But the thought only filled me with rage.
I felt the heat of it clawing under my skin like a charge desperate to find a circuit to complete, to renew itself.
They didn’t tell me.
Two weeks. Two goddamn weeks they’d been gone, and Chubs couldn’t find a second to mention it to me? Lisa told me they’d made contact with him immediately to let him know. He could have gotten word to me somehow, in person or through Vida. He didn’t think it would matter to me that two people we love were just—just gone, and that they’d left Haven, the most important thing in their world, behind?
I knew I was shaking. Crossing my arms over my chest did nothing but trap the furious heat in, wrapping me in it.
“—see that it’s grown quite a bit since you were last here. We have about twenty kids now. The youngest is nine. Suzume?”
Finally, I looked up from the trail.
At one point in its life, Haven might have been someone’s summer home. A secluded house on a lake, with all the privacy anyone could ask for.
Liam and his stepfather had done considerable work expanding out what had been a simple two-story wood house. The dark, woodsy colors, all deep greens and browns, were meant to help the property blend into its surroundings. Despite the sharp angles of its roof, the first—and last—time I’d seen Haven, I’d had the wild thought that maybe the house had grown up out of the forest, rising up from dirt the same as any of the surrounding trees.
As we approached, the familiar rope lines peeked out through the trees, but…wait. We were still far away from the house, and the last time I’d been here, the ropes hadn’t extended this far into the woods.
I tilted my head back, following the line that passed over our heads to where it was knotted to a tree on our right.
It was a live oak, massive in stature. A silver ladder leaned against its side, a bucket of hammers and nails hooked on it. Nestled between the sturdiest of the branches was the beginning of a wooden platform.
“It’ll be Tree House Ten whenever Liam…well, when one of us gets to finishing it,” Lisa said. “There are nine completed ones on the grounds. After some of the kids took to the first one Lee built, he and Ruby decided to create more to give others their own private spaces. Then it just sort of got out of hand, because Liam doesn’t like the word no, and here we are with more tree houses than actual houses.”
“They’re great,” I somehow managed to choke out.
“The kids usually sleep up there, too, unless the weather gets too hot or too cold and forces them to come into the house,” Jacob added.
The sudden guilt that flooded through me was so overwhelming, I couldn’t speak. The missing years had never felt more pronounced than they did standing there. Each tree house was like a cut that carved down to the bone. My body tensed with the urge to turn and run, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them.
This is what you missed.
Why didn’t I come back?
Look at what they did without you.
Why didn’t I just find a way to call?
You don’t belong here.
It was the last thought that made me reach up to my throat, trying to rub away the thickness.
“I know you don’t agree with Haven…” Jacob began, misreading my look.
I held up my hands, cutting him off. “It’s not that. It was never that.”
“Then what was it?” Lisa asked.
“Lisa—” Jacob interrupted.
“No, I want to know,” she said, turning to more fully face me. “You never came back, but they never stopped hoping that you would.”
The accusation in her words, a realization of the truth I’d managed to sweep away for a time, brought me up short.
I’d hurt them. I’d hurt the two people who Lisa and Jacob and all the kids here loved. Even old wounds could reopen with the right amount of pressure.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to slam my fist into the nearest tree and let the years of silence between us pour out of me like blood.
Instead, I took a breath. I clasped my hands behind my back. I spoke in that careful, cool voice Mel had coached me on adopting. And that numbing self-control became my armor.
“I wanted to work to make sure we didn’t need places like Haven,” I told her. “This was their way of helping. I have mine.”
Or, at least, I did.
Haven wasn’t sanctioned by the government. It, and other places like it, would never be, because they brought kids outside the protection and monitoring the government provided. These places returned the Psi to the dangerous way we’d been forced to live before.
I’d never doubted that the kids at Haven had escaped from truly terrible situations. Abuse and neglect that came after being returned to their families, runaways who’d refused to go back at all, who’d been made to use their Psi abilities against their will…
I understood. I’d only struggled to understand why they hadn’t been brought to us to find better living situations. Existing in the shadow of society was an invisible, fragile existence.
Lisa and Jacob exchanged a look. He gave a shake of his head, and the girl’s shoulders slumped.
“Sorry,” she started. “I just—”
“I get it,” I told her. “I do. Let’s just…figure out what’s going on. I need to find a charger for that phone, and I need to hear everything you know about what’s happening with—”
Lisa put a finger to her lips, looking up at the curious faces peering down at us from the houses.
They don’t know, I realized.
“They’re on a long pickup trip,” Jacob said meaningfully. “They’ll be back soon.”
They were lying to the others—lying by omission, but still lying. It had to be to protect the younger kids, but I would have thought, given the circumstances that brought them here, they would have been given the respect of being kept informed.
“Come on,” Jacob said. “Miguel is waiting for us in the Batcave. I’
m sure he’s already got some theories about your new friends.”
As we made our way to the house’s wraparound porch, the kid in Tree House Four sent a message can—an old coffee tin that had been weighted at the bottom—across a rope line to Tree House One. It zipped over our heads with a whispering sound. All the houses seemed to be connected to one another, and to the window that marked the attic of Haven. Where Liam and Ruby slept.
“Everything good?” Another teen, also dressed in black, jogged up from the back of the house. Her long braid swung out behind her, and she seemed winded.
“Yeah, it’s under control,” Jacob said, handing his gun over to the girl. “Jen, this is Zu; Zu, this is Jen.”
“Hi,” the girl said. “You made tonight pretty damn interesting. Should I go help the others?”
“They have it handled,” Jacob said. Then he added sheepishly, “Could you do me one favor and put this away in the lockers upstairs? We have to go debrief Miguel.”
“Sure,” she said, taking his weapon. “If you don’t need me, I’ll put mine away, too.”
Jacob ran up the steps of the porch, opening the door with a dramatic sweep of the arm he’d clearly picked up from Liam at some point. Jen went ahead of us, disappearing as she headed down the entry hall. I steeled my nerves and stepped through the doorway into the cool, cedar-scented air, almost forgetting to wipe my feet on the worn welcome mat.
That awkwardness I’d felt outside was nothing compared to what swept through me now; it was almost physically painful. What little familiarity I’d had with the place evaporated in an instant. I was vaguely aware of Lisa explaining the setup of the house as she walked in behind me, but most of my attention was on the hallway itself.
While the outside of the house had been designed to camouflage itself in nature, the inside threw colors and patterns at you from every direction. The rugs were a trail of dizzying yellow and blue; wildflowers burst from a crooked vase. A strand of colored lights wound up the banister of the front stairs.
But my eyes kept drifting to the walls. On our brief tour, years before, Ruby had explained that it was too dangerous to keep photos of the Psi who stayed with them, whether the kids were there for a few months or years. They had been thinking about encouraging them to leave a piece of artwork—so that the house, and all of its inhabitants, would never forget them.