WE DROVE IN SILENCE, ROMAN behind the wheel, Priyanka in the front passenger seat.

Me, once again, in the back.

I leaned my head against the glass, trying to will myself to sleep.

Clancy’s voice had wormed deep into my thoughts, burrowing through every plan I tried to make about what we should do next. In the end, I gave up trying and let the others choose. I didn’t trust myself to make any kind of decision.

It wasn’t just that she had gone to see Clancy, knowing the risks, knowing who he was and what he had done. It was that she had chosen to confide in him. Anyone could lie about another person’s exact words, but he had seen something that Ruby never let slip. When I’d first met her, she hadn’t even wanted to be touched, she was so locked inside her own fear. And while she’d learned control and had become stronger, those darker storms moving beneath her skin hadn’t left, they’d only morphed.

Trapped by people’s expectations and needs, alone in what she’d seen and what she could do. Lonely.

I was here, I thought. I was here the whole time.

I couldn’t keep from wondering if I had done this somehow. By working with the government, by not going to live with them at Haven—did that lock the door on our friendship? I’d only been trying to help her live a better life. I wanted that for all Psi. She could have used our contact procedure to get in touch with me. I would have come to her. Instead, I waited for a call that never came.

I should have made the call.

Still, there was a small part of me that clung to the belief that Ruby wouldn’t just walk away. From Liam. From the kids at Haven. From her friends. From her family. From the world. The more I tried to picture it, the harder it became. The only times Ruby had willingly distanced herself, it had been to protect us.

But things were different now, and all of us were, too. So much could have happened between when I’d last seen her and the time she’d vanished. She could have been swallowed by her old, familiar darkness and left us for good.

I leaned between the seats and turned on the radio, just to see what terrifying crime I’d been accused of that day.

When the familiar voice came over the speakers, I thought my exhausted mind had spun it out of thin air.

“—out there, if you’re listening, turn yourself in. Please, Suzume. Turn yourself in.”

“Who’s this chump?” Priyanka asked as Roman pulled into an empty rest station parking lot. He turned the engine off, but none of us moved.

“You’re a delegate in the Virginia state House, are you not?”

I closed my eyes. Of course. Of course he’d gone on Truth Talk Radio.

“I am. I’ve had thoughts about resigning, but staying and fighting for the American way is the only thing I can think to do to counteract the evil Suzume has injected into our fragile world.”

“Okay, no, seriously, who is this asshole?”

I cracked an eye open. Priyanka looked ready to jump through the sound system and strangle someone. Roman had gone stiff, his hands still gripping the wheel. An orange glow from the rest station’s lights filtered through the windshield.

“My father,” I said dryly. “Can’t you tell by the love and warmth in his voice?”

“Her mother, Akari, and I wanted her home—we wanted to work with her and to try to reform her ourselves—but she refused, and she has gone out of her way to hurt us and others ever since. And, of course, Interim President Cruz interfered and made an exception for her. I could not believe my eyes when I saw her speaking on the government’s behalf. If that’s not reason enough for people to vote for Joseph Moore, I don’t know what is.”

Priyanka looked at me. “I’m going to need a meat cleaver and your home address.”

Even Jim Johnson was intrigued by this statement. “Can we consider this your official endorsement of Joseph Moore, Delegate Kimura? Isn’t that the same man who, citing the ineffectiveness of Cruz, has been using his own money to fund a search for your daughter to bring her to justice?”

“Yes,” he said. “In fact, I would like to say this to Mr. Moore—”

Roman was the one to switch the radio off. I didn’t have it in me to move. Didn’t have a thought in my head, not at first. There was just this feeling like a balloon at the center of my chest, and I thought if I did anything at all in that moment I might actually burst.

But, somehow, the others’ twin looks of concern were worse.

“I’m going to use the bathroom,” I mumbled, popping the door open. The air was drenched with the smell of grass and the days-old garbage spilling out of the trash bins. I started for the women’s restrooms, only to double back. My body seemed to know what my mind wanted before it did. I opened the trunk and took out the small first-aid kit, bringing it inside with me.

The sensor lights switched on, filling the filthy restroom with harsh light. I stood in front of the cracked mirror, and the girl I saw through the fractures, through the scrawl of graffiti—I didn’t recognize her.

The kit that Ruby or Liam had packed contained various over-the-counter medication, bandages, and a pair of small sharp scissors. I took out the scissors and set them on the edge of the sink, staring at them like they could tell me my own thoughts.

“Am I about to witness a makeover montage?” Priyanka asked from the doorway.

I looked over. “I should…disguise myself, right? My face is all over the news….”

And I’m not her. I wasn’t Suzume Kimura, spokesperson for the interim president. I wasn’t Suzume Kimura, daughter of a state assemblyman. I wasn’t Suzume Kimura, leader of the Psion Ring.

I was just Zu.

“Unless you’re planning on mutilating your face with those blades, a haircut isn’t really a disguise….” Priyanka cocked her head to the side. “I would say bleach it, maybe, but that would fry your gorgeous hair and make your scalp feel like you’ve dunked it in a fiery hell pit. Not that I speak from personal experience, of course.”

There wasn’t a more elegant way of putting it. “I think…I just want to look different.”

I felt hollowed out, like all the ornamentation and training had been shaken off me. I wasn’t that little girl I’d seen in the photo from Haven, captured in a single carefree moment. But I wasn’t the polished, pretty girl on the news, either. As hard as I’d tried to be.

“Is that ridiculous?” I asked her.

Priyanka came toward me, her expression contemplative. “No, it’s not. The only way to live is by following whatever message your heart is beating out for you.”

“Did you read that on a greeting card?” I asked.

“No, on some kind of blood pressure medication ad,” she admitted, “but it doesn’t make it any less true.”

I turned back toward the mirror and picked up the scissors again. That first soft snip cut through the restless buzz that had been moving through me, momentarily stilling it.

“Dang, you aren’t playing,” Priyanka said, delighted. “How short are you going?”

I showed her, gathering a few inches in my hand and cutting just below my chin. The long strands fell into the sink, curling around the drain. I stared at them until I wasn’t seeing my hair, but a chunk of someone else’s scalp. My vision shook along with the rest of me.

“Why don’t you let me finish?” Priyanka suggested quietly, taking the scissors from me. She turned on the water and wet her hands, running them through my hair again and again until the tangles were gone, along with any last trace of dirt and smoke-scent.

I noticed the tattooed outline of a dark blue star on her wrist again, but before I could ask her about it, Priyanka demonstrated where she was planning to cut. “You want it that length, right?”

It was about an inch beneath my chin. I nodded, murmuring, “Thank you.”

Weaving my fingers through each other, I clasped my hands together in front of me, squeezing until I couldn’t feel them shaking anymore.

“No problem, I live for this,” she said, snipping away. “When I see people upset, I just start grooming them until they feel pretty again. Roman won’t let me near him with scissors. I used to cut Lana’s hair all the time but…now I only ever get to do my own.”

“Roman doesn’t let you cut his hair?”

She met my gaze in the mirror. “Do you think I’d let him wear it so scruffy if I had a choice? But, no, it’s a thing with him. Always has been. I don’t know. Friendship is weird. I think it only works when you finally figure out what buttons you have to push to help them and what buttons are triggers that’ll only hurt them.”

“Are you my friend?” I hadn’t meant to say the words, and I could hear that unbearable loneliness rooted in them.

Priyanka’s hands stilled. “Of course, Sparky. I liked you from the jump, pretty much against my will. You’re a great lesson in not judging a book by its government-groomed cover.”

She leaned down until her face was next to mine in the mirror, giving me a devious little grin. I returned it with a tremulous one of my own.

The quiet snip, snip, snip of the scissors was soothing, almost hypnotic. As each long strand fell away, I no longer felt that anxious tug that was trying to pull me apart from all directions.

When she finished, Priyanka put a comforting hand on my head, running her fingers down through my wet hair again.

“Are you all right?” she asked, serious this time.

All right had become relative.

“I don’t know why it still gets me so upset,” I said, my throat aching. “It shouldn’t. I hate them—I’ve hated my parents for years. It wasn’t even just what they did to me, it was what they didn’t do. Even after the camps fell, I kept thinking…maybe? Maybe now? They’ll have seen that I was a good girl, and that I wasn’t a danger to them. But they never came. They never called. Not until they needed me.”

“What happened?” Priyanka asked. “What did he mean when he said Cruz intervened on your behalf?”

It had been the one rule Cruz had been willing to bend for me, and I’d felt guilty about it for years now—I’d felt like I owed it to her to do whatever she asked in return.

“You know how there was a policy put in place for reclaiming kids after the camps fell?” I asked. “Many of us were teenagers, a good number older than sixteen, and most felt like they shouldn’t necessarily have to go back to parents who had turned them over to the government in the first place. Who had made them feel unwanted.”

“I can understand that.”

I nodded. “The UN and Cruz’s people felt strongly that parents still had legal claims on those of us under eighteen. The compromise was that, if the parents didn’t come to claim their kids, and their kids didn’t want to go back, they wouldn’t force the issue. Parents would be allowed to file claims of guardianship at any point, but in the interim, the government would re-home them.”

Something flickered in Priyanka’s expression when I said that.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head.

I watched her for a moment, waiting to see that same hesitation again. It never came. “Well…for a number of years, I lived with a friend—Cate—and the other kids she’d been looking out for. Then one day, I got the call. My parents wanted me. They wanted me. They applied to restore their guardianship and sent a letter to me along with the paperwork, saying how sorry they were, how frightened and confused they had been. My cousin, Hina, and her parents had been pushing me for years to try to talk to them. But I didn’t want to go. Not really. The last time I’d seen them, they’d been so angry with me—I’d caused a horrible car accident in the middle of a busy highway, and it almost killed my mother.”

“Shit,” she breathed out.

I nodded again. “But…I had to set a good example. I had to show other kids that this could be a fresh start for all of us, and old wounds could be healed—insert whatever clichéd phrase you like there. I went. I got in a car, and I was driven to Falls Church with all of my things. We were about two miles from the neighborhood when I saw the first sign.”

“A Stop, Don’t Come Any Closer, These People Are Bullshit sign?”

“Kimura for Delegate. A Better Tomorrow with Kimura.”

Priyanka caught on quickly, and I loved her for her look of complete outrage. At the time, I’d felt like maybe I was making too big a deal out of it, that it was just a coincidence. It had been Agent Cooper driving me that day. He’d realized what was happening and had offered me the choice that no one else had. He’d risked disciplinary action over it.

“We parked a ways back from the house because we had to. There were so many news vans parked up and down the street. A nice little crowd, too. Everyone was waiting. He even had a banner hanging over the house’s garage door: Reuniting our families, reclaiming our future!”

“I can’t decide if I want to punch something or scream,” Priyanka said. “What did you do?”

“We backed up and returned to DC,” I said. “I never had the guts to read the news coverage from that day, but it must have been everywhere. I got questions about it for years, even after Mel put a ban on them.”

Chubs and Vida had been waiting for me the second I got back. Chubs had hugged me so tightly I thought I wouldn’t feel anything anymore. That would have been a relief. Instead, I held it in and had dinner with them, then raged and sobbed in private, with the shower running.

That’s one of the few things rehabilitation camps gave you: the ability to hold in tears on command, and the knowledge of how to cry so no one will hear you.

I hadn’t spoken to Hina or my aunt and uncle in almost a year. They were good, kind people, and had fallen out with my parents for years over my parents’ decision to send me to a camp. I knew they’d been frustrated when I didn’t move back to California to live with them, and I knew that frustration had only deepened when the wedge between me and my parents turned into a canyon. I just didn’t want to hear their explanations, I didn’t want to be cajoled. I wanted to work.

I turned to look at her and accidentally knocked the first-aid kit off the sink with my elbow. Priyanka and I both knelt to pick it up. In the process, something slid up out of the back pocket of her jeans and clattered against the floor. At first glance, it looked like the burner phone, but the rectangular device was a matte black, with no screen. Inside its casing was a faint charge.

“Backup battery for the phone,” Priyanka explained, sliding it into her pocket as we stood. “In case we have to ditch the car. I was going to charge it in here for a while.”

It must have been run down to nothing. The power whimpered as my mind brushed against it.

I tucked the first-aid kit against my chest, shooting her a grateful look. “Roman’s probably getting worried….”

“I think that’s a definitely, not a probably,” she said, now looking at herself in the mirror. “I’ll be out in a few. I might try to wash my hair in this hellacious little basin.”

I nodded, making my way to the door. Just before I slipped out into the warm summer night, I looked back. Priyanka had braced her hands against the rim of the sink and was staring at herself in the mirror, searching for something I wasn’t meant to see.