“How does this connect to me?” she asks. Her eyes shine, reflecting the changing landscape outside the window.
“This ring is assigned to you. You are the last surviving member of Prescott Adams’s family. The last of the original Vigilantes.”
She exhales long and slow. I realize I’ve gotten ahead of myself with my own plan. In the cemetery when I decided to escape all this, to live a simple life with Mia, I forgot something important.
To ask her whatshewants.
She presses her fist to her chest. “So I can be a Vigilante if I want to?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know why you were at the safe house. We don’t know what happened to your parents. I think you were being protected.”
“How do I find out?”
“A couple committee members would have private, personal knowledge of your history, as they would have voted on your designation as a special.”
I let her absorb all this. Her chest rises and falls with each deep inhalation.
“We’re about to rendezvous with Sam,” Colette says quietly. She understands the implications of what I’ve said as well.
“Is this why I could go around the silo wherever I wanted?” Mia asks.
“Probably.”
“Does that mean I can get into this big meeting coming up with Sutherland?”
I realize she has a very good point. “Quite possibly.”
She lets go of me and leans forward, holding on to the back of the front seat. “It sounds like I have the keys to the kingdom,” she says to Colette. “Give me some weapons and let’s cause some damage.”
Colette breaks out in a wide smile. “Sam’s already on it.”
16: Mia
A Vigilante.
Me.
I’m still trying to get used to the idea. I don’t like the oval ring on my thumb, so I start unraveling the hem of Jax’s discarded pajama pants until I have enough thread to wind through the ring and tighten up the hole.
“Just like they used to do in the 1950s with high school rings,” Jax says.
“Exactly,” I say. I slip the ring on my middle finger. It fits better now.
We drive through the traffic-heavy streets of D.C. Colette has to remove the visibility cloak, or we’ll get run over by roaring taxis. We can only hope the other methods to hide us will hold.
The city is thick with cars, and the air bustles with helicopters. Of all the places to meet, this one feels the most fraught. “There’s so much security,” I say to Jax. “How do we know who is friend or foe?”
“Assume they are all the enemy,” Jax says. He sorts through Colette’s Vigilante stash of weapons and passes me a dart gun. “You good with this?”
“Well, it’s not as hot as the blue one with bullets,” I say, teasing.
Jax’s gaze drops to my lap, as if he’s picturing the metal barrel sliding between my legs. “We’re going to have to do that again,” he says.
I curl my arm around his neck. “Mmmm-hmmm.”
“Okay, lovebirds, Sam at two o’clock,” Colette says. “Look lively to see if anyone spots him.”
“They’ll never get a heat signature in this snarl,” Jax says. He scans the perimeter of the car. “Give us a topside view,” he says.
