“I don’t know yet,” Liz blurted. “But I will soon. Probably soon. Hopefully soon.”
“How soon?” I asked.
“A couple days. Maybe sooner.”
“Okay, so in the meantime, we get Preston.”
I waited for the objections, the questions, the doubts, but no one said a thing until Bex asked, “What do we know about this prison?”
“Before Joe left, he told me it’s a maximum-security facility in the Alaskan arctic,” Zach said, taking over. “Very remote. Very extreme. Very secure. Only the highest-level terror targets are taken there.”
“Because it’s so remote?” Liz asked.
Zach shook his head. “Because, officially, it doesn’t exist. Prisoners only get sent there if they are never supposed to leave.”
I didn’t want to look at Macey, but I couldn’t help myself. I watched her from the corner of my eye, waiting for her to wince or cringe, but she was stoic. Frozen.
“How big is it?” Bex asked.
“Not sure.” I shook my head. “The facility was built into the mountain, and I didn’t see the whole thing. It was like a maze. I think you’re supposed to get lost.”
“Do you remember the route you took?” Bex asked, and I smiled.
“Every step.”
“Good,” Macey said. “There’s a gun safe in the basement.”
“No.” I shook my head.
“But—”
“We can’t blast our way in, Macey. No matter how much firepower we bring, they are going to have more. Our only way in is very, very quietly.”
“It’s not that simple, okay?” Zach shook his head. Frustration poured off him in waves. “You guys don’t get it. The temperature and altitude alone make this maybe the hardest target in the country. If you think this is going to be easy, you’re crazy.”
“Zach’s right,” Bex said.
“I got out,” I said, almost under my breath.
“And you were lucky,” he countered.
Until then, I hadn’t really considered how miraculous it was. There had been too much adrenaline, too many wild thoughts inside my mind. But that didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t tell him he was wrong. I could only say, “So I can get in.”
“Getting out is different than breaking in,” Zach told me.
“It’s a prison, Zach. Keeping people in is kind of the idea.”
“But—”
“But what?” I asked him.
“But if we get caught, there’s no getting out. Maybe ever again.”
I thought about what Aunt Abby had told me in Rome, that we couldn’t be kids and adults at the same time—that we no longer got to have it both ways. People had already come for Zach. They already wanted me. If we did this it would be official. There’d be no turning back for any of us.
“Okay.” Bex rubbed her hands on her thighs, warming them as if in preparation for where we had to go and what we had to do. “We’re going.” It wasn’t an argument. It was an order. And none of us had the strength to defy her. “We’re going right now.”
Macey walked to a door off the kitchen, threw it open, and switched on the light. Instantly, fluorescents flickered to life, buzzing and glowing and illuminating a massive room filled with rows and rows of shelves covered in skis and down jackets and jumpsuits, cables and tents. Every rich-person toy in the world filled the massive room, and Macey smiled.