AFTER EVERYTHING WITH AGENT Cole, all Fort wanted to do was see a friendly face. But the chill coming from his friends’ table in the cafeteria made Fort shiver as he entered. Rachel gave him an evil, dead-eyed stare as he walked in, and Jia caught his eye, then immediately looked away. Cyrus at least looked concerned, though considering everything that had gone wrong, that could be about a lot of things.
“Hey,” Gabriel said, waving at Fort from a different table, where he’d already taken some cereal. “Did you know that there are a couple of suits in our room going through our stuff? What’s that about?”
“You don’t want to know, trust me,” Fort said.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow, then seemed to notice the looks from Fort’s table of friends. “Yikes. I can see why you don’t want to talk about things. What’d you do to them all?”
Fort sighed deeply and moved to get in line for food, ignoring the question. He grabbed a tray and slammed it down on the counter, not even sure who he was most angry at: Gabriel for asking more questions, Agent Cole for catching him, or himself for betraying his friends in the first place.
Himself. Definitely himself. With Agent Cole a close second.
After choosing something that he hoped was oatmeal, Fort slumped into a seat next to Gabriel, where he could still see his friends. Only Cyrus seemed to be looking, and he waved at Fort like he wanted to say something, but Rachel grabbed his hand and pulled it back down to the table.
Great.
“Listen,” Gabriel said. “I get that you don’t want to tell me what happened, and I accept that. But here’s what you don’t realize: I’ll stop asking about it if you tell me. That’s called a win-win.”
Fort dropped his head into his hands, groaning softly. “You know what? Fine. Here’s what happened: I did something… not so great. I lied to them about it so that they wouldn’t be in dan—in trouble too. And now they’re a little upset about it all. Understandably.”
Gabriel nodded, then dug into his own cereal. “And which part involves our room getting searched?”
Fort didn’t look up. “That’s somewhere in there too.”
“Are they going to find anything?”
“No,” Fort said, probably too angrily. “Because there isn’t anything to find, okay?”
“Smart,” Gabriel said. “But back to the death looks from behind me, it sounds like, if I’m hearing your incredibly vague description right, you were trying to protect your friends. Considering what’s going on in our room, you had good reason to. What’s the problem, then?”
Fort frowned. “The problem is that I didn’t tell them the truth. I lied to them.”
Gabriel took another bite. “Would they have gotten pulled away by agents too, if you’d told them the truth?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t going to take that chance.”
“Then I still don’t see the problem,” Gabriel said, flying through his cereal. “You were trying to protect people you cared about, so don’t sit there and tell me you did anything wrong. You watched out for your friends, and they’re only mad because they wanted to watch out for you, too. But you did the right thing here. You kept them safe, even if it meant them getting mad at you. That takes guts.”
Fort frowned. “I guess. But—”
“There’s no buts here, kid,” Gabriel said. “Listen, Fort. You remind me of my little brother. He’s kind of a goofball and always getting into trouble. But I watch over him, because that’s what big brothers do.” Gabriel smiled, just a bit. “And wow, did he hate it. But I never let that stop me. Because I knew that if I ever looked away for just a minute and he got hurt…” He trailed off, looking into the distance for a moment before turning back to his cereal. “Friends are no different. It’s us versus the world, kid, and the world isn’t pulling any punches. You protect those you care about no matter what.”
Fort just stared at his roommate, his annoyance at Gabriel slipping away. “I really remind you of your brother?” he asked, a little surprised by that.
“Yeah, not so much in the face or anything,” Gabriel said, not looking up. “But he’s a good kid, and from what I’m hearing, you are too. Don’t beat yourself up for trying to help people, Fort, no matter how you have to do it. It’s not always pretty, but it’s still the right thing to do.”
“Um, thanks,” Fort said, and really meant it. For some reason, he actually did feel better, though he had to admit it was a bit new to him, having this semistranger say Fort reminded him of his brother. Maybe that was because Fort was an only child and didn’t really understand what having a brother or sister was like? Still, right here and now, with everyone else he knew angry at him, it didn’t feel that bad to have Gabriel in his corner.
Gabriel nodded, then rose to get back in line for seconds, while Fort got to work on his own breakfast, suddenly famished now that he felt a bit less guilty. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jia and Rachel leave, neither looking at him as they went. Cyrus hung around, like he was waiting for Fort, but a soldier came in and waved him out of the room.
It took Fort until just then to realize he didn’t recognize any of the remaining students in the cafeteria, which meant that all the old Oppenheimer School students must have left already.
And here was Fort, stuck with the new kids.
After Gabriel plowed through a second bowl of a cereal, two more soldiers entered the room, each holding a list of names.
“The following students should accompany me to the Destruction classroom,” one said, and read off a list of names Fort had never heard before. There seemed to be more girls than boys overall left in the cafeteria, and ten girls and five boys followed the first soldier out. That left about a dozen girls and ten boys, but instead of reading names, the second soldier just shrugged and told the remaining students to come with him.
Gabriel was also in the second group, which Fort figured would be the case, since Colonel Charles said Fort would be tutoring his roommate. After their talk just now, though, that seemed less of a pain than it had when he’d first heard about it.
As they exited, one of the agents who’d escorted Fort to Agent Cole stopped him for a moment. “Cole wanted me to tell you that your room is clean,” she said. “And that she knows the books are around somewhere, so she won’t stop looking until she finds them. In case you hear anything.”