We’ve been gone for days! It doesn’t seem real. The food makes me feel a little less like I’m on the verge of collapse, but guilty too. Here I am warm and safe while the others are still out in the freezing wilderness fighting for their lives.

“Your article made quite the impression,” Emmi says as she pulls out of the parking lot. She frowns, and the lines people call crow’s feet form deep grooves at the corners of her eyes. “It created a lot of unnecessary panic.”

“Unnecessary?” I’ve never been in trouble with Emmi before. She’s the last person I want to disappoint.

“You claimed a chaos mage was on the loose and stealing children! How did you think people would react?” Emmi arches an eyebrow.

“I just wanted to warn people. To stop it from happening again.”

“While that’s admirable, I suppose, you need to consider this from all perspectives. A good journalist never takes sides and only reports the facts.”

“I didn’t take sides. I mean, chaos magic is outlawed. A chaos mage does bad things with bad magic.”

“There is no such thing as bad magic,” Emmi says, suddenly stern. “A chaos mage isn’t inherently evil.”

That pretty much goes against everything I’ve ever been taught about chaos magic—not that we’re taught a lot. It’s a taboo subject no one talks about beyond saying, “It’s not something to be openly discussed.” How can something like that be anything other than wrong?

“But our friends were taken. How is that anything but terrible?” I ask.

“Perhaps it would be best not to form an opinion about something without fully understanding it. Perhaps—” It looks as if Emmi is about to say something else, but she squeezes the steering wheel and coughs instead. “All I’m saying is, these things are rarely so black-and-white. Good people can sometimes do terrible things.”

“The whole ‘end justifies the means’ thing?” I ask, remembering the debates we’ve had in ethics class.

“Yes. Sometimes. It’s complicated,” she says, like every adult does when they’re uncomfortable talking about something they think a teenager is too young to understand.

Whatever. I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes, resting them for a moment while Emmi’s words scuttle around my brain like cockroaches, creating an infestation of doubt. Were we wrong about everything?

Taika the Useless, Taika the Worthless.

No! Natalie was taken. She was scared and hurt, and she’s somewhere out there right now running out of time. Whoever took her and Hannah is absolutely not a good person.

“Do you want to tell me where you’ve been?” Emmi asks gently.

A thousand words shoot through my mind too fast for me to get off my tongue. I want to tell Emmi everything, but I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.