Penelope had listened, down in Mexico City. She was a slim girl who’d never felt safe in her own body, and thus had never worn anything to flatter it. Time for a reinvention. The man who’d taken her to Mexico had money (she didn’t ask from where), and in a department store in La Colonia Centro, Penelope had found some tight sweaters and skinny jeans that made her look five years older. She’dgotten her hair cut short and dyed blond. The man with her had been impressed.A whole new girl.
Not that it had done much good, in the end. Yesterday morning, that itch on the back of Penelope’s scalp had been so vivid it had dragged her from a sound sleep. Looking out the hotel window, she’d seen this bland Honda Odyssey double-park on the street outside, watched as her grandfather Stanley heaved himself from the driver’s seat like a bear on a mission. Even before she saw the gun on Stanley’s hip, Penelope had known the jig was up.
That furious itch went wild, long fingernails of dread scraping across her scalp, her skull, her mind. The pain almost sounded like it was saying,I told you so.
Penelope had been on the floor of the Honda Odyssey ever since. She thought she was going to lose her mind from boredom. She liked to read, but of course Stanley hadn’t brought any books (I’m a numbers guy, what can I say?). She liked to draw, to paint, to dance. She could run a quick mile, arm wrestle with the boys, hold her own on an Xbox. She’d tortured her grandfather for a while with The Game, but it had never been the same since her sister died. She’d spent the last several hours counting the notches on the zippers of the seat cushions above her. Stanley had said it would help her fall asleep.
Now, for the first time in hours, her grandfather spoke, if only to himself. “The hell is that?”
Penelope propped herself off the floor in time to watch Stanley adjust his rearview mirror. Turning to look over the back seat, Penelope saw nothing behind the van but the big gold-brown bowl of the desert everywhere, the empty thread of highway that had been unspooling since forever.
“Get down, Penn,” Stanley said. “We’re still in no-man’s-land.”
Penelope ignored him. She squinted down the highway, curious and bored, and blinked when she saw a small glint of light at the limit of her vision. It almost looked like the sun reflecting off something small and metallic. The handlebars of a motorcycle, maybe.
Ryan drove a motorcycle. It’s what he’d been driving last week, when he’d pulled up unannounced outside Penelope’s school and caught her eye through the window of her biology class and patted the back of his seat. He’d raised a spare helmet in her direction, likea question. By the time anyone realized Penelope was gone, she and Ryan were across the border. Penelope could be sneaky when she needed to be.
She’d ridden on that motorcycle across the entire length of Mexico. Some people would find that scary, but not Penelope. Not much can scare you after you’ve survived getting shot in the head.
Now, for instance, Penelope wasn’t afraid when Stanley said, “I told you to getdown.” Penelope just watched the highway, waiting for another glint of metal. Waiting for Ryan’s bike to come back into view.
Instead, the next light she saw was a sudden silver glare that washed over the entire sky. The silver light was brilliant, it was everywhere—and for the first time in years, Penelope was afraid.
She’d seen that silver light before, three years ago, in her old house, in her old room, moments after she’d awoken in the middle of the night and discovered a strange man standing next to her bed with a gun pressed to her temple.
She’d locked eyes with the man. He’d pulled the trigger, and Penelope’s whole world had gone silver.
It was the same exact silver she saw now. Penelope had no idea what it meant, had no idea why she’d seen it the first time, let alone why she was seeing it now, but she knew this: that itch on the back of her scalp was suddenly more painful than it had ever been before. Those long fingernails were practically burrowing into her brain. The pain was so intense, Penelope screwed up her eyes, but even in the darkness, she saw stars.
Brilliant silver stars.
And now, as the nails dug and dug and dug into her brain, Penelope heard a voice, clear as day, whispering from just behind her ear. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in years.
Three years, to be precise.
“It’s four o’clock, Polly,” the voice said. “Time to get busy.”
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?ETHAN
5:15 p.m.
He’d never feel warm again.
Ethan couldn’t feel his hands, his face, his clothes. His feet were so numb the boots they wore seemed to clop along of their own volition. The empty gas can thumped at his side, the fingers around the handle frozen to stone. The heavy Colt Python he’d stolen from the diner in Turner dug at the small of his back. He’d stuck it down the waistband of his jeans before they’d left the truck.Better than nothing, Hunter had said, but what good would a gun do if a man couldn’t use his hands?
The boys were walking toward the only break in the landscape anywhere around: the dark mountain up ahead, its peak a knife aimed at the great belly of sky.
For a while as they walked, Hunter had talked, but never about what had happened at the diner. What he’d done to that fry cook. “It’s good the Malibu didn’t stop for us. Those girls were armed.”
The Malibu that had whisked past them on the road. The two girls—one Mexican, one Black—who’d studied them from inside like cops. Ethan’s lips were so numb, words sounded stupid coming out of his mouth. “What?”
“They had guns. You saw the way they were reaching for the pockets of their doors. They were waiting for us to make a wrong move.”
Ethan thought of the Black girl in the Malibu’s passenger seat. For a moment when she whisked by, he’d imagined he saw a trace of regret in her eye. A flash, there and gone. Ethan said, “They didn’t seem so bad.”
Hunter opened his mouth to reply but broke off when a stab of pain passed through him. He shut his eyes, rubbed his temples,scowled. Ethan didn’t have to be a genius of empathy to see the man was in the grip of an awful headache.
And typical of Hunter, he didn’t say a word about himself. When Ethan shivered, Hunter said, “It’s good you’re still cold. If you start feeling warm, the hypothermia is setting in.”
