I did it again. And again. Then I fished out letters to build words he might recognize: L U M B E R. N A I L S. W I N D O W.
“Huh,” he said.
I wrote out his name, my name, and Becca’s name. I wrote out CELL and UNITED.
“Huh,” he said. I handed him the pen.
“You practice,” I said. “Sound out words. Practice writing the letters. Copy down words you don’t know.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding more enthusiastic. Maybe he was much smarter than he realized. I left him to it and started to wade through this bizarre collection.
MCDONALD’S FRENCH FRIES, I typed into the log. The small white box was flattened and oil-stained. There was no way to tell what year it was from, or where. Or who McDonald was.
I found a small plastic rectangle with BANK OF AMERICA written on it, and a name: MIKAYLAH WISDOM. There was a string of embossed numbers and EXP: 10/22. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I logged it, plus hundreds of other items. I hoped it would be dinnertime soon. Would someone come get us? My stomach rumbled. Tired of sitting at the desk, I got up and wandered around. He had covered many boxes with writing and he was now looking at an old street sign.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Ped Xing. What’s a ped? What’s an Xing?”
“‘Ped’ is short for ‘pedestrian,’” I explained. “And the X stands for ‘cross.’ So this sign means ‘pedestrian crossing.’”
He frowned. “Like they were trying to trick people.”
“They’re trying to save space on the sign,” I said. He looked like he wanted to argue about it, so I pointed to a block of color nearby. “Hey, what’s that?”
It was a suitcase covered in pink flowers. He popped the lock and I felt a tingle of excitement. The first thing I saw was a green journal labeled SECRET! KEEP OUT!
26
BECCA
“EVERYONE CLEAR ON THEIR ROLE?” I whispered into my comm. I got a chorus of yeahs and uh-huhs and rogers. “Watches synced? Okay, I’m going to count to five. Move on FIVE—not four and not six, got it?”
They assured me that they got it.
“One, two, three, four, FIVE!” I said, and Nate, Bunny, Mills, Jolie, Levi, and I each popped up from our hiding places like groundhogs.
Pying! Pying! Pying! Pying! Almost as quickly, the sniper shot at us. On cue we all dropped down again. More bullets sprayed the buildings around us, splintering wood, breaking windows, making signs swing precariously.
Lying flat on the café’s tile floor, I looked over at Nate. Of all of us, he hadn’t been trying to dodge bullets. He’d been watching and listening, seeing who’d been shot at first, where the bullets landed the quickest, and a bunch of other nitpicky details I’d never be able to pay attention to in a gunfight.
Nate crawled over to the patch of dirt where we’d sketched out his plan. He pointed his stick to one of the buildings not on the main street, but on the next street over.
“This is the only place he can be,” Nate said. “It’s a church with a steeple. I bet he’s up in the bell tower. It’s the only place that makes sense.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “We need to defuse him.”
“We could—” Nate started, but I held up my hand.
“Let me think.”
If our sniper was in the bell tower, and he probably was, then he was well protected. It would be almost impossible to get a shot at him unless we were almost as high. Our other option was to lure him out somehow…
I hit my comm. “Who wants to set something on fire?”
27
NATE LOOKED AT ME ANGRILY. “That?
?s what I was going to say ten minutes ago! Burn down the bell tower! Jeez!”