Disclaimer: I do not own the 39 Clues series.

This one's set at the end of Trust No One.

Jake rubbed his eyes. His gaze, which had been fixed firmly on his laptop screen for the past few hours, drifted over to the window. The sky was a dark blue color and scattered with stormy gray clouds. The window was streaked with clear droplets. With a jolt, Jake realized two things: one, it was raining and two, Amy Cahill was out without an umbrella.

Long after he tucked Atticus in bed and Dan had disappeared into the bathroom (Jake suspected he had fallen asleep on the toilet again as he had been in there for nearly an hour now), Jake remained awake. About five tabs were open on his laptop, which he had used to research Archimedes' doomsday device. But the main reason why he was up was because he was waiting for a certain green-eyed girl.

Amy, where are you?

Immediately after they returned to the hotel, Dan had booked them morning flights to Attleboro.

"But what if Amy isn't back by then?" Atticus had asked.

"She'll be back," Dan had replied firmly. "She wouldn't want us to waste any time when we could be working on a plan to stop the Vespers or save the hostages."

"And we can always cancel the flights if we need to," Jake had interjected. To which Dan simply repeated: "She'll be back."

Jake felt slightly ashamed when he thought about how much Dan believed in his sister. He thought about how Erasmus, who was at least thirty years Amy's senior, had called the Cahill girl "boss" and taken her orders as easily as a sergeant would from his commander. Jake knew that Amy was strong and capable—he'd seen her take down men bigger and stronger than her—and therefore perfectly capable of finding her way back to their hotel.

And yet he still worried for her. Everyone else saw Amy as the great Cahill leader over the sixteen-year-old girl. But he had seen the cracks forming in her armor lately. He knew Dan did too, but the younger boy seemed to rather want to believe that his sister would get over it.

With a sigh, he glanced back at a PDF file from the Yale University website on the blueprints of Archimedes' inventions—and then the faint ding sound of the hotel elevator made his head snap back up.

A few seconds later, the door was pushed open. Amy didn't seem to see him as she kicked off her sneakers and took off her coat. Her jeans were soaked and her hair was a dark brown color due to the rain.

It was only when she turned around that she realized he was watching her—and even then, her eyes only met his for a second before flitting away. Her voice was soft. "Hey."

"Hey," he said back and swallowed as he tried to think of something to say. "There's cold pizza in the kitchen if you're hungry."

She gave him a small smile, but it didn't reach her eyes. As she walked closer to him, Jake noticed that her skin was pale and sallow. She looked like a ghost, he thought with a shiver. There was a slight red mark near her collarbone, where he had noticed her rubbing at for the past few days.

"I'm not hungry." Her eyes flitted to her computer screen. A shadow passed over her eyes.

"Amy, are you all right?"

Amy just looked at him. It was a stupid question, Jake knew. She was most definitely not all right. And in that moment, she cracked.

Her whole body shuddered. Tears welled up in her eyes and flowed down her cheeks. Jake reached for her. Her skin was cold and wet. He put his arms around her as she shivered and cried, choking out apologies through her sobs.

"I'm sorry, Jake. I'm so, so, so sorry about everything, so, so sorry…"

He wanted to tell her that it was okay, that they would find some way to stop the Vespers and save everyone. But the truth was that it wasn't okay, that they could not erase the mistakes they had made and the deaths they had caused no matter what they did.

"I'm sorry, too," he told her. He held her and stroked her hair until her cries died and she fell asleep.

I liked Jamy better when it wasn't canon. :|