Unable to find Connor, Trace speeds back to the main aisle, headed for the ComBom, ready to sound the alarm himself. He sees kids carrying weapons away from the arsenal, but they’re not moving nearly fast enough.
He’s so distracted, he nearly runs down Ashley, who’s standing right in his path. He screeches to a halt.
“Trace! There you are!”
“Where’s Connor? The Juvies are coming with a full takedown force.”
“We know, Hayden heard the chatter,” Ashley tells him. “Connor wants you to power up the escape jet.”
“He knows I’m back?”
“Of course—he saw you racing off to the supply jets in a panic.”
“It wasn’t panic,” Trace says, although he knows it was. “I’ll get the Dreamliner ready for flight. If we’re fast enough, we may not need to fight them. Tell Connor to start loading kids onto the plane.”
“Sure thing, Trace.” But she does no such thing. She watches Trace race to the Dreamliner and climb up the stairs. Then she goes to tell Starkey that her mission has been accomplished.
64 - Lev
The rifle shot explodes through the Graveyard gate, ringing in Lev’s ears. “Down!” he yells. “They’re shooting at us!”
But Miracolina is already down. Not just down, but crumpled. She lies lifelessly in the dirt by the side of the road.
“No!” He falls to his knees beside her, afraid to look, afraid to touch her. “Please, God! No!” This can’t be happening. Not again! Everyone Lev gets close to is either killed or maimed, and it can’t happen again! He prays for the impossible. He prays for it not to be true. . . .
Then he rolls Miracolina over to find there’s no gaping hole in her chest. But there is a small spot of blood on her shoulder. And the tiny flag of a tranq bullet. He doesn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified.
“Looks like you’ve got trouble from both sides, Lev,” says Nelson, somewhere in the dark behind him. “What to do . . . what to do?”
Then, from the gate, he hears a shaky voice say, “Stay away, whoever you are, or I’ll shoot again!”
But before the teen guard can even aim his rifle, Nelson fires a second tranq bullet out of the darkness and takes the guard down right through the fence.
“Enough of him,” Nelson says calmly. “Now, where were we?”
Lev still can’t see Nelson, but Nelson can clearly see him, because Lev hears the telltale pffft of a tranq being fired. It hits his pant leg, deflecting off a rivet in his jeans, and lands in the gravel beside him. Lev knows he has no defense against Nelson now, so thinking quickly, he grabs the dart, digs it into the fabric of his jeans, careful not to nick his skin, and collapses on top of Miracolina. He closes his eyes. He hears the second guard panicking by the fence, and hears Nelson’s footsteps approaching from the other direction on the gravel. Lev’s heart races like it might explode in his chest, but he holds still, playing possum for his life, and prays for a second miracle in as many minutes. He prays that Nelson will fall for his act.
65 - Nelson
He never went to Indian Echo Caverns. Nelson merely drove his van to a roadside café a few miles away, then monitored his laptop and waited for the tracking nanites in Lev and Miracolina’s blood to show movement away from the cabin. Then he followed. It was no accident that the bed frames were nearly rusted all the way through. Nelson had wanted them to escape. For a while he worried that Lev might be too stupid to figure out how to break free, but in the end the boy rose to the occasion.
Lev didn’t give away the location of Connor Lassiter that day, but Nelson heard enough to know that they were on their way to warn him about the big bad parts pirate. All Nelson had to do was give them a leash and let them lead the way.
Now that he knows Lassiter is at the defunct air force base, he has no use for these two anymore, but killing them would require too much disposal time. Besides, knowing Lev will wake up and have to live with the knowledge that he was responsible for Connor being unwound on the black market is a far sweeter revenge than the numb silence of death.
Nelson is not seriously concerned about the skittish AWOL still manning the gate. The first one fired wild, and he’s confident the second doesn’t really know how to wield a rifle with live ammo either. Most likely they were trained on tranq bullets, which have no kick and shoot lower. Nelson, who can use both, is well armed for this mission. In fact, he has a romantic notion that, for this capture, he will be like an old-fashioned gunslinger—his singular purpose reflected in a tour de force of firepower. He has three pistols at the ready and a semiautomatic rifle slung across his back. All but one pistol are loaded with fast-acting tranqs, which are far more effective than bullets. A bullet can graze a target, hit a limb—even inflict a body shot, and still the target can return fire. With a tranq, no matter where it hits, it takes a target out of the equation instantly. As for the live-ammo pistol, well, Nelson considers that his insurance policy.
He’s about to check Lev to make sure he made an accurate and effective hit, when the situation takes a drastic turn that no gunslinger could have predicted.
66 - Gate Guard
The one remaining kid at the gate has no idea what has taken his comrade down. Their job usually consists of giving directions to people who are lost, because no one comes to the Graveyard intentionally at night. Trace has put the fear of God into both of them, however, and now his friend is lying on the ground right in front of the gate, possibly dead.
He hurries to him, fully expecting to be killed on the way. Although he heard voices outside the gate, they’re silent now. No one shoots at him. And he’s relieved to find his friend still breathing.
The only warning he has is the sudden rev of an approaching engine. Then out of nowhere, a police battering ram, its headlights dark, crashes through with such speed that the gates fly off their hinges. He dives out of the way just in time, and when he looks back, he sees his unconscious friend turned to roadkill by the wheels of the battering ram. Flowing in behind the ram is a flood of Juvey squad cars and armored riot trucks, followed by the chilling sight of Unwind transport trucks—it’s just as Trace said. This is a full takedown force!
Only now that they’ve crashed the gate do their headlights come on, illuminating the desert before them, glinting off the planes in the distance. After the last transport truck passes through the gate, a brown van barrels through, following the Juvies, and then some kid races through the ruined gate, running after the van.