Not if I Save You First

  Maddie dropped into a crooked curtsy, then took his arm. “Why yes, sir.”

  They didn’t talk. They didn’t laugh. They just walked toward the fanciest party in the country, arm in arm, like they weren’t ten years old at all.

  This time, they heard the three men before they saw them. The big cart made a squeaky, rattling noise as it rolled over the tile floor, and Maddie and Logan knew to move out of the way. Russians, it seemed, liked to take their half out of the middle, so she and Logan pressed against the wall, and Maddie felt the cool tile through the mesh fabric on the back of her dress.

  The men were shouting loud and fast in Russian, and Maddie didn’t understand a word. She just pressed close to Logan for reasons she didn’t know or understand.

  Two of the Russians seemed really young, probably in their twenties. They had short dark hair and expensive suits with ugly ties. One of them pointed to the doors that seemed a mile away and Maddie caught the flash of a tattoo on his wrist—a weird two-headed bird being eaten by a wolf.

  Her first thought was that she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want something that ugly on their skin for forever.

  Her second thought was that the muscles in Logan’s arm had gone suddenly tight. Her hand hurt as he bent his arm, squeezing her fingers in the bend of his elbow. But Logan didn’t even notice.

  When the men passed, Maddie felt a rush of air, like a breeze in their wake. But one of the men—the one with the tattoo—paused for just a moment. He looked right at Logan, recognizing him. Considering something. When the other men shouted he kept his eyes trained on Logan.

  Then he said something in Russian.

  And winked.

  But it wasn’t playful. It wasn’t teasing. And right then Maddie’s head knew what her gut had suspected since she first saw their ugly ties: These men weren’t Russian secret service. Maddie knew it in her bones, in her blood.

  So who were they?

  And why were they there?

  Suddenly, Maddie’s throat was tight; her heart was pounding.

  “Logan …” she started, but Maddie trailed off when she followed Logan’s gaze.

  The Russians were ten feet away and moving fast toward the doors to the loading dock, pushing the heavy cart that seemed heavier than when they’d pushed it in.

  If they were bringing in their delegation’s meals, wouldn’t the cart be lighter on the way out? Maddie wondered.

  And then she saw it: the piece of gauzy red fabric that protruded from beneath the container’s door, floating on the breeze.

  “Logan?” The word was practically a gasp.

  Maddie felt him moving, digging in his pocket as Maddie pulled away. She was starting to run toward them, to chase and follow …

  And bite.

  Maddie was an excellent biter.

  But Logan was grabbing her arm with one hand. In the other, he held the tiny button that he had to keep on him at all times.

  He pushed it, and for a second nothing happened. Then Maddie heard her father’s voice.

  “There you are!” Her dad was smiling, laughing. He was in his dark tux and his hair was still damp from his shower, and he was so handsome and tall and strong. And happy. Her father was happy.

  Then he stopped and brought one hand to his earpiece and everything changed.

  “What is it?” he asked Logan, who was trembling.

  They could still hear the rattling of the cart’s wheels as the Russians broke into a run.

  “My mom. They have—”

  Sirens were starting to blare and Maddie’s dad was already breaking away and drawing his weapon. Maddie had seen his gun a million times, but she’d never seen it like that before—like it was an extension of him, a far colder and deadlier limb.

  “You two. Hide!” her dad yelled as he started to run.

  And the Russians started to fire.

  Maddie knew what her father’s job was. In fact, it had been her grandfather’s job even before that. Turns out, she came from a long line of people who were made to run toward the shots—to step in front of the bullets.

  She’d just never really understood why.

  But then Logan’s mom was in a food cart and her dad was ducking behind a tall stack of water bottles wrapped in plastic, shooting the gun she’d never seen him fire.

  It all happened in a second.

  And it seemed to take a year.

  “Daddy!” Maddie screamed even though she knew not to distract him, to get in the way.

  “Maddie!” She felt Logan’s hand on her arm. She heard her name screaming from his lips. But her father was still running toward the gunmen, and something about that seemed so fundamentally wrong that, for a moment, she could only stand there. Waiting.

  All through the White House, sirens screamed. Logan’s panic button had a GPS tracker, so the rest of the Secret Service would be there soon, Maddie knew. They were probably already blocking the exits and barricading the gates.

  The president would be halfway to his underground bunker by now. But Maddie was still standing in that corridor, watching her father run. Fire. Fall.

  One of the Russians was down. Maddie could see him sprawled at the end of the hallway.

  Blood streaked across the floor, and Maddie couldn’t help herself.

  “Daddy!” she yelled again. She wanted to run to him, but Logan’s grip on her arm was too tight.

  Her new charm bracelet bit into her wrist as Logan pulled her into a doorway that offered a little cover, but not much. She should have been running, dragging the first son in the opposite direction—toward safety. But Maddie couldn’t take her gaze off her father.

  He was up again, limping forward and firing more. At the end of the corridor, a door opened. Bright light flooded the hall and there was shouting and running, more agents filing in from that direction.

  Behind her, Maddie heard the heavy tread of running feet. The cavalry was coming. The Russians were surrounded.

  But an animal is never more dangerous than when it’s trapped. One lone Russian remained. For a moment, he was just a dark shape silhouetted against the glare of the bright lights. He stood perfectly still as he raised his gun and leveled it at Maddie’s father.

  Then the man smiled and, as if pulled by a magnet, the gun moved, to point directly at where Maddie and Logan huddled together.

  The man shouted something in Russian—the words echoing off the hard floor and tile-covered walls. Maddie didn’t know what he’d said, but she knew what he meant:

  That it wasn’t over.

  That his cause was just.

  That, someday, all of civilization was going to know—and fear—his name.

  For a second, the world stood still, and then he pulled the trigger just as Maddie’s father jumped between the man and Logan.

  And fired.

  At first the Russian stood, mouth gaping, as if he couldn’t quite believe that someone would have the nerve to get in his way. To fire back. To go against whatever master plan had brought him to that place and time.

  But then he looked down at his chest, at the place where blood was starting to ooze from beneath his ugly tie, and he dropped to his knees. Then to the floor.

  He didn’t move again.

  “Rascal!” someone shouted, and Maddie could feel the world change as the rest of the Secret Service swarmed around them.

  “The first lady!”

  Maddie’s father’s voice sounded faint, like he was half asleep, and yet he was still dragging himself toward the box. Blood trailed behind him, and Maddie couldn’t be held back any longer.

  She pulled away from Logan just in time to hear Charlie yell, “Maddie, you and Rascal stay right there!”

  The agents were everywhere, a virtual wall between Maddie and Logan and the men who lay, not moving, on the floor, and Maddie knew Charlie wasn’t keeping the two of them from danger. He was trying to keep them from the blood and the death and the things no ten-year-old should ever see, but Maddie was already crawli
ng through the agents’ legs, pushing toward the place where her father lay, too still on the floor.

  There was so much blood.

  She was going to ruin her dress.

  But Maddie didn’t care, so she crawled faster. When one of the agents gripped her around the waist and tried to pull her back, she kicked harder.

  Two of the agents were pulling the first lady from the big steel box. She was limp and deathly pale, and everything was wrong.

  Everything was so, so wrong, and Maddie had to fix it.

  “Let me go!” she snapped at the men and women around her. “Let me—”

  “Mad Dog?” Logan’s voice was behind her, too soft and too faint—and that was why she turned.

  “I got something on my tux,” he said, looking down at the red spot that was on his white shirt and spreading quickly. “I promised I wouldn’t get dirty,” he said, then fell hard to the floor.

  Dear Logan,

  This is called a letter. It’s like an email but written on paper and sent through the regular mail (like bills). Your mom gave me this paper. Isn’t it pretty? It’s called stationery, and she said that I should use it to write to you since my dad says we have to leave.

  He doesn’t ever talk about why we have to leave. But we’re going just the same. Maybe it’s because ever since he got out of the hospital our phone keeps ringing. I don’t think he likes being a celebrity or whatever. The Man Who Saved the First Lady!

  Now he just wants to be the Man Who Doesn’t Have a Telephone because we’re not going to have one. Or a cell phone. Or Internet. Dad says he thinks it’s going to be good for me.

  I think it’s going to be lonely.

  But you can write me back, he says! We can write all the time.

  So … will you write me back?

  Your (best) friend,

  Maddie

  Turns out, the key to throwing a hatchet isn’t in the wrist, like everyone always says. Sure, it’s a little bit in the wrist. But it’s also in the shoulders. And the hips. But, most of all, it’s in the head, Madeleine Rose Manchester thought as she dug her second-favorite hatchet from the base of the big tree nearest to their cabin.

  She no longer practiced with her favorite hatchet. No. The grip on that one hadn’t been good for throwing ever since she’d bedazzled the handle last winter.

  Her dad might have been angry at her if he had even noticed that she’d done it. Which he hadn’t. For a man whose very survival had once depended upon noticing everything, he’d developed a nasty habit of not noticing anything in the past six years.

  Or maybe, Maddie thought, he just no longer noticed her.

  She dug the hatchet from the tree and moved back ten paces.

  Twenty.

  Thirty.

  She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with cool, damp air. The shadows were long and the forest was still and Maddie knew that winter was coming fast.

  She had wood to haul.

  A chain saw to sharpen.

  Someone needed to crawl on the roof and replace a couple of shingles, then reposition the solar panels that had been blown around by that big storm last week.

  She also had a mountain of schoolwork she’d have to send with her father the next time he took the plane to Juneau.

  Maybe she could get him to bring her thirty or forty more library books. They hadn’t gotten much snow for the past year or two, but the sun was going to go behind a cloud soon, and it wouldn’t come out again until Easter. When that happened, Maddie wanted to be ready.

  Maddie was always ready.

  She took a few more steps back, flipped the hatchet in her hand, drew back her arm.

  And threw.

  When the hatchet hit the tree, its blade sunk so deep into the wood that most girls couldn’t have even pulled it free. But Maddie was never going to be most girls, she remembered as she jerked the hatchet from the tree and thought about maybe trying it from farther away. Maybe with her left hand.

  But that was when she heard it—a hum in the distance, a mechanical whirling sound that broke through the stillness. Maddie turned and watched as the small red dot in the big blue sky grew larger and larger.

  When the dot touched down in the middle of the lake and floated toward the cabin, Maddie couldn’t help but remember another day. Another landing.

  Another world.

  “Dad’s home,” she said, but there was nothing but the wilderness to hear her.

  “Mad Dog!” Michael Manchester shouted from the plane as soon as he killed the engine.

  He was still a big man. Still strong. Even leaner somehow. In DC, Maddie’s father had spent hours boxing and running and lifting weights. He’d taught courses on self-defense and used to spar with the president himself, who had once been an Olympic athlete.

  But Maddie watched the man who leaped to the dock from the plane that sat on top of the water, bobbing on the rippling waves. He didn’t move like that man used to move.

  It could have had something to do with her father’s bad leg. Many would have credited the shoulder injury or the three surgeries that had followed it.

  But Maddie knew it was Alaska that had changed her father. In Maddie’s not-so-uneducated opinion, Alaska could change anyone.

  “Hey, kiddo! Did it rain while I was gone?”

  “Yes, it rained,” she told him. “It always rains.”

  “Good.” He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her tight against him. “I stink.”

  “I can tell.” Maddie tried to pull away, but her father laughed and pulled her tighter.

  “If the barrels are full, I’ll heat some water and take a bath. How are you, kiddo?”

  When they reached the porch of the small cabin, they both paused and pulled off their boots. It was a luxury, being able to do this outside. Soon it would be too cold, and Maddie wanted to keep the mud out of the house for as long as possible.

  Even though house wasn’t really the right word.

  She followed her father into a room that held a wood-burning stove and a rickety table with four chairs. There was a shower rod over an open doorway that led to the kitchen, heavy curtains that could make the room private whenever one of them wanted to pull the tub in from the back porch and heat some water on the stove.

  In DC, Maddie’s bathroom had been entirely hers, with a pink shower curtain and towels so soft that Maddie would never, ever use them for something like drying her hands. Here, she had a tub and a curtain and, if she was lucky, four barrels full of rain and not ice. It was like that other bathroom—that other life—was just a dream.

  The main room held a recliner and a couch and three electric lights that worked as long as the sun was shining in summer or the wind was blowing in winter. And Maddie was grateful for the light. Light meant reading. It used to mean writing. But that was a long time ago. Back when Maddie had someone to write to. But Maddie didn’t let herself think about that.

  “So how are you, kiddo?” her father asked again. He was unloading his backpack, pulling out a few of the supplies he’d promised to bring back.

  “Fine,” she said.

  It took a moment, but her father laughed.

  “What is it?” she asked, and he shook his head.

  “Nothing. It’s just … I guess it finally happened,” he said.

  “What?”

  When her father looked at her again, she couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad. “You ran out of words.” He started unloading library books, stacking them on their only table. “I knew you’d use them all up eventually, as fast as you went through them when you were a kid.”

  Maddie didn’t know why exactly, but something in that sentiment stung. “I’m still a kid.”

  “What was that, sweetheart?” he asked, turning to her.

  Maddie shook her head. “Nothing.”

  He looked like a man who knew better than to argue.

  He pulled a half dozen newspapers from his backpack and those landed on top of the pile of books. On the cover
of one, she saw a headline about the president, some trip he was taking overseas. She wondered briefly if her father was jealous of the men and women who’d be going with him. But, no; if her father had wanted that life, he could have had it.

  Maddie was the only one who’d never been given a choice.

  In the beginning, she used to ask her father why they’d left DC, when they’d return. At first the answers didn’t make any sense. (For example, Maddie seriously doubted that they had to leave because Miss America had fallen in love with her father and wasn’t going to rest until she became Maddie’s stepmother.)

  But then the answers stopped being crazy and started not coming at all, so Maddie didn’t bother asking anymore. This was their home. This was their life. And any life that came before was nothing more than a very elaborate dream.

  “Do you have any letters for me to take on my next run?” he asked. It was like he could read her mind sometimes, and when that happened Maddie was glad she lived in a small house in a huge forest. If the bears could read her mind, at least they had to keep their thoughts to themselves.

  “Do you bring me any letters?” she asked.

  Her father shook his head.

  “Then that’s your answer.”

  Dear Logan,

  Dad said we’d have a house.

  Dad LIED.

  It’s a cabin, he says, but it’s more like a shack. I have my own room, though. Well, technically, I have a little loft that he built in the main room. It’s just a mattress sitting on a platform and a little lamp. But there’s a curtain I can draw if I want privacy, and I have it to myself. At least I do when I’m not sharing it with the local wildlife. (Some people will tell you that squirrels are cute and cuddly. They are not. You can consider yourself warned!)

  I’m sorry I can’t reply to anything you’ve said in your letters, but they haven’t gotten here yet. They’re probably in the mail.

  I really hope they’re in the mail.

  Maddie

  Logan couldn’t hear the music. It simply pounded, beating in his skull until he wanted to scream. And maybe he would. It’s not like anyone would hear it. He highly doubted anyone would care.