He’d come pounding on their doors twelve minutes ago, their own Paul Revere. He was both relieved and disturbed to see that the British had actually come.
“It’s complicated. I’ll explain once we start moving again.”
Zack narrowed his eyes at the distant lights. He took no comfort at all from their close getaway. The Deps shouldn’t have found them this quickly.
He shined a flashlight on his compass, and then at the trees. “We need to go north, which means we’ll have to cut through the woods. I hope nobody has dark-forest issues. We have two flashlights. It shouldn’t be bad.”
“I can make more light if we need it,” David offered.
“Third rule,” Mia sternly reminded him. “No public weirdness.”
He raised his palms. “When you’re right, Miafarisi, you’re right.”
Amanda slung her knapsack over her shoulder. “We should get going.”
As they moved toward the woods, Theo furtively pushed the stolen cash into Zack’s palm.
“Sorry.”
Zack patted his back with tense distraction. “Don’t worry about it.”
Theo checked on David, anticipating a far less charitable response. To his surprise, the boy merely eyed him through a quizzical leer.
“You’re just not what?” he asked Theo.
“What?”
David removed Zack’s pen sketch from his pocket and pointed to the incomplete scribble that Theo left in the corner. I’m sorry, guys. I’m just not
“Oh.” Theo scratched his neck in contemplation. “I don’t know how I was going to finish that.”
“Well, I suppose you have time to figure out what you are and aren’t.”
Though David had said the words amicably, they still didn’t sit well with Theo. He’d spent the last five years in a liquid state, living without a single care for the future. Now suddenly he found himself insanely concerned with events to come. He was concerned about Evan, concerned about New York, and now very concerned about Peter Pendergen.
He straightened his book bag and followed the others into the woods. By the time they emerged, the sun had come up and the Silvers were five miles closer to Brooklyn.
TWENTY
They marched north, through a seemingly endless terrain of dirt roads and grassy hills. Yesterday’s clouds had all but vanished. Now the late-summer sun raged away at their skin, repeatedly forcing them to take shade under sprawling oaks.
When they traveled, they plodded forth in a drowsy trance. It was only while resting that thin reeds of chatter sprang up between them. Virtually all the conversation came from Amanda and the men. Mia had fallen into a bleak silence. Amanda didn’t like her flushed color or the way she occasionally staggered on the grass. Mia had to assure her twice that she was fine. Just quiet.
Everyone knew why Hannah wasn’t talking.
It was at their first oak tree respite, four hours ago, that Theo relayed a message from Evan Rander.
“He said check your pockets. I have no idea why. Just . . . be careful.”
At first Hannah couldn’t find anything in her shorts but the silver half-dollar Zack had given her. She opened her knapsack and fished through the jeans she’d purchased yesterday. Tucked away in the back pocket was the driver’s license of a handsome thirty-year-old man. After a few seconds of tense perusal, she passed it to the others. Zack was the first to speak his name.
“Ernesto Curado. Huh.”
“You don’t know the guy?” David asked Hannah.
She didn’t, but she was sure she recognized Ernesto from her hallucinatory vision yesterday, the muscular man who’d held another Hannah so closely from behind. Her ghostly double had called him Jury.
Amanda studied the license with fidgety unease. “It doesn’t make sense. How did Evan get this in your pocket?”
“He did it yesterday when I bumped into him at the department store. He put all my stuff back in the handcart. Guess this was why.”
“But what was he hoping to accomplish? I mean if he was trying to upset you, why use the driver’s license of a man you never met?”
“I don’t know,” said Hannah, with distant bother.
Zack returned the license to her. “Well, whoever he is, he’s from the unified state of California. He’s one of us.”
“Was one of us,” David corrected, with enough detachment to make Hannah want to scream.
Theo frowned at him. “You don’t know he’s dead.”
“I think the message is a pretty clear indicator.”
Evan had placed a small and ominous sticky note on the back of the card. You would have liked him.
Hannah obsessively studied the license for the next two miles, until all his information was chisel-etched into memory—his height (six-foot-two), his weight (205 pounds), his hair (black), his eyes (brown). She knew his address on 13th Street, not far from where the 747 had crashed. She knew he was an organ donor and that he shared a birthday with her mother.