Run For Cover (11 page)

EVA GRAY
enjoys reading, cooking, and camping. Though she doesn’t expect to need them in the near future, Eva keeps lots of extra batteries for her flashlight and a stock of canned food in her pantry.

What will happen tomorrow?
Read on for a preview of
Tomorrow Girls #3: With the Enemy.

We divide up the food evenly and start eating. I put a berry in my mouth and bite down and it explodes with a burst of tart juice on my tongue. I eat another as I peel off the green skin of one of the nuts and edge the tip of my CMS-issued knife in the crack to pry it open. It takes work but the nut inside is crunchy with a taste somewhere between an almond and a peanut.

Maybe it’s because I’m starving but I think these are probably the best nuts and berries I have ever eaten in my life, possibly the best ones in the world. For five minutes the only noise in the snack bar is the sound of shells cracking open.

Until Louisa says, “I wish they’d taken me, too.” She puts down her knife and pushes away the rest of her nuts. I’m sitting next to her so I can hear the trembling in her voice.

“Who?” I ask, setting down my knife and turning toward her.

“The people in the — what did Helen and Troy call it — Rover. The people who took Maddie.” She looks around at all of us and there are tears in the corners of her eyes. I slide off my stool and give her a hug.

“I hate thinking of her there alone,” she says into my shoulder. “Why did they only take
her
?”

My throat feels like it’s closing up.

Louisa pulls away from me but keeps hold of my wrist as she repeats, “Why?”

I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t tell them.

“Maybe because she’s the smallest,” Ryan says after a moment.

“That would make her the easiest to control,” Alonso confirms. “That makes sense.”

“And to feed,” Rosie points out. She brushes the shells from her hands and touches Louisa lightly on the arm.

“Seriously, what if they’d taken Ryan?” Alonso puts in then. “They’d waste all their ransom money on food.”

Louisa relaxes the hold on my wrist and gives a little smile and says, “I guess.”

Drew sits up straighter. “The truth is, we might not know why. But at least now we have some idea of who took her, and where. Right, Evelyn?”

I discover I’ve been holding my breath. “Right,” I say. “We have something to go from.”

Disaster is averted. Eating recommences. Boys are strange but at this moment I am really glad they’re here.

We are filling Alonso and Ryan in on what Helen and Troy told us when there’s a tapping on the boards over one of the windows.

Followed by a low moaning.

Instinctively, we all turn off our flashlights. What you can’t see you can’t shoot.

“That’s just wind,” Rosie says, but next to me I feel her tense. My heart starts to beat faster and my palms get clammy.

Something thuds on the roof of the building, and there’s a sound like feet skittering over it.

“What’s that?” I whisper to Rosie in the dark, my heart racing.

“Tree branches?” she whispers back, not sounding completely sure.

That’s when a voice outside demands, “Who?”

I jump to my feet, panting. “That is not the wind, that is someone —”

“Who
who,”
the voice calls again. An owl. It’s an owl.

Everyone else starts to laugh but it takes some time for the “All clear, just nature” message to get from my brain to my heart, which continues running a race in my chest. Our flashlights click back on.

Drew pulls himself to his feet. “Look, I’m feeling much better. This place is creepy and I think we should keep moving.”

The speed with which everyone else leaps up and starts shoving things in their packs shows how much they agree.

We skirt the edge of the pavement toward a driveway Ryan and Alonso saw before which we’re pretty sure must lead to the highway. It’s long past 7:30 — which means long past curfew — but since it’s night we decide to risk walking on the road, where we’ll make better time. The chance of there being anyone driving on it, with the current price of gas, is remote, and even if there were someone, we’d hear their engine or see their lights long before they could see us in the dark.

Drew and Louisa lead the way, with Ryan and Alonso behind them. Rosie hangs back to walk next to me.

“Do you really think Maddie is in that place that Helen and Troy came from?” she asks.

“It sounds like she was picked up by the same people, and the tire tracks headed to Chicago,” I say. The temperature has dropped and our breath is making little clouds in the air. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” Rosie kicks a stone from the road. “I thought Helen was mostly talking to stall until Alonso and Ryan came back with the food once you pointed out we didn’t have any.”

My fingers tighten around the straps of my backpack. “I shouldn’t have done that. I was just worried they were going to hurt you.”

Rosie pats me on the arm. “Believe me, I’m not complaining. You handled that great.”

“Really?” I say. I instantly feel a thousand times better.

“Yeah.” But then she purses her lips. “Although I do think it’s funny that you can talk down two crazy hostage takers and save my life, but you’re afraid of an owl.”

“I didn’t know it was an owl!” I object. “Besides, you were scared, too.”

“Nuh-uh,” Rosie says.

“Uh-huh,” I reply.

“Do I need to separate you two?” Alonso turns around to ask. “I thought I heard my name and I wanted to let you know it’s okay if you want to tell me how handsome and brave and quietly brilliant I am to my face — you don’t have to do it behind my back.”

“Same goes for me,” Ryan says. “Although my brilliance isn’t quiet.”

“Duly noted,” Rosie says, gesturing for them to return to their own conversation. She rolls her eyes at their backs, then says to me, “Assuming the school is real, how do we find it?”

“Even though Helen was lying, I have the sense that they told us more than they meant to.” I try to think of how to explain what I mean. “When Troy talked about the Phoenix, that all seemed completely real.”

“Helen said he made it all up,” Rosie points out.

“Which practically guarantees that it’s true,” I say. I am starting to get excited. “Do you know that feeling where you’re close to uncovering an answer or solving a problem but you can’t quite touch it?”

Rosie nods slowly. “I do. Remember when we were in that prison camp, the one we broke into?”

I give her my most innocence-filled look. “No, I’m afraid I have totally forgotten about the time when we broke into a prison camp. What was it, two days ago?”

She makes a face at me. “I’m serious. When we were there I — I felt like I was close to finding my sister, Wren. Like maybe if I stayed I could figure out what happened to her after Ivan betrayed her, where she ended up. Is that the same?”

“No,” I say. “That’s much worse.” And then it hits me just how bad. I turn toward her. “You gave up that chance to save the rest of us.”

She shrugs, not meeting my eyes. “What choice did I have? You would never have gotten anywhere without me.” Her tone is light but I can tell it hurts. “Of course, maybe you would have been better off. Maybe then Maddie would still be here.”

I stop walking and pull on her pack until she stops, too, and turns to face me. “You have to cut that out,” I tell her. “There was nothing you could have done to keep Maddie from being kidnapped. Whoever took her knew who she was and knew what they were doing. The only thing that could have gone differently was that you could have gotten hurt. Is that what you want?”

She stares at me wide-eyed and I realize everyone else has stopped in the middle of the road and is staring at me, too. Silence falls hard and heavy.

“She’s right,” Louisa says, coming to stand next to Rosie. “There was nothing you could do.”

“Maddie wouldn’t want you to beat yourself up,” I point out.

Rosie flips her hand in the air, brushing this aside. “People always say that.”

That makes me angry — I am not
people
— and maybe that’s why I say, “In this case it happens to be true. Maddie wouldn’t want you to be throwing a pity party for yourself because you lost her the same way you lost Wren.” I hear Rosie’s sharp intake of breath but I don’t stop. “She would want you to focus on what needs to happen next, not what happened before. She’d want you, the strongest leader in our group, to help find her. And if we can find Maddie, we can find your sister.”

Rosie’s jaw is tight and she takes three breaths before she says, “Do you really think so? Do you really think that’s true?”

“I do,” I say. If I’m not going to mention that I think Maddie might be (as good as) dead, there’s no reason to mention I have no idea how to find Wren.

Copyright © 2011 by Tui T. Sutherland
Cover art by Alan Brooks
Cover Designed by Yaffa Jaskoll
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First printing, July 2011

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