by Tracy Deebs
“She’s not a hacker!”
“And I know this how?” Lundstrom stares him down. “The worm launched from here. She was the only one here. Ergo …”
I can’t stand it, can’t sit here listening to this for one second more. “Please,” I say. “I really need to use the restroom.” Even though I don’t. I just want a couple of minutes alone to think, a couple of minutes where they aren’t staring at me like I’m a monster.
“I’ll take her,” Mackaray finally says, and I almost change my mind. I don’t want to be alone with him, even for as long as it takes to walk to my bathroom. But it’s not like I have a choice now, not after I made such a big deal of having to go.
We leave the kitchen together, and when I try to head upstairs to my bathroom, he grabs my elbow and directs me to the half bath down the hall. The one without any windows. I shake my head in disbelief. They already think I’m some kind of genius hacker—now they think I can mastermind an escape from federal custody as well? Who the hell do these people think I am?
“Leave the door open,” Mackaray tells me when we get there.
“What?” I stare at him incredulously.
“You heard me.” The face staring back at me is implacable.
“Where am I going to go? There’s no other way out of the bathroom!”
“Take it or leave it.” Something moves in his eyes, and I know he’s waiting for me to leave it. But I won’t give him the satisfaction.
“Does your wife know you get your kicks by listening to teenage girls pee?”
The hand on my elbow gets tighter, his fingers digging into my flesh until I start to see stars. He pulls me toward him and whispers, “You don’t want to play games with me, little girl. I win every time.”
I’m straining so hard in the other direction that when he finally lets me go, I stumble, crack my funny bone hard against the door frame.
I go into the bathroom, leaving the door partially open. I turn on the faucet, splash water on my face, blink back the tears.
“Hurry up!” he says after a minute. “We don’t have all night.”
Before I can respond, the lights blink once, twice, then go out completely. My entire house is plunged into an inky blackness.
“What the hell!” Mackaray says, slamming the bathroom door open all the way. “Either get it done or not, kid. You’ve got one minute, and then I’m taking you back to the kitchen.”
I barely hear him over the pounding of my own heart and the panic clawing through me, overpowering everything else. Even my fear of going to jail. I hate the dark, hate it, hate it, hate it. Ever since I was five and got trapped in my uncle’s storage shed, under a pile of heavy boxes that fell when I was looking for my Christmas presents. There’d been no lights or windows, and I’d lain there in the dark for hours, crying, convinced that no one was ever going to find me.
Curiosity had been my downfall then as well.
“Tom?” Lessing’s voice drifts through the hall.
“Yeah?”
“Just checking. It looks like the whole grid just went down.”
“I can see that.”
Lessing must catch the sarcasm in his voice because she shuts up quickly. I hear her walk back down the hall to the kitchen, her heels clicking on the wood floor.
“Pandora—” In his voice is a warning, and I know my time is up. But he stops abruptly, and there’s a muffled thump, followed by a slithering sound that has me imagining a bunch of snakes sliding down my hallway. I press myself back against the wall and try not to scream.
Something large moves in front of the doorway. “Pandora?”
“Theo?” I whisper, shocked.
He leans forward until his face is only inches from mine. “Let’s go.” His voice is pitched so low that I have to strain to hear it even this close.
“Go where?”
“Out of here. Come on, we’ve only got a couple of minutes before they come looking for you.”
“Looking for—You want me to break out of federal custody?”
“Would you rather I leave you here?”
“I don’t know. I …” My head is spinning. Of all the ways I envisioned tonight ending, this wasn’t even in the top thousand. “Where’s Mackaray?”
“I hit him. He’s out, but I don’t know for how long. Now, are you coming or not?”
Am I? I look back toward the kitchen, where Emily and her father wait with the other agents. I can’t leave her—
It’s like Theo can read my thoughts, because he says, “Emily will be fine. She’s not the one in trouble here.”
He’s right; I know he is. But still. Can I do this? Bad enough to be a federal suspect—but to be a fugitive? How is it even possible? They’ll find us in minutes.
Except the electricity just went out. Communications are gone. No cameras to catch us running away. No way to get out word of a widespread manhunt (or, in this case, womanhunt). No way for them to track me when they’re basically blind, deaf, and dumb. It could work.
But still, do I really want to do this? Do I really want to go down this road?
Hell, yes, I do.
I slip my hand into Theo’s, not bothering to ask how he knew I was in trouble, and we glide as silently as possible through the hallway into the living room. He seems to know exactly where he’s going, and I wonder how long he’s been here, prowling around the house, without anyone knowing.
He slides open the glass door that leads to the deck just enough that we can slip out. As he silently closes the door behind us, I realize this is it.
I really have reached the point of no return.
13
We hit the ground running. Literally.
After sneaking across the deck, we scale the iron railing that keeps people from falling off and then—because the stairs are in perfect view of the windows, thanks to the solar lights I insisted my mom install—we jump the five feet to the ground. I twist my ankle when we land, and bite my lip to keep from crying out. I try to stop to check for damage, but Theo grabs my wrist and yanks.
And then we’re running straight into the black.
Theo cuts across the yard—away from more solar lights that illuminate the ground and might catch our movements—to the fence line. We run in close-to-total darkness, the light of the half-moon above us our only guide. I try not to panic, tell myself this is the only way even as my brain tries to turn itself inside out. I stumble a few times, nearly go down, but Theo’s there every time to catch me and pull me along.
Fear is a living, breathing nightmare inside me, scraping at me with every step I take away from the house. I block it out, block everything out, including the pain from the car accident and my fear of the dark, and I just run.
I concentrate on the rhythm, on the act itself of putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t know where we’re going or how we can escape, but Theo seems to have a plan, so I go with it. Go with him.
Our property is huge, over two acres, and there are woods toward the bottom half of it. As soon as we reach them, Theo darts away from the fence and into the middle of the trees. We use them for cover as we keep running.
As we flee, everything around us takes on a surreal quality. A little bit out of focus, just a little bit unreal.
When I woke up this morning, when I rolled out of bed, I didn’t have a clue I was going to end up here. When I read that message from my father, rejoiced in the words he wrote and the pictures he sent, I never once imagined where they would lead. How things would end.
Not that this is really an ending. It’s more of a beginning.
The beginning of my life as a fugitive.
The beginning of my quest to figure this thing out.
The beginning of the end of my world, and maybe the whole world, if the warning from Pandora’s Box comes true.
I can’t let it come true.
Theo stops abruptly. I know why, just as I now know how he’s planning to escape. “They’ll figure it out,” I tell him, keepi
ng my voice low.
“It’s a big lake. They won’t know where we’re coming out.”
“Helicopters—”
“Everything is a mess because of the worm. It’ll take a little while for them to get one here. And by then we’ll be gone.”
He takes my hand, leads me through the darkness and down to the dock. There’s a two-seater kayak resting at the very end, one that wasn’t there before. “Is it yours?” I ask, pointing.
“Yeah.”
We don’t talk as we get the boat into the water. Theo climbs in first, then holds on to the dock to steady the boat as I climb in behind him. When I’m settled, he hands me a two-bladed paddle, then picks up a second one for himself.
“You ready?” he asks.
Not even close. But I nod, and he shoves off from the dock.
We start to paddle, straight out toward the middle of the lake. I don’t say anything for a while, just concentrate on the side-to-side motion of paddling.
It’s been a few years since I’ve done this, but when I was younger I spent every available second on the lake. The rhythm comes back to me quickly, my body remembering the familiar motion without much help from my brain.
Paddle on the left.
Roll and shift.
Paddle on the right.
Roll and shift.
Paddle on the left.
The world around us is dark and very nearly silent, except for the excited vibrations of the cicadas in the trees. But as we go farther, even that sound fades until there’s nothing but the splash of the paddles hitting the water and coming back out.
It’s a lonely sound, a lonely feeling, moving straight out into the black, and I know that I would never have been brave enough to attempt it alone. I owe Theo, huge, and I don’t have a clue how to begin to repay him.
Back on shore, I see the flash of police lights from my driveway. Figure it means they’ve discovered I’m missing. I don’t say anything and neither does Theo, but he starts to paddle even faster. Again, I’m left scrambling to keep up.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I ask breathlessly after a few more minutes.
“Yes.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. Still, the boat is subtly shifting, angling to the left. We’re heading toward shore, though I don’t know how he knows when to turn. I don’t say anything though. When I took Theo’s hand back at the house, I put my trust in him. I’m not going to second-guess him now.
We paddle for another thirty minutes or so, until my arms feel like they’re going to fall off and I’m completely exhausted. I haven’t eaten anything since the Crunch Berries nearly ten hours ago, and it’s not like those are exactly the fuel of champions. Had I known what the future had in store I would have gobbled down an entire jar of peanut butter instead.
“We’re almost there,” Theo says. Again, I don’t know how he can tell—I’m just thrilled that he can. A couple of minutes later, he says, “Stop paddling.”
I do as he instructs, and we coast up to what I think must be a dock. Theo reaches for it, then curses softly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just climb out.”
I start to scramble up but someone else is there, grabbing my arm and pulling me forward. I screech, a startled, high-pitched sound that echoes through the night.
“Shhh!” A hand clamps over my mouth as the stranger pulls me against his body. “It’s me, Pandora,” a familiar voice whispers in my ear.
Eli. My body goes limp as the fight rushes out of me.
“Don’t mind me,” Theo comments drily as he vaults onto the deck, keeping one hand on the kayak the whole time so it doesn’t float away. Then he reaches down to pull the small boat out of the water. Eli lets go of me to help him and I’m immediately bereft. He scared the hell out of me, but he was also something—someone—to hold on to in the middle of this hell.
Instead of putting the kayak on the dock, the two of them start walking with it.
“Come on, Pandora.” Theo’s voice is low but harsh. “We need to keep moving.”
Now that Eli’s back in the picture, I guess Theo feels like he doesn’t have to be nice to me anymore. After all, if I have a nervous breakdown, there’s someone else around to clean up the mess.
“Moving where?” I look around, try to get my bearings. But there’s nothing here—just a bunch of trees. We’re in the middle of the wilderness.
“Toward the forest,” Eli tells me gently. “We don’t want to leave this out here like a beacon. I guarantee the helicopter will be up any minute.”
“Any minute?” I swear I can feel the blood drain from my face.
“They’re crippled by the worm, not completely incompetent,” Theo says, obviously amused by my panic. “What do you think they’re going to do? Throw up their hands and say, ‘Whoops, we lost her’?”
“No, of course not.” Which is true. But I haven’t exactly had a chance to think it through, either. There hasn’t been time.
“Then let’s hustle.” He checks his watch. “We have places to be.”
“We do?” I sound like an idiot, but it’s hard to be anything else, since neither one of them is telling me what’s going on.
Eli must sense how disgruntled I am, because he bumps shoulders with me as he mutters, “Trust the plan, Pandora. Trust the plan.”
I didn’t even realize there was a plan besides running like hell. But of course there is. This is Theo, after all. The guy built an airplane practically single-handedly. Evading Homeland Security must seem like child’s play after that.
I snicker a little at the thought as I watch them weave carefully through the trees, kayak in hand. “What’s so funny?” Theo asks.
“I don’t think you’d get it.”
“Too square?” He tosses a glance over his shoulder, and even though I can’t see his features in the dark, I think maybe I’ve hurt his feelings. Which is so not what I intended.
“Of course not. I just … I’m shocked at how prepared you guys are.”
“Boy Scouts have nothing on us,” Eli jokes.
Theo doesn’t answer, just gives a little snort that says he doesn’t believe me, but his pace never falters. After we’ve hiked about half a mile into the woods, he says, “I guess this is as good a place as any to lose the kayak.”
He and Eli lay it on the ground. Theo reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tiny flashlight, the kind you can hang from your keys, then turns it on and sweeps it around the area quickly, checking to make sure the tree cover is heavy enough. I’m so grateful for the light that I nearly grab it from him, just to prove to myself that it’s real.
Theo checks his watch again and I say, “Geez, you’re a real stickler for keeping a schedule, aren’t you?”
“I’m looking at my compass. So I know how the hell to get us out of here. That okay with you?”
“Yeah, fine.” I can feel my cheeks burning. “I wasn’t making fun of you.”
“Whatever.”
“You really have a compass on your watch?” I ask, moving closer.
“I like to hike. Since I don’t always follow the beaten path, the watch helps keep me going in the right direction. Which, in this case, is to the left.” He pulls a small pack out of the kayak, slips it over his back. For the first time, I notice that Eli’s wearing a similar one. “You ready?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course.”
We set off again, and while Theo and Eli are still moving fast, they’re not setting the brutal pace of earlier. This tells me that Theo’s a little more comfortable with our odds of escaping, at least for now.
“So, are you going to let me in on your plan?” I ask him. I don’t like not knowing what’s going on, especially when it comes to my own safety. While I can totally appreciate everything Theo has risked to get us this far, I’m more than ready to start pulling my own weight.
“There’s not much more to it, to be honest,” Eli says. “We need to hike to a couple of miles away fro
m where we dropped the kayak, and then we’ll pick up Theo’s mom’s van.”
“How’d it get all the way over here?” I ask, but I already know.
“I drove it,” Eli confirms, “then hiked to the lake to find you.”
“Even though the plan called for you staying in the van,” Theo tells him darkly.
“Hey, I wasn’t going to let you have all the fun!”
Fun? We must have different definitions of the word because while this middle-of-the-night trek into hell is a lot of things, I wouldn’t call it “fun.”
“So you guys really planned all this out in the three hours since I saw you last?” I ask Eli.
“Yeah.”
He sounds like a little boy, totally pleased with himself, and I can’t help laughing. “You know, you’re really good at all this fugitive stuff.”
He laughs a little. “It’s not like this is my first time.”
I stumble over a raised tree root, bang into a nearby tree. I scrape my arm on the bark but barely notice. I’m too busy trying to wrap my head around what Eli just said.
But before I can think of anything to say, he laughs and says, “Relax, Pandora. I was just joking.”
My breath rushes out in one gigantic sigh. “Well, thank God. I was already imagining the headline for when the police found my dead, rotting corpse.”
“Oh yeah? And what would that be?”
Even though he can’t see me in the dark, I wave my hand in front of my face like the words are on the world’s largest banner. “Modern-Day Pandora Found Naked in Ditch After Unleashing Cyber-Armageddon.”
“Huh. That’s kind of catchy.”
“I thought so.”
We walk in silence for a while, and every step I take is an agony. Now that the adrenaline has worn off, I can feel my blisters again and they are killing me. Once this night—once this nightmare—is behind me, I swear I’m never wearing these boots again.
“Theo?” I say.
“Yeah?”
“How did you know?” I can’t help remembering that moment on the street when he decided to take off, demanding that Eli go with him.
“I’m a good guesser.”
I think about that for a second. “You knew they were going to arrest me, and you didn’t warn me?”
