Chubs started to say something, only to stop. Liam leaned down so his face was level with mine, so close that our foreheads were nearly touching. "We want you," he said, his hand slipping through my hair to cup the back of my neck. "We wanted you yesterday, we want you today, and we'll want you tomorrow. There's nothing you could do to change that. If you're scared and you don't understand your crazy abilities, then we'll help you understand-but don't think, not for one second, that we would ever just leave you."

He waited until I was looking him in the eye before continuing. "Is this why you acted that way when I said the Slip Kid might be an Orange? Is that really why you want to find him, or do you just want to go to your grandmother's? Because either way, darlin', we'll get you there."

"Both," I said. Was it so wrong to want both?

I had stopped crying, but my lungs felt sticky, heavy, and getting in even an ounce of air was too much effort. I don't know why my brain was as still as it was, but I was trying not to think about it. Liam and Chubs both took an arm. I was lifted out of the van, guided over to the crackling fire.

"Where are we?" I asked finally.

"Somewhere between North Carolina and the Great Dismal Swamp, I hope," Liam said, his hand still on my back, now rubbing circles there. "Southeast Virginia. Now that you're awake, I need to check on Zu. You two stay put, okay?"

Chubs nodded; we watched Liam go in silence, then Chubs turned to me. "Ruby," he began, voice perfectly serious. "Can you tell me who the president is?"

I blinked. "Can you tell me why you're asking this question?"

"Do you remember what happened?"

Did I? The memory was milky and distorted, like I was glimpsing someone else's dream. "Angry man," I said. "Rifle. Ruby's head. Ouch."

"Cut it out; I'm being serious!"

I winced, touching the stitching in my forehead again. "Can you keep your voice down? It feels like my head is about to cave in."

"Yeah, well, serves you right for scaring the hell out of all of us. Here, keep drinking this," he said, handing me what was left of our water bottle. It didn't matter that the water was stale or warm; I finished it off in one gulp. "I mean, my dad used to say that head wounds look worse than they actually are, but I legitimately thought you were a corpse."

"Thanks for stitching me up," I said. "I'm looking a little Frankenstein, but I guess it's appropriate, all things considered."

Chubs gave me a weary sigh. "Frankenstein is the name of the doctor that created the monster, not the monster itself."

"Couldn't let that one go, could you?"

"Don't get on my case about it. You're the one that doesn't know her classic literature."

"Funny, I don't think they had that one in Thurmond's library." I hadn't meant for it to come out as sharply as it did, but it wasn't a pleasant experience being reminded that your education level equaled that of a ten-year-old.

He had the decency to look apologetic as he let out a deep sigh. "It's just...take it easy, will you? My heart can only take so much stress."

All along, while listening to Chubs and Liam try to talk me down, some part of me had been trying to work through the argument I had overheard. I could understand, as horrifying as it was, the need to leave Betty behind. The PSFs and skip tracers all seemed to know to look for her now. But there had been something else underlying their words-something else that had them at odds. I had a feeling I knew exactly what it was, but I couldn't ask Liam. I wanted the truth, not a sugarcoated version of it. The Team Reality take. Only Chubs could give that to me.

But I hesitated, because next to his feet, on the ground between us, was Chubs's copy of Watership Down. And I kept thinking about this one line, the one that had made me so angry the first time I read it as a little kid.

Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate.

In the book, the rabbits had come across this warren-this community-that accepted food handouts from humans in exchange for accepting that some of them would be killed by the same humans in return. Those rabbits stopped fighting the system, because it was easier to take the loss of freedom, to forget what it was like before the fence kept them in, than to be out there in the world struggling to find shelter and food. They had decided that the loss of some was worth the temporary comfort of many.

"Will it always be this way?" I asked, drawing my knees up to my chest and pressing my face against them. "Even if we find East River and we get help-there's always going to be a Lady Jane around the corner, isn't there? Will it even be worth it?"

The will to accept their fate. In our case, that fate was to never see our families again. To always be hunted and chased down to every dark pocket of earth we tried to hide inside. Something had to give-we couldn't live that way. We weren't made to.

I felt him drop a heavy palm on the back of my head, but it was a long time before he could piece together his thoughts.

"Maybe nothing will ever change for us," he said. "But don't you want to be around just in case it does?"

I don't know if it was the smoke from the campfire that calmed me, or the sudden reappearance of Zu, who had come back from scouting a nearby campsite, making sure it was deserted. As she wrapped her arms around my waist, the boys began to pool together what was left of the food in Betty.

"So that's how you figured out the clue," Liam said. "You saw a memory of it?"

I nodded. "Not so impressive now, is it?"

"No-no, that's not what I meant," Liam said, adding quickly, "It's just I'm trying to imagine what the inside of that kid's head looked like, and the best I can come up with is a swamp filled with alligators. It must have been terrible."

"Not as terrible as slipping into someone's head I actually like," I admitted.

"Did you?" Chubs said after nearly ten minutes of silence. Liam was busy testing out whether he could use Betty's car key to pry open the lids of the fruit and soup cans.

"Did I what?"

"Did you ever get inside our heads?" he finished. The way he asked reminded me of the way a kid would ask for the end of a bedtime story. Eager. Surprising-in all of my nightmares about them finding out the truth, I had pictured Chubs taking it the worst.

"Of course she's in our heads," Liam said, his arms straining to open the can's lid. "Ruby is one of us now."

"That's not what I meant," Chubs huffed. "I just want to know how it works. I've never met an Orange before. We didn't have any at Caledonia."

"That's probably because the government erased them all," I said, dropping my hands in my lap. "That's what happened to them at Thurmond."

Liam looked up, alarmed. "What do you mean?"

"For the first two or three years I was there, we had every kind of color, even Red and Orange," I said. "But...no one really knows why or how it happened. Some people thought they were taken away because of all the trouble they caused, but there were rumors they were being moved to a new camp where they could do more testing on them. We just woke up one morning and the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows were gone." And it was just as terrifying for me to think about now as it was then.

"What about you, though?" Chubs asked. "How did you avoid getting bused?"

"I pretended to be Green from the start," I said. "I saw how scared the PSFs were of the Oranges, and I messed with the scientist who was running the classifying test." It was a struggle to push the rest of the words out. "Those kids were...they were so messed up, you know? Maybe they were like that before they got their abilities, or they hated themselves for having them, but they used to do terrible things."

"Like what?" Chubs pressed.

Oh God, I couldn't even talk about it. I physically could not speak. Not about the hundreds of mind games I watched them play on the PSFs. Nothing about the memory of having to scrub the floors of the Mess Hall after an Orange told a PSF to walk in and open fire on every other soldier he saw there. My stomach turned violently, and I could taste it, the metallic bitterness of blood. Smell it. I remembered how it felt to scrape it out from where it was packed painfully under my nails.

Chubs opened his mouth, but Liam held up a hand to shut him up.

"I just knew I needed to protect myself."

And, truthfully, because I was scared of the Oranges, too. There was something wrong with them. With us. It was the constant chatter, the flood of everyone else's feelings and thoughts, I think. Eventually you learned how to block some of it out, to build up a thin wall between your mind and others', but not before everyone else's poisonous thoughts were in there, staining your own. Some spent so long outside of their own heads that they couldn't function right when they finally had to return their own.

"So now you see," I said, finally, "what a mistake it was to let me stay."

Zu was shaking her head, looking distraught at the suggestion. Chubs rubbed at his eyes, hiding his expression. Only Liam was willing to look me straight in the eye. And there was no disgust, or fear, or any of the thousand other ugly emotions he was entitled to; only understanding.

"Try to imagine where we'd be without you, darlin'," he said, quietly, "and then maybe you'll see just how lucky we got."

TWENTY.

THAT NIGHT, WE SLEPT IN THE VAN, each sprawled out on a seat. I let Zu have the rear seat, and stayed up front next to Liam. I felt uneasy in the silence, and sleep didn't come easy, even when I called to it.

Sometime around five in morning, just as I was about to give into the fuzz covering my brain, I felt someone run a light finger down the back of my neck. I rolled over onto my other side, and Liam was there, half-awake.

"You were muttering to yourself," he whispered. "You okay?"

I propped myself up on an elbow, wiping the sleep away from my eyes. The rain had condensed on the windows, covering the cracked windshield like a filmy overlay of lace. Every time a fat raindrop dislodged itself and went streaking down the glass, it was like a tear in the fabric.

Looking out into the forest was like searching someone's dreams, disorienting and unsettling, but inside the van, everything was sharp. The lines of the reclining seats, the dashboard knobs-I could even read the tiny printed brand name on the buttons of Liam's shirt.

In that light, I could see every bruise and cut on his face, some just beginning to heal, and others that had long-since scarred. But what held my attention wasn't the bruise on his cheek-the same one I had given him a few days and lifetimes before-but the way his hair was standing almost straight up, curling around his ears and against his neck. The storm had turned its color to a darker shade of honey, but it didn't lose any of its softness. It didn't make me want to reach out and touch it any less.

"What?" he whispered. "What are you smiling about?"

My fingers brushed against his hair, trying to smooth it down. I realized what I was doing a full minute after Liam had closed his eyes and leaned into my touch. Embarrassment flared up in my chest, but he grabbed my hand before I could pull back and tucked it under his chin.

"Nope," he whispered, when I tried to tug it away. "Mine now."

Dangerous. This is dangerous. The warning was fleeting, banished to the back corners of my mind, where it wouldn't interrupt how good it felt to touch him-how right.

"I'm going to need it back eventually," I said, letting him run it along the stubble on his chin.

"Too bad."

"...crackers..." a voice breathed out behind us, "yessss..."

Both of us turned, watching as Chubs twisted around in his seat and settled back down, still fast asleep.

I pressed a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Liam rolled his eyes, smiling.

"He dreams about food," he said. "A lot."

"At least they're good dreams."

"Yeah," Liam agreed. "I guess he's lucky." I looked back at Chubs's curled up form and, for the first time, realized just how cold it was without the heat from Betty's vent.

Liam let his head slide down to rest against his other arm, threading his fingers through mine. He seemed to be studying the shape they made, the way my thumb appeared to rest naturally on top of his.

"If you wanted to," he began, "could you see what he was dreaming about?"

I nodded. "But those things are private."

"But you've done it before?"

"Not intentionally."

"To me?"

"To the girls in my cabin at camp," I said. "To Zu that night in the motel. I've been in your head-once. Just not in your dreams."

"Two days ago," he said, putting it together. "At the rest stop."

It was instinct to pull back, to let go before I felt him let go first, but he didn't allow me.

"Don't," he said. "I'm not mad."

He brought our hands down against his forehead, not looking at me when he asked, "Does it make it worse? To be touching someone, I mean. Is it harder to control?"

"Sometimes," I admitted. I didn't know how to explain it, because I had never wanted to. "Sometimes, when I'm tired or upset, I'll pick up on someone's thoughts or a memory they're thinking about, but I can avoid being pulled in if I don't touch the person. Touching them when my head is like that...it's an automatic connection."

"I thought so." Liam sighed, closing his eyes again. "You know, when we first met, you used to go out of your way to avoid touching us. I kept wondering if it was something you had been trained to do at your camp, because every time one of us would try to touch you or talk to you, you'd jump like we had shocked you."

"I didn't want to hurt any of you," I whispered.

His eyes flashed open again, somehow brighter than before. He nodded to our linked fingers. "Is this okay?"

"Are you okay?" I countered. I recognized the look on his face-it was nearly identical to the grief he'd worn at the rest stop, talking about his own camp. "What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking about how strange it is that we haven't even known each other for two weeks, but it feels like I've known you for much longer than that," he said. "And I'm thinking that it's frustrating to feel like I know certain parts of you so well, but other parts of you...I don't even know what your life was like before you went to camp."

What could I tell him? What could I say about what I had done to my parents and to Sam that wouldn't scare him into letting go?

"This is a place where we don't have to lie," he said, motioning between us. "Didn't you tell me that?"

"You remember?"

"Of course I do," he said. "Because I keep hoping that goes both ways. That if I ask you why you don't want to go home to your parents, you'll tell me the truth, or if I ask you what Thurmond was really like, you'll stop lying. But then I realized that it's not fair, because it's not like I want to talk about my family. It's like...those..."

I turned to look at him, waiting as he tried to piece together his thought. "I don't know if I can explain it," he said. "It's hard to put into words. Those things-those memories-are mine, you know? They're the things that the camp didn't take away when I went in, and they're the things I don't have to share if I don't want to. I guess that's stupid."

"It's not stupid," I said. "That's not stupid at all."

"And I want to talk about everything with you. Everything. But I don't know what to tell you about Caledonia," he said. "I don't know what I can tell you that won't make you hate me. I was stupid, and I'm embarrassed and ashamed, and I know-I know-that Charles and Zu blame me for what happened. And I know that Cole has told Mom about it by now, and she's told Harry, and the thought just makes me sick."

"You did what you thought was right," I said. "I'm sure they understand that."

He shook his head, swallowing hard. I reached over with my other hand to brush the hair out of his eyes. The way he turned his face toward me again, closing his eyes and tilting his chin, made me brave enough to do it again. My fingers followed the natural wave of his hair, tracing the strands down around his ear.

"What do you want to do?" I whispered.

"I've got to wake the others up," he said. "We have to keep moving. On foot."