Going Rogue (26 page)

I turned so I could look at him, resting my palms on either side of his face. “You are amazing.” I sighed. “Absolutely amazing.”

“Not all the time.” He shrugged. “But I have a few moments every now and then. So you like it?”

“I love it,” I said, tugging it over my head. “Why are you the best?”

“Because I learned it from you,” he replied, then wrinkled his nose. “We sound so stupid sometimes.
‘I learned it from you.’
Roux would puke if she heard us.”

I leaned in to kiss him. “Bring on the stupid.” I laughed, but Jesse stopped me, putting his finger to my lips.

“Shh,” he whispered, and I looked over his shoulder. “Roux’s busy, I guess.”

Roux and Ames were in the dark bedroom, illuminated by only moonlight as they shared a kiss. Ames held her so tenderly, his hands on her hips as if he knew how fragile she could be, and Roux stood on her tiptoes to reach his mouth. It was so intimate that I wanted to look away, but my heart swelled to see Roux happy.

“Told you he was a good guy,” Jesse murmured in my ear. “Not even getting handsy with her.”

I kissed his shoulder and we snuggled together, waiting for Roux and Ames to leave before climbing back inside.

The next morning, Angelo woke me just as the sun was rising.

“Whuzzat?” I said, sitting up. “Is everything okay?” Jesse was asleep next to me, one arm slung over his head and his face mashed into the pillow. (My boyfriend was many things, but he was not an elegant sleeper.)

“I’m so sorry to wake you, darling,” Angelo whispered. “It’s early, I know. And everything’s fine. I just need the coins from you. I have to leave this morning for a few hours, and I don’t want you to have the coins in case something goes wrong. It’s too risky for you.”

I reached under my pillow and pulled out the pouch. I had carried them everywhere with me, even the bathroom, for the very reason Angelo mentioned. I didn’t want anyone else to hold them and have to assume that responsibility.

“Travel safe,” I said, then collapsed back into my pillow and fell asleep before I could even hear the door click shut behind him.

A few hours later, we were all awake and gathered
around the kitchen table. “We need an emergency meeting place,” Ryo said. He wore a different pair of frames every day. Today’s were a dark jade green and they glinted in the late morning light. “But where?”

We thought for a minute. The problem with Paris wasn’t that there weren’t enough options, but that there were too many. Every third doorway had probably once housed someone famous. Or, as Roux kept putting it, “Marie Antoinette probably died there.”

Now, though, she was deep in thought, her fingers drumming on the table in front of her. She and Angelo had re-created their long-standing chess game the night before, and now her eyes were glazing over as she stared at it.

And then she leaped up.

“I get it!” she cried.

“Jesus, babes,” Ames said, clutching at his chest. “Warn a lad, will you?”

“Get used to that,” Jesse told him. “Roux doesn’t exactly keep her feelings to herself.”

“Shut up, Jesse. I still have your Transformer, by the way. Anyway—”

“You do?” Jesse cried.

“ANYWAY,” Roux continued, ignoring him. “Angelo’s always saying this thing to me whenever we play chess: A knight on the rim is grim. And usually I’m all ‘Angelo, what are you smoking?’ but I get it now!” She looked absolutely delighted with herself.

The rest of us stared at her. “Well?” Élodie finally asked. “Are you going to tell the rest of us?”

“Look,” Roux said, then picked up her knight. “Don’t tell Angelo I’m doing this or he’ll try to forfeit the whole game. So here’s the knight, and he can only move in a certain way. Either one square, then two, or vice versa, right?”

We all nodded.

“Okay, so when he’s in the corner of the board, he can only move in two directions.” Roux demonstrated with Angelo’s beautifully carved knight piece. “So that’s bad. And then if he’s on the edge of the board”—she slid him halfway down the board—“he can only move in four directions, which is better but not great. But if he’s in the center, then he can move eight different ways. Eight different escape routes, so to speak.”

Roux moved the knight to the center and set him down. “If you stay on the edge where it seems safe, you’re more easily captured. But if you’re in the middle of everything, even though it seems less safe, you have the most options. God, that was driving me insane!”

I just looked at her in astonishment. “Remember when you used to just call the knight ‘the horsey guy’?” I asked.

“There’s no shame in having a steeper learning curve than others,” Roux said primly. “So wherever we meet needs to be open, in public, something like that. There’s going to be seven of us; we need ways for all of us to flee without getting, you know, captured.” She made air quotes around the last word, then dramatically dragged her finger across her throat to illustrate her real meaning.

Ames looked at her adoringly while the rest of us winced.

“Thank you for that, um, delightful interpretation of our fates,” I said. “But good work, Roux.”

“I aim to please,” she replied. “But now we just have to figure out where.”

We had Élodie’s iPad on the table in front of us, a picture of the double-eagle gold coin blown up on the screen. It looked better in person, but the picture was still accurate, and I locked eyes with Victory once again. It felt like years since I had stood under her protection at Grand Army Plaza, but in reality, it had only been three days ago. Her engraved arms were spread out like wings and—

“Oh my God!” I cried, and Roux screamed and clutched at her chest.

“Sorry, sorry,” I told her. “Actually, no, I’m not. That was payback for earlier.”

“Fair enough,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I was just thinking too hard. I think. What’s wrong?”

“I know where we can meet!” I cried. “This coin was designed by Saint-Gaudens, right?”

Five blank faces looked back at me.

“Okay, just trust me, it was. He also designed the statue of General Sherman at Grand Army Plaza in New York—”

“Manhattan or Brooklyn?” Roux asked.

“Manhattan.”

She nodded in approval. “Go on.”

“That statue has the same figure on it, the figure of Liberty just like on the coin. But his original inspiration was in the Louvre.” I grabbed Élodie’s iPad and typed in a few key words, then flipped the screen around. “It was this.”

I had pulled up the Winged Victory of Samothrace on the screen, one of the major exhibits at the Louvre. It sat at the base of a stairway, its huge marbled wings spreading throughout the atrium. Her head was missing, but you barely noticed that fact against the sheer size of the statue.

“We tell Dominic that if he wants these coins, he’ll know where to meet us.”

Ryo looked doubtful. “You really think it’s a good idea to toy with him like that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t care. He tried to kill me and my family. You know he’s done his research on these coins. If I know that little fun fact, so does he. I guarantee it.”

Roux wrinkled her nose, then nodded. “I like that it has Victory in its name,” she said. “That’s a good sign, right?”

“A good sign for
someone
,” Ames said. “Hopefully it’s us.”

Everyone was on edge the next morning. Roux sat at the kitchen, picking all the chocolate pieces out of her
pain au chocolat
, while Ames stirred his coffee again and again until it resembled more of a dirty whirlpool than a beverage.

Élodie and Ryo were packing up their things, getting ready to move out. “Where are you going?” I asked them. It was clear we couldn’t come back to the apartment, even if our plan went according to, well, plan.

“Sydney, maybe?” Élodie shrugged. “Ryo hasn’t been home in quite a while. Or perhaps London. Or maybe even—”

“Élodie, love.” Angelo poked his head out of the office, where he had been working all morning. “May I speak with you for a moment?”

Ryo picked up the conversation after she left. “Élodie hates Australia,” he said with a laugh. “I doubt we’re going there. Maybe we’ll just stay in Paris.”

“So jealous.” Roux sighed at the table. “I want to stay here, too.”

Ames hid a smile. “Careful what you wish for, darlin’,” he said.

“Seriously,” I added, remembering when I told Angelo that I just wanted something to happen, right before too many things started to happen. “Let’s just make it through the day, okay? Then we’ll discuss jetting off to nowhere.”

“Not to be negative,” Jesse began.

“Oh, here we go,” Roux muttered. “Mr. Positive.”

“But do we have a plan if things go wrong?”

Ryo and I looked at each other. “It’s not going to go wrong,” we both said at the same time, even though I wondered if he fully believed that statement. I knew I didn’t. I had been through enough over the past week to know that things could definitely go wrong.

I also knew that even if things went wrong, they could still work out.

“All we have to do is stick to the plan,” I told Jesse, sitting down in his lap. He reached up to play with the necklace he had given me, the tiny knifepoint sharp against the pad of his thumb.

“This looks really nice on you,” he murmured. “Very cool.”

“This one guy gave it to me,” I said. “I might keep him around for a while. Use him for his body, you know.”

Roux pretended to make barfing sounds next to us.

“He sounds like a keeper,” Jesse agreed, winding his arms around my waist. “Probably good with the alphabet, too. He could put
U
and
I
together.”

There was a pause, and then—

“That was terrible!” Roux cried as I started to laugh.

“So terrible, Jess, oh my God! Pass me some crackers for that
cheeseball
!”

“Really awful, mate.” Ames sighed, even though he was chuckling. “Mine aren’t even as bad as that.”

Jesse just smiled and kissed the secret spot on my neck. “Tension diffused,” he whispered against my skin, and I hugged him.

“Yeah, I think I’ll keep him for a while,” I murmured.

A few minutes later, I went to get a sweater (the Paris apartment was beautiful and drafty) and heard Élodie and Angelo talking. The office door had popped open just a crack and I stopped, even though I knew I shouldn’t eavesdrop.

But hey, I’m a spy. Eavesdropping is pretty much the first item in the job description.

Élodie and Angelo were whispering together in front of a huge computer screen, clicking through passport photos one by one. I saw Markus, Mathieu, Zelda, my parents, Ryo and Élodie and Ames. Then Angelo clicked something again and the screen filled with dozens more photos, all of them people I didn’t recognize.

“Not for your eyes, my love,” Angelo said suddenly, then turned around and smiled.

“But—”

“And shut the door behind you, please.”

I did as I was told, but all I could think about were my parents’ pictures, and why Roux and Jesse hadn’t been included at all.

***

A few minutes before three, the cars arrived for us. All the tension that Jesse had managed to crack was back now, plus more. I couldn’t see the drivers’ faces as we piled in, and I wondered if Mathieu was one of them. The windows were all tinted, though, and I noticed Angelo breathe a tiny sigh of relief once the cars pulled away from the curb.

“Bulletproof?” I asked, pointing to the window, and he nodded.

“Of course. We’re currently in the safest place in Paris,” he replied, then glanced out at the street. Ames, Élodie, and Ryo were in the car behind us, gliding as smoothly as we were, and Roux kept looking over her shoulder, keeping an eye on Ames.

“He’s fine,” I whispered to her, taking her hand. “Ames could probably survive a nuclear fallout.”

“Oddly not comforting, but thank you, Maggie.”

I patted her hand in response.

Behind closed doors, I had argued with Angelo about using Jesse and Roux as part of the plan. “We can’t involve them anymore!” I protested, my voice low enough so that they wouldn’t hear me. “They’ve done more than enough! They’re just civilians!”

“They’re not civilians anymore,” Angelo replied, which stopped me in my tracks. “Dominic knows who they are. The Collective knows who they are and, more importantly, what they know about us. Do you honestly think they’re safer alone than without our protection today?”

I paused, thinking about his words and realizing he
was right. “I hate that I brought them into this,” I said. “I really do.”

“Sometimes, my love, we don’t get to choose our team,” Angelo said. “And Roux and Jesse are becoming seasoned professionals at this point. Jesse, especially, would do anything to protect you.”

“That’s the problem,” I admitted. “I don’t want him to do anything.”

“Like I said, love,” Angelo repeated, then bent down to kiss the top of my head, “sometimes we don’t get to choose.”

Now that we were in the car, I could see his point.

Still, I didn’t feel any better.

We had arranged to meet at the Louvre at three, mostly to avoid the first rush of morning tourists and the last rush of evening crowds. It was still packed, of course, with the end-of-summer tourists crowding through the doors and into the halls, and most were Americans.

The six of us all had badges that designated us as a tour group from a local school. Angelo had a docent badge, which let him lead us past the heavy lines at security and into the museum.

Ryo just shook his head after we made our way inside. “Do you see?” he whispered to me. “Security is so lax. They didn’t even check the badge.”

On my other side, Roux had more pressing concerns. “If anyone asks,” she whispered to me as she and Ames walked hand in hand, “I’m French.”

“Got it,” I whispered back. “I’m not sure anyone will be asking, but I got it.”

Their voices rang up to the high ceilings and through the corridors, and my heart started to race. This wasn’t my area of expertise. I needed something to open, to crack, to unlock, in order to feel better. All I had instead, though, were five friends and ten gold coins in my pocket.