“Well, well, well, what we have here?” A familiar voice reaches us from the end of the hallway—Aaron, accompanied by two other guys. “I feel like I’ve won the lottery? I came here to collect one, and I’ll get out of here with three.”
Three? Wait a second, of course. Daniel must be Dan, Emily’s son. I look behind me and he’s staring at Aaron, a trace of recognition in his eyes. He knows exactly who Aaron is.
“Daniel, it’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“I can’t say the same,” Daniel says.
“What the hell is going on here?” Adam hisses at Daniel. “Are you with them or not?”
“Why would I be with them?”
“We don’t have time for this,” I mutter. “We need a plan.”
“No plan. We’ll have to fight. That’s the only way out.” Dan looks at Adam and me. I realize that his lips haven’t moved—he’s talking inside our heads. “Livia? Find your strength, because you’ll need it.”
I watch as Daniel runs faster than my eyes can follow, and in a second, he’s at the south end where the exit has been blocked. He jumps up, kicking the guy in front of him. The man flies through the door and out of the building. Adam is running after Daniel and shouting for me to follow him, but as we reach the exit, Aaron is on our heels. His foot knocks mine out of step and I fall forward onto the floor.
“Livia!” Adam shouts as Aaron reaches for my arms. He pulls me up. My back is against his chest and his grip is strong around my arms.
“Let her go!” Adam says, and he and Daniel stalk back inside.
“Hit him!” Daniel tells me in my head. “You are stronger than him. Throw the back of your head hard against his face. You’ll break his nose.”
I don’t have time to think. Aaron starts to pull me back, away from the door, and my heart starts to pick up its pace. I close my eyes and I concentrate on bringing all my strength into my next act. I throw my head back—Aaron’s grip loosens and I stumble forward. The pain in the back of my skull makes me see stars.
Someone grabs my hand and I look up to see Daniel. “Get up—we gotta run!” He helps me up. Adam charges forward and throws his fist into Aaron’s face, making it bleed even more. Aaron staggers back, he’s slightly disoriented, but moves fast toward Adam, pushing him against the wall and taking two fast swings at his face and neck. Blood pours out of Adam’s nose.
“Help him!” I urge Daniel.
“He can do without me!” he says. “Watch.”
I turn to look at Adam, who gradually overpowers Aaron and wrestles him to the floor. Aaron tries to push him off, but Adam twists Aaron’s arm and pushes his face down into the tiles. On his knees, Adam tightens his grip. I hear a cracking noise in Aaron’s shoulder, followed by Aaron’s scream of pain.
Adam gets up and kicks Aaron one more time right on his ribs. This vicious fighter is not the Adam I know.
“Let’s go!” He snaps out of his violent aura and pulls me by the hand, dragging me with him and Daniel until we reach the Challenger my uncle left here for us. I get in the passenger seat and as Adam is pulling the car out, Daniel hops in the back seat.
“Hey, get out!” Adam shouts.
“Adam!” I snap. “He’s not our enemy. He just helped us.” He gives me a look as he speeds away, driving around the school parking lot and making the car’s tires squeal. We exit through the back entrance that leads us to the main road.
“Take the highway—don’t go towards the ferry,” Daniel says and Adam gives him a wicked glare in the rearview mirror.
“I’m on your side, dude!” our tagalong protests.
“Are you Emily’s son?” I ask and I see Adam starting to make sense of things.
“Um, you’ve met her?”
“She was in town last night. She told us about you, but she called you Dan and, at that time, I didn’t realize she was talking about you.”
“Speed up, will you?” Daniel urges. “It’s a V-8 hemi. You can do better than that.”
Adam looks at me and shakes his head. He still doesn’t trust him. I take a look back and Daniel is watching the road behind us.
“I don’t see them coming after us,” Adam says.
“They won’t. Chasing us will only attract attention. They’ll wait ’til your next stupid move and catch you by surprise.”
“What do you mean by stupid move?” Adam demands.
“Your first stupid move was to talk about running away at the dance—they could hear you, and that’s when they brought in backup. Second, they have surveillance everywhere. They can track every single move you make. If you don’t want to be found, start by throwing your cell phones out the window. They know exactly where you are right now, thanks to what you have in your pockets.”
I watch as Adam opens the window and throws his phone out without hesitation. He looks at me, waiting for me to do the same. “I left mine at home,” I admit. “I only have the go phone my uncle gave me last night.”
“That’s fine, but you can’t call your family or anyone that you know. They will trace it.” Daniel says.
“I know. My uncle got a new phone as well, so I can contact him.”
“Your uncle is Henry Berwick, right?” Daniel asks.
“Do you know him?”
“Not personally, but when Emily told me what I was, she told me about him; the man who saved the babies and burned everything down. The way she talked about him, I could tell that…” He trails off. “Do you guys have a plan? Where are we heading?”
“We,” Adam emphasizes the word, “are not going anywhere.”
“Adam, he is one of us. We’re supposed to stick together, remember?”
“I don’t trust him, Livia! What guarantee do we have that he’s not already with the agency? Emily said that he hadn’t contacted her in months and she feared he had been captured.”
“It’s not safe to contact her,” Daniel explains with surprising patience, “and if the agency had captured me, I would be fighting with them, not against them.”
“He’s not lying, Adam. You trust me, don’t you?”
He looks at me then he glances at Daniel. “How do you know he’s not playing us?”
“His emotions. He has a sense of belonging when he is around us. He trusts us.” Adam nods reluctantly and Daniel raises his eyebrows when I turn to look at him.
“So you know what I am feeling? That must suck for you.”
“It did for the longest time—it still does, depending who I run into. But for the most part, it’s just part of who I am. How about you? What can you do?”
“Well, like the both of you, I have speed, but what is unique to me is precognition. I can see the near future, but only a couple minutes before it happens, and only for people I’m thinking of. For instance, I was thinking of you right before Ms. Johnson came to attack you. That’s how I knew where you were.”
“Did you kill her?” Adam asks.
“No, I just paralyzed her. If she’s like us, she’ll heal fast enough.”
“So you heal fast, as well?” I ask.
“I think healing is a common trait among us.”
“Adam doesn’t heal.” I take a look at Adam, whose face is still beat up. I look at mine in the mirror and it’s already free of blemishes.
“Not that he knows of. If he practices, I’m sure he’ll develop the skill.”
I take a deep breath. Daniel sounds so sure and yet there’s so much that I don’t know. I look to the back seat where my uncle’s folder of information lies. I’ll get to it as soon as we stop somewhere safe.
“How do you know Aaron?” Adam asks.
“He found me in New York City when I first went looking for Livia. I was in an underground gambling establishment, winning easy money so I could travel across country and survive along the way. Aaron is a gambler and I wasn’t careful about using my abilities. He had me all figured out and he came after me.”
“So you led him here?” I can’t help the accusation in my tone.
>
“No, he had no idea where I was. He came here for you. He was already after you back when I first came across him in New York.”
“I don’t understand why he took so long to try to capture me.”
“I think he was waiting to make sure that Adam was one of us. He wasn’t sure about him—Adam wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“So we heard.” Adam says. He speeds up through town and I’m glad the highway is clear; no one to hold us back in traffic.
As I watch the streetlights fly by, I mention, “My uncle said that if we need to rest, we should camp in the woods. Hotels aren’t safe because they have cameras.”
“Camping is the best way to go,” Daniel agrees. “But if you need a bed, then we can always stop at one of those cheap, rundown motels.”
“We have two tents and sleeping bags with us,” I say.
“We have to cross the border first,” Adam interjects.
“Agreed,” Daniel replies. “So we are heading to Canada?”
“Passing through,” I say.
I lean back in my seat and relax a little as we get off of the island, passing through nearby towns and merging onto I–5 North. Adam doesn’t slow down. I open my mouth to tell him to be careful, but Daniel cuts me off.
“I’m watching out for cops. If I say to slow down, do it immediately.”
“Did you know what I was going to say?” I ask, perplexed.
“Yeah, but I can’t read your mind, if that’s what you’re thinking. I can see what you’re about to do or say after your decide to do it. But Adam, for some reason; I can’t see his future and I can’t talk to him telepathically.”
“I can block everyone’s abilities towards me,” Adam explains with a hint of indifference. “You can’t see my future, and Livia can’t empathize with me.”
“Nice!” Dan says with a smirk. Adam doesn’t return the enthusiasm.
“How do you know how to talk telepathically?” I ask.
“That’s how Aaron talked to me first time I saw him. We were gambling at the same poker table. I answered him in the same way out of instinct. It just happened.”
“Emily never told you that you could do that?”
“Emily had an idea of what abilities each one of us has, but it was more of a guess. She follows a list of probabilities from the formula injected into us when we were in the womb, but she didn’t know which of those abilities we would develop. She had great hopes that the one who could block all the others would be the one to destroy the agency.”
I look at Adam, but he’s glaring over the steering wheel, and I’m not sure if his mind is even here.
I turn back to Daniel. “Have you found any of the others yet?”
“No. I first went looking for you in New York because Emily knew for sure where you were. But when I got there, you had moved, so I came after you here. I didn’t know about Adam until the day the both of you raced in PE class—what a show-off, by the way.” His smirk returns for a second. “I guess that’s when the agency was sure of Adam. I saw Ms. Johnson sitting on the bleachers.”
“I saw that,” Adam says. “I didn’t see you, though.
“I’m good at hiding myself. As the assistant coach, nobody really questioned me when I was anywhere near the football field.”
“Not that good,” I say. “I saw you following me.”
“I didn’t mean to follow you. I went to your house to talk to you, but I saw you running in the woods and I went after you. But then Adam showed up and I didn’t think it was a good idea to talk to you then. I wasn’t completely sure that Adam was one of us.”
“I saw a black Mustang following me. Was it you?”
“I did follow you a couple of times. I was trying to find a way to talk to you alone.”
“Did you know the agency was here?” Adam asks.
“I only saw that last night.” Daniel sighs. “They know our identities now, and they’ll find us faster, so I hope you two have a really good plan.”
“It’ll take us two days to get to where we need to go,” I say. “We’ll take turns driving.”
“We don’t need much sleep. I’ve gone a week without sleep,” Daniel says. “And I’ll be happy to drive once we cross the border. I grew up in Calgary and I’ve been to Vancouver many times. I know my way around.”
After an hour and a half on the road, I see signs that we are approaching the border. I grab the backpack and retrieve our fake passports. Our birthdays are different—we’re twenty-one now, and though our first names are still the same, our last names have changed—to Mayer. Both of us. “I guess you are my brother now, after all.”
“Families stay together and travel together. I guess it makes sense.” Adam’s eyes search my face. I give him a flat smile and he laces his fingers through mine.
We reach the booth where a Canadian Immigration officer stands. “Passports please,” she says, and Adam hands her our passports and Daniel’s fake Canadian ID.
“Nationality?”
Adam and I answer USA, and Daniel answers Canada.
“How long are you staying and where are you going?”
“We are staying ’til Monday. Just dropping off a friend in Vancouver,” Adam says, and the lady takes our passports in. I watch as she runs it through a machine and my stomach turns with anxiety. But it’s not my emotion—I look back and Daniel is biting his nails.
“Can you calm down a bit? You’re making me nervous,” I say, and he frowns at me.
“You want to control what I feel, now?” he asks.
“What you feel, I feel,” I respond, and he laughs.
“You’ll need to learn how to block that. I’m sure you’ll get there with some training.”
The immigration lady hands our passports back. “Have a safe trip,” she says, and relief washes over us as we enter Canada.
“That was easy,” Adam exhales loudly. He was nervous, too.
I look out the window, and it doesn’t look like we’ve left the United States—everything appears the same except for the signs on the side of the road, which read in kilometers. If we drive nonstop, it will take us two days to reach Fairbanks; we’ll get a flight to Noatak from there.
“How are you holding up?” Adam asks, his voice low as if he means it only for me.
“I’ll be fine once we get there. Right now, I just want to get out of this dress.”
“Don’t mind me,” Daniel says from the back seat and Adam glances at him.
“Do we really need him?” Adam asks. I ignore the question.
After battling with my dress to keep me covered while changing into new clothes, I turn to grab the notes my uncle left me. There’s too much information here and some is more interesting than the rest. I read and absorb it all, and easily, now that I’m comfortable and focused.
“Did you know we have a ‘copycat’ ability?” I wonder aloud while skimming a page. “Once we develop our photographic memory to its full potential, we can watch a martial arts movie and be able to reproduce it.”
Daniel shakes his head. “Boy, you two know nothing, do you?”
“Just like you a couple months ago,” I dispute.
“Well, the good thing is, we’re fast learners, and it won’t take much time for you to catch up.”
* * *
We drive for hours, stopping a couple of times to refuel. Dan eventually takes over the wheel and Adam and I move to the back seat. I lean my head on his shoulder while he turns the pages of what Uncle Henry left us.
We enter the city of Prince of George. I sit up to look outside and the eastern horizon is a bright shade of orange. The roads look very similar to where we came from—evergreen trees tower all around the town.
Daniel turns right into the Moore’s Meadow Park, where we are supposed to swap for a new car.
“What kind of car are we looking for?” I ask.
“Henry said it would be an all-wheel-drive red GMC Acadia, in case we have to drive in a bad weather,” Adam says, shuffling f
or the page that confirms the fact.
“It’s beginning of October,” Daniel says. “We could end up driving through a snowstorm, but I doubt it.”
“There it is!” I spot the car at the end of the parking zone.
We move all of our stuff into the Acadia. I get in the backseat and, this time, Adam sits up front. I reach for my uncle’s notes and I start on memorizing the maps as Dan drives away.
“Here,” Adam says, handing me a cereal bar and a bottle of water. “When we stop somewhere, we can heat up some canned food.”
I inspect the food with the realization of, “I’m not even that hungry.”
“Our body can store enough energy for you to live three weeks without food,” Daniel says. “You might feel a little hungry, but you won’t really need to eat—we don’t get the organ damage normal humans would suffer.”
“Did Emily go over all of this with you before you left?” I ask out of curiosity.
“Some she did. Some I learned on my own.”
With that in mind, I continue reading on and passing the papers back and forth to Adam before I notice we’ve been driving for almost seventeen hours.
“We should go ahead and find a place to camp for the night. It’s gonna get dark soon.” Adam says.
“Or we can keep driving until it’s dark and get a cheap motel room,” I say. “That way we don’t waste time making and breaking camp. The sooner we get there, the safer we’ll be.”
35 Adam
By the time we reach the town of Watson Lake, it’s eleven o’clock at night. We’ve been traveling for over twenty-four hours, now. As we drive through town, I see snow piles on the side of the road. As Daniel pulls into the parking lot of the ultimate cheap, rundown motel, he announces, “This area only gets 86.4 hours of sunlight during the entire month of October. This year, the number of inhabitants barely exceeded eight hundred.”
He sure doesn’t miss an opportunity to show off how much he knows. I liked the guy better when he stuck to football maneuvers.
I look out of the window and we are the only car parked here. “I don’t think they’re open.”
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