The girl with the crazy hair shakes her head.
“It’s okay, we’ll figure it out, I promise.” She turns to Mia, reaches back for the door. “In you go.”
Mia glances back at me. “Are you sure he’s not here?”
There is sheer agony in not knowing—if we leave and he is here, if he’s only hidden, I don’t think I could recover from that. Knowing we left him here to die alone would kill me. It would.
“Positive,” says the boy in the fleece; then, after being elbowed by the driver, adds, “I’m sorry. He’s not here.”
“Look,” the other girl says to Ruby, who is now also hesitating—who, with a single glance, tells me that she won’t leave if I don’t want us to—“we’ll call Nico on the way. I know you don’t need me to remind you about how fucking close we’re cutting this—”
“Agreed,” the driver says. “Let’s roll and figure it out as we go—just like old times.”
“Yay,” the other boy says, without a hint of enthusiasm. “Because that always went so well.”
With a steadying breath, I climb into the way-back seat, trying to ignore how badly I’m shaking, how cold I feel at my core, despite the heat coming through the vents. Mia is right behind me. The others quickly fall into place—Ruby in the front passenger seat, our rescuers in the two middle seats, and—
“Sam, Mia, this is Liam,” Ruby says as Liam buckles up and starts the engine. He makes a wide arc and sends us sailing down the open highway. “You already met Vida and Chu—Charlie.”
“Hi,” Mia says, which is good, because I can’t seem to get whatever is stuck in my throat out. “Where the hell are we going?”
Vida actually snorts. “My thoughts exactly.”
Liam glances up at us in the rearview mirror. “Where do you want to go?”
“What he means to say,” Vida says, “is what the hell were you planning on doing with that Red?”
“That Red is my brother,” Mia growls. Vida turns fully around in her seat now, brows raised, assessing.
“She didn’t mean it like that,” Ruby interrupts.
“Of course she did,” Charlie says, rolling his eyes. “And, by the way, it’s a valid question.”
“Still need a direction to drive, here,” Liam says.
The way these kids talk to each other, the way they look at each other, it’s so…comfortable. I bring my arms around my center, hugging myself.
Ruby told me once that her parents died, way back when we were first processed into Thurmond. Though I know that’s not true now, she’s clearly found a new family all the same. A part of me wonders if it’s not what she went through that has shaped her into something so solid and strong, but the people who went through it with her.
I’m not jealous…not exactly. I feel a longing that surprises me, though, to capture this easy warmth with Lucas and Mia again. I want to stay inside this warm bubble of Ruby and her friends, and start believing in the possibility of finding steady ground to stand on again.
I can tell Mia is still, despite Vida’s bluntness, a little starstruck by everyone in the car. Save for Vida, these are all faces that have appeared in the press, people who’ve had their stories told—they’re the ones who have been speaking up on our behalf. These kids got to fight for the rest of us. If you had asked me seven years ago who I thought would be at the helm of the ship torpedoing the camps, I would have reached into the box of memories in my mind and pulled out some senator’s name, or a general’s. I would not have offered up Ruby’s.
But here she is, so much more than I ever thought. So much braver than I ever gave her credit for.
“We want to find Lucas,” I say finally. “We appreciate you…we’re so thankful you got us out of there, but we can…we can do it on our own. We’ve already been enough trouble.”
“Luckily for you, this particular group specializes in trouble,” Ruby says, pulling what looks like a small cell phone out of the cupholder. She starts to tap out a message as she continues, “Did you guys hear anything about where they might be taking him? Anything at all? Damn—I thought we fixed this stupid battery. It just died again.”
Ruby turns to Vida, who’s already reaching into her jacket pocket for something.
“No. No,” Charlie says. “Bad enough we’re out here, but using a phone they can listen in on?”
Vida already has