The back door swings open as I barrel my shoulder into it. Mia stumbles, her toe catching on the frame. “Wait—Sam, wait!”
I spin back, my breath wet in my chest. I cough, trying to get my wild, tumbling thoughts back in some kind of order. It’s not until the panicked haze clears from my vision that I look at her face—really look at it.
Mia is frightened.
I’ve scared her worse than the man back there ever did.
Of course you did! I press the back of my hand against my forehead, surprised to feel sweat there. You didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come with you! You took her—you took her just like one of the snatchers would!
“I’m sorry.” My lips are numb. It’s barely a mumble. “I just…do you want to go back? Do you want…do you want the procedure? Tell me you don’t…please, whatever they’ve told you…”
“I just want to know where we’re going!” she pants out. “Is that your car?”
There’s only one back here, and it’s parked at a diagonal across three spaces. A tan Honda sedan that was left unlocked in front of a shopping center not unlike this one. It was harder to teach myself how to shift gears, which pedal was stop and which was go, and the rough mechanics of parking, than it was to find the car itself.
“I’m taking you wherever you want to go,” I say, climbing into the driver’s seat. My hip is so stiff by the time I finally sit, my calf muscle strung so tight, I have to bite the inside of my mouth to keep my gasp in as I floor the gas pedal and send us sailing backward in reverse.
“Whoa!” Mia scrambles for her seat belt—why didn’t I warn her to put it on? I should have warned her before ever getting into this car. I got her out of that mess, but now I’m going to get her killed because I don’t really know how to drive, and I don’t know how soon that man and those soldiers are going to come for us, and why did I do this? Why did I do this?
Lucas.
I whip the car out of the parking lot, and it turns on what feels like two wheels as we find the road. I painstakingly charted my drive out here on a map, but I know the way back by sight. Mostly. Was it right at this tree? No—left. The car flies forward into the intersection, cutting across the traffic lanes as I make the turn too sharply.
How long have I been gone for? How long will it take to get back? I glance over at Mia and catch her watching me with dark eyes, and I’m scalded all over again. Those are Lucas’s eyes. Those are their father’s eyes. And for a second, it’s like they’re both watching me—they’re both judging me for taking a mess and dropping a bomb into it.
“Breathe, Sam,” Mia says. “It looks like you’re going to rip the steering wheel off the dashboard.”
My hands are choking the wheel, chapped and red from weeks of being exposed to the cold. But what Mia doesn’t see, or maybe she does see and just doesn’t really understand, is that there’s so much ice on the road that the wheels feel like they’re trying to slip out from under us. It’s like being on the bare back of a horse that suddenly bursts into a gallop. You have to bury your fingers into its mane and hold on for dear life.
“I’m…not very good at this yet,” I admit, too scared to take my eyes off the road again, much less look in the rearview mirror to make sure we aren’t being followed. Most of the buildings we pass have the same look as the rest of the country: battered and empty, boards where there should be windows, yellow police tape whipping around in the breeze.
Before I went to Thurmond, I had a sense that things were bad; the only reason we were able to stay in our house, while the Orfeos had to move, was because our house was paid for by the church my father served. But I was so focused on what was happening to me inside of the camp’s electric fences, I barely spared a thought for what kind of world we’d find outside of it. Imagine my surprise to find that it’s only slightly less welcoming to us than it