He grinned. “Must be tiring being the big hero.”

I waved him off, trying to quiet the small, ridiculous buzz of happiness in my chest that came with his words. He was just trying to be nice.

“Good thing we had the ladies there to take care of business,” he continued, turning to Chubs. “Otherwise you and I would be rolling around in the bed of a truck, halfway back to Ohio.”

Chubs only grunted, his coloring still faintly gray.

Liam looked a little better, at least. His face was tinged pink from the shock of cold fountain water, and his fingers still seemed to be twitching every so often, but his eyes had lost that cloudy, unfocused look. Considering it was his first time being ear-tased by the White Noise, Liam had recovered fast.

“All right, team,” he said, slowly. “Time for a Betty vote.”

“No!” Chubs startled back to life. “I know exactly where you’re going with this, and I know I’m going to be overruled, and I—”

“All those in favor of letting our girl wonder stay with us for the time being, raise your hand.”

Both Liam and Zu raised their hands immediately. Zu looked at me with a smile that seemed particularly bright next to Chubs’s glowering face.

“We don’t know anything about her—hell, we don’t know that what she has told us is even true!” he objected. “She could be a psychopath who kills us in our sleep, or calls her League buddies in just when we let our guard down.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said dryly, half flattered he thought I was capable of that level of scheming.

“The longer she stays with us,” he added, “the more likely it is the League will catch up to us, and you know what they do to their kids!”

“They won’t catch up with us,” Liam said. “We took care of that already. If we stay together, we’ll be fine.”

“No. No, no, no, no, no,” Chubs said. “I want to register my nay vote, even though the two of you always win.”

“Well, don’t be a bad sport about it,” Liam said. “This is democracy in action.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course I am,” Liam said. “What I wasn’t okay with was the thought of dropping you off at some back-of-beyond Greyhound station with no money, no papers, and no way of knowing for sure you got where you’re going safe and sound.”

There it was again—that smile. I pressed my hand against my chest, trying to keep things at bay. Locked inside. To keep my hand from reaching out to brush the one he had put on the armrest of my seat. It seemed so sick, so wrong, but all I wanted to do was slip inside his mind and see what he was thinking. Why he was looking at me like that.

You really are a monster, I thought, pressing a fist tight against my stomach.

I wanted to protect him—at that moment, it was suddenly clear to me exactly what I wanted: to protect them, all of them. They had saved me. They had saved my life and hadn’t expected a single thing in return. If the showdown with the undercover PSFs had shown me anything, it was that they needed someone like me. I could help them, protect them.