I couldn’t keep up with his flip-flopping moods, and I suddenly wondered if it was even worth the energy to try. The memory of what had happened when he’d found me down by the falls evaporated like mist in the sunlight. Maybe I had imagined it altogether.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” Chubs said. “After what happened at East River? Do I need to remind you that while Clancy Gray turned you into his little poodle, he couldn’t even touch me?”
“I don’t… What?” Liam’s breath exploded out of him. “What are you talking about?”
Oh, I thought, damn.
When I had gone in and pulled myself out of Liam’s memories, I’d had to…tweak a few of them, otherwise they wouldn’t have made sense. The night we tried leaving East River had been one of them, because the whole terrifying episode had been sparked by my letting my guard down and trusting Clancy when I shouldn’t have. I was a crucial part of that story.
But now—what had I slipped into its place? Had I just erased that night completely? My mind was spinning, trying to dig up what images I had pushed into that vacant space, but everything was black, and black, and black.
Chubs turned to look at me with a glare that could have incinerated a mountain.
“What are you looking at her for?” Liam exploded. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here, and with them!”
“We were trying to find you!” Chubs said. “All of us just wanted to help you!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” came Vida’s shrill voice from inside the tent. “Can you two shut the hell up and just go back to spooning? We don’t need to hear this same shitty argument for the tenth fucking time before five A.M.!”
Jude made a very valiant effort to shush her, but the damage was done.
“You—you—I can’t—” Chubs sputtered, too furious to form an actual sentence. “Come out here. Right now!”
“Come and get me, big boy,” she sang back. “I know I don’t have the parts you like, but we can always make it work.”
“Oh, like a functioning brain?” he shouted.
“Chubs!” I snapped. He knew what she was like—he was only playing into her hands. “Vida, please come out. You too, Jude.”
She exited the tent with a blanket wrapped around her like a queen’s flowing robe. The effect was soured by the fact her fading blue hair was sticking straight up on either side of her head like horns. Jude didn’t look much better—I don’t know that I had ever seen such dark rings under his eyes. He slouched out after her in his EMT jacket, taking a seat on the opposite side of the fire pit.
“I’m not gonna change my mind, so don’t even start spinning your little yarn about how great the League is, how wonderful the agents are,” Liam said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell Cole to go screw himself. I don’t need him—or you—to take care of me!”
“Says the kid who was two steps away from death’s grasping fingers when we found him,” Vida said, rolling her eyes. “You’re fucking welcome, by the way.”
“I promise that we don’t have any other motivation beside getting the flash drive and seeing our end of the deal through,” I told him, watching his chest heave with the effort to get enough air in. It was easier to talk to him like he was a stranger. And as pale, as thin, as unshaven and dirty as he was, it wasn’t hard to imagine him as one.
This is not Liam, I thought. Something’s wrong.
“Is that a fact?” Liam said coldly. “I didn’t ask for any of this, and the last thing I’d ever want is to be babysat by someone like you.”
It took me a second longer than the others to realize that last zinger was for me.
“Hey!” Jude cut in. “We’re just trying to help. You don’t have to be mean about it.”
“Lee, you’re being dramatic,” Chubs began.
“And you—God, it’s like you get a new pair of glasses, a car, and some tech and you think you’re Rambo in the jungle. I never thought you would play along with this.”
“If he trusts us,” Jude tried again, “why can’t you?”
“The League?” Liam let out a single bark of laughter. “Are you all really that stupid?”
He held up a hand to silence whatever Vida was about to say. “They talk about rehabilitation and do nothing but hold kids hostage. They talk about training kids to defend themselves, and then turn around and send them off to be killed. Either we’re in camps, or we’re with the League, or we’re on the run, and it’s not even a choice. You wanna know what I want? A choice. Just one. And this is me making it. You might be okay heading back into the arms of those murderers, but I’m staying the hell away from them. From you.”
With that, he shouldered past Chubs and me and started heading back down the same path to the falls. Chubs glanced sideways at me, but I kept my eyes on Liam as I lowered myself down onto the stump, rubbing absently at the row of stitches on my lower back.
“You really think he wants me going after him this time?” I asked.
Chubs sighed, rubbing his hands briskly over his arms, and followed his friend down the trail. Neither of them got far; if I stood on my toes, I could see where Liam stood, leaning heavily against a tree. At first, it looked like Chubs was keeping a careful distance, not wanting to provoke Liam’s temper again. But he must have said something, apologized, because in the next moment, Chubs was standing close to him, one hand on Liam’s back, the other pointing back in our direction.
“I can’t believe he said all that bullshit,” Vida groused. “This kid has more mood swings than a toddler’s birthday party.”
“I didn’t realize he hated us that much.…” Jude said.
“He doesn’t hate you,” I promised, still watching the boys. “He hates the League. He thinks we’re better off without them—that we don’t need them.”
“Well, he needed us,” Vida said, “right around the time when he was drowning in his own mucus.”
Jude was quiet, even as he watched me watch the others. When I glanced back to ask him what was wrong, he only looked away and busied himself with digging Chubs’s coat out of the tent. I forced myself to sit on one of the tree stumps around the fire pit, my entire brain throbbing in time with my pulse.
It was ten more minutes before Chubs and Liam made their way back over to us. Chubs was still shaking his head, clearly frustrated. Liam kept his own face down, avoiding all of us. The biting wind or embarrassment had turned the tips of his ears red. He kept his hands shoved in his pockets as he shuffled forward, past us, toward the tent.
“He agreed to stay for now,” Chubs said. “He does want to go to California to find Zu, but he doesn’t want any of you to be able to tail us—we’ll probably have to split up before we hit state lines.”
“That kid’s a few colors short of a rainbow, isn’t he?” Vida said, rolling her eyes. Jude huddled in close to the two of them, passing the coat over to a grateful, shivering Chubs. “Be sure to send us a postcard when you get your asses caught and hauled back into a camp.”
“I’ll keep working on him,” Chubs promised. “He just needs to cool down.”
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”
But I knew it wasn’t going to be enough.
TWENTY-THREE
NATURAL FALLS STATE PARK was located in Oklahoma, in what most considered the highlands of the Ozarks—right up in the northeast corner of the state, where it was really freaking cold in December. Chubs gave me a brief tour of the campsite as we made our way back to the others. A few picnic tables here and there, RV parking, a number of hiking trails that looped around one another. The only thing that really mattered was that the campsite was deserted.
“Are you in any pain?” he asked, tossing another branch on the growing fire.
“I’m fine. I just want to know what happened.”
I scooted, giving him half of the stump so he wouldn’t have to sit in the snow, and threw one end of the blanket over his shoulder, drawing him in close. He still smelled faintly of laundry detergent and hand sanitizer, only now I could pick up earthy scents, too—the kind that gave away just how many nights he’d slept on the ground without a shower in between. The poor kid probably felt like he was dying.