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The wind shifted the trees, wiping away my mental sketch-in-progress.

A floorboard creaked and I lurched upright. Sam stood in the
doorway to my room, half hidden in shadow. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, boots. He’d been hanging around the house fully clothed since we’d returned, just in case we needed to leave at a moment’s notice. I had on an oversized T-shirt I’d nabbed from Trev. It was the only thing I wore other than my bra and underwear. What if Connor ambushed the house right this second?

I tugged the blanket closer as Sam crossed the threshold.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t,” I lied. The truth was, I was on edge. I knew what he was capable of, and I wasn’t sure if I was considered an enemy at this point.

He dropped into the window seat, rested his elbows on his knees. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Sore?”

“A little.”

“Do you need anything?”

I swallowed. “Why are you here, Sam?”

He ran a thumb over the knuckles on his opposite hand. Moonlight pooled on his back. “Remember when you got your first black eye, in your class?”

My combat class. I remembered—it was something I would never forget. While I’d hated that my opponent had bested me, that fight had made me feel strong. Like a warrior. I wore the bruise like a badge and barreled downstairs as soon as Dad fell asleep so I could show it off.

But Sam’s reaction had not been the reaction I’d hoped for. I’d wanted him to be impressed. I’d wanted him to look at me with reverence.

Instead, he had questioned me excessively over how it happened, who did it, whether my opponent was bigger, stronger, faster. Boy or girl. Arrogant or nice. That was the first time I saw a glimmer of his protective side, and I thought, well, I’d take that, too.

When I left the lab that night, I felt like I’d gained some ground with Sam, earned something from him, just not in the way I’d expected.

“I remember,” I said now.

He folded his hands together. “That was the first time I realized there was more to our relationship than I’d thought.” He sat back, and I lost sight of his face in the shadows. “It frustrated me in a way nothing else had since I’d woken in that lab. Because I couldn’t protect you the way I needed to.”

Needed
. Like it was something he couldn’t control. I dared not move. I couldn’t stand it if he stopped talking now.

“I knew it was odd to feel that way for someone who was on the other side of the wall, but I never questioned your involvement in the program. You made our lives bearable in that lab. I won’t forget that. No matter what.”

My throat thickened. My eyes burned.

“So whatever’s going on, I will do what I can to keep you safe. I
won’t leave you. I won’t barter with Connor for you. I don’t care what Nick says.”

I clamped my mouth shut against the stinging in my sinuses. I would not cry. Not now.

“I wanted you to know that,” he said. Even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I felt the weight of his gaze.

“Thank you.” My voice came out in a quiet hush.

He rose to leave. Inside I was screaming:
Stay. Stay. Stay.
I didn’t care if we talked or not. His presence was enough.

At the door, he paused.

“What color would you use?”

I frowned. “What?”

“When I came in, you were staring out the window.”

Drawing
, was what he didn’t say.
You had that look on your face like you were drawing.

That familiar burn came back and my vision blurred. It seemed like forever ago that we’d last discussed the weather, the outside world, and how I would draw it. I missed it. I missed it so much. “Lavender gray.”

He nodded and turned away. “Good night, Anna.”

“G’night.” I let out a breath of relief as his footsteps thudded down the stairs. I hadn’t realized until that very second how badly I wanted him to trust me. No matter what we’d gone through, I was on his side. Always. Even if it killed me.

The house was eerily quiet when I woke late the next morning. I put a hand up to hood my eyes from the daylight that blasted through my window. My head pounded on all sides. The trek down the stairs seemed to take forever; every step was agonizing. Every joint in my body creaked in misery. I felt like I’d taken a week’s worth of combat courses.

In the kitchen, I barely registered Trev at the table as I shuffled past him. I pulled the bottle of ibuprofen out of a drawer and downed two pills with a gulp of water.

When I turned around, Trev was barely a foot away. “You okay?”

“No. I feel like hell.”

“You look like hell.”

I managed to part my lids a fraction, only enough to glower. “Geez. Thanks.” I started to move around him, but he stopped me with a tug on my wrist.

“Hey. Come here.” He wrapped me in a hug, and I melted instantly. He smelled like tea and pinesap, probably from gathering wood. I stalled there for a second, loving how comfortable and familiar he felt.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, my voice muffled against his sweatshirt.

“Sam went for a run. Cas and Nick are in the garage messing around with the generator. Something shorted out last night.”

I pulled away. “And you? What are you doing?”

A lock of black hair fell across his forehead. “Me? I am tending to you.”

I sighed. “No need for that.” I peeked over his shoulder and saw the table covered in loose sheets of paper. “What’s all that?”

“That is what Sam spent most of the night doing.”

I dropped into a chair and picked a page from the pile. Sam’s handwriting, a barely legible scrawl, filled the paper. None of the notes made sense to me.

Trev rooted around in the kitchen and came back a minute later with a steaming mug of liquid. “Drink this.”

“Thanks.” I sipped gingerly, expecting coffee but tasting freshly brewed green tea. I didn’t drink tea a lot, except for when I was sick. Dad would brew up a cup using loose tea leaves and a little metal basket with a chain on the end.

“Your mother liked doing it the old-fashioned way,” he’d say.

Trev slid into the chair next to mine. “I just pulled the kettle out of the fireplace. It’s not quite the same as putting it on the stove—it tastes like burning wood, if you ask me—but it’s something.”

“It’s perfect. Thank you.” I held up Sam’s notes. “Did he crack the cipher?”

“Ah.” Trev plucked a page from the stack. “This is what he has so far.”

There was a series of letters running along the top of the paper. A lot of
X
s and
I
s, and a few other letters. Then, at the bottom,
Retrieve evidence from Port Cadia. Use scars and tattoo to find your location. Once you find it, the tattoo marks the spot. When you find the spot, it’ll be the third tree, sixty north.

The back door burst open and Sam sauntered in, his dark hair glistening with sweat. He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve and disappeared into the pantry, returning a second later with a fresh bottle of water.

I gave the paper a shake. “You broke the cipher. So now what?”

Before answering, he examined my face with a quick sweep of his eyes. I hadn’t bothered to check my reflection in the mirror before coming downstairs, and now I wondered if I really did look like hell.

My face felt puffy in spots. I was sure I sported new bruises that’d formed while I slept.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine.” I shook the page harder.

Trev rose to his feet. “Now that you’re back, I think I’ll go out for a run.”

“You got a cell?” Sam asked, and Trev patted his pocket. “Stay alert.”

With a nod, Trev left through the front door. Sam sat at the head of the table, the water bottle crinkling in his grasp. “The first portion doesn’t make any sense. So I don’t know if it’s deciphered.”

“How do you think you have to use the scars? Or the tattoo? Maybe the UV light—”

He shook his head. “Cas checked me again this morning.”

I slumped. “Oh.” Not only was I disappointed that that wasn’t
the answer, I was disappointed that he hadn’t asked
me
to check him. Though I suppose at that stage, he wanted to be as thorough as possible, which probably meant…

I blushed thinking about what “thorough” meant.

“But you know where you’re supposed to go,” I said, flattening the page in front of me. “
Port
was mentioned in your file. Whoever wrote those notes, they must have been talking about Port Cadia, right?”

He shoved the mess of discarded paper aside and set his elbows on the table. “Maybe. But I can’t go there without knowing where to look.” He scrubbed at his face with his hands. “The first part of the note could be a warning for all I know. I need to have a clear plan before making a move.”

I looked at the mixed-up letters at the top of the paper. The
X
s and
I
s seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place them. And the longer it took us to decipher the rest of the message, the closer Connor and Riley would be to finding us.

23

I LOOKED AT THE CLOCK HANGING ABOVE the fireplace. It’d been six hours since my last dose of painkillers. I’d spent most of the day in one of the easy chairs in the living room with my mother’s journal. I alternated between sketching a new picture of Trev, analyzing my notes about the boys, and rereading my mother’s passages.

One of the very first recipes she had added to the book was one she titled “Dinner for Two on a Rainy Night.” It was a tuna casserole that seemed all right, but at the bottom she’d written,

DISASTER. Arthur hated it.

Dad. It seemed like I hadn’t talked to him in weeks. I didn’t even
know if he’d had his wound tended to, if he was out of the hospital. And still I wondered about the house: Who would take care of it now that I was gone? The leaves needed to be raked and dumped in the woods. The winter rug had to be dug out of the garage and unfurled in the mudroom. The windows in the living room needed to be weatherproofed. Would Dad remember to do those things on his own?

I wished I could call him, hear his voice, know that he was okay.

I set the journal aside and pushed myself out of the chair. My body grumbled and my head swam. The headache had returned in full force. I was not built for real combat, apparently.

I shuffled across the living room and froze midway to the door.

The clock.

I looked at it again. It was an older model, with Roman numerals for the hours.
X
s and
I
s and
V
s. The first half of Sam’s coded message was in
X
s and
I
s.

“Sam!” I called and instantly regretted it as the vibration of my voice intensified the pounding in my head.

He came tromping down the stairs, eyes heavy with sleep. I hadn’t realized he’d been napping and felt a pang of guilt for waking him.

“What is it?” He held his gun loosely at his side. The others crowded in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.

“I think I know how to decode the rest of the message.”

I saw the message in a whole new way once I knew what to look for. Sam hovered over my shoulder. Cas had been excited about my revelation for all of five seconds, until his dinner was ready. Now he sat across from me, stuffing his face. Trev was next to me, and Nick had pulled himself up onto the counter at my back.

“I think these are Roman numerals,” I said, pointing at the beginning of the message. “So if we translate them into actual numbers, maybe it’ll give us an address or coordinates or a phone number.”

Sam put his hands on the back of my chair and leaned forward, sending a wave of nervous flutters down my back. I held tighter to the pen. “There were breaks in the code,” he said. “I thought it meant a space between words, but it might be a break between numbers.”

I read the first set: XXIII. “Twenty-three.”

Then XV. “Fifteen.”

We went down the row until we had 23 15 55 85 82.

“Ten numbers,” I said.

“I don’t think those are coordinates.”

“I think the obvious answer is that it’s a phone number,” Cas said around a mouthful of rice.