Throughout dinner I tracked information being passed from student to student as it had the night before when we'd sent our initial requests. Notebooks, folders, slips of paper, going from one student to another till they reached one of us. 

"Sad that it took this nightmare to bring everyone together." I mumbled as I watched a group of Hellhounds and Thunderbirds sit together. All around the dining hall there were new cliques that hadn't existed a week ago.

"Nightmare or not, you should take this opportunity to go talk to Hot Nick!" Jess grinned. Nick Sokolov, by far the most attractive junior boy, was unfortunately for my freshman crush on him, a Hellhound. 

"That would be so cute!" Ashley cooed, "Nic & Nick!"

A folder dropped in front of me and I quickly stuffed it into my bag, hoping its deliverer hadn't heard them. "Ugh, gross! Cutesy, matching names? No thanks."

"Who's got cutesy, matching names?" Eddie dropped into the seat beside me.

I tried to stop Jess from answering, but Ashley, catching her eye mischievously, blurted the names.

"Hot Nick? Really, Love? You know he's about as sharp as a bag of marshmallows right?"

Shrugging my shoulders, I looked across the hall at the boy in question. "It's a good thing then that being math class eye candy doesn't require one to be particularly pointy."

"I've heard he can get pretty pointy!" Jess choked out while she laughed. 

"Nice one, Kida!" Eddie high-fived her as I realized what I'd said.

"My God! You two are ridiculously impossible!"

"Well, since that's been settled, and you've decided that they're impossible, let's get going." Kellen chimed in, surprising us all. He pulled me from my seat, tucked me under his arm, and directed me away from the table. "We have a lot of possible to get done."

I let him lead me a few feet, thinking what he'd said was all kinds of clever. I even childishly threw a look over my shoulder at my friends, sticking my tongue out at them. As I did so, my eyes swept over Jess and I registered the amused look that she was giving me. Oh hell no! I slapped Kellen's arm off my shoulder and marched out of the dining hall with him chuckling behind me. I was thankful when we exited the hall and were out in the cold night air, to have something to blame my reddened cheeks on.

"Stupid innuendo!" I muttered under my breath. Behind me, Kellen laughed even harder.

-.-

-.-

"What's that?" Kellen asked as I retrieved the folder that had slipped under the door.

"Maps for tomorrow." I sighed and dropped the newly acquired folder on the nightstand. Maps I'd have to use to find a place for us all to escape to.

"What about the one to town?" Town; a solid hour and a half away at middle of nowhere highway driving speeds. I didn't want to imagine what that map looked like―through the unpredictable forest to the closest town―or how long that journey would take.

"We'll go over that and the squad that's going to make that journey once we're out, remember? Emma's holding on to those." 

Kellen eyed me in annoyance when I rejoined him on the bed, sending several papers whooshing into the air, messing up the chaotic order we'd had. When they settled on the navy bedspread, I carefully placed them all back into their folders.

"Where's Leon?" I scanned the room I'd already slept in and woken up in once before.

Kellen shrugged. "At mine. We swapped rooms since those meatheads don't actually know who any of us are, just how many of us are supposed to be in each room."

I glanced at the time display on his phone, reminded by his words of the fact that there was one less head to count in my room, and one more here. Kellen picked up on my nervousness with what I could only read as amusement.

"Don't worry, Cole, Jess has it covered." He swiped at my phone. "You're already in bed; you passed check-in."

Raising an eyebrow, I grabbed my phone. Sure enough, Jess had rigged a very real looking Nicole into my bed so I could keep doing, "all those possible things you're doing. 😉😉"

Ugh! She would never let this one go! "So, I guess Jackson and I leave in the morning with our crew... whoever they are."

Kellen, saw right through my subject change, and smirked in a self-satisfied way as he flipped open a file. It was one in which we had a collection of the current yearbook pictures already sorted into groups we had loosely decided on with everyone yesterday. He fanned them out on the bed and set a time limit of three hours to finalize the squads, and assign evacuation groups. So I could get some sleep, he claimed, before my early morning departure into the forest.

I scribbled quickly, making note of both definite and potential needs, and was so engrossed in my list that I was completely thrown off guard—and off the bed—when Kellen tackled me.

Utter confusion stopped any loud reaction I might have had, and thank goodness for that. Kellen's door opened and the sound of a warden's voice broke the silence, "Curfew che—This one's missing!"

"I'm right here..." Kellen pushed himself up slowly, so that he would be visible from the other side of the bed. Amused, I imagined the warden taking in Kellen's slow movements and dumb expression, and labeling him stoned. Which is frankly what we'd all been trying to convince them we were.

"Never mind. He's here," he grumbled and the door clacked shut loudly.

Letting out a breath he'd been holding, Kellen dropped back down, huffing against my shoulder. "Shit, that was awesome... you were so close to being caught!" He grinned down at me and then froze, the smile faltering on his lips.

I watched his face redden and he awkwardly tried to lift himself off me. And that was when it fully registered that Kellen Fitzpatrick was straddling me, and in the most uncomfortable compromising way too. If I wasn't preoccupied with planning our escape at that moment, I might have turned red too. Instead I was annoyed as Kellen stuttered an apology and attempted to get up without touching any part of me.

"God above, Kellen! What are you, 13?" I grumbled, shoving him onto his back and sitting up. "Put a fucking muzzle on it, and let's get back to work. Besides," I added with a grin as I plunked back onto the bed. "You wish!" 

Laughing, he picked up the Roster and settled beside me at the top of the bed. "Fine, fine, back to work. But, I was really hoping you wouldn't see through my plan of having the wardens almost catch you here. How am I ever going to recreate that moment?"

-.-

"This is useless! We're never going to make this work!" I groaned. Finalizing the squads had tired me out. There were many people whose talents had them jumping from squad to squad and we argued over whether we could afford to have people in more than one role. Kellen finally won, and we had overlapping squads.

That was the hardest part, right? No. Figuring out how the evacuation would work was an even larger nightmare.

We couldn't evacuate students as a whole, that would raise alarms, and quite simply, we'd be too easy to follow. So we needed to do it in waves. Departures would have to be staggered in such a way that would allow us to all be out quickly, without being noticed. Our plan was for it to take two days, once we began the evacuation.

Kellen's tired gaze washed over me. "You? Nicole, you're giving up? What happened to everything you said to get Katia and I to agree to this in the first place?"

I could feel tears stinging the backs of my eyes and it only furthered my frustration. "But..."

"Hero, we can do this. I know because you told me we could. One more time, k?"

I agreed, if somewhat petulantly, and swallowed down the frustration that made me want to pull out my hair. Assigning evac groups was not the easiest task and we'd been at it so long now that names were starting to look nonsensical to me. We realized early on that we couldn't release any one squad as a whole. All the scouts couldn't leave at once, who would protect them, and help them build shelters? What of the food and supplies?

"Are you supposed to be making this harder?" Kellen's voice interrupted my apparently out loud thoughts.

"Hey, I'm trying to make it easier for you tomorrow. It's better we have as much settled now as we can."

"You're right." Kellen left the room muttering about a break. While he was gone, I decided to work out how many people I'd travel with the next morning.

By the time he returned with two teas, I had a new list that I held out to him. "The crew Jacks and I leave with tomorrow; six Builders, four Natures, six Runners and one Med."

"Um, that's nineteen including you and Jacks... I think you need to get some rest, Cole."

"It's only twelve." I was quick to defend myself, and brushed off his concerned look. "Four Builders, one Builder/Nature, one Builder/Med, One Runner, Three Runner/Natures, plus Jacks and I. Altogether twelve people, and only six coming back. And if we can pinpoint a location early enough, we can do more trips throughout the day."

"It's possible." He nodded and ran a hand over his face tiredly. "But that's a tomorrow-Kellen issue. Tonight-Kellen wants to figure out who we absolutely need in the first few evacuation groups, so you can get some sleep."

I smiled at him as I sipped my tea; did he really care that much that I wasn't tired tomorrow? With the task significantly lessened, we managed to pin down the bare minimum for the first few groups. There were blank spots left in each group that Kellen and Katia would fill once Jackson and I returned from our scouting mission.

I didn't really envy them the huge job. They'd have to decide how big each group would be and when they'd leave so we could be fully evacuated by our goal of two days. I was thankful that I'd be hiking through wilderness for the most part of tomorrow, and not doing this anymore. 

As Kellen put everything away, I shimmied under the covers, rolled onto my belly and opened my folder of maps. I began flipping through them, carefully taking in the spots that had been marked for our consideration. I'd examined only one closely, before Kellen flopped down beside me. With a small smile, he closed the folder, tugged it from my hand and flicked the light off.

Unlike the last time we'd both been in this room, there was no one in Leon's bed in the room beside ours. Still, Kellen decided to make himself comfortable on the bed I was sleeping in. Before I could protest, he tucked the blankets firmly around me and then draped his arm over the burrito he'd turned me into.

"Now we got all that possible done, it's time for the wink wink part." He grinned, alluding to the innuendo that had made me blush in the dining hall. "Wouldn't want to disappoint Jess, now would we?" 

Damn the fact that he saw Jess' stupid winky-faced text message, and that he was teasing me about it! Now even though wink wink was so not happening, I'd be thinking about it. Crossing my arms as he laughed at my discomfort, I grumbled, "Shut up, Kelly-Bean."