them again, lead them here, then become invisible for good.
Well, only to them.
He would be very visible to Tasha when he went back into the pod, where after he showered they’d Talk with a capital T.
Oddly, he felt ready.
To Tasha’s relief, Thomas wasn’t lying dead just outside the entrance to the pod.
She really hadn’t expected to find him there, since there’d been no blood anywhere on the landing or the door’s frame, but she was still thankful as she climbed out, leaving the hatch open behind her, in case she needed to get back inside, fast.
And then, immediately, she was filled with the opposite of relief. Anxiety. Overwhelm.
She did not have the—what did Thomas call it? The skillset to be out here, pretending that she was capable of facing down whoever was hunting them.
Sure, she knew how to handle and fire a rifle. Thomas had left this one locked and loaded—another hint that he’d been in a massive hurry—so she treated it with extra care.
She’d had her share of weapons-safety training, starting when she was tiny. This is a firearm. It is very dangerous. Never touch it unless a trusted grownup says that you can. And even then, keep the barrel carefully pointed away from all people at all times. Always. If you’re at a friends’ house and you see a firearm, any kind of firearm, and it’s not secured in a locked weapons closet or safe, do not touch it; go tell an adult. And if the adult won’t take you seriously or tells you not to worry about it, call Mia or Uncle Alan or Thomas or Mrs. King immediately to come pick you up and bring you home.
Of course, as Tasha got older, her training included time on a firing range. She was a decent enough shot, but she’d never thought target-shooting was particularly fun. Still, she knew her lessons were important to Uncle Alan, so she’d dutifully showed up and paid attention and always properly respected the deadly power of weapons of war.
But marksmanship was definitely not something she could call one of her top skillsets. It wasn’t even one of her bottom skillsets.
She was really good at writing. And certain types of creative problem solving. Which was also why she was so good at being Ted’s personal assistant. Give her an iPhone and internet access, and she could research the crap out of just about anything. But that skillset wasn’t going to help her out here.
She looked around her, aware of the sharp coldness that made her breath hang in the air. She was alone on the side of a mountain. The pod was far enough from the ski lodge that it seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. A narrow footpath—a trail—led back to the lodge in one direction. Where it led, past the bulkhead, she had no idea.
She hadn’t really noticed much of anything but the concrete bulkhead in the darkness when she and Thomas had first found the entrance to the pod. But the door was built into a gentle hillside that crested about six feet above it.
The top of the hill had an outcropping of partially exposed rock—craggy and sharp, with a cluster of hardy trees growing nearby. Back when she was eleven, she would’ve deemed it the perfect place to play Away Team Explores a Class M Planet—a game she’d been perhaps a tad too fond of during her anti-princess-pro-Star-Trek phase.
But okay. She had to do something besides stand here.
What would Thomas do?
He’d start by rearranging the brush and branches that concealed the entrance to the pod.
As she did that, still leaving the door slightly open, she realized that before emerging, Thomas also probably would’ve opened the door just a crack and listened hard for any sounds of... what did he call them? Hostiles. Any sounds of hostiles in the area. There were at least twenty men wandering this part of the mountain, searching for them.
She’d been lucky—there were currently none in her immediate area.
But reality crashed down around her again. What did she think she was doing? Rushing out to “rescue” Thomas? How exactly? By somehow tracking him? Like she could snap her fingers and somehow know how to do that? Even if she’d had her phone so she could google How to track a Navy SEAL, it didn’t seem likely that was something she could easily learn from a YouTube video.
Tasha looked at the ground at her feet, at the scattering of dry, crisp leaves on the