by Sarah Jaune
“Gone,” the girl croaked out, as though she hadn’t spoken in months. “They were taken, all of them.”
“Who took them?” Eli asked as her startling eyes fixed themselves on him. “Where are your parents?”
She shook her head.
A startling thought hit Eli. “Were you with Guardians?”
If she didn’t know anything, that word wouldn’t mean much. Her shock, however, told Eli everything he needed to know. “Who were you living with?”
“It…” she swallowed hard and shook her dark head as her short braids danced. “They weren’t like me, but they were safe. My brother found them to look after me, but they were taken. They hid me.”
“Okay,” Eli said, deciding there was only one action. “Do you want to come with us? We can get you to safety.”
Ivy turned slowly to stare up at him. “Eli, we’re about to run into something incredibly dangerous.”
“I know,” Eli said as another blast of cold air shot straight up the back of his t-shirt. Some small voice in his head was screaming at him, telling him to get out of there. “Look, we need to go. We’ll figure it out on the way, but right now, we have to get out of here, and she’s just a little kid.”
“I…” Ivy hesitated only a second. “You’re right. What’s your name?” she asked the small girl.
“Claire,” she said simply. “Claire Chaplain. I’m not supposed to tell people my last name, though.”
“We won’t tell anyone,” Ivy promised. “Do you have anything you want to take with you?”
Claire hesitated only a moment before running to the back of the house. She came back with a sweatshirt on over her grimy jeans and carried with her a handmade stuffed dog. She moved outside, then paused. “You’re really like me?”
Eli had to respect her skepticism. He pointed to a rock and it shot away, across the road. Her eyes went wide in amazement, but she said nothing else as Ivy led her to the back seat of the jeep.
Eli had to wonder just how many times this kid had been moved that she didn’t even bat an eyelash at doing it now. “How old are you, Claire?” he asked her as he fastened his seatbelt.
“I’m nine,” she said as she glanced around the jeep. “This is really nice. My brother’s car is really beat up. Do you have anything to eat?”
“Here,” Ivy handed over an apple. “I’ll make up a sandwich while Eli drives.”
Eli turned on the jeep and pulled back onto the road, turning in a U-turn to backtrack down the road they’d just driven in on.
“What are you doing?” Ivy asked him, startled at the change of direction.
“We’re going to avoid Tulsa’s seat,” he told them. “I just have a bad feeling. It will only take a couple extra hours to go back down south through Oklahoma City and across to New Orleans once we hit the Dallas Zone.”
Ivy finished making the sandwich, which Claire devoured in what seemed like seconds. “How long have you been alone?”
“About a week,” Claire groaned happily as she sat back in her seat. “My brother was supposed to be back by now.”
Startled, Eli turned his head briefly to stare at the small girl. It couldn’t be… “Who’s your brother?”
Wariness made Claire sit up straighter in her seat. “I’m not supposed to say that.”
“We’re, uh,” Ivy chewed at her lip momentarily. “We’re going to New Orleans to try to rescue a guy. He’s seventeen…”
“Thane?” Claire gasped in alarm. “You’re going after him? Is he okay?”
Eli could only stare out of the window, too stunned to believe what he was hearing. They’d decided to head to New Orleans via a more northerly route than he might have otherwise taken. Something had told him to go that way. Then they’d not stopped until this town where a child was stuck alone and scared. Not only that, but the child was the sister of the man they were about to try to rescue.
The odds on all of that were extremely long.
“Please!” Claire pleaded. “Tell me about Thane!”
“We don’t know much,” Ivy told her soothingly. “He was sent there, but hasn’t reported in. We were sent to go find him. When we get there, though, we’re going to have to hide you, okay? It could be dangerous.”
Claire let out a quiet whimper. “He wasn’t supposed to leave me alone.”
“What happened?” Ivy asked her. “Who were you staying with?”
“They were from my home zone,” Claire explained quietly. “None of the Guardians are black, so I couldn’t fit in with any of their families. Thane left when I was five, but he came back for me a few months ago. He moved me out here, to where this family was. He’d known them for a long time. But now I don’t know where they are!” Her story ended on a wail of anguish as she dissolved into tears.
Ivy waited until she’d cried it all out. “Let me see if I have this straight. Your brother moved people out here to the Tulsa Zone to take care of you?”
Claire nodded meekly. “He knew I wouldn’t fit in anywhere. He didn’t fit in anywhere, which was why he’d been on his own for so long until the man found him and brought him home. It wasn’t a family for him to blend in to, but he was able to get better after being homeless for so long.”
“What did he do after that?” Eli asked the child. He’d been told already that Thane was an extremely accomplished Pursuer. He just hadn’t realized it was because he’d been living on the streets. Any jealousy Eli might have harbored against the guy fled.
“He stayed and trained with the man,” Claire explained. “Then he went out to save other kids. He’s good at it. Then he was able to save me. My dad is a bad man.”
Eli’s stomach twisted into several knots as he thought about what she’d been through. “My dad is a bad man, too. Do you know who came to your town and took everyone?”
“No,” Claire said sadly. “They were dressed in police uniforms, but they came in the night and I couldn’t see them well. Bob, that’s the man who I lived with, woke me up while Inga tried to keep them at the door. I hid under the floorboards in a secret room until the screaming stopped, but then they were all gone! I didn’t see anyone else.”
Eli exchanged a glance with Ivy, wondering if she was as stunned as he was about this turn of events.
He didn’t believe in coincidence, and this one was turning into one huge coincidence.
Something wasn’t right.
CHAPTER 13
NEW ORLEANS
Ten minutes later a car pulled out behind them that Eli was almost positive hadn’t been there when they’d driven by the first time. It was a sedan of some kind, black, shining, with tinted windows so Eli couldn’t see into it. He glanced in the review mirror as suspicion took root in him. There were at least two people in the car, but there was no reason for them to be followed.
He caught the little girl’s eye, and she too glanced behind them to see the car. With a moan of distress she sank further into the jeep’s seat as her lower lip trembled.
“You’ll be fine,” Ivy promised her once she realized what was going on. “Eli will keep us safe. He’s very powerful. Between the two of us, no one is going to get you.”
It was a lie, but she sounded so confident that even Eli felt better. That was until he checked the mirror and saw the car pulling closer to them.
“I should be driving,” Ivy muttered darkly. “Then you could send something into their car to throw them off.”
Eli scanned the road ahead of them, even as he pressed the accelerator pedal down to push the jeep faster. They were already going well above the speed he normally drove at, but this was no time to play it safe. “Why are they following us?” he asked Ivy. “Did we do something?”
Ivy shook her head helplessly. “Put on the cruise control, and I’ll take the wheel. Then you can turn and push their car off the road.”
“What?” Claire sounded panicked.
“The cruise control keeps us going at a certain speed,” Ivy assured her. “We can do this. Are y
ou ready?” she asked Eli.
He set the switch to keep the jeep moving and waited until Ivy’s hands were on the wheel before he turned in his seat.
This was stupid. This was the stupidest thing he’d ever done while driving. If Pablo had seen him pull this stunt, Eli would never be allowed to drive again.
He stared at the car behind him and concentrated on the front wheel. Eli attempted to push on it, but it only made the driver veer to the side a little. That wasn’t going to work. He needed to make the whole thing seem like it could have been an accident.
There was nothing big enough to stop the car that couldn’t be seen as something else. Desperate, Eli flicked a rock about the size of a plum up from the side of the road and straight into the windshield of the car, shattering it and causing the other driver to slam on the breaks.
Eli didn’t hesitate from there. He dropped back into his seat, grabbed the wheel from Ivy, and stomped on the accelerator, pushing the jeep even faster.
“Okay…” Ivy said as she studied the chaos he’d created behind them. “That worked out nicely. They’ve stopped, and they didn’t crash.”
“Let’s not push it, though,” Eli said as he continued to pick up speed. “We need to get out of here.”
They drove on in the loudest silence that Eli had ever experienced. The thoughts that Ivy wasn’t saying were enough to drive him crazy. He knew exactly what she was thinking, too, because he was having the same ideas.
Why were they being followed? Who would empty an entire town of all their people? Were they after Claire or was it just a coincidence?
Nothing was right in this situation. They’d spent so much time in anonymity that it was weird to think anyone would notice what a couple of teenagers were up to.
“Claire is asleep,” Ivy said quietly as the sun started to dip low on the horizon behind them.
Eli chewed on the words he’d wanted to say for hours. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Ivy sighed heavily as she stretched her legs out in front of her. “I didn’t see that car before, when we drove through. Claire is an Overseer’s child, though. Her father probably wants her back.”
He stared at the road ahead of them, his mind fixated on Thane. “Her brother was homeless.”
“We don’t know the full story,” Ivy reminded him. “There could have been a lot of reasons for that. The Guard is stretched thin, Eli. They may not have known he was being abused.”
It didn’t sit comfortably with him. “Still…”
“There are three of us,” Ivy pointed out simply. “Before that there were two, Thane and another guy, right?”
“Cole,” Eli explained. “He was the one who saved me.”
“That’s two people for the entire country, and don’t forget, there are only about six families with kids right now. There are at least two hundred zones. It would be next to impossible to keep tabs on everyone.”
Ivy was right, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He was also reasonably certain she was saying it to make him feel better and not that she actually believed it. They were almost out of Dallas’ zone when Eli pulled over so they could eat and swap drivers.
“I don’t know where we’re going to hide you,” Eli explained to Claire as she practically inhaled another sandwich. “Wherever it is, though, you’ll have to promise to stay hidden.”
Claire stared down at her sandwich, letting her hands fall to her lap. “That’s what I did at my house and no one came back for me.”
“But we’ll be coming back,” Ivy promised her. “If we don’t, we have some coins that you can use to get to safety. We’ll give you instructions on what to do.”
They drove on into the night, crossing into the Shreveport Zone, before heading south into the Baton Rouge Zone. Eli kept his eyes peeled, trying to locate a place where they could hide Claire, but they were in the middle of several swamps.
Eli didn’t know much about the swamps in this area, but after his experience with his father’s alligator, Eli wasn’t going to risk Claire being caught by one.
The roads were strange sorts of platforms, suspended above the swampland. Eli only knew that because Ivy could sense there was very little land beneath them. It was so dark, though, that Eli could only see through the beams of the headlights of the jeep.
“Maybe we should take her into the city with us,” Ivy said as they approached the city of New Orleans. “We haven’t found any good places to stop, and it might be better to have her closer. She could stay near where we park the car.”
It made Eli uneasy to think about doing that, but there weren’t a lot of options. They had to find her brother, first, then check out the Overseer’s kids to make sure they were okay.
They already knew they weren’t okay, but it still had to be verified.
Then they had to plan how to get the kids out of their house. If they were lucky, they’d have Thane there to help them form an escape plan. “We should just keep her with us. We can come up with some kind of plausible cover story, right?”
Ivy stared at him dubiously, clearly not sure what they could say that would sound legitimate. Claire looked nothing like either of them. There was no way that she could pass for family, except… “I have it!” Eli nearly crowed with his stroke of brilliance. “Step-sister.”
A slow grin spread over Ivy’s face. “That could work, but what are we doing here in New Orleans?”
Eli was ready for that. “Thane is my step-brother, and he’s missing. We’ve come to find him. You’re my cousin. We’ll say Claire tagged along, sneaking in the back of the jeep, and we didn’t know she was there until we’d gone too far to turn back.”
It was a flimsy story, at best, but it could work.
The lights of the city burned bright as they drove in, showing off vibrant colors and stores that were still lit up, even though it was late. Bars and restaurants lined the streets, while people milled around talking and laughing.
It was nothing like Eli’s home, Chicago, which was deserted at night. “This is… unexpected.”
“If you allow this sort of thing, you can make a lot of extra profit,” Ivy pointed out as she craned around in her seat to get a better look at a neon sign. “This is amazing! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Eli hadn’t either. He’d expected this zone to be falling apart like Chicago, but it was fine. No one appeared to be starving, or scared. Eli’s father had really gone off the deep end if other Overseers were still managing to keep their zones thriving. They drove over a bridge that spanned a huge river and crossed into a quieter section of the city. “Does anything look abandoned?”
“No, but there’s a motel,” Ivy pointed to a sign. “We could try renting a room.”
He shook his head. “That’s asking to draw attention to ourselves. We need to keep quieter.”
“There!” Ivy pointed to a two story dilapidated building that had a widow’s walk. The fenced in walk at the top of the building was supposed to be where women would walk, watching the sea for their husbands to come back from sailing. It was called the widow’s walk because so many times the men never came home. “That looks rundown. I bet no one is using it.”
Eli pulled the jeep behind the building, parking it as close as possible. He stared up at the creepy building and shook his head. “It doesn’t look stable. I think we’re hidden enough here. Let’s just sleep in the car tonight. Claire is already asleep anyway.”
She nodded and reclined her seat a bit. “Fine by me. I’m exhausted.”
He closed his eyes, resting his forehead against the car’s window and fell immediately to sleep.
His dreams that night were very strange. Eli stood in the road as the black car barreled towards him, clearly intent on running him over. Someone stood behind him. Eli was sure of it, but he couldn’t make himself turn to see who it was. Instead, he watched the car drive closer and closer, warping until it turned huge.
“Stay away from Tulsa,” a voice said behind him
. “They aren’t after you. They’re after the girl. Stay away from Tulsa and you’ll be safe.”
Just as the black car hit him, something banged on his window, startling Eli so badly that his throat slammed shut in fear. He turned around to see a man of about forty staring into the car, glaring at them with mismatched eyes. One was brown, but the other green. His skin, which was dark as night, was so pockmarked that it looked as though someone had taken dough and poked holes in it.
It was morning. He could see, now, that the parking lot they’d used was badly in need of repaving and that grass grew up in clumps through the cracked asphalt.
Eli reached for the jeep’s door handle and opened it, getting out and closing the door behind him, but not so it latched. He wanted Ivy and Claire to be able to hear him. They had to keep their stories straight. “Hey,” he croaked at the man who was staring at him suspiciously. “I’m sorry if we’re on your land. We were driving all night and I just needed a little sleep.”
