I’VE BEEN SITTING IN THIS ROOM, WATCHING MY guard stare at a television for the last two hours, thinking that this is the worst torture imaginable. The grunts and guttural noises he makes as he alternates between watching a football game and checking his cell phone are making me crazy. I’m beginning to think I’d rather be shot than spend another six hours with a TV-watching Neanderthal.
I brought it on myself. The guards decided to separate Whit and me after I attacked him. O’Donnell said there was a bedroom assigned to me, but when he made it clear that he’d be staying with me inside the room, I refused.
I asked if I could see Badger. Another no. And he didn’t even answer me when I asked if we could go outside. So we came down here to the “media room” as he calls it. I tried to watch television, but it gave me a throbbing pain between my eyes.
I scoped the room for anything I could use to Read, but there’s no fire, no water, not even a potted plant. In our yurts, the floors were dirt, we had fires in our stoves: Nature was all around us. This room doesn’t even smell natural. There’s a sweet artificial smell—like dying flowers—that’s making my headache even worse.
Unable to do anything useful, I’m distracting myself with a book on jaguars—the books in the room are all about hunting and animals—sitting on the couch the farthest away from the windows, as per my guard’s instructions. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do—break the glass and use a shard to persuade him to let me go? An idea I wouldn’t completely dismiss if it weren’t for Badger being kept hostage somewhere in the house.
As the minutes go by, O’Donnell gets more and more nervous, until he’s just sitting there staring at his phone. I’m almost relieved when it finally rings: The tension in the room’s as thick as goat curd.
“Yes? Where are you?” he asks anxiously, and then yells, “What the hell?”
He’s on his feet in an instant, and grabbing me by the arm, says, “You. Come with me, and keep quiet.” Pocketing the phone, he shoves me down the hallway, through the room of heads, past the front hall, and into a dimly lit office. He closes the door quietly behind us, and then throws himself in front of a computer sitting on a dark wooden desk the size of a rowboat.
He clicks a button, and the screen lights up. “What?!” he exclaims in surprise when he sees a dark square on the screen. He clicks something else and the picture goes from black to hazy white, and a road appears with spotlights lining it on either side.
He picks up the phone and punches a couple of buttons. “You see it now?” he asks, and then breathes a sigh of relief. “I have no idea how that happened. They were on before. Must be some sort of glitch in the system.” He waits. “Gotcha. We’ll be right there.”
He hangs up and, taking me roughly by the arm, leads me into the hallway and out the front door.
It’s pitch-black outside. O’Donnell leans back in the door and flips a switch up and down while staring at a nonfunctioning light on the porch ceiling. “What the hell’s going on around here?” he mutters, and giving up, yanks me down the front steps.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“I have an errand to run, and you’re coming with me,” he says.
His grip is so tight it hurts, but I don’t let him know. He seems like the kind of man who would find it amusing to inflict pain on someone smaller than him. O’Donnell leads me to the same huge vehicle I was brought here in, steers me into the front seat, and closes the door behind me. He jumps behind the wheel and clicks a button, locking us inside.
We make our way up the drive, through the electric gate, and go west at the crossroad instead of south, where my clan is. “Where are we going?” I repeat, but O’Donnell doesn’t answer. He turns on the radio and drives.
I can’t see a thing beyond our headlights, the night is so dark. But my driver seems to know the way by heart. After a while, he looks at his phone and murmurs, “Ten minutes. We’re almost there.”
We come over the top of a ridge, and spread below us is an airstrip, lit up on either side by white lights. I recognize it as the road I’d seen on the computer: O’Donnell just turned these lights on for someone. I check the sky and see flashing lights coming toward us—a plane flying low—and feel a surge of the shaky anxiety that almost crippled me in the Mojave.
This is a small plane, like the one I took to Los Angeles, but with no markings besides numbers on the tail. As we near, the plane eases down and lands on the runway, its tires screeching as it bounces a couple of times and then comes to a stop.
We follow the road in and park near the airplane, just as its stairway lowers, unfolds, and touches the ground. O’Donnell gets out of the car and comes to my side. He opens my door, and holding me tightly by the arm, marches me toward the plane. I look up at the door, and my heart plummets when I see a familiar figure appear in the doorway.
“Ah, Juneau,” Mr. Blackwell says. “So good to see you again.”
44
MILES