“Our plan played out like we thought it would,” Cole said, “Mostly. Don’t get your panties in a twist, Conner. No one got hurt. It’s a clean break. The fact that the other agents left does nothing but prove that our instincts on this were right. No one wants to help the kids. At least this way, we’ve got the Ranch and we’ve muddled them on what our plans are. If they’re stopped or picked up by President Gray’s friends, they’ll give them wrong intel on us. This is the right base of operations for us, not them. It’s quiet, we have working electricity and water, and, now, plenty of space to work.”
“Yeah, and look at what we don’t have!” Cate finally detonated. Her pale face flushed, and she was barely keeping a lid on her trembling anger. “You sent away trained professionals—the ones who could have conducted these camp hits you want to do, the ones who could have protected all of these kids! We should have spent time working to bring them over to our side, not manipulating them into thinking it was their idea to go. And how dare you make this kind of decision without even consulting me? I can’t—” She shook her head, her eyes latching so fiercely onto mine that I had to look away. “Ruby, what is going on?”
“Give it a rest, Conner,” Cole said, with an edge to his tone. “The plan is to train the kids to fight. To empower them.”
“To empower yourself,” Cate corrected sharply, and if Vida hadn’t been in the room, I have no idea what Cole would have said or done in response to that. His fist clenched at his side. “I get it, Cole...I do. But this wasn’t the right way. They took the computer servers. I have one laptop, and only because I brought it into my quarters to do some work last night and hid it when they started talking about leaving. They’ll lock us out of the system. What are we going to do then? You burnt this bridge without giving us a way to get back over.”
The League had spent the better part of a decade building up a network of information on everything: whereabouts of former politicians, access into the skip tracer and PSF databases, building schematics, black site locations. I’d been counting on having access to it to proceed with any and all camp hits. If nothing else, we’d need the few known satellite photographs that had ever been snapped of some of the camps.
“The Greens can break into the League’s network, that’s not even a question,” Cole said. “They’re the ones that built it. And I took measures to ensure that we would be able to copy the research on the cure. My only question is, where is the flash drive of the information I stole from Leda Corp? With the study on what caused IAAN?”
Cate’s jaw set as she looked away. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, silent just long enough for a cold, gripping dread to come over me. “It’s in the garbage. We weren’t far enough outside of the city when the EMP went off. It was wiped clean by the pulse...I’m sorry. I wish—” She shook her head, stopping herself.
At that, I sat down heavily in one of the chairs, feeling more and more like I was passing through a long tunnel in the opposite direction from everyone else. I barely heard Cole’s sarcastic “Oh, wonderful.” Didn’t register that Cate had stood and was already moving around me to get to the door.
“Where are you going?” Cole asked. “Let the kids sleep a little while longer.”
“I’m not going to the kids,” she said coldly. “I’m going after the other agents to fix this mess you’ve gotten us into. To get them to come back so we can work together on this.”
The chill in her tone sank through me, down to my bones. I’d never seen her like this, or at least I’d never had the full force of her anger barreling toward me. But I was angry too—furious. She had left us, she hadn’t been there when I needed her, and I’d done the best I could to help everyone survive.
“You want them to come back?” I asked. “Who? The ones that ditched you at the drop of a hat to go play terrorists, or the ones that wanted to hand us over to the PSFs?”
Cate couldn’t even look at me. “I’m sure there’s been a misunderstanding...”
“You’re right,” I said, “I misunderstood how in denial you are about who these agents are—”
“Ruby!” Vida snarled. “Shut the f—”
“I don’t know how many times they have to prove it to you, but these agents have never cared about the League you joined, the one that actually cared about the kids who are still stuck in camps—who are still dying every day from something we’re within an arm’s length of finding a cure for. We don’t need them! We don’t need to have them taint what we’re trying to do here! Wake up!”
“I am not interested in sending kids out to play soldier,” Cate said.
“You didn’t have a problem with that before,” I said bitterly.
“You were supervised by trained agents who led the tact teams—”
“Right. You mean the agents who then turned around and started picking us off one at a time? How about Rob? The one who tried to kill both me and Vida in one ‘accident.’ Do you even know that he came after us? He hunted us. He put a muzzle on me!”
Vida was frozen in place, her face ashen. The instinct to protect Cate from any insult was clearly at war with the side of her that knew the truth. Cole reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, but I sidestepped him, waiting for Cate to look at me. Waiting for an answer.
“Dolly and I will leave first thing tomorrow,” she said quietly. “The other agents only left a few hours ago. We can still catch up to them.”
It felt like she’d slapped me across the face. “Fine. Then go.”
“Good luck,” Cole added, with only a trace of mockery in his voice.
Her pale eyes flicked down over me one last time before she went out of the room, letting the door slam open and shut behind her. Vida was fast on her heels; I watched them go through the windows lining the computer room until they finally disappeared. I couldn’t stand it anymore and started after them.
Cole caught my arm and drew me back. “Let them cool off. They’re just upset, but it had to play out this way.”
“Did it?” The question escaped before I could stop it, the doubt trickling in through the cracks in my heart.
There was another loud groan of protest from the tunnel door—the sound got me on my feet, and both of us rushed out into the hallway. I was so sure that I’d see Cate charging down into the darkness, about to make good on her promise to leave, that the dirty, tired faces of the eight kids standing there hit me like a blow to the chest.
Each of them looked a little more terrified than the last. Senator Cruz brought up the rear, brushing away all of the hands that reached in to help her climb the last few steps. She glanced around, avoiding the assessing look from Dolly as she appeared to my left.
“Made it in record time!” Cole said, pounding each of them on the back in turn, earning a few smiles and even more relieved hugs. “Did you have any problems?”
“No, we were a little confused about the instructions you gave us on how to get down into the base from the pub, but once we saw the place we figured it out.” Zach, a tall, tan-skinned leader from one of the League’s Blue teams, seemed as unshakeable as ever. He dragged a hand back through his dark hair and surveyed the place.
If Zach looked relaxed now, confident, Nico had swung to the other side of the spectrum. He looked small and terrified, black hair standing up every which way, like he’d spent the last day running his hands back through it in dismay. Nico crossed his arms over his chest, cupping his elbows, breathing in deep. At least, until he saw Cate. She pushed toward him, shouldering her way through the other agents, but instead of flinging himself at her the way Vida had done, he reached up, covered his face with his hands, and began to weep.
It was the only word to describe the sounds coming from him. They rose over the excited chatter, smothered each and every question, sapped the laughter until it died down to a whisper. My guts twisted until I finally had to look away, and let gray static fill my ears instead. None of the other kids moved toward him, only Senator Cruz, who made it very clear with her expression what she thought of us for that. Her arms were around him even before Cate’s.
I turned to Dolly and asked where to find the showers and the sleep rooms, grateful for the excuse to get away from the horrible sound of Nico crying, from Cate’s disappointment, the others’ unknowing excitement for a place that had been stripped to the point of being almost uninhabitable.
From what I could see, the Ranch was split along two hallways that ran parallel to each other and were connected by double doors at either end. The lower level had the same floor plan as the upper one did: two narrow, twin halls with over a dozen closed doors lining each of them. One hall the stairwell emptied into was little more than a series of bunk rooms to sleep in, the kitchen, and a laundry room. One of the doors had been left open and I glanced inside at the four bunk beds.
The voices in the next room were muffled, but I recognized Chubs’s “What?” when it burst out of him. I crossed the last few feet to the door and gripped the door handle, wondering why they’d shut it at all.
“—she couldn’t have just told us?” Vida was ranting. “Un-fucking-believable. If our lives were in danger, she shouldn’t have dicked around with Cole. We should have been the first people she told!”
I leaned toward the door, pressing my forehead against it as I listened.
“She and Cole have been acting all buddy-buddy for a while,” Chubs said. “I’m not surprised they pulled something like this.”
“It doesn’t make sense—” Liam’s voice dropped low enough that I couldn’t hear it, but I was already backing away, blood pounding in my ears at the anger laced through their voices.
I made my way down the hall, to the linen closet that Dolly had mentioned. All of the towels had been claimed, but there was a soft, oversized black shirt tucked into a bag of street clothes the agents had missed when cleaning the joint out. I took that with me as I walked to the bathroom, grateful I wouldn’t have to change back into all of my dirty clothes.
The morning took on an unreal quality as I stepped into one of the shower stalls, stripped, and stepped in before the water could warm. The water burst out of the rusted showerhead and hit my skin with a freezing slap, cooling me instantly, easing the prickling on my scalp. They’d installed pumps of soap and shampoo in each stall: big, industrial-sized containers that were already half-empty. I let my shoulders hunch as my gaze dropped down to the water swirling deep, down, away under my feet. I breathed. The patches of dirt that didn’t wash away on my ribs and legs turned out to be bruises. I breathed. I breathed.
I just breathed.