I stay in the shadowed recesses across the street. Why did they send me on this one? Why couldn’t it have been stealing bank account information from a CEO or blackmailing a judge? I could have done those. I do those. All the time.
I haven’t messed up this bad in two years. I’ve done everything James asked me to, everything Keane wanted me to. I’ve kept Annie safe, and so what if how we’re living is no way to live, at least it’s alive. James let me come alone on this trip, and I know it’s a test to see if I’m really theirs, if they can trust that my need to protect Annie cements me to them forever, no matter what horrors I’m doing. I can’t mess up.
Technically I haven’t yet, I could still do it, I could still keep Annie safe and sound in her room where she sees nothing but fractured visions of life. Maybe she’s already seen this, maybe she knows it ended for us the moment this boy helped that puppy and became a person to me.
That dumb dog has killed us all.
But the decision is made and I have to cross the street and finish what I’ve begun. Now. I can’t plan it. Planning isn’t safe—it begs for Seers to spy on you. I have to just go.
My feet step onto the asphalt, carry me across, and I don’t know what to do. For so long my brain has been trained to ignore the wrong pulsing constantly, trained to work in spite of knowing everything I’m doing is always bad. Now I am thinking only for myself, using my instincts for my own good.
Which, for whatever reason, means this guy needs to come with me now, somewhere I don’t know yet, but I feel like north is the right direction. I am about to become the grateful owner of the silky-eared engineer of my destruction.
“You found my puppy!” A voice that is not my own but what he needs to hear slips out of my mouth, and the instant his eyes meet mine (gray, he has gray eyes, I would have closed his gray eyes forever), I know I have him for as far north as I need to go, and after that I will figure it out.
Planning is not my friend. Impulse is.
“This is your dog?” he asks, and his voice is deeper than I thought it would be and as kind and warm and untainted by violence as I knew it would be. He takes me in, my wide blue eyes, china doll lips, long brown hair: I am the picture of teenage innocence.
I lean down and pull the dog toward me. No tag on the collar, I get to name it. “Yes! Thank you. My dad—” I hesitate and look toward the bar. His gaze follows mine and then snaps back, sympathetic color flooding his face on my behalf.
Guys are so easy.
I stand, keeping my eyes on the dog as though I can’t bear to meet the boy’s instead. “Well, uh, he was supposed to be back two hours ago. I got worried. Chloe needs to eat.”
“I didn’t find her,” he says, his voice soft and bright to try and compensate for my embarrassment. “Just untangled her. She’s a great dog.”
My cue to look up and recover. “She is, isn’t she? She’s my best friend in the whole world. Oh, gosh, that makes me sound like a loser.” I giggle just like I should. He smiles. (His gray eyes, they will haunt me forever with what I would have done—what I still could do—what I still should do—oh, Annie, have you already seen this? Did you know when I left that I’d kill us both?)
“No, not at all. I love dogs. I had a German shepherd growing up; I still miss him.”
I twist the leash around my hand, drawing his attention there. Small hands, safe hands, hands he probably thinks he might like to hold once he figures out whether or not I’m too young for him. It makes me sick to look at my hands. “There’s a deli a few blocks away where I can get something for Chloe. Do you—I mean, if you aren’t doing anything, I’d love to say thank you for helping my puppy, and if you wanted to come along, I could—it’d be my treat?”
I know he’s going to say yes before it comes tumbling out of his lips and I smile in shy delight. He wants to get away from the bar of my pretended shame, and he wants to get to know me better and figure out whether or not I’m old enough for him to be interested in.
What on earth can this stuttering-arms-and-legs-and-nervous-hands guy have done to get on Keane’s hit list? I’ll have to find out. Because I’m going against Keane (oh no, oh no, they will kill us both) and I need to know as much as I can to try and fix it. When they give me things to do, they never tell me why. Just what. They want me operating on as little information as possible. I’m not like the other girls, the ones who choose to help them, who like money and power.
They know I have no choice, but if I did, they’d all be dead.
“It’s this way.” I walk in the direction we need to go. It feels right, in the same way you feel a drop coming up on a roller coaster before you go over the edge. I’m falling, but I’m falling exactly how I’m supposed to.
“I’m Adam, by the way.”
“Oh,” I say, with another giggle. “Yeah. I’m Sofia.” I almost miss a step. I told him my name—my real name. Why did it come out like that? I always lie. “My friends call me Fia, though. Or, well, I guess my dog does, since I already told you she’s my only friend.”
He laughs again. He likes me so much and he wants to know how old I am—I can read it in every line of his body. “Do you live around here?” he asks.
“Just visiting. Kind of a field trip, I guess.” I see his eyebrows rise involuntarily and even though I am a dead girl walking I smile, really smile. He’s scared now, but not of what he should be. “I’m seventeen.”
A relieved exhalation. “Oh, good. No offense, but you look young.”
“They always tell me I’ll like it when I’m older.”
/>
“They said the same thing when I was the awkward, horrible, six-foot two-inch wonder at thirteen.” He smiles, remembering, and I wonder what he was like then. I wonder what he is like now. “I’m nineteen, by the way, just in case maybe I look a lot older or younger than I really am.”
“No, you look exactly like what you really are.” He does not lie, this nineteen-year-old boy. With his body or his face or his mouth. My finger taps out the why-why-why of his death. “Do you live around here?”