He was expressionless. No feeling. Empty.
I was still by the closed door, my back to it, and I didn’t know how to continue. Not when he looked at me like that. Hollow.
He jumped off the bed and went to the closet, where he pulled out a flattened cardboard box. He opened it up and started assembling it, taping the bottom so it’d hold things.
“So it’s true,” I said. “We’re actually moving?”
“No,” he said, his voice still calm, which was odd to me with his flurry of activity. He placed the box near the side of the table. “This isn’t going with us.”
“Then what’s…I mean…”
He moved to the other end of the table, opposite the box, and then lifted, tilting the table heavily and letting the paperwork, the files, the books, even a jar of pens slide hazardously in one swoop into the box, with some of the stuff falling to the floor.
There was enough noise at once that Marc opened the door behind me, taking a peek and asking with a look what was going on. I waved him off, and he closed the door again. At least I knew I had backup. Just in case.
When everything had slid down and the table was clear, he let it drop. It ended upright again on the floor, a bit cockeyed from where it had been.
With that, he breathed in slow and then let out a breath. “They let me go.”
“From the Academy?”
“From my job,” he said. He turned to me, his dark eyes meeting mine.
A wave of anger he wasn’t expressing in his tone filtered into me, making me angry. “You mean…the animal hospital thing? From…”
“Yes,” he said. He tilted his head. “Too high a risk. I’m exposed. I risk the people around it since it’s such a public venue. It doesn’t have the security. They can’t expect a place like that to carry the cost of higher security just for one person…” He rattled it off, although there was sarcasm in his tone by the end.
My hands were now clenched into fists. The Academy made him quit. Or got him fired.
Because of other people.
People who had kidnapped us. Now with the phone call from Alice, it was confirmation we were still on their radar.
It was just like Brandon giving up his garage. They were all having to let go of everything they’d worked for. Only, apparently Axel hadn’t been ready to let go just yet.
This wasn’t our fault. We didn’t kill people. We weren’t the bad guys. But we were suffering for it.
“What do they want us to do then?” I asked him. “Lay low? Not talk to anyone? Live in a bubble, camping in a tent in the woods?”
He approached me, his hand pointing sort of in the direction of Brandon’s apartment where they’d had their meeting. “They want us to be happy. And safe. And if we’re with them, helping them out.” He closed the distance between us until we were toe to toe and his nose hovered over mine. “They want me to take you away from here…,” he said, his voice dropping down to a shallow whisper.
The change in his tone surprised me. An odd sensation drifted through me as I sensed Marc at my back, probably listening through the door.
“Do you not want to leave?” I asked.
He backed up a couple of inches. His gaze went to the wall and then down to his feet. He put his hands on his hips. “I don’t like running.”
It was hard to argue with the Academy on why he needed to leave work, but I didn’t agree with the approach. “If we run, they may chase us.”
“We could get away from them,” he said, looking up at me.
“I know we could. Live in the woods. Cut off contact. Pretend we don’t exist.” I hissed at the last part. “Is that what they want us to do? Fly under the radar and hope we don’t get noticed?” I touched at the center of my chest. “I don’t like being told where I can and can’t go.”
“They aren’t telling us…”
“I’m not talking about the Academy,” I said. I don’t know how it happened, but I felt I was saying what Axel wanted to say. I knew what he was thinking and had the guts to say it out loud. “Sure, they want you protected. Maybe the Academy genuinely wants us safe. But right now, that means giving those bad guys exactly what they want anyway. What do they care if we’re dead or gone, as long as we’re out of the way? While all those bad guys we kept exposing, they’re going about doing whatever they want and hurting people. It gives them control. Not us.”
“If Alice and old Mr. Murdock find us—"
“If they are still chasing us, why not let them find us? Alice didn’t even know I was in that hospital. It didn’t sound like she was even looking for me. We know they might look now, but let’s just be on guard and watch and see who shows up. Then we’ll know. We can find out who still cares about killing us off or whatever and then get to them. Or even better, let’s do your secret spy things and find them.” I smirked. “Or are you not spies like I thought you were? Are we just a bunch of snitches who run at the first sign of trouble?”
He leaned over me again, this time with hands on the door on either side of my shoulders. He looked at me, the hollowness fading out, replaced with something else. Something brewing just under the surface. “Go away, Marc.”
“Got it.” There was shuffling behind the door and footsteps fading away.
With that, his hand slid down the door until he reached around me and locked it.
His nose touched mine. I closed my eyes as he was too close to look at.
The hand drifted from the handle of the door to my lower back.
“The Academy wants to turn us into ghosts, Kayli,” Axel whispered, his warm breath against the skin of my cheek, close to my lips. He tilted his head forward, until he was whispering in my ear. “Ghosts that can disappear and can’t be hurt. Because when those bad guys decide to come for us, it won’t be to kidnap. There won’t be a warning. They’ll kill us.”
“They tried before…”
“They’ll be smarter next time.” He pulled back, focusing on my face, looking into my eyes. “Because they thought they were dealing with normal people. Now we’ve shown we know the game. They won’t send a team with guns in an obvious drive by. It won’t be some punk in the street with a knife told to stab us. It’ll be discreet, and it’ll be permanent. They’ll bide their time for the right moment. They were willing to do it by poison last time. They tried to kill us while they still talked to us and promised to let us go if we just listened to them. They’ll lie while sticking a needle in your back, willing to walk away without telling us what they’d done. Next time, it might be the same. Subtle. We won’t even know it’s them.”
He was right. It almost took us too long to discover what they’d done to us. We were lucky the Academy even had doctors and a hospital at their disposal. One advanced enough that they could discover what was happening.
So maybe the Academy wasn’t wrong to be so cautious. “So you want to move? You want to turn into a ghost?”
His lips twitched but went back to the stoic expression he usually carried, nearly unreadable. “We’ve got time to think about it. From what you’ve said, Alice didn’t even seem to be thinking about you when she called. You were the afterthought.”
“Did you get Blake’s brother and his wife out of town?”
He frowned. “Let’s not talk about that.”
Something must have happened but apparently nothing bad enough if Axel was here and not with Blake. It wasn’t really like him to not tell me anything I asked about. “What do we do next?”
He turned away from me, putting a hand to his mouth, wiping at his lips. He paced a bit in front of me.
“If we ghost”—he slowed his pacing—“it’s not because I want to. And if we do, it’s completely over. We can’t work for the Academy. We would have to do what they say, stay underground. Wait until Alice and others have been arrested by authorities.”
I frowned. “But you don’t like running.”
His eyes widened. “I hate running.”
“So what do we do? What do you want?”
I didn’t want it to come from me. I wanted him to say it.
He quieted. From the way his eyes danced back and forth, from my eyes to my nose to my lips and back, he was thinking.
“We can’t tell the others,” he said.
He didn’t have to say more. He had a plan. I was with him. I crossed my fingers over my heart. “Hope to die.”
There was just the faintest glint of amusement in his otherwise stoic face. “Which means we’ve got a lot of planning, too.”
A loud thud shuddered the door at my back, making me jump into Axel in reaction. The thud was followed by voices, at first like harsh whispers, then getting louder.
Axel pulled me away from the door so he could open it. He blocked the doorway, so I had to stand on my toes to look over his shoulder at what was going on.
Raven had Marc in a vice grip against the doorframe. Marc struggled to get an arm free to wedge himself out of it.
Raven stopped saying whatever he had been saying to look at Axel.
Axel said nothing. It seemed like he was waiting for an explanation, but since he had his back to me, I couldn’t see his expression.
Raven released Marc, who immediately started rubbing at his throat and coughing. “Sorry,” Marc said through his coughs. “He wanted to listen. Was trying to stop him.”
“I’m in,” Raven said directly to Axel. His voice deep now. His expression was dark, almost frightening.
So much for not telling the others.
“I thought we didn’t listen in,” I said to Raven from behind Axel. Axel moved out of the way and opened the door further.
Raven smirked. “That’s just Academy meetings. Anything involving my wife, I’m involved in, too.” He redirected his gaze to Axel. “So I’m in. What do we do first?”
“Me, too,” Marc said, standing up straight, still rubbing at his neck. “I can’t believe you’d keep it from us.”
Axel’s face was that blank slate he always seemed to wear. “We’ll be going against what the Academy wants. Again.”