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I stepped out of his reach. “Nothing? We're supposed to be doing nothing?”
He crossed his arms. “We’re teenagers. We aren't trained. We haven't even graduated yet. The only thing we should be doing is learning and staying safe and doing our best to be happy. That's what our friends and family would want.”
“So you're fine staying here in our little bubble where we have no idea what's going on outside in the real world?” I argued.
“This is the real world. This is our real life! We're lucky to be here,” Theo countered.
“Calm down,” Sai told him. “No one is saying we should leave. Saige, I understand your frustration. We're all going crazy, not knowing what's going on or where our families are or if they're safe. I know you miss Hannah, Daniel, Malik, and Travis just as much as we do. It's driving me mad not to know if they're okay. But I also know there's not much we can do to help right now. Theo’s right. We're a bunch of teenagers with a fraction of the amount of training the people in the government have. What do you expect us to do?”
He held out his arms, and I wanted to run into them and cry.
“I want us to do something.” My voice broke.
“This isn’t our fight,” Theo sighed.
I jerked back. “What are you talking about?”
“This is beyond us. Yes, it feels personal because they're attacking hybrids and four out of five of us and our families are affected in some way. But we're not the ones who will take down the Council. We're not the ones who’ll make changes. We have to trust the adults in our lives to do that.”
The ache in my heart grew, not just for Hannah and our friends, but from Theo’s words. I couldn't believe him. I couldn't believe that he was comfortable sitting here and allowing other people to fight on our behalf.
His expression intensified, as if he sensed my disagreement. “We're not the only ones. That's what I mean. We're not the only hybrids. We're not the only ones who are affected. This isn't just on us, and I don't think any of our families or friends would expect us to go up against them.”
“We're getting stronger,” I argued. “We've been working so well together lately. Don't you think that our bond happened for a reason? Don't you think we met when we did for a reason? Everything is getting worse around us and just because we're safe doesn't mean we should ignore what's going on. We aren't normal. We aren’t average teenagers. Our bond makes us incredibly powerful.”
“Yes, it has thepotentialto make us incredibly powerful, but we're still working to get there.”
“I'm not saying we should leave tonight,” I argued. “I just want . . .”
I hesitated. I didn't know exactly what I wanted.
“I want to know that you guys care. That you're thinking about them, and I'm not the only one missing what we left behind.”
Niall surprised me by being the one to speak up. “You're not. We're all heartbroken. We’re all missing pieces of ourselves. But I think we've done our best to stay positive and focus on the things that we can control. I'm sorry if it hasn't come across that way, but we've all had so much going on. It's not like we have time to sit down and express ourselves.”
He was right, but I hated it. We were falling back into old habits of going a hundred miles an hour in five directions. We needed to pull back and come together. Talk. Communicate.
“I’m going to lie down.” I needed time and space to calm down. I didn’t want to start a fight, and I was reacting more to missing Hannah than anything else. I hated feeling helpless, and completely out of control, but that was most of my life lately.
I wanted to get everyone I loved together in one place and keep them all safe.
Niall
It took me a week to update the pack information sheet, which surprised Nancy. She's expected the project to take me months, but she clearly underestimated me when I told her I needed more work to do. Without school or tests to study for, my mind was to free wonder and worry about things I had no control over. I needed the distraction.
Saige’s breakdown made it hard to ignore that I still don't know where the men I called my brothers were. I hadn't heard a single word about them or the woman who raised me as her own in weeks, even before we got to the compound.
I missed them.
I missed Hannah and Daniel and Malik just as much as the others, but there wasn't anything I could do, which I absolutely hated.
Since I had time on my hands, I set up scrapers that would send any results to me if our friends’ or families’ names appeared anywhere on the internet. So far, not a single hit. I had a feeling I would have to search the dark web, but doing that on one of the pack’s computers might cause problems. I had to get my hands on a computer of my own, so I could do it away from the office.
Maybe it was the dark web on my mind or maybe it took me this long for my conscious mind to see the pattern, but I stopped in the middle of reading one of the more recent message board comments. At first I thought it was a fluke, but when I went back through every conversation for the past few weeks, there was definitely something going on. Too many misspelled words. Too many capitalized letters that didn't belong. They might look like a typo or autocorrect gone wrong, but it was happening too frequently to be an accident.
I copied and pasted every instance into one document so I could see them all together. There was a pattern. I just didn't know what it was—yet.
A few more days passed, and after finishing my normal tasks, I checked for new coded messages across the pack’s site. Pasting the new codes in my document, I poured over it again, trying and failing to figure out the key. Maybe I was overthinking it, or maybe it was far more complex than I could handle.
