue who’d come in with Zu’s ragtag group. Elizabeth. That was her name. Liza.
“I finished, but I’m not sure it looks...I think it might look more like a white banana?” She held up a black helmet for the two of us to inspect. Painted along one side was what looked to my eye like a crescent moon. Liam’s arms tensed around my waist.
“It looks great,” he said.
“Well you know what it’s supposed to be, but what if she can’t?” Liza said.
“She?” I repeated.
“Our contact,” Liam said quickly, “Senator Cruz’s, I mean. When I go to pick up supplies, she wanted something to identify me.”
“But won’t you be driving a car or truck?” I asked. “Not the bike?”
He hesitated, standing up and away from the bike. I saw the effort of his concentration as he turned a smiling face back on me. “Sometimes the bike, depending on the situation. We’ll paint one of the doors of the trucks, too.”
I don’t know what it was, exactly. The odd tone of his voice; the way Liza all but bolted, her face pale; how quick he was to take my hand and start guiding us back toward the tunnel. Every thought that passed through his head had always registered on Liam’s face, good or bad. Seeing his carefully blank face, half-hidden by the shadows in the tunnel, I pieced together the realization.
He was keeping secrets, too.
Vida and Chubs left the next morning, long before the sun came up. Liam, Zu, and I were all there to see them off at the tunnel’s entrance. Regardless of whether or not we’d been planning on it, the two of them had been bickering so loudly from the moment the alarm on Liam’s watch went off that none of us had any chance of falling back asleep. Nico and Cole showed up a few minutes later, both pale and drained with an exhaustion that hadn’t come with waking up at that ungodly hour, but staying awake to meet it. It set me on edge the way they wouldn’t make eye contact with any of us. When I asked Cole what was going on, he only said, “We’ll talk about it after.”
As Vida went over the map one last time with Liam and Cole, I pulled Chubs aside and walked him a short ways down the hall. I could see him fighting inside himself for some composure; Chubs was so ruled by his head, by logic, that he didn’t have a coping mechanism for when powerful emotions threatened his careful process. I don’t think he was afraid for himself, so much as afraid of what could happen while they were gone.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he started. “Be safe. Make sure that you seek out proper medical attention—”
“Isn’t that the lecture I’m supposed to be giving you?” I asked.
“Yo, no time to chat and hug it out,” Vida called. “Let’s get cracking.”
Chubs held up a finger to signal to the others that we needed a minute. Vida let out an impatient snort, then turned a very different finger in his direction.
“I have no doubt you guys are going to pull this off,” I began, “but how are you going to get through it without one of you strangling the other?”
“Well, we’re pretty evenly matched,” he said reasonably. “She has the brawn, I have the brains. Either both of us will come back, or neither of us will because we’ll have clawed each other’s throats out.”
“Don’t even joke about it,” I whispered.
“I have to joke about it, otherwise I’ll probably start crying.” Chubs’s face suddenly looked as drawn as I felt.
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I said quickly. “It’s not too late.”
“Isn’t it? Besides, I have to pull my weight, too.” He shrugged with a nonchalance that looked unnatural on him. His voice sounded strained, filtered through a lump in his throat.
“You and Vida will both be fine,” I said, planting both hands on his shoulders and forcing him to look down and meet my gaze. “You have everything under control. You’ll both be careful, and quick, and back in one piece.”
Chubs turned back toward Vida, who was the only person I knew who could make pacing look like prowling.
“Well,” he amended with a long-suffering look, “hopefully no more than two pieces.”
Despite what Vida had said, she waited patiently as Chubs knelt to talk to Zu and gave Liam a good pounding on the back. Cole unlocked the door, letting a draft of cold air into the hallway, and stood back as Chubs took the first few steps down.
As much faith as I had in them, I did have to fight off the urge to throw myself in front of the tunnel out and block their path. I pressed a hand against my chest, trying to stamp the feeling of panic out. But Zu had no such reservations. She bolted out of Liam’s grip and pushed past Cole, who was shutting the door after them. By the time we caught up to them, she was gripping their packs, her heels digging into the unfinished floor, crying in that silent, heartbreaking way. Crying harder than I’d ever seen; she shook her head, her lips moving with silent pleas. Chubs looked back at us, startled.
Zu had been the toughest of our group in many ways, the one quickest to bounce back after terror or sadness knocked her flat. Whatever walls she’d built up to keep the feelings from cresting, they weren’t high enough now to stop the desperate fear. And it devastated me. My throat ached with the need to cry, too.
Vida dropped her pack and knelt down in front of her. “Hey girl, none of that. It’s like what we talked about, yeah?”
Zu pressed her face against Chubs’s backpack.
“What happened to you with that guy—the one who drove you to California, that was some—” I saw her catch herself, modify her word choice—“that was some messed-up stuff, and I’m sorry, I’m really sorry that it happened to him. But me and Charlie Boy? We’re coming back. None of us are going to leave you here alone. We take care of our family, right?”
I didn’t realize Liam still had a hand on my shoulder until it tightened. His face was ashen.
That calmed Zu down, at least enough to release her grip on Chubs and turn toward Vida fully.
“You can trust me, Z. I won’t let you down. Okay?”
She nodded, scrubbing at her face with her sleeve. Vida held up her fist for a bump, but Zu one-upped her, wrapping her bony arms around the older girl’s neck. Vida said something too low for any of the rest of us to hear, but when Zu pulled back she was nodding, a look of fierce determination on her face. With no other warning she turned and hugged Chubs, too, looking back to point a finger toward Vida as if to say, Be nice.
“I told you,” Vida said as she stood. “I keep my promises.”
Liam stepped forward to guide Zu back into the hallway so she didn’t have to watch the door shut and lock behind them. I saw her straighten herself out, her fists clenching at her sides and her chin lifting up—the same way I’d seen Vida prep herself for battle.
“Let’s go get something to eat, okay?” Liam said. He looked back over his shoulder. “Coming?”
I shook my head. “Have to shower and take care of a few things. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Liam waved and started walking with Zu back down the hall, heading to the kitchen in the lower level.
“Okay, what’s going on?” I asked before either Cole or Nico could speak. “What happened last night?”
“It’s easier to show you.” Cole started past me, heading the same way his brother had taken, toward the stairs. I followed him silently, watching Nico watch the floor, my stomach clenching. It was getting too hard to pretend like I didn’t care.
It was the first time I’d been down in the computer room since the supplies had come in last night. Where there had once been only one laptop, there were now five desktops. Another three silver laptops were spaced out along the desks, which were still pushed against the walls, leaving an empty space at the center of the room for planning. I spotted a printer and a scanner near the old laptop. Nico had picked a seat at the far back corner of the room, as usual. Cole brushed aside printouts of indecipherable code from one of the nearby seats and offered it to me.
Nico keyed in some kind of a password and brought up a window of more code.
“Somehow this doesn’t feel ‘easier,’” I said. “What are we looking at?”
“This is our server log,” Nico said. “It seemed like it was lagging last night, so I was trying to troubleshoot what the issue was. This right here—” He pointed to the screen. “That means someone sent one of the files saved there, transferring it via FTP to another encrypted server.”
“What file?” I asked.