I don't want to go back.

I don't want to go back.

I don't want to...

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"Green!' Liam's voice cut into my thoughts. "Can you drive?"

"No-"

"Can you see better than Chubs?"

"Maybe, but-"

"Great!" he said, reaching back for my arm. "Come on up to the captain's seat."

He snorted, even as another bullet pinged against Black Betty's metal skin. "Come on, it's just like riding a bike. Right pedal is gas to go, left is brake, steer with wheel. That's all you need to know."

"Wait!" But apparently, I didn't get a say in the matter. He swerved back into the left lane just as the SUV came up for another tap. Instead of speeding up, his foot came down hard on the brake. Black Betty skidded to a halt, and the SUV blew right by us.

It happened too fast for me to put up any kind of fight. He unsnapped his seat belt and pulled me toward the driver's seat just as he stood from it. The car rolled forward on its own accord and I panicked, slamming my foot down on what I thought was the brake pedal. Black Betty leaped forward, and this time I was the one that screamed.

"Brake is on the left!" Liam flew against the dashboard as the SUV recovered. I heard its tires scream as Rob turned the truck around and kicked up the speed. "Hit the gas!"

"Why can't he drive?" I asked in a strangled voice.

Chubs pushed the passenger's seat back far enough for him to climb over it into the back, and Liam took Chubs's seat.

"Because," he said, rolling down the window, "he can barely see five feet in front of him. Trust me, you don't want him to drive, darlin'. Now-hit the gas!"

I did as I was told. The car sprung forward again, sending my heart up into my throat. The wheels spun against the wet asphalt.

Liam was half hanging out of the window, half sitting on it. "Faster!" he said.

The rain fell thick and heavy, but the SUV's headlights pierced the mist as I drove the van straight toward them. We were going so fast that the steering wheel shook in my hands, jerking around like it had a life of its own. I bit back a frustrated scream and tried to let up on the gas, but Liam wasn't having it.

"No, keep going!"

"Lee," Chubs was hunched over in his seat. "This is insane-what are you doing?"

He had been so quiet that I'd almost forgotten he was in the van. With the speedometer creeping past eighty, ninety, ninety-five, I wasn't remembering much at all.

And that's when it went to hell.

There was a horrible bang-a thousand times worse than the sound of a balloon exploding-and the van was spinning, the wheel dancing right out of my hands.

"Straight!" Liam was shouting, "Straighten out!"

"Sh-!" The wind was knocked out of my chest by my seat belt, but I fought against the natural turn of the wheel long enough to get us heading straight again. The car tilted back, leaving a trail of sparks on the road behind us. We were staring the SUV down again, making a second head-on pass at them.

"Keep going toward them-don't stop!" Liam yelled.

But the tire, I thought, my hands strangling the steering wheel, the tire...

Chubs had reached for Liam's legs, steadying him before he could go flying out the window. "Let go!" he snapped. "I'm fine, I've got it now!"

I didn't know what Liam had meant by "it," not until I looked up into the rearview mirror and saw the dark body of a tree come hurtling out of the woods, guided in front of the SUV, by nothing other than a flick of Liam's hand.

With his attention focused on the minivan barreling toward them, Rob didn't have time to jerk the car out of the tree's path. I spun my hands around the wheel blindly, until we were facing away from the wreckage. I heard the sound of shattering glass and crunching metal as Rob tried to veer, only to overcorrect. When I looked back in the side mirror, the SUV was on its side in a smoking heap. Beside it was the splintered body of a tree, still rolling to a stop after the collision.

"What did you do?" I had to yell over the chatter of the wind and road. "I thought-"

Chubs was the one to answer, his face ashen. "Now do you get it? They weren't going to stop."

Liam slid back inside of the window, plopping down with a long sigh. His hair was standing up on all ends, dusted with leaves and little twigs.

"Okay, Green," he said, keeping his voice steady, "they blew the back tire out, so you're driving on the rim. Just keep heading straight and start to slow down. Get off on the next ramp."

I clenched my jaw so hard that it ached.

"You all right, Zu?" he asked. The girl gave him two thumbs-up, her yellow gloves the only bright spot of color in the van.

"Well, I'm fine, thanks for asking," Chubs said. His little glasses were crooked on his face as he smoothed his blue button-down shirt. For good measure, he leaned forward and smacked the back of Liam's head. "And by the way, are you out of your freaking mind? Do you know what happens when a body is thrown from a car at high velocity?"

"No," Liam interrupted, "but I imagine it's not pretty or appropriate for an eleven-year-old's ears."

I glanced back at Zu. Eleven? That couldn't be right....

"Oh, so you can throw her in the path of bullets, but she can't hear a scary story?" Chubs crossed his arms over his chest.

Liam reached down and pulled his seat back upright. When he sat back, it was with a grimace and clenched fists. There was a fresh cut above his eye. Blood dripped from his chin.

I saw the green highway sign through the haze of rain. It didn't matter what town or exit number it said. I just wanted to get off the road and out of the driver's seat.

My entire body was numb, exhausted, as I took my foot off the gas. The minivan followed the curve of the ramp with only the slightest nudging, and by the time we reached the road, it came to a natural stop. I pressed a hand to my chest to make sure my heart hadn't given out on me.

Liam reached over and put the parking brake on.

"You did a good job," he began. His voice was quieter than I expected. Unfortunately, it did nothing to calm the pissed off snake that was coiled tight around my stomach.

I reached over and punched him in the arm. Hard.

"Ow!" he cried, pulling away from me with wide eyes. "What was that for?"

"That was not like riding a bike, you asshole!"

He stared at me a moment, his lips twitching. It was Suzume who burst out into a fit of silent laughter, an endless stream of gasping and shaking that turned her face bright pink and left her breathless. Seconds passed with her laughter as the only sound able to float up above the rain-at least until Chubs put his face in his hands and let out a long groan.

"Oh yeah," Liam said, popping his door open, "you're gonna fit in real nice."

The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time Liam got to work on the back tire. I had stayed exactly where I was in the driver's seat, mostly because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing. The other two kids had jumped out of the car after him, Suzume heading to the back of the van with Liam, and Chubs in the exact opposite direction. I watched through the cracked windshield as he made his way toward a sign pointing us in the direction of the Monongahela National Forest. After a minute, he pulled something-a paperback book-out of his back pocket, and sat down at the edge of the road. Feeling more than a little envy, I squinted, trying to make out the book's title, but half of the cover was missing, and the other half covered by his hand. I don't know if he was actually reading or just glaring at the text.

I had pulled us over into Slaty Fork, West Virginia, if the road signs were to be trusted. What I thought had been some hickville back road had actually been Highway 219, in the middle of nowhere. Marlinton might have lost its people, but it didn't look as though Slaty Fork had any to begin with.

I stood up from the driver's seat and made my way to the back of the minivan. My hands were still trembling, as if trying to shake out that last bit of adrenaline singing in my blood. The black backpack that Rob and Cate had given me had been thrown into the backseat, covered in a few loose sheets of newspaper and an empty bottle of Windex.

I brushed the backpack off and set it down next to me on the seat. The newspaper was over three years old and stiff with age. There was a half-page ad for a new face cream someone had oh-so-cleverly called Forever Young.

I flipped the sheet over, looking for any actual news. I skimmed over an opinion piece that celebrated the rehabilitation camps and was more amused than offended that Psi kids were now being openly referred to as "mutant time bombs." There was also a short article on rioting that the reporter claimed was "the direct result of escalating tensions between the West and East government on new birth legislation." At the very bottom of the page, past some fluff story about the anniversary of some train conductors' strike, was a picture of Clancy Gray.

"President's Son Attends Children's League Hearing," is what the headline beneath it said. I didn't need to read more than the first two or three lines to get the basic gist: the president was too big of a coward to come out of hiding after a failed assassination attempt, so he sent his freak baby to do the dirty work for him. How old was Clancy now? I wondered. The pictures at Thurmond were identical to this one, and I had never thought of him as anything older than eleven or twelve. But he must have been eighteen or close to by now. Practically an old geezer by our standards.

I tossed the paper aside in disgust and reached for my backpack again. Rob had said there was a change of clothes inside, and if that was the case, I was getting out of my Thurmond uniform once and for all.

A plain white shirt, a pair of jeans, a belt, and a zip-up hoodie. I could handle that.

The knock on the window startled me enough that I nearly bit my tongue clean off. Liam's face appeared there, drawn in tense lines. "Can you bring those clothes to me for a sec? I need to show you something."

The very second I knew his eyes were on me, every bone, muscle, and joint in my body snapped to attention. With the faint taste of blood in my mouth, I jumped out of the sliding door, taking in the sight of the van. If it were possible, the car looked worse than before-like a toy that someone had wedged down the sink and run through the garbage disposal. My fingers came up to trace one of the fresh punctures on the side paneling where a bullet had slammed through the thin metal.

Liam knelt beside Zu, who was holding on to the spare tire with everything she had, and went to work cranking the van up on the jack and off the demolished back right tire. I came to stand behind them just in time to watch Liam wave his hand in front of the hubcap. The nuts twirled out on his command, collecting in a neat pile on the ground.

Blue, I registered. Liam was Blue. What did that make the others?

"Okay," he began. He blew a strand of his light hair out of his eyes. "Take out the shirt you were about to change into."

"I'm-I'm not changing out here," I said.

He rolled his eyes. "Really? You're worried about your modesty when we're going to have League agents on our tail in a matter of hours? Priorities, Green. Take out the shirt."

I watched him for a moment, but even I wasn't sure what I was looking for.

"Feel around the collar," Liam said. He set another nut on the ground by his feet. "You'll find a bump."

I did. It was small, no bigger than a pea, sewn into the otherwise nondescript shirt.

"Chubs has a little fancy lady kit under the front seat," he said. "If you're going to change into it, you need to cut the tracker out of that shirt."

The "little fancy lady kit" turned out to be a box of thread, scissors, and a tiny piece of embroidery. On a scrap of fabric, someone-Chubs?-had sewn a perfect black square. I stared at the mark, rubbing my thumb over its raised surface.

"Anyway, you should probably change out of the uniform," Liam continued. "But be sure to check the pants and the sweater, too. I wouldn't put it past them to use more than one."

He was right again. I found one sewn into the waistband of the jeans, one in the hem of the hoodie, and even one glued inside the belt buckle-four trackers for one girl, plus one that had been sewn into the lining of the backpack itself.

Liam finished replacing the tire with the spare faster than I thought possible. Zu helped him place the nuts back in their sockets and slowly crank the car back down. When he handed the tools to her, she knew exactly where to put them in the trunk.

"Here," he said, holding his hand out to me. "I'll take care of them." My hands trembled as I handed the trackers to him. He threw them on the ground, and crushed them beneath the heel of his shoe.

"I don't understand...." I began. But I did, in a way. They wouldn't have gone to all that trouble breaking me out if they hadn't had a method of keeping tabs on me if I got recaptured or separated from them.

Liam's hand came out toward me, and the sheer panic at the thought of his touch had me jumping back, trying to put as much air between us as I could. It still wasn't far enough; his hand dropped between us, but I felt the warmth of his upturned palm brush my shoulder as if it had actually rested there. My arms came up and crossed over my chest, and some mangled mess of anxiety and guilt rose up from deep in my guts. I tried to focus on the Psi identification numbers on the top of my shoes to keep from jumping away again.

You are acting like a nervy five-year-old, I told myself. Stop it. He's just another kid.

"They tell you a lot of lies in the Children's League, the biggest being that you're free," he said. "They talk about love and respect and family, but I don't know any family that puts a tracking device on someone and then sends them out to be shot up and blown away."

"But we didn't have to kill them," I said. My fingers tightened around the backpack straps. "There was another kid inside. Martin. He didn't...he didn't deserve to..."

"You mean-" Liam wiped the grease and dirt from his hands off on the front of his jeans. "The kind of-" He made a vague motion with his hands, which I think was supposed to indicate Martin's plump stature. "That guy?"

I nodded.

"The tree didn't actually hit them," Liam said, leaning against the minivan's sliding door. "They might still be alive."

Liam guided me back toward the passenger seat and whistled to get Chubs's attention. Somewhere behind me, I heard Zu climb back into Black Betty.

"Look," he continued, "they all wear the trackers. I'm sure another League agent will be along in a little while to help them. You can go back if you want, or we can take you to the bus station like I said we would."

My hands were still by my side, my face as blank as a clear sky, but I wasn't fooling him. He tuned in to my guilt like I had been wearing it plain as day on my face. "It doesn't make you a bad person, you know-to want to live your own life."

I looked back and forth between the road and his face, more confused now than ever. It didn't make sense for him to want to help me, not when he already had two other people counting on him. That he wanted to protect.

Liam opened the back door for me, tilting his head toward the empty seat inside. But before I could even consider the cost of staying with them, if just for a short while, Chubs's arm shot out and he ripped the sliding door shut in front of my face.

"Chubs-" Liam warned.

"Why," Chubs began, "were you with the Children's League?"

"Hey now," Liam said. "This is a don't-ask-don't-tell operation. Green, you-"

"No," Chubs said, "you decided that. You and Suzume. If we're going to be stuck with her, I want to know who this person is and why we got chased down by gun-toting lunatics trying to get her back."

Liam lifted his hands in surrender.

"I..." What could I tell them that wouldn't sound like a complete and total lie? My head felt light; I was almost too exhausted to think. "I was..."

Zu gave me a nod of encouragement, her eyes bright.

"I was a runner in the Control Tower," I blurted. "I saw the access codes to the computer servers the League wants access to. I have a photographic memory, and I'm good with numbers and codes."

That was probably overkill, but apparently I had sold it.

"What about your friend? What's his deal?"

The longer they stared at me, the harder it became to not fidget. Get a grip, Ruby.

"You mean Martin?" I said, my voice sounding high to my own ears. "Yesterday was the first time I had ever seen him. I don't know what his story was. I didn't ask."