“Thank you,” Caitlyn said. She said nothing more until they reached the trees at the far edge of the grass. “Here, this big oak is what we need.” She relished the relative coolness of the shade. “Stand close.”
Chances were extremely remote that the bloodhounds would find this exact tree. Still, to keep her scent from the ground, Caitlyn reached up and pulled herself onto a low limb without letting any of her body brush against the trunk. She straddled the limb and reached downward for Theo’s hands, then helped him up.
“You’ll need to climb higher,” she said. “Up where no one would think of looking.”
“I’m afraid,” Theo said. “I can’t see where I’m going.”
“I’ll stay below you,” Caitlyn answered. She noticed his arm was bleeding through the place where it was wrapped with cloth. Again, her admiration grew. Her legs must have been putting pressure on the wound, but he hadn’t once complained.
She helped him climb halfway up the tree.
“Now what?” Theo asked.
“We wait until tonight.” She’d already learned to trust Theo’s hearing. Because of it, they’d have enough warning to slip down the tree and run if anyone approached. “Sleep as much as we can.”
“Sleep? I’ll fall!” Her stoic rescuer was suddenly a boy again.
“Not if we are tied in.”
She reached for the coil of thin nylon rope in her backpack. She put it through his belt loops and around the tree trunk and made sure he was secure. She did the same for herself with the other half of the rope.
The bark of the tree was warm and felt almost pleasant in the dappled shade of the leaves. She felt comfortable, except for the distant baying of the hounds, an acute reminder of the fate they could expect if they were captured.
“What was that?” Theo’s whisper sounded frightened. “I heard something. Not the dogs…more like footsteps.”
His fear was contagious. Caitlyn craned her head.
“There it is again.” He pointed. “Can you see anything over there?”
In the direction of Theo’s gesture, shadows were moving and Caitlyn’s heart hammered, her skin prickling with adrenaline. But as she carefully gazed ahead, she realized the shape was a deer, followed by two fawns.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Deer.”
The adrenaline faded. She glumly consoled herself that if anyone had followed them, they would have already arrived at the base of the tree.
“Wish I had something to shoot it with. Ever eaten deer before?”
“Go to sleep.”
“I know you don’t want me with you,” Theo said. “I’m all right with that.”
“Sleep.”
“No, really. If I were you, I would lie to me too. I’d tell me that you were going to help me Outside, but then find a time to run away from me. People don’t like me. I talk too much.”
“Sleep.” Caitlyn wanted to deny his accusation, but it would have compounded her guilt to blatantly lie. About the need to leave him. And about his ability to irritate.
“I understand,” Theo said. “It’s because I’m weird. A freak. It’s not only because I talk too much. I can’t help my weird thoughts either. Like with double numbers.”
She couldn’t resist. And it was a better direction than the subject of abandoning him when it was necessary. “Double numbers?”
“Like four and nine and sixteen. See, two times two is four. Three times three is nine. Double twos and double threes and double fours and so on. It helps me go to sleep at night, trying to imagine the highest double number I can. Like 123 times 123. That’s how far I got last night. 15,129. And sometimes I figure backwards. Start with a number and see what double number makes it.”
“Square roots,” Caitlyn said.
“This tree?”
Despite herself, Caitlyn laughed. “No. It’s not called a double number. Three is the square root of nine.”
“Other people think about this too?” Theo sounded excited.
“Papa taught me.” He had spent hours and hours teaching her mathematics. Papa. To her, that single word had always meant love. Now, it meant betrayal.
“What about numbers that can’t be taken apart by other numbers?” Theo asked. “Like seven. Or seventeen. A number that can only be divided by itself and by one. The biggest that I can figure out so far is 937. That was last night too. It’s hard work, but it keeps me from feeling sorry for myself.”
“Those are called prime numbers.”
“You know this?”
“I learned it.”
“So other people do think about this stuff! Maybe I’m not so weird. Can you teach me more?”
“Maybe,” Caitlyn said.
“It’d be nice if you did. And I’d like stay with you, but I really don’t expect you to help me get Outside.”
“How did you hurt your arm?” Caitlyn asked, remembering the fresh blood that gleamed at the edges of the wrap around his arm.
“It feels hot under the bandage,” Theo said. “Not like from the sun. I hope it doesn’t get worse. But even if it gets worse, I won’t regret it. I would rather be dead than live in the factory anymore. Not much difference as they just want you to work to death anyway. And you can’t even think there or talk. But I have to think. I have to talk. I have to talk about what I think.”
“I’m beginning to understand that,” Caitlyn said, letting out a small laugh despite herself.
“If you leave me, just don’t do it when I’m asleep in this tree.” Theo’s voice sounded drowsy. “I don’t know if I can climb down without falling.”
Caitlyn didn’t answer. She’d have to leave him, sooner than later. But she didn’t want to think about it.
He yawned. “Oh, and I didn’t explain…it’s where the radio chip was—”
“Chip?” Caitlyn said. It was hard to follow Theo’s train of thought.
“You asked me how I hurt my arm. Factory kids have radio chips embedded in our muscles to keep track of us. I had to dig it out with a knife, otherwise I never would have escaped.”
Caitlyn looked up at Theo as if seeing him for the first time. He’d cut through his own skin and muscle? She didn’t know what to say.
“You’re a girl, right? You’re too soft and your voice is beautiful. How old are you? Where were you born?”
Unwanted, haunting words from Papa’s letter came back to her. “But in the motel room that was our home, the woman I loved died while giving birth. You were a tiny bundle of silent and alert vulnerability and all that remained to remind me of the woman.”
A girl? She turned her face away from Theo. She was a freak, with men hunting her for reasons she didn’t know. Self-pity and anger threatened to wash over her, but stronger was the image of Theo so determined to escape that he’d cut into his arm with a knife, of Theo falling asleep afraid and doing numbers in his head to keep from feeling sorry for himself.
“I was born Outside,” Caitlyn answered. She expected this would lead to a deluge of questions.
But when she looked up to catch his expression, she saw Theo had leaned into the tree trunk and his eyes were closed. Asleep. She watched him stir briefly, and he mumbled one last thing. “Nine hundred and forty-one…”
After a moment, she allowed herself a slight smile. The next prime number after 937: 941.
FOURTEEN
It took until long after dark for Mason to return to Cumberland Gap. He found Pierce in the diner just off the town square, where he pulled up a chair and faced Pierce across the table, arms crossed, making it clear that he had no intention of joining Pierce in a meal.
They were the only customers at the diner. All the others cleared out when Mason walked in.
Mason waited for Pierce to ask what had happened during the day in the valley. He liked making other people speak first.
Pierce kept sipping his coffee. Then he waved at the waitress and asked for his bill.
“It’s on Sheriff Carney,” she said, standing as far as po
ssible from Mason. Mason leered at her, and she crossed her arms over her chest and made a fidgety move backwards.
Pierce nodded at the waitress, then pushed back his chair. He stood.
“Hang on,” Mason said.
Pierce leaned on the table with his palms but didn’t sit.
“Don’t you want to know about the girl?” Mason asked.
“If you had something to tell me, I should have heard it by now. Table’s yours.”
“She’s not in the valley,” Mason said. “Alive or dead.”
Pierce raised an eyebrow. Mason didn’t like this, the man standing above him, looking down. He was being disrespected. By an Outsider.
“Widen the circle,” Pierce said. “This is your territory. I’m not going to tell you how to find her.”
“It’s not that simple,” Mason said, boiling. “You going to sit back down?”
Pierce shrugged and sat. But it was clear that Mason had lost some face by asking.
“We picked up her trail,” Mason said, “from the waterfall to about a mile downstream.”
“Okay, so she climbed down during the night,” Pierce said, “then started walking out until she heard the hounds. Turned back.”
“It took awhile with the bloodhounds to figure it out completely,” Mason said. “This is what her trail looked like.”
Mason pulled a piece of paper from his vest pocket. He’d drawn a crude map with a stream, the waterfall, and the shape of the valley. He’d also drawn a dotted line in the shape of a V, with the bottom of the V at the waterfall.
“From the waterfall,” Pierce said, touching the bottom of the V, “she started one way. Retraced her steps, started another way.”
“Maybe. But at both these points”—Mason touched each open end of the V—“there’s no sign of her. Like an eagle swooped down and picked her up.”
“Not a horse,” Pierce said.
Mason snapped. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I’m the best there is. You don’t think that’s the first thing I’d consider? No horse tracks nearby. No way possible for horses to be that deep in the valley, anyway. Not in that kind of terrain. She didn’t leave by horse.”
“I believe that’s what I just said,” Pierce said. “Maybe I need to be clearer about who is boss here.”
“Maybe I—”
“You think I didn’t see you signal to release the dogs on Jordan last night?” Pierce said. “That was stupid and unnecessary. Now the man’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Pierce nodded. “Now there’s no way to ask him where the girl might have gone.”
Mason scowled and glared at Pierce.
“Which eye?” Pierce said.
“Huh?”
“You’re trying to stare me down, but I don’t know which eye I should focus on.”
Mason pressed his hands on the table, his knuckles going white with tension. “Time you lost some blood.”
“If you pull your knife, I’ll kill you. In the meantime, you better find that girl.”
Mason moved his hands off the table, onto his lap.
“If I pull my knife,” Mason said, his hand on the hilt, “you’ll be clear on who’s boss.”
In an instant, the tabletop slammed into Mason’s face, spilling him backward in his chair, pinning his arms in place as he crashed on the floor. Just like that, Pierce was kneeling on the table with his full weight, trapping Mason under it like a bug under Pierce’s heel.
The waitress disappeared into the kitchen.
“For three days now,” Pierce said, “I’ve put up with your crap.”
“You better make sure I’m dead before you lift away this table,” Mason said, struggling against the top. “Otherwise, I’ll kill you. Whether I have to knife you in the back or strangle you in your sleep, you won’t live to Sunday.”
“How badly do you want to face Bar Elohim? He knows all the snakes you’ve been hiding under your pile of rocks. You’re a free man only because it suits him. But this is so big, if you don’t deliver, Bar Elohim will make sure your face shows up on every vidpod in Appalachia as the most wanted, and even your own men will hunt you. Not a good prospect, given you’ve spent years showing them the nastiest tricks in the book.”
Pierce moved off the table and kicked it away. Mason began to sit, reaching down with his right hand for his knife. Pierce stepped on Mason’s wrist, leaned down and grabbed Mason’s elbow, yanking it upward so quickly it took Mason a second to comprehend that the horrible snapping sound and the incredible pain in his lower arm were two connected events.
He opened his mouth to gasp for air. Pierce shoved a napkin in it and put his knee on Mason’s throat.
“A man like you succeeds because you have no scruples in breaking the rules of civilization, and by the time a normal man realizes this, it’s too late for him to fight back.” Pierce spoke calmly, his face only inches away from Mason’s. “You think I’m a sissy from the city and don’t understand what’s happening here? What you don’t know is that I’m better at this than you. Nod if you understand. Otherwise I’ll break your other arm the same way and not think twice about it.”
Mason’s forehead was cold with sweat. He nodded. Not from fear, but practicality. He wasn’t in a position to fight back, and if both his arms were broken, it would be that much more difficult to kill the agent later. Not to mention capture the girl.
“Tomorrow,” Pierce said, “we’ll go over plans to track the girl down.”
Pierce pulled the napkin out of Mason’s mouth and walked away from him. Mason focused on his hatred for Pierce to dull the intense pain in his broken arm.
“In the meantime,” Pierce continued, “I’ll send Dr. Ross to the sheriff’s office to set your arm. That’s where you’re going to spend the night. Watching surveillance video on the public cameras in case the girl tries to sneak into town.”
FIFTEEN
Caitlyn and Theo had waited hours after the dogs quieted, then silently traveled to the edge of town. They looked down at Cumberland Gap from a hill, well hidden by dark and trees. Streetlights illuminated the sidewalks of the city below, but night masked the buildings and alleys. It was past curfew in Cumberland Gap, and the town showed no life.
Even with the blanket of dark, Caitlyn didn’t feel safe. Too much ahead. Too many questions.
Her father’s letter had instructed her to steal a horse for the next part of her journey.
Although it was just one more crime against Bar Elohim—and after a certain point, when execution by stoning was inevitable, what did it matter how many more crimes?—the thought still terrified Caitlyn.
Yet what else could she do? Papa’s actions had committed her to flee, and without a horse, she’d face certain capture in the next day or two.
“You can’t be taken, dead or alive. You must not fall into their hands.” Words from the letter, to haunt her.
All that remained was forward. For survival and answers, she’d steal a horse.
“I’m afraid you won’t come back,” Theo said. He shivered slightly.
“You said you were forced into a factory when you were ten,” Caitlyn said. She’d already explained that once they were on a horse, the bloodhounds wouldn’t be able to track them on it, but she had not explained how she’d get the horse. “So you know and remember enough about the towns to understand how big the liveries are, right?”
“Fifty or sixty horses,” Theo said. “Sometimes up to a hundred.”
There were paved roads in Appalachia, connecting the towns and suitable for automobile traffic. But the only vehicles on the road were government supply trucks that traveled from town to town. Bar Elohim had outlawed private vehicles and reduced all personal travel to horseback. Because the towns were small and self-contained, people had little reason to travel far anyway, and at the most, it was only an hour or two by horseback or carriage to the next town. The benefits to Appalachia exceeded the simpler, unhurried American life of two centuries earlier; Outside
paid a hefty annual fee to Appalachia for carbon emission credits. This, along with the computer chips produced at the factories and the sale of water to Outside, provided a stable economy inside Appalachia.
“The livery man will walk a few blanketed horses out into the feedlot tonight,” Caitlyn said. All of it had been on the instructions waiting for her in the cave. From Papa. She didn’t even know if he was alive. She swallowed and continued explaining. “He walks them out every night, so it doesn’t seem suspicious. Every once in a while, however, one of the horses is already saddled beneath the blanket. He will leave that horse near the gate, out of view of any public surveillance cameras. The timer on the gate is set to be unlocked from 11:55 to 12:05. That’s when I step inside the gate and get the horse.”
Caitlyn held out a letter, and there was just enough light from the moon for Theo to see it.
“I want you to hold this. There are instructions on where to go once we have the horse.”
“You can read?” Theo refused the letter and stepped away nervously, looking at Caitlyn as if she were contagious. “No wonder they want to find you.” He shivered again. “Now I’m really afraid you won’t come back.”
“I’m not going to abandon you here!” Her nostrils had become accustomed to the skunk smell, but the boy still aggravated her. She’d take him farther, just enough for him to get well fed and to be safe. “That’s why I told you all that, about the plan, and offered the letter. So you know you can trust me. I can’t leave you here, or you could go to the Elders with what you know.”
“That’s not it,” he said. “What I meant is that I’m afraid something will happen to you. The horses have radio chips too. Nobody can steal a horse.”
“What if the horse isn’t reported stolen?” Caitlyn said.
“Oh.” Theo was almost violently shivering. “But I’m still afraid something will go wrong.”
“Nothing will go wrong.” She wondered if she looked as convincing as she tried to sound. “I promise.”
SIXTEEN
Billy Jasper didn’t like the dark presence of Mason Lee, who leaned on his left elbow on the counter that divided the front part of the sheriff’s office area. He occasionally lifted his uninjured hand to stroke his waxed mustache.
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