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We appreciate your cooperation with this action. Because of the major threat this poses to public health and national security, it is of utmost importance that all citizens comply. Financial compensation will be granted for any help rendered in fulfillment of this request.
Aubrey’s hands began to shake before she got to the bottom of the letter. Finally, she looked up at Jack. “Financial compensation?”
“There’s a bounty on you—on us both. That’s why we kept seeing those roadblocks. Lance and Ian—they were trying to get reward money. ”
She ran to the front door. For the first time in her life she hoped her dad was sitting on the front porch smoking. She twisted the knob, then peered outside.
Darkness. No one was there.
Not even her dad.
A blazing light filled her eyes. For an instant she felt Jack’s hand on her arm, pulling her back, but she disappeared, slipping out of his grip. She stumbled through the trailer, blindly forcing herself to the back door. Before she got there a foot kicked it in.
“Aubrey!”
It was Jack’s voice but she couldn’t see anything. Her vision was blurry, trails of the brilliant-white floodlights seared into her eyes.
Something flew through the window in a spray of glass.
She screamed. Jack was yelling. He couldn’t hear her while she was invisible.
The room began to fill with a glowing white light.
Jack bumped into her and knocked her down without knowing he’d done it.
She couldn’t breathe.
Her eyes stung and she wiped at them wildly as tears flowed down her face.
Was the trailer on fire? She couldn’t get any air.
Jack wasn’t yelling for her anymore. She couldn’t see him.
This was her fault. He had wanted to turn himself in.
She reappeared, sucked in a draft of burning air. “Jack!” she called out.
In a moment he was there, grabbing her hand, pulling her from the trailer, away from the bright, stinging smoke.
He twisted her arm behind her back, and the two of them stumbled down the stairs to where she landed, face down in the dirt.
He grabbed her other hand.
She could barely open her swollen eyes.
“Aubrey,” a choking voice said.
She cracked one bleary eye. Jack was beside her, pinned to the ground, his arms bound behind his back.
She felt the tug of cuffs being tightened on her wrists.
“Stay here,” Jack said.
Every impulse in her urged Aubrey to disappear, to slip away from the soldiers and run. But it was too much. She was handcuffed. Her dad had turned her in—sold his own daughter out for beer money.
And as tough as she was—or pretended to be—there was something in Jack’s insistence that he stay with her that she’d liked. They would have been on the run together. A friend who wasn’t using her.
She’d stay.
NINE
DAN WAS STILL CRAWLING OUT of the car as Laura hurried to the edge of the cliff, excited about Alec’s unexpected new goal. She peered over the rim of the canyon, into what looked like a black river of darkness. “It says here,” Alec said, shining a flashlight on a plaque next to the rest stop parking lot, “that they named it Eagle Canyon because pioneers thought it was so deep not even an eagle could fly out of it. ”
Laura looked down again, at the pitch-black bottom, and at the enormous steel beams that held up the short bridge.
It wasn’t a big target. No one was guarding it, which made it even more perfect. She guessed that most of the people who drove over this bridge never realized they were crossing such a deep gorge. It was maybe eighty yards wide, in a stretch of canyon country called the San Rafael Swell. Interstate 70 swerved and climbed through the rugged terrain, and even Laura hadn’t noticed the bridge when she passed over it. Alec had to point out the turnoff.
“There are two bridges,” Alec said to Dan, who still looked exhausted. “The eastbound and westbound are separate, maybe forty feet between them. The plaque says the rocks are limestone and sandstone. ”
Dan stood up and stretched. “Now you’re talking. ”
Laura climbed over the edge of the cliff, testing the strength of the notoriously grainy and brittle rock. She slipped her hand into a fissure and clenched a fist, creating an ironlike anchor point.
This was what she loved: using her strength for something real. She’d spent the last month doing nothing but hauling an exhausted Dan over her shoulder like a rag doll. Her parts of the plans were never any fun.
Alec didn’t help. He thought she was stupid, just because she was the lowest-ranking member of the group. She wasn’t even the youngest—she was nineteen, only three months younger than Alec—but he treated her like she was a little kid, like she didn’t know how to do anything.
She leapt sideways, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, and caught another outcrop of stone. She wished she wasn’t wearing shoes—they only slowed her down. Her feet and toes were just as tough and unbreakable as the rest of her.
“Can you climb from here?” Alec asked impatiently.
“Sure,” she said, leaping again to the side and catching herself deftly. She couldn’t even see her landing spot clearly—it was just a craggy outline in the darkness—but she knew she could grab hold of it. It was like a playground, like a circus high-wire act.
“You look like an orangutan,” Dan said, a smile in his voice.
Laura laughed, and swung with one arm, leaping up to where the boys stood.
“You done?” Alec said, the snide frown on his face illuminated only by moonlight.
“We can climb down here easy,” she said. “Lots of hand holds. Dan, are you strong enough to hang on?”
He held up his wrists. There was a rope tied between them. “Alec already helped out with that. ”
Laura smiled. Alec probably thought it was ingenious. He thought everything he did was brilliant.
“Try to just crack the supports,” Alec said. “Leave it on a hair trigger for the next eighteen-wheeler that drives over it. ”
Dan nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. ”
He put his arms, tied together at the wrists, over Laura’s head. He’d ride on her back all the way down the cliff.
“Dan,” Alec said, his tone more serious. “For your mother and mine. ”
“Yeah,” Dan answered quietly.
With that, Laura hunched over, lifting Dan off the ground so she could move freely. He smelled of sweat, but she probably did too. They’d been on the run for hours, and sitting in an old car.
She stepped down to a ledge.
“Try not to choke me,” she said, and leapt toward another rock.
TEN
JACK SAT BESIDE AUBREY, BUT neither of them talked. Two soldiers were behind them in the bus, and Jack was sure he didn’t have to warn Aubrey to be quiet about her—was it invisibility? She was an expert at keeping secrets. At lying.
The two of them had cooperated at her dad’s trailer. They’d given their names and ages, and her dad had confirmed them—with a constant request for extra financial compensation. The man had tried everything: claimed that Aubrey’s job was his only source of income; claimed that she helped him with his handyman jobs around the trailer park; claimed that he was disabled and needed her to help him around the house.