“What the fuck you implying, puto?” he snaps, stepping forward. Julio holds up an impatient hand, stopping him in his tracks.

“I really wish you would play nice, boys,” he says tiredly. “Andreas, go see if this guy’s ready to tell us what he’s doing here please. Zeth, I know you said you were going to collect a friend, but perhaps you’d do me the honor of spending this afternoon with me? I thought maybe some entertainment from the girls perhaps and a few beers in the sunshine?”

For fuck’s sake. He wants to keep me close. He may not believe Andreas right now, but he also doesn’t necessarily believe me either. I arrange my face into my best imitation of an apology. “Sorry, Julio. I really do need to grab this chick. Maybe tomor—”

“You wouldn’t leave me to drink alone, would you?” he breaks in. He places a firm hand on my shoulder, pushing me back into the sun lounger. “No, Zeth, man. I don’t drink alone. I’m afraid I really must insist.”

When I finally wake up, Lacey isn’t in the motel room. The place, dilapidated and threadbare, has an aura of abandonment that gives me chills. Feels as though I’ve been on my own here for a long time. I instantly panic, wondering where the hell the girl has gotten to. Straightening off the bed and hurrying barefoot across the darkly stained, slightly tacky carpet, I fling the bathroom door open fully expecting to find the girl floating in a dark red bathtub full of her own blood. The overhead lighting is stark as it lights up the off-white tiles and yellowing sink basin, but there’s no red in here. No blood. My heart rate drops a little. That is, until I realize the motel is right on the side of a busy road and there’s more than one way to kill yourself besides slitting your wrists in a tub of lukewarm water.

“Lacey? Lace!” I dash out of the room, surprised to find the sky overhead a glorious wash of pale blue instead of grey and weighty with rain clouds. The blonde girl stands thirty feet away, back to me, at a payphone cemented into the concrete of the parking lot. The handset is pressed to her ear. I make sure she hears me as I approach behind her.

“…night. Two of them.” Her large, intensely dark eyes widen as they register me standing to her left. She gives me a brief nod. “Yes,” she says into the phone. “I know. I will, I promise. But right now I just need the address.” She bites on her lip, her body tense as she apparently waits for whoever is on the other end of the phone to respond. The rigid stance evaporates a second later; she closes her eyes for a scant moment, exhaling a long breath, and then rummages for a piece of paper in her pocket. She quickly scribbles down a set of numbers using a Rest Eezy pen she must have found inside the motel room. “Thank you, Georgio. I’ll come and see you, I promise.” She slams down the handset, holding the screwed-up piece of paper in her hand triumphantly. “I got it. I got the address of the compound where Zeth is right now.”

I stare doubtfully at the paper, which Lacey’s currently waving in front of my face. “That’s just numbers, Lacey.” I’m screaming in my head, though. Compound? Fucking compound? That sounds dangerous and frankly very scary. And why the hell is it that Lacey knows where he’s gone but I didn’t get told? It’s an irrational, stupid thing to be pissed about given that she’s been living with him for six months now, and they clearly share a strong tie, but still. It sucks, and I’m clearly an irrational creature. I push all of that aside, trying to focus on the task at hand.

Lacey tuts, leaning the paper against her knee to quickly insert some commas, and suddenly the information on the paper is no longer a string of random numbers but coordinates. “It’s out in the desert,” she tells me, handing over the paper.

“Who gave you this? How do we know this is the right place?”

“Because Zee told me about this place a few times. Never gave me specifics, but my old boyfriend runs in the same circles as Zeth. Kind of. He knew where I was talking about right away.”

“Oh god, Lacey.” I scan the coordinates over and over as if to make sure they’re actually real. “There are probably a thousand of these places in L.A. This can’t be the only one out in the desert.”

“Not that charge fifteen thousand dollars a night and are invite only,” Lacey argues. This girl standing before me is an entirely different creature to the panicking girl who smashed a rock over a guy’s head last night. She’s self-possessed and a light has sparked from somewhere in her eyes, replacing the dull look of anxiety. She’s barely recognizable. Even her voice is stronger. Firm, in fact.

“That’s the right address, Sloane.” She nods her head to cement the truth of this statement. “Zeth will be there. Don’t worry. We’re gonna go get him and he’s gonna take us the hell away from the state of California and everything bad that ever happened in it.”

****

It’s probably a bad idea renting a car under my own name, but I don’t really have a choice. Perhaps I should try and bribe the clerk to change my details, but these places aren’t exactly like that. The only companies I can find are corporate ones that want to photocopy your ID and make you fill out sheets and sheets of paperwork, and besides, the kid behind the desk doesn’t look smart enough to actually understand that I’m trying to bribe him in the first place. I go for something that’s not going to break down on me before we even hit California, and then we get moving.

We’re on the road after that. I feel hideous. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it; Lacey is practically happy as I drive in distressed silence for the next ten hours. I’m distressed because I’ve decided that I can’t take her with me to this place. Zeth wanted to keep both me and his sister (even if he doesn’t know that’s who she is) away from the compound, and he’s right. There’s no way I can in good conscience expose her to that kind of environment; she’s too damaged, and God knows what will happen to her if I put her in a position where technically anything could happen to her. Technically anything could happen to me as well, but I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about going in there, screaming at Zeth for completely fucking up my life in the space of a few short weeks, notwithstanding the events that took place in a hotel room two years ago, grabbing my sister and then getting the fuck out of there. In my head, there’s no room for deviations from this plan. Even the prospect of the slightest hiccup might persuade me to stay with Lacey where I intend on leaving her, where we could wait it out and spend some time figuring out another way of reaching Zeth.