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for your stupidity.”
    “But—”
    “I can fight a dozen Ticks when I’m well fed and healthy. And you, my dear, are no me.”
    “Okay,” I snap, because I know he’s right. “What do you want to do? Just stand here and wait for them to come eat us for dessert?”
    Sebastian looks around. All I see are more Ticks. Yeah. We’re definitely in trouble here.
    Our only clear way out of the square is to go back toward Roberto’s house.
    “Retreat?” I ask.
    “Ladies first.”
    I wedge my shoulder under his arm and pull him against me. “Come on, Chuy,” I mutter, and the dog leaps to my side. Together, we turn and run.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    CARTER
    Joe was waiting for me in the hall outside the copier room.
    “That’s it?” he asked. “You just threatened him and walked away.”
    I hadn’t seen Joe when I’d been in the room with Ely, but I guess he’d been listening. That didn’t surprise me nearly as much as the vehemence in his voice. “Yeah. That’s it. For now.”
    “He doesn’t get any kind of punishment?”
    Once I’d made it back into the Dean’s office, I turned to look at Joe. The guy wasn’t that much older than me. Maybe a year at most, which put him at around nineteen years old, but he looked much older. Older even than he had looked just a few days ago. Losing McKenna—the girl he’d loved and the mother of his child—had done that to him.
    Did I look older, too? Jesus, I sure as hell felt older.
    “I swear to you, I will make him pay. For what he did to Lily. For what he did to Josie. He will pay. But until I’ve rescued Lily, until I’ve found the cure, revenge is going to have to wait.”
    Joe looked like he wanted to argue, but after a solid minute of clenching and unclenching his fists, he nodded. I exhaled in relief. Joe was a lot of things, but he sure as hell wasn’t a killer. “Okay. Then what’s next?”
    “You have a map of Texas? We need to see where all the Farms are. We need to figure out where the helicopter might have gone.”
    Zeke paused in the act of rummaging through a drawer in a desk. “You don’t know?”
    “Things were . . . a bit confusing when we left El Corazon.” The fences had collapsed. Ticks were swarming onto the property. Lily’s dad had loaded her and a bunch of other Ticks-in-comas into the helicopter. They’d just gone. “I know the general plan: get to another Farm, but there hadn’t exactly been time to submit a flight plan.”
    Zeke finally found a map and shoved some stuff aside to unfold it onto the desktop. We all bent over the map. I grabbed a pen and drew a big
X
just north of San Saba. “Here’s were El Corazon is. Roughly.”
    Zeke, the only one of us who’d been a Collab and had actually worked in the Farm system, added circles around Dallas, Austin, College Station, Waco, San Marcos, and Abilene. I leaned over and added a circle at Georgetown just north of Austin and then a few in San Antonio. I’d been in and out of most of the Farms in Texas as part of the rebellion, trying to help people escape and looking for Lily. There were a hell of a lot of Farms in Texas. It had taken me six months to find and rescue her last time. How much longer would it take this time? What if her father went back on his word and tried to hide her from me?
    I looked up at Zeke. “I assume you have some sort of directory of all the Farms? The Dean must have had the numbers of their satellite phones. We’ll need to find that list and—”
    “If the Dean had a sat phone, he guarded it closely and took it with him. And as far as we can tell, it wasn’t used for the day-to-day stuff,” Zeke said. “But we have a ham radio.”
    I frowned. I should have thought of that. Operating a ham radio had been one of the many obscure skills I’d learned at Elite, but we’d only spent a couple of days on it. But if the Farms all had ham radios . . .
    “Who’s operating the radio at this Farm? Is the room secure?” Because if there was some Collab