“Gemma, no.” Pete grabbed her by her shoulders so she had no choice but to look at him. She wiped her face with a hand and left a slick trail of wet and maybe snot. Great. “Listen to me, okay? Those men at Haven—the ones who stole children so they could get their funding, the ones who made people, living people, just to use them and poison them—those are the monsters, okay? Not you. You’re amazing, do you hear me? You’re perfect.”

Somehow through the suffocating mud of her misery, this penetrated. No one had ever told her she was perfect. She was about as far from perfect as you could get. And yet looking up at him, at his freckles and his eyes all warm with kindness, she believed that he thought so.

Of all the things that she’d seen and learned in the past week, this seemed like the most miraculous.

“So you don’t hate me?” She swallowed a hiccup. She could only imagine what she looked like, but he didn’t make her feel ugly. He still had his hands on her shoulders and she realized how close they were. No one had ever looked at her the way he was looking at her, or touched her like this, like she was something beautiful that needed preservation.

He smiled, and behind his eyes were doors that opened and said come in. “God, Gemma. You really are dumb sometimes. You know that?”

He had to lean down a little to kiss her. Gemma had never felt small before in her life, but she did then: small and protected, held inside of the space made by his chest, by his hands on her cheeks. His lips were soft. He didn’t try and put his tongue in her mouth and she was glad. It was her very first kiss and she was nervous, too nervous to have to sort out whether she was doing it right or worry about opening her mouth and whether she was using too much tongue or too little. She just wanted to stand there, in the sun, with the softness of his lips on hers and his fingers light on her cheeks. She moved her hands to his waist and felt the thrill of his body beneath the T-shirt, the narrowness of his waist, so delicious and foreign and other.

He pulled away and she took a step backward, bringing a hand to her lips, which were tingling. Her first kiss. With Pervy Pete. But she was happier than she could ever remember being. It felt like someone had cracked open a jar of honey in her chest. She was filled with a slow warmth.

“Wow,” he said. “That was pretty good, huh?” His smile was so big she couldn’t see beyond it.

She nodded, afraid to speak, afraid she would giggle.

“I mean, I’m not going to lie, I think I kind of killed it, actually. Like if there was a town for knowing when to kiss a girl, I’d probably be mayor.”

“Pete? Don’t ruin it, okay?” But she was smiling, too. In the parking lot, a man in mirrored sunglasses was obviously watching them. She started to turn away, suddenly self-conscious—had he been staring at them the whole time, like some creep?—when she noticed the cut of his suit and the man, identically dressed and nearly invisible behind the glare of the windshield, sitting behind the driver’s seat in the car next to him.

The car next to him was a maroon Volvo.

The maroon Volvo.

They’d been followed. They’d been found.

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 14 of Lyra’s story.

FIFTEEN

ALL THE GOOD FEELING VANISHED. She was suddenly freezing.

“Two men,” she said.

As soon as he realized she’d spotted him, the man had turned away, pretending to be talking on his cell phone. “In the parking lot, watching us. They look military to me. Don’t look,” she said, grabbing Pete’s wrist when he started to turn.

“Military. Christ.” Pete had gone white again. Even his freckles seemed to disappear. “You sure?”

Gemma hated looking at the men. It felt like getting slapped. But she did now, in time to see the guy in sunglasses once again pivot away from her the second her eyes landed on him. He climbed into the car and for a second she imagined—she prayed—they would simply drive away. But both men just sat there. She nodded.

“How the hell did they find us?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t know what they were waiting for. Maybe they didn’t want to cause a scene. But she was positive the men, whoever they were, wouldn’t let Pete and Gemma leave. Only an hour ago she’d been hoping for someone, anyone, to interfere with Harliss, to save them from him. But now she wished herself back inside that close-smelling room, back inside the dark with the gun.

“Look, what can they really do? I mean, think about it. We didn’t do anything, right? They can’t arrest us just for talking to Jake Witz. They’re not going to throw us in jail. Sure, we broke a few traffic laws. Maybe they’re here to give us a speeding ticket, no right turn signal, points off my license. . . .” He trailed off. She knew he didn’t really believe that the men had followed them across Florida because they’d failed to signal.

Gemma saw movement in the parking lot. A hard slant of reflected sun. The car doors opened. Both men climbed out of the car. She heard a tinny ringing, and it took her a second to recognize her own ringtone. She fumbled her phone from her pocket. Jake.

“This is America,” Pete finished, in a whisper. As if that would help. As if that would protect them. “I mean, they’re not going to hurt us. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. Right?”

Gemma felt a surge of relief, of joy. Jake would help them. He would know what to do. He was back on her side.

“Jake?” She nearly choked on the word. She was close to tears again. “Is that you?”