“Armed and dangerous,” he said, thinking primarily of the wolves he was sure were watching him from the shadows beyond the tree line. He held his Tablet, which was in its palm size, in his free hand and began walking, following Faith’s GPS marker on the screen.
As he made his way through the trees, a thought crossed his mind: if he was to use the shotgun to protect himself, it might be heard a long way off, maybe as far away as the prison. And if that happened, well, who knew? Maybe they’d think it was one of the outsiders, just a random hunter trying to feed his family. But more likely he’d be giving away the fact that someone was up in the forest looking down at the prison.
He picked up his pace. If he could get to wherever Faith was, she could protect him from almost anything. It was slightly demoralizing, no doubt about it. Wasn’t it the guy who was supposed to protect the girl? Well, he concluded, the world is upside down. Who knows what’s normal anymore?
When he reached the halfway point—the place where the GPS marker for Clooger was just as far away as the one for Faith, he thought it was the right time to let Faith know he was coming out there to find her. He pressed his sound ring and used his small voice, just to make sure Clooger stayed asleep.
“Hey, Faith? It’s me. It’s Hawk. Look, I know you were angling for some alone time or whatever, but Clooger’s snoring the doors off, and I really wanted to talk to you about this Gretchen thing. I’m heading your way. Looks like, ummm . . . looks like about five more minutes. Stay put.”
Faith couldn’t tell Hawk to turn around and go back to the HumGee because Wade was standing right in front of her. The only way Hawk would hear what she was saying was if she pressed her sound ring. And she sure couldn’t have Hawk suddenly appear, walking down the side of a mountain totally unprotected. Wade might kill him on sight.
“I’m glad you came back,” Wade said. He knew she’d deceived him, knew she was possibly trouble. But he couldn’t help it. His heart wasn’t listening to his head. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
Faith put her hands in her back pockets nervously.
“Well, I did. What’s new with you?”
Wade laughed and shook his head. “Oh, the usual. You know, picking up train cars, stuff like that.”
Faith figured she had two minutes tops before Hawk would be close enough to be seen or heard. That was assuming he wasn’t running.
“I haven’t flown in days,” Faith said. “You know, don’t want to be detected or anything. I miss it.”
Wade moved in closer and felt his pulse quicken. “I have a transponder. They know it’s me out here. As far as they’re concerned, I’m just doing some recon. No big deal.”
He put an arm on her waist, wrapped it all the way around, and pulled her close. He was taller than Dylan, so his hand rested not on her hip, but against her ribs. For some reason this sent an electric charge through Faith as her body responded to his touch.
They lifted off the ground, not like two ghosts, but two rockets, shooting a hundred feet up into the sky. Faith felt the power of Wade’s forearms, the incredible force of his strength, and couldn’t help wrapping her arms around him. He turned abruptly sideways and blasted through the sky. The farther they went, the fewer lights there were below, until there was nothing but darkness, a sea of empty space without stars or life.
“That should do it,” he said.
“That should do what?” asked Faith. She was lying on her back in the air, staring up into his face. He was on top of her, weightless as he looked into her eyes.
“They can’t track me this far out,” Wade said. “Once in a while I tell the night watch guys to let me go.”
His eyes followed the curve of her face down to her lips. He touched the side of her cheek, wanting to tilt her face toward his.
Hawk was in Faith’s ear—Where are you going? Faith? Hello?
“Why are we up here?” asked Faith, tuning out the voice in her head.
Wade looked into her blue-green eyes, felt her softening.
“So no one can find us. We can be alone up here, just you and me and the stars and the moon.”
Faith rolled slightly to the side, as if they were on a bed together, floating through time and space. She pulled in close.
“It’s so high up. And a little cold, don’t you think?”
God, how he wanted her, more than anything in his entire, overstructured life. For years he’d been told what to do for every hour of every day. The prison had only made things worse. He was being smothered alive by Gretchen and Clara and Andre.
“Wouldn’t it be something if we just flew away and never came back?” Wade asked, moving back on top of her and pulling her gently through the air, farther away from the prison. “Wherever it takes us, just go and see where it leads. The two of us.”
“Wade, I—”
He kissed her, their cold lips touching in the chill air. He felt the warmth of her breath and wrapped his arms tighter around her. He remembered then what a fool he’d been at Old Park Hill. How soft her lips were against his own, how she’d felt in his arms. Wade wished he could hold this moment forever, drift into eternity holding Faith aloft in his arms.
“That, my friend, was an alarmingly good kiss,” Faith said, breathless when he pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Tell me something?”
“Anything.”
“Why do you want to leave so badly? What’s going on that makes you hate it so much you’d leave everything behind without a second thought?”
“For starters my mom is the control freak to end all control freaks. And my sister is impossible. She has to be right about everything, she has to win one hundred percent of the time.”
“Yeah, but I mean, what are they planning? You must not agree with it or you’d want to stay, right?”
Wade was starting to feel a devious chill of emotion in the air. He knew the difference between girls who were enamored of him for real and those who were faking it for their own gain. He’d seen plenty of both over the years.
“Why does anyone want to leave the family they grow up in?” Wade asked. “You don’t agree with their ideas. They drive you crazy with all their bullshit. It’s a lot of reasons.”
Faith smiled winsomely, but there was something in the look that felt to Wade that she was, maybe, putting on an act. It was hard to say.
“My parents wanted me to join their cause and become a drifter. But it wasn’t my fight, you know? They weren’t my plans, for my future. Same thing for you?”
“Why do you keep asking me the same question in a different way?” Wade asked.
“What do you mean?” Faith asked. “I’m interested in why you want to leave. I’m trying to understand.”
Wade kissed her again, and this time he could tell she was having a harder time keeping up the ruse. She wasn’t coaxing him closer, showing him that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Either he’d turned her off with his defensive attitude, or she’d been trying to trick him into giving away their plans from the start.
When he pulled back, Faith wiped her bottom lip with the back of her hand. “You okay?”
Wade let Faith go, pushing a few feet away into the night, and for a strange and unexpected instant Faith wished he would keep holding on to her. There was, at least in the unseen places of her heart, a space that felt vulnerable and liked the protection of another person. It wasn’t Wade—or was it? It was the fact of another human being, the warmth of another body in a world so cold.
While Faith was navigating a tricky situation with Wade high overhead, the stupidity of Hawk’s decision magnified in his brain. It grew from the size of a pea to a watermelon that threatened to burst his head open. He was an Intel, one of the brightest people on Earth, and he had done a wildly stupid thing. For a moment he didn’t move at all. He simply stood in the woods and listened to the sounds of the night, hoping not to hear growling of one kind or another. He knew about cougars and had done the calculations. There were at least a dozen in these woods
, give or take, and they were quiet as mice. If one of them was stalking Hawk, he wouldn’t know it until it was way, way too late.
Hawk weighed his options, which included climbing a tree, screaming Clooger’s name into his sound ring, or begging Faith to come back. He chose none of these options. Later, when he had real time to consider what had happened, he would unpack the decision in his mind, take it apart, try to examine it for clues to his decision-making process. He would come to understand that sometimes even an Intel succumbs to the mortal fear of being clawed to death by a giant cat.
Hawk pointed the sawed-off shotgun up the mountain and started running.
It wasn’t until he was almost all the way back to the HumGee that he realized how incredibly out of breath he was. He’d never been an athlete of any kind, and the cold air burned his lungs as he gulped breath after icy breath. He stopped, bent over with his elbows on his knees, and tried to regain his composure.
It was then he saw something coming toward him. He’d watched a lot of Tablet shows lately, and he was especially fond of retro classics—it was his thing. Freaks and Geeks, Family Guy, 30 Rock—anything off-kilter and funny from fifty-year-old television provided him with some sort of unexpected comfort he’d needed. Very recently he’d stumbled onto a documentary about a Sasquatch, a half man half ape of the woods that stood about ten feet tall.
As he rose up and saw the outline of a beast coming toward him in the nearly pitch-black of the night, Hawk raised the sawed-off shotgun and pulled the trigger. The blast threw him backward, and he tumbled down the gentle slope of the forest, hoping his aim had been true and not straight up into the trees as he feared.
He heard a scream, then the sound of something heavy hitting the ground.
Hawk didn’t move, choosing instead to play dead and hope that whatever was out there would leave him to rot with the fallen leaves. That was when his sound ring popped to life and a familiar voice entered his head.
“Hawk?” Clooger asked.
Hawk silently reached for his ear, pressed, whispered.
“Get out here, buddy! I’m in some trouble!”
“Hawk,” Clooger said again. “You’re a terrible shot. But you still got me.”
Hawk was too happy about the fact that he was no longer alone in the forest to care that he’d shot Clooger in the face with a sawed-off shotgun. He stood and ran up the hill in the direction of the large shadow of a man sitting on the ground. When he got there, he threw his arms around Clooger and laughed.
“Oh, man, that was—wow—that was crazy!”
“Hawk?”
“I thought you were a Sasquatch!” Hawk laughed at his own ridiculous imagination. “Oh, my God, that was insane. Insane!”
Clooger stood up and took Hawk by the arm, hauling him up the mountain toward the HumGee. The shotgun blast had echoed through the trees, and Clooger had to get them hidden in case anyone showed up. When he had them both safely under the camouflage of the tarp and inside the HumGee, he cranked on a light and looked at Hawk.
“I think I got you in the forehead,” Hawk said. “And right there.”
Hawk pointed to Clooger’s cheek, which had a nasty bruise forming around a red dot. There were two other such marks on Clooger’s forehead, one of which was bleeding.
“Really sorry about that,” Hawk said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“This is why I don’t take naps. Faith goes totally AWOL, and you shoot me.”
“Yeah, I can see why you’d think twice about the whole sleep thing. It’s risky. For sure.”
Clooger rolled his eyes, pressed his sound ring.
“Faith, if you can hear me, check in.”
No reply.
“What now?” Hawk asked.
Clooger leaned back on the seat, took a deep breath, and touched the abrasions on his forehead.
“Now we wait.”
“I need to ask you something,” Wade said. He and Faith had landed on the catwalk of an old water tower a few miles away from the prison, where they sat staring out into the empty space below. Second pulses felt the cold less than a normal person, but it was still a little chilly. Winter was coming; the nights were getting colder. He turned in Faith’s direction, but she wouldn’t look back. He loved the way her long hair fluttered in the light breeze and reached out and touched it. He wished things could be different.
“Are you alone out here?” Wade asked.
Faith hesitated, but only for a split second.
“You already asked me that, remember?”
“I remember.”
He let the words hang in the air and watched Faith’s feet dangle back and forth beneath them.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you’d lied to me before, and you actually did bring someone with you,” Wade said. He was still searching for a reason to believe, because landing firmly in Clara’s camp put a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he’d just bitten into an unpeeled orange. “I mean, it’s the middle of nowhere. You’d have to be head over heels for some guy to come all the way out here by yourself. It’s dangerous.”
Faith knew Clooger and Hawk wouldn’t stand a chance against Wade if she told him the truth. They might not make it through the night alive. She turned to Wade, touched his hand gently.
“I came out here for Dylan, but now I’m not so sure.”
Something about the way she said these words did more than just put Wade on alert. A red froth of jealously boiled up through his head. She was bald-faced lying to him, and not just about Hawk and Clooger. She was using her charm and beauty to deceive him even further. She was a so-so actor, especially when it came to matters of the heart.
“I need to tell you something,” Wade said. He’d made his decision. There was no way he was letting Faith do this to him. She’d had her chance, and there were plenty of other fish in the sea. Pretty soon the work would be done, and he could get as many girls as he wanted. He was Wade Quinn. He’d never had any trouble scoring. “Things are going to start happening soon,” he said.
“What kind of things?” Faith asked. She moved in a little closer, squeezed Wade’s hand a little tighter.
“Keep an eye on Gretchen,” Wade said, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “What she does tomorrow will matter.”
“What do you mean? Is she leaving?”
A long pause, and then Wade was looking her in the eye. “We all are.”
Faith wanted to ask if they’d be taking Dylan with them, but she worried it would set off Wade.
“I’ve never told anyone this before, and I sure as hell shouldn’t be telling you,” Wade said. He hemmed and hawed, as if a great internal struggle was under way. “She hates you, Faith. Gretchen really, really hates you. If for some reason you end up face-to-face with her, I want you to at least get in one good shot before it’s over.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You’re a single pulse. Is what it is. If you get into a situation with Gretchen or any other second pulse, you’re pretty much a rag doll. There’s no firepower you can wield that makes any difference, except one.”
Wade gave Faith one more look, in which he tried to see all the way into her soul. Was there any chance she loved him? Any chance at all he wasn’t playing the fool?
No. No chance.
It’s true, Wade thought. She’s taking you for a ride, bro.
“You know how Dylan has a weakness for rocks and stones, stuff like that?”
Faith hated how the Quinns knew Dylan’s weakness, but they knew. There was no getting around it.
“Yeah, I know. It can break through his second pulse.”
“I’m only telling you this so you can use it to get away if it comes up, nothing more. If things get crazy with Gretchen, throw water in her face and run like hell. It’s your only chance.”
This was verification. Dylan had said it, now Wade. Gretchen’s second-pulse weakness was water. It was all she could do not to pick up the very water tower they sat
on, carry it over the prison, and unleash a torrent of liquid to flood Gretchen’s dead body into the field outside.
“Thank you for telling me that,” Faith said, regaining her composure.
“No problem,” Wade said. “Gretchen could use a bump or two once in a while, not that you’re going to have the chance. You see her and you’re alone, just run, fly, do whatever you can to get away. Speaking of which, I better get back. They’ll be wondering where I went.”
Faith was relieved. She wouldn’t have to stay at the water tower and make out with someone she didn’t want anything to do with—up in the sky had been enough. Whatever the team needed and all that, no problem. She had done it gladly, but there had to be some limits.
As they flew near the prison, their hands parted and Wade drifted away.
“One more thing,” Wade called back. The last part of the trap to set, then it was just a matter of whether Faith would take the bait. “Gretchen is going to the Western State. That’s where her task lies, and it’s hers alone. She won’t be with anyone else.”
He also knew how headstrong Faith was, so he said something more as he turned to go. “This isn’t your fight. Go on home, and maybe when this is all over with, I’ll come find you.”
Faith nodded and smiled and dived for the ground.
Not my fight? That’s where you’re wrong, Wade Quinn.
After hearing the sound of footsteps coming toward him, Dylan looked up and found Andre standing at the bars, carrying a wooden stool. He put the stool on the floor with a clang and sat down, staring at Dylan. A moment of silence passed between them in which Dylan thought maybe he had been caught. What would this man do, his own father, if he knew his son had deceived him?