“We’ll take the one in the back where you can’t watch,” I said, returning the same kind of grin he gave us. “We’d hate for you to find out anything else until we were ready.”
The hum of the pavement beneath the van’s wheels would screen our conversation from Nate. “Okay,” I whispered to Ashley. “I know we spent hours and hours talking about this on the spaceship, but I want to be sure I’ve got it right. When they took you from the Institue, All you saw was ‘Arker,’ right?”
“It was night,” she said, sitting directly beside my wheelchair. “Remember, they had me drugged with something when they took me out of there. I could barely keep even one eye open. It was like a real bad fever, where you’re not sure if what you are seeing is real or not. We got on a highway, and there was this skinny green sign. I think it said Arker 11.”
“Eleven miles to a town or city called Arker.” That’s what Dad had guessed during our discussions on the Moon Racer. “And you said red mountains, almost like Mars.”
“Yes.” Her voice was quiet as she remembered.
In a way, her childhood had not been much different from mine. She’d been raised in the Institute, trapped in a canyon, never seeing anything of the rest of the world. I, of course, had seen just as little of Earth.
We had done a map search on board, using the Moon Racer’s computer and one of the library’s encyclopedia DVDgigaroms. Dad had guessed red mountains to be somewhere in the southwestern states. But there was no Arker in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, or Utah.
We weren’t, however, without hope. Dad had wanted to do an Internet search as soon as we reached Earth. Of casinos.
“Slipper, Slipper, here we come,” I said to Ashley.
“It could have been my imagination,” she warned. “I mean, I was drugged and fading quickly. And there it was, a giant red slipper in the sky. To me, it was named Casi. The last thing I saw before I woke up on a space shuttle, headed for Mars.”
Unlike Dad, Ashley and I would never have guessed that Casi might be the first four letters of the word Casino. Or that the giant red slipper in the sky might be a neon sign. Not with our limited experience of Earth things.
I entered the words slipper and casino into the search directory. Seconds later my screen began to fill with results.
“Here it is,” I said, scanning my computer screen. “Lucky Slipper. Red Slipper. Another Lucky Slipper. Another. And another.”
I sighed as the search results finished. “There must be 100 results here. Casinos in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Jersey, Montana.” My Earth geography was limited to what I had memorized as part of my school lessons, but even I knew that all the states I was seeing were hundreds and thousands of miles apart. We had only four more days after today. How could we reach them all on the vague hope that Ashley would recognize something familiar?
“Hey,” she exclaimed. “Look!”
I looked above her pointing finger. Near the top of the list. Red Slipper Casino, Parker, Arizona.
“Parker?” I whispered. “Not Arker?”
“They’ve got a link to their own Web site. Take a look.”
I clicked. Waiting for the visual seemed to take forever. Slowly a photo of a giant red slipper glowing in the night filled the screen.
“Scary.” She shivered. “It’s bringing all the bad memories of that night back to me again.”
“Ashley!” It was my turn to point. Brochure information lined the bottom of the screen.
Located on the Colorado River, the Red Slipper Casino is a favorite stopping place for vacationers who visit nearby Lake Havasu. The reddish mountains nearby serve as a beautiful backdrop to a place of warm hospitality. …
“Reddish mountains!” she said, evidently seeing what I saw.
“Nate!” I shouted. “How far is it to Arizona from here?”
“Three days by highway,” he answered. “But I have to tell you, I never intended on taking this van much farther than it will go on a tank of gas.”
Without his help, we had no chance. How else could we transport two robots and someone in a wheelchair across the country? Especially with so few days left?
“Is it because we haven’t given you any money yet?” I asked, ready to beg. “If you need to go to a bank—”
“Relax,” he called back to me. “I have no intention of seeing either of you use your money cards.”
Fear sickened my stomach.
Wild Man continued to speak to us from the front. “Don’t you think they would use the computer record of where you spent or withdrew money to track your progress and find you?”
He didn’t give us the chance to answer his question. “So I’m going to have to dip into my own accounts until all of this settles.”
“Won’t they be able to track you by your money trail?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Nate said firmly. “When I went into hiding, I set up fingerprint identities on three secret accounts. They might have been able to find me in the swamps but not my money. That’s a good thing. Because let me tell you, the next part of our trip might cost a big chunk of money.”
CHAPTER 17
“How does $50,000 sound?” Nate asked the woman standing beside him.
Ashley and I remained in the van, peeking and listening through an open window.
“Sounds like too much,” came a gravelly voice. The woman looked a little younger than my mom, and her name was Red. I easily understood why. Her deep red hair glinted like fire in the afternoon sun. Freckles covered all of her exposed skin, including neck, face, and strong-looking forearms that stuck out from her rolled-up blue sleeves.
“I want you to get $50,000 because we’re old friends,” Nate bargained. “You’re telling me you want less?”
“No, I’m telling you I want more.”
“Let me get this straight. I offer $50,000. You say it sounds like too much. But you want more.”
Behind us came the roar of an airplane engine. I twisted my head to peer out the other window of the van. Heat waves shimmered off a long, black runway cut into the trees. A small, single-jet airplane approached, twisting slightly as it angled to land, the air whooshing through the turbines in the plane’s nose.
We had made it into the northern half of Florida, to this small private airport. Nearby hangars held parked airplanes. Other than the runway and the hangars, the airport had a small trailer used as an office. That’s where we had parked. Nate had gone in to talk to Red, and they’d stepped out here into the sunshine a few minutes later.
“Sure, I want more,” Red answered Nate’s question. “That’s if I even rented it to you. You’ve got two kids in a rented van, and once you get in the air I have no way of knowing where you’re headed or when you’ll be back. And you offer me triple what I would expect for a couple days’ use of an airplane. That makes me worried.”
“So worried that you won’t trust a man who spent seven years with you in the same platoon?” Nate asked quietly.
“I owe you my life,” Red said. “I haven’t forgotten that. Which is why I’m not going to make a call to the Combat Force goons who stopped by here yesterday asking about you.”
“What!”
“I don’t believe what they’re saying about you. And I don’t want to know the details either. But that’s the other reason I’m worried. You’re on the run. My guess is that the Combat Force is checking all your old friends, because we’re the ones you would turn to. And if you’re on the run, I can’t rent you one of the airport’s planes. Even for more than $50,000.”
“You know I can fly anything,” Nate argued, “and you’ll get the airplane back. If anything happens to it, I’ll cover the cost of the damage. You have my word on it.”
“Your word is as good as gold,” Red agreed. “Everyone in the platoon knew that. But I still can’t rent you an airplane. If the Combat Force comes back and checks my records, they’ll know two things. That I didn’t call back when you showed up. And that
I helped you escape. After the way they threatened me yesterday … I mean, with my husband dead, I can’t do much for my kids if I spend time in jail.”
“Yeah.” Nate sighed. “I heard about your husband and the car accident. I was real sorry for you. I understand. I can’t put you in that kind of position. I appreciate you sticking your neck out to tell me they’re on the lookout for us.”
Red shrugged. “Not a big deal. You remember Skids? The skinny guy in the platoon who was lousy with directions?”
“Yeah.”
“He runs a car dealership on the other side of the state. Who would have guessed, huh? Makes millions, and I remember he needed help tying his laces.”
Nate laughed. “Who would have guessed?”
“Anyway,” Red continued, “he called me yesterday. Said the Combat Force had dropped in on him, too.”
“Not good.”
“Here’s what’s really strange,” Red added. “Remember Cannon?”
“No one forgets a platoon commander, Red. He’s a general now. One of the highest-ranking generals in the Combat Force.”
“Yeah,” Red returned. “Get this. Cannon showed up after the other Combat Force soldiers came around with questions. Alone. It was like he wasn’t working with his own people. Skids told me the same thing, that Cannon showed up after the others. Now does that make sense to you?”
“Not much makes sense to me anymore,” Nate answered.
“Tell you what,” Red continued. “I’m going to give Skids a call. He owes you a favor too. I’ll ask him to tell the Combat Force you stopped by there trying to buy a car from him cheap. They’ll swarm that side of the state looking for you. You’ll have a lot easier time escaping in the other direction. It’s the least we can do for you.”
How much good will that really do us to escape the Combat Force but still be in the van? I wondered. As Nate had told us earlier, the only chance of getting to Arizona on time was by airplane. But this was the only place Nate had a chance of getting one. And now it looked like that chance was cut off. We needed the airplane or else …
I thought of Dad waiting in the prison cell. I thought of the countdown of passing days. I felt a sharp pain in my palms and saw that I was clenching my fists so hard in frustration that my nails cut into my skin.
“See ya, Red,” Nate said.
“See ya, Nate.”
Nate began to open the driver’s-side door of the van, but Red’s next words stopped him.
“Be a shame, wouldn’t it,” Red told Nate, her back to him, “if someone knew that the hangar at the end of the runway had a twin Otter with the door unlocked and the keys in it. It’s an old beater hanging around, a relic from the old days, but it still runs really well.”
Red turned toward Nate and grinned. “Be even more of a shame if someone knew that twin Otter airplane was fueled and ready to go, like it had been parked there for someone to take on short notice ever since those Combat Force goons showed up and threatened me not to help you. Biggest shame of all is that I might not even notice the twin Otter was gone for a few days, and by the time I filed the paperwork on it, who knows, that someone might even have returned it.”
“Real shame,” Nate agreed. He smiled.
Red reached out and shook Nate’s hand. “Thanks for trusting me enough to come here. I still owe you plenty.”
I wasn’t sure if I understood what I’d just heard.
“Got to be going,” Red finished. “My favorite show just started. Inside the trailer, I have to crank the volume on my television to hear it above my air conditioner. When I’m in there watching, it’s so loud, planes can come and go and I don’t have any idea of what’s happening out on the runway.”
Nate got into the van. He started the engine.
“By the way,” Red told him through the open window, “there’s a little trail behind that hangar that leads into the trees. I suspect if anyone ever drove a couple hundred yards down that trail with a rented van, it would be weeks before anyone noticed where it was parked.”
“Thanks,” Nate said.
“Thanks for what?” Red grinned again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Right? Not a thing.”
CHAPTER 18
What an incredible world!
We flew in the twin Otter at 2,500 feet, low enough to see the changing terrain. As the hours passed in the airplane and as I traced our westward path on a map, Nate pointed out different landmarks. The three of us were equipped with headsets that let us speak and hear easily above the roar of the twin prop engines.
Less than 20 minutes after takeoff, we’d reached the Gulf of Mexico. With the beauty of the clouds and sun and the endless stretch of light bouncing off the whitecaps of the waves below, I’d hardly been able to breathe.
Then we’d cut back over land, crossing Alabama. Everywhere I looked, it was green. I was staggered to think of all the life that swarmed the earth and the sky and the water. Later, after refueling, we had crossed the Mississippi. I’d been unable to comprehend a flow of water hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of miles long, all of it filled with fish and insects and frogs and turtles.
Then the landscape had slowly changed, as the carpet of green trees began to break into open areas and we began to cross the Great Plains. Nate told us that less than 200 years earlier, millions of buffalo had lived there, and I tried to imagine the immense herds in a sea of waving grass.
We had to stop after the first day of flying, because Nate didn’t want to fly at night in the mountains. I didn’t understand why he wanted to be cautious until we began to fly again the next morning.
At first, the mountains were just blue smudges across the horizon ahead of us. Then the snowcapped peaks came into focus. And then we were in them, with Nate following highways below us so we could make it through the passes. Wind shook us from side to side until our wingtips seemed to brush the snow and the granite. It was strange to imagine our plane as just a little speck floating high above the pine forests and rivers.
Time and again on our journey I stared—and wondered what it would have been like to grow up on Earth and to be able to see this incredible world every single day.
As we reached the other side of the mountains, moving into the western half of New Mexico and finally into Arizona, the red rocks and brown valleys reminded me in a small way of Mars.
When I thought of Mars, I thought about Mom. I wondered if she knew somehow that Dad was in trouble.
And I thought about Dad.
Especially of the fact that, including today, there were only four days left of our countdown.
“There’s the Parker Dam!” Nate pointed out the window to our left. “And downriver, the town of Parker.”
He banked the airplane as I checked the map. To our right, a long, narrow lake bounced brilliant blue light from the reds and browns of the desert. This was Lake Havasu, formed by the Parker Dam. On the other side of the dam, the Colorado River was a snake of blue winding through more desert reds and browns. From the air, the town of Parker appeared to be a neatly laid grid of miniature houses.
“Anything look familiar yet?” Nate asked Ashley.
When we had stopped last night, Ashley and I had agreed that we at least had to trust Nate enough to fill him in on a few details. Then he might be able to help us pinpoint our search. And so we had.
Ashley shook her head. She hadn’t spoken much over the last few hours. I wondered if she was afraid to return to the place where she had spent most of her life. Now it would seem like a prison to her. But then—among the others who, like her, had been in the Institute as long as they could remember—she didn’t know any other kind of life. Then her life had seemed normal.
“I’ll take us in a few circles,” Nate said. “I know things look different in the air than from the ground, but you never know.”
All Ashley had been able to tell us last night was that the children could see a strange tall mountain peak from the open area where they were allowed to play. Sh
e said all the kids had called it the Unsleeping Soldier because it looked like it guarded them.
Twenty minutes later we were still circling. The red mountains threw dark shadows into deep canyons.
“I’m going to have to take us down,” Nate announced into our headsets. “We’ll find a place to stay for the night. Tomorrow we’ll drive around in a rented vehicle and keep looking.”
Tomorrow. One more day closer to the deadline.
“Hang on!” Ashley shouted. “There!”
Sure enough, one of the peaks did look like a tall, skinny man.
“There?” Nate repeated.
“There!” Ashley insisted.
“Check it out, Tyce.” Nate motioned toward the map.
I studied the map briefly, then circled a place with my pencil. “Makes sense. Abandoned military base,” I said, reading the map. “No trespassing.”
“Exactly. I think we’ve found it,” Nate said enthusiastically. “First thing tomorrow, we’ll check it out.”
Which would have been a great plan.
Except as we were watching TV in our motel room late that evening, there was a sharp crack of breaking glass.
I caught a glimpse of a small ball as it tumbled across the floor.
Nate dived for it, but it was too late.
The flash of light and the boom of the explosion came at the same time.
And when the bitter smoke hit my face, I gagged once, then sank into blackness.
CHAPTER 19
I woke up in my wheelchair with a dry mouth and a slight headache.
A breeze came in through the broken window. It was still dark outside, and the clock in the motel room read 3:15 a.m. The TV was still on, with the volume turned down. Its dim glow showed that Nate had been duct-taped to one chair. He was blinking himself awake too. Ashley lay on the floor, where she had fallen out of her chair in front of the TV. She was still unconscious.
A large man in army fatigues stood against the door. Shaved bald, he had a square face with a bent nose. The neuron gun in his right hand was pointed at Nate. “You’re getting soft and old. I really expected you to be somewhere in the desert, in a camp guarded by trip lines. This is the price you pay for wanting a place with beds and showers. The Wild Man I remembered from the platoon never would have made the mistake of bunking down where he could be so easily trapped.”
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