The Other Morgan (Parallel Series, Book 5)

by Christine Kersey

  Her trust in me was so complete, so transparent. Would she hate me when my incompetence got us both captured?

  “What kind of supplies do we need?” she asked.

  “Food and water, and warm coats.” That was all I’d come up with on my own. “Can you think of anything else we might need?”

  “I guess it depends on where we stay. Like, should we have a tent, or will we be in a building?”

  Having someone to bounce ideas off of really helped. “I don’t know if we can get our hands on a tent, so we should definitely try to find a building or something.”

  “Okay.” She looked thoughtful. “We should get matches or a lighter in case we need to build a fire to stay warm.”

  “Good idea.” Why didn’t I think of that? “What else?”

  “What about a flashlight, in case we have to find our way in the dark.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re really good at this.”

  Blushing, she said, “You already knew we needed those things, didn’t you? You’re just trying to help me figure it out.”

  If only. Hiding my utter incompetence, I laughed. “Can you think of anything else?”

  Her face lit up. “Oh! What about a map? You know, of this area, so we can keep track of where we are.”

  Those were three important things she’d thought of that had never occurred to me. We’re going to get captured for sure. Despair swept over me, but I kept a smile on my face. “Yes. Right.”

  “That’s all I can think of,” she said with a frown. “What about you? Is there anything else?”

  I hope not. “I don’t think so, but we’ll need to use your backpack to carry everything in.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll have to take everything from Nick.” Inwardly I cringed. I’d never stolen anything before, but we had nowhere else to turn.

  “I know.” Then her forehead creased. “When should we leave?”

  That was the big question. Though I wished the whole issue would just go away and that we could either go home to our family, or at least stay safe at Nick’s, I knew eventually we would have to walk out the door of this house and find somewhere else to stay. But I wanted to put it off as long as I could. “We should leave before I have to go to the news conference, so, uh, I guess when Nick starts announcing it we’ll know it’s time to go. ”

  Amy considered this. “But what if someone comes and gets me before that? Shouldn’t we leave right away? Just in case?” She stared at me, her face paling. “We can’t be here if someone comes for me, Morgan.”

  “No, of course not.”

  Her voice rose in pitch. “I mean, what if they sneak in here while we’re sleeping? We’ll be totally unprepared.”

  Her growing hysteria was contagious and soon a shiver of dread began climbing my spine.

  A knock on the door startled us both and Amy let out a small scream.

  “Morgan?” Nick said from outside the door. “Amy?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I whispered, then I went to the door and opened it. Trying to keep a calm expression on my face, I smiled. “Hi.”

  He seemed distracted. “I have some things to take care of so I’m going to leave the two of you alone. Will you be okay?”

  Unnerved at his unexpected announcement, I pushed a pretended look of confidence on my face. “Yeah, of course.”

  “Good, good. Make sure to stay in the house, and don’t open the door to anyone.”

  That sounded ominous.

  He must have read the concern in my face, because he laughed. “I’m not expecting anyone, and you’re probably smart enough to know not to open the door to strangers, but, you know, I thought I should still mention it.” He smiled. “Besides, the alarm will be set, so you should be fine.”

  “Right.” Even though his words seemed reassuring, skepticism crawled through my brain. Did Mills have the alarm code?

  “Okay. I’ll see you in a while.”

  I watched him walk away, then I turned to Amy. “This is our chance.”

  “Chance to what?”

  “To get our supplies.”

  “Okay.” She stood. “Let’s wait a minute. You know, to make sure he’s gone.”

  Several minutes later we made our way out of our room and toward the garage door. All was silent. I pressed my ear to the garage door but didn’t open it—I didn’t want to set off the alarm. I heard nothing. “I think the coast is clear.” A moment later we stood in the middle of the kitchen. “I’ll look for food we can bring,” I said. “You look for matches and water.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled open the pantry and saw plenty of food, and began taking out items that I thought we would want to have, then I rearranged the pantry so it wasn’t obvious anything had been taken. Glancing at Amy, I saw she’d found a stash of water bottles and she’d put half a dozen onto the counter.

  “How many should we bring?” she asked.

  “We don’t want the backpack to be too heavy. Plus we’ll need room for other stuff, so maybe just those? Hopefully we’ll find a place where we can refill them.”

  “Okay.” She turned back to the cupboard. “I’ll see if I can find matches.”

  Twenty minutes later we’d put the food, water, and matches into her backpack, and then made sure the kitchen looked just as we’d found it.

  “Now we need a flashlight, map, and warm coats,” Amy said as we stashed the backpack in the closet of our bedroom.

  On edge, and worried that Nick would return at any moment, I nodded.

  “Where should we look?” she asked.

  “I’ll check his office.” But the moment the offer left my lips, my heart began to pound. What if he catches me in there? What would he do?

  “Okay. I’ll look in the other rooms.”

  I didn’t like the idea of Amy getting caught where she shouldn’t be either, but our search area was limited. Not knowing how much time we had until Nick would return, urgency pushed me out of the kitchen and towards Nick’s office. A moment later I stood in the doorway, then I went to the bookshelf and quickly perused the non-book items to see if he had any maps stashed on the shelves. I didn’t see any, and moved to the desk. Pulling each drawer open, I rummaged through them, but found nothing we would need. Sighing, I stood in the middle of the room and slowly turned in a circle. No maps, no flashlights, and certainly no warm coats.

  “What are you doing in here?” Nick said from the doorway.

  I spun towards him and my face blazed red. He almost caught me going through his desk. “I . . . uh . . . I was just . . . looking for something to write on. You know, so I could write a letter to my parents.”

  “Oh.” He frowned and I wondered if he’d bought my excuse. “Let me get you some paper.” He walked into the room, slid open a drawer I’d been rifling through moments before, and withdrew a notepad. “Here you go.” He held it out to me. “Let me get you a pen.”

  My mind was stuck on the question of how I hadn’t heard him coming, but then I realized that the door from the garage to the kitchen wasn’t exactly close by. “Thanks.”

  He gave me a pen, then smiled. “Give me your letter when you’re done and I’ll see about getting it to them.”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe Amy could write them a letter as well.”

  “Yeah, she wanted to,” I said, assuming it was true.

  “Morgan,” Amy shouted from down the hallway, obviously walking toward the office. “I found a . . .” She stopped in the doorway, her hand wrapped around a flashlight. “Oh.”

  “We can write letters to Mom and Dad now,” I said as I held up the paper and pen.

  “Oh good,” she said without missing a beat.

  “What do you need a flashlight for?” Nick asked, his brow wrinkling.

  “Amy’s been feeling a little scared at night,” I said. “But she didn’t want to turn on the overhead light and bother me.”

  “I see.” He rubbed his chin. “I can put a table lamp beside her b
ed. That would be more efficient.”

  “Thanks,” Amy said with a bright smile, as if he’d just solved her biggest problem.

  He held out his hand. “I’ll take the flashlight.”

  With a jerk, she put it behind her back. “I’d like to keep it.” A look of terror filled her eyes, and I knew it wasn’t completely pretend. “I get nightmares and it would make me feel better.”

  “Oh, well in that case I suppose it would be fine.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  We all stood there a moment.

  “I have some work to do,” Nick said. “Make sure to give me your letters when you’re done.”

  “We will,” I said, eager to leave.

  A moment later Amy and I closed the door to our room.

  “What were you doing when he showed up?” Amy whispered.

  “Just standing in the middle of the room trying to figure out where to look next.”

  “Wow. You got so lucky.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “I almost wet myself when he caught me in there.”

  “Now that would be embarrassing.”

  We both laughed softly until our hearts had settled into a normal rhythm, then we sat side by side on my bed. “Where did you find the flashlight?”

  “In one of the other bedrooms. It was on a shelf in the closet.” Her hands twisted around the flashlight. “I almost blew it, didn’t I?”

  “It’s not your fault.” I meant that. Neither one of us had heard Nick return, but we’d have to be more careful in the future.

  “Maybe next time one of us will have to be a lookout or something,” she said.

  “Yeah. But when will our next chance be?”

  She shrugged. “I guess we can get by without a map, but we’ll definitely need warm coats.”

  Urgency to leave swelled within me, and my voice fell to a whisper. “I just want to get out of here.”

  “Maybe we can go tonight.”

  “What about the alarm? Nick said he always turns it on at night, and I don’t know the code.”

  A knock at the door interrupted us.

  “I have your lamp,” Nick said through the door. Amy opened it, and he walked in, then placed a small lamp on the nightstand beside Amy’s bed and plugged it in. “There you go.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “That will help a lot.”

  He nodded, then left.

  “That was fast,” Amy said as she closed the door then sat beside me.

  “We’d better write our letters to Mom and Dad. Otherwise he’ll get suspicious.”

  “I want to anyway.”

  Thinking about my parents made me miss them. “Me too.”

  Half an hour later we’d both finished composing our letters. We had to assume that Nick would read our letters before passing them on, so neither one of us had written anything he would disapprove of. We folded them into thirds and set them on the dresser.

  “We can give them to him later,” I said. Though tempted to creep down the hall to his office to see if I could overhear something important, I didn’t want to do anything that would make him suspect I knew what he and Mills had discussed the night before.

  Still, I knew it was important to discover whatever I could. For Amy’s safety as well as my own.

  Chapter Twelve

  Over the next three days, whenever Nick went somewhere, he set the alarm—not that he left more than a few times. Amy and I began to feel like prisoners in his house. On Friday Nick and I spent the morning practicing how I would respond to questions from the media during the news conference. He told me that the news conference would begin with me making a statement and he helped me write it out.

  “Have you scheduled it yet?” I asked, anxious to know how much time Amy and I had before we had to get out.

  He glanced at me. “Not yet, but I’ll be sure to give you enough warning.”

  What he considered enough and what I considered enough were probably two entirely different things, but I couldn’t very well tell him that without arousing his suspicion. We continued with our practice, and it wasn’t until Nick said we’d done enough that I brought up the idea of sharing the alarm code with me.

  “Why do you need it?” he asked as he straightened his desk.

  “What if something happens and Amy and I need to open the door? We don’t want to set off the alarm.”

  “I’m usually here though.” He frowned. “I don’t really see a need for you to have it.”

  I could see my roundabout way of asking was getting me nowhere, and though I preferred to avoid confrontations, I didn’t see any other way to get what I needed. “To be honest, Amy and I kind of feel like prisoners here. I mean, are we allowed to go anywhere?”

  He laughed. “The alarm isn’t to keep you in, it’s to keep Enforcers out. Along with anyone else who might want to do you harm. I don’t think I need to remind you that you’re a wanted person, Morgan.”

  No, he didn’t need to remind me, although now that nearly a week had gone by with no Enforcers showing up to drag me away I suppose I kind of had forgotten that real danger lurked just outside the walls of his house. “Still, what would it hurt to give me the code? It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone.”

  This seemed to stump him. “I’ll think about it. Okay?”

  That was something at least. Back in my room that afternoon, I reported this to Amy.

  “If he won’t give it to you then we’ll just have to set it off when we leave,” she said. “I mean, when he’s not here.” She paused. “What happens when the alarm goes off anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I doubt it calls the Enforcers, so maybe it just tells him that someone set it off?”

  More and more it seemed that Amy should be the one in charge of our escape. She had more experience than me and continued to surprise me with her insight. “That sounds about right. So if Nick is far enough away, we could put some distance between us and his house before he could get back here.”

  “Right.” She smiled. “Next time he leaves us alone, let’s make a break for it.”

  As much as I liked her enthusiasm, taking the final step of going out there still terrified me. Somehow I preferred the idea of it to the reality, but I didn’t want to admit that to Amy. Besides, she thought I was DM, someone who would be eager to escape, someone who had already proved escaping great danger was completely doable, even easy. “Yeah,” I said, trying to put a confident smile on my face.

  The next morning at breakfast Nick had a surprise announcement. “The news conference is today.”

  “What?” I couldn’t hide my shock—and terror. Today I could be captured by Enforcers. Today I could face Holly and her torture device. Trembling, I looked at Nick. “Yesterday you told me that you didn’t know when it would be.” My gaze shot to Amy, who looked just as stunned as I felt, then back to Nick.

  “I thought it best not to tell you yesterday.” His face showed his empathy. “I can see you’re worried, which is exactly why I didn’t tell you before. I knew you’d stress over it and I didn’t want you to worry unnecessarily. Better for you not to know until the last minute, don’t you think?”

  No. But that explained why he’d spent so much time working with me on my answers the day before. He wanted my practice to be fresh in my mind. “What time will it be?” Maybe Amy and I could escape before we ever got close to the danger zone.

  “Eleven o’clock, so after breakfast we’ll head over there to make sure we’re ready.”

  Too soon. It’s too soon. No way Amy and I could escape now. We’d have to come up with another plan. “I want Amy there,” I said on impulse.

  “Yeah,” she added. “I want to be there too.”

  Nick looked from my face to hers and back again. “It will be dangerous there, Amy. There’s no guarantee the Enforcers won’t find you.” He frowned. “I know you don’t want to go back to Camp Willowmoss—or anywhere else they might take you.”

  Shaken by his
statement, her face paled, and I knew she was thinking of the Enforcers taking her to Holly. “No, I don’t.”

  “You need to think about wanting to go then,” Nick said. “You’d be much safer here at the house.”

  Unless you’re sending Mills to get her while I’m gone. “I need her with me,” I said, knowing Amy would be in agreement, although having her there only added another layer of stress and fear.

  Nick gazed at me. “Why? Do you really want to have to worry about her?”

  I’ll worry about her less if she’s beside me. “Are you going to be there?” I asked instead.

  “Uh, no, actually.”

  “Where will you be?” Amy asked.

  Nick turned to her. “I have some other business to take care of.”

  He didn’t know I’d told Amy I was supposed to be a distraction so he and some other mysterious people could do the actual damage—whatever that was going to be. “Who’s going to be there with us then?”

  “A few of my people will be with you.”

  So, I’d finally meet more people involved in the resistance. That would be interesting.

  “Can I go with Morgan?” Amy asked.

  When Nick hesitated, I jumped in with an ultimatum. “If Amy doesn’t go, I’m not going.”

  Nick looked at me with surprise, then his expression changed, and I knew we’d won—although this win didn’t feel especially victorious. “I suppose it might be useful for you to have her there.”

  I had no idea if this was really the best thing—what if the Enforcers captured both of us? But leaving her here without me didn’t feel right either. “Can we have some time to get ready before we leave?” That way Amy and I could at least try to come up with a new plan.

  “You have thirty minutes. We need to get going as soon as possible.”

  Amy and I immediately left the kitchen and went to our bedroom.

  “What are we gonna do?” Amy asked the moment we were alone.

  I didn’t have the first clue—I’d barely had any idea about what we’d do once we left Nick’s house if we’d managed to escape before this dreadful day. “Maybe we can leave now,” I said, though I was doubtful that would actually work. “While Nick thinks we’re getting ready.”