I didn’t sleep much that night.

I spent a lot of time thinking about my father. I had never known him, and now I never would, but I tried to imagine what it would have been like to find him and introduce myself to him as his daughter. The scenario felt hollow.

I also thought about Hope and her adoptive mother, Mavis Preston. I seethed with hatred for that woman. Before, I had worried about whether or not she loved Hope and was providing her with support and affection. But now that I knew she was a part of the Burchard Regime, all I could think about was getting Hope far away from her. As far as I was concerned, by supporting the regime, this woman had aided and abetted in the kidnapping of millions of children. She was a monster.

But she would also be a well-guarded monster with extra security and protections, and that made the prospect of getting Hope back less certain. Still, I would do anything in my power to fight for Hope.

And I had nothing to lose.

I was already wide awake by the time I heard my phone buzzing with a message the next morning. I grabbed it quickly from my nightstand and read. It was from an unknown number.

Tech room in thirty minutes. -Sy

Nathan had mentioned this new mission being big and involving lots of teams, which explained why his lead tech was calling us together. But I wondered how big the meeting would actually be.

Nelson awoke to a similar buzz of her phone, and I realized that all members of Team Hood were probably getting the message at once. She read the text groggily and then lay back in her bed and stared up at the ceiling. I waited for her to break the silence.

“How are you feeling this morning?” she asked gingerly, looking over at me.

There was no honest answer to her question. I wasn’t sure how I was feeling. I was drained, afraid, angry, bereaved, confused…

“Overwhelmed,” I answered after a pause. “But I’m ready for this meeting.”

That much was certain. My father might be gone forever, and Hope might be an impossible task at the moment, but there was at least one family member who was still in reach.

Juno.

Nelson and I rushed through showers and getting dressed without any idle chitchat. She was respectful of my desire not to rehash the painful memories from the night before. I was all about motivation that morning and didn’t want to be bogged down by any extraneous details.

When we were ready, Nelson slung a backpack over her shoulder, and then we were out the door and on our way to the tech building. We passed the dining hall without a second glance; Team Hood would’ve already been heading to the meeting. When we stepped outside, we found that it was another beautiful morning in Edgewood.

We ran into Jackie and Gabby almost immediately, on the main street.

“Guessing you guys got Sy’s text this morning, too?” Jackie asked as we began walking together.

“Yeah, but I wonder who all is coming to this meeting,” Nelson said. “I thought it was just going to be us after our conversation yesterday.”

“Maybe Nathan wants to open up the volunteer pool to other, more experienced Edgewood groups,” I said.

I had been worrying about that prospect. The more volunteers we had, the less likely I was to get selected for the mission. But I had to go wherever it was that they were taking townspeople. I had to know what had happened to Juno.

She was the only parent I had left.

We entered the tech room just as a sizable procession of people was filing out, Zion and Cloyd among them. It was a group of large, muscular men and women, and I assumed that it was the combat team.

“Zion!” Nelson called to him.

He walked over to us as the rest of his team continued out of the tech building and into the street.

“Aren’t you coming to our meeting?” Gabby asked.

“Yeah, you’re going to have a hard time deciding who’s going to volunteer for this mission if you’re not even there,” Jackie teased.

Zion shook his head. “I got different orders. The combat team just met with Nathan,” he replied.

I furrowed my brow. “About the same mission we’ve been discussing?” I asked.

“I’m sure Nathan will tell you everything you need to know,” Zion replied with a shrug. “I’ll catch you guys around.”

Zion left us standing on the steps to the tech building perplexed.

“Guess Nathan wasn’t lying when he said this was going to be a big mission,” Jackie said quietly.

We walked into the tech room together, and quickly spotted Nathan talking to Sy in front of the large coding screen. There was no one else in the cavernous computer room yet.

Nathan didn’t look up from his conversation, so Jackie, Gabby, Nelson, and I lingered awkwardly at the back of the room. Ant and Abe walked in next.

“Did you guys notice a small army walking out of this building a few minutes ago?” Ant asked in an attempt at lighthearted humor.

“Yeah, we were worried our favorite band of misfits was causing riots in here, and they had to call for backup,” Abe added.

But the looks on their faces hinted at a much more nervous and tense undercurrent.

“Nathan met separately with the combat team, it seems,” Nelson replied.

“Just consider yourself lucky that you’re not on the flight teams,” a familiar voice said from behind us.

I turned to see Kory and Jace walking up.

“I saw Rio walking down the hallway in the dorms, and he said they met with Nathan at the crack of dawn this morning,” Kory continued.

“I’d guess Alexy was in on that meeting,” I said. “So this is probably all of us.”

At the front of the room, Sy and Nathan shook hands as if finishing their conversation, and then Sy began to walk toward us.

“Glad you all got my message,” he said in a warm, baritone voice as he approached. “But Nelson and Gabby, I sent yours a little early. You’ll be joining us in the tech meeting after this.”

“Wait, so should we not be in this meeting?” Gabby asked with a hint of fear and frustration in her voice. Nelson also looked confused and upset.

“Of course you’re welcome in this meeting,” Nathan’s voice called from over by the coding screens. “We’ll just keep you two afterward so you can sit in with your team as well.”

Nelson’s eyes lit up. She looked wide-eyed at Sy, who gave her a knowing wink and then walked out of the room.

“We got selected for the tech team,” she said quietly to Gabby, who gasped and then smiled broadly.

I beamed at their reactions. I knew they had been working on the tech B team, and that they had been selected to work on the A team for the final phase of Artemis. But now it seemed that Nathan had made the call to officially induct them into the core squad. And I didn’t know any two people who were more deserving of that opportunity.

Nathan waved his hand to gesture us over, then, and we walked closer to the overhead screens near Nathan while Abe’s voice echoed in my head. Band of misfits. It was true. We were a ragtag bunch with no one talent to unite us. But it seemed like Nathan had designated us a team for some reason, even as members like Nelson and Gabby began to gravitate toward their own teams. I wondered what the reason was for keeping the rest of Team Hood together so far.

As we approached, the coding screens changed and began to display a new sight. I squinted up at them, trying to decipher what I was looking at, and as my eyes adjusted I started to make out the general outline of a map. There was a large green space in the middle, with a few gray lines running around it: roads and a forest. It was a satellite image.

Nathan didn’t glance up at the image. He focused his attention on us.

“We got these satellite images through Artemis. This is the uncultivated expanse of land between the abandoned factory towns,” he said.

We kept our upturned eyes on the screen. The image was inconspicuous enough, just a forest between a few towns. But as I focused on those woods, they began to appear more ominous. The abandoned towns were situated around that very forest. Were people being hidden in there? Or, worse yet, was it a mass gravesite? At any rate, why was all this happening? What was Helping Hands doing? And why was the government so invested in it?

“By backtracking a few days’ worth of images, we can start to see some activity,” Nathan continued.

The screen began to change. It was the same basic picture, but we were now seeing little variations in things like cloud cover and lighting. It looked like the same image on different days. Nathan zoomed in on a particular image so we could see the roads more clearly. Six or seven large, hulking figures were on the road—and the first of them was turning off the road and toward the forest.

“Cargo trucks,” I said out loud.

Nathan nodded gravely. “With the information you two got from Ironfield, we can deduce that these cargo trucks may have been carrying people. The timing lines up.”

I squinted at the image. It was horrifying to imagine poor people being transported like textiles or refrigerated goods in the back of a big truck. Were they confused? Were they afraid? I thought back to what the woman had said in Ironfield. Was there any chance that Helping Hands was telling the truth and they were actually housing people in temporary shelters on this land? If so, why were they keeping it hidden? And why hadn’t they started doing any of the repairs on the abandoned towns they had promised?

“If you’ll recall, we weren’t able to ascertain the layout of this space with our X-ray drones. But the satellite images give us some new insight,” Nathan continued.

The image zoomed in on the woods. From overhead, you could see a large building in the middle of a clearing. Another large building was set off to the side by maybe a half mile.

“We think we’re looking at some sort of fenced-in compound here.” Nathan pointed to the building surrounded by clearings. “And possibly a small airship hangar over here.”

The screens went black, and I blinked hard and then looked at Nathan.

“We’re going to send two of you in,” he said. “We need to know what’s happening in that compound, why the government is so involved, and why security is so tight.”

The room was silent and tense. We knew the plan already, but seeing those images of the forest made the mission seem more real. And, at least to me, a lot scarier. Whoever went in there would be alone and at the mercy of the enemy if they were discovered hiding out among the townspeople.

“Is this when we open up the floor to volunteers?” Jace asked in a forward tone. He was obviously ready to submit himself for the mission.

Nathan shook his head. “Before you volunteer for this mission, I’d like you to have a better understanding of what you’ll be getting yourselves into,” he said.

Nathan walked forward and pulled a small remote out of his pants pocket. He clicked a button, and then we were hopping backward to allow the projection table to spring up from the floor again. The projection grid reappeared the same as last time: Ashton, Bitter Creek, Ironfield, and Millville were all back on the map. The middle of the map showed the green space that we would be traveling to.

Nathan’s remote control pointed a laser onto the map.

“You’ll remember most of these towns,” he said, pointing at the four towns in quick succession with the laser. “But this one is new.”

His laser stayed on a projected town on the far corner of the map. A new town to be evacuated.

“This is Dry River. And it’ll be evacuated tomorrow,” he finished. Then the laser retreated into his controller, and he slipped it back into his pocket.

We stared at the city together, unspeaking.

“How do you know?” I finally asked.

“Our government operative told us, at the risk of her own life. Which is why we have to be extremely cautious on this mission. If we’re found out, Aurora will be compromised,” Nathan said gravely.

I nodded. I knew that Aurora’s involvement would be dangerous because of the stakes. She was already in the government’s hands. If she proved treasonous, she’d be at risk of death.

“Speaking of, how can we be sure the plants won’t be discovered? Most of us don’t have a working identity,” Nelson interjected. “So if Helping Hands or the government is scanning identities…”

She trailed off, but I knew what she was thinking. If we were led into a government facility and then had our identities scanned inside, we would immediately be unveiled. And we’d have no escape route.

“Aurora came through on that point, as well. She will be able to edit the identity files in the system to assign the fingerprints of our volunteers to two working identities. Then we’ll 3-D print your masks based on those identities,” Nathan said.

“But the 3-D masks only last five hours,” Jace said. “Are we supposed to get in and out within that timeframe?”

Nathan sighed. “We don’t have a choice. They’re our strongest disguises.”

“How do we get back out?” Jackie asked.

“We’ll create a diversion. The flight and combat teams will handle that,” Nathan replied. “Then we’ll have another team on hand to get our volunteers out safely.”

It had worked well enough to get us out of government custody before, when we didn’t even know what Little John was. But it was a dangerous wager to make. Any number of things could go wrong—and if they did, whoever was left inside would be trapped.

“But how do we protect ourselves in the event that we’re discovered and can’t be reached by reinforcements?” I asked.

The question had started to gnaw at me. If we were caught inside the facility (or whatever awaited us in those woods) and help couldn’t reach us, we’d need a way to fight our way out. But we’d be at even more risk of being caught if we were wearing armor or carrying weapons. It was a double-edged sword.

“By hoping and praying that that doesn’t happen. We can’t send you in with armor or with guns. We don’t know what type of bodily search you will be subjected to on the inside. If you’re discovered with weapons, the entire mission will be blown, and if the identities can be traced back to their inception, we put Aurora at great risk. You’ll have to go in unarmed,” Nathan said.

The room was silent again when he finished speaking, as those stakes sank in for all of us. This was going to be a very dangerous mission. There was no guarantee of safety.

“Now,” Nathan continued, “we’ll open up the floor to volunteers.”