Peri sprang ahead, slipping from him as Silas pounded behind her. The two attendants followed, one yelling into a two-way. “I didn’t know they were here,” Peri got out between breaths, when she’d slowed enough that Silas could catch up. “Opti wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“It’s not Opti. It’s the alliance,” he said. “No, keep going!” he shouted, pushing her to an employees-only door, when she almost stopped.
“Why are we running?” she asked as they spilled through it and into a quiet hallway.
Grimacing, Silas dead-bolted the door, starting at the sudden pounding on it. “Come on. This has to lead somewhere.”
“You told me you were alliance,” Peri said as she jogged beside him. “Are you or not?”
“I am,” he ground out. “It’s Fran, Taf’s mother. She’d rather believe that you bewitched her daughter into believing your lies than that her daughter might be a better judge of character than she is.”
“Taf?” Peri bit her lip as she recalled the young woman. “I don’t get it.”
They turned a corner and Silas eased their pace, looking for an exit. “Fran is the head of the alliance. Taf ran off with you instead of backing up her mother. There was a gun involved, and Fran’s pretty pissed off about it.”
“Swell. I ran off with the daughter of the head of the alliance? They’re never going to believe me,” Peri said bitterly. “Why are you just telling me this now?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Silas smart-mouthed. “I couldn’t wedge it between you cracking my rib and the hot dog.”
The sudden crash of the distant door slamming behind them jolted them into motion.
“Go!” Silas shouted, pushing her.
Peri sprinted ahead for the fire door, hitting it full-force since fire codes would have it unlocked from this side. The heavy door thumped into the wall, and Silas ran after her, skidding to a stop when three men straightened from a car waiting in the sun.
“Get her!” one cried as weapons were pulled.
Silas’s heart seemed to stop as Peri continued to head for the wide square of light and her freedom, going full-tilt off the raised platform to roll upright and running upon landing. Her hat was gone, and her black hair gleamed when she reached the sun and the men at the car.
“You in the black! Stop!” one shouted, and Peri hesitated to look back for him.
“Don’t shoot her!” Silas shouted, knowing the pause was fatal. “For God’s sake, Peri, don’t draft! You might go into a full MEP!”
Two men crashed into him from behind, knocking him down and wrestling his arms behind his back. But his eyes were fixed on Peri, his eyes closing in heartache when she slowly rose from her crouch and yanked a dart from her arm.
“No!” Silas shouted as she staggered … and then … drafted before it could take hold.
Silas gasped, shocked at the breadth of her reach as she yanked everyone in a half-mile radius into a blue haze of hindsight. His mind seemed to expand as time became malleable, and with a sudden pop he could almost feel the world reset with a crystalline clarity of lost chances.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
“Peri! Wait!” Silas shouted as he ran onto the loading dock, and Peri spun, putting her back to the Dumpster and edging deeper into the shadows instead of into the sun and her freedom. She was drafting, and for the first time, a new fear slid between her thought and her reason. Silas thought she was going to go into MEP? If Silas’s tinkering didn’t hold, she wasn’t only going to lose her past, but her mind.
“Stop!” Silas exclaimed as two men fell on him, and Peri backed farther into the alley. “I can talk her in. You’re making this worse.”
“You shut up,” the man holding him said, kicking his knees out from under him, and Peri crouched, reaching for her pen pendant and jerking it open.
TRUST NO ONE, she wrote, eyes fixed on the two men creeping closer with the caution of Bushmen circling a lion. She shifted the pen’s position to gouge.
“No!” Silas protested as she silently rushed them.
“Watch it!” someone cried, and Peri crashed into the nearest man. He shouted, dropping out of her way when the pen buried itself deep between his shoulder and his neck. Teeth clenched, she shoved him at the other man, the jolt of her breakaway lanyard snapping through her. She darted left at the pop of a weapon. She was going to make it. She was going to make it!
And then the world hiccupped. She was running. Men were shouting behind her, and she didn’t know why. But she didn’t slow down, confused as she zigged when a red-fletched dart pinged on the window of the car she was passing. Heart pounding, she looked at her palm.
Trust no one.
It made perfect sense and none at all. She’d come here to buy her way into the alliance, but she didn’t remember talking to anyone. She’d lost at least ten minutes, maybe more. But it was that she might have damaged Silas’s patch job that struck fear into her. She’d be fine if she could just … get away!
“Jack?” she shouted, and she saw him thirty feet up the street, gesturing for her.