address listed for the safe house?”
“I’ll find it and text it to you, but—I don’t think you’ll make it back in time, not if you go to Ohio. It’s a six-hour, twenty-eight-minute drive between there and Salem, and that’s a direct route, without having to figure out how to get back through the zone blocks—”
Salem. Ruby has to be home in time for something, and while she clearly doesn’t seem worried about it, the others are.
“No,” Charlie and Liam thunder together, the second she clicks off the call. Even Ruby looks taken aback by the force of the words. Vida straightens, leaning away from Charlie, with a look of calm, cool murder on her face that makes me wince. She likes them trying to make a decision for Ruby about as much as I do.
“Neither of you have to be involved—” Ruby starts.
“Do not pull that with us,” Charlie says. “Don’t act like we’d ever choose to separate. Look—” He turns back to us. “I’m really sorry about your brother. I am. If you want to try to go find him, you should know you’re dealing with armed soldiers who will happily take you back into custody and put you through the procedure. You’ll be back where you started. But you are not dragging us any further into this than we already are. It’s too big of a risk.”
I think I’m going to be sick. My guts have knotted themselves so tightly, I can barely breathe.
“We don’t need your help,” Mia spits back. “You can pull over right here. Go ahead. Let us out. If you think my brother is a risk, then you won’t want to spend another second with me.”
“It’s not that,” Ruby says quickly. “We—I—want to help.”
“Same,” Vida says, to my surprise. “All I’ve done these past few weeks is listen to old white people talk about what to do with us. I could use a good fight—and no, Charlie Boy, you don’t get to decide that for me.”
“Ruby, I know…I get it, all right?” Liam says, dividing his attention between her and the road. “But it’s too dangerous. You know that. Think about yourself for once.”
“Why do you get to decide whose life is more important?” Mia demands. “It’s because he’s a Red, isn’t it? You have no idea who he is, or what he’s like. He’s the kindest—” Her voice cracks. “He’s the best person in the world, and you’d leave him there for them to kill. You’d let them take him back in and break him more than they already have, break him until there’s nothing of him left!”
There’s one of those old-fashioned rest stops up ahead, the kind that are meant to look like brick ranch houses, I guess. Without another word, Liam pulls us off the highway, turning into its empty parking lot. Throwing the brake on, he unbuckles his seat belt and twists around in his seat, clearly struggling to keep his voice and expression in check.
“You don’t have one damn idea what you’re talking about,” he says, his voice low.
“Liam—” Ruby tries, clearly reading his temperature on this. “She just wants us to help her brother. I want to help. I know why you’re against it, but you also know why it’s important to me.”
He glances at her, takes in an unsteady breath, and gives a curt nod.
“Girlfriend has the power to melt brains and underwent extensive combat training,” Vida says, as if she’s reminded him of this a hundred times.
Extensive combat training? Ruby?
She won’t look at me, acknowledge this.
“And if I’m there, you know we’ll get in and out quickly,” Vida continues, as if it’s simply the truth, and not arrogance. And maybe it is, because the others don’t exactly contradict her. “You need to stop with this stupid, smothering, protective bullshit—”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Charlie says, raising his voice, “But if you’d been this close to getting killed and there was nothing I could do to stop it, if you were getting buried under death threats, if you had a multimillion-dollar bounty on your head, then, yeah, I’d be a little mistrustful of the world, too! I’d shoot anyone who gave you a wrong look and then destroy their bodies with lime!”
The blood drains from my head at that rush of information—killed, death threats, bounty—Ruby came for us in spite of all of that?
Vida smiles. “Please. Like you could hide bodies without my help. Besides, acid works faster.”
“True,” he concedes. “And you’d probably be the one to shoot them.”
The