THE CAR ROCKED AS I climbed back into the driver’s seat and shut the door. A moment later, Roman moved to the passenger side and did the same. The only sound that came from him was the hard click of his seat belt as he strapped himself in.

I glanced back at Priyanka as she stretched her long legs across the backseat, but she didn’t, or couldn’t, meet my gaze.

“You tell her?” Priyanka asked. Without the usual warmth in her voice, the lightness of her tone felt artificial. Put on for our benefit.

Roman nodded, not looking at her.

My hand hovered over the ignition, not sure if I should be driving, or if we needed a moment to find whatever little center we’d had before.

“Man, you missed out,” Priyanka told me, in that same painfully airy tone. “I tell the tragic tale with a lot more flourish—or, at least, a lot more sound effects and shadow puppets.”

“Priya…” I began, taking in the sight of her. Her whole body was covered in a sheen of sweat. It turned her thick head of hair into a tight cap on her skull, black curls sticking to her collarbone and shoulders like vines. She slipped her hands beneath her legs, but I could see the rest of her was trembling. “Maybe not right now.”

She cleared her throat, sitting up a little straighter. “There was an address. On the server. It matched one of the address searches on Ruby’s phone, but they—Blue Star—deleted the archive before I could get a good look at it.”

“Do you actually see the files?” I asked, curious. “How does it work?”

“It’s more like…” Priyanka began, “everything gets downloaded into my mind. Sometimes I can’t access it right away and it’ll pop up in my thoughts days later, randomly. My mind is like a net when I’m plugged in. Sometimes I can catch everything, sometimes pieces of it slip away. It just feels like…connection. A hot, bright flow of snapshots.”

“Did you see anything else in the files?” I asked.

“It was a veritable potpourri of blackmail, and it stank to high heaven of corruption and secrets. Lots of good stuff on senators, and even a little on a sketchy real estate deal President Cruz made a while back.”

I resisted the urge to press my forehead to the steering wheel. “Great. Anything particularly interesting?”

“There’s one thing you should know,” Priyanka said. “There were files on you and your friends. Actually, okay, two things—after destroying the archives, the very last thing their system did was to issue a GO command and money transfer.”

“That’s the deal done, then,” I said. “Clancy’s in the wind now.” I filled them in on what Lana had revealed about Clancy’s deal. Roman shook his head, disgusted.

Ruby, what did you need from him that was so important you were willing to risk unleashing him back into the world?

Priyanka dissolved into a fit of coughing, pounding against her chest.

“Are you all right?” I asked, handing her a bottle of water. Unable to speak, she nodded, gulping it down. She was sweating hard enough to turn her purple blouse into a second skin, but her color was already improving.

“Coming down from Super Priya Mode is never as enjoyable as the ride, which is why it can be tempting to stay on,” Priyanka said, winking at me.

Roman slammed his hand against the dash. I jumped. “It’s not funny. I don’t understand what you were thinking jumping into the server and chasing whoever was on the other end.”

“I was handling it,” Priyanka said. “The high was useful, like I knew it would be—”

“You don’t need it, Priya.” If the harrowing expression on his face was enough to grip my heart, I could only imagine what it was doing to Priyanka’s. “I don’t understand how you can’t see that you’re enough.”

“I wish that were actually the case,” Priyanka said. “There was no other way past the firewall Blue Star put up. It was that, or let them get the material without us ever seeing any of it.”

“We could have unplugged the servers and taken them with us to analyze later,” Roman said, his voice ragged. “I could have—”

“Made yourself sick with a cracking migraine, like you did? Risk it being the one you might not wake up from again?” Priyanka shook her head. “That high is the only way I have of keeping up with you.”

“I was always having to run to keep pace with you,” Roman said. “It wasn’t just about that.”

“No,” Priyanka said. “It was about reclaiming some power after what Mercer did to me. To all of his kids.”

“We’re not his kids!” Roman interrupted angrily.

Priyanka only shook her head. “You never understood. Lana and I wanted to use our abilities to help other vulnerable children—to burn out corruption, but you just wanted to run.”

He jerked around in his seat. “I don’t want to run from this, I just want us to be safe. You want to talk about useless? Powerless? Look at me. Look at me, Priya.” She did. “The only thing Mercer ever saw me as good for was my loyalty and a steady hand. The only reason he didn’t put me down like a dog is because I was willing to do whatever it took to protect you and Lana.”

What does that mean?

I glanced between them, the raw anger and pain on their faces enough to make me wish I had stepped out. Priyanka looked genuinely shocked by his words. Roman faced forward again, pressing his fist against his mouth and staring out the window.

I needed something to do, so I turned on the engine and took us back the way we’d come down the access road. Dust whipped up in clouds behind us as the wheels ground into the dirt.

“Ro…” Priyanka began, softer this time. “You don’t have to worry. It’s not that I want to be in that high, it’s just sometimes it feels like we need it. But I make it a point not to fall into traps I’m not completely sure I can climb out of, and this is one of them. And while we’re talking about traps, I’m sorry I didn’t tell either of you about the tracker. I just thought…one more try….”

I glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “I understand.”

She shot me a look of gratitude that was still tinged with lingering guilt.

“I don’t mean to lecture you,” Roman said. “You don’t need it, and it’s your right to use your ability the way you want to. But I can’t lose you, too, and I don’t want your hatred of Mercer to play any role in destroying you. You deserve more.”

“I won’t let it destroy me,” Priyanka said, sliding Ruby’s phone out of the backseat. She pulled up an address in Baton Rouge and handed it to Roman to plug into the car’s GPS. It was miles of silence later before she leaned her head against the backseat and let her eyes drift shut.

I barely heard her whisper over the sound of the wheels turning on the road. “Not until I destroy him first.”

The thick, churning heat set in as soon as we crossed the state line into Louisiana. It rose in shimmering waves off the boiling asphalt and slowed my thoughts to a crawl. I’d surrendered the steering wheel to Roman hours before but hadn’t let him coax me into sleep.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Priya’s ability sooner. We’d still have all that money for food.” I watched in the side mirror as Priyanka poured the gas she’d just acquired—simply by hacking the pump to make it believe it had read a ration card—into the tank. The walk down to the station hadn’t been far, and she hadn’t had to wait long in the ration line, but by the time she’d returned, she looked like she’d swum the distance. When she finished, she threw the empty red can into the trunk again. “Why were you always the one going to get the gas, not her?”

“She did get the gas those few times that you slept. We were able to stretch what cash we had by using her ability. She put in a used ration card and hacked the pump,” Roman said. “But there’s always a risk someone will take a closer look at what she’s doing and report her. I’m trained to be as inconspicuous as possible. It’s the least I can do.”

“I’m trained, too,” Priyanka insisted as she slid into the backseat. “Well, in theory. But why be inconspicuous when your enemies can furiously shout your name at the sky instead?”

I looked at Roman. “Point taken.”

“You didn’t take more than the ration limit, did you?” he asked, glancing up at her in the rearview mirror.

“No, you can relax. Even if I had gotten brave and tried it, there was a cop standing right there, watching the meter. Ugh!” Priyanka fanned herself. “Can you turn the air up before I get a whiff of myself again? I think I somehow absorbed the burned-nacho-cheese smell that was radiating from that place.”

I did as asked. The line of cars waiting for their turn at the station now stretched past us. The symphony of impatient honking had begun. Roman had his hand on the door, and seemed to be talking himself out of it.

“Go,” I told him. “We can wait. You deserve to wash up and change.”

“Maybe the gas station attendant will take pity on your sad state and give you the week-old nachos,” Priyanka said. “But if it’s a choice between nachos and hot dogs, take the hot dogs.”

“Yeah. That’ll happen when the lobster whistles on the mountain.” He saw our blank looks. “Really? That’s not an English one, either?”

“More like ‘when pigs fly,’ but we’re keeping yours because it’s absolutely delightful,” Priyanka said. “What is it with Russia and lobsters? What was that other one you used a while back—something about sleeping lobsters?”

“I’ll show him where lobsters spend the winter,” Roman said, a glum note in his voice. “It’s a good threat.”

“Very evocative,” I agreed. “Even more menacing than sleep with the fishes, because you don’t necessarily know where lobsters spend the winter.”

“Deep, freezing water?” Priyanka guessed. “Ice? Someone’s freezer?”

With an exasperated sound, Roman opened the door and stepped out. He stuffed his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and kept his head down as he made his way toward the gas station.

Priyanka came to sit in the front passenger seat, coughing as she buckled in. I gave her a worried glance.

“I’m all right,” she said. “The only thing that ever came close to killing me was the sad look in Roman’s eyes. That is some weapons-grade effectiveness.”

We both turned to watch him fade into the distance.

“Thank you,” she said after a while. “For not leaving when you found out the truth. I’m sorry about the lies. You didn’t deserve that. But nothing makes me feel more protective than thinking about those kids trapped with Mercer.”

“Once I had the whole picture, it made sense why you did it,” I said. “But this time I mean it—we have to be honest with each other, or this isn’t going to work.”

“Well, in the interest of full disclosure, did Roman tell you about how I came to Mercer? My parents?” Priyanka asked.

“Not really. He told me Mercer kidnapped you as leverage because your father was one of Mercer’s business rivals,” I explained.

“Oh yeah, big-time rival in weapons smuggling. Like, nemesis-level rival.” Priyanka pulled her legs up onto the seat and wrapped her arms around them. “Have you ever heard of Parth Acharya?”

“That rings a bell….”

She picked up the burner phone and switched over to the browser. The New York Times article was already pulled up. The image of a handsome, gray-haired Indian man filled the screen below the headline ACHARYA ESCAPES INDICTMENT.

She gave a faint laugh. “I can’t help myself sometimes. I search his name at least once a week. I tell myself it’s because I want to know if he’s still alive, but I think it’s just a different kind of morbid curiosity. When I was a little younger, I used to pretend that he was trying to secretly communicate with me through photos in the newspaper and online, to send me signals. He was such a big figure in my mind—like an emperor—I assumed there had to be a reason why he was always getting busted and tried for this crime or that. Turns out, it was just Mercer constantly leaking information about him to the government. No one could ever pin anything serious on him, though. Seems like they still can’t.”

“And your father…he just…let Mercer keep you?”

“Not exactly.” Priyanka let out a soft breath. “I wasn’t born here. My mother—her name was Chandni. She and I lived in Delhi for the first seven years of my life. My father had gone to America to establish himself there—one day he was a driver, the next, some crime boss’s driver, and the next, the new crime boss himself. It didn’t happen quite that fast, but it was only a year before he sent a private plane back for us. It was a whole thing, because commercial flights to and from the States had been stopped owing to IAAN and how they thought it could spread.

“A few days before it was set to arrive,” Priyanka continued, “my mom was killed by a car as she was crossing our street. So, I went alone. I lived in his massive, echoing marble mansion in Jersey and watched the constant stream of henchmen and overheard a thousand whispered conversations, and that became my new baseline for normal. If he was ever scared of me catching IAAN, my father never showed it. And then about a year after I arrived, a day before Christmas—because, yes, he’s that asshole—Mercer sent someone to kidnap me. He offered a choice to my father: get out of the guns business, or he’d send me back to him in pieces.”

“Jesus,” I breathed out.

“Oh wait, it gets better.” Priyanka shifted in her seat. “The deadline fell on the same day my father was due in court for racketeering charges. Instead of responding to the message, or trying to renegotiate those terms, Mercer and I both watched on the news as my father walked up the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan in head-to-toe white. When one of the reporters asked him why, he explained that his beloved daughter Priyanka had died from IAAN the night before and he was in mourning.”

It actually took me a moment to remember how to speak. “What?”

“Oh yes. That’s how strong his sense of pride is. He refused to admit that Mercer had kidnapped his daughter, that Mercer had won and put him in a position of weakness, so he chalked me up as a loss and moved on. I was a problem to him, which meant I no longer had value. For him, I wasn’t enough.”

“That is disgusting,” I said.

“At the time, the bigger issue was what Mercer would do to me. I remember it so clearly—Mercer looked down at me and said, ‘Well, how are you going to be useful to me now?’ So I asked to join the other kids.”

I gasped. “Priya…”

She shrugged, clearing her throat. “Mercer is a sick son of a bitch, but my father is a coldhearted bastard. That’s the difference between them in the end. Lana isn’t wrong. Mercer did take care of us, in a way. When he turned his attention on you, it was like warm honey. It wasn’t until I was older that I saw how manipulative he is.”

“God,” I breathed out. “What about your mom’s family? Could you go back to them?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I keep up my Hindi so I’ll be able to communicate with them to some degree one day, but it’s not like I’ve really tried to get in touch with them, even after we left Blue Star. Every time I think about it, something stops me. I tell myself that it’s because I don’t want Mercer to go after them, to use them to hurt me, but it’s more than that. I’m not even sure how to explain it….”

“Just try,” I said.

“One of the worst things about all of this is that I feel this strange disconnect with my wider family and culture. I still have my faith, my deep passion for malpua, and all these golden memories of living in Delhi with my mom, but…it feels like I got plucked out of my real life midstream. Does that make sense?”

“It does.” She’d put into words a feeling I’d never been able to articulate myself. When we’d gone to the camps, it wasn’t just our lives that had been interrupted, but our sense of self. It changed the trajectory of our worlds. For so long, our focus had to be on survival, and survival alone.

But that wasn’t living.

“I think that about sums it up,” Priyanka said. “I feel lucky in some ways, because Lana and Roman are more family to me than my father ever was. I never would have met them otherwise.”

Still…

She turned her wrist up, pushing the sleeve of her blouse back until it revealed the blue star tattooed on it. “I don’t know why I kept this. Roman burned his off a few nights after we escaped, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Roman said he hated feeling like he’d been marked as someone’s possession, but I never saw it that way—to me, it was always more of a unifying symbol. A sign that we were family. Now it’s a reminder that nothing is all good or all bad.”

My heart was exhausted. It just couldn’t handle any more. I pressed my hand to my eyes.

“Don’t start crying,” Priyanka said. “Otherwise I’ll start and won’t be able to stop.”

I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. Sometimes it just feels like it’s too much, you know? I always thought the world would feel easier as I got older, but I’ve only gotten more practice at pretending it is.”

“It’s hard for people like us,” Priyanka said, leaning over the console to rest her head on my shoulder. I let mine fall against hers. “We feel everything.”

Outside, Roman appeared along the road again, his dark hair damp and shining in the sun.

“I’m sorry about Lana,” I told her. “It must be unbearable to see her like this.”

“It’ll only be unbearable when I give up hope of ever getting her back,” she said. “And I won’t. Not ever. My heart is a wheel. It breaks all the damn time, but, most days, it just rolls on.”