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expression went all gooey as she said it. “We found infant formula in the storage center. Lily was right. The Farms were well equipped to care for babies.”
    Before I could ask any more questions, Dawn showed me into the office, giving me one last worried look as she shut the door behind her.
    Joe and Zeke were both waiting for me in what had once been the Dean’s office. Joe had always seemed like an old soul. Even though he was about my age, he’d always seemed wise. And I trusted him. That was important. I’d only known Zeke a handful of days, but we’d traveled across the country together to pull off a risky as hell coup at this Farm. So even though I didn’t know him well, I knew he was as determined as I was to stay in the fight. And that counted for a lot, too.
    Since neither was much for bullshit and we didn’t have time for that anyway, as soon as the greetings were out of the way, I launched right into sharing the bad news about Sebastian’s betrayal. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We’re up shit creek. This betrayal didn’t help, but—”
    Before I could continue, Zeke held out his hands. “Look, I know it sucks, but I didn’t know what else to do with him. Joe wanted to just leave him outside.”
    “Yeah,” Joe said belligerently. “After what he did—”
    “Wait.” Now I held out my hand. “What are you talking about?”
    For a second we all just stood there, staring at one another as it sank in that we were having two different conversations.
    “What are you talking about?” Joe asked. “Why are we up shit creek?”
    “Sebastian lied to us. Roberto didn’t have the cure. In fact, Roberto didn’t create the Tick virus. Sebastian did.”
    Zeke just sort of shrugged. He’d never met Sebastian, but Joe had known him, had fought side by side with him. He ducked his head, shaking it slowly. “Dude, I’m sorry. And Lily?”
    “She’s with—” I hesitated before mentioning her father. Yeah, my own dad was no prize, what with the general disinterest interrupted by the occasional beatings, but at least he’d never helped launch the apocalypse. If Jonathan Price was my dad, I wasn’t sure I’d want my friends knowing. So instead of mentioning him, I said, “The doctors at El Corazon induced a coma to slow the progression of the disease. Then the doctor took her and some of the other patients to one of the nearby Farms. It bought us some time to find a cure.”
    “But there is a cure?” Zeke asked, a note of awe in his voice.
    I nodded. It wasn’t that I wanted to lie to them, I just still wasn’t ready to consider any other possibility.
    “What were
you
talking about?” I asked.
    Zeke and Joe exchanged a look. Finally Zeke cleared his throat and admitted, “Ely showed up yesterday afternoon. Joe wanted to leave him outside the fence. I had him brought in and locked up.”
    For a second, I couldn’t even think. My vision tunneled as my blood pressure spiked. Ely was here?
    How the hell had that happened? Ely had kidnapped Lily. He’d tried to abandon baby Josie in the desert and turn Lily over to Roberto. Lily—being Lily—had fought back and had won. The last anyone had heard from him, he’d been left in the desert with a gun and a single bullet. So how the hell had he survived?
    But, of course, I knew the answer to that question. When it came to staying alive on his own, Ely was the best there was. Besides, he was too much of an asshole to die.
    “Where’s he being kept?”
    “Now wait a second,” Zeke said, palms out again, in a placating gesture.
    I turned to Joe. “Where is he being kept?”
    “In a copier room, just down the hall.”
    I didn’t need Zeke to tell me which room Ely was in. There was only one room with two guards standing outside of it. They were guys I didn’t know and had never seen before, but either they knew who I was or they were too scared to get in my way, because they stepped aside and let me pass.
    The mammoth copier sat silent in