The fueling attendant had made himself scarce, and that was good for me. I caught a glimpse of him tinkering around with a plane, no sign that he was paying attention to anything other than his work on a small two-prop job. That was a good sign for me that this place wasn’t under serious scrutiny, or at least that it hadn’t been infiltrated by hordes of Police Scotland agents under Rose’s control. The mechanic started working on one of the plane’s engines and didn’t even spare a glance out the open doors of the hangar, which convinced me he was who he appeared to be.
The pilot stopped a few feet from his plane and surveyed the ground around him. He cast a gaze over the flat, open space that surrounded the airfield, like he was just taking in the weather. He shuffled around the plane for a few minutes, stretching his legs, then opened the door and pulled out an apple. He started to eat really slowly, which made me think this was either my guy or he wanted an extended break before starting on the next leg of his trip, wherever that may have led him.
It was time to chance it. I broke cover, wandering out of the woods completely casually. It was about a hundred yards to the edge of the airfield, and there was no perimeter fence save for a low one about four feet high that I vaulted when I got close. I didn’t even have to go meta on it, I just climbed over it like a normal person, in case anyone was watching from a distance. No point in drawing unnecessary attention to myself by sprinting or leaping like a gazelle over the thing. Motion draws the hunter’s attention to the prey, after all, and I knew to keep my actions measured and normal. I was just a girl out for a walk, so far as anybody knew.
The pilot caught sight of me when I was only about fifty yards away from him. He cocked his head, looked at me over his sunglasses, and after an interminable pause in surveying me, lifted his hand in a very small wave, once he had checked in either direction to be sure no one was watching us.
We were clear, and I was pretty sure this was my guy.
I drew closer, picking up the pace a little. “Hey,” I called out to him when I was only about twenty yards away.
He nodded at me. “How’s it going?” European accent, somewhere in the Mediterranean area. Spanish, maybe, or Greek. Tough to tell by his English.
“It’s been a day,” I said, now only about ten yards away. I slowed my pace further. “You waiting for someone?”
He smiled thinly. “Not anymore. Get in and let’s get out of here.”
“How was the view from inside?” I asked as I passed him, never once taking my eyes off him. I climbed up into the plane through the pilot’s door and crawled over into the passenger seat, not wanting to board the aircraft in clear view of the admin building or the hangars.
“Sleepy,” he said, getting in and fastening his seatbelt. I didn’t really want to fasten mine, because it restricted my motion, but I also didn’t want to get thrown from the aircraft now that I couldn’t fly or heal myself either, so I did the ostensibly smart thing and buckled up. “Only a clerk to process paperwork,” he said. “Maybe another in the tower for ATC. Why?”
“Just paranoid,” I said, and he smiled again, thinly. He was a pro, probably a smuggler, but I didn’t care what he did right now. I just wanted to get the hell out of Scotland intact. “You got my gear?”
“Big bag in the back,” he said, nodding over his shoulder, before positioning a boom mic in front of his face from a headset. “I’m told it contains everything you asked for. I was also told to ditch it if I was in any danger of getting caught.”
“Yeah, this isn’t the sort of stuff you want sitting on the passenger seat when the cops roll up,” I said, turning back to see a big military duffel and a smaller one next to it. “What’s in the other bag?”
He didn’t look back. “That’s for me.” I caught the hint of a smile. “In case of trouble.”
“Oookay,” I said, “well let’s hope for none of that.” I suspected it was a handgun or something of the sort. Maybe a knife if he was the overly cautious sort. My instincts of him being a smuggler seemed more and more likely by the minute, which meant if he was carrying a rocket launcher for me and machine gun, an assault rifle…carrying a pistol of his own, even in the UK, wouldn’t exactly have been a tremendous addition of trouble with the law.
He brought the plane around in a bumping taxi, and I looked out the window at the air traffic control tower as I passed. He was talking to them in his headset, requesting permission to take off. There was a little bumping as he guided the plane, the ground uneven on this landing patch. Not terrible, but it was no airport runway, that much was plain.
“Where are we headed?” I asked. And when he cocked his head at me for asking, I said, “You know, in case we get separated in flight.” Which was a joke.
He let out a grim smile. “A field south of London to refuel, and then past the Channel into mainland Europe.”
“Where’s my final destination?” I asked him over the sound of the prop spinning, chopping through the air like the world’s most hellacious fan. It was loud, even through the headset I was wearing.
“We’re heading to—” He stopped, and I caught the flicker of motion ahead a second after he did. It must have originated behind the tower, because there’d be no sign of anything the moment before, but now—
There were choppers.
Two of them.
They looked like old Hueys, the military helo that America had made famous in Vietnam. They were still painted in the olive green of a military helicopter, but their age was showing, and they could have belonged to anyone. There were men with guns inside, hanging out of the big open bay doors, and a voice crackled through the air, aided by a loudspeaker on the side.
“Sienna Nealon! Surrender now, or you will be killed!” Judging by the hardware the black-tac-geared guys within were carrying…they could do it, too. Several times over. I saw Stinger missiles, a couple of M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, a machine gun that could fill the air with 100 rounds per minute without breaking a sweat, and a dude with a big fifty-caliber sniper rifle that could put holes in a human body the size of a Gatorade bottle. And not one of the small bottles, either.
Something about this setup trickled through me with the dim creeping of fear that made its way from my brain into my stomach, churning the acid in mere seconds. It wasn’t the weapons, though I had plenty of reason to be fearful of those. They could kill me easily now, after all. And it wasn’t the second helicopter, which came sweeping in behind us, similarly laden with men with guns.
It was, I realized, the fact that when they’d shouted their message of surrender, these heavily armed men…it hadn’t been with a Scottish accent.
It had been an American one.
The US government had found me.
11.
Reed
I was awoken in the middle of the night by the call, jarring me out of a fitful sleep. Isabella was breathing softly by my side, but even she was wakened by the buzz of my phone. I rolled over in the peaceful darkness of our apartment and fumbled past my hand lotion (they get dry in winter in Minnesota, come on), the pad of paper and pens, and finally to my cell phone charger next to the bed. I damned near fumbled it in my sleepy clumsiness, but managed to hit the unlock button and push it to my ear. “Hello?” I asked blearily.
“It’s Miranda,” came the calm voice at the other end of the line, and for a second my stomach dropped, remembering that when last I’d left consciousness, my sister had been on the run in Scotland. My brain decided to jump to conclusions, and as my breath stuck in my throat I wondered if her next words were going to be, “I’m sorry—she’s dead.”
But they weren’t. Instead: “We’ve received an emergency request for assistance from a little town outside Odessa, Texas. They’ve got a hostage situation involving a metahuman.”
My heart, a second earlier feeling like it was thudding toward two hundred beats per minute and an explosion, suddenly stilled. “Okay. When do they want us there?”
“Yesterday, if you could travel through time,” she said. “They’ve got the place surrounded, but this person—the hostage-taker—they’ve got a family barricaded in a house. Mother and small children.”