Authors: Lynn Barnes
You’re supposed to be my friend. My
best
friend.
The words she’d said to me before she’d bolted haunted me.
I trusted you when
I didn’t trust anyone.
I forced myself to open my eyes. Vivvie was bound and terrified. She was being held at gunpoint—and there was nothing I could do about it.
They’re going to find us
, I thought, the realization washing over me, coating my body like oil.
They’re going to find Henry. They’re going to find me.
“We have to do something.” I managed, somehow, to form the words. “They have Vivvie.
They have Emilia.”
Henry’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “There is nothing we can do.” His words were as hard-won as mine. “I wish there were. I
wish
,” he repeated roughly, “that we could end this, but
I see no way of making that happen and too many ways that we could make things worse.”
What are you saying, Henry?
He responded like I’d said the words out loud. “I am saying that the best
way of protecting Vivvie—and ourselves—might be to join her.”
“What?”
I said sharply. If I’d been capable of speaking in anything other than a whisper, my voice would have risen.
Henry grabbed my shoulders, turning my body square to his. “We would be safer down in the classroom with Vivvie,” he said. “
You
would be safer down there.”
In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen Henry Marquette
on the verge of tears, but I could hear them in his voice. I could see the sheen of despair in his gaze.
Always steady. Always in control.
“You heard their list of demands,” Henry told me, running his thumbs along the edges of my collarbone in a motion so gentle I wondered if he was even conscious of it. “They want something from Ivy.
They won’t hurt you.
”
Henry wanted me safe. I recognized
the impulse. I recognized that whatever anger he’d felt toward me an hour ago dulled in the face of his need to see me taken care of now.
I understood because I wanted him safe, too.
My free hand made its way to his wrist. I held on to him, holding on to me.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Maybe we would be less likely to get caught in the crossfire if we turned ourselves in.” I could feel his
pulse. I could feel the heat from his body. “But the chances of getting accidentally shot only matter until they start shooting us on purpose.”
Mrs. Perkins had taped the headmaster talking about
cooperation
. The terrorists were making demands. I knew better than most what could—and would—happen when demands like that weren’t met.
They’ll line us up, one by one.
They would start with the low-value
targets, the
disposable
ones. They might carve pieces off the rest of us for show.
A sound below sent a jolt of adrenaline straight to my heart. I processed the fact that there were armed men in the stairway below an instant before Henry pressed me back against the wall, his body covering mine.
Shielding
mine.
It happened too fast for me to counter. I stood, frozen.
This is it. No more running.
No more maybes.
A floor below us, the footsteps stopped.
A door opened.
A door closed.
Henry’s breath was warm on my face, his lips no more than a millimeter from mine.
The second floor. The guards went to the second floor.
On the third, we were safe—for now.
Henry eased back, a millimeter or less between my body and his.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said roughly.
“Even though
I’m a liar?” I hadn’t planned on saying those words. I hadn’t intended to ask for absolution. I wasn’t sure I deserved it.
“We’re all liars sometimes, Kendrick,” Henry said.
I surged upward, pushing off from the wall and closing the space between my lips and his. For a split second, he
stiffened, and then his hands dug into my hair, and he was kissing me back.
I would have pegged Henry Marquette
for a gentlemanly kisser—restrained, a little too proper, a little too controlled.
I would have been wrong.
Henry Marquette kissed the way I fought—fiercely. No fears. No hesitations. No regrets. Just Henry and me and a hunger I’d never recognized in either one of us. For this.
For us.
I broke away first, my lips lingering near his for a second or two. Breathing raggedly, I forced myself to
get it together. We didn’t have time for this.
“We can’t turn ourselves in, and we can’t stay here.” I took a step back and turned my attention back to the tablet in my hand. I didn’t look at Henry,
couldn’t
look at him. Instead, I scrolled through the video feeds. “I was going to try to get to the security offices, to see if there was a way of getting a message out.”
There was a beat of silence.
“You are aware, I assume,” Henry said, “that this is the single worst idea in the history of the world?”
Do you have a better suggestion?
I let a raised eyebrow do the talking for me.
Henry stared at me. I could see the wheels turning. He was thinking something,
feeling
something, but the exact meaning of the tension in his jaw, the way he was looking at me—that, I couldn’t diagnose.
“The tunnel.”
Henry’s voice was—if possible—quieter than it had been up until that moment.
“The one Di had us use to break into the Aquatics Center?” I said. “I thought of that, but there’s no way we can make it out of the main building. There are snipers on the roof and armed guards at every exit.”
Henry shook his head. “That’s not the only entrance to the tunnel.”
My mouth went dry. Suddenly, I was back
in the library, watching Anna and her Secret Service agent. I hadn’t asked myself why the agent had chosen the library for his standoff with the guards.
He told Dr. Clark that he had to get Anna out.
I grabbed Henry’s arm, the way he’d grabbed mine in the hall. The part of my brain that was driven by instincts—by an ancient and unmentionable fear of predators, of darkness, of death—kicked into
high gear. I ignored the vicious and incessant beating of my own heart. I ignored the lead that lined my stomach when I thought about the fact that I was risking Henry’s life, as well as my own.
“I think I know where to look for the entrance to the tunnel in this building,” I told Henry. I checked the tablet feeds, then nodded toward the stairs. I forced myself to let go of his arm, forced myself
not to touch him, not to think about touching him. “Move.”
We made it three-quarters of the way to the library before a man with an assault rifle caught us, head-on.
“Down on the ground!”
I recognized the man as the one who’d hit Anna Hayden over the head, the one who’d implied that he was taking orders from Dr. Clark
for now
.
Mercenary. Unpredictable.
I dropped to the ground. The guard rounded on Henry.
“You!” he said, jabbing the gun
in Henry’s direction.
Henry held his hands up. He slowly lowered himself to his knees. I saw a flicker in the gunman’s eyes. He stepped toward Henry.
“Marquette,” I blurted out Henry’s last name. “He’s Henry Marquette. I’m Tess Kendrick Keyes.”
Henry stared down the gun—and the man who held it. When he spoke, each word was deliberate and crisp. “You want us alive.”
Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot
him. Please, don’t—
After an elongated moment, the guard lowered the gun ten or fifteen degrees—just enough to start my heart beating again in my chest, not enough to stop me from picturing him changing his mind and pulling the trigger.
The guard shifted his gaze from Henry to me. He removed one hand from his gun and lifted it to his ear. I realized that he was talking to someone, sending a
message. “I’ve got eyes on—”
One second, Henry was beside me, and the next, he lunged for the man’s gun.
No.
Henry’s hands closed around the barrel of the gun and he slammed it back into the gunman’s face, throwing his whole body after the blow. The two of them went down. The gun went off.
No.
I leapt forward, nothing in my mind except getting to Henry. If I could get to him, he would be
okay. If I could touch him, I could save him. I could
make him
fine.
Please, God, let him be fine.
“Tess.” Henry stood up off the guard. I looked for blood, looked for a hole in his shoulder or chest. “Kendrick.” Henry’s voice was sharper this time. “We need to go. Now.”
He’s okay. Henry’s okay.
As we took off running for the library, I fought the urge to glance back over my shoulder.
No blood
, I thought.
There was no blood. Not on Henry. Not on the gunman.
“He’s unconscious,” Henry said as we hit the library door. “He won’t stay that way.”
Maybe one of us should have grabbed the gun—but I didn’t know how to shoot it. I doubted Henry did, either.
We have to find a way out of here. We have to find the tunnel before someone comes looking for the man Henry took out.
How long did we
have? Seconds? Minutes?
Fueled by adrenaline, I pushed forward. Where had the Secret Service agent been heading?
If I were an entrance to an underground tunnel, where would I be?
“The tunnel’s under us,” I told Henry. “The entrance probably is, too.”
I squatted down, running my hands frantically over the floor. There had to be something. I looked for a flip, a switch, a crack in the floor—
“Here,” Henry called. He threw his weight against a bookshelf. It creaked, then started to move. I hurried to help him, not questioning how he’d found it, how we could have possibly gotten so lucky when—
“This way!”
I heard the shout, and then I heard running—toward the library, toward us. The bookshelf gave way. Something clicked, and a second later, I was looking into a dark hole.
The tunnel—
if we were lucky.
“You go first,” Henry told me. “Give me the tablet, and go.”
There was no time to think, no time to waste. I handed him the tablet, then dropped down into the hole and landed hard. I looked up.
“Go,” Henry told me again. There was a finality to his tone, and I realized then why he’d asked for the tablet.
He’s not coming.
“Henry!” My yell was lost to the sound of the bookshelf
moving back into place. A second after the entrance closed, there
was silence, and a moment after that, I heard the sound of feet overhead.
Of gunshots.
They won’t hurt him. He’s a high-value target. He has to be—
There was no way back up.
I have to go.
I had to get help. For Henry—and Vivvie and Emilia and all the others. I stumbled in the dark, feeling my way to the tunnel wall. It was
cool and damp to the touch. I kept moving—running, stumbling, falling and getting back up.
I’d
crawl
if I had to.
They have Henry.
I didn’t let myself consider the possibility that there was no Henry anymore, like there was no John Thomas. I didn’t let myself think about Henry’s face belonging to a body and not a boy.
They have Henry. They have Vivvie. They have Emilia.
I pushed myself forward.
Finally,
finally—
there was a break in the darkness. The closer I got to the end of the tunnel, the easier it was to make out the slants of light. On the ground, I could make out the outline of two long-dead glow sticks.
Three days.
It had been three days since the party, one week since John Thomas had been killed.
It had been less than ten minutes since I’d left Henry, less than an hour since
the armed men had fired their first shot.
I put my hands flat on the iron door to the tunnel and pushed. My body protested. So did the hinges on the door, but a second later, it gave. I heard the sound of running water.
It must have rained
, I thought. The drainage ditch had been dry on Friday, but now I slogged through water to get to a single metal rung. I put my foot
on it, hoisted myself up.
Removing the grate was easy, but getting through was harder wet and alone than it had been on Friday.
I threw my upper body against the ground overhead for purchase. I made it out. I made it to my feet. And then I heard the voice behind me.
“So nice of you to join us, Tess.”
I turned slowly. Mrs. Perkins stood behind me. She wasn’t visibly armed, but the guards on either side of her were.
Henry stood just behind them.
I could feel my body getting ready to give out beneath me. Henry was alive, I had failed, and the adrenaline that had kept me going for the past hour drained out of me, leaving my body feeling like little more than a shell.
I stumbled. Henry moved past the guards to catch me. The terrorists didn’t turn their guns on him. They didn’t so much as bat an eye as he steadied
my body with his.
Henry held on to me a second longer than he had to. He whispered two words directly into my ear, and then he let me go.
“Take her to the third floor. Put her with Raleigh.” Mrs. Perkins offered me a smile, too sharp-edged for her soccer-mom face. “I’ve heard you fancy yourself an expert problem solver, Tess. I’m interested to see what you make of my current problem.”
I barely
heard her. I was fixated on two things—the words Henry had whispered in my ear and the fact that the order to take me to the third floor hadn’t been issued to the guards.
Mrs. Perkins had issued that order to Henry.
And the words he’d whispered to me as he’d caught me, his body keeping mine vertical?
I’m sorry.
Kendrick, what you don’t know could fill an ocean.
Mrs. Perkins reached out and laid a hand on Henry’s shoulder. Henry didn’t stiffen at the terrorist’s touch. He didn’t bat an eye.
We’re all liars sometimes
, he’d told me.
We infiltrate.
Dr. Clark’s words to Emilia in the library washed back over me.
We observe, we influence, we
recruit.