Gone (Gone 1)

They walked—Little Pete could seldom be induced to run—across the backyard. The natural wood fence was fairly low, but still it was exhausting and time-consuming getting Little Pete to scale it. They ran through the neighbor’s backyard.

“Stay off the streets,” she told herself.

They went as far as they could, backyard to backyard, then dodged into the street when their way was blocked, and then back to yards and alleyways again.

They saw no one. But there was no way to know if they were being watched.

They reached the hill that marked the edge of town and the beginning of the Clifftop grounds. They scrambled up through shrubbery clinging to sand. Astrid pulled Little Pete along, desperate to move quickly, but afraid to do anything to set him off.

Clifftop had not changed. The barrier was still there. The lobby was still clean, still bright, still empty.

Astrid had the electronic key they’d made on that first night. She found the suite, opened the door, and collapsed inside onto the bed.

She lay there, panting, staring up at the blank ceiling. The bed was soft. The air-conditioning hummed.

She could explain away the words Drake had put in her mouth. They were meaningless words. Just words. Little Pete didn’t care.

But she could not explain away the fear. It shamed her.

She put a cold hand to her face, to see if it really was as hot as it was in her imagination.

“Where are we going, Sam?” Quinn asked anxiously. They were moving at an easy lope, not an all-out run, but a jog they could sustain.

Sam was leading them straight through town, straight through the plaza, as if indifferent to pursuit.

“We’re going to find Astrid before Drake does,” Sam said.

“Let’s go check her house.”

“No. The good thing about a genius is, you don’t have to wonder if she’s doing the stupid thing. She’ll know she has to get out of her house.”

“Where would she go?”

Sam thought for a moment. “Power plant.”

“The power plant?”

“Yeah. So we’re going to grab a boat and head up the coast.”

“Okay. But, brah…I mean, dude, shouldn’t we be a little more sneaky instead of just running right through town?”

Sam didn’t answer him. Part of the reason he was going in a straight line rather than being sneaky was that he hoped to pick up Edilio at the fire station. The other was that he needed to know whether Quinn would betray him the first chance he got.

And there was a matter of tactics that Sam understood intuitively: Caine had more power, so Sam would need more speed. The longer he let the game go on, the more likely it was that Caine would win.

They reached the fire station. Edilio was sitting in the cab of the fire engine with the engine running. He spotted Sam and Quinn and leaned out of the window. “Good timing, man, I’m going to try it out, take it on a…” He fell silent when he saw Sam’s blood-streaked face.

“Edilio. Come on. We have to go.”

“Okay, man, just let me get—”

“No. I mean right now. Drake’s looking for Astrid. He’s going to kill her.”

Edilio jumped down from the fire engine. “Where to?”

“The marina. We’re going to take a boat. I think Astrid will head for the power plant.”

The three of them jogged toward the marina. Sam knew that Orc and Howard were up at the school with Caine. Drake was on his way to Astrid’s house. That would leave a few thugs still roaming loose, but Sam wasn’t too worried about any of them.