“What?”
His lips looked redder, wetter. My pulse thumped against my ribs.
“It’s written all over your face.” He pushed a lock of hair out of my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I never said you were.” But my voice came out an uncertain whisper.
His hand went to my waist as his eyes met mine. His fingers found bare flesh beneath the hem of my T-shirt. Every nerve ending in my body thrummed in response.
“Sam,” I said, though I couldn’t pull together the rest of what I wanted to say, all the things I should have said.
He leaned in and brushed his lips against mine, feather-light at first, then more eager. My heart thundered as he exhaled, like he’d been holding the air in his lungs for far too long.
My hands walked up his biceps as his fingers threaded through my hair, sending ribbons of heat down to my skull. He pressed into me as if he couldn’t get close enough, and I pressed back. Because I wasn’t close enough. Because I’d spent the last several years of my life wishing I could be closer.
As his hands slid up, mine slid down, exploring the swell of muscle in his sides. I slipped my hands beneath his shirt and a voice in my head said, No, slow down, what are you doing? And every part of me ignored it.
His body felt fevered beneath my touch, and when his mouth found mine again, I leaned back into the wall, unsure of my ability to stay upright.
If he wanted to, I was ready to do anything. Anything. And as my mind opened to the possibilities, he pulled back.
“Anna,” he said. His voice was hoarse but firm.
The way he looked down at me, his fingers still pressed against my cheeks, I knew what he was thinking without him saying it.
We shouldn’t.
And maybe he was right. But I still wanted so much more of him.
I slid away, tugging down the hem of my shirt and smoothing it with a shaky sweep of my hand. I tried not to look at the sliver of hard stomach still exposed under his hitched-up shirt, but failed. If I couldn’t touch him with my hands, I wanted to touch him with my eyes and never let go.
“Anna,” he said again, but nothing else came out and I thought maybe, for once, he was the one at a loss for words.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, my tone sharper than I meant it to be.
I didn’t wait for a reply. I hurried from the living room, from the fire, from Sam. The cold snuck back in, crawling up my arms.
What was I thinking?
I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking, and that was the problem. If I’d learned anything about Sam in the years I’d known him, it was that he calculated everything he said and did.
And that kiss… that wasn’t in the plan.
I just wanted to retreat to my room, lock myself inside till dawn. But when I was halfway up the stairs, Sura came barreling down, eyes wide, hair wild and unbraided.
“Grab your stuff,” she said. “Connor found you.”
27
SAM HOISTED HIMSELF UP AND OVER the banister, landing on the stair above me. He drove Sura into the wall and pressed the barrel of his gun under her chin, forcing her head back.
“Did you bring him?” he asked.
Sura tried to shake her head, but Sam held her firmly in place. “No. I swear it. I am on your side, Sam.”
“Then how do you know Connor is coming?”
She swallowed. “I just got word from one of my contacts. I called to ask for help.”
“Who is this contact?”
“No one you know.”
A bead of sweat rolled down Sam’s temple. “How long do we have?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Shit.” He put the gun away and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to rouse the others. One of them was probably outside somewhere, on watch, but I didn’t know which one.
Sura and I locked eyes. “I didn’t set you up,” she said. “I would never.”
“I want to believe you….”
She came down a step. “It doesn’t matter. Listen. There’s something else my contact told me. Something about you.”
I backed into the banister. “Me?”
Her hair hung in thick waves over her shoulders. “What’s your earliest memory?”
Nick darted across the landing on the second floor. Somewhere upstairs a door banged open.
“Anna! Think.”
I refocused. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Where did you live before the lab? Before you knew the boys?”
Cas sailed past us on the stairs. That meant Trev was the one outside.
“In town. In an apartment.” I started up the stairs. “I have stuff to grab. I should—”
Her hand circled my forearm. “Was it an upstairs or downstairs apartment?”
“Upstairs.”
“What color was your room?”
“I have to go!” I shook out of her grasp.
“They’re false, Anna!”
I froze.
“Your memories. If you sit and think about them, you’ll realize you don’t actually know what color your room was. Or where you ate breakfast.”
Uncertainty cemented me in place. “I know the color of my old room.”
“Then what was it?”
A dog barked outside. Sura’s dog?
“It was…” I tried to picture the room in the apartment. Where the bed was. The closet. What color were the walls? Purple. Weren’t they?
The dog yelped. I heard a bag thunk against the landing above me.
“Anna,” Sam called. “Move it!”
“When I left the Branch,” Sura said in a rush, “they were testing a new way of wiping memories and planting false ones. I think that’s what they—”
A window shattered in the living room and blood sprayed across the front of me. Sura pitched forward, taking me down with her. I hit the hard edge of the stairs and felt the unnatural crunch of muscle against bone.
“Sura?” I gave her a shake, but she didn’t respond.
When I pushed her away, her wide-open eyes stared back at me, unblinking. Unseeing. There was a gaping bullet hole in her forehead, and I doubled over, retching.
Someone grabbed me beneath the arms. Dragged. Lifted. Hauled me to my feet. The blood had soaked into my shirt. Blood and other things. Meaty things. I screeched and swiped at the mess, trying to erase it. Get it off.
Cas swung into the stairwell as the front door exploded in a burst of splinters. Another gun went off and Cas dropped to his knees.
Sam pulled me back as I shouted down the stairwell, “Get up! Cas! Get up!”
Another bullet hit him in the shoulder, and he toppled back down the few stairs he’d made it up. Men barged into the cabin, gas masks concealing their faces. Another window shattered and a black cylinder whumped to the floor, hissing as it let out a cloud of gas. Behind me, Nick shouted.
“Cas!” My voice was lost in the sound of pounding footsteps. I fought against Sam’s arms, wrapped around my waist. Cas lay on the floor, blood leaking from his wounds, eating away at the white of his shirt. His eyes closed.
Sam carried me into my bedroom. Nick was already there, a bag slung over his shoulder. He opened the window. The wind caught the curtains and they ghosted out. Sam pushed the dresser in front of the door, while someone banged on it from the other side. What if it was Cas? And where was Trev?
Nick jerked me toward the window. “Out,” he said, and I scrambled onto the roof. The gritty shingles dug into my hands and the wind bit at my exposed arms.
“We can’t leave Cas,” I protested.
Nick climbed out behind me. Sam came next. Staying low, they steered me forward, to the edge of the roof. We peeked over. An agent stood between the cabin and the garage. Sam pointed to him and Nick nodded. What does that mean? I wanted to ask.
Sam rose to a crouching position and jumped off the roof. I gasped. Nick clamped his hand over my mouth, catching the sound before it fully escaped. He pressed his lips a
gainst my ear. “If you don’t keep your goddamn mouth shut, we’re all dead.”
I forced a nod and he let me go. We both looked down to where the agent lay sprawled in the dirt. Sam motioned us down.
He wanted me to jump? No. No. I couldn’t jump. It was two stories. I backed away.
“He’ll catch you,” Nick whispered.
“I can’t.”
His flame-blue eyes narrowed. “Fine. Don’t scream.” He placed his hand on my back and gave me a shove. I staggered over the edge, arms pinwheeling, hair whipping in my face. The sky blurred around me, and then I was in Sam’s arms and he was swinging me to my feet.
Nick came down with a graceful, almost silent thud as a second agent rounded the corner of the house. Nick attacked with a knee to the gut and an elbow to the back of the head. The man collapsed. Another agent appeared. Nick distracted him as Sam moved in from the other side and snapped the man’s neck with a quick twist of his hands.
My stomach churned.
Go, Nick mouthed.
“Outside! Outside!” someone yelled.
We ran through the woods, disappearing in the dark and the twist of trees. It didn’t take long for my lungs to burn, for my legs to cramp. Sam wasn’t even breathing heavily.
I tripped on uneven ground and staggered forward.
Nick caught me. Sam looked over his shoulder and asked, “Can you keep going?”
I sucked in a breath, trying to catch up. No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even breathe. “Yeah… I’m… okay.”
The land descended the farther we went. I could just make out the line of the road, the barren stretch of dirt cutting through the woods. Sweat gathered at the small of my back. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep up this pace. Probably not long enough.
Headlights swung out of the driveway and Sam stopped running. Nick pulled me down to a crouch. Whoever was behind the wheel punched the gas and the back end fishtailed.
“Sam!” someone shouted.
“That’s Trev,” I said.
We cut across the woods to the road as Trev stomped on the brakes, the SUV swinging sideways. “Get in!”
A shot rang out. The bullet hit the back door a foot away from my hand, the metal folding in like a sinkhole. I stared at it, at the closeness of it.
“Anna!” Sam said.
The sound of his voice broke my trance and I ripped the door open, scurrying inside as Trev shifted into drive.
“Shut off the headlights,” Sam ordered. Trev did as asked and the lights cut out, the night swallowing us.
I stuck my head between my knees, sucking in air, and along with it the stale smell of an old fast-food bag that lay crumpled on the floorboard.
Cas had been shot. Shot. Was he dead? Sura was. She was truly dead this time. My shirt still felt hot with her blood. The material stuck to my chest.
Had she betrayed us? Her last warning rang through my head. My memories. My memories weren’t real. Had Sam overheard our conversation? Nick? No; if he had, he’d have already turned against me. He couldn’t find out.
“How did you escape?” Sam asked Trev.
Nick slid closer to me, putting himself in the middle of the bench seat so he could better see Trev and Sam in the front.
Trev messed with the radio. “I was taking Sura’s dog for a walk when I literally ran into an agent. We fought”—he pointed at his eye, the lid swollen and bruising—“but clearly I won. So I went to the truck and tore out of there. I saw you guys running from the house, but I lost you when you hit the woods.”
I sat up, watching Sam over the rise of Nick’s broad shoulder. Sam clenched his fist, then relaxed it, then clenched it again, the tendons dancing in the half light of the dashboard. “How many were there?”
“Fifteen, give or take.”
“Did you see Riley or Connor?”
“Riley’s there. I didn’t see Connor.”
Sam propped an elbow on the center compartment, running a hand over his chin, the stubble rasping.
“What are you thinking?” Nick said.
Sam closed his eyes, the dark fan of his lashes resting against his cheeks. He looked so worn out. “Maybe they held back to flush us out.” He opened his eyes. “That way, Riley can follow us to Port Cadia and retrieve whatever it is I left behind. Maybe that was the plan all along.”
“You mean”—I twisted in my seat—“they deliberately allowed you to escape the lab? Is that what you’re getting at?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“No way. Think about it. If that was the plan, Connor and Riley wouldn’t have been there to begin with. They wouldn’t have risked themselves.”
“Anna’s right,” Nick said, surprising me. He gave me a look. “Well, it makes sense. We were never supposed to escape, and now that we have, they know the information Sam stole is at risk of being found. This is them scrambling to prevent more damage.”
Trev set the radio on a classic-rock station. If Cas were there, he would have demanded a pop-hits channel. I felt the loss of him suddenly and acutely. He’d been so close to escaping. Maybe if I had helped him…
I put my face in my hands and tried to force the image of Cas lying on the floor, blood pouring from his wounds, out of my head.
Please don’t be dead, I thought. Please.
“Are we headed to Port Cadia then?” Trev asked.
“Yes,” Sam said, “as fast as we can. Before they catch up with us.”
28
“GET UP.” I OPENED MY EYES. SAM leaned in through the door of the SUV. His hand lay gently on my shoulder. Exhaustion still held me in its grip, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open as I righted myself on the bench seat, arching my back to stretch my sore muscles. I’d never before used my body in such a brutally real way, and it was starting to catch up to me. I felt like a pretzel, knots included.
I had no idea what time it was, but it was still dark, so I couldn’t have been out for too long. “Where are we?”
“Port Cadia. I got us a room.”
Behind us, an orange motel sign buzzed, but the street was dead and quiet. It was such an anticlimactic arrival. We’d been pushing to reach this place for what felt like forever, and now we were here, and there wasn’t anything to see. And Cas was gone. I closed my eyes again, thinking that if I hoped hard enough, maybe it wouldn’t be true.
“We’ll get him back.” Sam tried to sound positive, but his voice echoed my distress.
“They shot him.”
“Cas is strong.” He held the SUV door for me as I slipped out, shivering in the cold. He forced me to look at him with a nudge of his thumb. “We’ll get him back,” he said again. “I promise.”
All I could do was nod.
Trev, still in the driver’s seat, cleared his throat. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.” To me he said, “We’re going to the gas station to fill up. You need anything?”
“No, thanks.”
The boys pulled away and I followed Sam down the motel’s open breezeway, passing brown metal doors with the room numbers tacked above the peepholes. Sam stopped at room 214 and wiggled the key into the lock. The door opened with a pop. He flicked on the light and I squinted, still too tired to see clearly.
I dropped into the chair at the table, slouching, arms crossed over my chest. I missed my jacket. I missed Cas. I missed Dad and the farmhouse. I missed being normal.
Sam sat across from me and dug a few sheets of loose paper from his pocket—the clues he’d left himself. We still didn’t know the answers to those mysteries. We had no idea where we were going or what we were looking for.
I lay my head on the backs of my hands on the table, too exhausted to even think about it anymore.
“What did Sura say to you? On the stairs?”
I jolted upright and met Sam’s eyes. He regarded me with open sympathy. I swallowed. “Did you hear any of it?”
“Enough to be interested.”
So I told him everything. I wanted to get it out
before Nick came back and formed his own opinion. I still didn’t know how I felt about it.
I vividly remembered a sketch I’d done not too long ago, of a girl in a snow-covered forest, pieces of her separating and dissipating. Was it my subconscious, trying to tell me something?
“What if I am a Branch tool?” I said once I’d finished. “What if you can’t trust me? What if…” There were too many what ifs to list them all.
I bowed my head. My hair swung forward in a curtain. “This doesn’t even feel real anymore.”
Sam ducked his head to better see my face. “I trust you. You got it?”
“Okay.” The pressure in my chest lessened. “Thank you. Really.”
“We need to figure out what I stole from the Branch. Maybe some of your answers will be in there.” He disappeared into the bathroom and came out a minute later, shirtless. My eyes went to the R scar on his chest, then down to the hard planes of his stomach.
“Can you look over the tattoo again?” he asked. I had to drag my eyes up to meet his. “If you see anything unusual, tell me.”
“Sure.” I climbed on the bed from the opposite side as he sat on the edge, waiting. I scooted up behind him. I started at the trees’ leaves, checking the veins, counting the clusters, looking for any sort of symbolism.
Finding nothing, I moved to the bark, examining the fine lines. On the third tree to the right, a line in the bark caught my eye. I stifled a yawn. I was exhausted and not seeing clearly, so whatever it was wasn’t immediately evident.
I got in closer. Something definitely seemed out of place. I ran a finger over Sam’s skin. He felt warm to the touch, warmer than he should have been in the cold room without a shirt.
“Did you find something?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
He got up from the bed and dug around inside the drawer of the bedside table. He found a pad of paper with the motel logo on it and a pencil and handed them to me. “Can you redraw it?”
I nodded and he settled back on the bed. My knees were sore from my sitting on them for so long, so I unfolded myself, keeping one leg up and putting the other alongside Sam’s. Being so close to him sent my heart skittering, and I wondered if he felt it, too.
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