towing her car away. The road should be clear in a few minutes.”
“Okay, there’s only one message: ‘Come home. Don’t leave it this way,’” Priyanka read. “But the actual number shows up as blocked.”
“That’s probably Liam, then,” I said, a new, sick feeling writhing in the pit of my stomach.
Don’t leave it this way? Leave what? Haven? Him?
All of us?
“Did she look up any addresses?” I asked.
Priyanka let out a soft hum. I felt Roman’s eyes on me, but couldn’t bear to see what was in them.
“Let’s see…Raleigh, Tampa, Jacksonville, Nashville,” Priyanka said, scrolling through the list of addresses. “Wait. This one keeps coming up—it’s in here at least four or five times. It’s in Charleston—Zu, do you recognize it?”
She held up the phone for me, using her thumb to point it out to me. The moment I saw the street name, my blood iced over.
Ruby, I thought. Ruby, what are you doing?
“Yeah. I recognize it,” I said. “That’s where they keep Clancy Gray.”
ON A STREET SHADED BY heavy magnolia trees that had lived to see too much history, in a little pink house with a wraparound porch and window boxes spilling with flowers, lived the sociopathic son of a murderous ex-president.
“I’ve got to say, the flag is a nice touch.” I nodded toward the American flag posted at the edge of the porch, an exclamation mark of bold red, white, and blue in an otherwise pastel street. “You can almost believe he didn’t try to destroy the country.”
I’d parked the car on the street a few houses down, in front of a grand old home with a for-sale sign promising AUTHENTIC SOUTHERN LIVING. We were just close enough to downtown Charleston, or at least the historic part with all the tourists, for me to feel uneasy about idling too long.
“They never did find his dad, did they?” Priyanka asked, resting her arms on the front seats as she leaned forward.
“No. He’s still a fugitive. They think he escaped the country in the chaos of the UN coalition taking control.” I shook my head. “Never thought I’d have something in common with President Gray.”
For all that the man had done to us, it was the strangest thing—I just couldn’t remember what he looked like, not unless his photo was right in front of me in the paper or on the news.
It was the strangest mental block. For the longest time, he’d been nothing but an impression; a voice that haunted us, reminding each Psi how very wrong we were. On the bus radio as they drove us through our camp’s barbed-wire gate. On the announcements they sometimes played over our many silent dinners. Pouring out of Betty’s speakers in the middle of nowhere.
“The mailbox says ‘Hathaway,’” Roman said.
“He and his mother are hiding in plain sight as John and Elizabeth Hathaway.” Cruz had given us this information years ago because she knew we’d check for ourselves anyway, but nearly everything else I knew about him could be categorized as a rumor. “She remembers their past life. He doesn’t.”
“Head injury?” Roman asked, eyes narrowing in interest.
“Ruby.” I didn’t tear my gaze away from the front of the house. Its sweet, old face was like a kindly grandmother whose gentle demeanor and endless supply of warm cookies hid her ugly, racist past.
The general public had held up Lillian as a hero to her husband’s villain, which left their son to be cast as the victim she’d fought so hard to save. In that narrative, Clancy Gray had of course received the cure procedure happily, to prove to others that it was safe, much like he’d supposedly volunteered to go to Thurmond, to prove to American families the camps’ “rehabilitation” programs worked. Most people believed the Grays were still living in seclusion outside DC, but Lillian had refused any sort of government position, claiming she just wanted to take care of her son in peace and quiet.
Considering she’d done such a bang-up job the first time, I was shocked that they’d let her.
Then again, Lillian knew things most people didn’t—and Mel used to say that if you could keep someone happy, you could usually keep them quiet. Of course, Clancy had known all those things once, too, before Ruby had taken those memories. Closed them off. Did whatever it was she actually did.
Why did you come here?
The front door opened. All three of us slumped down in our seats.
A man in sunglasses emerged, glancing up and down the street before stepping aside to