She motioned for me to crouch down behind one of the middle seats. As I pressed my knees against my chest, I realized that despite the fact that I had followed her order to the letter, she still hadn’t spoken a single word to me.
“What’s your name?” I asked. She draped herself over the top of the rear seat, her feet kicking at the air as she dug around for something in the back. If she heard me, she pretended not to.
“It’s all right; you can talk to me.…”
Her face was flushed when she reemerged, a paint-splattered white sheet in hand. She pressed a finger to her lips and I wisely shut my mouth. The girl shook out the folded fabric and threw it over my head. The smell of fake lemon cleaner and bleach assaulted my nostrils as the sheet settled around me. I opened my mouth to protest, reaching up to yank it away from my face, but something stopped me.
Someone was coming—no, more than one person. I caught snippets of their back-and-forth, heard their feet slap against the pavement. The sound of a door opening stopped my heart dead in my chest.
“—I swear to God it was her, Liam!” The voice was deep, but it didn’t sound like an adult. “And, look, I told you she’d beat us back. Suzume, did you run into trouble?”
The other car door opened. Someone else—Liam?—let out a relieved sigh.
“Thank God,” he said, with a hint of a Southern drawl. “Come on, come on, come on, get in. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to stay long enough to find out. The skip tracers were bad enough—”
“Why won’t you admit that it was her?” the other voice snapped.
“—because we ditched her in Ohio, that’s why—”
Above the sound of Liam’s voice and the blood pounding between my ears, I heard another voice.
“Ruby! Ruby!”
Cate.
I pressed both hands against my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut.
“What in the world?” the first voice said. “Is that what I think it is?”
The first gunshot popped like a firecracker. It might have been the distance, or the army of trees and undergrowth muffling it, but it seemed harmless. A warning. The next one had much sharper teeth.
“Stop!” I heard Cate scream. “Don’t shoot—!”
“LEE!”
“I know, I know!” The engine sputtered to life, and the squeal of the tires wasn’t far behind. “Zu, seat belt!”
I tried to brace myself, but the car tossed me back and forth between the seats. At one point, my head cracked back against the plastic side paneling and drink holder, but no one was paying attention to the strange noises in the backseat when someone was firing a gun.
I wondered if Rob had given the other rifle to Martin.
“Zu, did something happen in the gas station?” the voice identified as Liam pressed. There was an edge of urgency to his words, but not panic. We had been driving for over ten minutes and were well away from the guns. His other companion, however, was a completely different story.
“Oh my God, more skip tracers? What, were they having a freaking convention? You realize what would have happened if we’d been caught, don’t you?” he railed. “And they were shooting at us! Shooting! With a gun!”
Somewhere to the right of me, the little girl giggled.
“Well, I’m glad you find it funny!” the other one said. “Do you know what happens when you get shot, Suzume? The bullet rips through—”
“Chubs!” The other boy’s voice was sharp enough to cut off whatever gory tale he was about to share. “Settle down, okay? We’re fine. That was a little bit closer than I would have liked, but still. We’ll just have to try to make better mistakes tomorrow, right, Zu?”
The first voice let out a strangled groan.
“I’m sorry about before,” Liam said. His voice was gentle, which was enough for me to put together he was talking to the girl, not the guy who had moved on to moaning in dismay. “Next time I’ll go with you to get food. You’re not hurt, right?”
The vibrations from the road dulled their voices. A loose penny was clattering around so loudly in the drink holder that I almost reached up from under the sheet to grab it. When the first boy spoke again, I had to strain my ears to hear him. “Did it sound like they were looking for someone to you?”
“No, it sounded like they were shooting at us!”
Feeling left my hands, draining from the tips of my fingers.
You’re safe, I told myself. They’re kids, too.
Kids who had unwittingly put themselves in the line of fire for me.
I should have known this would happen. This, not my fear of setting off alone into a deserted town, should have been my first concern. But I had panicked, and it was like my brain had melted into a simmering pool of terror.
“—a number of things,” Liam was saying, “but let’s try to focus on finding East River—”
I needed to get out now. Right now. This had been a terrible idea, maybe even my worst. If I left now, they still had a chance of escaping Cate and Rob. I would still have a chance of escaping them, too.
I looped the straps of the backpack over my shoulders again and kicked the sheet off. Taking in a deep drag of the musty, cool air-conditioning, I used the rear seat to prop myself up.
Two teenage boys were in the front seat, facing the road. It was raining harder now; the fat drops were falling too fast for the windshield wipers to keep up with them, making it look as though we were headed straight into an Impressionist’s vision of West Virginia. Silver skies were above and a black road was below—and somewhere in between, the luminescent glow of the trees with their new spring coats.
Liam, our driver, was wearing a beat-up leather jacket, darker across the shoulders where the rain had soaked through. His hair was a light, ashy blond that stood on end when he ran a hand through it. Every now and then he would glance to the dark-skinned teen in the passenger seat, but it wasn’t until he cast a quick look into the rearview mirror that I saw his eyes were blue.
“I can’t see out of the back window when you—” His words choked off as he did a double take.
The minivan lurched to the right as he spun around in his seat and turned the wheel with him. The other kid let out a strangled noise as the car jerked to the right, toward the side of the road. The girl glanced back over her shoulder at me, her expression somewhere between surprise and exasperation.