Chapter 21

chapter Twenty One

And that's when it went to hell.

There was a horrible bang-a thousand times worse than the sound of a balloon exploding-and the van was spinning, the wheel dancing right out of my hands.

"Straight!" Liam was shouting, "Straighten out!"

"Sh-!" The wind was knocked out of my chest by my seat belt, but I fought against the natural turn of the wheel long enough to get us heading straight again. The car tilted back, leaving a trail of sparks on the road behind us. We were staring the SUV down again, making a second head-on pass at them.

"Keep going toward them-don't stop!" Liam yelled.

But the tire, I thought, my hands strangling the steering wheel, the tire

Chubs had reached for Liam's legs, steadying him before he could go flying out the window. "Let go!" he snapped. "I'm fine, I've got it now!"

I didn't know what Liam had meant by "it," not until I looked up into the rearview mirror and saw the dark body of a tree come hurtling out of the woods, guided in front of the SUV, by nothing other than a flick of Liam's hand.

With his attention focused on the minivan barreling toward them, Rob didn't have time to jerk the car out of the tree's path. I spun my hands around the wheel blindly, until we were facing away from the wreckage. I heard the sound of shattering glass and crunching metal as Rob tried to veer, only to overcorrect. When I looked back in the side mirror, the SUV was on its side in a smoking heap. Beside it was the splintered body of a tree, still rolling to a stop after the collision.

"What did you do?" I had to yell over the chatter of the wind and road. "I thought-"

Chubs was the one to answer, his face ashen. "Now do you get it? They weren't going to stop."

Liam slid back inside of the window, plopping down with a long sigh. His hair was standing up on all ends, dusted with leaves and little twigs.

"Okay, Green," he said, keeping his voice steady, "they blew the back tire out, so you're driving on the rim. Just keep heading straight and start to slow down. Get off on the next

ramp."

I clenched my jaw so hard that it ached.

"You all right, Zu?" he asked. The girl gave him two thumbs-up, her yellow gloves the only bright spot of color in the van.

"Well, I'm fine, thanks for asking," Chubs said. His little glasses were crooked on his face as he smoothed his blue button-down shirt. For good measure, he leaned forward and smacked the back of Liam's head. "And by the way, are you out of your freaking mind? Do you know what happens when a body is thrown from a car at high velocity?"

"No," Liam interrupted, "but I imagine it's not pretty or appropriate for an eleven-year-old's ears."

I glanced back at Zu. Eleven? That couldn't be right.

"Oh, so you can throw her in the path of bullets, but she can't hear a scary story?" Chubs crossed his arms over his chest.

Liam reached down and pulled his seat back upright. When he sat back, it was with a grimace and clenched fists. There was a fresh cut above his eye. Blood dripped from his chin.

I saw the green highway sign through the haze of rain. It didn't matter what town or exit number it said. I just wanted to get off the road and out of the driver's seat.

My entire body was numb, exhausted, as I took my foot off the gas. The minivan followed the curve of the ramp with only the slightest nudging, and by the time we reached the road, it came to a natural stop. I pressed a hand to my chest to make sure my heart hadn't given out on me.

Liam reached over and put the parking brake on.

"You did a good job," he began. His voice was quieter than I expected. Unfortunately, it did nothing to calm the pissed off snake that was coiled tight around my stomach I reached over and punched him in the arm. Hard.

"Ow!" he cried, pulling away from me with wide eyes. "What was that for?"

"That was not like riding a bike, you asshole!"

He stared at me a moment, his lips twitching. It was Suzume who burst out into a fit of silent laughter, an endless stream of gasping and shaking that turned her face bright pink and left her breathless. Seconds passed with her laughter as the only sound able to float up above the rain-at least until Chubs put his face in his hands and let out a long groan.

"Oh yeah," Liam said, popping his door open, "you're gonna fit in real nice."

The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time Liam got to work on the back tire. I had stayed exactly where I was in the driver's seat, mostly because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing. The other two kids had jumped out of the car after him, Suzume heading to the back of the van with Liam, and Chubs in the exact opposite direction. I watched through the cracked windshield as he made his way toward a sign pointing us in the direction of the Monongahela National Forest. After a minute, he pulled something-a paperback book-out of his back pocket, and sat down at the edge of the road. Feeling more than a little envy, I squinted, trying to make out the book's title, but half of the cover was missing, and the other half covered by his hand. I don't know if he was actually reading or just glaring at the text.

I had pulled us over into Slaty Fork, West Virginia, if the road signs were to be trusted. What I thought had been some hickville back road had actually been Highway 219, in the middle of nowhere. Marlinton might have lost its people, but it didn't look as though Slaty Fork had any to begin with.

I stood up from the driver's seat and made my way to the back of the minivan. My hands were still trembling, as if trying to shake out that last bit of adrenaline singing in my blood. The black backpack that Rob and Cate had given me had been thrown into the backseat, covered in a few loose sheets of newspaper and an empty bottle of Windex.

I brushed the backpack off and set it down next to me on the seat. The newspaper was over three years old and stiff with age. There was a half-page ad for a new face cream someone had oh-so-cleverly called Forever Young.

I flipped the sheet over, looking for any actual news. I skimmed over an opinion piece that celebrated the rehabilitation camps and was more amused than offended that Psi kids were now being openly referred to as "mutant time bombs." There was also a short article on rioting that the reporter claimed was "the direct result of escalating tensions between the West and East government on new birth legislation." At the very bottom of the page, past some fluff story about the anniversary of some train conductors' strike, was a picture of Clancy Gray.

"President's Son Attends Children's League Hearing," is what the headline beneath it said. I didn't need to read more than the first two or three lines to get the basic gist: the president was too big of a coward to come out of hiding after a failed assassination attempt, so he sent his freak baby to do the dirty work for him. How old was Clancy now? I wondered. The pictures at Thurmond were identical to this one, and I had never thought of him as anything older than eleven or twelve. But he must have been eighteen or close to by now. Practically an old geezer by our standards.

I tossed the paper aside in disgust and reached for my backpack again. Rob had said there was a change of clothes inside, and if that was the case, I was getting out of my Thurmond uniform once and for all.

A plain white shirt, a pair of jeans, a belt, and a zip-up hoodie. I could handle that.

The knock on the window startled me enough that I nearly bit my tongue clean off. Liam's face appeared there, drawn in tense lines. "Can you bring those clothes to me for a sec? I need to show you something." The very second I knew his eyes were on me, every bone, muscle, and joint in my body snapped to attention. With the faint taste of blood in my mouth, I jumped out of the sliding door, taking in the sight of the van. If it were possible, the car looked worse than before-like a toy that someone had wedged down the sink and run through the garbage disposal. My fingers came up to trace one of the fresh punctures on the side paneling where a bullet had slammed through the thin metal. Liam knelt beside Zu, who was holding on to the spare tire with everything she had, and went to work cranking the van up on the jack and off the demolished back right tire. I came to stand behind them just in time to watch Liam wave his hand in front of the hubcap. The nuts twirled out on his command, collecting in a neat pile on the ground. Blue , I registered. Liam was Blue. What did that make the others? "Okay," he began. He blew a strand of his light hair out of his eyes. "Take out the shirt you were about to change into." "I'm-I'm not changing out here," I said. He rolled his eyes. "Really? You're worried about your modesty when we're going to have League agents on our tail in a matter of hours? Priorities, Green. Take out the shirt."