by Eva Chase
Oh. My thoughts jerked to a halt. There was only one park that could have figured much into her investigations: the one I scanned for lost objects from time to time, when I hadn’t happened on any out of the blue in a while. The one where I’d found the teddy bear.
I couldn’t ask her to be sure. I just had to assume we were enough on the same wavelength.
I can meet you there in twenty, I typed in reply.
She answered with just a smiley face. I had the urge to reply with a kissing emoji, but that probably wasn’t all that wise either.
My heart was thumping as I headed for the door. I hesitated only for one second, to grab the pack I’d left ready by the kitchen. Just in case. If she was nervous enough to ask me to meet her in the middle of the night this way, shit might have really hit the fan.
I didn’t look back at the home I’d called mine for the last five years. I just locked the door behind me and dashed for the stairs.
The taxi gods were smiling on me, and I got to the park in fifteen minutes rather than twenty. I walked a short distance down the main path and sat down on a bench, kicking my pack underneath it. No one else was around, since it was after midnight in a public park. Not as dangerous a situation as if I’d been in some cities, but still not the kind of place people you wanted to run into hung out at this time.
Carina appeared a few minutes later, hurrying toward me with her head ducked low, a hoodie covering her curls. Her gaze darted from side to side before she let it rest on me. She dropped into the bench beside me with a little sound that was half sigh, half groan.
I took her hand automatically, and she twined her fingers with mine, offering me a tight but relieved smile.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They’re pulling me off the assignment,” she said. “Langdon called me a few hours ago. I don’t know why, what he might have found out… He made it sound like he thinks I’ve just gotten too emotionally invested or something. But the timing scares me. And he’s insisting I go back to their compound. Tomorrow, at noon. I don’t want to leave.”
“No,” I said firmly as a spike of panic pierced my chest. “You’ll lose whatever freedom you’ve managed to get.” Tomorrow at noon. Fuck. My heel pressed against the side of my pack. I’d come ready to run, hadn’t I?
“We could go,” I said. “Right now. Get the hell out of here. My brother, the one who’s good with computers, he can leave a digital trail pointing them in the wrong direction.”
Carina winced. “But your apartment—your home…”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t trade you for that. Are you kidding me?”
A glimmer came into her eyes that looked suspiciously teary. She blinked hard. “I wish it wasn’t like this.”
“I know. Me too.” I squeezed her hand tighter. “Maybe we’ll be able to come back here in a few months if the search eases off around London. Or we’ll find some place we like just as much. But it’s up to you. If you take off on them and they catch us… they might not treat you any better than they would me.”
“Into the lab with me,” Carina said with a short laugh that had no humor in it at all. “I’ve thought about that. But your family has been able to stay ahead of them this long. I’d rather take that chance—I’d rather know I took the chance, even if I end up in some experimental prison in the end—than go back and live like a prisoner in a different way.”
She leaned in and kissed me, fast and hard. It wasn’t anywhere near enough, but it was all we had time for. I pushed myself to my feet and yanked my pack from under the bench. “Do you have everything you need?”
She patted her purse. “The bare essentials. I wasn’t actually thinking—it wouldn’t really be safe to go back to my apartment to pack, would it? There’s nothing there I can’t live without. I can always buy more clothes or whatever.”
I nodded. “Our best chance is if we start moving right away. Like, now. Come on.”
I tugged her with me deeper into the park. We could take a side path out onto another street. In the meantime, I pulled out my family phone and dialed up Jeremy’s number, praying he was keeping late hours too.
Of course, this was Jeremy, who sometimes seemed to think he was a second father to the rest of us, so even if he’d been asleep, he wouldn’t ignore the buzz of his phone. He answered it after three rings, sounding only slightly bleary—and slightly panicked.
“What’s up, Nick?”
“Can you put together a new passport?” I said. “Fast? We’ll want to get out of England ASAP. I can send you a photo.” Any blank white wall with decent lighting, he could fix up with his photo editing skills quickly enough.
“Sure, I can pull that together in just a couple hours.” Blankets rustled, and he murmured something—to Grace, I guessed. He had been in bed. “But don’t you already have your extras? Why would I need a new photo? Who’s ‘we’?” He halted. “You’re running with Carina.”
“They’re on to her,” I said. “At least partly. Which means I have to leave anyway, because who knows how soon they’ll put together the pieces about me. And I’m not leaving her behind.”
Here came the big brother tone. “Nick, have you really thought through what this could mean? You have no idea what lengths they’ll go to in order to get her back too.”
My tone sharpened despite myself, despite the fact that he couldn’t have known the “her” in question was hustling along right next to me, clutching my hand as if I were her only lifeline. And maybe I was. “That’s exactly why I can’t leave her on her own. Don’t you dare lecture me, Jeremy. I’ve never once criticized you for bringing Grace into this. At least Carina has a talent and practice at being stealthy.”
Carina’s head had jerked around at my tone. Her shoulders tensed. “If he doesn’t want—”
I raised my hand, cutting off the offer I knew was coming. “Well?” I said to Jeremy. “Will you do it?”
“All right,” he said. “I just— Never mind. You know what you’re doing. Send me that photo and the rest of the info, and I’ll get to work.”
We should get out of the city, I figured, and then find a good place for the photo if we hadn’t stumbled on one along the way. The street came into view up ahead. I pocketed my phone and gave Carina the most reassuring look I could summon.
“We’ve got you covered. We’ll get you out of here. I promise.”
Another ringtone sounded—not mine. Carina flinched and reached into her purse. Her whole body went rigid.
“It’s him. It’s Langdon.”
Shit. “Don’t answer it,” he said.
“I’d better get rid of it,” she said. “I’ll bet they can track it if they want to.”
She tossed the phone into a trash can we passed as we reached the park exit. I fished out my regular phone, the one we’d communicated on—the one with the number Alpha Project might very well have in their databases by now too—and chucked it in after hers.
The light of an approaching taxi shone up ahead. “Come on,” I said, gripping her hand. “In this together?”
“Together,” she said softly. And we ran.
18
Carina
The countryside beyond the window gave way to more densely packed buildings as the train approached the main station in Amsterdam. The sun outside shone brightly, warm against the glass, but my eyes were heavy as I shifted my head against Nick’s shoulder. His arm tightened around me, hugging me a little closer.
It was just past noon. Not long after the time when a car should have been pulling up outside my apartment building in London, ready to cart me back to America and the Alpha Project compound. If they were even still coming. I wouldn’t be surprised if after I’d ignored that call, Langdon had checked my apartment and discovered I was gone. Maybe he’d figured that out beforehand, and that was why he’d been calling in the first place.
We’d caught a bus to a town called Ashford where the Paris trains stopped, and waited anxiously for N
ick’s brother to deliver my new passport. I could tell Jeremy had been skeptical from the way Nick had talked to him on the phone, but he’d delivered. The very first train from Paris had arrived with a courier carrying an envelope for us. To my untrained eyes, it looked exactly like my real passport, only with a different name and birthdate.
“Jeremy’s work has never failed us yet,” Nick had told me. I’d asked him during those few hours when we’d had nothing to do other than roam as unnoticeably as we could, about the destruction I’d witnessed in that warehouse in San Jose, and he’d told me how Alpha Project had grabbed Jeremy’s lover, tried to kill her and tranquilize Jeremy; how he’d simply hit them back as hard as he could in his desperation to get out. “He didn’t want to have to use his talent in front of them at all, but he didn’t have a choice. They don’t usually give us a choice.”
I wasn’t sure how much I liked the guy from initial impressions, but after the glimpses of the past I’d seen, I had to believe Nick’s version of events over the one Langdon had told me, where Jeremy had burst into an Alpha Project meeting intend on destroying them.
“Where do they think we are now?” I asked Nick now. He’d been getting regular updates from his other brother, the computer hacker.
“Liam has them on a trail down through Spain,” he said. “By tonight it’ll look like we’re on a boat to Morocco. They won’t even be looking for us on the same continent anymore.”
“Assuming they completely take the bait.”
“Well, yes.” He was silent for a moment. I knew his brother had tried a similar trick to divert the Alpha Project people who’d been after Jeremy in San Jose, and it hadn’t entirely worked. But Jeremy had stayed put where they’d already been looking for him. There shouldn’t be any way for Langdon to figure out where we’d gone from London, even if he wasn’t convinced we were heading to Morocco.
“I’ve got a lot of practice at this,” Nick added. “We all do.”
He’d already picked out a hotel not too far from the train station. When the train pulled into the station, we hurried down a few streets and came to a plain, modern structure without half the character of the older buildings along the canals.
“If it looks like we can settle in here for a while, we’ll find something nicer,” Nick assured me as we rode the elevator up to our floor.
“I hope we can,” I said. “I like the vibe here.” The cool breeze off the water had refreshed me momentarily.
But when we reached our plain, modern room, I found I didn’t have the energy to do anything except collapse onto the bed. I hadn’t really slept since last night other than some anxious dozing on the train.
Nick crawled onto the bed beside me. He left a little space between us—still not completely sure of how intimate I wanted to get, I realized. We’d been through a lot already, but it had only been a couple weeks since we’d been strangers to each other, and only a few days since we’d basically been enemies.
I scooted closer, resting my head against his chest. Nick let out a contented sigh and stroked his fingers over my hair. I closed my eyes, but my nerves were still jittering a little too much for me to relax into sleep.
“How do you pay for stuff like this anyway?” I asked. “Are you going to get in trouble, leaving your work behind?”
Nick shook his head. “We all have jobs that allow a lot of flexibility. I mostly pick up freelance copyediting work. Good eye for detail.” He smiled. “I’ve developed a strong enough reputation that I can charge pretty good rates, and I’ve lived frugally for the last five years, so I have a lot saved up. You don’t have to worry about us running out of cash.”
I didn’t have any money of my own except the hundred pounds in my wallet. I bit my lip. Even if it had been safe to access my bank account, the money in there was just funds Alpha Project had deposited—theoretically payments for my “work” for them, but really more like an allowance, now that I thought about it. As if I were a kid under their guardianship and control.
“As soon as we do settle in somewhere, I’ll find some kind of a job too,” I said. “I don’t want to be sponging off you indefinitely.”
“I didn’t think you would,” Nick said. “These are special circumstances. But you can count on me as long as you need to.”
I snuggled closer to him with an ache in my heart. “What was it like, being on the run all the time when you were a kid?” I asked him. “Did you even understand what was going on?”
“My parents told us a little—and then more as we got older,” Nick said. “When we were really young, we didn’t know any different. A lot of the time it felt like an adventure: exploring new places, watching out for the bad guys. It was only now and then that something happened that made them feel we had to go on the run again. Those times were scary. It wasn’t until my talent developed, before I knew how to control it and got impressions from my parents every time I touched them or they touched me, that I understood just how awful it’d been in the facility they were trapped in, but we could tell how scared they were. When you’re that young, I don’t think there’s anything more scary than seeing your parents terrified.”
The ache sharpened. “I wouldn’t know.”
His hand stilled against my hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot.”
“No. It’s okay.” I slung my arm around his chest in a loose hug. “It’s because of you I’m a hell of a lot closer to knowing the truth about them. That must have been weird, though, picking up pieces of your parents’ lives at random.”
He let out a rough chuckle. “Oh, yeah. I’m sure they never would have wanted me to experience any of that, even by proxy. And obviously there were sometimes more private impressions it was awkward to get a sense of… I learned to get very good at hiding my reactions and willfully forgetting things.”
My lips curled into a wry grin. “So, you know your parents way better than you’d ever have wanted to, and I never knew mine at all. Quite a pair.”
“We’re going to fill in some of those gaps. And, you know, in some ways I’m glad my talent works the way it does. Having to take in all those impressions from all kinds of people before I learned how to hold back… You realize just how human everyone is underneath, even people who are annoying you or acting in ways you don’t understand at all.”
“Everyone?” I said teasingly, but the ache had squeezed right around my heart. It was lucky that it’d been Nick I’d found—or who’d found me, if you looked at it that way. If he hadn’t had that perspective on life, maybe he’d never have given me a chance to prove I was more than his enemy.
“Well, there are a few exceptions,” he said, sounding amused. “I guess there always are.” He rubbed my shoulder. “What about you? What was it like growing up in this compound?”
“Kind of isolated and boring, but nothing scary.” I grimaced at the memories. “My foster parents were nice to me, just detached. I never felt they really loved me or anything, you know? And they were always clear that they weren’t my real parents, I guess because Langdon wanted to get me hung up on the idea of those murders as early as he could. I had a tutor who went over the basic school stuff with me, and they did tests now and then that must have been to check for any talent emerging—and then to evaluate that, once it did.” I shuddered. “I hate to think of how much information they might have gotten from me. What do you think Langdon is even doing all this for?”
“My dad thinks he’s obsessed with figuring out what heights people can achieve,” Nick said. “That probably he’s hoping to find a way to ‘unlock’ some kind of talent in himself, or to sell that information to other people. But it’s been a long time and he’s not there yet… My parents were two of the strongest talents who were ever in the Facility, which is why they were able to escape. And I guess why he wants them back so badly.”
“And that must be why you and your brothers have such strong talents too,” I said. “Something genetic.”
“That’s what we figure. W
e all have them, and they all came on early compared to Mom and Dad, from what they’ve said.”
His hand slid lower down my side, his thumb teasing over my ribs. Still nowhere near anything that sensitive, but a flash of desire shot through me all the same. We’d come so far, been through so much, and right now I felt closer to him than I had to anyone in my entire life. We should get to enjoy that closeness while we had a moment, shouldn’t we?
I let my fingers drift over his chest, tracing the muscles through the soft fabric of his shirt. “So… can you focus your talent at all? Like, if you were hooking up with someone, would the general, ah, atmosphere lead to you getting impressions along those lines.”
Nick grinned. “Context can definitely push certain things more to the surface. But it wouldn’t be what you’re feeling right now. It’d be fragments from the past. Not sure you really want me delving into that.”
I wrinkled my nose. “If you mostly see the times with the most emotion, you’re not likely to get a glimpse of anyone other than my vibrator. The hook-ups I’ve had in the past were very brief and not really all that exciting.” Nick made a sound of disbelief, and I added, “No, really. Yesterday, with you… That’s the best time I’ve ever had, by far.”
He rolled over to face me. The heat in his eyes was enough to make me melt before he even spoke. “Oh, I think we can do even better than that.”
He kissed me, his hand easing around to stroke my breast. Tingles of pleasure shot through me as his mouth melded with mine and he urged my nipple to a stiff peak through my dress and the thin bra I was wearing. My hips canted toward him of their own accord. I hooked one leg over his, pulling myself flush against him. Against the bulge already forming in his jeans.
“We went fast last time,” Nick murmured against my lips. “I want to take my time with you now.”
A shiver of anticipation ran through me. “No argument here.”
But I couldn’t help rocking against him as our mouths met again. One kiss merged into another and another, each deeper and hungrier than the last. Nick teased my breast until the pleasure of it was almost painful, then unzipped the back of my dress and yanked it down, unhooking my bra a second later. He palmed my curves skin to skin and drank in my whimper.