NO WAS THE ONLY WORD Roman would say as we left the rink and crossed the street back to the car. No, and no, and no.
“But—” Priyanka began, gripping the front passenger door.
“No.” The word held no anger, just finality. Roman shook his head. “I’m calling this in to the police, then we can reassess the available options as we head out.”
“You’re being an idiot,” Priyanka told him as he walked toward the pay phone at the edge of the McDonald’s parking lot. “You know I’m right! We should have done it in the first place!”
Roman’s body stiffened, but he didn’t turn back to us. “Maybe. Or maybe we’d all be dead now.”
“Argh,” Priyanka said. She climbed into the backseat and slammed the door behind her. “He’s being ridiculous. Of course it’s a risk. What isn’t a risk?”
“I’d love to sympathize, but I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told her as I buckled myself back into the driver’s seat.
Priyanka let her head fall back against the seat, taking a deep breath. “Did Roman tell you that four of us survived Wendall’s experiments?”
I nodded.
“I want us to go find the fourth member of our Sad Squad,” she explained. “He’s a Fisher. He can locate a person telepathically. It’s like he casts out a mental line and hooks onto an image of that person, wherever they might be.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “How is that even possible?”
“You’d have to ask Wendall,” Priyanka said. “He might have some insights, considering Max is his son.”
My mouth fell open. “How does this story manage to get worse each time you add something to it?”
“I’ve learned to break up the bad bits because it’s too soul-crushing to absorb all at once,” Priyanka said. “But you can see how an ability like that would be very useful to Mercer, right? He could find almost anyone he wanted: spies in his organization, his enemies and competitors…Mercer took Lana into his security detail, but the three of us formed our own team. Max would locate the person, I would break through their security systems, and Roman…”
All at once, I knew exactly what Roman had meant when he’d said Mercer valued his steady hand.
“It got to be too much for Max—the guilt, I mean. He might not have been the one pulling the trigger, but he saw each death and kidnapping as being on him. It got to all of us in different ways, and everything came to a head on the last job Mercer sent us on. Mercer wanted Roman to kill a former business partner and make it look like a burglary gone wrong. But in a burglary setup, you don’t just kill the mark. You have to kill any witnesses present, too. And the guy had young kids. Max saw them when he went fishing for the man’s location.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “What happened?”
“Max usually traveled with us, and we didn’t always know the parameters of the gig until we were nearly there because his locating became sharper the closer he got to the mark. Well, the night before the job, he woke up and tried running. Roman caught him a few hours later, and Max finally explained that he’d seen the guy’s kids, and that he was done, no matter what the consequences were. So Roman let him go. Escape. Knowing about the kids ultimately decided our fate, too, because it wasn’t like Roman and I were going to go forward with the mission alone and kill a bunch of innocent children…but running meant leaving Lana behind.”
“Did you think about trying to go back to Mercer alone?” I asked.
She nodded. “I almost did. I didn’t want to leave Lana, but I couldn’t go back and blame it all on Roman. Mercer would have sent team after team to kill him. And even though he’d never admit it, Roman needs someone to look out for his well-being.”
At that exact moment, Roman rounded the corner of the playground again and made his way toward us.
He opened the back door, slamming it shut behind him. “They said they’re sending someone over just as soon as they can.”
Before Priyanka could say anything, Roman added, “The only reason I don’t like your idea is because of the risks involved with it. There’s no way to get to Max without breaking him out, and from what I’ve seen, there’s no way of breaking in undetected, either. He’s in there for a reason, Priya. He doesn’t want any part of this.”
“Wait…breaking in where?” I asked.
I was really starting to fear the looks the two of them exchanged.
“Roman and I bailed from the mission about an hour after Max did, but that was enough time for him to disappear,” Priyanka said. “We finally tracked him down a few days later, when I found police records saying he’d voluntarily turned himself in at a station in Texas, and they dropped him off at some kind of facility. The security was too tight to try to scope it out, and the fact that he did the thing he’d been threatening to do—turn himself in—made us decide to leave him alone.”
“What part of Texas?” I asked.
“North, right near Oklahoma. What was the city we drove through?”
That last question had been aimed at Roman. “Wheeler.”
That sounded familiar, but my thoughts were too scrambled to piece together why.
“Max could have been moved,” Roman pointed out. “Or that place could have shut down. It’s been almost six months.”
“No, let’s go,” I said. “If he’s still there, we can see if he’s willing to help us. It’s that, or storm any and all of Blue Star’s facilities without all the facts.”
“Again,” Roman said, “the issue isn’t just getting Max out, it’s finding a way inside.”
I shifted the car out of park and guided the wheels onto the road again. The sun was slipping down toward the horizon, bold and shining despite the oncoming darkness of night. I drove us into it.
It was a wild idea. The sheer recklessness of it made me feel like I was careening around inside my own body.
“We don’t need to find a way to break in,” I said. “We just have to let ourselves get caught.”
Miles and hours passed, but I still couldn’t shake the girl from my mind.
Priyanka was stretched out across the backseat, her head resting against the door. She’d tilted it back just enough to look up at the highway cameras as we passed beneath them, counting each one under her breath. Roman fought the slow drag of sleep, drifting off, then startling awake a few seconds later.
I turned the radio on, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the zone announcer’s voice jump out at us. “Here is the current hourly summary of the news….In Washington today, Interim President Cruz’s campaign announced that they had met and surpassed the sudden surge in fundraising money collected by Joseph Moore’s campaign. Cruz herself announced that a new budget agreement had been reached with the United Nations, extending the repayment deadline and securing additional funds to support the Department of Defense….In local zone news, the mayor of Nashville…”
On and on, each state giving an update about their progress, about the new UN-sponsored factories that were employing whole towns, new highway projects, new schools, reopened universities, the return of parades, road closures, rally stops by local and national campaigns. I held my breath as she reached Louisiana, waiting to hear about the body the police had to have discovered by now.
Instead, she skipped over the state and moved on to Florida’s reopened public beaches.
I glanced down at the dashboard, then at Roman in disbelief, waiting for the newscaster to circle back to it. Mel had taught me that it was better to pad bad news with good, to soften it, but the announcer clearly hadn’t been given the same advice.
“Finally, the press secretary announced today that the interim president has asked Congress to reallocate the funds set aside for the Psi reparations program to the defense budget to increase the number of Defenders who are tracking the whereabouts of the Psion Ring. The reparations program, which would have seen a small financial stipend given to surviving Psi and debt forgiveness for their families, will be put on indefinite hold.”
Having reached the end of her news summary, the station switched back to soft classic rock standards.
“Shit,” I breathed out, banging my hands against the wheel. “Shit!”
“They can still change their minds,” Roman said. “You can still change their minds. We have to stay focused on gathering evidence.”
I shook my head. The reparations package had just barely survived being cut apart during the vote in Congress. Knowing they’d used me as the excuse to kill the project Chubs had fought so hard for made me sick; the betrayal of it was almost too much to take.
It wasn’t just that, though. It was the fact that they didn’t even mention the girl—that she clearly hadn’t been deemed newsworthy—that made me want to roll down the window and scream at the world. Wake up, wake up, wake up!
They were covering up her death. Sweeping it ever so quietly under a rug. The zone news reports weren’t meant to be in-depth, but Cruz’s administration had always prided itself on its transparency after years of secrecy by Gray. From a publicity standpoint, though, it made perfect sense to trumpet the good news and not draw attention to the expected spots of trouble that came with resetting a whole nation.
Now…now I wondered if they had actually cut out the rot at all, or if they’d only applied a fresh coat of paint over it.
Something is happening in America, I thought. And no one wants us to know.