Three

Half an hour later, Ian pulled the van into a nearly empty McDonald’s parking lot. The lights were on inside, although the only movement came from a hanging cardboard sign wavering over the counter.

“Why are we stopping here?” Penn asked. “Please don’t tell me you’re hungry, because I can’t stomach this place on a normal day, let alone now.”

“We’ve got to get cleaned up,” Ian said. “This place is as good as any.”

“Believe me,” Markus said, “you don’t want these chemicals on your skin. We need to flush our eyes out. If you don’t rinse off now, you’re going to be in serious pain later.”

The thought of clean, cold water made my mouth water. The skin around my eyes felt raw. Each blink brought tears, but instead of washing away the chemicals, they only made my eyes sting more. My lips and throat didn’t feel much better. Even the little hairs on my arms stung, so the smallest movement hurt.

“Are you sure about this?” Dave groaned from the back seat. Thanks to Jane and her insistence that he stay still and let her keep pressure on his head, the bleeding had stopped, but his face was still smudged with blood. “You don’t think we’re going to look totally suspect, all of us coming in bleeding and raw?” he continued. “We don’t exactly look like we’re in the market for Egg McMuffins.”

“What do these guys care?” Ian asked, waving toward the counter.

“What if they call the cops?” Dave asked. “In case you forgot, there was just a very large explosion at a warehouse not too far from here. I’m sure they’d be happy to have a bit of information on that.”

“Where else do you suggest we go?” Markus asked.

“Uh…back home?” Dave said, rolling his eyes, as if this was the most obvious answer in the world.

Markus scoffed. “Home?”

“Fine, headquarters…whatever,” Dave said.

“Are you an idiot?” Markus asked. “We can’t go back. Not now. Somebody in our own circle just sold us out. You want to go back there?”

“But we can’t let everyone back at headquarters think that we all just died! Half of us are still alive! They have the right to know.”

“As far as I’m concerned, there are no others. Let them think we’re dead,” Markus said, climbing out of the car and slamming the door behind him.

The rest of us followed slowly, trailing into the restaurant like a group of zombies.

“Go wash up in the bathrooms,” Markus said once we were all gathered under the fluorescent lighting inside the front door. “I’ll order a few drinks. We need to wash this stuff out of our systems.”

We filed into the bathrooms, not even bothering to stop and look at the signs on the doors. I followed Penn into the room on the right, heading straight to one of the sinks.

“I don’t know what the stuff in that canister was,” Penn said, peeling off his jacket and draping it across a handrail, “but I’m glad we had it.”

I pulled off my jacket, too. The thin white T-shirt I had on underneath clung to my sweaty skin. My skin burned. Even that layer of fabric hadn’t protected me.

Penn turned on the water, and I bent over the sink, wishing I could crawl all the way under the stream. Penn watched me as I splashed my face.

“You got it worse than the rest of us,” he said. “I think Markus must have been planning to detonate it the moment he saw that monster of my dad’s, but I guess there wasn’t really any way to let us know.” He stepped closer, gently gathering the hair that fell in front of my eyes. “Does it hurt?”

I blinked under the water. I didn’t want to tell him how bad it was, that my eyes felt like they’d been set on fire. I rested my head against the cool porcelain. “It stings, but the water is helping.”

Penn cupped his hand under the spout, spilling handful after handful of water over the back of my neck. My skin pricked with pain, but the sensation gradually began to fade. He moved on to my arms, and I held still, letting him rinse every inch of bare skin, imagining the water was his fingertips. When he finished the sweet torture, I stood, wiping my face.

A trickle dripped down my spine. “Do you want me to help you now?”

Penn didn’t answer. Didn’t move.

“What?” I shifted uncomfortably under his unblinking gaze. “It really does feel better. I promise.”

His gaze was unsettling, like he was trying to look inside of me. “Why did you do it? Again!”

He turned away from me, running his hands through his hair as he began to pace the tiled floor.

“It was just like before, when those men from NuPet came. You were just going to leave with them. Like you don’t even matter. Like we don’t even matter.”

He spun around, and the look on his face made a chill creep over my wet skin. It was fragile and imploring, but there was anger in it, too.

I shivered. “You know I don’t think that.”

“Do I?”

“I thought you did. What else could I do?” I asked. “It’s Missy. I owe her. I wish it was just about you and me, but it’s not. It’s about them, too—the other pets. I can’t just forget about them.” I sighed. “I have to make this right.”

Penn’s face softened. There he was, the boy I loved. “I know,” he said. “I know that. Sometimes I just want to be selfish. I guess I wish you could forget them.” He shook his head. “That’s awful. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not awful.” I wished I could be selfish, too. Wished I could let everything but Penn disappear and live a normal life.

Would we ever have that?

He stepped closer to me, lifting his hand almost timidly to my face, as if he was afraid to hurt me. He paused, hovering above my cheek. Finally he lowered his fingers to my lips, softly brushing them over my skin. He held my gaze for a moment, his eyes imploring. They were asking something of me, but I didn’t know what, and my not knowing was hurting him. I was sure of it.

He gave his head a little shake and lowered his eyes, stepping to the sink where he hastily splashed water over his arms and face as if he could wash all that neediness away.

…

Back in the dining room, Ian and Markus sat at a table by the window, staring glumly out at the dark parking lot. Jane and Dave sank down into the booth across from them while Penn and I pulled up a couple of chairs.

“We’ve got to go back to headquarters,” Jane said. “I’m freaking out. I have to know if anyone else is okay.”

“No.” Markus shook his head. “I said I don’t want to hear this, so drop it, okay?”

“Dammit, Markus! I’m serious,” Jane said. “I can’t live with myself like this, not knowing how many of my friends I might have killed.”

“You didn’t kill anyone,” he said.

Jane knotted her hands into fists on the tabletop. “I might as well have,” she choked out. “It was my information. It was my plan.”

“It was our plan,” Markus said. “We did this together.”

She scowled. “Don’t try to make me feel better. I should have confirmed my sources. Twice. Three times. I know who’s responsible.”

Markus banged his hand down on the table. “And I know it’s not you!”

Behind the counter, the lone worker who’d appeared sometime while Penn and I were in the bathroom turned around to stare at us.

“Keep it down, man,” Dave said, waving the cashier’s worried look away with an awkward shrug.

Markus glared at him. “You tell me that again, and I’ll break your face. I swear to God!”

Dave narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t speak.

Markus shoved his hands into his shaggy brown hair and tugged, frustration knotting his face. “Does anyone besides me even understand what happened tonight?” Markus asked. “This isn’t just about those bastards killing our friends. This isn’t about losing. This isn’t about a failed mission. This is about somebody betraying us. A filthy, lying traitor. Got it? This wasn’t you, Jane. One of our so-called friends looked us in the eye tonight and then sold us out to the enemy.”

The group of us stilled. Yes, the fury in Markus’s words was frightening, but even more alarming was the thought that what he was saying was true.

“But how do we know?” Penn asked. “NuPet might have found out what our plans were tonight some other way, right?”

Ian and Dave nodded eagerly, but Markus didn’t respond. He held Jane’s gaze.

She sighed and looked at us.

“Jane?” Dave asked. His voice shook. He sounded worried. “Come on, Jane. You don’t really think one of our own guys would do this to us, do you? You know them. We’ve been together forever.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Jane said. “All that matters now is keeping us safe. The fact is, Markus is right to be cautious, and if that means we have to assume the worst, it’s what we have to do.”

“But all of our stuff is back at headquarters,” Dave complained.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does,” he insisted, red-faced. “What about all our gear? What about the monitoring system? The computers? Shit! I have to go back.”

“If it’s so important to you, go!” Jane snapped. “But you’re not endangering the rest of us. I won’t let you.”

Markus shook his head. “None of us are going back,”

Under the table I squeezed Penn’s hand. I needed something to hold onto. Why was it that the second I began to feel grounded in a place or a group of people, something went wrong? I felt like a balloon, drifting untethered through the sky. And as much as I didn’t want to be held down, tied and bound, it was frightening to be blown about, like even the littlest gust of wind might send me spinning out of control.

“So if we’re not going back, what do we do now?” Dave asked. His face was still splotched and red, but he was obviously trying to keep it together.

“We need to find a place to go,” Markus said.

We all stared at one another, and I realized for the first time that I had no idea where these people lived or if they had families. I had just assumed they were like me, which sounded ridiculous now. Maybe Markus and Ian had lives similar to mine, but Jane and Dave were normal people. They could have come from anywhere.

“I hear Fiji’s nice this time of year,” Penn joked.

Markus snorted, smiling for the first time all night. “Passports might be a little tricky for half of us,” he said.

Dave shifted in his chair, his lips pressed into a thin line. “I’ve got a place.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “We’re not going back to headquarters!” she teased, leaning into him. Already the tension was easing.

“No, seriously,” Dave said, but he didn’t smile back at her. “I’ve got a place. I just need to make a phone call to make sure it’s okay.”

He reached for his phone, and Markus’s face fell. “Our phones.”

Dave frowned. “What about ’em?”

“You don’t think they’re bugged, do you?” Penn asked.

Markus shrugged, looking to Jane for confirmation. She gave her head one small shake.

“So we can’t use them anymore?” Dave tossed his phone onto the table. “We might as well be living in the Stone Age. We can’t function like this. We might as well admit they’ve beaten us.”

“Give me a couple days,” Markus said. “I’ll get us more supplies, I promise. If you can find us a place to stay, I’ll do the rest.”

Dave picked up his phone. He thumbed a large crack running the length of the screen. “Drink up,” he said, gesturing to the two large cups sweating in the center of the table. “We’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of us.”

…

The morning light was just beginning to illuminate the sides of the fancy buildings in the Upper East Side when Dave pulled up in front of a tall apartment building.

“You guys wait here,” he said. “I’m not making any promises about this, but I’ll try.”

He hopped out of the car, straightened his shirt, and headed for the man at the door. He gestured to the van and shook the man’s hand, then walked inside.

“Whose place is this?” Markus asked, staring over his shoulder at Jane, who sat in the back seat.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Come on,” he said. “You guys aren’t fooling anyone. We’ve known for months that you’ve been messing around.”

Jane’s face flushed.

“You don’t think we really believed you when you both had to ‘run errands’ at the same time every night, did you?”

“It’s nothing serious,” she muttered.

Ian laughed. “Hey, calm down. There’s no reason to get defensive. Nobody cares.”

“Well, that’s not entirely true,” Markus said. “There’s a reason we don’t want our people to get involved with each other. Relationships are messy. They can make you do stupid things…distract you.”

Jane’s eyes widened, and Markus’s face softened. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not saying your relationship with Dave had anything to do with what happened tonight,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I promise.”

“I know.” Jane nodded, but she still looked unwell. “You have to believe me, though. I really don’t know who lives here. Dave never mentioned anyone in Manhattan. He doesn’t really talk about people.”

“No kidding,” Ian said. “For someone who likes to babble so much, you’d think I would have heard him mention another human in the last two years I’ve known him, but no. He only talks about his stupid tech stuff.”

“He’s just passionate,” Jane said.

Ian shrugged. “Speak of the devil.” He pointed out the window as Dave came striding out the door.

“All right. It’s a go.” Dave gestured for us to get out. “Grab your stuff and follow me up.”

Penn nudged me. “Our stuff? Like we’ve got suitcases or something.”

“He’s just trying to be hospitable,” I said, climbing out of the van.

He followed after me. “Dave isn’t the hospitable type,” he grumbled. “And apparently he’s not the type that acknowledges when you practically save his life, either. He was heading for the other exit when Markus detonated that gas. If I hadn’t grabbed him, he’d have been stuck on the wrong side of the building.”

“I’m sure he’s grateful,” I said.

Penn snorted. For some reason, Dave had rubbed him the wrong way since the day we’d met. Mostly Penn kept his distance from him, which hadn’t been difficult to do back at headquarters, but things might be harder here, with all of us trapped inside some little city apartment together.

I stared up at the building, rising higher than any building I’d ever been in before, towering at least thirty stories above us.

The man at the entrance held the door for us, nodding politely as each of us passed. We’d done a fair enough job cleaning the blood and dirt off of us in the McDonald’s bathroom, but we still looked like we’d been dragged through hell. Our eyes were all rimmed with red, our hair matted to our foreheads.

Ian hadn’t done the best job washing up. Trailing behind him, I could still see a dribble of blood he hadn’t gotten off the back of his neck.

If the doorman judged us poorly, he did a good job hiding it.

He nodded to me as I passed. “Enjoy your stay.”

…

The elevator dinged, and we all filed out behind Dave.

He hesitated in front of a door midway down the hall, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but where we all stood. “So…this is my sister’s place,” he said. “She’s not crazy about having everyone here, but…” He shrugged. “Anyway, just don’t bug her too much. She’d like to keep her privacy. So, you know, don’t, like, snoop around.”

Penn nudged me softly in the side, raising one of his eyebrows.

“We won’t. We’re just grateful for a place to stay,” Markus said.

The door opened, and Dave ushered us awkwardly inside. The foyer opened into a living room with a white sectional couch bookended by ornate golden end tables in the shape of lions with bird’s heads and wings. The gold-dipped creatures looked as if they’d been plucked straight from the pages of one of the fairy tales Ruby, Penn’s little sister, used to read me, then dumped here, frozen, consigned to holding TV remotes and magazines.

The thought of Ruby warmed me. She and Penn were proof that there was a place for me in this world.

The apartment wasn’t huge, but it felt purposeful, elegant. Not in a warm way, like Penn’s house had been. This room was stylish, but oddly sterile. I couldn’t place what it reminded me of, but I didn’t like it. The feeling pricked at my memory. And then it hit me; the cold, antiseptic feeling reminded me of the waiting room at the kennel. It was a lifeless place. How could I trust anyone who chose to live like this?

Beyond the couch, a large glass-topped table was flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the city. Sitting at it was a tall, dark-haired woman, dressed in a simple white silk blouse and black pants. Her face was set in an icy scowl as cold and uninviting as her style. Was there anything warm about her?

She was thin like Dave, but their features were nothing alike. “I’m Dave’s sister, Vanessa,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “Did he mention that already?”

Dave stood next to her, smiling uncomfortably.

“No, but it’s nice to meet you.” Jane reached out for her hand. “Thanks so much for having us.”

Vanessa glanced at the outstretched hand but didn’t make a move to shake it. Instead, she caught Dave’s gaze and held it for a moment. “Yes, Dave said there were extenuating circumstances.”

“Well…” Jane slowly lowered her hand. “We appreciate it.”

Vanessa’s gaze traveled briefly over the rest of us, stopping on me. Her eyes widened ever so slightly before she looked back at her brother. “I’ve got someplace I need to be,” she said, standing abruptly. “You’ll show them around, I assume?”

Dave nodded. It was clear his sister made him uncomfortable. I hadn’t been around enough siblings to know whether this was common or not, but it certainly wasn’t how Ruby and Penn had been together. There had been an easy warmth between the two of them. The tension between Dave and his sister was palpable.

She grabbed her purse off the counter in the kitchen and walked out the door without looking back over her shoulder.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Markus asked.

“Do you have any better ideas?” Dave glared at the group of us as if he blamed us all for the situation he’d been placed in. “I need some air. I’ll be up on the roof if anyone needs me.”

And without waiting for an answer, he walked out the door, too, slamming it behind him.