Eight . . . Seven . . .
He eyes the knife in my hands. “You won’t be getting access codes to Group A if I’m dead.”
Six . . . Five . . .
“We keep you alive, and you help us if we run into Order members,” I remind him. “You said that back in Stonewall.”
Four . . .
“Do you want them to search this house? Find Aiden? Punish him because he’s here with me?”
Three . . .
Jackson’s eyes dart between me and the door. “I’ll handle it.”
Two . . .
I cut the ropes binding his wrists.
One . . .
He opens the door. It swings inward, blocking me from the Order’s sight.
“Sorry about the delay,” he says. “Was in the bathroom.”
“Not at all,” replies the woman. There’s a rustling of paper. “We’re looking for this boy and checking in on citizens while we’re at it. Making sure he’s not holding anyone against their will.”
“I think . . . Yes. I saw this boy just earlier, peering into a window down that alley.” Jackson’s voice is surprisingly convincing. “I thought he locked himself out of his house, but maybe he was looking for a place to hide.”
I hear the woman take the poster back. “This alley, you say?” Jackson must nod or point in clarification because she says, “Thank you.”
The door closes and I’m breathing again, weight lifting off my chest. I grab the Forgery—who’s rubbing his forehead like the entire encounter has given him a headache—and push him into a chair in the sitting room. “Emma! It’s safe.”
She looks angry when she reappears with Aiden. It’s not an expression I’m used to seeing on her face and I know why she’s shooting it my way; deal or not, I momentarily put our lives in the Forgery’s hands. But it paid off and I don’t regret a thing.
I rebind Jackson’s wrists, covering the rope burns he’s beginning to develop. “Thanks,” I say to him. “For helping us like that.”
“I was helping the boy, not you. I’ll do what I need to, eventually: get the location I came for. I don’t have a choice.”
“Every action is the result of a choice. Even a Forgery’s.”
He grunts skeptically. I look over to Emma, who has a hand on Aiden’s shoulder.
“The others?” I ask her. “Did you see where any of them went?”
“Sammy has the dog, and he just sat in the open. Smart, really. Bo and September hid in a house across the way.”
“And Bree?”
“I don’t know. Last I saw, she was running along the roofs. Alone.”
But these words are reassuring, because if Bree is on her own, I know, without a doubt, that she is absolutely fine.
ELEVEN
WE TAKE TURNS BATHING. THE water that comes from the faucet is tinged with salt, but I’m clean at the end of the process and that is enough to make me happy. There is no window in the bathroom and I feel comfortable letting Jackson have some privacy after I’ve emptied the room of razor blades and anything else I think he can get too creative with.
The owner of the house still hasn’t come back, but the sky is starting to lose some of its color. We should leave soon, but Emma insists on cutting my hair first.
“I like it better long,” I argue.
“It’s not about what you like, Gray. It’s about making you look less like the face on those posters.”
I reluctantly stand near the sink in the bathroom while Emma hovers around me with scissors. I’m not sure why parting with something as meaningless as hair hurts a little. Nothing has been the same since I climbed the Wall with Emma over the summer, and I feel most comfortable when my hair curls over my ears, falls into my eyes, grazes the back of my neck. These things remind me of Claysoot: a reassurance that I haven’t lost myself in all that’s happened.
“What’s Jackson doing now?”
Emma glances out the open door and into the sitting room. “He’s playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with Aiden. Just like he was the last five times you asked me to check.”
She smiles at me in the mirror and then pushes me to my knees so she can better attack the rest of my hair.
“What will you do when this is all over?” she asks, cutting my bangs back so they no longer fall into my eyes. “Group A, Frank, everything. What then?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead. It almost feels dangerous to be so optimistic.”
“I’ll go back to Claysoot,” she says. “I miss my mother. And I want to find Laurel, too; tell her that I was never crazy to believe there was more, even though she laughed at all my theories when we were younger.”
I picture the reunions. Emma’s mother and best friend dissolving into tears, hugging Emma so tightly she can barely breathe.
“Will you stay there?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It depends. It might have too many tough memories, of being a prison and a lie. But then, it’s still home, and maybe it won’t seem so bad when we can cross the Wall freely.”
“I’ll go with you. To see Blaine, because I know he’ll go there immediately, looking for Kale. And then maybe I’ll fight with Chalice for good measure, just to watch you stitch her chin up again.”
Emma grins and puts the scissors down. “You are not good with grudges.”
“I know,” I say, standing. “I’m terrible with them.”
“Well, no one’s perfect. Least of all me.”
A few months ago I would have said that Emma was as close to perfect as a person can be. Kind, helpful, confident. Loyal. But now, even though I’ve known her my whole life, she feels like a stranger.
“I really am sorry.” She looks at me, and her eyes are terrifyingly doubtful, like she fears we’re ruined forever. More than once, I’ve had the same thought myself.
“Whenever you decide I deserve that second chance, I’ll be ready,” she adds. “I hope you know that.”
She brushes past me and into the sitting room. I squeeze the lip of the sink with both hands, stare at myself in the mirror. I wish I knew how to forgive her, wish I could love this Emma the way I loved the one in my memories.
I fetch a blade from the other room and shave. It will make me look more like the face on the wanted posters, but I don’t care. I just want to feel like myself.
By the time I step into the sitting room, Aiden has grown tired of his hand games. He’s lying on the couch, his head on Jackson’s lap, eyes struggling to stay open. Jackson has an arm draped over the boy in an almost parental manner. The Forgery: a pillow, a protector. It’s so ridiculous I almost laugh.
I gather my gear, tell the others to do the same. Aiden yawns and says something about using the bathroom first, and I snap at him to hurry. Emma gives me a chastising look, but the sun is setting. I don’t feel like pushing our luck in the house much longer.
I flip through a handful of letters lying on a cluttered desk while we wait for Aiden. They are handwritten in elegant script, all smooth arcs and flourishes. I find the most recent one, dated a week back, and read.
Carl—
Badger told me he won’t run our letters anymore, even if you are trading with him. He says it’s getting too risky. The Expats are gaining momentum—I know some of their stories have made it to Bone Harbor—and Order troops along the borders have doubled as a result. Ships on the Gulf are being stopped more and more often. They’re looking for reasons to arrest people, Carl. So long as it’s a blow to the Expats—dulls enthusiasm—they won’t hesitate.