Chapter 28

I GOT MAYBE TEN MILES BEFORE the boys began to rouse. With Zu still crying in the backseat and me having no idea where we had been headed in the first place, to say I was relieved was an understatement.
“Holy crap,” Liam croaked. He pressed a hand against the side of his head and startled, sitting straight up. “Holy crap!”
His face had been inches away from Chubs’s feet, so his hands went there first, yanking at them like he was making sure they were still attached to something. Chubs let out a low moan and said, “I think I’m going to be ill.”
“Zu?” Liam crawled toward her, earning another yelp out of Chubs as he kicked his leg. “Zu? Did you—?”
She only cried harder, burying her face in her gloves.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—I—” Liam sounded agonized, like his guts were being torn straight out of him. I watched him press his fist against his mouth, heard him try to clear his throat, but he couldn’t get another word out.
“Zu,” I said, sounding strangely calm to my own ears. “Listen to me. You saved us. We wouldn’t have made it without you.”
Liam’s head jerked around, as if just remembering I was there. I winced, but how could I be upset that he would check on his real friends first?
I felt his eyes on the back of my neck as he worked his way back up to me. When he reached the driver’s seat, he collapsed into it, his face drawn and pale. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice rough. “What happened? How did you get us out?”
“It was Zu,” I began, already well aware of the narrow line I’d have to walk between the truth and what I could actually tell them—both for myself and for Zu’s sake. I wasn’t sure how much she actually remembered from what happened, but I wasn’t about to confirm any of her fears. In the end, all I said was, “She sent one car crashing into the other. It knocked one of the guys out and sent the other one running.”
“What was”—Chubs was having a hard time breathing—“that horrible noise?”
I stared at him, my mouth trying to push the words past my disbelief. “You’ve never heard that before?”
The boys both shook their heads. “Jesus,” Liam said, “that was like hearing a cat go through a blender while being electrocuted.”
“You really didn’t have White Noise? Calm Control?” I demanded, surprised by the anger licking at my heart. What camp had these kids been in? Candy Land?
“And you did?” Liam shook his head, probably trying to clear the ringing.
“They used it at Thurmond to…disable us,” I explained. “When there were outbursts or problems. Keeps you from being able to think long enough to use your abilities.”
“Why are you all right?” Chubs wheezed, half suspicious, half jealous.
That was the question of the day, wasn’t it? My long, sordid history with the White Noise included several episodes of fainting, vomiting, and memory loss, not to mention my most recent experience with bleeding profusely out of my eyes and nose. I guess once you’d had a taste of the worst, pretty bad isn’t all that terrible. If it was their first time dealing with it, that would at least explain why they wilted like dead grass after only a few seconds.
Liam was searching my face, and I wondered what he was seeing. All of it? I thought of how his jacket had felt against my cheek, the curve of his spine, and something calm and warm settled in my chest.
“I’m used to it, I guess,” I said. “And Greens aren’t as affected as Blues and the others.” I remembered to add this. A truth and a lie.
Liam offered to trade seats as soon as his face lost that familiar pinched look, and a healthy color began to return to his cheeks. The kid deserved a round of applause for how well he was hiding the tremors in his hands and legs from the others, but I had a trained eye. I recognized the nasty after-bites of the White Noise as the old friends they were. He needed a few more minutes.
“Come on,” he said as the dashboard clock clicked off another minute. “You’ve done…” His voice trailed off.
I looked down at him, only to realize he was looking at me—or, more accurately, my bony, busted knees. A moment later, after I returned my gaze to the road, I felt something warm hovering just above my leg and jerked away.
“Ah—sorry,” Liam whispered, pulling his hand back. I watched the tips of his ears go a bright cherry red. “It’s just—you’re all cut up. Please, can we stop for a second? We should regroup. Figure out where we are.”
But I didn’t want to just pull over alongside some random stretch of fence and pasture; I waited until we had found an old rest stop, complete with its red-brick colonial-style finish, and turned the van off the road and into the deserted parking lot.
Chubs took the opportunity to try to empty the contents of his stomach onto the ground but accomplished little more than some enthusiastic dry heaving. Liam stood and patted his back. “Will you help Ruby when you’re done?”
Chubs might have hated me, or wanted to scare me off, but he at least recognized I had played some small part in saving his skin. He didn’t say yes, though, only crossed his arms over his chest and blew out a long, martyred sigh.
“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.”