I wasn’t worried about taking care of Greg and his friends. Even with their guns, we still had a chance. But if they tried to pull something while we were asleep, or if they called in reinforcements—
My feet stopped mid-stride.
Chubs had beaten me to guard duty.
He sat facing the tents, his long, spidery legs crossed in front of him, and Zu’s workbook in his lap. He was leaning toward the others’ tents, concentrating so hard on picking up their conversation that he missed my approach and nearly jumped out of his skin when I appeared.
“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 ass**les 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.
“I trust Liam,” I said slowly. “He’s such a good person, but he’s so easy for others to read—and they don’t have the best intentions.”
“Exactly,” Chubs said. “He’s so busy looking inside people to find the good that he misses the knife they’re holding in their hand.”
“And even then he’d probably blame himself for the person having the knife to begin with, and apologize for being such a tempting target.”
That was what troubled me the most about Liam—if he was any more trusting and good-hearted, he would have been a Boy Scout. It was either an amazing feat of stubbornness or naiveté, I thought, for someone who had seen so much death and suffering to still believe so unconditionally that everyone was as stand-up as he was. It was something that inspired both exasperation and a fierce sense of protectiveness in me—and Chubs, too, it seemed.
“I think we both know he’s far from perfect, no matter how hard he tries,” Chubs said, settling himself down on the ground and leaning back against the empty shelf. “He’s never been a big thinker, that one. Always rush, rush, rushing to do whatever his gut tells him to, and then drowning in his own self-pity and guilt when things blow up in his face.”
I nodded, absently fiddling with a tear in the sleeve of my new plaid shirt I hadn’t noticed before taking it. After hearing Liam with Zu, I knew that he felt an intense guilt over what had happened the night of their breakout, but it sounded like it might run even deeper than that.
“I can fix that for you later.” Chubs nodded toward the torn fabric. His long fingers were splayed out over his knees, tapping against the bones. “Just remind me.”
“Who taught you how to sew, anyway?” I asked. Apparently it was not the right question to ask. Chubs’s back went stiff and straight, like I had dropped an ice cube down the back of his shirt.
“I don’t know how to sew,” he snapped, “I know how to stitch. Sewing is for decoration; stitching is for saving lives. I don’t do this because I think it’s pretty or fun. I do it for practice.”
He stared at me over the rims of his glasses. Waiting to see if I got what he was trying to say.
“My dad taught me how to stitch before I went into hiding,” he said, finally. “In case of emergencies.”
“Is your dad a doctor?” I asked.
“He’s a trauma surgeon.” Chubs didn’t bother to hide the pride in his voice. “One of the best in the D.C. area.”
“What does your mom do?”
“She used to work for the Department of Defense, but got fired when she refused to register me in the IAAN database. I don’t know what she’s doing now.”
“They sound great,” I said.
Chubs snorted, but I could see him warm to the compliment.
The minutes dragged by, and the conversation waned. I found myself reaching for Zu’s notebook and flipping it open to the beginning. The first few pages were mostly sketches and doodles, but those gave way to page after page of math problems. Liam’s handwriting was neat and precise, and, surprisingly, so was Zu’s.