Pete leaned his head through the pickup window and shot Zoe a sly grin. “Ask her to share whatever it is she’s taking,” he said.
Zoe ignored him and returned to the table. She set the glass down. The girl had moved to the dessert menu that advertised the latest options, and she held it out so Zoe could see.
“Is this good?” the girl said, pointing at the new strawberry swirl milkshake. “Can I have it?”
“It’s pretty average for a milkshake, if you like strawberry,” Zoe said.
The girl glanced at the picture again, then beamed at Zoe. “Yes, I would like this.”
Zoe paused, placed a hand on the booth, and leaned forward. “Can you pay for that?”
The girl’s eyes shifted curiously, and she looked at Zoe as if she spoke a foreign language. Zoe tried to control her fading patience and slid into the booth across from the strung-out girl.
“Listen, no judgment—I don’t care what you do with your time—but you probably shouldn’t be here right now,” Zoe started.
The girl’s smile washed cold, and she shrank back into the booth. Terror regained control of her body. “Is it not safe here?” she asked, her voice low.
She locked eyes with Zoe, and Zoe could feel her desperation. Her bright blue eyes begged for help, the kind of help needed by a child seeking refuge. It struck something deep inside Zoe’s stomach that caused her to question the assumptions she had started making.
“Are you in trouble?” she asked.
The girl’s eyes flicked back and forth, then back to Zoe. “I have to be careful who I trust.”
The words resonated with Zoe. She herself lived by them. The girl’s tone was frail and honest. Her eyes weren’t red. Her hands were steady, her skin clear, her voice open. Nothing said “strung out” except for her strange lack of awareness. The kind you would expect from a child. An innocence shone in the corners of her eyes and asked to be sheltered.
“Can I call someone for you? Family, or a friend?” Zoe asked.
Hope sparkled in the girl’s eyes. “Yes. Summer Wallace.”
“Okay, do you know her number?”
The hope died out. “No.”
“Do you know her address? We can look her up—”
“She lives in Corpus Christi.”
“The city?”
Again, a wave of joy fell over the girl’s face. “You know it?”
“I know where it is,” Zoe said.
“Can you take me?” The girl leaned forward excitedly. “I have to get there as soon as possible.”
“You can’t go right now. It’s hundreds of miles from here.”
Like a switch being flipped back and forth, the girl’s expression changed again. From hope to fear. Wonder to despair. “It’s that far?”
“Do you not know where you are?” Zoe asked, suddenly much more worried than she’d been before. Something was clearly wrong with this girl. Maybe she shouldn’t have intervened. Yet something pulled at the strings of her heart, and she couldn’t make herself stand up and walk away.
The girl shook her head, her eyes misty and on the verge of tears, and Zoe longed to comfort her. She gave a warm smile, hoping to make the teen feel more secure. “You never told me your name.”
“Lucy,” the girl answered.
“Just Lucy?” Zoe asked.
“Just Lucy.”
“Cool, like Beyoncé.”
“What’s a Beyoncé?”
Zoe gave an awkward laugh, then realized once again she wasn’t kidding. Who was this girl?
“Hey, are you hungry?” she asked. “Let me get you something to eat. My treat.”
Lucy gave a sheepish shrug and then a tiny corner smile. “Okay.”
“Fries and a strawberry swirl milkshake coming up,” Zoe said.
Lucy’s smile grew, and Zoe felt a warmth that she hadn’t experienced in a long time circle inside her chest. The way Lucy smiled made her think about her little brother, the way he used to glance up at her when she shared her watermelon with him. But that memory was tinged with pain, and the warmth turned cold as she shut the memory back inside the box with the rest of her past.
“After you eat, we can talk more, and maybe I can help you,” Zoe said. “Would that be okay?”
Lucy drilled Zoe with an intense stare, and Zoe felt the penetration of it in her gut.
“Can I trust you?” Lucy asked. Like a child would, wanting to be saved but remembering not to trust strangers.
The question nearly took Zoe’s breath away. Maybe she should have felt warier of the peculiar teenager, should have been more reserved with her own trust, but all she could see was a fragile girl who needed protection from the cruelty of the world. The way Zoe and her little brother had needed protection. Protection they’d never received. How different her path would have been had someone come along and sheltered her from the diabolical nature of humanity. How could she now deny this girl that same protection?
She nodded. “Yes, you can trust me.”
Lucy pondered it a moment, then smiled brightly. “Okay,” was all she said, and Zoe knew Lucy would trust her completely.
Zoe smiled back, suddenly heavy with the burden of the young girl’s trust. She wanted to recant her statement. She wanted to admit she’d been carried away by her own sentiments, and that Lucy was right not to trust anyone. Even those who seemed honorable were capable of betrayal. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to kill the relief that had settled over the girl.
She left Lucy sitting in the booth. She would let her have a moment of peace, then she’d help the girl as best she could before sending her back out into the world, where it would do all it could to kill Lucy’s rare innocence. No one got away unscathed.
But for now, there could be fries and milkshakes.
THREE
TOM SEELEY ROLLED the hard peppermint across his molars with his tongue. The sharp flavor filled his mouth and slivered down his throat. The oral fixation was supposed to help him quit smoking, but he could still taste the tobacco at the back of his throat, permanently stained from years of consuming a pack of cigarettes daily. With each passing moment he craved the taste more.
He was alone, standing in the hallway outside the director’s office. He could overhear a muffled apology through the thick wooden door as Director Robert Hammon explained to the secretary of defense the events that had unfolded in the last dozen hours. Hours that had been tasked to Seeley. Orders directly from the president. Orders he’d failed to execute.
The voices stopped, and a moment later the door opened.
Hammon didn’t even bother to stick his head out. “Inside, now,” he barked. Seeley was going to need a lot more peppermint.
He entered the office and closed the door. The space was simple, undecorated, with large, dark leather furniture, a single mahogany desk, and zero windows. The walls were concrete, like most of the building and the ones that surrounded it. It had been an easy material to haul over the mountainous terrain when they’d built the black site labeled CX4-B.
The soldiers referred to the place as Xerox because it was a carbon copy of the ground-zero location outside of Washington State. Buried in the Ozark Mountains along the northwest border of Arkansas, Xerox was covered in thick forests that helped keep the site off the map and hidden from hikers.