Purple

Eight

Dedicated to hjoonng

They were parked in the middle of nowhere. Ruby stayed exactly where she was in the driver's seat, mostly because she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing. The other two kids had jumped out of the car after Liam and Luce. Zu was heading to the back of the van with Liam, Luce getting the map and heading to the front, and Chubs in the exact opposite direction.

She watched through the cracked windshield as he made his way toward a sign pointing them in the direction of Monongahela National Forest. After a minute, he pulled a paperback book out of his back pocket and sat down at the edge of the road. She didn't know if he was actually reading or just glaring at the text.

She stood up from the driver's seat and made her way to the back of the minivan. Her hands were still trembling. The black backpack that Rob and Cate gave her had been thrown into the backseat covered in few sheets of newspaper and an empty Windex bottle.

She picked up the few sheets and read them before she tossed them in disgust. She reached for her backpack again. She remembered Rob said there was a change of clothes inside, and she was sure damn glad to change out of her Thurmond uniform for new clothes.

The knock on the window startled her enough that she almost bit her tongue clean down. Liam's face appeared there, drawn in tense lines. "Can you bring me those clothes to me for a sec? I need to show you something."

She jumped out of the sliding door, taking the sight of the van. If it were possible, the van looked worse now than it did before. Her fingers came up to trace one of the fresh punctures on the side paneling where a bullet slammed through the thin metal.

Liam knelt beside Zu, who was holding on to the spare tire with everything she had, and went to work cranking the van up on the jack and off the demolished back right tire. Ruby came to stand behind them just in time to watch Liam wave his hand in front of the hubcap. The nuts twirled out on his command, collecting in a neat pile on the ground.

"Okay," he began. "Take out the shirt you were about to change into."

"I-I'm not changing out here," she said.

Luce snorted as she obviously heard her, causing Ruby to turn a bit red. "Really? You're worried about your modesty when we're going to have League agents on our tail in a matter of hours? Priorities, hun."

"Just take out the shirt," Liam repeated.

She watched him for a moment, but even she wasn't sure what she was looking for.

"Feel around the collar," he told her. He set another nut on the ground by his feet. "You'll feel a bump."

She did. It was small, no bigger than a pea, sewn into the otherwise nondescript shirt.

"Chubs has a little fancy lady kit under the front seat. If you're going to change into it, you need to cut the tracker out of that shirt. Anyway, you should probably change out of uniform. But be sure to check the pants and the sweater, too. I wouldn't put it past them to use more than one."