I take the hint and start packing the cables away, disconnecting the hard drives, putting everything back in Casey’s bag.
But the guy just stands there. “What’s going on at the gym?” he asks.
Casey places a hand on her hip and still doesn’t look at him, but she puts on this condescending air, which makes her seem younger, instead of the other way around. “We’re volunteering,” she says. “Come on.” She pulls my arm, and I follow. We’re walking down the hall, ignoring him, when I hear it.
The click of a camera.
Casey hears it, too.
She spins around, and the guy gets off one more shot before sprinting in the other direction. “Shit,” she says, and she starts to run.
“Stop!” I say. “What are you going to do when you catch him?” I ask.
She stops, staring back at me, her eyes full of desperation.
“It’s too late,” I say. We’re not going to hurt some kid. Someone who’s here by accident. Someone whose only crime is the circumstances of his location. I was a victim of circumstance, a victim of my life—there’s never a good enough justification for the things they have done to me because of it.
She stands in the middle of the hall, still debating. And then she turns in my direction.
“Damn it,” she says. “We need to hurry.”
“Cameron …,” I say.
We race into the gym, and I throw everything I can into Casey’s bag. My papers, the articles, whatever food my hands grab in the minutes we have. I slide my feet into the sneakers that don’t fit right, the laces still undone. We’re already heading for the office when Cameron comes racing through the office door.
“There’s a car here,” he says, out of breath. “Someone’s here.”
“Too late,” Casey says, and Cameron’s eyes go wide, seeing us and the chaos we’re leaving behind.
“Go,” he says, boosting me up through the broken window first. “To the church.”
Casey’s on the ground a moment behind me, and we’re both racing toward the church, and I’m listening for sirens, but my breath is catching in a way that makes it seem like I’m crying.
Maybe I’m out of shape.
Maybe I’m tired.
Maybe I’m panicking.
The grass is slick beneath my feet, and there’s a light, cool rain coming down around us. Cameron catches up to us, catches my hand, pulls me to a brown car with deep, tinted windows. I dive into the backseat, and Casey and Cameron sit up front. Cameron starts the car, and we drive just over the speed limit through residential streets when I realize that I am actually crying. This is my life. I am not free. I am running. I have to keep running. I can’t stay in one place for any length of time. I cannot have human contact. I cannot be free.
Casey turns around and says, “We’re okay, we’re fine.”
But we’re not. I can hear it in the quiver of her voice. It’s shaking, uncertain. Desperate. She’s supposed to be good at people, and the fact that she can’t even hold it together breaks the last thread within me.
It’s drizzling outside, and Cameron turns on the headlights. The wipers cut through the rain in a pattern like a metronome.
I hear the inevitability of my life, and the one before, heading our way.
Cameron and Casey tense when they hear it, too. In the distance, but coming closer.
The sirens. They’ve started.
Chapter 19
Eventually we stop hearing the sirens. Eventually we hear helicopters instead. I look up from the corner of the window and see a news station symbol on the side of the nearest helicopter. But there are others in the distance—black and sleek with no visible designation. I instinctively back away from the window, but I keep watching. They circle the area over the school, possibly believing we’re still holed up inside. That kid took our picture. They will find our prints. They will know, for a fact, we were there. I don’t think they see our car. If they do, I don’t think they know we’re in it. I keep my face covered, just in case.
“Tell me you wiped the search history,” Cameron says.
“Of course I wiped the search history,” Casey says. “Who do you think I am?”
Search history. Right. That’s how I pulled up the article Cameron was reading.
“Of course, if they bring in someone who actually knows what they’re doing, that won’t really matter.” Cameron tenses behind the wheel. “But that will take time,” she says.
“I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t wipe anything from the computer I was using.”
“Did you search for Ivory Street at all?” Casey asks, spinning around.
I shake my head. “No, just looking at the data on the hard drives.”
Cameron taps his fingers against the steering wheel in a frantic rhythm. “Can we disappear?” he asks Casey in a low voice. “Can you work up some identities?”
“And then this is all for nothing?” Casey asks.
“Not for nothing,” he says. I know what he means. I am out, and that counts for something. The idea of freedom would be nice, but we have limited options.
“There’s no turning back,” I whisper. “You’ll be fugitives forever. Dominic was right—we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt.”
It’s quiet inside the car, but outside, the helicopters circle. The sound is physically painful—I wince every time they come closer.
“Something doesn’t add up, about June, about me,” I say. I’m stuck thinking about the past life, but everyone else is focused on this one, like always. “I think June knew something … I think she and Liam stumbled upon something in there …”
“I want to find Ava,” Casey whispers. And again, I think of Ava in that database somewhere, and the fact that she will not be the same person, which Casey must know.
There’s a beat of silence as Casey rifles through the bag, checking on the safe keeping of the hard drives, when Cameron says, “I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“You won’t. I promise. But we’re out of options, Cameron. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” she says, pulling out the stacks of paper taking up space in the overstuffed bag. “But we have nothing right now. No answers, no money … Oh, God,” she says. She squints at the articles I’ve printed out.
“What?” I ask.
“I forgot. The printer has a memory. It can reprint.”
I’m picturing our secrets dispensing from the base of the printer, eyes reading what I’ve just read—I wonder what, if anything, they will see.
“Why would they even check?” I ask.
She turns around in the front seat, her eyes wide. “That kid is going to say he saw Alina Chase in the computer lab. Of course they’re going to check!” Casey says.
“Well, I’m sorry, I never knew that a printer had a memory. And you didn’t tell me. And they’re just science articles! What does it matter?”
“It matters because they’ll know what we’re after. It matters because they’ll eventually find what we were searching for. I printed off her picture. I can’t believe it. It matters because they’ll be able to find us, Alina. God!”
“We don’t even know what we’re after! We have no plan! Don’t you get it? My entire life is riding on this, right now!”
“Don’t you get it?” she yells back. “So are ours!”
“Stop!” Cameron says. “We’re in a car, we’re not caught, we’ve got some time. We need to stay a step ahead, is all. Get there first.”