“Thanks,” I say and take a sip. I let the warm liquid coat my tongue and run down the back of my throat.
Luke slides his back along the wall until he reaches the spot on the ground next to me. His position matches mine. Knees up, head back, forearms draped over the tops of his kneecaps. “I know this is a stupid question, but how are you doing?”
“Best I can,” I say and attempt to shrug my shoulders but they don’t really move. More like a flinch than a shrug. “I just had to walk away. Sam isn’t listening to me at all even though I was completely right about the airport take-down. She doesn’t want to hear it. She probably thinks I’m too emotionally compromised or some bullshit.”
“Do you think you are?” Luke asks, his eyes fixed on my face as I continue to stare straight ahead.
“Noooo.” I let the answer slowly leak out of my mouth with extra o’s for emphasis. “I think I was the only one thinking clearly during that blown mission. I knew we should have rushed them and opened fire as soon as Torres’s guys got there. I knew exactly what would happen if we waited or tried to take them peacefully. They’ve been watching my family for too long. They already lost me. No way were they going to return to Colombia without my parents.”
“You were right,” Luke says with a sigh.
My lungs take a breath, but the air down here is heavy and thick and makes me feel like I’m drowning. “I wish they would have just taken me,” I say, my voice gravelly, like I’ve swallowed a fistful of broken glass. “Then none of this would be happening.”
“But you’d be dead.”
“I’d be dead but everyone else would be safe.”
“Don’t say that,” Luke says, grabbing my arm, turning my face toward his. “Don’t even think it.”
I nod in forced agreement. But it’s hard not to. The butterfly effect. Had I done one tiny thing differently, I wouldn’t be sitting here.
“We’ll find them, Mac,” Luke says, his face falling as soon as the nickname escapes his lips. Cooper’s and Sam’s muffled voices just beyond the wall fills the sudden space between us. He looks down at the ground, digging the heels of his sneakers into the cement floor, then looks back up at me. “Sorry.”
“I actually really like that nickname. I’ve never told you that before. But now it just feels strange, like Mac is part of another life, another Reagan, and you know the real one now.”
“How many Reagans have you been?” Luke asks, his blue eyes still sad.
“So many,” I say and tuck a strand of my dark hair behind my ear. “Seven or eight. At least that’s the number of covers I remember. I’ve created a lot of lives and told a lot of lies. Honestly, it’s been hard to keep them straight. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want to do it anymore. I know the good I could do as a Black Angel. It’s just…”
“So hard,” Luke says, finishing my thought, and I nod. Luke opens his mouth to speak, then changes his mind and stops.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Luke says, rubbing the palms of his hands over the top of his jeans. “I feel in this weird way sort of envious of the training you’ve had. I want to be in the military more than anything. Maybe even become a Black Angel one day now that I know the group exists. But at the same time, I feel like you’ve been cheated somehow. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to feel like you’re in constant danger while also trying to pass geometry.”
I look down at my hands and examine my almost nonexistent fingernails. I tuck them into the sleeves of my sweatshirt and hug them to my chest. “I’ve gotten so used to it—to the fear—that it’s sort of become my normal. I feel so guilty about not wanting to go to the training academy. I was planning on it all my life. I didn’t have a question in my mind. That was just what I was meant to do. But in the last year things have just … shifted.”
“You got a taste of normal life,” Luke says. It’s incredible how that boy can read my mind.
“Yeah. I mean, I feel like I made real friends and created a real life. I met you,” I reply, and shrug. “And when I was with you guys, there was sort of this lightness I never felt before. I guess I’m scared of losing that feeling.”