Rachel's mouth gaped. Did Jason know he had an aunt? He hadn't known he had an uncle, or whatever Sam was to their family. He'd certainly never mentioned any other relatives. She clicked on the email and scanned the rest of it. There wasn't much more detail there. The woman said that she was already in Arizona and just needed to know where they wanted to meet, and warned that Rachel should stop pulling stunts in public before the authorities—or worse—caught up to them.

She navigated back to the other email. It had no subject and no extra details. Just the password they'd asked for: the name of Jason's mom.

These couldn't both be the people Jason was looking for. Reeling for answers, she messaged back the second one.

>> Who is this?

Her foot tapped impatiently against the mat. She never brought the truck out in the daylight hours. Too bulky, too visible. Police might even know she drives it by now, even though she tried to keep it out of sight during her nightly shows. How long should she wait for an answer? One minute? Five? How long could Jason stand to wait for an answer?

Her phone dinged. >> You tell us. What do you want?

Her fingers hesitated. She flipped back to the other, much warmer, email. It was possible he had family he didn't know about. Right? There was plenty else no one seemed to have told him. Why not a long-lost aunt?

Then a frown took her lips. She tapped into the message she'd typed up four days ago, in one of Jason's last moments of clarity, when he'd come up with this plan in the first place. She knew it by heart; she'd recited it with dozens of scared patrons staring at her. But just to be sure, just to know she wasn't crazy, that she hadn't made a mistake, she read it back to herself:

Blitz, superspeed. Sam Wiles, invisibility. Resistance. Email [email protected]. Password: Blitz's first name.

She hadn't mentioned Jason's name anywhere in there. Warmth spread up the back of her neck. And that lady—Rachel checked her email again—Josalyn, if that really was her name, said she was already in Arizona. Where, is what Rachel wondered.

If these were the same people that had been after him, then probably in this very town. Rachel hadn't exactly been subtle.

She messaged Josalyn back. >> We're on our way to Phoenix. Cops too hot here. See you there?

Then she flipped over to the other thread. >> My friend needs help. Like, immediate medical attention kind of help. When can you get here? With it, she attached a link to the little town they were in.

>> Who said we were coming?

Rachel cursed. But she understood too. It was the same way Rafe dealt with new recruits, kids who were likelier to bite the hand feeding them than they were to fall in line. Especially after he got involved in drug sales, because the other gangs didn't take kindly to him stepping on their territory. Rafe and her had needed to watch with two eyes forward and four eyes back after that. Warm and cuddly promises didn't really work then, and neither did giving something for nothing.

So she didn't beg for Jason's life, even though she felt very much like begging right now. It wouldn't mean a thing to them. Her flying fingers wove a different message instead.

>> The people after you are after him too. And they'll get him, because I'm about to take him to a hospital. They've been dogging us all the way from the east coast. I doubt it will take them long to find him once he checks in. I don't know what they want him for, but I bet it's not good for you. Or maybe you don't care. But they sure do.

Maybe that was enough to make them jealous. She'd shown them Adrian Foster's shiny new toy. If they hated him enough, or whoever it was he was associated with, then they would snatch Jason from under his nose for nothing other than spite.

Or at least, street kids would have. She chewed on her lip.

A couple minutes passed. She started to wonder if they were going to respond at all. And then all she got back was this: ETA +2h.

She blinked at it. Was that in two hours or more than two hours? And would Jason be alive in two hours anyway? Her gut screamed yes and her brain said there was really no way to know.

He might not be alive when she got back to the shed. Might have died alone, wondering where she'd gone, why no one was there—

She cut the nasty flow of thoughts off and threw her door open. It was time to make that phone call.

🧬 🧬 🧬

She made it back Jason before the paramedics did. She pulled her new denim jacket, freshly nicked from the back of a chair in McDonald's, tighter around her. A holey, musty ballcap from the collection of junk in the shed hid the worst of her atrocious hair cut. It felt like a flimsy disguise, none of the videos had captured her face very well. She wished she'd used a mask before, but she hadn't thought that far ahead. Why did she never think that far ahead?

Jason muttered to himself in fever-ridden dreams. His words were so weak she wasn't even sure that's what they were.

You're doing the right thing, she tried to convince herself as her nerves crawled and the sirens came closer. Whether you get caught or not, you're doing the right thing.

The EMTs swooped in, checked his pulse, and loaded him onto a stretcher. She followed close on their heels. One gently tried to bar her from entering the back of the truck, and she all but snarled at him. "I'm not leaving him."

"Miss, you can meet us at the hospital, but he's not stable—"

"I'm not leaving him!" Frustration pricked tears to her eye.

"Miss," he said, taking her shoulders, and she searched desperately for words.

"That's my brother!"

The paramedic paused and glanced back at the one already in the back of the ambulance, working on her 'brother.' It seemed to be the magic word; they nodded at each other. "Sit here," he said, and directed her to a small bench inside, out of the way of the paramedic's work. Then the driver closed up the doors from the outside.

The space was tiny, and the air was stale. The ambulance bumped along the road. Rachel held tight to the bench, eyes locked on Jason. The paramedic fit an oxygen mask over his mouth. Then he moved to check on the bandage.

He unpacked her gauze and cotton pads. His head tilted. "Did you do this?"

She nodded.

"It's not bad," he said, then shook his head. "But you should have taken him to a hospital a long time ago."

Rachel swallowed past a lump in her throat. "Is he going to be okay?"

She asked even though she hated when people asked her that question. You had no way of knowing. You can ward Death off but you can't lock your gates against it entirely, much less someone else's. You can't promise anyone's life. But she looked at the paramedic with the same pathetic hope so many of the Lost Boys had looked at her with.

He, like she often had, looked back to the patient. "We'll do everything we can." A monitor beeped threateningly, and he zeroed back in on his work.

The hospital was a blur. They wheeled him through the back doors of the hospital, and she followed the rolling cart until hands caught her arms and they rolled him past a door no one would let her follow through. She screamed at them and cursed and thought of the gun in her pocket. But no matter how strongly she claimed he was her brother, all that magic word got her into was a waiting room while he was stuck with strangers doing who knew what.

Hunched in her chair, she stared down at her hands. She waited. Her face was damp, but she didn't remember crying. Someone had put a cup of water near her on a wooden cube masquerading as a table. A little bit of condensation leaked onto the corner of a glossy magazine. I should be there, she thought. In case something happens.

She didn't know what she would do—certainly nothing better than the doctors would. But at least he wouldn't die around strangers. She was suddenly glad Rafe had refused to take kids to the hospital. At least her boys had died around family. At least they hadn't gone alone, scared and hostage in this bleached-out, blinding, chemical burn of a building.

She choked down a swig of the bitter water. Even it tasted synthetic.

Just for something to do, she connected to the wifi and checked her inbox. There was nothing from their mystery contact and one email she didn't bother to read from Josalyn. She shoved her phone back in her pocket. She paced. Time passed in weird increments. If it hadn't been for the clock on the wall—she refused to keep checking her phone like a junkie waiting for a fix—she wouldn't have known that the last five seconds had really been minutes. She wouldn't have known that the last ten minutes had only been one. The two hour mark came and went silently. The old notification on her phone mocked her, and she jammed it back in her pocket without even realizing it'd been in her hand.

A nurse tried to talk to her, but Rachel brushed her off. It wasn't until another nurse came over later, more persistently asking about her family situation, that Rachel realized if she didn't answer something, CPS was going to show up and dig their nose in much further than it belonged. She gave the woman just enough to ward her off—Rachel lived alone with her brother, yes he was an adult, his ID was on him, you can check yourself.

She was in the middle of explaining when two nurses, a young man and a woman, strolled into the waiting room. They looked entirely normal, with paper masks covering their mouth and wearing scrubs. But something about them pricked the hairs on the back of her neck. They might be dressed like nurses, but they walked like muscle: hand in their pocket, eyes moving, steps steady. They walked the way Rafe did, and the way Rachel would have if she'd been snooping the place out herself.

Rachel slunk further into her seat, shifting so the overbearing nurse blocked even more of their line of sight. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as they turned down an adjoining hall.

Rachel's gut lurched. She grabbed the nurse's wrist while the woman was mid-question. "Honey? What's the matter?"

For a second, Rachel's jaw worked without words. How did she explain that those people were looking for Jason—or maybe they weren't—and that they might kill him—if Rachel's neglect hadn't already done so?

"I think I need the bathroom," she managed instead, voice strained. The nurse pointed her down the hall, and Rachel hurried that way.

The pair were already out of sight, but Rachel trailed what footsteps she could hear, cursing the lack of shadows in this disinfected eggshell. She peeked past a corner as they disappeared around it. The hall was empty, so she hurried along. When she peered around this time, she vaguely recognized the area. This was near the back door the ambulance had pulled up to. Just ahead were the doors they had rolled Jason through and kept her out of.

And through the doors pushed the two 'nurses.'

Her phone dinged. >> Where do we meet?

>> Hospital. She hoped this town only had one hospital because she had no idea what this place was named. Her eyes flicked up to the push-through doors and the label above it. >> Intensive care.

She padded up to the doors and peeked through the small square window. Doctors and nurses bustled in and out of curtained off areas, rows to the left and to the right. The nurses she was looking for peered into one curtain after another, ducking in and out.

It couldn't take them long to find Jason.

Without a thought, she burst in through the doors and whipped out her gun. "Nobody move!" she screamed, overtop all the moaning and cries of the patients, over the doctors busily consulting. "Move, and I'll shoot."

She brought the gun up at the two imposters as they slipped out of another curtain. They froze.

And she caught her first real glimpse of his face. It was still covered by the mask, but the dark glitter in his eyes, the pointed scar above his thin brow, the widow's peak swooping down like a hawk's beak—it punched her in the gut. He'd had a hair cut, and he'd put on someone else's clothes, but there was no denying who he was.

Her lips moved to form the R, but she couldn't voice his name.

"Miss me, Ray-Ray?" His scarred brow rose, and she could clearly picture the cocky smile that always went with it, hidden now behind the mask.

Behind her, she heard one of the doctors whispering into the intercom for security. Others huddled together or peeked out from behind curtains. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

"Miss Carson," the woman with Rafe said, "we don't want to do you any—"

Rafe jerked his hand back toward him. A force tugged on the gun in Rachel's hand, tearing it out of her grip. She cried out as her finger turned at an unnatural angle. The gun, and needles and metal trays, all flew through the air toward Rafe. He ducked to the side to avoid the barrage, and the gun skittered across the white tile floors, disappearing under a curtain.

Doctors and nurses called out. Rachel didn't know what they thought they'd seen; she wasn't sure what she had seen. Rafe couldn't have—he didn't—

Rachel drew her white-hot hand to her chest, tears pricking her eyes. If he could pull guns out of people's hands, she would have known it a long time ago.

The woman's dainty hand clasped onto his wrist, and he winced. In that fraction of a second, he winced, like a little girl. As the people around them started to rise from their defensive crouches and get their wits about them, the woman muttered something to him and shot him a reprimanding look. She released him as quickly as she'd grabbed him, pushing him toward Rachel.

As the woman slipped behind a curtain, Rafe stepped forward. "We don't gotta fight, Ray. We can—" Rafe's eyes widened, and his chin jerked in warning.

Rachel dropped to her hands and spun, kicking one leg out behind her. A man with a syringe fell to the ground. Rafe was at her side in an instant, pulling her up. His arm wrapped around her protectively as a dozen doctors and nurses eyed her like a threat.

She elbowed him in the gut.

He doubled, and she shoved him away, running toward the last curtain she'd seen the nurse disappear through. She pushed a woman aside and dodged past a pair of hands trying to grab her. She burst past a curtain and found the woman over Jason's bed. Her hand had settled on his good shoulder, and she was just standing there, looking down at him.

Her head snapped up as Rachel crashed through and tackled her. She landed over the woman's midsection and scrabbled for an arm to bar. As soon as Rachel tried to grip anything, though, her crooked finger screamed at her, and she called out.

The woman slipped her weak grip and flipped Rachel like she didn't weigh anything. Rachel rotated in the air and landed with a whoomph on her back. Before she could catch her breath, the woman was crouched beside her, one delicate, iron-clad hand clamping around her neck.

Rachel's throat burned, eyes widening in terror. This was not a choke-hold—or it shouldn't have been. Not at this angle, one handed, but the woman had her pinned as cleanly as a monster pins a bit of prey. Rachel tried to drag in a bit of air, but none came through. She scrabbled at the woman's wrist; it was like pulling against a steel bar.

"We don't want to hurt you," the woman said kindly, as if this was all some misunderstanding they could clear up with a smile and a cup of coffee. "But you need to stop fighting."

Black spots blotted the edge of Rachel's vision like ink. Her legs kicked.

"My nephew is coming home with me," the woman said softly. "You can come too if you li—"

A shot rang through the air. The woman gasped, gaped, looked down at her chest. Blood spattered the left side of Rachel's face. It oozed down the front of the woman's shirt. Her hand trembled as she drew it to her wound. She collapsed.

Behind her, Jason's arm stretched out with the bed as support, the barkeep's gun still smoking. He slurred something incoherent as the gun slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor.

And then security swarmed them.