I raised my good hand, but the rest of me still stood frozen on the spot.
“Come on, kid. Let’s go.”
Slaves hardly ever got to make decisions, and when they did, they were agonizing. You chose something horrible so you wouldn’t be forced to accept something even worse, for either your loved ones or yourself. And I wasn’t so naive as to think that freedom would put an end to those decisions.
But I had thought, nonetheless, back when Langer had first proposed his deal all those weeks ago, how remarkable it felt to be treated, for once, like a free man. Like a man atall. Yet I hadn’t understood what that meant. Not really. Not until now did I understand that freedom didn’tevercome free.
Well, shit. I really should have figured that out already.
The damp, crumpled paper weighed in my hand, the total extent of my brilliant plan. Thelastof my brilliant plans.
“Max?” I shouted over the roar.
“Yeah?”
“That day you came to see me, you asked me if I thought I was going to get lucky again.”
He glanced up and nodded. “I guess we know the answer now.”
It all still felt like slow motion as the door to the roof burst open, revealing Noam’s bald, massive, sweaty frame silhouetted in the harsh light of the staircase. As he thundered toward us, drawing a nine-millimeter pistol from inside his jacket, I gritted my teeth and grabbed hold of the metal frame of the copter with my one good arm, hoisting myself up on the skid, ducking, and swinging into the seat behind Langer, who was already setting himself beside the pilot, headset over his ears.
Well. Time to run away for the last time. Except—except I’d been running away my entire life. From love, from attachments, from guilt, from failure, from shame. Other than Maeve, I’d never had anything or anyone to run toward.
And for once, that might be nice.
“Yeah.” Noam’s aim was just good enough to put one bullet hole in the fuselage, but it must not have been anywhere critical, since the pilot barely noticed as Langer signaled to him to take hold of the collective lever and lift us up and to the left, the copter already well off on its solo trajectory over the city.
And maybe it was the hum of the engine, or maybe my hand really was shaking as, just before closing the door, I took the paper out of my pocket and let it fly, letting the rotor blades—so I didn’t have to—shred it to ribbons.
“I guess we do.”
10
HER
In the end, what calmed me was watching Ivy. My brother’s old friend may not have been at the top of her class, but she had the unconscious grace of someone who had spent her childhood diligently attending her dance lessons, instead of—likesomepeople—bursting into tears halfway through her first one and demanding her mother take her home. Ivy’s long fingers nimbly bunched up one of the fluffy towels from the wicker chair and guided me to the edge of the bathtub. She lifted me out, still dripping, before my burns could meet the dry, unforgiving desert air. But as those burns and the memory of what had made them came back into painful relief, my knees buckled. Ivy caught me, valiantly keeping me upright and spreading a beautiful rose-scented aloe gently over my arms, turning around to slide her willowy fingers down my chest and back.
Alma had been settled in the other room and the child had finally been coaxed to bed, but Erica still stood in the bathroom doorway, arms crossed stonily, waiting for me to calm myself.But as soon as she started talking again, that calmness melted down.
“Maeve and Sloane arewhere?”
“Milagros convinced me to go,” Erica said, starting at the beginning, still keeping tight control of her voice. “Because of course she did. She felt so useless sitting there, letting you and Maeve put yourselves in danger, whenwewere the ones with all the experience. She figured if we borrowed a friend’s van, no one at the university would know it was us. And then we found Maeve, and she’d found the other girls despite the bad info, and we helped get them away. Thanks to you and your distraction.”
I tried to smile. So it hadn’t been useless, after all, even though it had felt that way.
“But Resi sent one of her goons to give chase, and they ran us off the road.”
“So there reallywasa car accident. But?—”
“Once we realized everyone had survived, before the EMTs could show up, we made a plan to make lemonade out of lemons. We’d trick Resi into thinking her plan to kill us had worked. Since it almost did.”
“But how? How did you get that item in the news, and?—”
“It’s a bitter irony that in a society where the mainstream media cannot be trusted to tell the truth, for the sake of the greater good, I had to enlist one of the few trustworthy reporters I know to put out a lie.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what about the police, and the hospital, and—ouch. Fuck. Ivy, I don’t mean to seem like an ungrateful bitch, but whatisthat?”
Even under the balm, my entire body still burned as if the electric fingers had left embers that still popped and smoldered angrily underneath my skin. I hissed when she started dabbing on something from a much smaller tube.
