“We, uh, still haven’t exactly figured out how we’re going to get you out,” Dante said. Nadia was glad he wasn’t rising to Nate’s bait and was keeping focused on the problem at hand.
Nadia chewed on her lip. There was no way she was getting out the front entrance, not with the little guard station they had there. She doubted even the Chairman Heir had the authority to order them to let her go—only her parents or the Chairman himself could do that. The fence was electrified, so there would be no fence-climbing as there had been at Tranquility—even if Nadia thought she had the upper body strength required to get over a fence.
“The watchtowers,” she murmured under her breath, visualizing the retreat’s grounds with the towers set into the fence. The towers themselves wouldn’t be electrified, and Nadia doubted there was more than one guard manning each one.
“Huh?” Dante asked.
“They’re the weak spot,” she explained. “I can get over the fence by jumping from a watchtower.”
“Umm, aren’t there people in those watchtowers?” Nate asked.
“My guess is that there’s a single guard in each,” Nadia said, reaching into her pocket and fingering the canister of knockout gas. “I’ve got some handy supplies thanks to the people who tried to kill me, so I ought to be able to get into one of the towers and subdue the guard. Then I’ll just have to jump down and hope I don’t break my legs.” She hadn’t ever gotten an up-close view of the towers and wasn’t sure how high they were, but out with broken legs would be better than inside in one piece.
“Meet me at the second tower from the right of the entrance, and make sure no one sees the car driving up.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Despite everything, Nadia couldn’t help smiling just a little, imagining the looks on their faces when they heard her, a sixteen-year-old gently bred Executive girl, claiming she was going to take out an armed guard all on her own.
“It won’t be as hard as you think,” she assured them. “I’ve got a key card and some knockout gas. And these aren’t prison guards braced for trouble. I doubt any of them has seen any action ever, so they won’t be prepared to deal with me.”
Still silence.
“Unless you have a better idea…?”
Someone—or maybe multiple someones—let out a heavy, frustrated sigh that she took for a no.
“All right, then. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She crossed the fingers of her free hand, knowing there were about a thousand things that could go wrong, no matter how easy she had made her escape plan sound.
“Be careful,” Dante said, as if there were any doubt that she would.
“You too. And thanks for coming for me.” Her throat tightened with grateful tears, but as with everything else, she didn’t have time for them right now.
Bracing herself for another plunge into danger, she hung up the phone.
* * *
Nadia exited the building onto the back porch where people had gathered for the funeral. Unlike at Tranquility, there were no discreet little lights marking the edges of the walking paths here. During the day, there was a clear view from the porch straight to the fence, though it was at least a quarter mile away. At this time of night, however, there was nothing but an intimidating pool of darkness out there. The fence itself and the watchtowers were well lighted, but getting there would require a nerve-jangling run in the dark.
There was no sign of the moon or the stars, which Nadia took to mean it was overcast. The air had a wintry bite to it, and she could see her breath steaming. Spring took its own sweet time to visit upstate, and Nadia shivered with a combination of cold and nerves as she took off across the lawns. The overcast sky would work to her advantage, she told herself even as she stumbled over the decorative rock edging of one of the paths. It might make for a stubbed toe here and there, but it was far less likely anyone would see her as she ran toward the tower.
Nadia forced herself to slow down when she approached the band of light that stretched out from the watchtower. She stood still under the protection of the darkness and took stock of the situation.
The tower was narrow and circular, a utilitarian concrete cylinder with a glass-enclosed control room at the top. As she’d expected, there was a single guard stationed in the control room, sitting on a tall stool and facing out over the fence. But he wasn’t actually looking out, or even looking at the feed from the security cameras on the various screens built into the console; his attention focused instead on something he held in his lap. From his jerky, urgent movements and the occasional flashes of colored light, Nadia guessed he was playing some kind of game on his handheld.
He was exactly as alert as Nadia had hoped he would be. She watched for a minute or two and saw that he spared the console a brief glance every once in a while. Nadia couldn’t see the images on the console, but she was pretty sure the cameras were pointing outward, designed to find people trying to sneak close enough to get forbidden photographs of the Executive residents.
Getting her key card and the canister of knockout gas ready, Nadia sprinted toward the tower, her whole body tense with nerves when she stepped into the light. She half expected lights to start flashing and sirens to start blaring, but nothing happened, and the only thing she could hear over the pounding of her heart was the thump of her feet hitting the turf.
She made it to the base of the tower without being seen. Sure enough, there was a card reader at the base of the tower by the door. Nadia cursed in a way that would make her mother cringe when she tried Lily’s card and it didn’t work. Apparently, the security crew had their own access cards.
So much for that plan.
But Nadia had to get into the tower. It was her only hope of escape, and she was painfully aware of every agonizingly slow second that passed by. Surely Lily and Athena were awake by now, probably had been for a while, and were making noise in an effort to attract attention. Though come to think of it, they’d be pretty hard-pressed to come up with an explanation for what had happened, so maybe they weren’t in such a great hurry to raise the alarm after all.
Reminding herself for the millionth time that the man in the tower was a night watchman, not a trained, paranoid prison guard, Nadia took a gamble and pounded on the door with her fist.
“Help!” she cried. “Open up! Help!” She let out a muffled sob that sounded forced to her own ears, but that she hoped sounded real to the guard.
An elongated man-shaped shadow formed on the grass behind her as the guard stood up and stepped to the window to investigate, but he couldn’t see her where she stood in the protection of the doorway.
“Help!” she cried again, and gave the door another pound for good measure.
“Who’s there?” the guard called out. “What’s wrong?”
Nadia just sobbed and gasped, making as if she were so panicked she couldn’t even talk. If the guard called for backup, she was in big trouble, but she was gambling it wouldn’t even occur to him.
He called out again, but she kept making incoherent sobbing sounds. Sure enough, she soon heard the clank of shoes hitting metal stairs as the guard came down to investigate. She readied the canister of knockout gas.
The moment the door opened, she stuck her foot in the gap to stop it from closing and discharged the knockout gas straight into the guard’s face.
He had about two seconds to register surprise before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed. He was too heavy for Nadia to move, so she merely stepped over him to get inside. Because another weapon couldn’t hurt, she relieved the unconscious man of his sidearm before she sprang for the stairs. She held her breath to avoid accidentally breathing in any gas until she made it to the top.
The windows around the control center allowed the room to be climate controlled, which Nadia supposed was only reasonable, considering how fierce the winters could be. But it didn’t make sense to station an armed guard behind windows if he couldn’t open them to shoot, so she fiddled a
round with the center panel until she found a catch and popped it open. She swung her legs out and sat on the ledge, looking down. She was definitely up higher than she’d like to jump from, maybe ten feet or so, but she didn’t have a choice.
Ahead of her, just outside the reach of the lights, shadows moved in the darkness. Thinking that she was quite literally making a leap of faith, Nadia jumped.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
About half a mile shy of the Sanctuary, Dante pulled the car into the parking lot of a small grocery store that was closed for the night. He parked around back by the delivery entrance so that no one driving by would see the car. Not that there was any traffic out in the middle of nowhere at this time of night, but you couldn’t be too careful.
According to the map on Dante’s handheld, if they forged ahead on foot through the woods behind the store, they would eventually emerge right near the Sanctuary. It was still chilly at this time of year upstate, and the woods looked relatively easy to navigate with most of the undergrowth still dormant. Even so, the moment they stepped out of the car, Nate realized they had a couple of problems, both centered around Agnes’s opera finery. For one, she had on high heels that would make it impossible for her to even walk through the woods, much less run. For another, since she hadn’t been planning on an excursion outside, she hadn’t even brought the gossamer, ineffectual wrap she’d worn into the theater. If Nate felt the cold through his tux, she had to be freezing in her strapless gown.
“I think you’ll have to wait with the car,” he told her as she crossed her arms over her chest and shivered. “You’ll never get through the woods in those shoes.”
She looked down at her feet as if startled to find she was wearing heels. “Damn,” she said, her breath feathering in the cold air.
“We can’t leave her here alone,” Dante protested, eying Agnes with suspicion.
“Oh, come on!” Agnes said with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “What do you think I’m going to do? Steal your getaway car? You have the keys, and you have my phone battery.”
Dante ignored her and focused on Nate. “You should stay here with her.”
Nate laughed with no humor. “Yeah, right. Not gonna happen.”
“She could run off the moment we have our backs turned,” Dante argued. “Just because she doesn’t have a working phone on her doesn’t mean she can’t find one. No offense, Miss Belinski, but I still don’t get why you’re ‘helping’ us, so I’m not about to take any chances.”
“I’m not helping you,” Agnes said with disdain. “I’m helping Nadia. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’m already in this up to my neck by now. Plenty of people saw me leave the theater with Nathaniel—willingly. Once they figure out what he’s up to, they’ll know I was an accomplice. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but it’s not going to be anything good.”
Her eyes shimmered with tears. It was a rare Executive girl who couldn’t conjure up crocodile tears in an attempt to get her way, but even so, Nate believed her. In the heat of the moment when she’d insisted on helping him, and even when she’d refused to allow them to lock her in the trunk, Agnes might not have fully comprehended what the consequences of her actions would be. But she’d had more than four hours to think things through, and she was not stupid. It was far too late to change her mind now, and she knew it.
“I’m coming with you,” Nate told Dante, “and Agnes will wait with the car.”
Dante bristled, drawing himself up to his full height and shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet in a posture that screamed of aggression and intimidation. He was an imposing specimen with muscles on his muscles, and Nate had no doubt he knew how to fight. He probably learned all kinds of useful skills like that in spy training school.
“Stay with Agnes,” Dante ordered, as if ordering around the Chairman Heir were business as usual for him. “Or I’ll make you.”
“He’s your servant,” Agnes put in drily, nodding. “Ri-ight.”
Nate was sure he’d come out the loser if he got into a fistfight with Dante, but he wasn’t about to let the bastard ride off to Nadia’s rescue while he sat around in the car and twiddled his thumbs. Internally wincing, pretty sure he was about to get the crap kicked out of him, he raised his fists and gave Dante his fiercest glare.
“Fine. Make me.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Agnes said before any punches were thrown. “Put me in the trunk if that will satisfy both of your overblown egos. Stop acting like kids on a playground and get moving.”
Nate’s face flushed with heat as he realized how right she was. What possible reason could he have for refusing to back down except that his ego was too big to let Dante be Nadia’s hero? Childish and selfish. He was really on a roll.
Nate forced his fists open and straightened up from what he was sure was a pathetic imitation of a fighter’s crouch. Conceding to Dante was harder than it should have been, and he chose his next words carefully, trying to get his point across without escalating hostilities once more.
“If you really think I’m more useful sitting in the car with Agnes than coming with you as backup in case anything goes wrong, then I’ll stay here. But we’re not putting her in the trunk.” She deserved better than that.
Dante looked back and forth between the two of them, then sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. He stared at the pavement at his feet for a moment, then looked up again.
“Do you know how to use that gun you took off Fischer?”
“Um, I assume I just point and shoot.”
Dante grimaced as he held his hand out and made a give-it-to-me motion. Nate handed over the gun, and Dante took a quick look at it.
“This is a semi-auto,” he said, “so it is basically point and shoot. Just make sure you have the safety off before you do.” He turned the gun over and pointed at a toggle switch beneath the grip, then handed the gun back.
“Is it on or off right now?” Nate asked, even though it made him sound like an idiot too ignorant to be allowed around a deadly weapon.
“On. And keep it that way until I tell you.”
Nate swallowed a protest, knowing that objecting to Dante’s tone was just petty. If Dante was the one who knew what he was doing, then Nate was just going to have to be a man about it and listen to him. Even when he insisted on giving orders.
“I’m getting back in the car,” Agnes said, her teeth chattering with cold.
Nate slid his tux jacket off and handed it to her. “It won’t be much warmer in the car,” he said. He might have tried to talk Dante into leaving the keys so she could turn on the heater, but he didn’t want to start another argument.
“You’ll need it,” Agnes said, trying to hand the jacket back.
“With all this adrenaline pumping through me?” he asked with a grin. “I won’t feel a thing. Besides, we’ll keep warm by running.”
Reluctantly, Agnes slipped the jacket over her shoulders. “Good luck,” she said. “Bring her back safe.”
“That’s the idea,” Nate said under his breath.
And then he and Dante were jogging through the darkness of the woods, using Dante’s handheld as a half-assed flashlight and trying not to trip over roots and underbrush.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Nate to realize his occasional forays into the gym for a bit of exercise had not prepared him for real-world physical exertion. He was huffing and puffing in no time, even though they weren’t running terribly fast. Dante, of course, wasn’t even breathing hard. If Nate wasn’t careful, he was going to give himself an inferiority complex. He wasn’t used to feeling inferior to anyone, and he couldn’t say he much cared for the experience.
Eventually, they saw the glow of the Sanctuary’s lights in the distance, and they slowed down, picking their way much more cautiously through the woods. When they got close enough that they could catch glimpses of the fence, Dante came to a complete stop and crouched behind a tree.
Nate had
no idea where they were in relation to the tower Nadia was planning to escape from, and he knew even the superspy couldn’t have figured out their position based on the tiny expanse of fence they could see through the trees.
“Why are we stopping?” Nate asked, his breath still short from the run.
“You need to stay here while I go on ahead and figure out where we are.” Nate started to protest, but Dante cut him off with a sharp gesture of his hand. “That white shirt of yours glows like a beacon. You don’t dare get too close to the fence, or someone might see you.”
Nate cursed as he looked down at himself and the crisp white tux shirt. He supposed he could take it off, but aside from the fact that it was freezing out, he didn’t think his pale skin would be that great an improvement. Dante, of course, was wearing all black, and his complexion was naturally darker, even though he’d lost the unfashionable tan he’d had when they’d first met. It only made sense to let him scout things out by himself, no matter how much it galled Nate to be left behind.
“Fine,” he said. “Just hurry.”
Dante gave him a look that managed to convey no shit without words. Then he began creeping forward, keeping low and darting from tree to tree. Even knowing where he was, Nate had trouble picking his form out of the darkness, and that had to be a good sign.
Dante was gone long enough that Nate wasn’t out of breath anymore when he returned. Nate knew that caution was absolutely necessary under the circumstances, but curbing his impatience was damn hard when urgency kept beating at him. It was possible his father had figured out Nate was going to show up here in an attempt to get to Nadia. Unlikely, given how impossible it seemed that he could get her out of there, but if his father did guess, pursuit wouldn’t be far behind.
“Looks like Nadia’s tower is about half a klick that way,” Dante said, waving to his right. “Let’s go.”
Nate didn’t know how far a klick was—a kilometer, maybe?—but he wasn’t about to admit his ignorance by asking. He wondered if Dante had used the term just to be annoying, or if he’d had military training before becoming a spy for Paxco security.