No Refuge

by Richard Bard

  “One second,” I said, my senses on full alert as I scanned the deck. And there it was, cradled in a cranny by the ledge where dad had gone over. I dashed forward and retrieved it like it was a fallen baton in a relay race, and then spun on my heels to sprint after the others.

  Chapter 25

  THE BREEZE HAD PICKED UP. Clouds darkened the sky, and I smelled moisture in the air.

  Even though most of the buildings in this neighborhood were attached to one another, few were the same height. The building on one side of the three-story hostel, which was on the corner, was one story higher, and the building on the other side—the one that housed the motorcycle repair shop—was one story shorter, as were the two rooftops beyond it. We’d surveyed the area earlier in the day, and Deondre had scouted an escape route that led to an apartment building three rooftops over, where the rooftop access door led to an interior stairway straight down to the lobby. That’s where we were headed.

  But first we had to make the ten-foot drop to the motorcycle shop’s rooftop. Easy for Deondre and the others, who were a lot taller. Not so easy for me.

  “Just let go,” Deondre whispered urgently. “I’ll catch you.”

  He and the others had already lowered themselves down, but I got only as far as hanging over the lip with my legs dangling. When I looked down, the rooftop below seemed like a long way down and my fingers didn’t want to let go.

  “You can do it, Alex,” Strawberry said.

  “Dude,” Simon said in a hushed voice. “You have to do it!”

  My brain was telling me I would get hurt.

  “We’re running out of time,” Deondre said. “You’ve got to—”

  A ringtone sounded above me.

  “Si!” the woman’s voice said, answering the call. Her voice was faint. “Me estás tomando el pelo. ¿El niño pequeño?”

  She was speaking about me! There was a brief silence, and then she shouted in English, “We know who you are, Alex. We’re coming for you!”

  I closed my eyes and let go. Deondre caught me in a fierce hug that dug the contents of my pack into my spine and stole my breath away.

  “I told you I’d catch you,” he whispered. “Now move it!”

  He grabbed my hand as we sprinted toward the next roof, my backpack bouncing with each stride. The mini inside and the energy it emitted fueled my courage, but it didn’t make me less afraid. She knows my name. I dodged a short chimney as I skipped over a loose brick that had toppled to the deck. The jump to the next roof was easy. We were halfway across it when the target rooftop-access door on the next building slammed open, and Sergeant Sánchez and another man stepped out. Sanchez spotted us immediately.

  “Got you,” he spat.

  “Back!” Simon squealed. We spun around and leaped back onto the roof of the motorcycle shop.

  “Down there!” a man shouted in front of us from the hostel rooftop. Another guard hurried next to him, and they both raised their pistols.

  “Don’t shoot, you fools.” The woman appeared next to them. “I want them alive.”

  We were trapped. Sánchez and his guard were moving toward us, and any second now the men above us would lower themselves down. There was no stairwell door leading down into the motorcycle shop, and since the building was only two stories tall, there was no fire escape ladder. An air conditioner unit was up there, though, so there had to be a way for a serviceman—

  “This way,” Deondre shouted. He picked up the fallen brick as he dashed past the chimney toward a skylight at the back end of the roof. He peered through it, nodded, and hammered the brick into the pane. The glass shattered. “Hurry,” he said. He vanished down the interior rooftop-access ladder.

  Simon ushered Jazz down next. Her eyes were wild with fear, but she moved faster than a cat with its tail on fire.

  “¡Oye!” a gruff voice shouted from inside the building.

  “After them!” The woman shouted in Spanish from above us. As I scrambled down the ladder, I heard the impact of men jumping from the hostel onto our roof deck. Simon was directly above me, and his feet grazed my hands with each rung I released. A part of me wondered why he’d gone before Strawberry, but the answer came soon enough.

  “Eat this!” she shouted. I glanced up to see her toss one of her two remaining firebombs toward the hostel. There was an explosion, and from the way her face was bathed in firelight, I could tell she’d smashed the bulb not far from where she stood.

  A man shrieked in pain.

  As my shoes crunched on the chunks of glass on the floor, I looked up again to see Strawberry light the last bomb and smash it in the opposite direction toward Sánchez and the other guard. There were shouts as she half-scrambled, half-slid down the ladder. Simon pushed me aside and arrested her fall. Her eyebrows were singed, and her maniacal expression reminded me of the Joker from one of the Batman movies.

  “The flames will hold them back,” she said breathlessly. “But not for long. I felt raindrops.”

  “¡Sal de mi casa!” a gruff voice said behind us. We turned to see a hefty old man with his arms locked behind him under Deondre’s grip. The old man twisted and kicked to get free. I recognized him as the shop owner we’d seen when we first arrived.

  “Please don’t hurt him,” Jazz said.

  “Him?” Deondre grunted, peeking his head around the guy to reveal a swollen and bloody lip. The old man had obviously come out swinging.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Simon said.

  Jazz stepped up to the old man and spoke urgently in Spanish, her hands waving. The old man’s expression tightened, and I reached out to calm him with my mind. He stopped struggling and glanced at me curiously. When he looked back at Jazz, the anger inside him was no longer directed at us.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can let him go.”

  Jazz nodded. “Yes. Please.”

  “You sure?” Deondre asked.

  “Trust they are right,” the old man said. His accent was thick but his English was good. “I will help.” Deondre released him and the man raced down the steps to the ground floor. We followed, and over the echoes of our footsteps, I heard the first rumble of thunder.

  Moments later I’d rotated my backpack around to my chest and was scrambling onto the front edge of the seat of an old Vespa motor scooter. Deondre was in the driver position. Strawberry jumped up behind him and wrapped her hands around his waist.

  “Ready?” the old man asked. He stood at the rear roll-up door of the shop, his chest heaving. There was fear on his face, and his gaze kept darting toward the staircase.

  “Yep,” Deondre said, steadying the bike with his legs. His hands gripped the handles, and his right thumb hovered over the starter switch.

  “Listo,” Jazz said with fire in her eyes. She was beside us, straddling a sleek off-road motorcycle with a beefy-looking engine. Simon sat behind her, his face white.

  A flash of lightning shone through the row of windows at the top of the roll-up door, followed immediately by another clap of thunder. A second later there was a loud thump on the floor above us, and the old man’s eyes widened. “Now!” He mashed his palm against the red wall switch and the door rolled upward.

  It was a slow mechanism. Too slow.

  Deondre and Jazz revved their motors impatiently.

  Footsteps pounded on the staircase, and my heart raced as I realized the bottom of the door wouldn’t be high enough for us to clear it before Sánchez and the others were on us. The old man must have known it, too. He raced into the room and bowled into the first man to appear around the corner. They went down in a tangle. A gun went flying, and the following footsteps slowed.

  Deondre ducked low and scooted the bike under the lip of the rising door into a wall of rain. As soon as we were clear, he gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and we jerked forward. The old man had bought us the time we needed, and when I heard a gunshot, I suspected he’d paid the ultimate price.

  The rear of the bike skidded as we picked
up speed, and I freaked when I nearly lost my grip on the center of the handlebar. But when I saw that Jazz and Simon were right beside us, I allowed myself to breathe. The dual motors echoed between the buildings on both sides of the narrow alley. I squinted at the approaching intersection.

  The woman stepped around the corner.

  “It’s her!” I shouted. The woman reached into her bag, leering at me.

  There were gunmen behind us so we couldn’t turn back. Deondre opened the throttle all the way, but the Vespa wasn’t built for speed and we wouldn’t be on her for at least three seconds.

  A lifetime.

  My vision narrowed into slow-motion detail: The woman’s hand climbing out of the bag, the glint of a pistol, an engine rev beside us, Jazz’s dirt bike leaping past us as if we’d been standing still, her white dress flapping, her face twisted in anger, mouth in a sustained scream, the woman’s eyes going wide, Jazz cocking her right leg, the woman turning to dodge, Jazz’s foot kicking into the small of the woman’s back, the woman thrown forward onto the pavement, Jazz’s motorcycle skidding into a turn in the intersection as Simon hung on for dear life, the bike righting itself at the last possible moment, and speeding up the avenue.

  “Bitch!” Deondre spat as we sped past the unmoving woman and followed Jazz and Simon.

  I twisted back and saw Sánchez helping the woman to her feet, but by then we were zigging onto another side street.

  Now all we had to do was search through a city of seven million people to find Ellie.

  And Dad.

  Chapter 26

  I WAS OUT OF BREATH as we spilled into the hotel room. Not so much from physical activity since we’d had to force ourselves to appear casual as we walked through the lobby and checked in at the fancy hotel where we’d intended to stay in the first place, but because my heart wouldn’t stop racing.

  Because my brain was swimming.

  Dad is alive!

  He must’ve been badly injured from the fall, but there’d been no trace of him. I could only pray that someone had helped him, and that right now he was in a hospital somewhere. And who was the big man who’d bowled him over the ledge? He’d come out of nowhere. If he’d been part of the gang who’d chased us, we’d have seen him again, right? But we hadn’t. Why had he tried to kill my dad?

  And why did the woman single me out?

  I knew the answer before I’d even asked myself the question. Someone had told her about me. Whether she had learned about my abilities or simply knew I was the infamous Global Terrorist’s son didn’t really matter. Either way, I was in her cross-hairs.

  “How did she know your name, Alex?” Strawberry asked.

  “That’s not important right now,” I said, drawing in a deep breath. I had to push those worries aside for now, because the real issue was how to find Ellie. My stomach turned at the thought of her in the hands of the same monsters who’d held Jazz and the others. The slave traders would be furious over what had happened, especially Lieutenant Garcia and the woman, and that anger had no place to go except toward Ellie.

  It’s all my fault.

  I added, “Because we’ve got to focus on Ellie.”

  “How can we possibly find her?” Jazz asked, her voice pulling me out of my head. She sat on the edge of the bed, the pretty white dress the woman had forced her to wear soiled and wet. The smoky makeup around her eyes had run in rivulets down her cheeks, as much from the rain as from her tears.

  “It will be easy,” Strawberry said, sitting down beside her. She used a damp washcloth to wipe Jazz’s cheeks.

  “She’s right,” Deondre said. “We found you, didn’t we?”

  “Y-yes, but how?”

  “Because Alex is a freakin’ genius, that’s how,” Simon said, patting me on the shoulder.

  They all looked toward me. I said, “Don’t worry. We’ll find her.” I slid the backpack off my shoulder, pulled out the tablet and charger, and set up a workstation at the desk.

  “You won’t believe what he can do on the internet,” Simon said.

  “He used a photo of Ellie to find you, using facial recognition software,” Deondre added. “We had your location before we could even check into the hotel.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s true,” Strawberry said, with a final wipe of the cloth across Jazz’s cheek.

  Yeah, I’d found her easily enough. But now what? Another wild scheme like the last one? With the kidnappers on full guard? I shook my head. First things first. I needed to isolate Ellie’s location, and fast.

  “The Wi-Fi password is your last name and the room number,” Simon said, referring to a pamphlet he’d grabbed from the desk. “The fake name you used when you made the reservation.”

  I entered the information and reached for my backpack on the floor. As I dug around inside, my hand tingled from the energy surrounding the mini, and a part of me was glad to feel it. But a bigger part wished my dad had never lost it in the first place, because maybe then he wouldn’t have been hurt from the fall off the roof and he’d be here now to help us.

  Leaving the mini buried, I grabbed the Spider and pulled it out. I raised it to place it on my head…

  …and froze.

  One of the eight legs of the device had broken off.

  “Oh, no,” Simon said.

  I reached into the pack and retrieved the broken piece. A dozen hair-thin wires protruded from the sheared end. “Must’ve happened when Deondre caught me…”

  “But it should still work, right?” he said.

  I pushed the power button in the center of the Spider, but the LED light didn’t illuminate. Strawberry and Jazz had stepped closer as well, and the only sounds in the room were everyone’s shortened breaths. I grabbed the USB cord from the pack and connected the Spider to the port on the tablet, hoping it simply needed a charge. I pushed the power button again. Nothing.

  “I-It’s broken,” I said.

  A wheeze came from Jazz’s throat.

  Deondre said, “So, worst case is you have to do it manually. It’ll just take a little longer.”

  “Yeah,” Simon said. “Obviously you know all the passwords and stuff, right?”

  “No, it doesn’t work that way. When I hack a site, I don’t use passwords. It’s not like entering a bunch of keystrokes, which, sure, I would remember. I just focus on a site with my thoughts, and my brain sort of goes on autopilot to drill through the code to get me there. There’s no way I can duplicate that without the headset.” I turned to Jazz, and the anguish on her face made me feel small. “I-I’m sorry.”

  Strawberry covered her mouth with her hand.

  My mind scrambled for a solution. Almost unconsciously, I tapped the browser icon, and the last window I’d looked at filled the screen. It opened at the top of the children’s page on the darknet auction site, and for some odd reason the live bidding had commenced. It read:

  BIDDING ENDS IN: 47m:48s

  “You don’t think…?” Deondre’s voice trailed off. I exchanged a glance with him, and knew he’d drawn the same conclusion I had. But like me, he didn’t want to voice it. Not in front of Jazz.

  “What?” she asked.

  “They’re selling Ellie,” Simon blurted out.

  “No,” Jazz whispered.

  There was no sense hiding the truth. Ellie’s image was lower on the page. My finger hesitated over the touchscreen, unwilling to swipe upward.

  Strawberry sniffled.

  “Do it,” Jazz said. There was steel in her voice.

  I scrolled down. The images of the ten children were still there. Except nine had been crossed out with red Xs. The tenth picture—Jazz’s—was still up. The current high bid was thirty-nine bitcoins, which was over twenty-nine thousand dollars.

  “Bastards,” Jazz said.

  Deondre said, “You got that right.”

  They were using Jazz’s photo instead of taking a snapshot of Ellie. And why not? No one could tell the difference between the two, and Ellie was pro
bably bruised and beaten right now, if not worse. They probably figured she’d heal before she had to be delivered. The thought of her being handed over made me want to vomit, but I had to push my disgust aside for now. For Jazz’s sake.

  I turned and looked at her. “But it means Ellie is still alive.”

  “Wait a minute,” Simon said, pointing at the VISITOR counter on the side bar. “Why is the count so high?”

  “That’s impossible,” Deondre said.

  Strawberry added, “Especially since the other nine children are gone.”

  The last time we’d checked, there’d been 5,000 visitors to the site today, and 650 had preregistered as bidders on the children’s auction page. But the site’s daily visitor count was now over 900,000, and at the blazing rate it was churning up, it would be over a million in a matter of minutes. By comparison, the registered bidders on the children’s page had risen to only 669. Deondre was right—it made no sense.

  I tabbed back to the home page, and what I saw made my stomach jump into my throat.

  “It’s him,” Deondre said.

  “Who?” Strawberry asked.

  Simon said, “The guy who helped Deondre on the roof.”

  “It’s my dad.”

  Everyone leaned in. It was a live video feed of my dad. He was bound to a chair with thick zip ties. His face was distorted, and the smooth skin on his forehead and one cheek glistened as though it had been grafted on. He must’ve been injured in the crash. But that had been only a week ago, and the damage seemed to be well healed. Not so the bloody lip, black eye, and swollen jaw, which I suspected had come at the hands of the kidnappers. There were 3,334 active bidders on the page, and the current high bid was 3,750 bitcoins.

  Over 2.7 million dollars.

  Simon gulped. “Your dad is the Global Terrorist?”

  My skin prickled.

  “Of course not,” Strawberry said. “He can’t be.”

  “What’s your dad even doing here?” Simon asked.