“. . . rule about students only. Don’t want to take a chance on drawing attention. You three head outside. Go around back. Find the rear doors. I’ll crack them open from the inside. Be careful, take your time, and don’t take any risks.”
“Take our time? Guess that’s gonna cost us the time bonus,” Lien quips.
The time bonus for getting the mission done at warp speed. It starts out as triple points and decays by increments of point five. There are a ton of options to score bonus points in the game. Stealth-hit bonus points. Multi-hit. Head-shot bonus points. Tyrone explained it all to me the very first time I was pulled. But I rarely think about points and scores, and in the heat of battle, I never think of my score. I just think of staying alive.
“Are you serious?” I ask, my whole body vibrating tension. “I get that you want to earn your thousand, that you want out. But you’re talking about scoring bonus points when these are people, real people, my friends—” She looks at me, her eyes wide, surprised. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know.
And then she does. I see the change in her the second that it hits her. She holds up both hands in front of her like she’s warding me off. Her expression reflects all the worry and distress I feel. She might not know my friends, but she knows what this means: If the Drau can come into my real world, they can come into hers.
“Sorry. We good?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I nod, recognizing how close to the edge I really am.
Kendra’s strangely quiet, hanging back a couple of feet, pale, shaking, sort of huddled into herself. Not good. I’m worried she’s going to freak out again, like she did before the last mission.
Holding Lien’s gaze, I cock my head in Kendra’s direction. Lien sinks her teeth into her lower lip and shakes her head as she falls back to talk quietly in Kendra’s ear.
I glance at Tyrone. He’s watching them, narrow-eyed, and then he looks over at Jackson. He mouths a word, but I’m at the wrong angle to catch what it is.
Some silent agreement passes between them, but I have no idea what.
I walk over to Kendra and Lien and take both their hands in mine so we’re a little circle. “We are all coming back. Remember?”
Kendra lifts her eyes and whispers, “I remember.” But her expression’s vacant.
“Jackson,” I say, wanting to tell him I don’t think she’s all here. And I think that in her current state, she just might get herself—or someone else—killed.
I’m on it.
I gasp. I’d forgotten what it was like to have him push his thoughts inside my head, his voice right there, part of me.
“Go. Get them outside. Back doors,” Jackson says to Tyrone.
Lien shoots him a glare, but doesn’t argue and I have a feeling that’s for Kendra’s sake.
As the three of them jog down the hall, back the way we came, I realize Jackson knew before I did that Kendra was in trouble. That’s what this whole rear-door thing is about. He sent Tyrone to babysit. Which means it’s me and Jackson and Luka. Three of us against who-knows-how-many Drau.
Awesome.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I GRAB JACKSON’S ARM. “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A SITUATION like this before?”
“Like what?”
“The game pushing into the real world.”
He bares his teeth in a smile that isn’t a smile. “You ever seen my left shoulder?”
I swallow. Of course he’s seen the Drau in the real world. One attacked him. Scarred him for life.
Incongruously, I wonder what he told his parents about that scar, about how he got it. I wonder if the Committee just planted some bogus knowledge in their heads. Can they do that? I know they can take memories away. Can they add them, too?
The possibility is horrific.
Then another thought hits me. Did Jackson know? Did he know we were coming to Glenbrook? Did he know the walls between our two realities would fail?
Did he choose not to tell me?
Jackson snaps his fingers.
My gaze jumps from his shoulder to his face.
“Stay with me, Miki. Wherever you just went inside your head, don’t go there again. Not till we’re out.” He unstraps his knife from his thigh and shoves it into one of his vest’s many pockets, then does the same with his weapon cylinder.
I follow his lead and tuck my weapon cylinder into the pocket of my vest. The pocket isn’t as big and loose as Jackson’s and Luka’s, and the outline is still clearly visible through the cloth. I poke at it, trying to make the shape less obvious.
“I’m not worried about that,” he says. “I’m more worried about your sword.”
“Crap. Forgot about that. What do we do?”
He walks around behind me and I feel him undoing the sheath; then I feel the weight lift off me.
“Don’t turn around,” he says.
I hear a swoosh, like a belt pulled quickly through a loop. I turn around. Jackson’s standing there with his pants undone, hanging way low on his hips, baring most of his dark-gray boxers. He slides the sheath of my sword down his pant leg. He’s holding the bottom of his T-shirt up and I can see smooth, gold skin and ridged muscle and the thin line of light-brown hair that trails down his belly. With a gasp, I turn away.
“Told you not to turn around,” he says, and I can hear the smile. There are faint sounds as he finishes what he’s doing—I’m guessing buckling the sword to his thigh—then, “I’m decent. Shirt safely in place.”
Echoes of what he said to me the night he climbed in my bedroom window to prove to me he wasn’t a shell. Weeks ago. A million years ago.
I feel like I’ve known him my whole life.
“We’re lucky Glenbrook isn’t a school with a metal detector or we’d be screwed,” Jackson says.
“If we get caught with weapons, Ms. Smith is going to be pissed. We could get suspended. Expelled.”
“That’s your biggest worry right now?” Jackson asks with a short laugh.
“No,” I whisper, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. But they’re too big, too terrible to think about, so I focus on the small, the less important.
“Steer the nightmare, Miki. Clear your mind. Think of this like a kendo competition. We go in. We fight. We win. Doesn’t matter that you’re a girl and they’re boys, faster, stronger. Doesn’t matter that some of them look at you like you shouldn’t be there, like you don’t have a right. You fight. You win.”
He’s right. Doesn’t matter that the Drau are faster, brutal, deadly. What matters is that I’m deadly, too. The fact that I’m still alive proves it. So I do what he says. I take a couple of deep breaths. Focus. Visualize.
“So what now?” I ask. “You said we go in . . . but Luka gave us the all-clear sign. There are no Drau inside the dance.”
“Not yet.” His expression is ruthlessly neutral. And his answer makes my stomach churn.
“Maybe they’ll go somewhere else. The science room. The roof. The weight room. The—”
“They won’t,” he says. “You know that. You feel it here”—he splays his fingers over my abdomen—“and here.” He shifts his hand to my chest, over my heart, over the tattoo of the eagle. “Courage,” he whispers. “You have enough of it to fill an ocean, Miki.”
“Why here? Why are the Drau here at Glenbrook?”
Jackson shrugs. “Maybe coincidence. Maybe they’re going for something that matters to us.”
I swallow and force the words past my too-dry lips. “Maybe the Committee chose this battleground. Maybe they’re trying to make a point. Keep us in line.”
I desperately want him to shoot down that possibility, but he only tips his head toward the open double doors to the dance. “We’ll keep them safe.”