Chapter 25

The farther we walked from the minivan, the more nervous I felt. It wasn’t raining, but my skin felt clammy and cold to the touch. All around us, as far as my eyes could see, were the burned-out silver and white husks of former homes and vehicles. Several of the larger, more permanent trailers had entire walls ripped or charred away, revealing kitchens and living rooms with their insides still intact, if not waterlogged and infested with animals and slowly rotting leaves from the nearby trees. It was like a mass grave of past lives.
Even though screen doors had been ripped off or warped, even though some RVs knelt on whatever tires had been slashed, there were still signs of life all around. Walls were decorated with pictures of happy and smiling families, a grandfather clock was still counting time, pots were still on stoves, a small swing set remained undisturbed and lonely on the far end of the grounds.
Zu and I navigated around an RV that was now on its side, following a path of deep footsteps in the mud. I took one look at the RV’s rusted bones and immediately turned away, my hand tightening around Zu’s gloves. She looked up at me with a questioning look, but I only shook my head and said, “Spooky.”
When the rain came, it hammered against the metal bodies around us, rattling a few of the weaker roofs and screens. I jumped back with a yelp when a trailer’s door fell into our path. Zu only jumped over it and pointed ahead, to where Chubs and Liam were locked in conversation.
It had taken me a second to recognize Liam. Under his jacket, he wore a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over what looked like a Redskins hat. I had no idea where he managed to find them, but a pair of aviator sunglasses obscured a good portion of his face from view.
“—isn’t it,” Chubs said. “I told you.”
“They said it was at the east edge of the state,” Liam insisted. “And they could have meant West Virginia—”
“Or they could have been screwing with us,” Chubs finished for him. He must have heard us approaching, because he jumped and turned around. The moment he locked eyes with me, he scowled.
“Mornin’, sunshine!” Liam called. “Sleep okay?”
Zu darted out ahead of me, but I could feel my feet begin to drag with an invisible weight as I came toward them. I crossed my arms over my chest, steadying myself enough to ask, “What is this place?”
This time, it was Liam who blew out a sigh. “Well, we were hoping it was East River. The East River, I mean.”
“That’s in Virginia,” I said, looking down at my shoes. “The peninsula. It empties into the Chesapeake Bay.”
“Thank you Detective Duh.” Chubs shook his head. “We’re talking about the Slip Kid’s East River.”
“Hey.” Liam’s voice was sharp. “Lay off, buddy. We really didn’t know anything about it until we were out of camp, either.”
Chubs crossed his arms over his chest and looked away. “Whatever.”
“What is it?”
I felt Liam turn his attention back to me, which immediately prompted me to turn my attention back to Zu, who mostly just looked confused. Get a grip, I ordered myself, stop it.
I wasn’t afraid of them, not even Chubs. Maybe a bit when I thought too hard about how easily I could ruin their lives, or pictured their horrified reactions if they were to figure out what, exactly, I was. I just didn’t know what to say or how to act around them. Every movement and word on my part felt uncomfortable, shrill, or sharp, and I was beginning to worry that the feelings of hesitancy and awkwardness were never going to lift. I already felt like the freak of freaks without the added realizationthat I lacked the basic ability of communicating normally with other human beings.
Liam sighed, scratching the back of his head. “We first heard about East River from some kids in our camp. Supposedly—and I mean supposedly—it’s a place where any kids on the outside can go and live together. The Slip Kid, who runs the show, can get you in touch with your folks without the PSFs finding out about it. There’s food, a place to sleep—well, you get the picture. The problem is finding it. We think it’s somewhere in this area, thanks to a few fairly unhelpful Blues we ran across in Ohio. It’s the kind of thing that…”
“If you’re in the know, you’re not supposed to talk about it,” I finished. “But who’s the Slip Kid?”
Liam shrugged. “No one knows. Or…well, I guess people know, they just don’t say. The rumors about him are pretty incredible, though. The PSFs gave him that nickname because he—supposedly—escaped their custody a good four times.”
I was too stunned to say anything to that.
“Kind of puts the rest of us to shame, huh? I was feeling really bad about myself until someone told me the rumors about him.” Liam shuddered. “Supposedly he’s one of those—an Orange.”
That single word thundered down around me, freezing me in place. Liam went on to say something else, with a lot less disgust, but I couldn’t hear him over the roar in my ears. I didn’t hear a word of what he was saying.
Slip Kid. Someone who could help kids get home, if they had a home to return to, and parents who remembered them and wanted them. A life to reclaim.
And, potentially, one of the last Orange kids out there.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing the heels of my palms against them for good measure. I didn’t qualify for his help, not in the traditional way. Even if I could get in touch with my parents, it wasn’t like they would welcome a girl they considered a stranger back with open arms. There was Grams, but I had no way of knowing where she was now. After finding out what I had done, would she even want me?
“Why do you even need this guy’s help?” I interrupted, still feeling light-headed. “Can’t you just go home?”
“Use your brain, Green,” Chubs said. “We can’t go home, because PSFs are probably watching our parents.”
Liam shook his head, finally taking his sunglasses off. He looked exhausted, the skin under his eyes baggy and bruised. “You’ll have to be really careful, okay? Do you even want me to drop you off at a bus station? Because we’d be happy—”
“No!” Chubs said. “We most certainly would not. We’ve already wasted enough time on her, and she’s the reason we have the League after us, too.”
A sharp pain sprouted on the left side of my chest, just
above my heart. He was right, of course. The best option for everyone would be to drop me off at the nearest bus station and be done with it.
But it didn’t mean I didn’t want to, or need to, find this Slip Kid as badly as they did. But I couldn’t ask to stay. I couldn’t impose on them anymore than I already had, or risk ruining them with the invisible fingers that seemed bent on tearing apart every single connection I managed to make. If the League caught up to us and took them in, I’d never forgive myself. Never.
If I was going to find the Slip Kid, I was going to have to do it by myself. You’d think I’d be used to the thought of taking on each day with no one beside me, that it’d be some kind of relief not to be in constant danger of sliding into someone else’s head. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to step out under the gray overcast sky alone and feel its chill work its way under my skin.
“So,” I said, squinting at the nearest trailer. “This isn’t East River.”
“It might have been, once,” Liam said. “They could move around from time to time. I hadn’t really considered it.”
“Or,” Chubs groused, “they could have already been taken back into PSF custody. Maybe this was East River, and now there is no more East River, and we’re going to have to find a way to deliver Jack’s letter and get home by ourselves, only we won’t ever, because of the skip tracers, and we’ll all be thrown back into camp, only this time they’ll—”
“Thank you, Chuckles,” Liam cut in, “for that rousing burst of optimism.”
“I could be right,” he said. “You have to acknowledge that.”
“But you could also be wrong,” Liam said, dropping a reassuring hand on Zu’s head. “In any case, that’s what we’re going with now: this was just a false alarm. Let’s see if we can find anything useful, then we’ll hit the road.”
“Finally. I’m sick of wasting time on things that don’t matter.” Chubs shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and stalked toward me. If I hadn’t jumped out of the way, his shoulder would have knocked into mine and sent me stumbling back.
I turned, my eyes following his path as he kicked rubbish and rocks out of his way. Liam was suddenly standing next to me, his own arms crossed over his chest.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said. I must have made a sound of disbelief, because he continued. “I mean…okay, the kid is basically a grumpy seventy-year-old man trapped in a seventeen-year-old’s body, but he’s only being this insufferable to try to push you out.”
Yeah, well, I thought, it’s working.
“And I know it’s not an excuse, but he’s as stressed and freaked out as the rest of us and—I guess what I’m trying to say is, all of this acid he’s throwing your way? It’s coming from a good place. If you stick it out, I swear you won’t find a more loyal friend. But he’s scared as hell about what’ll happen, especially to Zu, if we’re caught again.”
I looked up at that, but Liam was already walking away toward a far row of battered trailers. For one crazy second I thought about following him, but I’d caught Zu out of the corner of my eye, her bright yellow gloves swinging at her sides. She jumped in and out of the trailers, stood on her toes to peer into the smashed windows of the RVs, and even, at one point, started to crawl into wreckage of an RV that looked like it had been split in half by a tornado. The metal roof, which was hanging on by what looked like two flimsy joints, was swaying and bouncing under the combined forces of rain and wind.
Although she had the hood of her oversized sweatshirt pulled snug over her head, I watched as one of Zu’s gloved hands came up and brushed the side of her face—as if she was pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. It didn’t strike me as strange until she did it again, only to pale slightly as she caught herself.
The conversation I had tried to have with Chubs in the van came crashing back to me.
“Hey, Zu…” I began, only to stop short. How were you supposed to ask a little kid if someone had played slice and dice with her brain without trampling over an already painful memory?
The truth of it was, they only shaved kids’ heads at Thurmond when they wanted to do some poking around inside of their skulls; they had all but stopped by the time I arrived, but it had taken a while for the older kids’ hair to grow back out. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had wondered if this wasn’t the case with her after all—if the reason she couldn’t speak was because they had crossed a few wires they shouldn’t have, or gone a step too far in the name of finding a “cure.”
“Why did they cut your hair?” I asked, finally.
I knew plenty of girls that would have preferred shorter hair—myself included—but aside from an annual haircut for the girls, we didn’t have much say in the matter. The way that Zu seemed to stroke her ghost hair made me think she hadn’t had much say, either.
If she had been upset by my question, she didn’t show it. Zu brought her hands up to her head and began to scrub at it, making a face of acute discomfort. Seeing that I wasn’t getting
it, she slipped one hand out of its glove and went to work scratching at her scalp.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh! You mean your group had lice?”
She nodded.
“Yikes,” I said. It made sense, but it still didn’t explain why she couldn’t open her mouth and answer me. “I’m so sorry.”
Zu lifted a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, then turned and bounded up into the nearest RV.