Page 56 of All Her Ghosts

“I’m not asking you to leave.”

“It sounds like you’re asking me todie,” he snarls, hurting, and my heart seizes.

The idea of a world without him in it—my hand scrabbles across the table. His bent fork juts through our tangled fingers, ordinary and small and sad, meat and pancakes in the face of war.

My eyes sting. I want to laugh.

“This is stupid,” I choke, voice thick. I force myself to let go, shove my traitor hands under my arms. “This is so stupid. I don’t even know you! Ilostthe parts that knew you. I shouldn’t care like this.”

Bas cracks a sad little smile. “Who says?”

And I have protests for that. I have logic and common sense and an argument that sounds like my mother giving me a lecture about boysand losing my head—but the moment breaks on the sharp edge of a siren, droning from Bas’s pocket.

“Why doyouget to have a phone?”

Frowning, Bas reaches for it.

“It’s a burner. Nobody knows to track it,” he mutters, distracted, tracing a complicated password into the lock screen. The moment he finishes, his face falls. His shoulders go hard, hands tense.

“What is it?” I whisper. “Remnant warning?”

His eyes find mine across the table.

“It’s an Amber Alert,” he says. “They’re looking for you.”

Someone turns up the TV volume. Or else, suddenly, it’s the only thing I can hear, my own name in the announcer’s mouth. And there’s my picture on the screen, my own smiling face staring at me in accusation—temple to temple with Bas in the leaves.

I can’t breathe. My stomach drops out of my body entirely, leaving me empty and cold, waiting for the earth to swallow me and God, I swear I can feel it yawning.

“How do they have that picture?” I whisper. “That was on my phone. I put it in a secret folder.”

My mind flicks back to the night before, Mom calling me to dinner, my research crumbling in my hands.

This website has been blocked. Contact administrator.

“She hacked my phone,” I hiss between my teeth, furious. “She’sbeenhacking my phone. That’s why she never confiscated it. Because she had it cloned the whole time. She was using it tospyon me.”

My ears throb. Bas’s mouth moves. I pick the words from his lips—oh shit—but I can’t hear him. It takes all my attention just to focus on my own face, the emotionless newscaster breaking in and out like a bad connection.

“…a two-man team… believed to be acting as father and son… male, early forties, last known alias Cain Lokke… alias of the younger partner, pictured here beside the missing girl, is currently unknown.”

Unknown. Unknown because my mother never heard it. Because she broke into my phone, spying on me without permission, but I saved him in my contacts asBig Mouth, set his picture to a stupid singing fish.

“… believed to be headed south from the Pittsburgh area in a 1990 Ford Falcon RV but police advise all states highlighted on the map here to be on the lookout…”

South? We’re not heading south, we’re heading west, well away from that mess. But my brief shiver of relief shatters on the newscaster’s final line.

“Her mother urges anyone involved to come forward and says she will be praying for her daughter’s safe return.”

Betrayal boils into confusion, my anxious thoughts colliding in painful starbursts.Praying?Mom doesn’t pray. When Mom gets stressed, she doesscience. She has no faith in organized religion, trusts only what she can prove with research and strict methodology.

She wouldneversay she was praying.

My stomach twists, rotting on a gut-hook instinct. Something’s wrong. Something’sweird. I don’t understand. But we’re out of time. Bas shovels in the last of his meat mountain, scrubs his mouth of grease.

“We can’t stay here,” he says and starts to stand. I grab his sleeve before he can move any farther, forcing him back down into his seat. “Jenny—”

“Not together,” I insist. “Someone threw you and Cain to the wolves—and I’m not sure it was my mom. Everyone will be looking for teenagers in pairs, but they probably won’t notice us separately.”