Rachel came to slowly. The chair beneath her was hard. Something sharp dug into her wrists. A flat bit of wood stretched straight her broken, throbbing finger. Her eyelids felt heavy, like she'd slept for too long, and she blinked them open.

A single bright light threw stark shadows across a dark room. She squinted against it. She tried to bring her hand up, to look at the splint job, but her hand stuck and metal jangled.

Muscles stepped away from her, leaning against a table. "There we are." He threw a glance over his shoulder. On the other side of the table, past the hanging bulb, sat Isa. Her clothes were fresh, her black cropped hair wet. She scowled, arms crossed. He sighed at the woman. "She's awake now, so if you're going to be unpleasant, let's get it over with."

Rachel tensed, fingers of her good hand wrapping around the metal bars of her chair. Isa's scowl deepened. "If you're not going to help with the interrogation, then leave."

Muscles crossed his arms and shifted so that he was sitting on Rachel's side of the table. His bulk loomed over her; if he was trying to comfort her with his support, he was doing a terrible job of it. "I'm good here," he said.

Isa's lip curled before she swung the distaste in her gaze down to Rachel. "Alright, kid. This is how this is going to work. I'm going to ask questions. You're going to tell me the truth. If you're honest, you get a hot meal and a warm bed and we don't toss you out until at least the morning. If you lie to me, I've got no use for you and a long stretch of desert I'm sure would be happy to host you instead."

Isa's eyes cut like knives, and Rachel swallowed thickly. Her tongue felt heavy. "You've gone a long way out of your way," she said slowly, despite how fast her heart was hammering, "to toss me out on my head now."

Muscles snorted. Isa stood, leaning on the table. Her shadow loomed on the wall. "You begged in the car." Rachel cringed at the reminder of her mistake. "So you can play tough all you want, but I've bled people a lot tougher."

"And I've watched a lot of tough people bleed." Rachel snarled, covering the fear burning inside her with hotter rage.

"Careful, Isa." Muscles threw an amused look over his shoulder. "She's you, but younger."

"Out, Fletch," Isa growled.

"Oh, am I getting in the way of your glaring competition?" He rolled his eyes and pulled a key out of his pocket. Rachel's handcuffs fell off with a twist and a click. She rubbed at one wrist, but his dark form still loomed over her. His eyes were serious as he paused and met her own. "She really will throw you out." He waited as if to let that sink in, then drew back.

Isa leaned forward. "What's your name?"

"Why does it matter?" She brought her hand up to check the splint job—not half bad; she'd certainly done worse—and to dodge the full weight of Isa's glare.

The woman hit the table so hard it rattled. "Because I asked!"

Jason would give them her name as soon as he woke up, if for no other reason than he'd freak out and ask where she was. All she was doing was antagonizing this woman, but Rachel didn't really see any reason to please her. Rafe's silver chain burned in her pocket. She was tired of cowering to people who scared her.

Rachel flipped her off.

Isa's knife flicked out of its sheath, and its tip pressed against Rachel's throat. Rachel snarled at her. "Cut me up, throw me out, do what you want, but I'm not gonna dance for you."

They glared at each other. The tip pressed a little harder, pricking Rachel's skin, but she didn't shrink back.

"Enough, Isa." Muscle's voice was mild. Isa didn't move, and he stood. "I said enough."

"I say we toss her." The knife hovered unwaveringly at Rachel's throat.

"And I say," Muscle said, pulling Rachel's chair back, out of range of the blade, "that we just proved she's not going to fold. Since when did you want a shrinking violet for your army?"

Rachel tried to measure her breaths, her lungs catching up on air she hadn't quite realized she'd been withholding.

Isa gestured with her knife, from Rachel's bellybutton to her throat. "Screw us, and I will gut you."

Then she walked out of the little room, leaving her alone with the man.

Rachel's heart still hammered in her chest, but she sat up a little straighter, trying to slow her breaths. "I suppose this is where you play good cop?"

Muscles took his seat against the table again. It was slightly less suffocating now that he'd pulled the chair back away from it. "We're not cops," he said, "and we don't have any interest in playing like we are."

"So what then?"

"You can get up and walk around if you want, you know. Nothing's tying you to that chair."

Rachel almost said she was good just to be contrary, but the small room was caging her in, and the metal chair felt too much like a cell itself. She rolled to her feet and paced to the opposite end of the room, putting the table between her and him.

"You think I'm going to hurt you?" he asked, shifting to face her.

"You didn't seem in much of a hurry to stop her."

"You're welcome, by the way." Rachel scoffed, and he shrugged. "You can think what you like. But we didn't leave you for the Org and Isa barely left a scratch on you. You've got it better than a lot of people."

Rachel paced forward, leaning with both hands on the corner opposite of him. "I want to know what's going on? Who are you people, and what have you done with Jason?"

"And I want," he said, "to go home to my wife, but I'm stuck here tonight with you and the Lich." He gestured out the door Isa had left. "So why don't we get each other up to speed in the meantime?"

Rachel stepped back and crossed her arms, careful to keep her broken finger over her elbow. "What do you want to know?"

"How long's the Org been after you?" he said. "And why?"

Rachel's hand flipped palm up. "I don't know. You know, days kinda bleed together when you're being hunted like an animal, yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, voice startlingly even. "They do."

She paused, eyes narrowing. Her chin turned, as if her brain thought she could get a better angle to understand him with one eye.

"You're not the first kid to get chased by the Org, Rachel, and you won't be the last."

She stiffened. "I thought you didn't know my name."

He snorted. "Isa said she wanted you to tell her the truth, not that we didn't know it." He pulled out a little picture—the same dumb mug shot the TV crew had used—and slid it across the table at her. "We looked you up."

She shoved it back. "And? So you got a file on me from three years ago. You don't know a thing."

"We know your father was a RN and your mom was an opioid addict who couldn't hold down a job. I've got your old Hampton address—looks like a rough part of town. But you got by somehow because apart from that one arrest, you fell off the grid for the next three years."

"Great. Paperwork. We done slinging facts and figures?"

"Not quite, because I want to know how you survived."

Rachel's chin jerked forward. "That's none of your freaking business."

"It is if you want to stay with us."

"I told you," she said, voice tightening, "I am not dancing for you people."

"And I'm not compromising the safety of my facilities. You see, whether you know it or not, you're exactly the kind of target the Org loves to get their hands on. You get arrested at thirteen, and... someone paid your bail. Then you never show up again. Not in a school. Not in a Home. Not on a medical record. Rachel Carson vanishes off the face of the map. So I want to know how."

Rachel's nose scrunched. "You think I'm working for them? They almost killed Jason. I blew up a building to get away from them. I hopped a train, I put a gun to a woman's head, I drove for fifteen hours straight. They've run me like a dog, and you think I'm on their leash?"

He shrugged one shoulder, muscles rolling. "If so, you're a good actress."

"You guys are insane! You brought me here. What do you want from me?"

"To make sure any other people I've ever brought here are safe." He crossed his arms, looking her over. She took an unconscious step back, as if pushed by the weight of his presence. He didn't have Rafe's bluster or Isa's cold hate—things she was used to guarding and fighting against. He was just sure, solid as a mountain, and it made her feel small.

"I don't want to hurt anyone," she said.

"I appreciate that. But if you came from the Org, then we both know you don't think you are hurting us. You're on a rescue mission. You're going to save us from ourselves. No?"

Rachel's head shook, and a grimy black curl fell into her eyes. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Then tell me where you came from."

"It was a street gang, okay? A tiny little street gang. Runaways. We looked out for each other. I didn't get picked up by anyone."

"And your bail?"

"Rafe paid it. My—" She paused, at a loss for a word. "Boss," she settled on.

"Your gang have a name?"

"What, you gonna look us up? It was tiny. I don't think we made any waves."

"Name."

"No." They weren't going to find anything on it to corroborate her story, and the idea of saying it aloud, to a stranger, felt like a violation, of her and them. The Lost Boys passed the lips of its members like a warm joke, like a promise, like a mantra, like a living piece of each of them. They were the kids who would never grow up—at least not the way the rest of the world grew. They weren't stuck in a school, they didn't need parents, they weren't bound by society's rules. They were each other's home, each other's family, and no matter how many came or left, that promise stayed the same. She wasn't giving that up so someone could run a cursory Google check on it.

"You realize Isa wasn't joking about leaving you in the desert?"

"Then leave me there," she bit off.

A knock came at the door. Muscles rose and slipped around her, surprisingly lithe for his size. His frame blocked most of the door, and she craned her neck to see someone hand him a sticky note. He nodded and closed the door.

"What?" Rachel said.

He glanced back, brow raised. "You're not impatient at all, are you?"

She scoffed. "I'm sorry, did you want me to be warm and cozy while you're holding me hostage?"

"You asked for our help," Muscles reminded. "You don't get to pick how we give it."

Her arms crossed tighter against her chest.

"You," he said, coming back around the table, ceding her the spot closer to the door again, "have a choice."

She turned her head, raising her brows in a silent go on.

"You're not Flagged, which means that if the Org did get you, it was either much more recently than three years ago or they determined that you weren't a viable candidate."

"What do you mean Flagged?"

He nodded thoughtfully with the barest smile. "That's a good question."

He seemed pleased she'd asked it, and she felt like she'd passed perhaps the easiest hidden test ever. Her lip curled at him; she didn't like being played with. He just smiled a little more, kind of like her father used to when he'd been teasing her and she finally caught on.

"How much biology do you know?"

"Like you said," she said, voice thick with disdain, "I dropped out of school at thirteen." She didn't tell him about all the late nights she'd spent trying to wrap her mind around articles on the internet, or all the random anatomy knowledge her father had liked to dump on her. As touchy as these people were, she wasn't sure how he'd take knowing that she'd lied to him once already, in the hospital when she claimed she didn't know any first aid.

Because she didn't want to be the medic again. She didn't want to beg for her life by claiming she could save someone else's. Anyone could do what she did. She wasn't special. And she wasn't going back to that.

"Then we'll go with the short version. By 'not Flagged,' I mean no one's fiddled with your DNA. There are certain 'flags' that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population has turned off. You're in that ninety-nine."

"You mean I don't have freaky weird powers? I could have told you that."

"Well, that's the question." He pulled the metal chair forward and sat, leaning his elbows on the table. "Do you want them?"

Her eyes closed. Her mouth opened, closed. Her lips pursed as she struggled to find the words. "Are you asking if I want you to 'fiddle', to use your lingo, with my DNA to... turn me into a freak? No. Can't say I really do."

"Then I can have someone escort you back to civilization in the morning. I'll make sure someone sends in dinner tonight." He rose.

"Hold on, hold on." She jumped in his way. "That's it? Join our club of creeps or get out?"

His head tilted. His eyes closed. "Anyone ever told you that you could work on your diplomacy skills?"

"We're talking about my life and you want to mince words?"

"This club of creeps," he said with a patience that bordered on anger, "is my community, my friends, my family. And we've been hunted too long to allow anything that even smells of a trick through our doors. So yes. I do think you're telling the truth, which is why I'm even giving you the offer. You can join, or you can leave."

Rachel's lips pressed together, and pain sparked through the split. Leave, and go where? Back to life as a criminal? Out into the world alone, no one to push her and no one to pick her up either. An empty world—empty of friends anyway. She'd seemed to have acquired plenty of enemies after meeting Jason.

And she couldn't even go back to Rafe if she'd wanted to. Somehow, he wasn't in Hampton anymore. Somehow, he was Flagged. He'd left the Lost Boys. He'd joined Team Superfreak.

And he'd broken her finger doing it.

Her good hand reached into her pocket. His necklace twined around her fingers, the cold metal burning into her.

What would he do to her next time they met? Her gun hadn't stopped him. Would he take her back—whether she wanted to come or not? And would she even be able to stand against him?

She balled the chain into her fist. Her eyes jerked up to the man before her, waiting with watchful eyes. She drew a deep breath. "What do I need to do?"