“Uh, hey,” he says, hugging me back.
“She’s alive,” I say. “She’s alive.”
He hugs me until I stop shaking, then gently pries me off and holds me away. “Can we go back to the trailer now? Before Matty pees on everything?”
“There’s just one more thing I need to do.”
He snorts and gives me a fond smile. “Always one more thing with you.”
I go up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Yeah, but this one’s going to be fun.”
15.
I get a couple of dirty looks in the big house, but the Cranes must learn to let bygones be bygones pretty quick. That, or they’re scared of me. The dining room table is packed with thin Cranes and fat Cranes, and they stare as I pass but don’t put down their plates of spaghetti. I figure all the dangerous ones are with Leon in the taxidermy shed. The big guy at the stairs is neither Tuck nor Hartness, and he won’t let me pass unless I let him search my backpack.
“No problem,” I say sweetly, unzipping it and letting him look.
All he’s going to find are Pop-Tart boxes and sodas.
“You steal all this food?” he asks.
I shrug. “Bought it with my card. Kids like junk food.”
He points his gun up to let me squeeze by. Upstairs, I knock on the first door I see. No one answers, and I push it open and go in. It’s an old-fashioned bedroom turned into a conference room, with four card tables set up in the middle and maps and data pinned all over the whitewashed walls, just like at Alistair’s trailer. I reach into my backpack, pull a nut can out of a Pop-Tart box, and hide it in a dresser drawer.
In the next room, also empty, I find what I was really looking for: the tech room. Laptops are ranged on every flat surface, identical to the ones I brought from Alistair’s trailer—hell, maybe they actually are the ones from Alistair’s trailer. In the corner is a pile of clothes, all with ink dye packets attached, which I figured they had to have, somewhere, to test tomorrow’s strip mall inksplosion. I drape a coat over one of the chairs, put a pair of expensive panties in a corner, and take several shirts into the conference room, hanging them on coat hooks in a corner, facing out. The nut can goes onto a table covered with half-eaten snacks, where its camouflage has a lovely irony.
The stairs creak outside, and I duck behind the bed pushed in the corner, shrinking down as small as possible. Footsteps enter the room and linger near the biggest map. “You think it’s going to work?” one guy’s voice asks.
“It better,” says the other. “Where’s my damn chaw?”
They rummage around the tables, and one walks toward the bed. I flinch as his muddy work boots stop, and he says, “Here it is. We’re good. Hey, did you mark today’s blast?”
The boots tromp back over to the map, and in the silence I hear the soft punch of a thumbtack. “Wish I coulda seen it,” one of them says wistfully.
“If there’s one thing Leon knows how to do, it’s blow shit up. Now come on, before we miss dessert.”
Once they’re down the creaking steps, I creep out and inspect the map more closely. Right where my house is, there’s a shiny red tack.
Right where my house was.
The puzzle pieces fall into place with a sickening thud in my heart. I gave Leon the laptops from Alistair’s trailer, told him the password. Somewhere in all that green code, Leon got information on me, found my name and address. He went to my house, or sent his men. They stole my mom and put a gun in Mrs. Hester’s hand and rigged my front door to a bomb, all the while dressed as Valor suits.
Whether he did it to control me or kill me, he’s going to get the opposite.
I pull out my can of spray paint and start shaking it.
I go visit Kevin, but my mind is definitely not on his fish-medicine intake. But I did really bring him some Pop-Tarts, so he’s easier to deal with when his mouth is full.
“What did you guys do today? Was it, like, spy stuff? Gabriela says you get to go on missions.”
God, he looks so young in his hospital bed. At least he’s not pale and wilting today. He’s annoyingly perky. I guess the antibiotics worked.
“It’s not like spy stuff. It’s more like . . . when your mom gives you a list of shitty chores you have to do, except you might get shot while you’re cleaning your room.” I think back to Wyatt’s face today as he watched the old security guard lying on the ground. “Or you might have to shoot someone, which is kind of worse.”
Kevin snorts and shakes his leg. “Uh, until you’ve been shot, I don’t think you know what it’s like.”
I feel my face go blank and numb. “Until you’ve shot someone and watched them die, I think you can be grateful for your time sitting in a comfy bed while other people do the hard work. Do you have any idea how many people . . . ?”
His face is slowly breaking, and he goes from looking like a pissed-off pre-teen to a lost little boy. “My folks. I saw it happen. I’ve got nobody. Just Gabriela and Chance, and they haven’t been to see me all day. Just . . . nobody. So don’t you tell me how hard it is. Because I know, okay? I know.”
Without really meaning to, I’m hugging him, this scrawny little kid, and he feels like he’s made of rabbit bones, quick and slender and fragile and full of energy. He starts crying, too, pressing his face into my hoodie and shuddering with sobs. I try to edge up on the bed, but I nudge his leg and make him gasp.
“I’m sorry,” I say, jumping away.
He pulls up the flowered sheet to rub away the tears. When he says, “It doesn’t matter,” I know he’s lying. Because it does matter. But if it makes him feel better, he can say whatever he wants. At least he doesn’t look at me like I’m a monster—he still thinks I’m on the good side.
“Have they said when you can leave?” I ask.
That brightens him up. “Tomorrow. They said tomorrow, if I can walk downstairs and remember to take my pills. They said they might need the bed for someone else.” He looks at the other three beds, all empty, and his face screws up. As little as he knows about the truth behind the Citizens for Freedom, he knows enough not to trust them.
“We’ll come get you at breakfast,” I promise him. “We’ve got a tent ready just for you.”
At that, I get his real grin, his little-kid grin. “I’ve never been camping before,” he says.
I just know that I want him out of this house before we find out why they’re going to need beds. And before those nut cans cover everything with ink and make Leon even more suspicious.
That’s two nut cans gone. The last one I keep. Just in case.
I never did trust the Cranes, but I sure as hell don’t trust them now.
Matty barks joyously from inside the trailer, and a cluster of what I guess you’d call my friends waves from the tent camp in my front yard. The gang’s all here—Chance, Gabriela, Rex, and a lantern’s glow denoting Bea’s presence in her zippered tent. Chance is flopped over on his back on his sleeping bag, while Gabriela looks jittery as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. Rex, as ever, seems utterly relaxed.
“Where were you guys this morning?” I ask, scuffing my toes in the dirt to hide the bloodstains on my sneakers.
“Just got back,” Gabriela says. “Very close call.”
“Closest call yet,” Chance adds, an arm thrown over his face.
“Wait. They didn’t send you out on nut duty, did they?”
Gabriela hops up to pace, looking haunted. She keeps glancing at the dirt road like she expects bad news. “Yeah. Insane, right? We got sent to that strip of fancy shops by the mall. You know, the ones where the department stores off-load their unwanted crap? In the fourth store, they cornered me. Wanted to see what was in my backpack. Two workers and a policeman. I tried to run, and they grabbed me. They put strip ties on my wrists.” She rubs them, and we all stare at the indentations.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Chance says. “I was still outside, so I stabbed all the tires on the cop cars and pulled our car up to the curb
and had it running. I shot the cop and one of the ladies. Arm and leg. They freaked out, and I managed to get her in the car and peel out. But Leon was pissed.”
“Only got three cans placed out of twenty, and then the cops were everywhere. Leon wouldn’t even let us have dinner.” Gabriela looks up at me, eyes pleading. “What kind of fool sends a kid with a purple Mohawk into a store where the socks cost a hundred goddamn dollars? What am I supposed to do, pretend to buy a prom dress?”
I jerk my chin at Chance. “Why didn’t he do it? He can act like a snob.”
Chance snorts. “It was a women’s store. Was I going to pretend to buy a gift for my mom?”
We all stare at him and as one shout, “Yes!”
He rubs his eyes, then pounds his fists into the dirt. “Okay, yes, fine. Well, we didn’t think about that today. We’ll know better the next time we fight the bank government by planting peanut cans in fancy stores. I’ve never done this before, okay? It’s not like they gave us an instruction manual.”
“Leon said we were the only ones who had to do it,” I say.
“Yeah, well, Leon lies,” Chance shoots back.
“Did you open your cans?”
“We tried,” Gabriela says, “But they were glued shut. As long as Kevin’s in the house, I figure we don’t have much of a choice. Like it even matters what’s inside.”
The silence gets awkward, and I assume everyone is thinking back, like I am, to all the stupid mistakes we’ve made in the past week. I don’t want to think about that, and I don’t want to think about watching my house blow up or shooting the suit in the SUV, so I nudge Rex’s boot with my toe.
“How about you?”
He smiles up at me, placid as hell. “Me and Little Miss Sunshine”—he jerks a thumb at Bea’s tent—“had no trouble. But we were at the crappier outlet mall, down by the interstate. We fit right in, even in the stores fancy enough to have ink packs.”
“Is Wyatt okay?” Gabriela asks.
I stare up at the trailer and steel myself. “I’m about to find out. ’Night, y’all.” When my fingers touch the doorknob, I get a shock and draw back with a gasp. After watching Mrs. Hester at my house today, I don’t like doorknobs anymore. Which reminds me . . .
“Kevin should be down tomorrow morning. I told him we’d go get him after breakfast. He can sleep in the big tent.”
Gabriela smiles for the first time and stands. “I’ll get it ready for him, then.”
And I have no choice but to open the door.
Matty, at least, is glad to see me, barking and wriggling like she thought I’d disappeared forever. Wyatt appears behind her, his smile crooked and his eyes red.
“You okay?” he asks.
I’m too shy to touch him, so I kneel and concentrate on petting Matty. “Not really. But . . . that’s kind of how it is now, isn’t it?”
He breathes in and lets it out as a sigh. “Yeah. I guess it is. Hungry?”
“Nope.”
“But you haven’t eaten all day.”
He’s right. The moment I say it, my stomach lets out the most ridiculous growl.
“Come on. I made you some soup and toast.”
Now the warm, comforting smell in the air makes sense. He’s got the tiny table set with two bowls, two plates of soggy toast, and two Cokes poured into glasses so I guess we can pretend that we’re civilized. He even pulls out my chair for me, which makes me giggle. No one has ever done that for me before.
“Wyatt, I’m really sorry—”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now. Let’s just eat. Can we eat?”
I nod and blow on my soup. It’s the same kind my mom used to make for me when I got a cold as a kid, canned and creamy. It’s like drinking a sunbeam, and I slurp up the whole bowl in a companionable if worried silence. There’s so much to talk about, but I want Wyatt to have what he needs, so I just peel the crust off my toast and fold it in half twice to eat it. Wyatt notices and murmurs, “You’re so weird,” but like it’s a compliment.
He finishes long before I do and follows his dinner with two Pop-Tarts, which I liberated from their boxes earlier so I could sneak the nut cans into the big house. When I’m done, he washes my dishes, and I throw our napkins in the trash and feed Matty. It’s kind of funny, how just last week I was in a mail truck, wishing it were a college dorm or an apartment so that I could play house, and now I’m basically living with a boy in a small house. It’s like someone hit fast-forward on my life and I’m suddenly twenty-four. But I never dreamed I would have a job as an unpaid mercenary. I would not have chosen this.
Now we’re alone in the kitchen, and the dishes are done. The space seems small and awkward, and Wyatt edges around me and takes my hand. I let him lead me to the bedroom, where he closes the door, sits on the edge of the bed, and stares at his hands. I don’t know what he wants from me, so I sit beside him. Not so close that I’m touching him, because the last time I did that, he asked me not to. But close enough, I hope, to show that I’m here and I’m listening.
“How did you get through it?” he finally asks, although he won’t look at me.
The pause draws out long as I wait for him to elaborate. He doesn’t.
“Do you mean . . . last week?”
He nods.
“I cried a lot and hugged my dog.”
He shakes his head and looks at me, really looks at me. “No, I mean . . . how did you live with yourself? I can’t stop seeing that old man’s face, his surprise and confusion and shock as he fell over. I did that. And I don’t want to be the kind of person who does that.”
A few tears slip out, and his hands are shaking, so I sit on the bed, against the headboard, and pull him back into the cage of my legs so that he’s leaning against me like I’m a pillow. It’s strangely intimate, but I want to be able to answer him honestly without him looking into my eyes.
“Okay, so first of all? I’m not over it. You know about the nightmares. I relive it, all of it, while I’m asleep. Every night, every person, every bullet. And then my brain shows me all the other things that could’ve happened, in the truck and in Sherry’s house and every time I rang a doorbell. I’ve seen myself shot full of holes and burned alive and left for dead on a lawn covered in frost. I don’t know how long it’s going to take before I go back to normal, or if I’ll ever be normal again. I never had panic attacks before, and now it’s like I have one ten times a day. My heart never slows down. I’m scared of doorknobs and shirt buttons. I think this is PTSD, but I don’t have Internet, so I’m not sure. So don’t think that I’m okay, because I’m nowhere close to okay. Okay?”
He nods against my chest. “Okay.”
“Okay. So here’s how I think it happens. At each moment that goes wrong, you have two choices: You die or they die. Right?”
“I guess.”
“No!” It comes out as a shout, so I focus on making my voice calm again. “No. You don’t get to say that. When I was standing on your front lawn and the red clock in the truck dash started counting down, you have to understand that it was me or your dad. Actually, me and my mom or your dad. There was no in-between. Valor didn’t give a third choice. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So from that moment, when I chose to shoot your dad, every moment after that meant that if I let someone else go, then I was wrong about your dad. With each person I shot, I had to shoot the next, or the previous marks meant nothing and my mom and I had to die anyway. It’s like I had to carry them with me.” I put my cheek against his hair. “They’re always with me. Weighing on me. Drowning me. So the best thing I can do is keep swimming and not sink. I want to forget them so it won’t hurt anymore, but if I forget them . . .” I can barely swallow. I shake my head and whisper, “If I forget them, then I’m a monster. I let Valor make me a monster. I don’t deserve to forget them. It can’t get easy. The killing.”
“One of my therapists taught me a trick,” he says, and his voice creaks and cracks. “Have you ever heard
of a memory palace?”
“Is it anything like Château Tuscano?”
He chuckles and resettles against me, relaxing just a little. “No. It’s a way to remember things. Like, you build this palace in your mind, or maybe it just looks like your house, and when you want to remember things, you associate them with physical parts of the house. Like, you always put your keys by the front door of your memory palace, so if you need to remember to take your homework to school, you mentally put your homework and your keys right by the front door. He was trying to help me catch up on schoolwork and remember all the shit I had to do for Max and community service, because I kept messing up. But I sort of used it for the opposite purpose.”
“You made an un-memory palace?”
“Kind of. I built this broken-down Victorian haunted house to keep my bad memories locked up. I didn’t want to remember all the horrible things I said to my mom, all the bad shit I did with Mikey. I didn’t want to remember him anymore, didn’t want to think about the past. So every time I had one of those thoughts, I imagined using a skeleton key to unlock the front door of this old green house, I walked up the creaking stairs, and I went into this locked room in the attic that had a huge pigeonhole desk. And I put the memory in one of those drawers and closed and locked it. And then I could forget about it.”
Without realizing it, I’ve started stroking his hair, running my fingers through it. I try to imagine this place he’s built, the drawers full of locked, quiet memories.
“Did it work?” I ask.
He nods, leans into my touch. “I’m going to put the memory of that old man away now. But before I did it, I wanted to know if that was wrong. It feels good to lock up stupid, childish things I did a long time ago. I locked up taking out that Valor card in my brother’s name, and I locked up watching Mikey OD, and . . . all this other stuff. But am I allowed to forget choices I made that . . . I’m still not sure were right? That’s why I wanted to know. How you do it.”
I take a deep breath. In my mind, I’m walking past Wyatt’s old Victorian and taking a rusted key from under the mat of the house next door. This one is lavender going gray, with a tower and garrets and little curlicues on the corners. I unlock it and walk up the stairs, which creak, just like Wyatt’s. I find the attic room, and instead of a desk, I have a card catalog. One by one, I open drawers and put away the people I’ve killed, almost like a mortician sliding bodies into the freezer at the morgue. A drawer for Robert Beard. One for Eloise Framingham. A nameless, rapist thug I left to die in the dirt, gut shot. Ken Belcher. Alistair Meade. Sherry. Two more thugs. My ex–best friend, Amber. My uncle Ashley. Crane goons who dared to steal my dog. A Valor suit. And now, even if I didn’t actually kill her, Mrs. Hester and her cat Keith. I lock the door behind me and open my eyes. Wyatt’s sitting up now, looking at me carefully, hungrily. I put a hand on his stubbled cheek and look directly into his brownie-batter eyes.
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