The taller boy held the baseball, uncertain. "How long are we going to stay here?"
Rafael glanced at me. I had no answer to that. These kids needed families, therapists, years of deprogramming. What they had was a Romani safe house in Montana and whatever happened in the next twenty-four hours.
"As long as it takes," Rafael said finally. "This place is safe. Diego's family will make sure you're taken care of."
"And then what?" The girl doing pushups had stopped, sitting back on her heels. She was maybe eleven, with blonde hair pulled into a tight braid. "We just stay here forever?"
"No," I said, because lying to them seemed worse than the truth. "Eventually, you'll go somewhere more permanent. Families, maybe. Or group homes with people who know how to help kids like you."
"Kids like us." She said it flatly, like she'd heard that phrase before and knew exactly what it meant. Damaged. Broken. Weapons without a purpose.
The kid in the loft spoke up for the first time. "What if we don't want families?"
Fair question. I hadn't wanted a family either. Wouldn't have known what to do with one.
Rafael moved closer to the boys with the baseball. "Then you get to figure out what you do want. That's the whole point. You get to choose now."
"Choose what?" The taller boy's grip tightened on the baseball. "We don't know how to do anything except..."
He didn't finish. Didn't need to.
"You're kids," Rafael said. "You'll learn other things."
"We're not really kids anymore." The girl with the braid stood up, brushing hay off her pants. "You know that, right? You can't just put us in school and pretend we didn't spend the last two years learning how to kill people."
Christ. She wasn't wrong.
I stepped further into the barn. "No one's pretending anything. You were dealt a shit hand." I looked at each of them. "But you're out now. That's something."
"Out until someone decides we're worth coming after," the girl shot back. "We know how this works. The facility's gone, but the people who wanted us trained? They're still out there."
My jaw clenched. She was right about that too. Constantine's network was bigger than one facility. Zeus's reach was longer than any of us wanted to admit.
"That's what we're trying to fix," Rafael said quietly.
The girl's eyes narrowed. "By doing what? Fighting him?"
"Something like that," I said.
She studied me for a long moment. "Are you going to win?"
Honest answer? I had no idea. We were walking into a trial by combat against a man who'd orchestrated every move we'd made for years, chained together in a labyrinth he probably designed, with almost no advantages.
But these kids didn't need honest. They needed something to believe in.
"Yeah," I said. "We're going to win."
The smallest one with the rabbit looked up at me, thumb still in her mouth, and I wasn't sure if she believed me or if she was just too tired to care anymore.
The kid on the phone finally spoke up. "What happens after? Like, to you guys?"
I blinked. "What?"
"After you win." She didn't look up from her screen. "What are you going to do?"
The question landed wrong. I'd been so focused on surviving the next twenty-four hours that I hadn't thought past it. Hadn't let myself.
Rafael's hand found mine. Squeezed once.
