He looks down at his chest. He’s shirtless, but most of his chest is covered by a white pad. When the Stalker slammed him into the ground, the force was so strong it took a lot of the skin off. His face glows white, and his hair is damp and pressed down over his forehead. Damn it, the LIC was right. Wounded guys are hot.
Thankfully, the cuts are quite shallow, little more than grazes, and Natalie thinks he passed out from shock. While I was carrying Dyl away from the barn, Juliet raided the wreckage of the truck for food and other supplies. She managed to salvage a few cans of food, some singed clothes, and a kit filled with medicine and matches.
I raise a white pill, a Tylenol, to Dyl’s chapped lips.
“Here,” I say. “It’ll get rid of the pain.”
He waves my hand away. “It’s fine. I can handle the pain.” He scratches his arm. “The cold is slightly harder to handle. Can you get me a shirt?”
I stand up and brush the leaves from my pants. Then I walk through the forest to the others. Trevor and Natalie are curled up together on the ground, with Trevor’s massive arm covering most of Natalie’s torso. Juliet is sitting on a large moss-covered rock, her legs dangling over the edge. Her hair is straggly and she’s fiddling with some wires: the Bolt Gloves. Her eyebrows are furrowed and her lips are pursed.
She places the wires down and picks up an open can of beans. She offers it to me.
“Baked beans?” she asks. “They’re cold and terrible, but they made me feel a little bit better. So maybe they’ll work on you.”
I grab the can and raise it to my lips. I fill my mouth with the metallic-tasting beans. I swallow, then place the can back down on the rock.
“Caden,” says Juliet, “I’ve decided to forgive you.”
I wipe my chin with my sleeve. How can she forgive me so fast? How can she be over it when I haven’t even begun to forgive myself for what I’ve done to her?
“You don’t have to do that, Juliet.”
“I know. But I’ve decided I want to. So I forgive you. We’re okay.”
“You have no idea how much that means to me,” I say.
I’m being totally honest.
“I think I do,” she says. “It’s why I’m forgiving you. But enough about that. How’s Dyl?”
“He’s awake. And he’s all right, I guess, considering what happened to him. He can move, at least. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Not good. Just okay. I’m trying to come up with a way to get out of this alive. To do that, I need to know more about the LIC. Nat’s told me a bit, but your memory is fresher, so I’d also like to ask you some questions. How much do you know about it? They spy on people they think are important, right? Why? What does that achieve?”
I cross my arms. “Juliet, they don’t tell Love Interests everything. We’re on a strictly need-to-know basis.”
“I understand that, but someone as smart as you must know some things about their operations. Please, Caden, this is important. If we’re going to escape them, I need to know more about them.”
I sit down. “Fine. All I know for sure is that they sell the information they collect. That’s what Mr. Craike, who is the leader of the place, told me. He asked me how much I thought someone would pay for information that could destroy a president.”
“No,” she says. “They can’t be…”
“But they are! This goes really deep. If you think of anyone who has ever been anyone, chances are they had, or have, a Love Interest beside them. That’s the thing, Juliet. This has been going on for centuries. He showed me this hologram of all the Love Interests throughout history, and there were hundreds of them. These people have been lurking in the backgrounds of history for generations, collecting secrets for the LIC to sell. We live in a world where a piece of information can kill careers or start wars. The people who run the LIC have been taking advantage of this for years.”
She nods, taking it all in. “It’s actually kind of genius. Of course people are going to share secrets with their loved ones. That’s kind of the whole point of having them in the first place. What the LIC is doing is disgusting, but it’s genius. That said, I think I’ve found their weakness.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Secrets are their business, but their existence itself is a secret. I imagine their clients are small in number, or maybe they don’t even know how the LIC gets its information. My point is that people who know about the existence of Love Interests are dangerous to the LIC. It’s why they want to kill us so bad. If word got out that they’re using loved ones to spy on people, they’d lose all their power. If we could find a way to tell the world about Love Interests, then…”
“A Stalker will—”
Her eyes light up as she interrupts me. “That’s the thing, Caden. It always comes down to the threat of Stalkers. Without them, the LIC would just be … people. And that’s the thing about technology—as much as I love it, it becomes a crutch. I’m sure they had ways to keep Love Interests in line before they invented Stalkers, but now I’d bet they’d be lost without them. If we could find a way to destroy the Stalkers, we would buy enough time for Love Interests to come forward. We’d need a lot of them to do it, but that would destroy the LIC for good.”
I breathe in the clear, crisp air. It’s too nice, too easy, to be true. If this plan were feasible surely someone must’ve tried it. “Well, maybe that’s true. But right now all I know is that we need to move.”
But I can already feel her idea worming its way through my brain, finding a spot to nestle and take root. We can fight back. I pick up a black shirt from the pile beside Trevor’s head and walk back to Dyl.
He’s standing with his hands in his pockets. I grip the shirt tight. This boy tricked me, and tried his absolute hardest to kill me. I should want to beat the crap out of him. Yet the sight of him standing there only reminds me of our nights together. It was fake, I think. It was all fake. I can’t long for those moments because they weren’t real, and I can’t keep treating Dyl like he’s the guy I thought he was.
I pass him the shirt and he grabs it with one hand.
“It’s Trevor’s,” I say. “So it’ll probably be a bit big. But it’s black, so I thought you’d like it.” I wince. I guess it’s not as easy as just deciding to stop being nice to him. “We need to move,” I say, my tone harsh. “Is that a problem for you?”
He shakes his head. “No, it’s not. I’m fine.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“Don’t you trust me anymore?”
“Just … put your clothes on. We’re moving.”
Keeping eye contact with me, he pulls the shirt over his head, flinching as the material touches his chest. Once it’s on, he smoothes down his hair.
“So what’s the plan, Caden?”
We rejoin the others. Natalie and Trevor are now standing. She is stretching, and he is yawning a massive yawn that shows all his teeth.