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Siie It was the sa to convinceLike so off campus in the middle of the day wouldn’t land us in seriously deep shit with our parents, the principal, and coach

FoolSi seeer deal Especially since just yesterday he and Thom could hardly look each other in the eye Yet now they were sharing private looks andsilent pacts

They were one step away from secret handshakes

"A place called Blackwater Ranch," Si in the blank He nodded toward Thom "It’s where we met A lot of the Returned end up there at sonition flashed in Jett’s eyes, and he gave a slow nod "Yeah I heard’a that place" His face contorted as though straining to recall -or-other One of those guys who thinks the Returned should rise up against the man Give the No-Suchers a dose of their own hed at the notion

"What, like some kind of army?" I asked Sure, it sounded crazy, but as I to question their ways? As the last of us to be returned, I’d barely scratched the surface of all there was to learn about the caencies ere after us I still had about a million unanswered questions about hy this had even happened to us in the first place

"Sorta like that," Jett answered "From what I hear, they’re like Returned activists They have a reputation for being a tad on the zealot-y side, but stories tend to get exaggerated as they lanced froet a beat on their whole look-at-us-being-friends bit "Does all that sound about right?"

Si as clear as dishwater "I think they just want to be prepared if anything goes sideways, is all"

In typical Thoht-lipped on the matter

"So, where is this place? This activist camp?" I asked

"About fifty miles outside Zion National Park Basically, it’s smack in the raphy wasn’tsuit, but I knew Utah was nowhere near where ere It was ten hours away At least And that was if we stuck to the hways, which had already been ruled off-liet there with the NSA hounding us the entire way Double aweso ton even farther behind

You’d think after everything I’d been through, and the wayonmy mom and her new husband and their new son, especially since they’dto do withso far from them only madepeople

I had to ask, "How are we supposed to do this? Get therewithout being caught?"

Siue "The only e can One as station that ay off the highway It was also super, super sketchy

But just like ere on the road to the Daylight Division’s Tacoma facility from Silent Creek, we had to assume the sketchier the station, the less likely it was to have security cameras It also didn’t seeetting its mail by Pony Express, which we hoped meant the cashier hadn’t been alerted to be on the lookout for a carload of kids : our descriptions There was no ere getting all the way to Utah looking the e did

To avoid drawing attention, Jett went into the tiny store alone, and when he came back, he held out three boxes of hair color to Natty and Willow and e favor

"That’s it?" I asked, turning up my nose at the selection Our choices were jet-black, brown, and dark brown

"You’re lucky they had these It’s not exactly a Walmart in there" He passed Simon an old-school-style paperour course from here all the way to Utah GPS was out of the question, Siet a lock on us that way

Si, you only have about half an hour"

Willow grabbed a box without even looking Brown it was

I was relieved because the girl on Willow’s box had rerade Mandy Maxwell had sprouted a good seven inches, and three bra sizes, past the rest of us girls, all within aabout the coh-water jeans and her brand-new C-cups that had left Mandy foul-tempered So when I’d beaten her one toorecess, she’d decided I deserved to have gu to pick the sticky wad out, but in the end she’d had to resort to scissors, leavingafter the hair had grown back