“What?” Celia asked, while the others just looked at us, confusion all too clear upon their faces. Even my dad swiveled from the front seat to stare.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Hunt’s brow furrowed. “You really don’t know there’s more than one Magnum?”
“You’re not just lying to us again?” Brady added.
“No, we don’t know,” Celia told him with angry, wounded eyes, though Brady’s accusation was fair, obvi.
The ’rents exchanged exasperated looks.
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” Porter was saying. “If that wasn’t Fanny in Joss’s room, we need to rethink things.”
“There’s no time for that,” Alexis said. “He knows we’re here. And he knows why.” She left the rest unsaid.
The ruse was up. We were exposed. There was no going back.
“So forward we go,” I said.
Griffin’s hand settled at the small of my back. “You do know about the others with powers locked up in some underground facility though, right?”
They exchanged another look before Orson, with pursed lips, finally nodded.
“We know.”
“We get them out too,” Griffin said.
“No,” my mom said right away. “There’s no time.”
“We’re not leaving them there,” Hunt said.
“It’s too risky,” Celia insisted.
“Thenwe’ll get them out,” Layla said, and then, just for us,
My dad revved the engine a little. Hunt and Brady turned and started toward our Mustangs.
“I … I hope you all make it through this,” I said, surprising everyone there, especially myself. “I’m really angry at all of you. Like, totally livid. But I don’t want any of you to die.”
I hadn’t known it to be true until the words were out of my mouth.
“Yeah,” Griffin added, but then said nothing else.
Layla just stared at the lie-rents. And Brady and Hunt, though surely they heard me, didn’t return to the back of the truck.
From the front, my dad said, “Let’s just get through this and then we’ll have a chance to talk everything through after. We’ll do right by you guys, you’ll see.”
Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t.
“Just give us a chance to prove it to you,” my dad said.
Layla tipped her chin up defiantly. “Earn that chance, and only then we’ll give it to you. Years of lying to us straight to our faces, guys.Years.Oh, and by the way, we know we’re actually twenty-two and not eighteen. A bit of a biggie, don’tcha think?”
My dad, who’d been looking at us with earnest, imploring eyes, suddenly glanced away. The others looked anywhere but at us, all but Alexis.
She shrugged, a graceful tilt of slim shoulders. “We did what we had to do. We aren’t apologizing for that.”
Layla said to our crew.
