“Grandmother,” I said. “Grams.”
Grams. Grams. Grams. The person who remembered me. Who I’d be able to find once this was over. I need you. We need you.
My grip on her tightened to the point where I’m sure my nails dug into her flesh. With one final, deep breath, I pushed against the wall as hard as I could, turning my mind into a bat and slamming against it until I felt it give with a deafening crack. I slid forward, forcing my way through, until it shattered and cut the connection to ribbons.
“Ruby, what was the name of our van? What did we call it?” Chubs must have been shouting the question to me. His voice was ragged.
“Black...” I mumbled, my mind in pieces—pain everywhere—agony—“Black Betty.”
I didn’t slide through, so much as fall past the remnants of the barrier. The world around me exploded into electric blue light—
When I came around, rising up from the murky pain, I was flat on my back on the floor, Chubs’s anxious face an inch above mine.
“Okay?” he asked, taking my arm to help me sit up. “How do you feel?”
“Like I took a flaming knife to the head,” I got out around gritted teeth.
“You were out for a full minute. I was starting to get worried,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked, turning toward the bed. “What—”
Lillian Gray was sitting at the edge of her bed, her face hidden behind her hands. Her shoulders shook, trembling with each gasp of breath.
She’s crying, I realized, rising up to my knees, I hurt her—
Her face was red, swollen from the force of her weeping. The air in the room had shifted, a thunderstorm of feeling had rolled back, and what was left was weightless blue sky. When she looked at me, she saw me. Her lips pulled back into a painful smile.
“Thank. You.” She treated each word like the small miracle it was.
And then, without warning, I began to cry too. The pressure that had built in my chest gave way with the next heavy breath in, and expelled fully as I released it. I did this. If I did nothing else worthwhile in my life, I helped this woman. I gave her back her voice. I hadn’t broken someone; I’d put them back together.
“Um...” Chubs began awkwardly. “Should I maybe...er...”
I stood up, swiping at my face with a laugh. “I’m going to find Cole,” I said. “Can you tell her what’s going on? Make sure everything is okay?”
I used the hem of my shirt to scrub my face once I was outside of the room, allowing myself a few steadying breaths before I looked in on the gym and office, then the big room, where kids were already sitting down with their plates of macaroni and cheese.
Right. Dinner. That meant...
I took the stairs two at a time, bounding down the hall to the kitchen. The kids serving there only shrugged and said Cole had come in and left with two plates. It would have looked too suspicious for me to wait outside of the storage room; I slipped the string I held the key on up from around my neck and glanced back and forth, making sure no one was watching as I went inside and locked it behind me. The overhead bulb swung with the movement of air, and the door behind the shelf unit groaned, not fully shut.
It was curiosity, more than anything else, that made me step into that narrow hall. It was the first time in days I’d gone to see him—Cole had simply waved me off each time I offered to do it, saying it was better for me to stay away and avoid antagonizing him when he was already furious with me. That he’d been perfectly cordial, with no evidence of trying to influence Cole’s mind.
Now that she was back, I half expected Vida to be there, watching them from the small window in the door at the other end of the hall—but no. There wasn’t anyone there, making sure Clancy wasn’t running wild inside Cole’s mind.
If you had told me that Cole and Clancy would have been sitting facing each other on the floor eating, separated by only an inch-thick wall of bulletproof glass...I would have told you to keep your delusions to yourself. But there they were. The two of them, relaxing and talking with the ease of old friends.
I leaned forward, pressing my ear against the door, catching snippets of conversation.
“—wouldn’t be any files on it, that’s how confidential it is, the only reason I know it exists still is a PSF account—”
“—worth it if it means more boots on the ground—”
“Don’t discount the propaganda they’re releasing—try to use it to get your own message out there. Recruit willing soldiers—”
Ten minutes went by; fifteen. The elation I felt deflated into something that resembled dread. Not that the two of them were talking—I trusted Cole to take everything Clancy said with the largest grain of salt known to mankind—but that I was agreeing with what I heard.
“The goal should be to keep as many choices open for the kids as possible, to not let someone sweep in with regulations on how they could or should be,” Clancy continued. “Is the senator even willing to stand up for their right to make decisions about their future?”
The cure is another way to control us, take decisions out of our hands.
I stepped back from the door, shaking my head. No—helping Lillian was giving us a choice. We couldn’t make a real decision without knowing what the cure was.
Then why, all of a sudden, did the past few hours feel like such a mistake?
“—nothing else you can tell me about Sawtooth?” Cole was on his feet now, taking Clancy’s empty plate from the slot in the door.
Clancy returned to his cot. There was a new, thicker blanket there now—a real pillow, too. A stack of books beside the bed stood up nearly as tall as the cot. Apparently Clancy had been a very good boy, if Cole had been willing to bring him all of that.
“You know everything I do. That wasn’t the camp I helped set up—it was the original one in Tennessee,” Clancy said. “Are you ever going to come in, Ruby?”
I leaned away from the door, but it was pointless. His eyes shifted over to the window and caught mine through the glass. With a deep breath, I unlocked the door and propped it open with my foot. Cole’s hand twitched at his side as he strode toward me. I was starting to have a hard time telling his apprehension apart from his irritation.
I waited until we were back out in the hallway before opening my mouth.
“Don’t,” he said, holding up a hand. “I have this under control.”
“Nothing is ever really under control with him,” I pointed out. “As long as you’re careful...”
“You’re killing me, Gem,” he said, raking his hand back through his hair. “What is it?”
“I think you have to see it to believe it.”
With the others occupied by editing Zu’s interviews and, at Liam’s suggestion, giving their own, Cole and I were left to do the planning for an actual assault on Thurmond. We stayed up through the night rehashing the details. I would go in with the flash drive on February twenty-seventh. On March first, our team of twenty kids and Harry’s forty-odd soldiers would storm the camp at approximately seven in the evening and engage and restrain the PSFs—I would need to get the program uploaded into their servers by a quarter till. The kids would then be brought to a secure location within walking distance of the camp to wait for their parents to retrieve them. Written out step by step, it almost sounded simple. The reality was stark.
The morning officially began with Cole dropping a large blanket of paper over my head, startling me awake from where I’d fallen asleep at one of the computer room desks.
“What’s this?” I asked, pulling it away. At least fifteen sheets of paper had been taped together to form a whole, cohesive image of rings of cabins, shoddy brick buildings, a silver fence, and the green wilderness around it.
I jumped to my feet. “This is Thurmond. How did you get this?”
In response, he calmly passed me a silver burner phone—there was something grudging in his expression, reluctant. I took it from him, raising it slowly to my ear. “Hello?”