The “little fancy lady kit” turned out to be a box of thread, scissors, and a tiny piece of embroidery. On a scrap of fabric, someone—Chubs?—had sewn a perfect black square. I stared at the mark, rubbing my thumb over its raised surface.

“Anyway, you should probably change out of the uniform,” Liam continued. “But be sure to check the pants and the sweater, too. I wouldn’t put it past them to use more than one.”

He was right again. I found one sewn into the waistband of the jeans, one in the hem of the hoodie, and even one glued inside the belt buckle—four trackers for one girl, plus one that had been sewn into the lining of the backpack itself.

Liam finished replacing the tire with the spare faster than I thought possible. Zu helped him place the nuts back in their sockets and slowly crank the car back down. When he handed the tools to her, she knew exactly where to put them in the trunk.

“Here,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “I’ll take care of them.” My hands trembled as I handed the trackers to him. He threw them on the ground, and crushed them beneath the heel of his shoe.

“I don’t understand.…” I began. But I did, in a way. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble breaking me out if they hadn’t had a method of keeping tabs on me if I got recaptured or separated from them.

Liam’s hand came out toward me, and the sheer panic at the thought of his touch had me jumping back, trying to put as much air between us as I could. It still wasn’t far enough; his hand dropped between us, but I felt the warmth of his upturned palm brush my shoulder as if it had actually rested there. My arms came up and crossed over my chest, and some mangled mess of anxiety and guilt rose up from deep in my guts. I tried to focus on the Psi identification numbers on the top of my shoes to keep from jumping away again.

You are acting like a nervy five-year-old, I told myself. Stop it. He’s just another kid.

“They tell you a lot of lies in the Children’s League, the biggest being that you’re free,” he said. “They talk about love and respect and family, but I don’t know any family that puts a tracking device on someone and then sends them out to be shot up and blown away.”

“But we didn’t have to kill them,” I said. My fingers tightened around the backpack straps. “There was another kid inside. Martin. He didn’t…he didn’t deserve to…”

“You mean—” Liam wiped the grease and dirt from his hands off on the front of his jeans. “The kind of—” He made a vague motion with his hands, which I think was supposed to indicate Martin’s plump stature. “That guy?”

I nodded.

“The tree didn’t actually hit them,” Liam said, leaning against the minivan’s sliding door. “They might still be alive.”