“Thanks,” Liam said. “You’re the best, Mother Teresa.”
He went out the sliding door behind my seat and made a beeline for the small cluster of silver water fountains that stood between him and the restroom entrances. Zu followed him out, bounding across the distance with a pink duffel bag in hand. By the time I turned my attention back to him, Chubs had collected himself enough to start poking and prodding me.
“Easy!” I gasped when his finger brushed my elbow. He jabbed a finger against one of the overhead lights and it snapped on at his command. I finally saw that the skin from my elbow down to my wrist had been rubbed raw by the road.
“Turn toward me.” Chubs looked like he was fighting with all the strength he had left in him not to roll his eyes at me. “Now, Green, before I grow a beard.”
I twisted myself around so my legs were facing toward him in the passenger seat. Unsurprisingly, they looked just about as pretty as my arm did. Both knees were skinned and already scabbing over in places, but aside from a few stray scratches and bruises that had nothing to do with the attack, they were in much better shape than my hands.
Chubs pulled what looked like a briefcase out from under his seat and popped the clasps on it open. I was only able to sneak a quick glance inside before he pulled out four white square packets and shut it again.
“God, how did you even manage to do this?” he muttered as he ripped the first one open. I smelled the antiseptic and tried to squirm away.
Chubs glowered at me from over the rims of his glasses. “If you’re going to make yourself at home, could you at least try to take better care of yourself? It’s hard enough as it is to keep the other two in one piece without you flinging yourself at danger, too.”
“I didn’t fling—” I began, then thought better of it. “Sorry?”
“Yeah, well,” he huffed. “Not as sorry as you’ll be if any of these cuts get infected.”
He brought my right hand up close to his face in order to get a better look, and I tried not to wince as he began to swipe at it with one of the disinfecting wipes about as tenderly as a wolf shredding apart its dinner. The sting that followed snapped me out of the hazy, numb stupor I was falling into. Suddenly aware of his touch, I wrenched my hand away from his and took the cold wet cloth from his hand. It didn’t hurt any less when I cleaned the small bits of asphalt out myself.
“You should go check on Lee and Zu,” I said.
“No, because then they’ll be all pissed off I’m not taking care of you.” After a moment he admitted, somewhat reluctantly, “Besides, you did seem to…well, you’re worse off than the rest of us, at least. They can wait.” He must have seen the corner of my mouth twitch, because he added, “But don’t think you’re going to get all the bandages—these are superficial wounds at best.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, tossing the disinfectant wipe out of the window. He handed me a new one for my other palm, eyes still narrowed, but maybe, just maybe, softening at the edges. I felt myself relax a bit, but I wasn’t suffering under any delusion that we were about to start braiding friendship bracelets for each other.
“Why did you lie?”
My head shot up at his question, suddenly feeling very light. “I didn’t—what are you—I’m not—”
“About Zu.” He glanced back over his shoulder. His voice was quiet when he continued. “You said she only knocked that guy out, but…that wasn’t the case, was it? He was killed.”
I nodded. “She didn’t mean to—”
“Obviously not,” he said, sharply. “I was wondering why no one was coming after us, and I got worried, knowing what it would do to her…and, well, I guess you have some common sense after all.”
It came to me then as I looked at him—one of those rare, perfect crystallizations of understanding. He wanted me out because he saw me as a threat to them. He wouldn’t ever trust me until I proved myself otherwise—and after my slip in messing up the color of the SUV, that was likely to be half past never.
“What’s the world with one less skip tracer, anyway?” He bent down to retrieve his briefcase again, replacing the unused supplies in it.
That’s right, I thought, sitting up straighter. I didn’t tell them.
“They weren’t skip tracers. They were PSFs.”
At that, Chubs actually barked out a laugh. “And I’m guessing their uniforms were stuffed under their plaid shirts and jeans?”
“One of them was wearing a badge,” I said. “And the orange device they were using—I saw one at Thurmond, once.” Chubs didn’t look convinced, but we didn’t have the time—and I certainly did not have the energy—to be running circles around the truth for the next hour. “Look,” I continued, “you don’t have to believe me, but you should know that one of them radioed in a Psi number—42755. That’s Liam, right?”
I gave the story from my end and left the rest for him to fill in from his side. By the time I got to a description of the orange device, he had heard quite enough. He sucked in a deep breath, his lips drawing together to a point, until he looked more ferret than human. I held my own breath as he rolled down his window and proceeded to relate, down to the exact words, what I had just finished telling him, like he didn’t trust me to do it myself.
“I told you the PSFs would catch up to us!” he kept repeating, like we hadn’t heard him shout it the first ten times. “We’re just lucky it wasn’t her.”
I wondered who he meant but knew better than to ask.
Liam ignored him and kept his back to us, still bent over the silver drinking fountain. Zu stood next to him, dutifully holding the button down so he could use both hands to scrub his face in the stream of water shooting out of it.
I used the last of the wipes to clean the dirt off my own face. “I just want to know how that PSF recognized him, even before he used this orange thing. It flashed, but he knew the number off the top of his head. He didn’t need to wait for it to tell him that.”
Chubs stared at me a moment, then brought a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Everyone had their photo taken when they were processed. Didn’t you?”
I nodded. “So they put together a network for searching the photos?” I asked.
“Green, how the hell am I supposed to know that?” he said. “Describe it to me again.”
The orange gadget must have been some sort of a camera or scanner—that was the only explanation I could drum up that Chubs didn’t shoot down as being moronic.
I pressed my hands against my eyes, trying to fight back the urge to vomit.
“It’s bad news if that’s all it takes for them to ID us,” Chubs said, rubbing a hand over his forehead and smoothing out the wrinkles there. “If we weren’t already screwed—they probably know we’re looking for East River now, which means they’re going to have more patrols out, which means they’re going to be watching our families even closer, which means it’ll be even harder for the Slip Kid…”
He never finished his train of thought. He didn’t have to.
I let out a humorless laugh. “C’mon. They’re going to send out a whole armada for a few freaks?”
“First of all, armadas are comprised of ships,” Chubs said. “And second, no, they wouldn’t send one out for a few freaks.”
“Then what’s the—”
“But they would send one out to get Lee.”
He didn’t wait for me to piece it together.
“Green, who do you think was the mastermind behind our camp’s breakout?”
When the others were ready to return to the minivan, we played a silent game of musical chairs. Chubs took the middle seat on the passenger side, and Zu, her usual perch behind the driver’s seat. I had two options at that point: crawl into the rear seat or tough it out in the front seat, while trying to act like everything was all hunky-dory and pretending that Chubs hadn’t just told me Liam was responsible for what might have been the only successful camp breakout ever.