“President’s Son Attends Children’s League Hearing,” is what the headline beneath it said. I didn’t need to read more than the first two or three lines to get the basic gist: the president was too big of a coward to come out of hiding after a failed assassination attempt, so he sent his freak baby to do the dirty work for him. How old was Clancy now? I wondered. The pictures at Thurmond were identical to this one, and I had never thought of him as anything older than eleven or twelve. But he must have been eighteen or close to by now. Practically an old geezer by our standards.

I tossed the paper aside in disgust and reached for my backpack again. Rob had said there was a change of clothes inside, and if that was the case, I was getting out of my Thurmond uniform once and for all.

A plain white shirt, a pair of jeans, a belt, and a zip-up hoodie. I could handle that.

The knock on the window startled me enough that I nearly bit my tongue clean off. Liam’s face appeared there, drawn in tense lines. “Can you bring those clothes to me for a sec? I need to show you something.”

The very second I knew his eyes were on me, every bone, muscle, and joint in my body snapped to attention. With the faint taste of blood in my mouth, I jumped out of the sliding door, taking in the sight of the van. If it were possible, the car looked worse than before—like a toy that someone had wedged down the sink and run through the garbage disposal. My fingers came up to trace one of the fresh punctures on the side paneling where a bullet had slammed through the thin metal.

Liam knelt beside Zu, who was holding on to the spare tire with everything she had, and went to work cranking the van up on the jack and off the demolished back right tire. I came to stand behind them just in time to watch Liam wave his hand in front of the hubcap. The nuts twirled out on his command, collecting in a neat pile on the ground.

Blue, I registered. Liam was Blue. What did that make the others?

“Okay,” he began. He blew a strand of his light hair out of his eyes. “Take out the shirt you were about to change into.”

“I’m—I’m not changing out here,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “Really? You’re worried about your modesty when we’re going to have League agents on our tail in a matter of hours? Priorities, Green. Take out the shirt.”

I watched him for a moment, but even I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

“Feel around the collar,” Liam said. He set another nut on the ground by his feet. “You’ll find a bump.”

I did. It was small, no bigger than a pea, sewn into the otherwise nondescript shirt.

“Chubs has a little fancy lady kit under the front seat,” he said. “If you’re going to change into it, you need to cut the tracker out of that shirt.”

The “little fancy lady kit” turned out to be a box of thread, scissors, and a tiny piece of embroidery. On a scrap of fabric, someone—Chubs?—had sewn a perfect black square. I stared at the mark, rubbing my thumb over its raised surface.

“Anyway, you should probably change out of the uniform,” Liam continued. “But be sure to check the pants and the sweater, too. I wouldn’t put it past them to use more than one.”

He was right again. I found one sewn into the waistband of the jeans, one in the hem of the hoodie, and even one glued inside the belt buckle—four trackers for one girl, plus one that had been sewn into the lining of the backpack itself.

Liam finished replacing the tire with the spare faster than I thought possible. Zu helped him place the nuts back in their sockets and slowly crank the car back down. When he handed the tools to her, she knew exactly where to put them in the trunk.

“Here,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “I’ll take care of them.” My hands trembled as I handed the trackers to him. He threw them on the ground, and crushed them beneath the heel of his shoe.

“I don’t understand.…” I began. But I did, in a way. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble breaking me out if they hadn’t had a method of keeping tabs on me if I got recaptured or separated from them.

Liam’s hand came out toward me, and the sheer panic at the thought of his touch had me jumping back, trying to put as much air between us as I could. It still wasn’t far enough; his hand dropped between us, but I felt the warmth of his upturned palm brush my shoulder as if it had actually rested there. My arms came up and crossed over my chest, and some mangled mess of anxiety and guilt rose up from deep in my guts. I tried to focus on the Psi identification numbers on the top of my shoes to keep from jumping away again.

You are acting like a nervy five-year-old, I told myself. Stop it. He’s just another kid.

“They tell you a lot of lies in the Children’s League, the biggest being that you’re free,” he said. “They talk about love and respect and family, but I don’t know any family that puts a tracking device on someone and then sends them out to be shot up and blown away.”

“But we didn’t have to kill them,” I said. My fingers tightened around the backpack straps. “There was another kid inside. Martin. He didn’t…he didn’t deserve to…”

“You mean—” Liam wiped the grease and dirt from his hands off on the front of his jeans. “The kind of—” He made a vague motion with his hands, which I think was supposed to indicate Martin’s plump stature. “That guy?”

I nodded.

“The tree didn’t actually hit them,” Liam said, leaning against the minivan’s sliding door. “They might still be alive.”