Unbreakable (Unraveling) (13 page)

“What?”

“Before I left, I deleted all the files that referenced your world. Everything that Eric and I found out while we were there, all of the addresses and the names. I deleted everything.”

For a split second, I’m almost moved. I look at Barclay, kneeling just a few inches from me—this guy who’s the youngest agent in IA. He’s smart and determined, and he’s not above being a complete asshole to get his own way, not above doing whatever needs to be done in order to solve the case and make his superiors proud. And he deleted my file in order to protect me.

“There’s no written record of you.”

But there is, and as I realize that, I’m over my awe of him. There’s a hard copy, and they have it now. When Elijah and I escape from prison, they’re going to be able to use everything I care about against me. Jared and Struz. They’re not safe. How could I have not realized IA would come after my family if I did this?

Ben, the guy who brought me back to life—IA is after him. They threw him in prison, and when he escaped they grabbed his parents, his brother, and his best friend. They grabbed the people he cared about.

“Oh my God, we have to go back.” I struggle to get to my feet, but Barclay pulls me back down. I pull against him. “Barclay, my family—my brother!”

He pushes me against the ground and leans into me. “Listen to me.” I try to push him off me, but he’s too heavy. “Janelle, I took care of it!”

I relax for a second, and his hands come to rest on either side of my face. “I took care of it,” he says again, his forehead against mine.

I’m not sure if I believe him. “How?”

“The file is a fake,” he says. “Someone in IA, someone high up, doesn’t trust me. With good reason,” he adds darkly. “When I erased the files, I doctored them first, printed out a fake one to leave here, just in case, and then I deleted them all. So even if they recovered the information, it would be wrong.”

I nod against him, but he must not be convinced. “No one is going to find Struz or your brother. You might not think that much of my word, but I swear to you, on everything I’ve worked for, no one will ever find them.”

I take a minute to absorb that.
No one will ever find them
. There are thousands of universes out there and billions of people still on mine. But there’s nothing now—no record of me or my family or where we lived.

Thank God.

“Thank you,” I whisper, closing my eyes. This right here is the treason he was talking about. He erased IA files and destroyed evidence. This is what he could lose his life for. He couldn’t have done this
just
for me. His job and the IA are everything to him. I know it must be killing him that there are people high up who are dirty. I know what my dad thought about cops who were dirty—they were the worst kind of bad guys. Because they were supposed to be good guys and they changed teams for money.

But at the same time, sitting here in the corner of Barclay’s closet, leaning my forehead against his, his hands holding mine, I know he
did
do this for me.

I don’t even care if he did it as some kind of leverage to somehow get me to help him. It’s done now, and no one can undo it.

His thumbs sweep under my eyes, wiping the tears away.

“Are you okay?” he asks again.

I nod and open my eyes. And I realize how close together we are. Barclay is practically sitting on top of me, and our faces are touching. “Get off of me, will you?” I say, trying to ignore the fact that I can feel myself blushing. “Haven’t I been through enough today?”

“Whatever you say, Tenner,” he says as he stands up, and for a reason I can’t explain, I’m glad he’s back to using my last name.

I push myself off the floor, and because I need to acknowledge what he’s doing for me, I add, “We’re going to win.”

“You bet we are.” Barclay smiles, and for the first time the arrogance in his expression doesn’t bother me. “We’re going to take them down.”

He doesn’t say
we have to
.

He doesn’t need to.

“
W
e need to get out of here,” Barclay says when we make it out into the living room. The bedroom is messy. His drawers have been emptied onto the floor, and his things carelessly strewn about. But they did a number on the rest of his apartment.

The flat-screen TV is gone, the living-room lamp is overturned, and papers from Barclay’s desk are everywhere. The couches where Ben and I watched the collapse of my earth have been gutted and there’s stuffing everywhere. Something like Coke has spilled and splattered the rug with brown stains. In the kitchen, all of Barclay’s cabinets and drawers are open, their contents now shattered in a mix of glass and ceramic on the floor.

“Here, put these in your backpack,” he says, handing me the blueprints.

I fold them carefully and do as instructed. “I’m not exactly a fan of the need-to-know basis,” I call after him as he slips into the bathroom.

“If I were you, I’d say that’s shocking,” he says.

I just stare at him. “Where are we going?”

The bathroom door opens, and I look away as he tucks in his shirt and then buttons up his jeans. “Take this too,” he says, handing me a gun. It’s a 9mm, black and stainless steel, and just a few pounds in my hand. It looks a little like the HK that Deirdre carries, only instead it reads
HM USP
. It has a compensator on the end that makes the barrel longer, but I know from Deirdre that this is only a stylish way to weight the barrel, reduce the kickback, and make the gun more accurate.

My heart beats a little faster as I turn it over in my hands. This is a gun that means business.

“We’re going somewhere else to study the blueprints and crash for the night.”

He doesn’t have to say any more. He wants to get out of his apartment, sleep somewhere else tonight. I don’t blame him. I’m not anxious to stay here any longer than I have to, and I certainly don’t want to hang out here alone while he does whatever it is he’s got to do.

“Not a problem. Let’s go.”

I follow him to the door, but before we head out, he turns to me. “Same rules as on the way here. Keep your hood up and eyes down. Stay quiet and stay by my side.”

I pull my hood up and follow him through the hallway, down the elevator. But instead of getting off at the lobby, we go ten floors down to P10.

“Are we taking your car?” I ask. I don’t add that I think that might tip off some of the city cameras, but it’s on the tip of my tongue.

Barclay shakes his head as the elevator doors open to a very empty and dimly lit parking garage that smells like mildew and looks like it hasn’t seen use in at least five years. We exit into the alley at the back of the building. It doesn’t exactly have the red-light vibe of the alley we portaled into, but in a way it’s worse.

This is what anyone would call the slums. Graffiti-covered buildings seem to droop rather than stand. There are broken windows, collapsed doors, boxes piled awkwardly and adorned with thin blankets to make some kind of tentlike structure. We walk at a brisk pace, not fast enough to call attention to ourselves, but not slow, either.

The smell of burning rubber and cigarette smoke hangs in the air. It reminds me of old New York, from before Giuliani, when the city was covered in graffiti, drug needles, and worse. When the crime rate was the highest in the country and no one felt safe walking alone. It’s the New York from
Taxi Driver
.

It doesn’t take much for me to realize the glitzy buildings near Barclay’s apartment in New Prima are hiding a lot of the same problems that are a big deal in my world—poverty, drugs, organized crime. I’m surprised. I thought they were more advanced here, smarter somehow. If they’re policing the interverse, surely they should be able to create better lives for their own people.

W
e turn a corner and Barclay leads me down a set of stairs and into an underground subway that smells like urine and worse. I stick close to him even though there’s no one else on the platform with us.

When the downtown train comes, it’s only three cars that look like they should be out of commission. The windows are broken or just gone, and when we get inside, most of the seats are cracked, stained, or falling apart. I follow Barclay’s lead and sit down next to him on one of the cleaner seats. I’m already looking forward to a shower.

There’s one other guy in the car with us, slumped in a seat at the opposite corner. From the color of his skin and the smell, he’s either passed out or dead. I look at Barclay, about to ask if there’s anything we should do, but he shakes his head.

At the sixth stop, Barclay stands and nods his head toward the door. I get up, following him out, with one last glance at the guy we’re leaving behind. I might die tomorrow in an attempted prison break, but I still can’t help feeling like I’m better off.

We come aboveground into another alley that looks like it’s straight out of a movie where the naive girl gets off at the wrong subway stop and ends up dead. We’re facing the back of a line of abandoned row homes that look like they were boarded up years ago and forgotten about.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Home sweet home,” Barclay says.

I look around.

Barclay smirks. “I grew up here. This neighborhood is called the underground.”

“How come?”

He glances at me with a smile. “About thirty years ago, the city had a huge crime problem. They didn’t want to lose jobs and people to the suburbs, so they put in the monorail a hundred feet off the ground. Developers built up—higher buildings, better views, enclosed access to the monorail. If you have enough money, you can spend your whole life a hundred feet above everything.

“And if you don’t . . .” He shrugs and gestures around us. “You live in the underground.”

W
e’ve barely gone a block and a half when a siren goes off.

The screech of it is almost deafening.

But Barclay’s reaction is worse.

He grabs my arm, fingers biting into my skin, and his voice comes out low but urgent. Above him, I hear something that sounds like a helicopter in the distance. “I need you to run,” Barclay says.

And I do. We both take off, Barclay with his death grip still on my arm as he pulls me to keep up with him. I match him step for step, running at full speed, my lungs and muscles burning from the strain, as the sirens wail and spotlights flood the alleyways around us.

I don’t know what I’m running from—what
we’re
running from—but I can guess. Either someone has seen us, which is unlikely, or someone has reported something else. It doesn’t matter, though—if we’re caught by law enforcement, we’ll be turned over to IA and we’re as good as dead.

But I’ll be damned if we’re going to get caught by accident. Not when so many people need us.

We take a left, then a right, and then two more lefts in a row. We run behind a building and across a lawn. I’m concentrating so hard on keeping up with Barclay that I can’t be sure at all where we’re going. I’m just hoping we can get somewhere before I collapse from exhaustion.

When we’re about to turn down an alley, Barclay grabs me and pulls me against him, and we crouch behind a Dumpster. A split second later, a floodlight shines down on the alley in front of us. We’re still surrounded by the darkness, but only an inch or two separates us from the light.

I scrunch my knees closer to my body, and my chest heaves as I try to catch my breath, to rest while I have the chance. I count the seconds as the light moves up the alley and then back toward us. Next to me, Barclay’s breaths are as heavy as mine, and he’s close enough that I can feel the pumping of his heart through the warmth of his skin.

Barclay leans into my ear, his lips tickling my skin. “There’s a diner with good coffee two streets over,” he says, and I manage to hear him despite the continued wailing of the sirens and the motor of the helicopter.

W
e wait almost fifteen more seconds, then the spotlight moves on. Barclay darts up and runs down the alley. I follow on his heels.

When we make it into the diner, we slow down like two normal people. There’s a handful of patrons inside. None of them look over when we come in. As the door jingles shut, I’ve never been so happy to be inside a crumbling diner in a shady part of town. Barclay heads up to the counter to order and I hang back.

Standing still, with the sirens muffled, all I can feel is my pulse pounding through my body. I’ve never run from the cops before, not even because a party got busted up or anything. It’s not exactly something I want to ever experience again.

But I can’t help feeling like this is what I have to look forward to.

It makes me wonder where Ben is, what he’s doing right now, if he’s running constantly, if he’s hiding in the shadows, breathing quietly and looking over his shoulder to make sure that no one’s behind him.

I think of how we held each other the night Elijah got shot—the night it rained and Ben came to my house with blood on his clothes. The world might have been ending, but it didn’t feel that bad because we had each other. It doesn’t feel right that this time we’re alone. It almost makes me mad, not at Ben, but just . . . mad at the world. Ben, my dad, Alex—it isn’t fair how much I miss them or that they’ve left me here to carry this burden alone.

Dizziness makes me sway. If I don’t sit down soon, my legs are going to give out.

“That was good,” Barclay says as we slide into a booth to sit and wait. “I didn’t think you’d be able to keep up,” he says, gesturing outside.

“I’m pretty fast, for a girl.” I ignore the way the sweat is cooling on my skin.

He smiles, and I laugh a little, though I don’t know how I’m able to. The adrenaline running through my body makes me feel light and a little giddy now that I don’t need it.

It’s not like we’re out of danger—I know that—but for the moment we’re safe.

“No, I’m serious, Tenner,” Barclay says. He’s stone-faced, his skin shiny with sweat, his eyes ocean blue. But it’s his voice that makes me shiver. It sounds like truth. “You’re good at this.”