“No!” I yelled. “He’s got to go! Make him go!” I yelled to no one in particular. My cries were lost inside the crowd.
There were guards in dark suits speaking into his ear, but King Najeeb didn’t seem to notice them or care. He was shaking the hands of his people. Blessing babies and waving at the masses like a returning, conquering hero.
He walked without a worry or a fear in the world right through the heart of Security Perimeter B—the area that was most dangerous for short-range arms and high-powered explosives.
Was it that thought that made me stop? I don’t know. Maybe my subconscious saw the small, abandoned package before the rest of me could process what it meant. Maybe it was Joe Solomon’s voice in the back of my head or my father’s angel on my shoulder, but in any case I did stop.
And I looked at the package on the ground, directly in the king’s path.
And I heard my own voice scream, “Bomb!”
Looking back, it was like it happened in slow motion—like running through sand. One moment, I was watching the king stroll through his people, shaking hands. The next there was nothing but a cloud of smoke and terror. People screamed. Children cried. But it all sounded so far away, like a TV blaring in a distant room.
I coughed and squinted. The force of the blow had knocked me to the ground, and my side ached. My hands hurt. It took everything I had to force myself upright.
“Cam!” Zach was yelling. I realized there was static in my ear. The blast must have knocked out our comms units. In the smoke, we were practically deaf and blind.
“Cam!” Bex yelled.
“I’m here!” I said. There was a bleeding woman carrying a child.
A man stumbled through the crowd, his face so covered in blood that I couldn’t even tell what damage had been done.
“I’m here,” I said, softer, as I pushed against the current of people trying to flee the blast site. I had to see it. The crater where the bomb had begun. The mangled bodies of the guards and the man who was Caspia’s only hope for peace.
“And I’m too late.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Surely that wasn’t the longest night of my life, but it felt like it.
Not one of us protested when Liz insisted we stop and clean our wounds in the bathroom of a gas station outside the city. They were inconsequential, really. Scrapes and bruises. I had a pretty nasty cut on my shoulder, but nothing any worse than any of us had had before. We’d been on the perimeter of the blast radius. Ten feet closer to the king, and we wouldn’t have been so lucky.
Once we were back in the van, I risked a glance at Zach. No one had tended to his scrapes and burns. No one had tried to. He just kept staring out the window, looking for what, exactly, I didn’t really know.
Maybe a way out.
Maybe a chance to turn back time.
We kept the radio of the van turned low. News of the king’s assassination swept across the globe. Riots were spreading throughout Caspia and beyond, crossing borders, a whole region on fire. Chaos was the new norm. The world was a powder keg, and I rubbed my sore body, afraid I’d just felt the spark.
We drove all night, heading south along the coastline until I was almost convinced Zach was going to drive us out to sea.
Finally there was a dock with a small ferry that you had to push with a long pole, like it was still 1850. At last there was an island and an overgrown pathway and a house surrounded by tall trees filled with Spanish moss, a massive wraparound porch and a scene befitting Scarlett O’Hara.
“What is this place, Zach?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. He just kicked the front door; but it didn’t put up a fight, splintering easily, swinging open. Liz carried her computers protectively like there might be an alligator or a monster after her hard drive. But Zach said nothing. He just kept looking at the staircase as if waiting for a ghost to descend from the second floor.
It had been a grand old house once, a mansion. But everything about it had fallen into rubble from decades of disuse and neglect.
“Is this one of Joe’s houses?” I waited, but Zach was speechless. “If it’s Joe’s house, Zach, we probably shouldn’t stay. Someone may track us here.”
“Not Joe.” Zach shook his head.
“But you know it.” It wasn’t really a question, not a guess. I inched slowly closer. “Whose house is it, Zach?”
“It’s safe.” He turned. “We’ll be safe.”
“Zach…” I reached for him, but he pulled away and walked to the corner of the room, measuring his footsteps carefully, listening until one step sounded slightly different from the others. Then he knelt to the floor and removed one of the boards and reached inside to pull out six birthday candles and a G.I. Joe, a rumpled five-dollar bill and an assortment of broken crayons—and only then did I know where Zach had brought us. After all, that wasn’t the covert stash of an operative; it was the hiding place of a child.
“This was your mother’s safe house,” I whispered.
But Zach just looked around the big, dusty rooms that must have been so grand, once upon a time. “No. It was her house,” he said.
Spies aren’t like normal people. No one expects us to have houses and mortgages, tire swings and barbecues on the Fourth of July. But every spy is somebody’s child, and I stepped across those dusty floorboards, wondering what kind of place had given birth to the woman we called Catherine.