These Deadly Games(96)

“Hang on.” Sanchez raised a hand. “You should know—Akira’s alive.”

My heart jolted. “What? She is?”

“Holy shit.” Randall flopped forward, putting his head between his knees as Lucia patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.

“It was a nasty fall,” Sanchez went on. “She has some pretty bad injuries, and it might be some time before she can walk again. But she’s alive.”

“Oh, thank God.” I clasped a hand over my heart.

“We found this next to her.” Sanchez held up a ziplock bag with my phone in it. “It still works—”

“That’s mine!” Relief washed over me.

“I figured.”

I reached for it. “Here, I’ll show you Andrew’s app.”

He didn’t budge. “Now, this is evidence in an attempted homicide—”

“Please!” I stretched my hand farther. “Let me show you the app. I can prove all of this.”

Sanchez’s nostrils flared, but he passed me the bag, then stopped me when I started unzipping it. “Leave it in there.” Oh. I swiped to the last home screen through the plastic, searching for the icon with the silver serpent snaking around a mic.

It was gone.

“Hang on…” I swiped through all the home screens. But the app wasn’t there. Like it never existed. “No. No, no, no. Where is it?”

Had Andrew made the app self-destruct or something when he’d deduced it had sailed down the mountain with Akira? If so, he’d deleted any evidence that anyone had forced my hand. He knew he’d screwed me over even at the end as he thumbed the spark wheel, counting down, seeming to find some shred of humanity. He knew any evidence of my innocence would be destroyed with him.

He still wanted to punish me. As though what he’d already done wasn’t enough.

Everyone watched me skeptically, expressions ranging from pity to fury. “I swear, it was there! The icon had a snake wrapped around a microphone. I swear to God—”

Sanchez took the ziplock back, shaking his head. “You didn’t happen to record your conversation with Dylan, did you?”

“No,” I whispered. He still wasn’t calling him Andrew—that wasn’t lost on me.

“Rookie mistake, boo,” Randall said somberly.

“I didn’t exactly have a way to record it, did I?” I snapped.

“Ah, well,” said Sanchez. “If you recorded it in secret in his home, it wouldn’t’ve been permissible in court anyway.” Court. I was going to court. Next stop, jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Bloom. “Why would the Cullen boy even do this?”

Randall, Zoey, and I seemed to hold a collective breath. But I had to tell the truth. My lie got me here in the first place, and I had to believe my truth would get me out. I took a deep breath and told everyone how we’d snuck out that night to play Manhunt. How we’d lied about it the next morning, and ever since. Zoey threw fearful glances at her parents, who watched me with stunned expressions. “But Andrew saw us all out there,” I said. “He knew the truth the whole time.”

“Whaaaaat,” said Randall. I still couldn’t tell if his reactions meant he believed me, or if he thought I’d concocted a wild lie.

“Now wait a minute.” Sanchez scratched his cheek scruff. “You think he wanted revenge or something?” As the adults focused on me, Zoey surreptitiously started typing on Andrew’s laptop, compressing her lips so all the pink disappeared. Had she unlocked it? Maybe she hadn’t been faking her attempt.

“I don’t just think it,” I said. “He admitted it. All of it; how he sold his real passport to some kid going to Europe, how he lied to us about living with his dad. His parents died in a car crash months ago.”

“Marcia and Nate Cullen?” Mrs. Bloom gasped. “What a shame.”

“You didn’t know?” I asked. “Weren’t you Facebook friends?”

Mr. Bloom shook his head. “We’re not on Facebook.”

Useless, the whole lot of them.

“Dylan was an emancipated minor, I believe,” said Sanchez.

“He did tell us about his father,” said Randall. “That part’s true.”

“It’s all true,” I said.

“Well,” said Sanchez, “he could’ve fibbed about that to fit in. Maybe he didn’t want your pity.” I cringed. Was he really so determined to believe some dead boy over me?

“But he even told me he was picking up his dad at the train station this morning,” said Randall. “That’s some serious fibbage.” Hope filled my chest. Maybe he was starting to believe me after all.

“I’m in,” Zoey said suddenly, pulling out the USB. “I had a program on here to crack the password,” she explained to Sanchez.

Mr. Bloom’s brow pinched. “How’d you get something like that?”

“I, uh … coded it myself.” Zoey’s cheeks flushed to match her pink ombre tips. If she could hack MortalDusk, writing a password hack must be child’s play. But instead of looking angry, her dad looked impressed. Zoey bit back a hint of a smile.

Sanchez motioned for the laptop. “We should bring that in for analysis—”