Frozen by Erin Bowman Page A

codes to Group A if I’m dead.”
    Six . . . Five . . .
    “We keep you alive, and you help us if we run into Order members,” I remind him. “You said that back in Stonewall.”
    Four . . .
    “Do you want them to search this house? Find Aiden? Punish him because he’s here with me?”
    Three . . .
    Jackson’s eyes dart between me and the door. “I’ll handle it.”
    Two . . .
    I cut the ropes binding his wrists.
    One . . .
    He opens the door. It swings inward, blocking me from the Order’s sight.
    “Sorry about the delay,” he says. “Was in the bathroom.”
    “Not at all,” replies the woman. There’s a rustling of paper. “We’re looking for this boy and checking in on citizens while we’re at it. Making sure he’s not holding anyone against their will.”
    “I think . . . Yes. I saw this boy just earlier, peering into a window down that alley.” Jackson’s voice is surprisingly convincing. “I thought he locked himself out of his house, but maybe he was looking for a place to hide.”
    I hear the woman take the poster back. “This alley, you say?” Jackson must nod or point in clarification because she says, “Thank you.”
    The door closes and I’m breathing again, weight lifting off my chest. I grab the Forgery—who’s rubbing his forehead like the entire encounter has given him a headache—and push him into a chair in the sitting room. “Emma! It’s safe.”
    She looks angry when she reappears with Aiden. It’s not an expression I’m used to seeing on her face and I know why she’s shooting it my way; deal or not, I momentarily put our lives in the Forgery’s hands. But it paid off and I don’t regret a thing.
    I rebind Jackson’s wrists, covering the rope burns he’s beginning to develop. “Thanks,” I say to him. “For helping us like that.”
    “I was helping the boy, not you. I’ll do what I need to, eventually: get the location I came for. I don’t have a choice.”
    “Every action is the result of a choice. Even a Forgery’s.”
    He grunts skeptically. I look over to Emma, who has a hand on Aiden’s shoulder.
    “The others?” I ask her. “Did you see where any of them went?”
    “Sammy has the dog, and he just sat in the open. Smart, really. Bo and September hid in a house across the way.”
    “And Bree?”
    “I don’t know. Last I saw, she was running along the roofs. Alone.”
    But these words are reassuring, because if Bree is on her own, I know, without a doubt, that she is absolutely fine.

ELEVEN
    WE TAKE TURNS BATHING. THE water that comes from the faucet is tinged with salt, but I’m clean at the end of the process and that is enough to make me happy. There is no window in the bathroom and I feel comfortable letting Jackson have some privacy after I’ve emptied the room of razor blades and anything else I think he can get too creative with.
    The owner of the house still hasn’t come back, but the sky is starting to lose some of its color. We should leave soon, but Emma insists on cutting my hair first.
    “I like it better long,” I argue.
    “It’s not about what you like, Gray. It’s about making you look less like the face on those posters.”
    I reluctantly stand near the sink in the bathroom while Emma hovers around me with scissors. I’m not sure why parting with something as meaningless as hair hurts a little. Nothing has been the same since I climbed the Wall with Emma over the summer, and I feel most comfortable when my hair curls over my ears, falls into my eyes, grazes the back of my neck. These things remind me of Claysoot: a reassurance that I haven’t lost myself in all that’s happened.
    “What’s Jackson doing now?”
    Emma glances out the open door and into the sitting room. “He’s playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with Aiden. Just like he was the last five times you asked me to check.”
    She smiles at me in the mirror and then pushes me to my knees so she can better attack the rest of my hair.
    “What will