“No, not that.”
The familiar, raspy voice trickles down into the catacombs of my brain and stirs me into consciousness. Squinting at the analog clock to my left, I make out the shape of eleven o’clock. My captor is strictly a bed-by-ten kind of gal, so an after-hours rager is extremely unlikely. However, if she is going out, I find it doubly rude she didn’t invite me and woke me up with the noise.
“The twenty-two. The Sig. And the bow. No, the other one. Yeah.” A man’s deep bass grumbles in response. As quietly as possible I inch out of my bed, but as I reach the door, it swings inward and forces me back. “What are you doing?” Taylor hisses at me.
“What areyoudoing barging into my room at night?” I counter, crossing my arms over the front of my borrowed flannel pajamas.
“This is not ‘your room,’ princess. Go back to sleep.”
Before she can close the door, I wrench it open to peer behind her. Mason is fumbling with a duffel bag, dressed in black, staring at me like I caught him in bed with my lover. “Sleep.While you go out and do God knows what, leaving me here unprotected?”
Mason gives Taylor a look. “Theia did tell you we had to take her with us.”
“On the missions,” Taylor presses.
It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. Clandestine whispering. Dark clothes. Empty duffel bags. I’ve snuck out of my own house enough to know what it looks like.
“You’re sneaking out!” Taylor widens her eyes for me to lower my voice. In a normal speaking voice I ask, “You’re sneaking out and not taking me with you?”
Triply rude.
Taylor huffs impatiently. “We are going to the island for a couple hours.”
“The island? My island? The city?” My heart races like I drank ten coffees. “But—but the Lightbringers.”
“I know,” she says solemnly. “I made a promise, and, Lightbringers or not, I intend to keep it.”
A million dangerous scenarios flash through my mind, but the look on Taylor’s face is peculiar. It appears she wasn’t expecting me to wake up and I’ve stumbled into a secret. “I want in.”
“Good for you. You are staying here, Miss Piccolo.”
“Am I?”
If I can go toe-to-toe with Luciano Piccolo, a girl in the woods of Pennsylvania is naught in comparison. But, actually, she’s a lot in comparison, because she is a killer with insane reflexes and not a portly old man with a soft spot for me.
“Yes. Go back to sleep or I will put you to sleep.”
She almost gets me. But the tiny eruption of fear inside my heart cools off and I school my features as best I can. “Didn’t Lady Leather explicitly tell you, ‘Where you go, she goes’? Ibelieve the phrase ‘no exceptions’ was used. I could go ask her, if you want.”
We square off until she turns on her heel to consult Mason. They have a silent conversation—complete with facial expressions, posture changes, and hand motions—and Taylor faces me again. “Get dressed. Wear dark clothing. Five minutes.”
The door slams in my face.
Groggy but triumphant, I disrobe out of my sleeping clothes and pillage the dresser. The clothes are rather pedestrian, so I need not worry about standing out in a formfitting black sweater and snug black jeans. When I join them, Taylor and I startle at the sight of one another, like kittens playing hide-and-seek. Her tan skin pales a shade or two, as if she’s seen a ghost. Like Papa when I snuck into my mother’s boudoir and tried on her clothes. Perhaps the stranger whose clothes I’ve rummaged is dead, like my mother. Maybe they’ve gone away. Maybe they were kidnapped by a rebellious organization designed to kill them. Maybe they were a nobody like I am now. But clearly, they were somebody to Taylor. And really, every nobody is a somebody to someone.
Taylor, however, looks like an entirely different person stripped of her cookie-cutter soldier uniform. She looks absurdly casual, like an Underclass punk I could meet in a bar, who’d lean on the counter with a masculine gait and a feminine smile, telling me what “girls like me” enjoy. People love to tell you what you like. The only difference being if it were Taylor at that bar, I may have listened.
She tosses me a jacket and gestures ahead. “Come on, the others are waiting.”
What others? I ponder this as we cross the lawn toward the woods from which we came when I arrived. They’re as imposing and ominous as I remember, like if this were a fairy tale, I’d come upon a gingerbread house. While I find this labyrinthdizzying, Taylor is able to navigate as if each tree were a street sign, fingers tracing along the rough bark like the familiar skin of a lover. Neither the darkness nor the claustrophobic density of trees appears to bother her.
“Aw, it’s like being kidnapped again,” I say as we approach the clearing.
“I don’t recommend attempting to escape.”
“Why? Can’t bear to part with me?”
Rolling her eyes, Taylor leads me to the helicopter resting anxiously on the grass, two strangers already inside. One, an older man with a shock of white hair and a stern, dark face, gives me only the barest of acknowledgments as I climb in. The other, a middle-aged Indian woman with a curtain of black hair and deep brown eyes, smiles at me, flashing brilliantly white teeth in my direction. Once Taylor gets in and shuts the door, the helicopter ascends and makes my stomach flip but I squeeze my eyes shut to ignore it. Deep breaths.
