by Seren Goode
“And the redhead is Jaxon, my brother. I told you about him.”
I compared the two brothers. They were both lean and muscular, but they didn’t look like brothers. Jaxon had spiky ginger hair, skin almost as pale as mine, a smattering of freckles across his nose, and flushed cheeks. He had an earbud in one ear, narrowed green eyes, and the corners of his mouth turned down in a scowl.
“What is all that green shit in your hair?” Jaxon asked.
“It’s my hair.” I responded defensively. I put a hand to my head like I could cover up the streaks that had plagued me since birth. Breeze reached out toward my head. I pulled back. I wasn’t sure I wanted any of them touching my head.
“You look like a freak.”
I couldn’t tell if Shim or Jaxon made that remark. They both stared at me like I was a freak.
“It’s genetic, from my mom. She has it too—had it too,” I automatically corrected and continued, “I get in trouble for it all the time. At one school, they thought it was dyed, and I had to get a doctor’s note proving it wasn’t.” I was desperate to sound confident but failing miserably with my awkward verbal gushing. I ground my teeth. Why was I letting them intimidate me? My stomach did a flip.
“I’ve never heard of someone having green hair DNA before. I like it,” Breeze said.
“Don’t knock genetics. Jaxon and I are brothers.” Shim held a dark fist up to Jaxon’s pale freckled arm. “Weirdo.” He gave his brother a friendly punch on the arm. Jaxon snorted and returned the punch.
“Can we focus?” I glared at them. “What happened to my dad, and what do you know about my mom?”
“And where did you get those bags?” Shim hijacked the question.
The twins ignored me and responded to Shim.
“Well—Dad is always learning survival tips,” Skylar explained, wide-eyed, “Has been for years. He pretended it was all normal.”
“Last year, he got really crazed. Started hoarding supplies and stashing stuff all over the city for us.” Breeze looked pointedly at the backpacks. “He wouldn’t tell us why, but now—”
“—now it makes sense. I think it was about the time that your mom went missing, Grace.” Skylar finished Breeze’s thought, and they both looked at me.
Everyone here thought my mom was still alive. Everyone—even me. I had always thought her disappearance was suspicious. But my dad had been so convinced she was gone, even when they hadn’t found her body after the diving accident, he had insisted on burying an empty casket. I didn’t know what to think anymore, and alarm bells were going off in my head. I couldn’t figure out how all these events were connected.
“Why would someone take them? First your mom, now our parents—why is someone kidnapping our people?” Breeze whined.
“I didn’t even know my mom was missing,” I admitted. My declaration was met with shocked looks from the others. While Shim explained what we had talked about at the mall, I tried to organize what I knew so I could figure out what to do next.
“So Breeze and Skylar, your dad, Arie, was kidnapped with my dad, but none of you know why or by who?” The others nodded their heads, so I continued, “And Kindle, Arie, and my mom grew up together, like siblings, or something similar.” I was mystified by the strange names but tried to stay on track.
“Kindle called them foster siblings. Said we all were cousins or some crap when she introduced us and dumped us off this morning with the twins,” Jaxon said, his voice deadpan.
“I was so exhausted from driving all night, I didn’t think to ask her more,” Shim said, adding another thing we had in common. Later, I’d have to remember to ask where they were from.
“And you had never met before?” I had a strange feeling about all of this. There were too many coincidences in our stories.
“No. We were hanging out in the mall, waiting for the all clear, when I got a call from Kindle telling us to run. The twins must have grabbed the bags on the way here.” The blonds bobbed their heads at Shim’s summary.
I was incredulous that, collectively, they had barely more information than me.
“Ah man, this is so weird,” Skylar said. Shim pointed to the pack in his hands.
“Maybe there is something inside that tells us what is going on.”
There were three backpacks, and the twins each dug into one. Jaxon grabbed at the third bag, and Shim tried to pull it from him. They sank to the floor, struggling over it.
“Jaxon, leave it…” Shim shoved his brother back.
“I’ll do it.” I leaned forward and snatched the bag from the distracted pair.
We unzipped the backpacks and started rummaging through. There were a couple of smaller sacks inside mine, one with the usual survival gear. We had a bag like that on the boat. Then, the contents got strange. There was a sack with a box of hair dye, a man’s change of clothes, and an envelope with wallets and a stack of passports. What rolled out of the last sack got everyone’s attention: a velvet envelope and a sunglasses case.
“These are sick! They look military grade.” Jaxon grabbed the expensive sunglasses and put them on.
Shim opened the vinyl bag and pulled out binoculars. “Are we supposed to be hunting something?”
“I think we are the hunted ones,” I replied, looking in the thick envelope. “Whoa.” Everyone turned to look. “It’s full of money!” I leafed through the thick wad of twenty and hundred-dollar bills, shocked. I had never seen so much money in one place before.
Breeze was going through the wallets; they all had IDs with the same man but different names and hair styles. Skylar reached into the velvet envelope and pulled out a watch covered in dials. A white tag attached by a string fluttered at the clasp. A second item rolled out of the envelope, and it was met with a gasp from the group.
It was a cuff, wide enough for a man’s arm, made of flattened bronze with a round reddish-green stone with silver threads set in the center. My eyes widened in recognition. I was very familiar with that stone—it exactly matched the one in my mother’s necklace. How was that possible?
A dark shadow of suspicion entered my mind. I knew why I was shocked to see the stone, but why had the others reacted as they did?
“That’s Dad’s cuff. He always has it on. What’s it doing here?” Breeze said, her blue eyes troubled as she turned to Skylar. She reached out to touch the metal, like she could reach her father through the bracelet.
“It’s the same stone as my mom’s necklace,” I said, pulling the necklace out from under the collar of my shirt. I pushed a thumb under the stone at the front, angling it to show the others.
“No way!”
“Oh, it’s pretty,” Breeze cooed. They all leaned in closer. Everyone, except Shim.
“Wait a minute,” Jaxon demanded. “That’s the rock that’s on my mom’s ring.”
I turned to Jaxon, and Shim swore softly. Pushing up off the floor, he paced away from us.
“Shim?” Jaxon asked with a hint of uncertainty quivering in his voice. “The stones are the same, aren’t they?”
Shim cursed again. With a loud exhale, he spun around and dug into his pocket. “Yeah, it's the same as this.” He pulled out a ring made of a different metal from the other two pieces of jewelry. The ring’s band was studded with chunky, glittering crystals, but the stone set in the center was the same.
“You took her ring?” Jaxon shouted at his brother.
“Shhhh,” the twins hissed.
“You…” Words poured out of Jaxon’s mouth I had never heard before as he lit into his brother. Without a pause, he launched himself at Shim, knocking the ring out of his hand and punching him in the face.
I scrambled back, shrinking against the wall to stay out of range as legs splayed and arms flying the brothers rolled by.
The ring landed next to me, and I studied it without picking it up. It was inter
esting that the ring had the same stone—maybe a remarkable coincidence. But the odds that the cuff was made from the same metal as my mom’s necklace and the same stone was in all three—that was unreal.
And I couldn’t believe that we are on the brink of discovering something that might help us rescue our parents, and these two idiots were fighting.
“We don’t have time for this!” I hissed, my voice harsh. “We have to focus…We have to figure out what to do next.”
“What do you mean? We have to go back home, of course,” Breeze said.
Did this girl not remember what had just happened?
Shim shoved Jaxon off, his clothes now dirty and a new scrape starting to bleed on his arm. Pulling his shirt down where it had ridden up, he came back to our huddled camp around the packs. On his way, he scooped the ring off the floor and held it tight in his fist. Jaxon started at him again, but Shim glared, and something in his dark expression made Jaxon stiffen and back off.
I found my hand on the cold metal at my throat. Unless I was swimming, I was always wearing it. Running my fingers along the necklace, I pulled it out and studied it upside-down, comparing it to the other pieces and logging the differences. After my mom died—went missing—I had become obsessed with researching the necklace. I’d spent a lot of time online reading about gems, geology, metallurgy, and jewelry making; I’d even studied meteorites. That is how I knew that the metal on the necklace was the same as the cuff but different from the ring. My mother’s necklace was a torc, a single piece of curved metal that, when I wore it, wrapped around my neck at my collar. Both pieces were smooth with no visible hammer marks, but the surface of each was etched with a pattern of intricate score marks, like a script, that I’d never been able to identify. The metal was aged and darkened in places. Both ends of the pieces terminated with a miniature metal-screened dome. On the necklace, the ends hung in front and were several inches apart, linked by a chain, and in the center, a cabochon-set stone sat in the hollow of my throat.
The cuff, however, would have wrapped around the wrist with the metal folding back and forth and the stone mounted in the center. The stones were identical on all three pieces, a deep reddish-green threaded through with twisting silver lines.
In all my research, I’d never seen anything like this stone.
It raised so many questions. Where did it come from? Why did each of the siblings have one? Well, a piece. They were obviously slices from the same rock. And that led to the most troubling thoughts, the ones I was pointedly avoiding. How were our parents really connected? How could my father have kept all this from me? What really happened to my mother? It made my stomach ache, but this was the path we needed to follow.
“What are they hiding?” Had I said that aloud? Yes, I had.
Looking at the four of them, I held up my mother’s necklace and repeated, my voice trembling, “What are they hiding? Why were they ready to run?” I yanked gently on the chain, then pointed to the cuff Skylar had put on and the ring in Shim’s hand. “These stones are the key.”
Shim studied me. He had a smudge on the side of his cheek that took the intensity from his glare. When he nodded, the tension eased in his face.
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Shim’s gaze lingered on the stone, and he shook his head. “How long do you think they have been on the run?”
“What do you mean?” Skylar looked up from the cuff he was studying on his arm.
“What if they weren’t just ready to run?” Shim nodded to the backpacks. “What if they were already running?”
“Yeah. All those times mom made us move,” Jaxon said.
“All the new schools,” Skylar added.
“All the job changes.” I thought about how many times my dad dropped a perfectly good job, and we up and left a town in the middle of the night.
“Our dad is a Locum Tenens physician.”
I raised an eyebrow at Breeze.
“That’s a doctor who fills in for other doctors. We only stay in a place for a couple of months, then move on. No friends, no family.” Breeze’s voice was soft.
“But they did have a family.” Skylar made a circle with his finger pointing at each of us.
“Not a real family,” I reminded them. “They were pseudo-siblings.”
“It was real to them. Whatever they experienced in that foster home bonded them together. We might not know each other, but our parents knew about each of us. What I don’t understand is why they kept us a secret from each other.”
I looked from the stones to the bags. “There is some kind of connection here. Between all of us. Something happened that connected our parents, but also frightened them, so they stayed apart.”
“Maybe they saw something illegal or a murder,” Breeze guessed.
“Oh, like they were in a witness protection program and had to hide who they were.” Skylar got excited at the idea. “Maybe they carried guns and went undercover to spy on some mafia-types.”
“Man, you watch too much TV.” Jaxon’s tone was scornful. “My mom wouldn’t spy on anyone. She’s too smart to get caught up in that.”
Shim corroborated with a nod.
“My dad’s a marine biologist. I can’t imagine who he would spy on,” I admitted.
“Your dad’s not one of them.” Jaxon’s blunt tone needled me.
I bristled at the exclusion of my dad from whatever this was—he had been taken too.
“Logan isn’t either,” Shim reminded his brother. To me, he added, “Logan O’Connell, he’s our dad. I bet that was why the Micah dude who visited Kindle last year wanted to know what she had told him. Whatever happened to them must have happened before they married our dads.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Jaxon glowered at Shim. They stared each other down like mad dogs, willing the other to blink first. I didn’t think Jaxon was going to respond. Then he broke eye contact.
“My mom was pissed after the divorce,” Jaxon began, slowly. “Last year, there was a huge blowup. The police got called.” His face scrunched as he dug deep into the memory.
“Afterwards, this stranger turns up; I’d never seen him before, but Kindle knows him. At first, he’s comforting her, then this guy demands to know where Amy’s diary is and what Kindle had told Logan.” I was about to correct the pronunciation of my mother’s name to Amé when his eyes widen and he continued his story. “Big mistake. She started yelling at him. Called him ‘Micah.’ Said she ‘hadn’t told Logan the truth.’ Then they saw me and immediately stopped fighting. It was so weird.”
“So, Micah was one of the original five. Who was the fifth?” I asked.
“They mentioned someone else. She had a strange name too. I think it was his wife.” Jaxon’s face went blank and he shrugged.
Skylar let out a whistle. “And you don’t know what it was she might have told your dad?” He looked back and forth between both boys, who were shaking their heads.
“How did they know?” I muttered, shivering as goosebumps raced up my arm and alarm bells went off in my head.
“Know what?” Shim scooted closer to ask.
“Diar—” my voice cracked and I started again, “diary. My mother kept one. It had a green cover, and she always had it on her when I was growing up. We never found it after…” When had I last seen the diary? I pushed back through my memories, swimming backward through the messy ocean of pain. What kind of person couldn’t remember something so important? How had Kindle and Micah known about it, and why would Kindle have it?
“Man, this is messed up.” Jaxon swore a string of curses as he got up and hitched up his jeans, then walked around the small alcove, kicking at the corners where the wall met the floor.
I would have liked to pace out the frustration that was making me feel trapped. My knee felt better, but it still twinged as I flexed.
What else had my mom and dad lied about? Why lie to me? What did I do that they didn’t trust me? Now my dad was in trouble, all our parents were, and we couldn’t call the police because what if they were criminals? I shuddered. This couldn’t be real.
How much of my life was a lie? How would I ever know the truth?
“So, now what?”
I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t hear who asked the question, but I knew what I wanted to say. Let’s go home. But I didn’t have a home anymore…and the van with all our stuff, I couldn’t go back to that, I couldn’t even drive yet…and my dad was gone…and my mom was gone. I didn’t have anything—except this stone.
And just like that, I knew what needed to be done. I looked up at the others.
“It’s up to us.” I drew in a breath and exhaled shakily. My voice trembled a little when I added, “We can’t go to the police, we don’t know who to trust, and our parents can’t help us…but maybe we can help them.”
“How?” Skylar asked. He raked his hands through his hair, the disheveled white-blond strands sticking out at all angles. “How are we supposed to help them when they never told us anything?”
“We find out the truth. We find out what they’ve been running from and who would want to kidnap them. It’s the only way.”
They all stared at me, and it was making me nervous. My throat tightened, and I tried to push down my nerves. We had just met today. We were strangers, and these could be the people my dad didn’t want me to trust. All I knew about them was that the two blond wannabe child models looked like angels and seemed to plow through trouble like pixies. The foul-mouthed redhead was as volatile as nitroglycerin, and I was pretty sure he hated everything, including me. And the biggest puzzle, the shaggy-haired boy who stole from his mother, whaled on his brother and didn’t like to be touched. And what I was asking them to do—maybe it was too much.