“Zu?” He squinted in my direction.

“Zu?” I whispered back. “Really?” I mean, really?

I took Zu’s workbook and pencil out of his hands and flipped the page without looking at whatever he had been writing.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I wrote, showing it to him. He rolled his eyes and refused to respond when I tried to put the pencil back in his hand.

DO YOU THINK THEY’RE GOING TO TRY SOMETHING?

After a moment, he sighed and finally nodded.

ME TOO, I scribbled. COME WITH ME?

By the way his shoulders slumped, Chubs seemed to think he didn’t have much of a choice. He stood quickly and quietly, wiping his palms against the front of his khaki pants.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Chubs said when we were out of earshot. The tents were in our line of sight, but we weren’t in theirs. “About them.”

“Do you think they’re going to try to rob us?”

“I think they’re going to try to take Betty, actually.”

There was a long pause; I felt Chubs’s eyes slide over to me, but my own were fixed on the tents, watching for trouble.

“You should go back to sleep.” There was a gruff edge to his voice as he crossed his arms over his chest. But there was also something about the way he said it that made me wonder if he was waiting to see what I would reply. “What are you even doing up?”

“Same as you, I guess,” I said. “Making sure no one gets brutally mugged, beaten, or murdered in their sleep. Watching to see if those kids are the assholes I think they are.”

Chubs snorted at that, rubbing his hand over his forehead. It took some time in silence, but I felt the air between us ease from a guarded hostility to something that felt to me like acceptance. His shoulders were no longer bunched up with tension, and when he tilted his head toward me, I saw it for the subtle invitation it was. I took a step closer.

“It was bad enough he had to come back here,” Chubs mumbled, more to himself than to me. “God…”

“Liam?” I asked. “This is where he and his friend were captured, right?”

Chubs nodded. “He’s never told me the whole story, but I think what happened was that he and Felipe were traveling and ran into a tribe of Blues. Instead of recruiting them like Lee hoped, the tribe beat the hell out of them and stole everything they had—food, packs, family pictures, you name it. They came here for a few days to regroup, but they were in such bad shape that they couldn’t get away when the skip tracers finally showed up.”

Something hard settled in my throat.

“Lee thinks that that tribe probably called them in,” Chubs continued. “That they got a cut of the reward.”

I didn’t know what to say. The thought of a kid, of any of us, turning against our own kind made me want to smash the shelf we were leaning against into a heap of metal.