“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

Chubs and I glanced at each other, wearing identical grins.

“Get Zu,” I said. “You guys are going to want to hear this.”

SEVENTEEN

ACCORDING TO CHUBS, Jack Fields was the second son in a family of five kids, and the only one to survive Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration. His father had owned an Italian restaurant, and his mother died of cancer when he was young. Jack was unremarkable in appearance, the kind of kid you would pass in a school hallway and not think twice about. But he was stealth cool, the only one in their room that knew what Liam was talking about when he started in on Japanese horror flicks or articles from back issues of Rolling Stone. Apparently, he liked to tell stories in weird voices and spent years scratching out a replica of New York City’s skyline on the converted classroom’s blackboards. The PSFs assigned to their room had been so impressed with the sheer detail of his work that they actually let him finish.

More importantly, Jack took great pleasure in antagonizing the camp controllers by using his abilities to lift things off their belts and out of their pockets, or to throw things into their paths so that they’d trip and fall in front of everyone. To hear Chubs talk, you would have thought Jack Fields was a saint walking on earth, a disciple of Awesome, preaching the proper way to use their Blue abilities after spending years figuring it out for himself.

Which was probably why he was the first one the camp controllers shot in the back of the head the night the kids tried to make their escape.

Liam was silent as we approached Petersburg’s outer city limits, only nodding once or twice to confirm that the craziest parts of Chubs’s tale were true. He had been just as excited as the two of us when we dragged him over to listen to the broadcast, but slowly, over the course of a few hours, his mood had deteriorated. When Chubs’s stories died out, so did all conversation in the van.

“It’s supposed to be really beautiful there,” I said, suddenly, then winced at how awkward it sounded. “Lake Prince, I mean.”

Liam didn’t looked stressed so much as profoundly sad. That was what worried me—that he was sinking into something that not even our breakthrough could pull him out of.

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, quietly. He handed me the half-folded map. “Can you put this back in the glove box?”

I certainly hadn’t been looking for it when I opened the small compartment, but there they were, nested on top of a pile of crumpled napkins.

Truthfully, I had been expecting envelopes, or at the very least lined notebook paper. Which was stupid and didn’t make any sense, because it’s not like their camp had arts and crafts days. It’s not like they were just given the paper and pens. Still, I had been expecting the letters to be something…heavier. For Chubs and Liam to be carrying theirs with them.