Soulless The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,28
person. She stood in the hall and turned her head in surprise when she saw me stagger out of the elevator. “Get packed.” She pulled her phone away from her ear and I got a good look at her face, which was still drawn, but now more serious, her blond locks twisted and mussed around her. “Ariadne called. There was another robbery.”
I dropped the cell phone back in my pocket and my hand went out to the wall automatically to support me. “Where?”
“Red Wing, Minnesota.” She started to hold out a hand to help me but I waved her off. “It’s north of here, a little over an hour, on the Wisconsin state line. We need to move now.” A little hint of a smile peeked at me, understated, on her tanned and pretty face. “If we hurry, we might be able to catch up with them.”
Chapter 8
A few minutes later our SUV was back on the highway, doing about a hundred miles an hour, barreling north on the interstate with the siren blazing. Kat was at the wheel and I was in the passenger seat. Scott was passed out in the back seat, his head against the window. We hit a bump and he didn’t stir. I rolled my window down and let the warm night air blow in my face.
“How are you holding up?” Kat didn’t take her eyes off the road. I could tell she was tense, white-knuckling the wheel. I would have been too. Scott had learned to drive years ago. Kat and I had learned in the last six months, with Parks as our instructor, in an intensive driving course that the Directorate gave us to teach us how to drive both offensively and defensively. Now I could run a car off the road at eighty miles an hour easier than I could parallel park.
“My world is in motion,” I said, as I swallowed heavily. I didn’t quite feel sick, but I certainly felt the first strains of it. “I could do with a little less of that.”
A tight smile made its way onto her face and a few of her teeth peeked out from between her lips. “At least I didn’t take the back roads route the GPS suggested. All those twists and turns...”
“Bleh.” I shook my head. “Drinking is bad for you. Also, I think I came close to kissing a guy to death in the bar.”
“What?” Her head snapped over to look at me.
“He’s fine.” My eyes pointed straight ahead, and I was trying to watch the road in order to avoid getting motion sickness. “I mean, he seemed fine, so we must not have kissed for very long.”
“Um, wow.” Her eyes were not on the road, which became obvious a moment later when she had to swerve after the tires started bumping on the strips at the edge of the highway. “Sorry. Wait, so what happened? I mean, aren’t you and Zack...”
“I don’t know.” I pulled out my phone and pushed the button again. The screen flared to life, giving me a perfect view of the background, but there were no missed calls or waiting text messages. “We kind of had a fight.”
“Oh.” She turned to look at me, then swiveled her gaze back to the road. “What about?”
“Pretty much about what you and Scott were doing just before we left.”
“Sleeping?” She turned to me and then reddened. “Oh. Before that.”
“Yeah.”
She let the silence hang for a minute. “Because you guys can’t...?”
“Yeah.”
I think the edge in my response put her off, because she got quiet before she spoke again. “Not even a little? Like maybe being really careful, with some clothes on, and—”
“No.” I tried to end her inquiries, but I felt my frustration bleed over. “I don’t have much margin for error, Kat. A little unnoticed skin contact in the throes of passion and a few seconds later he’s dead.” I felt the breeze run through my hair. “That’s not really how I would want it to go. It’s not a turn-on, having impending death hanging over you during sex. Especially...” I swallowed heavily again, this time unrelated to that slightly sick feeling that was growing in me. “...you know. The first time. Or hell, any time.”
“I guess it sort of kills the romance, huh?” She looked at me again, and her face turned sympathetic, her eyebrows arched in concern. I found it annoying, especially since I knew she and Scott were having plenty of sex; scads of it, loads