“You bitch,” I said, looking up. “You really thought you could play us? Turn us back over to the League? What did Alban promise you—that you could take over as team leader?”
I was half blind with rage, too angry to let her answer. I stood, throwing the device on the ground. Vida and Jude both took generous steps back. My brain was humming with need, with nothing more than the desire to pry into hers and leave it mangled and ruined. My anger added a boost to their strength and I thought, I really did, if I let them loose, the invisible hands would take her this time without me needing to grab her. I turned, ready to let them fly.
Instead, I felt a hand close over my wrist and pull me back. Chubs was on his feet now, too, his eyes fixed on the screen. I heard him click a button, and then the Chatter was hovering in front of my face, and I was reading an old, received message.
HEAD SOUTH ON 40 // ADDRESS AS DISCUSSED // EXPLAIN UPDATED OP IMMEDIATELY UPON CONTACT // TELL HER I AM SORRY
“Tell her I’m sorry?” I turned back toward Vida, who had turned away, her face a stone mask. “Who is this? Cole?”
Vida’s swollen lip slurred her speech, and when she spoke, it was so quiet I had to strain to hear her. Her reluctance proved the blossoming theory in my mind—after all, there was only one person she protected like this.
“No,” she said, “it’s Cate.”
I was ready to have it all out there, but Chubs insisted that we return to the camp and rebuild the fire with a sharp “I prefer to not take my bad news in the freezing dead of night, thank you very much.”
He steered me toward one end of the smothered fire and headed for his car. I was distantly aware of the beep of the car unlocking and the door slamming shut. When he sat back down next to me, Chubs started in on cleaning the cuts on my face and arms with a total lack of sympathy.
“Someone better start talking now,” he said, “because, trust me, you don’t want to hear what I have to say about all this. Especially at one o’clock in the morning.”
Vida sniffed, drawing her knees up to her chest. The right half of her face was cast entirely in darkness. Or covered in an enormous bruise.
I held up the Chatter to the dim firelight, turning it back and forth. “Who gave you this? Nico?”
She waited so long to answer I thought for sure she wouldn’t. All I got was a shrug. Her nails were clawing into the dirt, dragging clumps of it up into her clenched fists.
“So he and Cate are in on this, too?” I demanded. “Who else?”
Vida crossed her arms over her chest and stared out into the dark distance.
“Why keep this from us?” Jude asked. “Did she ask you to? It doesn’t make any sense, and it really doesn’t make sense that you still won’t talk about it. You got caught, and now the Op has been compromised. And what are you supposed to do when that happens?”
Accept, adapt, and act. Quickly. The words had been scrawled onto one of the walls in the training room. They might as well have been tattooed directly onto our brains.
“Fine,” she said, circling her shoulders back as if to ease the tension there. She’s angry, I realized. Vida was furious—with herself. The perfect little soldier had blown her own Op, the special one Cate had entrusted her with. She was breathing hard, sucking air up between her clenched teeth. Cate was the single most important person in her life, maybe the only one who really mattered to her. I had an idea of why she had withheld that information, but I wanted to hear her admit it.
“Cate and Cole planned this whole thing, pretty much from the second we brought his ass back to HQ,” Vida said. “They go back. She took him under her wing when he first joined, helped train him. He told her the truth about your dumbass Prince Charming and the flash drive, and you were the solution they came up with. For whatever reason, Cate stupidly trusts you to handle shit.”
“Why have Cole give me the story, then?”
“They’re watching her. Rob and the others. She knew what he was like, or at least figured it out a few months ago, but she was trying to stay close to his creepy ass to make sure he didn’t come after us. She couldn’t go to Alban or any of the advisers, because she was afraid she’d be reassigned from us if they saw her as being ‘difficult.’ Nico showed Cole, Cate, and me the video of Blake being offed and she just about went ballistic.”
“When was this?”
“Just after you left HQ.” Vida tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, glancing over at me. “Nico said you told him not to, but something you said to Cole made him push the issue. They’re sitting on the video until we bring the intel back.”
Of course—because keeping the Children’s League together was the top priority here. Not protecting kids. Not cutting off the psychopaths.
“Let me see if I understand this,” Chubs began. “Cate was in on everything from the beginning, but she kept silent on it? Was that to act as some kind of fail-safe?”
“Not bad, Grannie,” Vida said. “Cole said Cate’s role had to stay a secret, even from you. If you dipshits got caught and were brought in for questioning, he didn’t want you to be able to implicate her—if he took the fall, at least Cate would still be around to be on our side. She hated it, but I told her she had to agree, otherwise I wasn’t going to help you. She didn’t say yes until she realized there was no way to get Jude removed from the mission without it making people suspicious. Rob requested him personally.”
Jude looked like he was a breath away from throwing up all over himself. The firelight drew out the flush of panic in his cheeks.
Vida threw a truly pitying look his way. “Cate said he ran after you called him out. Went totally off the fucking grid before Barton could bring him in for questioning.”
“So he won’t be there when we get back,” Jude said, sighing in relief.
No, but it meant that I had released a furious monster out into the world to rip it apart and remake to his own liking.
“That’s everything I know,” Vida said. “The end. But I’m telling you now, if either of you breathe a word—one goddamn word—about Cate, I will come down on you so hard, they’ll be naming hurricanes after me for a fucking century.”
I opened my mouth to fire back at her but thought better of it in the end. For as long as I’d known Vida, I’d felt a sharp sense of pity over her obvious worship of Cate. I thought I’d been given a glimpse of the real Cate that lived below the pristine exterior. But now it was becoming harder and harder to believe that either one of us was completely right about who she was. To me, her belief in the League had always seemed naive—I really thought she blinded herself to everything going on around her to stay in that happy world that existed only in her mind. Maybe Jude really was right, and the League of today didn’t remotely resemble the one she had willingly joined years ago.
Then why did she only give herself up to me in pieces? And why had it taken me so long to put them together into a somewhat complete picture?
“You’ve been communicating directly with Cate, I suppose?” Chubs took the Chatter out of my limp hand and turned it over. “She’s been guiding you along?”
“Yeah,” Vida said. “She sent me the routes to get down here. Too bad she couldn’t just load his ass into Google Maps. Not even Nico has been able to track him.”
The screen between Chubs’s fingers flashed to life and let out a low, vibrating growl. The light it emitted was bright enough that we could all watch as his eyebrows rose steadily up past his glasses’ frames to his hairline.
“Well, maybe she can’t send exact coordinates,” he said, flipping it around, “but she has an idea of where we could start.”
TWELVE
TARGET SIGHTED OUTSIDE NASHVILLE // HOSTILE BLUE TRIBE IN NEARBY AREA // APPROACH WITH CAUTION