Eve Silver: Push

“You sure, Miki? I know Mom would love to see you.” That’s as close to begging as she’ll get.

I almost cave. Then I think of Jackson, trapped somewhere in the game, and I say, “Sorry. Call me after, ’kay? Maybe you’ll come over?”

She brightens a little. “’Kay.” Then she gives me a quick, one-armed hug. As she does, I catch sight of my backpack, rammed into the corner of the seat. I freeze.

Jackson’s backpack. It’s in the trunk. I have a place to start, the seeds of a plan.

As Carly heads for her front door, I expect Luka to start talking. When he doesn’t, I ask, “Do you know where he is?”

“No.” He looks at me, then back at the road, his knuckles white where he grips the wheel.

Disappointment and worry sit in my chest like an unchewed chunk of cold, greasy pizza.

“But he’s alive, Miki. I know that much.”

“Alive for how much longer? I keep thinking they have him. That they’re going to use him to make an army of shells. Like that girl in the cold room. The one he”—I break off, then force myself to finish—“killed.”

“Terminated,” Luka whispers, then says, louder, “No.” He shakes his head rapidly from side to side. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they have him. They don’t need to keep him alive to make shells. They just need his body, hooked up to machines. If they took him, they’d have—” He breaks off, swallows. “He wouldn’t still be alive.”

“You’re right.” I desperately want him to be right. “And since Carly remembers him, that means he is still alive . . . somewhere.”

“Exactly. So what are the chances that the Drau have him? Slim to none, right?”

I nod. The weight that’s been crushing my chest lifts a little, but I’m afraid to hope, afraid of the hard crash that’ll come if we’re wrong.

Luka touches my forearm, then puts his hand back on the wheel. “We don’t have much if we don’t have hope.”

I stare out the window, thinking about that, wondering if it’s true.

As soon as we’re out of sight of Carly’s house, I say, “Pull over,” determined to follow the one possible lead we do have.

“What are you doing?” Luka asks, following me when I get out and head for the trunk.

I drag out Jackson’s backpack and start going through the pockets. “Looking for clues.”

Luka sighs. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.

“I know the chances of finding anything are slim, but I have to try,” I say, pulling out an empty water bottle and a ten-dollar bill. I shove them back in and move to the next pocket.

“There won’t be anything, Miki. We can’t bring anything back with us when we respawn.”

“Got a better idea?” I glance at him.

His mouth compresses in a thin line. He shakes his head and mutters, “Knock yourself out.”

I pull out Jackson’s textbooks one by one, fanning the pages in case there’s something hidden in between, then stacking the books in a neat pile. “There might be something in here that helps us find him.”

Luka’s quiet for a minute. I think he’s going to offer up more objections. Instead, he moves closer, picks up a book from the top of the pile, and double-checks in case I missed anything.

I move to the smaller front pouch and find a paperback copy of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves. My copy. The one I lent him.

It’s the last thing in the bag.

“There’s nothing here.” I start to shift everything back into Jackson’s pack when Luka reaches over and taps his finger on the textbook at the top of the pile. “What?” I ask.

He stares at the book, his dark eyes unfocused.

“Luka?” I ask. “Something special about Jackson’s law text?”

“No, it’s just—” He shakes his head. “I swear I thought of something, but it’s gone.” He waves a hand. “Poof.”

“Don’t focus on it.” I push the rest of the books back into the pack, then shove it deeper into the trunk, wishing I could shove aside my disappointment with it. “Think about other stuff and it’ll come to you.”

“Yeah.”

“You were right,” I concede as he gets the Jeep moving. “That was a waste of time.”

“Now what?” Luka asks, sounding bleak.

Good question. One I can’t answer. But I have to find an answer. Jackson’s life may depend on us.

“We talk it out,” I say. “We list everything we know, every possibility. We look for a pattern, or something that doesn’t fit the pattern.”

“It’s gonna be a short list.”

“It’ll be an empty list if we don’t at least try. So what do we know?”

“That he didn’t respawn with the rest of us.”

“And that he’s alive,” I say, needing to affirm it as fact.

Luka cuts me a sidelong glance. “If we figure out why he didn’t come back with us, maybe we can figure out where he is.”

“Maybe because he wasn’t with us in the first place,” I say. “He was on a different team.”

“And if his team’s still fighting—”

“Then he’s still there.”

I’m allowed a millisecond of hope before Luka shakes his head. “Our team wouldn’t have respawned until the mission was complete.”

Which means that even if he was on a different team, Jackson should have come back with us once the mission was done. “What if he got pulled on another mission?”

“Without coming back at all?” Luka frowns. “I’ve never heard of anyone going directly from one to another.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.” Luka opens his mouth to answer, but before he can say anything, I contradict myself. “Yeah, it does. We always respawn at the exact second we left.”

“And the world moves on from that second,” Luka says. “Which means Jackson would have come back exactly when he left, at the pizza place, before getting pulled again.”

“Which means we still know absolutely nothing.” I slump in my seat, deflated.

“DAMN,” LUKA MUTTERS AS WE PULL INTO A DRIVEWAY. “I WAS gonna just leave the keys in the mailbox.”

No chance of that now. There’s a woman coming out of the garage. She’s tall and lean, her honey-brown hair falling loose to her shoulders. She stops and shades her eyes and then walks toward us.

“Jackson’s mom?”

Luka nods. “We need to come up with an explanation of where he is, stat.”

“So I guess that means we can’t ask if she has any idea where her son is.”

Luka snorts. “Like your dad knows where you are when you’re on a mission?”

“Time’s frozen when I’m on a mission, isn’t it? I doubt my dad has a clue I’m even gone.”

“Ditto for Jackson’s mom. It’s a waste of time to ask her.”

“At this point, I’m a grab-any-straw kind of girl.”

He shakes his head. “I know. But there’s no straw here to grab. And asking her anything is against the rules.”

The rules that we don’t talk about the game outside the game. Stupid rules that make no sense. Rules we’ve all broken, but only with each other, never with an outsider. I tip my head back, eyes closed. “You realize that we have big neon zero when it comes to leads. Not an auspicious beginning to our rescue operation.”

“Auspicious? Can you spell that?”

I glance over and punch him in the shoulder, trying to match his halfhearted attempt at humor.

Luka pushes open his door and climbs out. “Hi, Mrs. Tate.”

“Hey, Luka.”

I get out and linger by the passenger door, not sure if I should say hi or just fade into the background.

Jackson’s mom walks over. She’s close enough now that I can see her eyes—not Drau gray like Jackson’s but dark, dazzling green. I’ve seen that color in my nightmare—Jackson’s nightmare—the one he shared with me about his sister and the car accident that dragged him into the game.