SOME PART OF ME HAD expected to find Roman outside the door standing guard, but it looked like he hadn’t moved at all. He was still gripping the steering wheel, staring out the windshield. I opened the front passenger door and dropped into the seat, shutting the door as quietly as I could.

For a long time, we sat in silence, watching the door of the bathroom. I didn’t understand the tension I felt radiating off him. It wasn’t directed at me, and neither was his look of quiet frustration.

“The haircut’s that bad, huh?” I said lightly.

He looked over, then looked again. “Oh. No—I mean—”

“I’m kidding,” I told him. “Everything all right?”

“Yes. No.” A thread of anger pulled through the words. “He’s wrong. About everything. He doesn’t know you at all.”

“Who’s wrong?” I asked. “My father?”

He nodded, his brows low and his jaw set.

“Some of what he said is true,” I said. “I did refuse to go home. I did hurt them by causing an accident. I did fail to live up to their expectations of what my life would be. But I take some umbrage with that one, mostly because I didn’t exactly choose to have my power. I just chose to keep it.”

Neither of my parents really bought into the concept of shikata ga nai, the knowledge that some things in life were simply outside of your control thanks to circumstances. My dad in particular was the type to believe that, with enough careful planning, there was little in this world that couldn’t be brought in line or contained. One of the reasons it had been so hard to hang on to my anger after they sent me to school on Collection day was because I understood. I really did. My power had been anomalous to their worldview, and they struggled to rationalize it as much as I struggled to control it.

Roman turned in his seat, his eyes blazing. “There is nothing disappointing about you.”

I leaned back, resting my temple against my seat’s headrest. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to live inside those words a little longer, even if there was a voice in my head whispering that I was a fraud. “I wish that were true.”

He shook his head. “I know what failure is. I have failed so many times in my life, I can’t even begin to understand how I’m still here. But you survived that camp, you used your voice to try to help others, you fought like hell against those kidnappers, you saved us from them—you, alone. You’ve navigated us this far, and you haven’t backed down from anything, even as you’ve taken hit after hit. That’s not disappointing. That’s incredible.”

I ducked my head slightly, a riot of emotion moving through me. In the backseat, I could have hidden that from him. The backseat was safe that way. You didn’t have to join the conversation. You didn’t have to be seen.

But I wanted to be seen. Because when Roman looked at me, he only saw the person I was now. Someone capable, strong, and in control. Not the little girl with her gloves who only had control over her voice.

“How have you failed?” I asked him. “I can’t even imagine it. Every time I get to the edge of being afraid, I just have to look at you. You hold it together, and you never miss a shot. You think every possibility through.” Then I added, teasing, “You sing like an angel….”

He let out a soft laugh, his hands slipping from the wheel and into his lap. His left hand rubbed absently at the scars on the back of his right. “I want to be that person you see.”

“You are that person,” I told him. “We don’t have to be what anyone else wants us to be.”

Roman smoothed his hair off his face. That same distance had returned to his eyes.

“My father lived and died to the rhythms of violence,” Roman began. “He did odd jobs, and was always at the mercy of whoever he had a debt to or agreed to work for. My mother kept us away from him, but he was like a bruise on the heart of the family. We couldn’t escape the stain of what he was doing, not fully. He was a terrifying man.”

I waited for him to continue.

“My mother made me promise I wouldn’t be like him. She really put a notch in my nose about it.” The phrase was a new one for me, but I took his meaning. “I promised. Again and again. I’d go to school, become a doctor, or a fisherman, a banker, a teacher…anything but that. And here I am, good at the one thing I hate more than anything.”

“Roman…” I began.

He tried to lighten his tone, but it didn’t quite take. “I also promised her that I would take care of my sister. Taking care of Lana has always been my responsibility, from the time we were little. I couldn’t even do that much. I looked away for a second, I focused on something else, and she slipped away.”

Roman scrubbed at his face with his hands, letting out a frustrated sound. I felt for him and Priyanka right then, even more than I had before. They both did their best to hide it, in whatever ways they could, but seeing Lana had rattled them. Being near them was enough to feel the deep pain burning beneath their skin like a live wire.

“Sorry. I’m feeling sorry for myself,” he said slowly, bracing his head against his hand. “I didn’t expect to see Lana there, and to have her be like that was…I don’t have a word for it.”

I did. Devastating.

“I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, even though I’m trying,” I told him. “Nothing about failure is final unless you accept it. We’re going to find Lana, and we’re going to help her. I have no doubt about that, unlike everything else in this situation.”

“Proving your innocence, you mean?” he asked.

“And getting justice for the people who died,” I said. That was the most important thing in all this. “But if Clancy was right and Ruby left on her own, it means my theory about her disappearance being connected to the kidnappers just got knocked out. I’m not sure how I’m going to collect evidence now if we’re on a completely different trail.”

“Once you have the evidence, though, what are you going to do with it?” Roman asked. “Is there anyone in the government you still trust enough to give it to?”

The way he said that last part gave me pause. “What do you mean by that? You think the government is involved?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I meant someone who would take it seriously and get it into the right, unbiased hands.”

“It’s government,” I said dryly. “Everyone’s got a bias. Everyone’s picked a side, I just have to find someone on mine. The only way to beat this narrative they’ve built about me is to create one that’s even stronger. One that’s unassailable.”

“Similar to what you did for the camps,” he said, putting it together. “Creating the media package of interviews and footage.”

I nodded. “Stories are powerful. You can give people a list of facts and they’ll be dismissed or ignored. People believe what they feel is true. So I have to make them feel something. I have to make them angry on my behalf, sympathetic to the victims, and try to restore some of that trust Moore is chipping away at.”

“Sounds nearly impossible,” he said. “So, all in a day’s work for you.”

For the first time in days, I smiled.

I want to be that person you see.

Priyanka barreled toward the car, her face glowing with excitement.

“Uh-oh,” Roman said, turning the key in the ignition. But before she reached us, he turned to look at me one last time and said, “I more than like your hair. You look like yourself.”

I knew what he meant.

“What’s up?” I asked Priyanka as she slid into the backseat and slammed the door shut with flourish. She must have gotten a good charge on the extra battery. The power had jumped from a spark to a steady flame.

“Your genius friend has had a genius moment,” she announced. “Remember how, after we tried calling the number creepy Clancy texted and got the invalid-number error message, you told me to leave it alone so you could have time to think about what you wanted to do, et cetera?”

“Priya,” Roman said. “The point?”

She gave him an exasperated look. “I did a quick search on the area code, except the area code isn’t in use.”

“Really?” I asked.

“It’s close to three-three-four, which is an Alabama area code, so I tried that number, and that one had also been disconnected.”

“You think it’s a typo?” I had never known Clancy Gray to get facts incorrect. If this was the number she’d left with him, I had a hard time believing that he hadn’t tried it at least once, if only out of curiosity. He would have known it wasn’t connected before giving it to me. I told the others as much.

“I was thinking about that, too,” Roman said. “If his aim is to protect Ruby, then he might want to see how quickly you’ll follow up for the correct information. How eager you are to track her down. That, or he’s giving everyone who comes looking the same bad information to throw us all off her trail.”

“Or he just didn’t check and was helping out a friend by passing along the information she asked him to,” Priyanka said. “Which is what I’m leaning toward now that I know it’s not a phone number at all, but something else entirely.”

She held up a scrap of newspaper she’d picked up somewhere, pointing out where she’d tried out a few ways of breaking the number up into coordinates. The last one was circled.

“This is the only one that brought up an actual address when I searched it,” she said. “It’s just outside of Athens, Georgia. It looks like a little house.”

“Do you want to go?” Roman asked me.

“It’s a long drive, but if there’s a chance that she’s there, I think we have to try, right?” I said.

“We can do that,” Roman said softly. “But we’re going to have to find more gas. And get more supplies. Food, water, and the like.”

“Except we don’t exactly have money for all that,” Priyanka pointed out.

They both turned to me, but there wasn’t another choice. We all knew what that meant.

“I’ll find us a drugstore that’s closed for the night,” Roman said. “In and out.”

Thank God the economy had recovered enough to reopen drugstores we could steal from. I should have felt worse about it than I did, but the world had taken so much from me over the last week. Maybe it was okay to take this much back from it.

I hated the feeling of waking up without realizing I’d nodded off almost as much as I hated opening my eyes to an empty car.

I sat up, trying to swallow the sour taste of sleep. There was a little water left in one of the bottles in the cup holders. I drank it down greedily, wiping my mouth against my sleeve.

As promised, Roman had found us a drugstore. The store was dark from what I could see through the windows, and the parking lot was empty, but it didn’t do much to soothe my spiky anxiety. I had no idea how long they’d been inside.

Roman had taken care to leave the car outside the halos of light from the streetlamps. I rolled down the windows, trying to wake myself up with some cooler, cleaner air. Small bursts of power indicated security cameras nearby. Even with Priyanka’s device, I didn’t want to risk getting out and having one capture my face. Instead, I climbed awkwardly over the console and into the driver’s seat.

Roman’s limbs were so much longer than mine that I had to shift the seat up a good foot. I caught sight of them in the rearview mirror as I adjusted it. Their voices carried farther in the quiet night than either of them seemed to realize.

“If something happens—” Roman was saying.

“I don’t need it,” Priyanka shot back. “What I need is for you to let me do whatever I have to do. I shouldn’t have to hold back because you’re scared.”

Roman didn’t say anything, but I caught a glimpse of his face as he walked up to the driver’s side, the deep unhappiness and worry there. When he saw me, Roman jerked to a stop, and then climbed in the back; Priyanka took the front. Both slammed their doors shut.

“What was that all about?” I asked. “What do you have to do, and what are you scared of?”

“Nothing,” Priyanka said even as Roman said, “Everything.”

I blinked. “Okay.”

“Roman wouldn’t let me take money out of their safe,” she said, handing me a packet of Goldfish from her plastic bag, “that’s all. I don’t like feeling useless when I know I could be doing more.”

“You are not useless,” I told her.

I couldn’t see Roman’s face in the rearview mirror.

“Are we good?” I asked.

This time, neither of them answered.