Jasper shook his head. “I don’t dare mess around with something right against your skin like that.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Mia. “I broke the pin in Jasper’s cuffs.”

We all blinked. “You did?” asked Jasper.

“Yeah, and somehow picked the cuffs anyway, if you missed that feat of prowess.” She glanced at Imani. “Sorry.”

Imani shrugged, pulling off her scarf and folding it into her waistband. “It’s all right. I don’t always wear the hijab. I just feel safer with it than without.” She smoothed her hair into place, curling it behind her ears with the practiced ease of a beauty belle. Now that I knew, I couldn’t believe I’d missed the signs earlier. Did anyone else know they had an online sensation in their midst? I offered her a smile, but she only half returned it. Everyone was too concerned with escape to target me at the moment, but I knew I hadn’t heard the last about our lies. And I deserved it. Yes, Cage had led the charge to lie, but I went along with it.

I needed to prove myself to them again, and even without powers, I wasn’t useless. “Could you come here, Jasper?” I asked, shouldering my way to the panel. He was the one who seemed the least hostile at the moment. In fact, when he joined me, he even gave me a gentle nudge, although he kept it out of sight of the others.

“What do you need?”

“The code. Maybe we can find something useful. And since you’re the only one with hands . . .”

He nodded, understanding, and I directed him to unlock the console, searching for visual code. If I could only find something to release the cuffs, or at least learn what had triggered the alarms . . .

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything quite that easily, not like before. The hunters had made their system harder to navigate. It was also incredibly frustrating describing things to Jasper when my own fingers would have flown through the commands. Rune fairly jumped up and down with impatience, and I didn’t blame her. Without her powers inhibited, it took her mere seconds to hack a system.

At last we gave up in frustration and stood in a rough semicircle, staring at one another. “What now?” Reed asked dryly.

“Jasper,” said Imani, “come over here, would you?”

Cage and I ignored her, searching each other’s expressions for answers. “I don’t know why no one’s come for us yet,” I said, half to myself. “But whatever the reason, we can’t have much longer.”

He frowned, pacing in a tight circle. “You couldn’t find anything in the system?”

“Not trying to direct Jasper. Maybe if my hands were free . . .”

Someone cleared their throat behind me. I ignored it at first, and then Imani was there, jabbing me in the side with her elbow. “Hey,” she said, brandishing what looked like a computer chip.

“What is that?”