Going Rogue (17 page)

“My parents!” I cried. “They’re coming, too, right?”

“They’re going out another way,” Angelo assured me.

“And you? Where are you going?”

“Go, Margaret! Just stop talking and
go
!”

I grasped the wrought iron and started to climb. My knees were shaking and it was hard to stay steady, but I followed Roux and Jesse. Angelo stayed in the window, watching us go down the ladder, one of his hands concealed in his coat. Roux had always thought he was an assassin, even though I had insisted for the past year that he was only a
forger. But I knew that Angelo would always watch out for us, ready to do whatever he had to to keep us safe.

He had promised me that.

Roux hit the ground first, landing on her feet with a soft, “Oh, ow.” Jesse followed behind her, not having to drop as far because of his height, then the two of them scrambled into the car. It was a dark town car, much like the one that had driven me around last fall when I was investigating Jesse’s father. I flew in after them and slammed the door behind me as the driver screeched out of the alley, gutter water splashing out behind us as he veered around a trash bin and careened into the Soho streets.

The three of us were silent for a minute, Roux glancing behind us to see if anyone was following, but the alley was empty. “Where are you going?” I asked the driver. I knew where he was supposed to go, of course. I just wanted to hear him say it.

“Platform Sixty-one,” he replied, turning to glance at me, and I realized with a jolt that it was the same man that I had seen following me the other day in the West Village.

“Don’t worry, Maggie,” he said, and I detected a bit of an accent. Maybe Russian, maybe Slavic. “We know what we’re doing.”

“Wait, what’s Platform Sixty-one?” Jesse asked, Roux wide-eyed and shaking next to him. “Where are we going? We have to go home, we have to warn our parents, Maggie!”

“Your families are already under our protection,” the driver called over his shoulder, blazing through a yellow light. “Do not worry about them.”

“I don’t even know where my parents
are
!” Roux yelled up at him.

“They are in Berlin,” he said calmly, and Roux sat back in her seat, momentarily stunned by the fact that a stranger knew where in the world her parents were while she had no idea.

Jesse twisted in his seat to look at me. Roux stayed silent, watching the streets fly past us and gripping her left hand with her right. “
Who
’s protecting them?” Jesse demanded. “Who, Maggie? The same organization that just tried to
kill
us?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was in shock, my mind still spinning and a little fuzzy from the gas. “I-I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s the new us,” the driver muttered, hanging a left and going around the corner so fast that he almost took out an older woman pulling a grocery cart behind her. Roux whispered something under her breath and closed her eyes.

“The new us?” Jesse yelled, leaning over the seat.

“Worked for them, twenty years almost. Then they say I stole evidence.”

My ears started to fill with an odd, humming sound.

“Did you?” Roux asked.

“Of course not!” he cried. “They want me to turn on friends, I said no. Then they said that paperwork is missing. And then my Social Security number went missing. None of my passports work.” His glare seemed to fill the entire rearview mirror as he looked at me. “How much do you know?”

Jesse swiveled in my direction. “Did you know about this?”

“Of course I didn’t know about this!” I shot back. “All I know is where we’re going now and that I don’t trust anyone unless Angelo says so. And he told me to trust him”—I jerked my thumb toward the driver—“so we’re trusting him.”

“Close enough,” the driver said, then flew over a pothole and sent all of us into the air. “And do not worry about your parents,” he added, ignoring Roux’s tiny yelp. “They are under watch.
We
are watching them, not the Collective.”

Roux opened her eyes and looked at me. “The Collective’s not watching them?” she repeated. “Is that who he was talking about just now?”

“They’re corrupt,” I told her, avoiding making eye contact with Jesse and admitting that his suspicions had been right all along.

The driver muttered something under his breath, and although I didn’t speak the language, I could tell that it wasn’t exactly a polite comment.

“Corrupt?” Roux repeated.

“Yes,” I told her. Something sliced through me as soon as I said it, the entire foundation of my life splitting apart. The Collective, which had taken care of me every single day of my life, was no longer to be trusted. Angelo had been trying to prepare me all along for that realization. The strongest force in my life was irreparably broken and neither Angelo nor my parents could fix it.

I saw the orange light reflected off Jesse’s face before I heard the sound, a muffled sort of boom that made all
three of us turn around to look out the back window. A huge ball of smoke slowly rose into the air, its wispy underside reflecting the explosion, and it felt like a smaller, more potent explosion happened in my heart at the same time, running through me like the flames that now rose in the sky.

“That’s … that’s my
home
,” I managed to say.

“Not anymore,” the driver replied.

“Are you seriously that much of a dick!” Roux yelled at him as she put her arm around my shoulder. “I’m sure they’re fine, Mags,” she said, voicing the terrible words that were currently stuck in my throat.

The driver held up his phone. “They
are
fine,” he said. “Angelo has sent the text. They got out.”

But I couldn’t turn around from the window to verify what he said. Jesse had his hand in mine, the warmth between our palms spreading like fire, and I thought about our kitchen table, my mom’s laptop, my bed, my clothes, my life, now turning into ash.

There was something dangerous settling in my chest, making it difficult to breathe, and I shook Jesse’s hand and Roux’s arm off me, not wanting comfort. If they comforted me, I would break down, and I had two people to protect now. There was no time to fall apart.

Jesse just nodded at me when I let go of his hand, and I wondered how much my face gave away. “Hey,” I said, leaning forward to talk to the driver. “Can you go faster?”

He smiled and hit the gas.

By the time we pulled up to Park Avenue and East Fiftieth Street, Roux was pale but no longer shaking and Jesse seemed to have calmed down after his outburst. They were being brave, too, I realized, and I wondered how much of it was shock and how much was actual bravery. Not that it mattered, though. Whatever would get us through the next few hours was fine by me.

The car screeched up to the curb and Roux reached down to unlatch her seatbelt. “I’m never complaining about a cab driver again,” she said, letting out a shaky exhale, then peered up at the building next to us. “We drove like that just to come to the Waldorf Astoria?”

I reached across her and opened up the car door. “We’re going
underneath
the Waldorf Astoria,” I told her. “C’mon.”

The driver—Markus, I later found out—stood next to the door as we climbed out, one hand concealed under his coat and his eyes looking not at us but at everyone milling
around the streets. Jesse started to climb out of the car, then saw Markus and stopped. “Maybe we should wait here?” he said, but I shook my head and gently shoved him out the door.

“I’m not letting either of you out of my sight,” I told him. “And I think you’ll want to see this.”

Markus shut the door behind me once I climbed out, then led us over to two huge silver doors on Fiftieth Street. “What is this, the kitchen entrance?” Roux asked, craning her neck to look up at the building.

Markus and I glanced at each other.

“It’s part of Grand Central Station,” I told her, digging around in my bag for my tools. “How hard are these locks, Markus?”

“Wait, Grand Central is that way,” Roux said, pointing down the street. “This is a hotel. This is not a train station.”

“And there’s only sixty platforms there, not sixty-one,” Jesse added.

I paused. “Why do you two know so much about Grand Central?”

Roux ignored my question. “What are we doing here, Maggie?”

I sighed as I looked back at her and Jesse, both of them very apprehensive and very scared. It was hard to blame them when I felt the exact same way.

“This is our secret hiding place,” I told them, then winced. “Wow, that sounds so lame. This is where we keep documents.”

“Documents,” Jesse repeated, like he was having trouble understanding the word.

“Clock’s ticking,” Markus muttered under his breath. He was right, we could discuss this later.

“Just trust me,” I told them. “Okay? Please?”

“Okay,” Roux said, and Jesse nodded at me. I could see in their eyes that I hadn’t lost them, that they weren’t going anywhere without me.

“Tick tock, tick tock!” Markus yelled.

“All right!” I cried, then took a deep breath. “Everybody look cool for the next thirty seconds.”

It only took me twenty seconds to jimmy the lock open, though, which felt even better than it normally did. It was the one thing I really knew how to do well, and in a night of absolute chaos and terror, it was a small comfort to break into something.

Even if that something happened to be Grand Central Station.

“C’mon,” I said, opening the door. There was a set of stairs, the light so faint that it took me the entire flight for my eyes to adjust to the dimness.

“Where the hell are we?” Jesse asked.

“It’s a secret platform,” I said, feeling my way along the wall as we rounded a corner. I hadn’t been down here in nearly five years, back when Angelo first brought me and explained the importance of the location, but I hadn’t forgotten it. You don’t forget something like that. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt had used it when he came to New York City so he could hide the fact that he had polio.” I
pointed across the musty tracks to an old train car. “That was his.”

Both Jesse and Roux looked amazed and I took advantage of the situation. “That’s the elevator he used,” I told them. “It goes all the way up into the Waldorf Astoria. He didn’t want anyone to know that he needed to use a wheelchair, so they created this for him instead.”

“Politics.” Markus shrugged.

Roux silently fist-bumped him.

“Can you help me?” I asked Jesse, and he followed me across the tracks to the other side of the train while Roux and Markus waited at the edge of the platform. There were tiny scurrying sounds all around us, the rats no doubt uprooted by our arrival and all the construction, and I watched my step as we walked, not especially eager to step on something with rabies and a short temper.

The second we were on the other side of the train, I turned and grabbed Jesse’s hands. “You’re okay?” I asked. “I mean, I know you got cut, but you’re not
hurt
hurt, right?”

“I-I’m fine,” he stammered. “I mean, not fine fine, but yeah. No major damage. You okay?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to talk. That syrupy burning feeling in my stomach was still there, but there was no way I could give in to it now. It would consume me if I wasn’t careful.

“Mags?” Jesse’s voice was softer now and he carefully put his hands on my shoulders. “You sure?”

I shook my head, then took a deep breath and covered
his hands with mine. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” I said. “It was such a stupid fight, I was stressed and tired and I’m sorry for putting you in danger and—”

Jesse cut me off with a kiss. His mouth was warm and familiar, and I felt myself start to give in to the terror that was racing through me. It would be so easy to stay here, hidden from everything I didn’t know and couldn’t yet understand, hiding with him and Roux and—

“TICKTOCK, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!”

“Oh, leave them alone,” I heard Roux say. “We almost got
killed
tonight. At least let them make out for a minute.”

I pulled away from Jesse and took a deep breath as he did the same. “Not now,” I whispered. “I just wanted you to know that I was sorry. I didn’t know this would happen.”

“It’s okay,” he whispered back. “I’m glad we’re together, all right? It’s you and me now. And Roux, too. You’re going to figure this out and we’re going to help you. That’s what we do, right?” He tried to smile, but it was clear that neither of us was in a smiling mood.

Still, it was both the best and the worst thing he could have said, and I bit my lip and nodded. “Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s find those documents.”

Jesse nodded, then kissed me again before taking my hand and helping me up into the train.

It was so dark and dusty that I sneezed three times (“Bless you!” I heard Roux call) before my hand closed on a manila folder, grimy from construction dust and underground soot. It was thick, thicker than I thought it would
be. I grabbed the folder and took Jesse’s hand so he could help me off the train. A passport fell out and he stooped to pick it up.

“Oh,” he said, his voice a little strangled. “Oh, this is … wow. Okay.”

“What?” I asked, and he held out the passport to me.

It had his picture, the same one that was on his school ID, but it had been Photoshopped to look like a standard passport photo. “Andrew Meyers” it read, along with a fake birth date and “New York, New York” as his place of birth.

I should have known. Angelo said that he wouldn’t let anything happen to me, Jesse, or Roux. This was his rainy day stash. “Welcome to the world of international espionage,” I told Jesse, then handed it back to him.

“Did Angelo do this?” he asked, shoving the passport in his back pocket.

“Yes, so don’t worry, it’s the best.” I took mine, glancing briefly at the name—Katherine Randall—then handed Jesse his matching birth certificate.

“What’d we find?” Roux asked, gingerly walking over the train tracks to our side. “Markus is super pushy,” she muttered under her breath once she was close enough. “He’s making me want a cigarette. This whole
night
is making me want a cigarette.”