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“Be quiet, look straight ahead, hands clasped in front,” the cop yells. “Everyone else take three steps away from the door. Now!”
They’re cuffed and marched away, all of them turning their heads back toward me as I try to come up with explanations for why they’re gone and I’m not. Maybe their parents were called and mine couldn’t be reached. Maybe it was just random groups of three that were being taken for fingerprinting. I’m still trying to convince myself when Agent Jones saunters up to the cell door.
“Oh,” I say.
“Cassel Sharpe.” A small smile lifts a corner of his mouth. “Please step to the front of the cell, hands clasped together in front of you.”
I do.
Jones leads me grimly into another hallway, one he has to swipe a card to enter. One without cells, just white walls and windowless doors. “We put an alert on your name, Cassel. Imagine my surprise when it turned up that you were in custody in Newark.”
I swallow nervously. My throat feels dry.
“You got that information for me yet?” His breath smells like sour coffee and cigarettes.
“Not quite yet,” I say.
“Have a good march?” he asks. “Get lots of exercise running from the law? Growing boy has got to get his exercise.”
“Ha, ha,” I say.
He grins like we really did just share a joke. “Let me tell you how this is going to go. I’m going to give you two choices, and you’re going to make the right one.”
I nod my head to show I’m listening, although I’m sure I’m not going to like what comes next.
“A couple doors down I’ve got Lila Zacharov and the other two you were brought in with. You and I can go there, and I’ll explain that any friend of Cassel’s is free to go. Then I’ll let them out. Maybe I’ll even apologize.”
My shoulders tense. “They’ll think I’m working for you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Definitely.”
“If Lila thinks I’m working for the Feds and tells her father, I’m not going to be able to find out anything for you. I’ll be useless.” I’m talking too fast. He can tell he’s getting to me. If the rumor gets around that I’m working for the Feds, my own mother won’t want to be seen with me.
“Maybe I don’t consider you all that useful anymore.” Jones shrugs. “Maybe if we’re all the friends you’ve got, you’ll see things a little differently.”
I take a deep breath. “What’s my second choice?”
“Tell me that by the end of next week you’ll have that lead for me. You’re going to find out something on this mysterious assassin. Something I can use. No more excuses.”
I nod. “I will.”
He claps my shoulder heavily with his gloved hand. “I told you you’d make the right choice.”
Then he lets me into the room with the others.
Daneca scrambles up from where she’s sitting on the floor and hugs me. She smells like patchouli. Her eyes look bloodshot.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You must be so mad at me. But we’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We would never—”
“Nobody’s mad,” I say, then look over at Sam and Lila to see if they can explain the rest of what she was saying.
“They told us we could walk out of here,” Sam starts, then pauses, “if we volunteered to be tested.”
“Tested?” I want to kill Jones right then. Of course he’s got some stupid extra angle going.
“The hyperbathygammic test,” Lila says quietly. She looks tired.
I punch the concrete wall. It just hurts my hand.
