Present Day

NO ONE TOLD ME.

I took the worn path up to Haven at a brisk, hard pace, my arms crossed over my chest. The otherwise smooth, packed dirt was interrupted by a few scattered leaves and footprints that had been stamped in during the most recent storm. Each time I passed one heading the opposite way, back toward the lake, I wondered if it had belonged to Liam or Ruby.

But the thought only filled me with rage.

I felt the heat of it clawing under my skin like a charge desperate to find a circuit to complete, to renew itself.

They didn’t tell me.

Two weeks. Two goddamn weeks they’d been gone, and Chubs couldn’t find a second to mention it to me? Lisa told me they’d made contact with him immediately to let him know. He could have gotten word to me somehow, in person or through Vida. He didn’t think it would matter to me that two people we love were just—just gone, and that they’d left Haven, the most important thing in their world, behind?

I knew I was shaking. Crossing my arms over my chest did nothing but trap the furious heat in, wrapping me in it.

“—see that it’s grown quite a bit since you were last here. We have about twenty kids now. The youngest is nine. Suzume?”

Finally, I looked up from the trail.

At one point in its life, Haven might have been someone’s summer home. A secluded house on a lake, with all the privacy anyone could ask for.

Liam and his stepfather had done considerable work expanding out what had been a simple two-story wood house. The dark, woodsy colors, all deep greens and browns, were meant to help the property blend into its surroundings. Despite the sharp angles of its roof, the first—and last—time I’d seen Haven, I’d had the wild thought that maybe the house had grown up out of the forest, rising up from dirt the same as any of the surrounding trees.

As we approached, the familiar rope lines peeked out through the trees, but…wait. We were still far away from the house, and the last time I’d been here, the ropes hadn’t extended this far into the woods.

I tilted my head back, following the line that passed over our heads to where it was knotted to a tree on our right.

It was a live oak, massive in stature. A silver ladder leaned against its side, a bucket of hammers and nails hooked on it. Nestled between the sturdiest of the branches was the beginning of a wooden platform.

“It’ll be Tree House Ten whenever Liam…well, when one of us gets to finishing it,” Lisa said. “There are nine completed ones on the grounds. After some of the kids took to the first one Lee built, he and Ruby decided to create more to give others their own private spaces. Then it just sort of got out of hand, because Liam doesn’t like the word no, and here we are with more tree houses than actual houses.”

“They’re great,” I somehow managed to choke out.

“The kids usually sleep up there, too, unless the weather gets too hot or too cold and forces them to come into the house,” Jacob added.

The sudden guilt that flooded through me was so overwhelming, I couldn’t speak. The missing years had never felt more pronounced than they did standing there. Each tree house was like a cut that carved down to the bone. My body tensed with the urge to turn and run, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them.

This is what you missed.

Why didn’t I come back?

Look at what they did without you.

Why didn’t I just find a way to call?

You don’t belong here.

It was the last thought that made me reach up to my throat, trying to rub away the thickness.

“I know you don’t agree with Haven…” Jacob began, misreading my look.

I held up my hands, cutting him off. “It’s not that. It was never that.”

“Then what was it?” Lisa asked.

“Lisa—” Jacob interrupted.

“No, I want to know,” she said, turning to more fully face me. “You never came back, but they never stopped hoping that you would.”

The accusation in her words, a realization of the truth I’d managed to sweep away for a time, brought me up short.

I’d hurt them. I’d hurt the two people who Lisa and Jacob and all the kids here loved. Even old wounds could reopen with the right amount of pressure.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to slam my fist into the nearest tree and let the years of silence between us pour out of me like blood.

Instead, I took a breath. I clasped my hands behind my back. I spoke in that careful, cool voice Mel had coached me on adopting. And that numbing self-control became my armor.

“I wanted to work to make sure we didn’t need places like Haven,” I told her. “This was their way of helping. I have mine.”

Or, at least, I did.

Haven wasn’t sanctioned by the government. It, and other places like it, would never be, because they brought kids outside the protection and monitoring the government provided. These places returned the Psi to the dangerous way we’d been forced to live before.

I’d never doubted that the kids at Haven had escaped from truly terrible situations. Abuse and neglect that came after being returned to their families, runaways who’d refused to go back at all, who’d been made to use their Psi abilities against their will…

I understood. I’d only struggled to understand why they hadn’t been brought to us to find better living situations. Existing in the shadow of society was an invisible, fragile existence.

Lisa and Jacob exchanged a look. He gave a shake of his head, and the girl’s shoulders slumped.

“Sorry,” she started. “I just—”

“I get it,” I told her. “I do. Let’s just…figure out what’s going on. I need to find a charger for that phone, and I need to hear everything you know about what’s happening with—”

Lisa put a finger to her lips, looking up at the curious faces peering down at us from the houses.

They don’t know, I realized.

“They’re on a long pickup trip,” Jacob said meaningfully. “They’ll be back soon.”

They were lying to the others—lying by omission, but still lying. It had to be to protect the younger kids, but I would have thought, given the circumstances that brought them here, they would have been given the respect of being kept informed.

“Come on,” Jacob said. “Miguel is waiting for us in the Batcave. I’m sure he’s already got some theories about your new friends.”

As we made our way to the house’s wraparound porch, the kid in Tree House Four sent a message can—an old coffee tin that had been weighted at the bottom—across a rope line to Tree House One. It zipped over our heads with a whispering sound. All the houses seemed to be connected to one another, and to the window that marked the attic of Haven. Where Liam and Ruby slept.

“Everything good?” Another teen, also dressed in black, jogged up from the back of the house. Her long braid swung out behind her, and she seemed winded.

“Yeah, it’s under control,” Jacob said, handing his gun over to the girl. “Jen, this is Zu; Zu, this is Jen.”

“Hi,” the girl said. “You made tonight pretty damn interesting. Should I go help the others?”

“They have it handled,” Jacob said. Then he added sheepishly, “Could you do me one favor and put this away in the lockers upstairs? We have to go debrief Miguel.”

“Sure,” she said, taking his weapon. “If you don’t need me, I’ll put mine away, too.”

Jacob ran up the steps of the porch, opening the door with a dramatic sweep of the arm he’d clearly picked up from Liam at some point. Jen went ahead of us, disappearing as she headed down the entry hall. I steeled my nerves and stepped through the doorway into the cool, cedar-scented air, almost forgetting to wipe my feet on the worn welcome mat.

That awkwardness I’d felt outside was nothing compared to what swept through me now; it was almost physically painful. What little familiarity I’d had with the place evaporated in an instant. I was vaguely aware of Lisa explaining the setup of the house as she walked in behind me, but most of my attention was on the hallway itself.

While the outside of the house had been designed to camouflage itself in nature, the inside threw colors and patterns at you from every direction. The rugs were a trail of dizzying yellow and blue; wildflowers burst from a crooked vase. A strand of colored lights wound up the banister of the front stairs.

But my eyes kept drifting to the walls. On our brief tour, years before, Ruby had explained that it was too dangerous to keep photos of the Psi who stayed with them, whether the kids were there for a few months or years. They had been thinking about encouraging them to leave a piece of artwork—so that the house, and all of its inhabitants, would never forget them.

Clearly, they’d made their decision.

The result was a mishmash of frames scattered over the main hall and up the staircase. Most of the Psi had done drawings or paintings of Haven itself, but others had decided to do self-portraits. Some wove bracelets or potholders, others sewed messages, and some even melted beads together to make flat plastic flowers and smiley faces. Liam and Ruby had diligently framed them all.

The last one on the wall, a picture of a short, dark-haired woman and a taller blond guy, their arms linked, their faces smiling, was drawn in careful strokes of crayon. My face was reflected in the glass, and, just like that, I could see Liam’s there instead of mine, smiling that dumb, proud grin of his.

“If you wouldn’t mind…” Lisa gestured to the row of neatly lined-up shoes—sneakers, sandals, boots, all in different sizes—along the wall. I kicked off my tennis shoes next to a pair of dirty red rain boots.

The TV was on in the living room, a sweet, upbeat song chirping from the speakers. I glanced in and saw twelve or so kids riveted by an animated movie I didn’t recognize. As we passed, a girl emerged from the room. She rubbed tiredly at her eyes, making a beeline for the bathroom.

Her crown of dark curls bounced as she came to a sudden stop in front of me, and her eyes went wide. “Zu?”

I stilled.

Oh God, I thought. She saw the explosion, she thinks—

But instead of running away, she let her face bloom into an enormous grin.

I actually could have cried, the relief was that strong. “Hi. Yeah.”

She latched onto my hand, pumping it up and down. It wasn’t a handshake, but a gesture of pure, mystifying excitement. As she looked up at me, her expression turned urgent. Serious. “Do you still like horses?”

“Do I—what?” I blinked.

“You said in your interview that you liked horses,” she insisted. “Do you like Arabians, Percherons, Clydesdales, Lipizzans, or a different kind best?”

Lisa laughed. “Sorry, Sasha, she doesn’t have time to talk right now. We have to steal her for a little bit.”

“Okay!” the girl said, giving my hand one last shake. “You can come to our room—it’s the blue one—and we can talk some more then!”

“Okay,” I said, still mildly startled. She continued past us down the hall, giving Jacob a high five along the way.

I gave them both a questioning look.

“It’s easier just to show you,” he said. “Plus, it’s on the way.”

Lisa led us down the hall. We swung a left at the dining room, and just before we reached the kitchen, she stopped beside a bulletin board on the wall that was overflowing with newspaper and magazine clippings. One face smiled out from every single photograph.

Mine.

“Wow…this is…” I didn’t have the words for it. I stared at the photographs from my speeches and publicity shoots, the articles about every event I’d attended.

“Sorry,” Lisa said. “I hope you’re not embarrassed. You know how Liam gets. I think he just…wanted everyone to know you.”

Because you never came back.

“There’s one for Charlie upstairs,” Lisa said. “It’s smaller, though. He doesn’t get out as much as you do…did.”

An old, battered hubcap hung over the massive kitchen table, taken from a van hidden deep in the woods near a different lake. I turned away, unable to bear looking at it a second longer. “Can we just go wherever we’re going to talk now?”

“This way,” Jacob said, nodding his head toward the back door.

The small room—which had clearly been added on to the original structure—was about ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. It was no small feat, considering the back wall was lined with server towers. A built-in desk wrapped around half of the space, and every inch of surface area was covered in either screens or computer units.

Miguel sat at the center of it all, his fingers pounding the keyboard in front of him like a piano. He swiveled back and forth in his chair to the beat of a muffled song coming out of his massive headphones.

As we came in, he tore his gaze away from his task. The computer screens illuminated his naturally tan skin, making his face glow.

“Hiya, Zu. Long time no see,” he shouted over the music in his ears, continuing to type. It was always amazing to see how many different things a Green’s brain could process at once. Three different computer screens flashed with code as Miguel smiled at me—the confident smile of a heartbreaker who knew the exact level of charm he possessed.

Jacob let out a noise of exasperation, affectionately pulling the earphones off Miguel’s head. The other boy caught Jacob’s hand before he could pull it away, planting a kiss on the back of it, with a wink. Jacob pulled back his hand, flustered, but pleased.

If that wasn’t confirmation enough that they were together, Miguel set his headphones down next to a photo of the two of them on the desk. A symphony of electronic beats and violins poured from the earpieces until Lisa leaned over and hit the MUTE button on the keyboard.

“Hey, Miguel,” I said. “Thanks for getting my message.”

Miguel ran a hand back over his dark hair, scratching just above where he’d tied it into a bun, and shrugged. “No problem. Glad everything worked out.”

“Before I forget,” I said, turning to the others. “Can I get those phones? Miguel, I’m wondering if you have a charger—”

He pulled open a nearby drawer. Dozens of charging-cable bundles were lovingly arranged inside. Lisa passed me the phones, and I handed them to him, pointing at the cell phone I’d used to take the photos of the kidnappers.

“Priyanka did something to that,” I told him. “She took out a part and put it in the other—”

Miguel opened the back of both phones, and somehow did the exact reverse of what Priyanka had done in the car. Jacob put his hands on the other teen’s shoulders, leaning over Miguel’s head to watch. “She just removed its SIM card. No big deal.”

At the sight of its screen finally lighting with power, I released a shaky breath. At least there was that.

“What’s the status at the hole?” Jacob asked, searching the screens for a feed.

With two keystrokes, Miguel changed the footage on the monitor directly in front of him. “So far, mostly fretting. And pacing. A bit like you, I’ve got to say.”

Jacob gave him a look that Miguel only returned with a small smile.

Sure enough, Roman was prowling back and forth across the ten-foot space. His posture was rigid, and he seemed incapable of taking his eyes off what I assumed was an out-of-sight door. There wasn’t much to the shed except a small bench to sit on, but it wasn’t a hole in the ground like the name implied. I shouldn’t have felt as bad as I did looking at them.

“This is quite the setup,” I said. “What are they fretting about—the fact that they got caught?”

Miguel typed in another command, and the footage jumped back ten minutes. He keyed up the volume. I braced my hands on the desk and leaned in.

“—doing to her,” Roman said, anger ringing through the words. “I’m so stupid! I shouldn’t have let them take her out of my sight. Now we have no way of knowing if they’re going to hurt her or not.”

Priyanka had been feeling along the edges of the walls, as if searching for weak joints. At that, she glanced over her shoulder at him. “She’ll be all right. Don’t act like she’s some helpless damsel. She got us out of most of the trouble we got ourselves into. If they try anything, she’ll fight like hell.”

“Still…” Roman said, stopping in the middle of the shed. His head fell back and he clenched his fists at his side. “I know. I know. I’m not doubting her. I just don’t…I don’t like this. We shouldn’t have let them separate us—”

“It’s a lot of that,” Miguel said, speeding forward through the other footage. “‘Should we break out and find her? She’s coming back, don’t worry. Should we try to talk to the kids outside? Why would they separate us? Et cetera.’”

I felt both Jacob’s and Lisa’s eyes on me as I stood upright again. My mind was spinning. “Well…it’s not like they’re going to reveal their plans out in the open for the kids standing guard to hear.”

The footage caught up to the present, snapping out of fast-forward. I watched as Priyanka reached out to catch Roman’s hand. After a small battle of wills, Roman relented. He slumped down beside where she’d planted herself on the bench, and Priyanka rested her head against his shoulder. Instead of closing her eyes the way I thought she might, she glanced up.

Directly into the camera.

“Is she a Yellow? She immediately identified the location of the cameras and mics,” Miguel said.

Huh. A lucky guess? I couldn’t imagine Miguel putting them anywhere remotely obvious.

“No, Green…at least that’s what she told me,” I said. “You guys don’t happen to have a copy of the old skip tracer and PSF database, do you? I was hoping you might be able to search it.”

“Sure do, and I already tried it,” Miguel said. “Ran captures of their faces through the system. No records, though that database is almost five years old at this point.”

“Roman said they avoided being picked up, which I’m guessing also means they avoided being registered, too.”

“Or someone wiped their records,” Miguel said. “What’s their deal? How did you even link up with them?”

I gave them the details as quickly and matter-of-factly as I could, along with my theory that they might have been targeting Haven or Ruby and Liam all along. Another thought occurred to me. “You don’t have anyone here by the name of Lana, do you?”

The boys looked to Lisa.

“No,” she said. “I’ve been monitoring the tip lines these past few weeks and I haven’t seen that name come up at all. Do you know what she looks like? What ability she might have?”

I shook my head. “All I have is the name. They were talking about her in a way…their tone wasn’t malicious. If anything, they were both emotional about it. It didn’t seem like they were tracking her on behalf of someone else, either.”

“The mystery deepens,” Miguel said, glancing back at the screen. “Haven’s not a total secret to Psi. Word has been spreading a bit more recently. Maybe they just wanted to find a safe place for themselves?”

A thread of frustration wove through me. “Then why not tell me that from the start?”

Jacob shifted uncomfortably, silently communicating something to Miguel with a look. The boy read it and nodded.

“What?” I pressed.

“Think about it…” he said, not unkindly. “You work for the government. They could have been worried that, instead of telling them how to get here, you’d turn them over to the FBI or the Defenders for trying to dodge their monitoring system.”

I felt nauseous at the thought. “I wouldn’t do that. If they wanted to come here…”

You’d help them break the law?

It wasn’t…it wasn’t as simple as that. Nothing about our situation had ever been black-and-white; our lives were painted in shades of gray. I believed in giving kids choices, and in trying to protect them in whatever ways I could.

“Or,” Jacob added quickly, “it could be that they just didn’t think you’d believe them. Or that you’d shut down and refuse to say anything if they straight-up asked you. So maybe they came to the speech to try to ask you about it, and then they just got caught up in everything and figured you’d find your way here eventually?”

Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know….They repeatedly blocked her from going on her own.”

I took a deep breath. We needed to put this aside and move on. Not knowing what was going on with Ruby and Liam had created a pressure cooker inside my mind, and it was about to explode. “Are they okay to stay in there for a little while longer?”

“Yeah,” Lisa said. “I’ll send some food and water down for them.”

“And blankets,” I said. “In case…It gets cold at night, doesn’t it?”

The girl gave me a faint smile, nodding. She disappeared through the door, returning a few moments later.

“All right,” I said. “Now, who’s going to tell me what happened to Liam and Ruby?”