I was about to say thanks when the water beneath us bloomed into glowing aquamarine, every ripple like liquid stars.
“Wow,” I breathed. It looked just like Max’s eyes.
He was smiling at the water, but I could still feel his hand resting against my leg.
For the first time in weeks, the fear loosened its grip.
But it never really left.
It waited in the shadows.
At Blackshear, even the wind was a predator.
3
MACKENZIE
AGE 18
Summer 2019
Present Day
Iwas eighteen the summer everything changed. And, like always, it started at Camp Blackshear. The only place that felt like mine. A refuge. A world untouched by the chaos I was born into.
And it was the only place I saw Max.
He’d be there waiting like he always was. Same crooked smile, same laugh that could crack through my worst days. We never needed to catch up. We just picked up where we’d left off, as if the rest of the year was just one long pause.
We lived three hours apart and had our own lives outside of camp. But at Blackshear, it was justus.
I counted down the days like I was in prison. Agent West and my mom had locked me out of the normal teenage world, and isolation became my default state. I still didn’t have a cell phone or social media.
“Digital thumbprint remains confidential,” West would say, like I was a classified file, not a girl.
My father was still out there, somewhere in the darkness. I hadn’t seen him since the night of the fire, but I could feel him lurking, like a shadow pressing cold and heavy against the back of my neck. I knew nothing about that night. My mom refused to tell me. It was all a black, shifting fog in my mind, a part of my life erased, forgotten.
The only sign it was real was the nightmares—haunting visions of the things he used to do—things he forced me to do. The FBI still watched us, like silent, black-vested shadows in the corners of my room. It was unsettling, nerve-wracking, and every time I asked my mom about it, she only shook her head and whispered, ‘Not now.’
They’d been stitched into our lives for so long, I barely remembered a time without them.
Agent West was always there, hovering at the edges like he belonged to us, like he was our family. In a way, he was. I sometimes saw him as a dad. His son, Jeremy, also became part of our lives. He slept over and ate at our table. More like a brother than a friend. It was normal in the way that only things you never question can be normal.
But I knew it wasn’t. Not really. My story had changed. I lived by rules no one my age had to live by. And even though I pretended not to notice, I did. Especially when Jeremy would flaunt his iPhone in my face.
“You’re a loser,” he had said, texting his girlfriend. He was five years older than me and liked to remind me about it.
“Shut up,” I had said back, trying to kick him in the balls. “I’m going to punch you in the face.”
“I’d like to see you try, little sis,” he had laughed, flipping his black hair back and walking off.
I wanted to know why I was the only teenager in my entire fucking town that wasn’t normal.
But with Max, the feeling of the unknown faded. He made me forget I was a ‘federally protected asset’, asWest said. With him, I was just Mackenzie. My life hadn’t really started until I came to Blackshear and met him.
We talked almost every night on my stupid landline. We talked about everything. He told me about his high school baseball championship game. He was a good player, and his dad made him practice with a coach who had played in the MLB.
“You think you’re going to become a professional baseball player? Am I going to get front row tickets?” I had asked him.
