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ugh,” I said. “The grandmother had lied from the beginning. Maybe if she said something earlier, it could have been prevented.”
His thumbs stopped massaging for a moment, and his smile lifted more. “So you’re still good with signing up? Joining us, maybe?”
I looked at him for the longest time, at the eagerness at the possibility of me joining them.
Despite knowing the bad things they’d done in the past, the mug shots and the rap sheets, looking at his cerulean eyes, his handsome face, and his sweet smile, I couldn’t imagine Corey doing any of the bad things Blake had said. I couldn’t imagine Corey kidnapping my own brother just to persuade me to join, or for some other idiotic plan.
Would the Academy do it and not tell Corey? Did they even know about the missing people at that school Blake had talked about?
“I like…” I said slowly, “I like what we’re doing here. I like why we’re here. I mean I don’t like the situation but…”
“You’re glad we’re helping,” he said.
“Yes. And I was okay with what you were doing before. With making sure the whole drug thing was cleared up.” I pressed my lips together, then, unsure how to say the next without being crude; Corey was the last person I wanted to be crude with.
He squeezed my hand gently. “What?”
I looked down, finding it easier to talk to my legs. “My own father lied to me for who knows how many years,” I said. Again, I was quiet, because I didn’t want to say the next part. It was hard. It was probably the biggest risk, because it was the most honest I was feeling in that moment. All the fears about them welled up inside me, and I was on the edge, where I could swim or drown, and I was scared to death of both.
“Kayli,” he said quietly. He released my hand and slowly, as if checking with me that it was okay, eased his arm around my shoulders. “Come here a second.”
As easy as falling, I did. My head pressed his chest. My hands gripped at his shirt. The tough ego inside me fought back tears. How in the world did he do this to me? All the tension I’d been feeling for the past few days was surfacing.
Corey’s hands on my back smoothed over the shirt, warming. “I know he lied,” he said quietly. “Your family should be someone you trust. Sometimes your family, your real family, isn’t who you think it is.” He pressed his cheek to the top of my head, and breathed out slowly. “It’s hard to jump in with someone new when you’ve been knocked down by someone you probably once cared about a lot. But you have to start somewhere.”
He was right, and it killed me. What was worse, was that this time, this moment, may have been my last chance. I wanted to believe in them so much. I wanted to believe that guys like this could exist. If they were as bad as Blake said, it could break my faith. If someone like Corey could be evil, what chance was there of anyone being good?
And what did that say about me? Because I was neck deep with them, and feeling a part of something better. It scared me because I worked so well with them. Like I was born to do this. Like this was why I suffered so long, with pickpocketing and with the rough life I’d led. If they were bad guys, and yet I felt they were doing good things, maybe I was just like them. It meant I was a bad guy, too, didn’t it?
“You don’t have to decide now,” he said quietly. “I know—”
“I don’t know anything,” I said in a voice a little higher pitched than I meant. I swallowed again and started over. “I mean, it’s…difficult to say I want to, when I do want to, but I don’t know anything about it. I ask questions, and I get these strange answers. It doesn’t make any sense.”
He was quiet for a long moment, stroking my back and holding on to me. “What do you want to know?” he asked quietly.
“Hm?”
“I understand how you feel,” he said. He pulled back a bit, enough so he could look down at me. I forced myself to put on a poker face, but knew my lip was pouting. He released one side of me to put his hand on my cheek. “Kayli, I felt the same way when I joined.”
“You did?”
He nodded. “I spent a few years among hackers. I lived on the Internet, in places I shouldn’t have been. I learned secrets because I was curious. I wanted to know things. When the Academy finally caught up with me, I dove right in, trying to figure out how it worked. I didn’t like not knowing how it operated. It drove me crazy.”
“Did you find out?”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “I did. I did it the wrong way.”
“Why?”
“Because what I found was the world looking in on the Academy,” he said. “The things I pulled up, the stuff I learned, it was all an outside view, not the inside.”
“What’s the difference?”
He smiled slowly. His thumb slid across my cheek. “Look at us, now,” he said. “Look at you. Okay, imagine for a moment, we’re back at that mall, and instead of you bumping into me, I was watching you pick a pocket. If I didn’t know you at all, what would I think?”
I shook my head a bit, but it was tucked against him, so there was little movement. “Thief,” I said.
He reached down, taking up my hand and splaying out the drawing of the scarab beetle with the spade on my skin. He traced the lines. “I wouldn’t know Kayli. I wouldn’t know that she only took what she needed, because she was just trying to survive and keep her brother safe and fed. I wouldn’t see that she had the most self-sacrificing personality, a huge heart. Underneath the rough exterior, you’d do anything to right the wrongs. I’d see just the shell.”
I breathed heavily and tugged away from him enough that he drew his hand away so I could press my own palms to my eyes. “But how do you get to know the real Academy? Not everyone…not all people are good on the inside. I mean I thought my dad… I always thought I could sympathize because he lost his wife…my mom…”
“There’s Wil,” he said quietly.
“Wil left without telling me,” I said, keeping my face covered. “He didn’t trust me to tell me he was leaving.”
Corey was quiet for a long moment. I couldn’t blame him. There wasn’t an easy answer to this. I didn’t know why Wil left, but the fact that he didn’t leave a note or tell me meant he didn’t want me to know where he’d gone.
Maybe that’s why I was so hesitant to go find him. I didn’t want to find out he didn’t want to see me. I didn’t want to learn that somehow this was my fault, that maybe he left because he really hated me.
“Kayli,” he whispered. He tugged at my elbow for a moment. I resisted, pressing my palms against my face still. He pursued, tugging again. “Sweetie, look at me for a second.”
I opened my eyes and was caught up in his intense gaze and gentle, sympathetic smile. He didn’t have to say anything. His smile was a promise and his hands rubbing my arm encouraged me.
I think I fell in love at that moment. He was so sympathetic, strong, smart, handsome.
“You don’t know the truth,” he said quietly. “You see the shell. You see he left without a word. Did you think for a moment that maybe he left to give you a chance? That he could see you deteriorating? He’s a smart kid, so I bet he could feel you being tense and worrying. Maybe he didn’t do it the right way, but maybe he was trying because he cared about you, and he couldn’t stand to see you running yourself into the ground for his sake. Maybe in his own way, he thought he was helping.”
I shook my head slowly, thinking.
“And maybe,” he said, “the Academy isn’t like how you see it from the outside. Like how Kayli isn’t just a thief. If anyone was looking in on this group, they’d see two boys in jail, two trying to bail them out, and us interfering with a case that doesn’t have anything to do with us. They wouldn’t know we were looking for a missing girl, taking the risks necessary to find her and to make sure she’s safe, that the family doesn’t end up in jail and her in foster care of some kind.”
“How do you know, though?” I asked. “I mean, the Academy part. How can you join something when you don’t know a thing about what th
ey stand for? What they do?”
“What do we do, Kayli?” he asked. The corner of his mouth lifted. “You and I. What have we been doing?”
I quieted, unsure.
“If we are the Academy,” he said, “then what we do is who we are and what we’re about. When you couldn’t live with knowing Coaltar got away trying to poison a well in a village you’d never even heard of, what did we do?”
“Marc didn’t want to go with me. There was a rule he didn’t want to break,” I said.
“Because they wouldn’t be happy if any of us got hurt.” He rubbed his palms over my arms. “We protect those we care about first, because we can’t help anyone else if we go running off, getting shot at, injured, killed, or arrested or any of that stuff. But we also have to make our own decisions. We need to take risks, and sometimes when you’re involved in an assignment like this, or like with Coaltar, you may end up breaking some Academy rules because you need to. Because we’re on the inside, and the ones who keep us in check, they’re on the outside and they have to wait for us to tell them what happened.”
“And then you get in trouble,” I said.
He smiled. “They only want the details. They trust us to do the right thing. The only ones who can punish us are ourselves. We choose, not them.”
“So if you get into trouble, you…decide what happens?”
He nodded, smiling. “You’re getting it.”
It was a hard idea to wrap my head around. It was a strange situation, like they really were in charge of their own group, they just had others in the group as a sounding board to keep them in check. Maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t understand everything going on, but that’s why I was sticking to finding out myself, instead of relying on what Blake told me, which could only be his outside perspective. I’d been on the inside, with them, with Corey, Blake’s theories didn’t tell the whole story. It was why I stuck around instead of running off with Blake. I knew there was more to it.
“Am I allowed to know?” I asked. “I mean, you said there’s rules. What are they? How does it work?”
His smile lifted and his eyes sparked. “Do you want to get in and find out?”
