“I told you the PSFs would catch up to us!” he kept repeating, like we hadn’t heard him shout it the first ten times. “We’re just lucky it wasn’t her.”

I wondered who he meant but knew better than to ask.

Liam ignored him and kept his back to us, still bent over the silver drinking fountain. Zu stood next to him, dutifully holding the button down so he could use both hands to scrub his face in the stream of water shooting out of it.

I used the last of the wipes to clean the dirt off my own face. “I just want to know how that PSF recognized him, even before he used this orange thing. It flashed, but he knew the number off the top of his head. He didn’t need to wait for it to tell him that.”

Chubs stared at me a moment, then brought a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Everyone had their photo taken when they were processed. Didn’t you?”

I nodded. “So they put together a network for searching the photos?” I asked.

“Green, how the hell am I supposed to know that?” he said. “Describe it to me again.”

The orange gadget must have been some sort of a camera or scanner—that was the only explanation I could drum up that Chubs didn’t shoot down as being moronic.

I pressed my hands against my eyes, trying to fight back the urge to vomit.

“It’s bad news if that’s all it takes for them to ID us,” Chubs said, rubbing a hand over his forehead and smoothing out the wrinkles there. “If we weren’t already screwed—they probably know we’re looking for East River now, which means they’re going to have more patrols out, which means they’re going to be watching our families even closer, which means it’ll be even harder for the Slip Kid…”

He never finished his train of thought. He didn’t have to.

I let out a humorless laugh. “C’mon. They’re going to send out a whole armada for a few freaks?”

“First of all, armadas are comprised of ships,” Chubs said. “And second, no, they wouldn’t send one out for a few freaks.”

“Then what’s the—”

“But they would send one out to get Lee.”

He didn’t wait for me to piece it together.

“Green, who do you think was the mastermind behind our camp’s breakout?”

When the others were ready to return to the minivan, we played a silent game of musical chairs. Chubs took the middle seat on the passenger side, and Zu, her usual perch behind the driver’s seat. I had two options at that point: crawl into the rear seat or tough it out in the front seat, while trying to act like everything was all hunky-dory and pretending that Chubs hadn’t just told me Liam was responsible for what might have been the only successful camp breakout ever.

In the end, exhaustion won out. I managed to collapse into the passenger seat feeling about as lovely as a wilted head of lettuce, just as Liam climbed into the driver’s seat.