I felt a sliver of hope. Maybe Emma had dropped her phone at Palmer’s house, and the CAMFers had just found it. Maybe she was safe at home after all, and she’d called us on her mom’s phone to tell us not to worry. I selected the last message and put the phone to my ear.
“Emma, where are you?” Mrs. Campbell’s voice asked, sounding shaken. “Please call me as soon as you get this. If you’re with Olivia, I won’t be mad. I tried to call your new phone too, but you didn’t answer. Just call so we know you’re safe.”
“What?” Marcus asked, his eyes scanning my face.
“She didn’t make it home,” I said, letting my hand and the phone drop to my lap. “Her mom doesn’t know where she is.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, reaching out and putting his arm around me. He said it like someone had died, like people used to say after my dad passed away.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said, shrugging out of his embrace. “Do something. We have to do something.”
“She took a risk,” Marcus said gently, “and it didn’t pay off.”
“What kind of cold-hearted load of bullshit is that?” I spat at him, pulling away even further. “My best friend has been kidnapped, and that’s all you have to say?”
“They won’t hurt her,” he said. “She doesn’t have PSS. She’s useless to them.”
“Not if they think she can lead them to me. That’s what the Dark Man said. They have Emma, but they want me.”
“That’s not what he said.”
But I was already grabbing my clothes. I didn’t have time to argue. Emma didn’t have time.
“He was talking about me,” Marcus went on, “and the list. And that’s exactly why we didn’t tell Emma anything else. She doesn’t know our location. She can’t give us away.”
“They don’t know that,” I said, slipping a clean pair of jeans inside the sleeping bag and wrestling them on. “They caught her talking to me on the phone. They’re going to assume she knows where I am.”
“They’ll figure out pretty quickly she doesn’t.”
“Yes, by hurting her!” I suddenly had a flash of Mike Palmer, tied, swollen and bloody. They might do worse to Emma. She’d said there were three men. Three CAMFer men. What would they do to a teenage girl to make her talk? “We have to get her out of there now,” I said, fastening the snap of my jeans and kicking the sleeping bag off. “She did this because I suggested it.” I stood, scanning the tent for my boots.
“Olivia, listen to me!” Marcus stood too and tried to grab hold of me, but I dodged away.
“No!” I screamed. “Don’t do that. Don’t grab me, or touch me, or play my feelings to get me to do what you want.”
“Play your feelings?” he asked angrily. “Is that what you think I’ve been doing? You kissed me this morning, not the other way around.”
“Fine. I won’t make that mistake again,” I snapped, bending to dig the phone out of the folds of the sleeping bag and shoving it in my pocket. “I need to get Emma back,” I said, staring him down, “and if you’re not going to help me, I’ll do it myself, but I am going to do it. You, of all people, should understand that. They had your best friend once, remember?”
“This is not the same,” he said, nostrils flaring. “She isn’t one of us. She doesn’t have PSS. They aren’t going to extract her or kill her.”
“She isn’t one of us?” I looked at him, stunned. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Marcus just stared back at me, saying nothing.
“Oh, I see,” I said. “
Them
is anyone without PSS. Is that what you mean? Emma doesn’t have PSS, so she doesn’t matter? She isn’t worth shit if she’s not on your little list.”
“That’s not fair,” he said, his voice low and dangerous.
“Then explain what you mean that she isn’t one of us,” I challenged.
“Okay,” he said, stepping close to me. “
Us
are the people I might be able to save, a handful of innocent teenagers who have no idea they’re in danger. And
them
is the rest of the world, the people I can’t save,” his voice broke on the last two words. For a moment, I could see some awful pain welling in his eyes, but then he regained his composure and went on. “And if I try, and I mess up or get caught, then the kids on that list are dead for sure, and I haven’t saved anyone.”
“I don’t even understand why they’re doing this. Why take our PSS? What good is it to them?”
“They know how to extract it,” Marcus said. “I’m pretty sure they have a way to store it. Now they’re working on a way to use it.”
“Use it for what?”
“As a renewable energy source would be my guess. That’s what the world is clamoring for.”
PSS as renewable energy? That was crazy. My hand wasn’t a resource; it was my hand. You couldn’t farm people’s body parts for energy. That was insane. Then again, there was a booming black market for healthy transplant organs, live tissue, babies, and children as sex slaves. The world wasn’t exactly picky about where it got what it thought it needed. And PSS might be easier to sell than any of those, once it was removed from its source.
“It’s just a theory,” Marcus said. “But they’ve been lobbying against PSS in Washington for years, and they haven’t made much progress going that route. Maybe they need to prove something to someone—some big name investor—and the list is a way to conduct some under-the-table experiments until they figure out exactly what they’re doing.”
“So, we’re guinea pigs?”
“Maybe,” he shrugged.
“And you actually expect me to leave my best friend with people like that?”
“They can only use Emma if we’re still here,” he said, taking my ghost hand. “If we’d left when we should have, this wouldn’t have happened. And that’s my fault. Not yours. I wanted those blades. I thought they could help us, and that blinded me to the risks. But you’re right. We can’t just leave her at their mercy. So, we call the police, and we leave an anonymous tip. We let the professionals take care of this.”
“
You’re
advocating calling the police?” I asked, pulling my hand from his. “You’re the one who constantly insists that the police force is made entirely of CAMFers.”
“Then we text Emma’s mom, tell her where Emma is, and let her parents handle it.”
“I’m not dragging them into this. The Campbells aren’t exactly street wise. They’d probably go running over there and get themselves killed. There’s no one else to help her. It has to be us.”
“We can’t help her without exposing ourselves. You know that.”
“So what! We risked that to go after the blades, and it didn’t stop you then.”
“Yeah, and look how great that went,” he pointed out.
“What about David? Do you honestly expect me to believe you wouldn’t go after him if they had him again?”
Marcus stared at me long and hard, then looked away. “No, I wouldn’t,” he said.
“You are a terrible liar.”
“Maybe I am,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I thought I could keep everyone safe, especially David, but obviously that’s not true. But I know he wouldn’t want me to risk you for him.”
“I didn’t ask what David would want,” I said. “I asked what you would do.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said, turning away from me. He paced to the far corner of the tent, and stood, his back straight, his fists clenched, battling out some inner struggle.
“She came looking for me,” I said to his back. “She went to Palmer’s for me. She needs our help.” I had been bluffing about doing it on my own. I needed him. Wished I didn’t, but I did.
I stepped toward him, put my hand on his back. “We can do this,” I promised. “We have the bullet, and we can figure out how to use it. We have Palmer. I can get information from him—Oh my God!”
“What?” Marcus jumped, spinning around as if we were under attack.
“What if they want Palmer back? What if that’s what the Dark Man meant?”
“No,” Marcus shook his head. “Even if they thought we had him, they’d cut their losses. He botched your capture twice. CAMFers don’t treat failure kindly. To them he’s expendable.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I just am,” he said, reaching out and pulling me to his chest. “It’s how they think.”
I tucked my head into the curve of his neck, inhaling the scent of him—smoke and woods and sweat and something indefinably him.
“Okay, we’ll go get her,” he sighed into my hair.
“Really?” I looked up at him, our faces close.
“Yes,” he said, smiling down at me. “But only if you promise to keep playing my feelings like this.”
“I’m not—I didn’t mean to—”
He kissed me this time, his hand finding the back of my neck. His mouth was rough and insistent, the scratch of stubble at the edge of his lips leaving a trail of almost-pain across mine. I opened my mouth wider and our tongues touched, teasing, coaxing. My body melted into his, marveling at the fit of hard against soft, the pressing need, the way we were trying to crawl inside each other. His right arm circled my waist, pulling my hips against his, and I couldn’t help myself; I actually moaned into his mouth.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked startled, pulling away.
“No,” I said, blushing like crazy, looking anywhere but in those amazing eyes.
“Oh, so you liked it,” he said, sounding very pleased with himself. He bent his head again, his mouth kissing its way down my jawline, finding the hollow of my neck. He pulled away, staring at me like he’d never seen me before, and said, “God, you taste good.”
“So do you,” I said, smiling.
“Olivia,” he said, his face gone dark and intense. “This isn’t a game to me.”
“I know.” My eyes strayed back to his lips. “I’m sorry I said that. It’s just—I’m not sure what this is.”
“Um, I’m pretty sure we’re making out.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, looking away.
“Hey,” he said soberly, touching my cheek and drawing my eyes back to him. “I like you.” This time he kissed me gently, brushing his lips across mine. Then kissing me on the nose, and the forehead, like a blessing. Like I was some precious thing.
“I like you too,” I said, feeling warm and amazed, but it was followed by a sudden wave of guilt. While I was standing there kissing, Emma was in serious trouble.
He must have seen it in my face, or felt it in my body, because he pulled away and said, “So, we need a plan.”
“What are you thinking?”
“If we have any chance of taking the CAMFers down and getting Emma out safely,” he said, beginning to pace, “we need to figure out exactly what Jason’s bullet does and how to use it. And we need everything we can get from Palmer. You understand what that means, right?”
“I’m going to have to use my hand on him.”
“Yes.”
I knew it would come to that, even as I’d pleaded with Marcus for help. Palmer would know how many CAMFers there were, how they were armed, where Emma and the blades might be held. Going after Emma was going to come at a cost. I was going to have to do something bad, something that all my convictions were screaming at me not to do. But I was going to do it anyway.
“I’ll get the info,” I said, praying I’d have the guts to follow through, “but I’m not going to pull anything out of him. Just the information. That’s all.”
“Fair enough,” Marcus agreed, “and one more thing.”
“What?”
“The other guys. It has to be their choice to come. I think Nose and Yale will want to. I don’t know about Jason. But whoever comes, they come armed.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding.
“And we should go soon. They weren’t anticipating this thing with Emma, which means they’re scrambling. We want to get in there before they have a chance to fully set their trap. That means tonight. Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“I will be,” I said.
INTERROGATING MIKE
Mike Palmer didn’t look so good in the morning light. He was bruised and swollen, and crusty with dried blood, his body sagging against the ropes the guys had used to tie him to a tree. The bandages I had applied the night before were pushed up on his forehead so he could see, but his eyes were vacant. They didn’t track me, didn’t even register my existence, as I entered his field of vision. And he smelled bad, really bad. That was when I realized that the dark marks near the crotch of his pants weren’t mud or blood.
Yale was sitting guard duty, leaning against a nearby tree upwind, but he stood when the rest of us entered the small clearing.
The breeze picked up, thrusting the full force of Palmer’s stench upon us, and I was afraid we were all going to revisit my breakfast. I took a few deep breaths and thought of Emma instead. Mike Palmer didn’t know we’d lost her. He had no idea that she was, at that moment, in the hands of his comrades, a hostage at the mercy of desperate and determined captors just like he was. And the last thing we needed was for him to find out. After all he had done, he deserved what he was about to get. This is what I told myself.
Nose took out Palmer’s gun and handed it to Jason.
Jason hefted it in his hand, and the Fire Chief’s eyes moved for the first time since we’d approached him, looking at the gun, looking at Jason, then back at the gun.
Jason stepped forward and ripped the duct tape off Palmer’s mouth in one savage yank.
“Fuck you,” Palmer said, his lips cracked and bleeding.
“Looks like you’re the one who’s fucked,” Jason said, tossing the tape aside. “Went and got yourself caught by a little girl, and now your CAMFer pals don’t even give a shit.”
“Fuck that bitch too,” Palmer said, looking at me with absolute hatred in his eyes. “She’s a freak. A mutant that needs to be put down. All you freaks need to die.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had known this man for years, had said hello to him in the supermarket. I had attended the same back yard barbeques and local sporting events he had. I’d even headed up a Fireman’s fundraiser in middle school and presented this very man with the proceeds in front of a class of seventh graders, handed it to him with my own ghost hand. And all this time he’d hated me simply because of the way I’d been born, for something completely outside of my control. How many other people felt that way? My teachers? My classmates? The new neighbors who had moved in next door, and then suddenly moved out two weeks later without any explanation?
“You keep your mouth shut,” Jason said, striding forward and pressing the gun to Palmer’s forehead. “You don’t talk unless we ask you something. You don’t breathe unless we tell you to. You don’t piss yourself till we say so. You got that?”