“You always side with Lee,” he said.
“No I don’t,” I insisted. “Sometimes I side with Vida.”
He didn’t laugh like I’d hoped. He didn’t switch on the radio, either, which bugged me less than I thought it would. Liam always had to have a song or news on in the background, like he couldn’t stand empty air.
Chubs leaned an elbow against the door, resting his head against his palm.
“It’ll never not be weird to see you behind the wheel,” I told him.
“If I’d been able to hang on to my real glasses I could have taken over for Liam in Betty at least part of the time,” Chubs said. “Though I doubt he would have let me. You know how he gets about driving.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “See? That was me siding with you.”
Finally, a faint smile.
“I wish I could drive,” I told him. “It’s so stupid I have to wait.”
“Such impatience,” he said, reaching over to briefly drop a hand on my head. He hadn’t done it in years. “Do you know how many things can go wrong when you’re behind the wheel? And that’s not even factoring in other drivers—actually, let’s talk about something else that doesn’t involve vehicular manslaughter.”
His grip on the wheel tightened as we left the limits of DC and reached the beltway. Through the blur of rain pelting the windows, we could just make out the shapes of the new highway lights and cameras that would be installed over the next few months. Right now, though, our only real sources of light were the car itself and the glow of the capital’s light pollution.
“Did I really always side with him?” I wondered aloud. “I swear I didn’t mean to….”
Chubs risked a quick glance at me, then fixed his eyes back on the road. “It’s not about choosing sides. I shouldn’t have ever said that. I’m sorry. You know how I get when my blood sugar is low. He’s Lee—he’s funny and nice and he dresses like a walking hug.”
“He does wear a lot of flannel,” I said. “But you’re those things, too. Don’t make that face just to try to prove me wrong. You are.”
“I don’t feel that way,” he admitted. “But I always got that you guys had something different. I respect that. I’ve never been…It’s harder for me to open up to people.”
The headlights caught the raindrops sliding off the windshield and made them glow like shooting stars.
He was making it sound like one friendship was better or more important than the other. That wasn’t true. They were just different. The love was exactly the same. The only difference was that Liam had lost a little sister; a part of me had always felt like he wanted to prove to himself that he could save at least one of us.
“I always understood you,” I told him. “Just like you always understood me.”
Chubs glanced over, swallowing. By his nature, he ran at a slightly higher frequency than the rest of us, but looking at him now made my whole chest hurt. The suits he wore seemed to hide how thin he’d gotten, and the shadows of the dark sky seemed to drag his face down.
I hated the selfish part of me that had been so excited to see our friends I hadn’t even stopped to realize how much planning Chubs and Vida put into this. How careful they’d had to be, to make sure that no one else picked up on the hidden messages, or their arrangements.
Chubs had the most at stake if we were caught or followed. Vida would lose her active-agent status, but Chubs would be raked over the coals. He’d be made out to be a self-serving liar. Congress could claim he had knowingly misled them, and he could go to prison for lying under oath. The Psi Council was still in its infancy. It wouldn’t survive the loss of its visionary.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said, too quickly.
“We’re not in DC anymore,” I reminded him. “No one’s listening.”
“Really, it’s—”
“You never used to lie to me,” I said, holding my hands over the hot air blowing through the vents, “so please don’t start now.”
Chubs sighed, rubbing a hand back over his hair. He usually kept it short, but it was clear to me that he’d gone several weeks longer than usual without getting it cut. “It’s…hard. All of it. I’m sorry you haven’t seen me much, and if I’ve been out of sorts lately. It just never stops. We make some people happy, we enrage another group. We try to change people’s minds about us, and they only get set deeper in their ways because they don’t like to be made to feel wrong. I’m trying to make sure everyone on the Council is organized and that we read absolutely everything, but we keep having to bend our original goals to fit with the rest of the government’s. It’s maddening, and those awful people who are on the news with their disgusting protest signs, those people who killed that Psi boy in California and claimed self-defense…it’s…it just never stops. If we could just get some movement on reparations…”
The court system had already dismissed any number of civil suits brought against the government by families who had lost children to IAAN, or who had children who’d survived it only to end up in camps. Each and every time, the judges would cite the same reasons. The administration and Leda Corp had conducted reasonable testing to make sure Agent Ambrosia was safe. The intention on the part of the government had been to introduce the chemical to prevent biological attacks on our water supply. The government had reasons to believe that we were an imminent threat, given our powerful abilities and the fear that IAAN could be spread by contact.
Interim President Cruz was working behind the scenes to cut a deal, but it would be years before anything definitive came out of it. Almost every single family in the United States had been affected, and the country was still drowning in debt and depression—there simply was no money to pay any kind of settlement.
They had issued an official apology on behalf of the Gray administration for not intervening. That had been a start, at least. But when Chubs had gotten a bill on the floor of the House that would have funded a memorial, the Speaker had axed it, explaining that the nation “needed time to reflect on the tragedy before they could properly mourn it.”
“Chubs…” I began, reaching over to squeeze his arm. In all the time we’d spent traveling together, I’d never seen him like this. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because this is what I signed up for.” He shook his head. “Wow, listen to me. I’m sorry, Zu. It’s not as bad as all that. I’m just frustrated. I keep having to remind myself that the work is good, even if it’s hard. A year from now, I’ll look back on this meltdown and laugh at myself.”
Things would and could get better. I believed that with my whole heart. But he needed help. He needed more of us to take some of the weight of the load off his shoulders.
“I think that optimism is going to get you kicked off Ruby’s Team Reality,” I said lightly.
“I’m tired of Team Reality,” Chubs said, his voice tight. The car picked up speed, flying past the workmen repaving the other side of the highway. “I’m done with it. I’d rather be the fool who hopes and works toward change than the cynic who does nothing and laughs when his doubts are proven right.”
I nodded. “I agree with you on that, too.”
He smiled. “Thanks for listening. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking just to myself.”
“We can all hear you,” I told him. “You speak for all of us.”
That same smile faded. “Not everyone.”
With no one listening in, I could finally ask the question that had been festering in me for months.
“Did they ever hurt you?”
“They didn’t bother to hurt me before they left,” Chubs said, struggling to keep the bitterness from his voice. “They didn’t even tell me they were leaving.”
“I meant the people who questioned you about their disappearance,” I said quietly.
Chubs had been questioned by the FBI in a way that I hadn’t. Those same men who harassed him for weeks, following his every move, never turned to look
at me. Two FBI agents had stopped by Cate’s apartment to ask me a few questions about the last time I saw Ruby and Liam, but Cate had been present the whole time. And, after an hour, she’d made them leave. That was it.
At first I’d been almost angry about it. Like, of course, what would a little girl know about anything, right? But I’d seen what the investigations had done to Chubs.
I’d watched him sit in front of Congress, testifying under oath he had no idea where his “so-called friends” were, and answering all of their questions with “I don’t know. I hadn’t spoken to either of them for months.” I was there when agents showed up during family dinner to ransack his apartment for evidence, seizing whatever they wanted, including his books, just to intimidate him. I witnessed the harassment his amazing parents had received from reporters, investigators, and people who just despised Psi until they were forced to move out of Virginia entirely.
The reality was, for once, my youth had protected me.
“No,” he said after a while. “They just asked questions I still don’t know the answers to.”
I plucked the folded map from one of the cup holders. He’d marked our route to Blackstone, a small town I’d never heard of in the southern, central part of the state.
“It should be about a three-hour drive,” he said, sounding more like himself. “Let me know if you get hungry. I packed some water bottles and protein bars. Is the temperature okay?”
“Everything’s great,” I told him. “Do you want me to turn on the radio or anything?”
“Actually, if you don’t mind,” he said, “I kind of like the quiet.”
I smiled, sitting back to watch the rain. “Me too.”
Present Day
NO ONE TOLD ME.
I took the worn path up to Haven at a brisk, hard pace, my arms crossed over my chest. The otherwise smooth, packed dirt was interrupted by a few scattered leaves and footprints that had been stamped in during the most recent storm. Each time I passed one heading the opposite way, back toward the lake, I wondered if it had belonged to Liam or Ruby.
But the thought only filled me with rage.
I felt the heat of it clawing under my skin like a charge desperate to find a circuit to complete, to renew itself.
They didn’t tell me.
Two weeks. Two goddamn weeks they’d been gone, and Chubs couldn’t find a second to mention it to me? Lisa told me they’d made contact with him immediately to let him know. He could have gotten word to me somehow, in person or through Vida. He didn’t think it would matter to me that two people we love were just—just gone, and that they’d left Haven, the most important thing in their world, behind?
I knew I was shaking. Crossing my arms over my chest did nothing but trap the furious heat in, wrapping me in it.
“—see that it’s grown quite a bit since you were last here. We have about twenty kids now. The youngest is nine. Suzume?”
Finally, I looked up from the trail.
At one point in its life, Haven might have been someone’s summer home. A secluded house on a lake, with all the privacy anyone could ask for.
Liam and his stepfather had done considerable work expanding out what had been a simple two-story wood house. The dark, woodsy colors, all deep greens and browns, were meant to help the property blend into its surroundings. Despite the sharp angles of its roof, the first—and last—time I’d seen Haven, I’d had the wild thought that maybe the house had grown up out of the forest, rising up from dirt the same as any of the surrounding trees.
As we approached, the familiar rope lines peeked out through the trees, but…wait. We were still far away from the house, and the last time I’d been here, the ropes hadn’t extended this far into the woods.
I tilted my head back, following the line that passed over our heads to where it was knotted to a tree on our right.
It was a live oak, massive in stature. A silver ladder leaned against its side, a bucket of hammers and nails hooked on it. Nestled between the sturdiest of the branches was the beginning of a wooden platform.
“It’ll be Tree House Ten whenever Liam…well, when one of us gets to finishing it,” Lisa said. “There are nine completed ones on the grounds. After some of the kids took to the first one Lee built, he and Ruby decided to create more to give others their own private spaces. Then it just sort of got out of hand, because Liam doesn’t like the word no, and here we are with more tree houses than actual houses.”
“They’re great,” I somehow managed to choke out.
“The kids usually sleep up there, too, unless the weather gets too hot or too cold and forces them to come into the house,” Jacob added.
The sudden guilt that flooded through me was so overwhelming, I couldn’t speak. The missing years had never felt more pronounced than they did standing there. Each tree house was like a cut that carved down to the bone. My body tensed with the urge to turn and run, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them.
This is what you missed.
Why didn’t I come back?
Look at what they did without you.
Why didn’t I just find a way to call?
You don’t belong here.
It was the last thought that made me reach up to my throat, trying to rub away the thickness.
“I know you don’t agree with Haven…” Jacob began, misreading my look.
I held up my hands, cutting him off. “It’s not that. It was never that.”
“Then what was it?” Lisa asked.
“Lisa—” Jacob interrupted.
“No, I want to know,” she said, turning to more fully face me. “You never came back, but they never stopped hoping that you would.”
The accusation in her words, a realization of the truth I’d managed to sweep away for a time, brought me up short.
I’d hurt them. I’d hurt the two people who Lisa and Jacob and all the kids here loved. Even old wounds could reopen with the right amount of pressure.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to slam my fist into the nearest tree and let the years of silence between us pour out of me like blood.
Instead, I took a breath. I clasped my hands behind my back. I spoke in that careful, cool voice Mel had coached me on adopting. And that numbing self-control became my armor.
“I wanted to work to make sure we didn’t need places like Haven,” I told her. “This was their way of helping. I have mine.”
Or, at least, I did.
Haven wasn’t sanctioned by the government. It, and other places like it, would never be, because they brought kids outside the protection and monitoring the government provided. These places returned the Psi to the dangerous way we’d been forced to live before.
I’d never doubted that the kids at Haven had escaped from truly terrible situations. Abuse and neglect that came after being returned to their families, runaways who’d refused to go back at all, who’d been made to use their Psi abilities against their will…
I understood. I’d only struggled to understand why they hadn’t been brought to us to find better living situations. Existing in the shadow of society was an invisible, fragile existence.
Lisa and Jacob exchanged a look. He gave a shake of his head, and the girl’s shoulders slumped.
“Sorry,” she started. “I just—”
“I get it,” I told her. “I do. Let’s just…figure out what’s going on. I need to find a charger for that phone, and I need to hear everything you know about what’s happening with—”
Lisa put a finger to her lips, looking up at the curious faces peering down at us from the houses.
They don’t know, I realized.
“They’re on a long pickup trip,” Jacob said meaningfully. “They’ll be back soon.”
They were lying to the others—lying by omission, but still lying. It had to be to protect the younger kids, but I would have thought, given the circumstances that brought them here, they would have been given the respect of being kept informed.
“Come on,”
Jacob said. “Miguel is waiting for us in the Batcave. I’m sure he’s already got some theories about your new friends.”
As we made our way to the house’s wraparound porch, the kid in Tree House Four sent a message can—an old coffee tin that had been weighted at the bottom—across a rope line to Tree House One. It zipped over our heads with a whispering sound. All the houses seemed to be connected to one another, and to the window that marked the attic of Haven. Where Liam and Ruby slept.
“Everything good?” Another teen, also dressed in black, jogged up from the back of the house. Her long braid swung out behind her, and she seemed winded.
“Yeah, it’s under control,” Jacob said, handing his gun over to the girl. “Jen, this is Zu; Zu, this is Jen.”
“Hi,” the girl said. “You made tonight pretty damn interesting. Should I go help the others?”
“They have it handled,” Jacob said. Then he added sheepishly, “Could you do me one favor and put this away in the lockers upstairs? We have to go debrief Miguel.”
“Sure,” she said, taking his weapon. “If you don’t need me, I’ll put mine away, too.”
Jacob ran up the steps of the porch, opening the door with a dramatic sweep of the arm he’d clearly picked up from Liam at some point. Jen went ahead of us, disappearing as she headed down the entry hall. I steeled my nerves and stepped through the doorway into the cool, cedar-scented air, almost forgetting to wipe my feet on the worn welcome mat.
That awkwardness I’d felt outside was nothing compared to what swept through me now; it was almost physically painful. What little familiarity I’d had with the place evaporated in an instant. I was vaguely aware of Lisa explaining the setup of the house as she walked in behind me, but most of my attention was on the hallway itself.
While the outside of the house had been designed to camouflage itself in nature, the inside threw colors and patterns at you from every direction. The rugs were a trail of dizzying yellow and blue; wildflowers burst from a crooked vase. A strand of colored lights wound up the banister of the front stairs.
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