Ryder was stretched out on the field, his shirt once more missing. The hard angles of his body shone with sweat underneath the afternoon sun, and his football cleats had been taken off and placed next to him.

Jane could stare at the sight for hours. Indeed, she had, though through the monochrome eyes of the camera overlooking the football field.

Victoria had sent her a message, informing Jane that Ryder had been looking for her. The idea had sent Jane’s heart beating for two very different reasons, the first of which being that she still hadn’t returned his phone, and it was likely that he suspected her.

The second, on the other hand, was because of a sudden rush of warmth in her gut. An unconscious thrill that vaguely resembled the buzz she felt when hacking.

Despite herself, she found that she wanted to see Ryder again. Mysterious contents of SecretNoteZ aside, she had a sense that he had been partially truthful on their date. It hadn’t been all lies, as she had suspected. Her thorough search of his phone had proven that.

And so she found herself striding across the field, laptop rhythmically bouncing against her hip, with one pale hand shielding her eyes from the sun.

She could see that Ryder’s eyes were closed as she approached his prone form, an expression of peace on his face.

“Ryder?” she asked, crouching next to him.

His eyes opened slowly, the green of his irises complementing the trimmed grass around them. He smiled at her sheepishly.

“Hey, wait- before you say anything, I just-… I’m sorry, about last night. Whatever I did, I’m really sorry.” His apologies rang with the peal of truth, a conviction that seemed to come from his heart. She almost felt bad for making him feel that way.

Jane exhaled as she glanced down at him, bemused. And here she was, preparing to apologize to Ryder instead. It seems he had gotten there first.

“Ryder, it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong, I just panicked,” she said. It was true for the most part.

He rose to a sitting position, the muscles on his abdomen growing taut from the motion. Jane found her eyes tracing the subtle lines between them, transfixed.

“Are you sure?” he asked, searching her face.

“Yeah. Promise,” she replied.

Jane, hands on the grass, took a seat next to him. Their shoulders bumped as she lowered herself to the ground.

“Beatrice was going to look for you. My dad ordered her to interrogate the kids at school,” Ryder said.

High above, the blue expanse of the sky was marred by a pair of contrails, like white streaks on a blank canvas.

Jane chewed her lower lip. “Why? What’s wrong? Do they suspect how much I know?”

“You never explained how you found everything out,” Ryder said, countering her questions. “In fact, how did you even find me? Victoria wouldn’t say.”

Jane was watching him closely, though the back of her mind was churning as it always did. She was in a minefield with clown shoes on. If she wasn’t careful, things could go very wrong. If she misjudged Ryder, this could mean the end for her.

“Before I tell you that, give me the code to your SecretNoteZ,” she said.

There. All the cards were on the table, it seemed. The lies between them. The shadows that separated Ryder from Jane, somehow felt incredibly vast, and yet so tiny. The obstacle to their feelings for each other.

Ryder’s expression tightened somewhat, though one eyebrow raised in an amused half-grin. “I knew it. You did take my phone.”

Jane nodded, tense. A bead of sweat ran down Ryder’s forehead and into his eyes. He blinked it away.

“Do you have it on you?” he asked, his gaze drifting to the bag at her side.

“Are you gonna tell me the code?”

Ryder looked up, and wet his lips. He seemed to be overcoming some sort of internal debate, an argument with himself. His eyes shifted incrementally in either direction, as if weighing his options in his head. Jane watched with bated breath, hoping that the one on her side would come out victorious.

“Twenty-three o-four.”

Jane pulled the heavy device from her waistband, the case momentarily catching the hem of her hoodie.

If Ryder was surprised that she could bypass his lock-screen, he didn’t show it. She could feel his eyes on her as she navigated his now familiar set of apps. With a click, SecretNoteZ’s password screen appeared.

Jane hesitated, thumb hovering over the numbers. She only had one shot at this, and if Ryder was lying, there would most likely be no way to recover the data inside. This could all be one big game of chicken, with him going to lengths just to ensure she couldn’t access it..

“It’s the day my mom died,” he said. A guilt crushed whatever lingering doubt Jane still held.

Ryder’s voice held that same hard edge from the night before, a dense mixture of anger and hopelessness. It seemed that making the decision to trust Jane had cost him something, and she could not discern what it was.

Now Jane truly felt guilty.

Slowly, she input the code. Each button flashing a light blue as her finger passed over it, accompanied by an electronic click from the phone’s speaker. The wind picked up, tossing a red strand of hair in Jane’s face.

An electronic beep sounded from the phone, and the word “WELCOME” flashed across the screen. Jane breathed a sigh of relief as a small list of text entries were pulled up, arranged by date.

“Your turn,” Ryder said. He was looking at her expectantly.

It was Jane’s turn to have a moment of indecision. The voice reminded her that Ryder was still a Jackson, the supposed ring-leaders of the syndicate. He associated with Beatrice in a criminal capacity, openly admitted to acting as a repo-man for his father, and-

No, no, Jane argued. She would never have even known any of that if he hadn’t been honest with her. So far, he had proven that she could trust him.

The voice was quiet at that, as if she had defeated its irrational paranoia with cold logic alone. Or, perhaps, with her feelings for Ryder. She wanted to trust him.

She only hoped she wouldn’t end up regretting it.

“There,” Jane said, pointing at a blocky camera above the bleachers. Ryder followed her finger, and it took him a moment to find what exactly she was referring to.

“The camera?” he asked.

“They’re my eyes.”

He raised his eyebrows, looking back at her curiously. “I don’t get it.”

There was no going back now. “I’m inside almost every system in Alexander. I’ve hacked the school, most of the government networks, even the library.”

Ryder’s lips had parted unconsciously as he made the connections in his head. It all made sense now, to him. Jane could see nearly anything, so long as it was recorded by a camera. She could access most digital records, even the ones he wasn’t aware existed. She’d broken past his phone’s password in a single night. Her eyes were the anathema to his lies.

His only choice was to be honest with her. And so he was honest.

“Wow… that’s-” Ryder was unsure of what to say. If he thought he had underestimated her before, it was certainly more true now.

Jane, on the other hand, seemed to be waiting for a blow to fall. Waiting for Ryder to lash out at her, or pepper her with suspicious questions, or even run away entirely. It had happened before. People do not like it when you have the potential to know their every secret.

“Let me guess, you’ve hacked me already, haven’t you?” asked Ryder.

Jane’s mouth tightened to a thin line. Here it comes. “Yes.”

His expression was inscrutable, impossible to read. The old anxiety was threading through Jane’s chest, growing worse with every passing second. She needed him to say something, anything. And when he didn’t, she decided to make a move first.

In the end, the exact reason she did it didn’t matter. She brought her face closer to his, and, slowly, kissed him.

It was far different than the first time they had kissed, or even the second time.

If the first time had been a spontaneous decision, this one was heavy with intent. Cloying with emotion and a desire to connect. If the second time they’d kissed had been laced with manipulations, doubt, and guilt, this time it was open. Jane was revealing herself to Ryder as their breaths caught, and he to her. There was an honesty between them as their lips touched, a feeling that Jane could sense in her belly as fireworks sputtered within it.

The grass beneath her, the slightly-too-warm breeze, even her hair falling over her eyes, all faded to the feeling of Ryder kissing her back. She felt his hand, damp from the grass, come to a rest atop her own.

And then they broke away from each-other, green eyes meeting their counterpart.

Ryder regained his breath first. “I’ve been telling you the truth, Jane. I really do like you.”

For a moment, Jane’s mind returned to a slightly younger Jane, one that had first moved to Alexander. The crippling loneliness, the fake friendliness that the other kids showed her until they realized she didn’t fit their idea of normal. The slowly-building crush she had held for Ryder as she gathered information on him.

That Jane wouldn’t believe you if you told her about this very moment. But she was not that Jane anymore.

“I like you too, Ryder,” she said.

Ryder’s thumb stroked a slow pattern over her hand as he smiled, an expression so unlike the practiced flash of teeth she so often saw him wearing. Much like the kiss, it was open, and honest. It was evident that he had accepted that she could betray him, break his heart and ruin his life.

“I like you, but you have to realize stalking me like that is messed up, right?”

Jane’s expression faltered. She’d chosen to be honest, sure, but it seemed that doing so would come with consequences.

The silence between them had grown awkward, weighing on her much like it had before.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said. She wasn’t sure what else to say.

Ryder glanced away, a breath deflating his chest. “Yeah, well… it’s gonna take me a bit to get over that.”

“Do you want me to go?” The tears weren’t quite there yet, but Jane could feel them. They pooled at the corners of her eyes, choking her words. Her voice cracked as she spoke.

Ryder’s eyes widened. “No! No. Let’s just change the subject, okay? I need time to think.”

That was incrementally better than him asking her to leave, at least. She spoke of the first thing that came to mind, desperate to move on from the topic.

“So, what do they know about me? Your dad, and all.” Jane could hardly believe she was speaking so candidly about a dangerous criminal organization intent on hunting her.

“I don’t know,” Ryder admitted, “He’s suspicious of you, but that’s because Beatrice has been whispering in his ear all this time. She really doesn’t like you.”

Jane could only wonder why. “It all started when she caught me listening to you two talking, that day it rained.”

It took Ryder a moment to remember when exactly she was talking about. He nodded.

“She’s coming for you. We need to be ready,” he said.

Jane felt another flush of giddiness at his use of “we”.

“How?” Jane asked.

“There’s something my father tried to cover up. Beatrice is so high up in the organization because her parents were-”

“I know, Ryder.”

His eyebrows shot up. “What? How? Even the cops don’t know…”

Ryder’s voice trailed off as his eyes fell upon her laptop bag. A smug smile crept over Jane’s lips involuntarily.

“Are you really that good?” he asked, a mixture of admiration and wariness in his voice.

“I’m that good,” Jane said, something resembling confidence steeling her voice.

Once again, Ryder was peering at her incredulously. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her, but that he didn’t want to.

Jane shifted uncomfortably under his shocked gaze and shifted the topic once more, as it had come dangerously close to what they were avoiding. “How do you even know Beatrice? I mean, I know you two were, like, an item or something.”

“So you don’t know everything,” Ryder chuckled. “Well, we’ve been friends since we were kids. The Ruths and the Jacksons helped build Alexander. That’s my great-grandpa’s statue outside the school.”

Jane nodded, she’d known as much, if only because it had been shoved down her throat during school orientation.

“It was our parents idea. They kept trying to push us together. I-… uh, didn’t really have a choice. After enough pressure from both sides, we started dating.” If Ryder seemed uncomfortable, Jane was all the more so. She didn’t like the image of Ryder and Beatrice together, even if it was one-sided.

“But she was completely insane. Completely controlling. She’d spy into my private life, and she was always suspicious of everything I did. She’d question pretty much everything I said. Honestly, sometimes I think my dad made her do it just so he could keep an eye on me,” Ryder continued. There was a detached bitterness in his voice, a semblance of the emotions he had when he spoke of his mother.

Jane turned her hand over in the grass and squeezed Ryder’s fingers encouragingly.

“And then that thing with her parents happened. All those dead people,” Ryder winced. “Beatrice doubled down after that. Became my dad’s right hand woman. It got to be too much for me, so I broke it off. She’d changed for the worse. I remember when she was just some sweet kid, way back then.”

Jane was watching Ryder as he told his story, his eyes unfocused from the effort of dredging up what must have been uncomfortable memories. He turned to her.

“Your turn. You still haven’t told me why you moved to Alexander. It’s only fair, since you know almost everything about me,” he said, a tad more grudging than intended.

The memories flashed through Jane’s mind, altogether painful and soothing. The quiet of her childhood home, with its not-yet-faded orchid shower curtain. Her father’s red hair glinting in the sun. The quiet drone of federal agents speaking to her mother in serious, hushed tones.

“When my dad disappeared, the police weren’t looking for him. They didn’t care, just because we were nobodies. Just because we weren’t rich or famous or something like that,” she said. It had been the first time she’d spoken about it to someone other than her mother.

“Cops,” Ryder muttered in sympathy.

“Yeah. Well, I got caught. Breaking into the police systems. I just- I just really wanted to know what happened to my dad.”

Ryder lowered his gaze, as if ashamed to be looking so closely at Jane’s brutal emotional turmoil.

“We had to leave everything. The house, the investigation, everything.” The last word held a finality, and Ryder knew that, even if he pried, she would say no more.

It was an exhausting conversation, sitting together under the sky. Exhausting, yet Ryder had never felt so close to someone before. For the first time in his life, he felt like someone was accepting him for who he truly was, and not what they wanted him to be.

“I’m sorry,” he said, unsure of what else to say. She didn’t seem to hear him.

“That’s why you’re right. I need to be ready. I started this, and I won’t let anyone push me and my mom out again.”

“You have any idea about what to do with Beatrice?” Ryder asked.

She looked at him then, with an intensity that Ryder had rarely seen on her face. Her expressions were concealed no longer. He was looking at Jane, not the beanstalk, not the invisible girl in the hoodie.

“I have an idea about how to take them all down,” she said. “I just need an address.”