Seven

“We are being followed,” I said. “There! The couple I was telling you about. The one with the stroller.”

I pointed, and Penn and Elise peered over the side of the cage, trying to get a better look.

“It has to be a coincidence,” Elise started. “I’ve never—”

“It’s a doll,” Penn said. “In the stroller.” He fell back in his seat, eyes wide. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Calm down,” Elise said. “It won’t do any good to panic.”

“What else are we supposed to do?” Penn said, peering back down at the couple. “Ella was right. They were following us, and now we’re stuck on this stupid ride. Those people have probably been recording our conversation, and they’ve probably already told Dad we’re with you. He’s probably on his way here right now!”

My body jerked, the instinct to run so hardwired inside me that I had to beat it back to keep myself from jumping to my feet. “I don’t think they know we’ve spotted them yet. That gives us the advantage, right?”

Elise’s gaze darted between the couple and the ride’s exit. “Yes. It’s going to be okay,” she assured us. “They can’t hear what we’re saying. That’s why I picked this spot. Believe me, there’s far too much distance between us, and this place has enough ambient noise to block out anything they could catch on tape. And even if they want to try to blow up their video and read our lips, they’re not going to be able to see anything unless we press our faces against the bars and look down at them.”

“What about Dad?” Penn asked.

“We’ve still got time,” she said. “One more rotation and we’ll get off. You two can go one way. I’ll go another. The crowd here will only help you get away.”

“But we haven’t solved anything,” Penn insisted. “Dad’s blackmailing people, and you’re telling me there’s no way to take him down?”

“What if we get rid of the blackmail?” I asked.

Penn’s face lit up. “If he’s got videos and documents, couldn’t we destroy them? Then he wouldn’t have anything to hold over anyone. He’d lose his leverage.”

“I doubt it,” Elise said. “Your father is not the type to risk losing his power. You’ve seen the vault he keeps in his study.”

Penn ran a hand over his face. “So we should just give up?”

“Maybe not,” she said. “There’s a man I used to go to school with at Cornell. We’ve reconnected over the last few months. Your father and I were both friends with him for a while, but we grew apart after we graduated. He never trusted your father, even before he made his way into politics. He used to accuse John of being a wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing, pretending to want to help the little man when really all he wanted was to grab more power for himself.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “If only I could go back in time. I should have listened to him.”

“But you think he might be able to do something for us now?” Penn asked.

“He’s a brilliant man,” she said. “He’s bound to have connections that could help. I truly believe you could trust him. He’s the only person I feel like I can confidently say that about.”

I reached out to her, placing my hand gently on her arm. “Will you ask him to help us? Please?”

She nodded. “If you tell him I sent you, I know he’ll do everything he can.”

Penn studied his mom’s face. It was clear there was another question he wanted to ask her, but something was stopping him.

“Who is he?” I finally asked.

She reached into her purse, scribbling some information down on a scrap of paper before she pressed it into Penn’s palm. “His name is Erik Vasquez. He’s a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office. Don’t let anyone follow you there.”

“We won’t,” I promised.

She smiled, but there was worry written all over her face. The wheel was beginning its descent. Time was running out.

“When will I see you again?” Penn asked, unable to hide the way his voice wavered.

“Your uncle has friends at the Cornwell on Prince Street. If you need to get in touch with me, you can always go there. They’ll find a way to get a message to me.” She pulled him into a tight hug. “God, Penn, please be careful. Please.”

When the wheel slowed to a stop, their eyes were red, but their chins were lifted, their shoulders squared. The girl operating the ride opened the door, and we climbed back onto solid ground.

“I love you,” Elise said. “Both of you.”

Without hesitating, she took off toward the exit where the couple with the plastic baby now waited nonchalantly, the blanket once again covering the doll’s painted face. Penn and I turned and pushed back through the line of people waiting to board the Wonder Wheel.

We rushed past whirling red-and-blue rides, and I had to grab Penn’s hand for balance. Our feet might have been on pavement, but my head still spun. As he pulled me onward, I turned to look back into the crowd. The rainbow-colored dragons and spinning horses were blocking the one thing I needed to see: the couple with the blue stroller. Had they followed Elise, or were they behind us?

I scanned the swarms of people, but they all blended together. I needed to concentrate. For a moment, the noise died away, and then a sound brought me back. Three words. “Greenwich Training Center.”

I dug my feet into the asphalt, scanning the crowd for the voice I’d just heard.

“Don’t stop,” Penn urged, tugging at my arm.

Next to the line for the small green roller coaster, a group of adults huddled around a tall man who was reading from his phone. “They’re saying it was that Liberationist group,” he said. “Friggin’ terrorists if you ask me. You don’t like this country, then leave.”

“He said something about Greenwich,” I said, turning to Penn. “Something happened.”

“We don’t have time to figure it out right now,” he said.

I scanned the park. The rides still clattered, but something had changed. The mood had darkened, as if a cloud had just passed overhead, casting a shadow across the bright colors, dulling them.

He was right. We needed to get out of there. I turned toward the exit. In front of me, the back door to the snack shop was open, filling the air with the hot perfume of frying desserts. In the doorway, a boy in an apron stood with his hands on his hips, staring up at a small television mounted inside. On the screen, the camera zoomed in on the smoldering shell of a building. The front doors had been blown off their hinges, but there was no mistaking it was Greenwich. Or it had been.

“Penn!” I pointed to the screen just as the image changed.

In place of the now destroyed building, photos of a dozen faces filled the screen. The television was small and far away, but that didn’t matter, I recognized all of us: Markus, Dave, Jane, Ian, Penn, and me, not to mention a half dozen others who might still be at headquarters.

Who knew where the news station had gotten the photos. They weren’t great. Some were obviously candid shots, taken from a bit of a distance. They weren’t too different from the photos Jane had taken of the people our group had been monitoring.

The photos of Penn and me were the exceptions. They hadn’t been snapped as we ducked into a car or glanced behind us on a city sidewalk. Penn’s was from his high school yearbook. I could imagine where the book still sat on the shelf in his room. In the picture, his hair was still messy and long, the way it was when we met, and he smiled a dashing white grin at the camera that seemed totally inappropriate now, like he found some pleasure in the idea that one of the training centers had been bombed.

I’d never seen the picture of me before, but I remembered sitting for it. A few months before the sale to our new owners, Miss Gellner had posed us, unsmiling, in front of the same white wall we’d been documented in front of every year since we arrived. In the picture, my hair was the light strawberry blond that was just starting to show again at my roots. It was pulled away from my face in a low braid they’d purposely positioned to accentuate the delicacy of my features.

I brought a hand to my bangs, combing them down onto my forehead. I’d never been more grateful to Missy’s handiwork. With my short, dark hair I looked similar to the girl on television, but not the same.

Penn gaped at the screen. “What the hell?”

The boy in the apron turned, and my muscles tensed, ready to run. What if he recognized us? What if he started yelling?

But he hardly glanced at us. “I know! It’s messed up, right?” He turned to look back at the television just as the image of our photos disappeared.

“What happened?” Penn asked.

“Terrorist attack,” the kid said. “Those pet protestor people bombed that place and killed the lady that worked there.”

As if on cue, an image of Miss Gellner filled the screen. I hadn’t seen her face in months, but the familiar yet strange combination of dread and awe spread through my body. I grabbed on to Penn’s arm for support.

I’d never considered Miss Gellner a woman I cared about. She’d been cruel to me, ruthless, harsh, demanding. But she’d been important to me, a figure that had filled my days and given me a sense of purpose. There was no denying all the girls at Greenwich had meant something to her. We were her legacy. We made her proud. And as messed up as it might seem, a part of me loved her.

“Who would do this?” I asked.

The boy at the snack stand turned back around as if I’d been talking to him. “Sickos,” he said. “They pretend they care about life, like it’s all important, and then they just go and kill people? That doesn’t even make sense.”

Penn and I both gaped at him. Of course, he thought the news was telling him the truth. They showed him the images. They told him who the bad guys were. It didn’t need to make sense to him. He only needed to trust it was true.

That didn’t make his blind belief hurt any less.

The image changed on the screen once more. This time the view of the devastated training center zoomed in from above. The camera swept over the wreckage. It was a place I’d spent years of my life, but it was almost unrecognizable now. Most of the outside walls still stood, but the blackened roof had collapsed in the middle, revealing a pile of blackened beams, scattered like matchsticks.

I tried to imagine what lay beneath this burned-out shell, tried to walk its halls in my mind, but all I could imagine were the pianos in the music room. They’d been my first love, my first taste of passion. And even though I knew they weren’t alive, my stomach clenched at the thought of them burned and broken. I could still feel the cold touch of their keys against my fingers. They’d saved me in that place.

“Dude, I’ve got to get back to work,” the boy said. “Sorry. Stupid funnel cakes aren’t going to fry themselves.”

Penn helped me steady myself, but as we turned to leave, the boy cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, studying us as if he was actually seeing us for the first time.

I froze. Please don’t recognize us, please don’t recognize us…

Finally, he shook his head. “You can stay and watch it if you want. I’ll leave the door open. Just don’t let anyone steal anything, okay?”

Penn swallowed and pasted on that beautiful smile of his. “Thanks, man,” he said, and for a second even I believed he was just another teenager at an amusement park.

The boy disappeared behind the counter, and the smile slipped from Penn’s lips. “We’ve got to get back,” he said. “Someone needs to tell me why our pictures are being flashed all over the news.”

We took off toward the exit, Penn practically running.

“Slow down,” I said, pulling on his arm. “People are going to notice us.”

Penn slowed his pace. “You’re right.” His gaze darted among the faces of people passing by. I knew what he was thinking. In the last few minutes, the rules had changed. When we’d entered this park, the sea of faces had been a sanctuary, hundreds of bodies to hide behind. Now there were hundreds of eyes that might recognize us. Hundreds of fingers that might point us out. Hundreds of mouths that might shout our names.

A group of kids rushed past, giggling and pointing at the ride behind us. In the chaos of their excitement, I plucked a hat from a spinning rack standing outside of a souvenir stand, hiding it behind my back.

“Here,” I said, stopping just outside the gates. “Try this on.”

I slipped it on his head, tugging it down low on his forehead. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but it was the best we could do.

Penn adjusted the hat, his eyes still a little too wide. “You don’t think it was Markus, do you?”

Of course we were both thinking the same thing. How could either of us forget the anger on his face, the passion in his eyes? He wanted to bomb them. He said so himself. What if this was the violence he’d been craving? Was this the reason he’d sent us on a wild-goose chase after Penn’s mother?

“But he told us to follow your mom?”

He shrugged. “I guess it was a pretty good distraction. It got us out of the way, didn’t it?”

The noise of the amusement park receded behind us, but my head was still full of that clattering din. I couldn’t think straight.

Penn stopped outside the subway station. “What do we do now?”

“We need to go back to the others,” I said.

He scowled. “How can we trust them after something like this? What if we’re just walking into an inferno? If the police track us down, we’ll go to jail. Jail, Ella. And not for something small. That bomb wasn’t just destruction of property. It was murder.”

I knew all that. “We have to go back anyway,” I said. “We can’t believe that stuff on the television without proof. What if it wasn’t them?”

Penn nodded, but he didn’t move.

“Here’s what I know for sure,” I said. “I know you and I had nothing to do with this. Nothing. And if our pictures were all over the news and we had nothing to do with this, maybe Markus didn’t, either. We owe him enough to find out.”