Cam answered from across the table, while Anne feverishly scribbled more name combinations on a fresh sheet from the pad. “Nothing yet. We’ve tried every possible pairing of Noelle’s name, her mother’s name, and yours, Anne’s and Kori’s. But we don’t know everyone’s full names, and we don’t know for sure that Elle used any of them. If she was smart—and she obviously was smart—she probably used a random name, to prevent exactly what we’re trying to do.”

“That’s the problem with having smart friends.” I picked up the sheet of eliminated names and glanced over it, trying to think of something they might have missed. But I came up empty.

A moment later, something clattered on the floor in the hall, and we all three spun around in time to see a small pink canvas shoe tumble to a stop in the middle of the living-room floor. But the hall was empty.

Anne was out of her chair in an instant and she had the shoe in hand before either Cam or I reached her. “It’s Hadley’s,” she said, fresh tears forming in her eyes. “Why would she send us Hadley’s shoe? Why isn’t Hadley wearing it? Is this some kind of warning?”

“Anne, calm down.” I took the shoe from her gently and pulled the tongue back with the opening aimed at the light overhead. “There’s something inside.”

She grabbed the shoe before I could stop her and pulled a folded sheet of plain white printer paper from inside. Cam and I read over her shoulder.

If she’s really Elle’s, you’re going about this all wrong.
You have to think lke Noelle.

That was it. No signature. No introduction. But it was definitely Kori’s handwriting. We’d passed dozens of notes—maybe hundreds—in school during my life before cell phones, and her writing hadn’t changed since the seventh grade.

“What does that mean?” The note shook in Anne’s hand. “Is she taunting us? Why not just call or text?”

“She’s probably prohibited,” I said, rereading the note for the third time, trying to find more meaning in the sparse wording. “Tower doesn’t know she’s bound to us, but he does know we’re friends.”

“She can’t make a phone call, but she can throw a shoe down the hall with a note stuffed inside?”

“She’s using the loopholes.” And the shadows I’d left in the bathroom. I took the shoe from Anne. “It’s a given that Tower would ban her from calling or texting us, but who thinks to specifically forbid tossing a shoe with a handwritten note inside it?”

“So what does this mean?” She gestured with the shoe, and I noticed that her hands were still shaking. If I wasn’t afraid it would start to fuzzy her logic, I’d offer her more whiskey. “How is thinking like Elle going to help us find Hadley?”

“I think she means we have to think like Noelle to figure out Hadley’s name. So we can track her.” I shrugged. “She probably heard us talking from the bathroom.” Or maybe she just knew we’d try tracking Hadley—it was a logical assumption, considering that two of us were Trackers.

“Okay…so how does—did—Elle think?”

“Like a Seer,” Cam said. “Elle thought like someone who knew what was going to happen, but not how to prevent it. All she could do was prepare for it, and that’s what she was doing when she sent Hadley to you.”

“Oh, hell…” I whispered, and my entire body suddenly felt heavy with the weight of a startling understanding. I sank into the nearest chair, trying to wrap my head around the details as they tumbled into place, some more reluctant than others. “It wasn’t just that.”

“It wasn’t just what?” Cam sat on the couch next to my chair, his knees nearly touching mine, and he looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to take my temperature or pour me a shot. “What’s wrong?”

“It wasn’t just sending her baby to Anne. Noelle did much more than that to prepare for this.”

“To prepare for what?” Anne dropped onto the couch next to Cam and they watched me like one of those three-dimensional images you have to squint to see just right—as if they couldn’t quite bring me into focus.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she saw, or how long ago she saw it. Maybe she knew that Tower would someday be selling Skills on the black market, and that he’d want her daughter’s blood for his project. Or maybe she just knew that someday someone bad would be after Hadley and that she’d have to be able to ask for help to protect her kid.”

“Yeah, we’ve established that,” Cam said gently. “That’s why she burned the second oath.”

I shook my head. “I think this goes back a lot further than that. How do you think she got the second oath from wherever Kenley hid it in the first place? If Kenley knew it was missing, she would have told us.”

“She saw it in a vision?” Anne said, and I shook my head again.

“It doesn’t work like that. She’s not—she wasn’t—a psychic metal detector. In fact, she was always losing her own stuff and borrowing ours, remember?” As teenagers, we’d theorized that her head was so full of the future it was hard for her to keep track of the present, and I’d never been more convinced of that than I was in that moment, with Anne and Cam watching me as if they were waiting for me to either start making sense or spontaneously combust. Was this how Elle always felt? As if she could speak until she turned blue, but no one would understand a word?