saying, “That fucking drive through no-man’s-land, Oklahoma, was the icing on a seven-layer shit cake.”
I seemed to recover first, hurrying over to shut the door behind her and take the smaller of the two bags she carried.
“Thank God you’re all right,” she said when I hugged her. “I should kick your ass for making me chase you all over these damn zones. It was really hard to pretend I hated you.”
“I’ll try to remember that next time I get framed for a terrorist attack,” I said dryly.
She slung an arm around my neck. “You look like a fucking street punk. I dig it.”
“Hi to you, too,” I said, then nodded at the bag she’d set down. “What’s in there?”
“The last of my patience and a few assault rifles.”
Chubs stood to kiss her, and it would never not surprise me that Vida let him. She took a step back, attempting to appear nonchalant as she inspected him. “Why do you look like you missed the bus to the science fair?”
He glanced down at himself. “You bought me this sweater.”
“Not to wear with that awful shirt, I didn’t.” When Liam let out a strained chuckle, she fixed her dark eyes on him. “I don’t want to hear a laugh out of you. You look like you’ve been living under a tunnel and subsisting solely on the flesh of rats.”
“It’s been three years since you called me ugly to my face,” Liam said happily, pushing himself up out of his chair. Her put-on look of disdain wavered as she saw him struggle toward her.
Vida stared at the others over his shoulder as he came in for a hug of his own. “And I have no idea who the fuck you three are.”
“That’s Priyanka, Max, and Rambo,” Liam explained. “They’re our new little buddies.”
Roman started to correct him, but Vida held up her hand. “No. I don’t care what your real name is. You are now Rambo.”
“It’s Roman,” I said, shaking my head.
“Thank you,” he murmured. As long as we’d been talking, he’d kept that tense posture. His near-silence reminded me how overwhelming it could be to listen to this group’s back-and-forth.
“Introductions over,” Vida said. She and Chubs took seats on the floor, rounding off our circle. Max let out a burp, pounding his chest as he swallowed the last of the bottles of apple juice. It joined two other empty jugs on the coffee table.
Priyanka and I took turns explaining everything that had happened, pausing now and then to let Roman or Max elaborate. By the time we reached the body of the girl in Baton Rouge, all three of them, even Chubs and Liam, who had already heard the story, fell into a stricken silence. When I described the Pit, both Chubs and Vida looked inconsolable.
“You can say it,” Chubs said, his voice strangled as he looked over to Liam. “You were right.”
For his part, Liam only wiped a hand down over his face, pressing it against his eyes. He shook his head. “Not going to gloat about the suffering of kids. And I wasn’t completely right, either. It’s not like you guys didn’t get good work done—I have no doubt that the world would be a hell of a lot uglier for us right now if not for you. Things were just weighted against us from the start, and we trusted them more than they were ever willing to trust us.”
“The government equipment at the Pit is an indication they’re expanding the program. I never thought Cruz would be that careless.” Chubs looked to Max, who was staring into the empty fireplace. “I’m sorry about everything you went through. We’re going to make this right.”
“She’s not being careless. She’s desperate,” I said. “We know better than to trust that others have our best interests at heart, but we did it anyway out of hope. That’s the limitation of hope—everyone else’s agenda.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” Chubs said. “But if we stop trying to genuinely work with the government, what sympathy the country has left for us will wear thin very quickly. If we move against them, they’ll start seeing us as a true threat, and then the Pit will be only the beginning.”
“But you have to admit that you have your doubts about the system, too, otherwise you would have told me about Ruby being missing,” I barreled on, letting the sting of betrayal back into those words. “You didn’t trust that the government wasn’t listening to everything we said over