“Why did you do that?” I asked. “You know I clobbered him.”
“I doubt he’ll admit that to anyone,” Nathaniel said. “But I really do need to talk to you.”
We heard the sounds of running feet, and a far-off siren.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and for once I listened to him.
32
“LOOK,” NATHANIEL SAID AS WE walked quickly to the school parking lot. “I need to show you something. I promise if you come see it, I’ll never bother you again. After you see this, if you tell me to never talk to you again, I won’t.”
I stopped by my moped. “See what?”
“I can’t talk about it here,” he said quietly. “But please, it’s important.”
“Why should I trust you?” I asked, thinking of the hundreds of times he’d been a jerk to me or Becca.
He paused for a moment, and finally said, “Well, I can’t think of any reason you should.”
Oddly, that made me trust him—a tiny bit.
“Okay, I’ll go see this whatever,” I said. “But if this is a double cross, I will hunt you down like a rabid raccoon and put you out of my misery.”
“Got it,” he said, and we both started our mopeds and headed away from school.
Like I said, our cell is four miles across, pretty much a big circle. There’s the town part and a factory part, but those are pretty small compared to all the rest, which is farmland. Nathaniel led me to an outer road that I’d only been on once or twice, with Pa.
“Where are we going?” I called to Nathaniel, but he didn’t answer.
No one lived out here—these were the far reaches of other people’s farms. We passed acre after acre of fenced pasture, saw herd after herd of soft-eyed dairy cows, and still we kept on, heading toward the edge of the cell.
Cassie, you’re being stupid—again, I told myself. You know you can’t trust him! Why are you so willing to follow him out to the edge of nowhere? Maybe this is what he did with Becca. Maybe he’d found her out on the boundary road, after she played chicken with Taylor. Maybe he was the reason she’d disappeared.
Maybe it was my turn to disappear.
Crap. I almost stopped and turned around. If I got a bit of a head start, he might not be able to catch me—his moped was brand-new and shiny, but I’d tinkered with the engine on mine, and could probably squeeze a bit more power out of it.
Nathaniel seemed to sense my hesitation; he looked at me then, caught my eye, and pointed off to the distance. Barely visible, surrounded by wheat fields, stood a building. A farmhouse. Suddenly Nathaniel took a sharp right. It looked like he was plunging right into the wheat, but as I clumsily turned and followed him I saw we were on a narrow dirt track.
It would be easy to dump a body here, I thought. There wouldn’t be anyone around to notice a cloud of buzzards circling overhead. Drying heads of wheat stalks whipped against me, and I kept my face down. I couldn’t turn around here—the track was so narrow that the only way out was forward with Nathaniel, or backward. My mouth went dry as I accepted the fact that I’d made a huge mistake.
Then suddenly we were out of the wheat field and right in front of the house. It hadn’t been lived in for a long time—windows were broken, the porch was rotten, and there wasn’t even a bit of paint on the worn weatherboards.
Nathaniel stopped his moped and kicked the stand in place. I stopped, but kept my engine running.
He came over and took hold of my handlebars. Keeping his eyes on me, he reached forward and pressed the ignition button off. The slight vibration ceased, and then the world seemed silent, empty of people, and there was no one except me and the Provost’s son.
“Get off the moped, Cassie,” he said softly. “We’re going in back, to the barn.”
33
IF I QUICKLY STARTED AND gunned the engine, I could putt-putt back toward the wheat field and pray that I could find the track that already seemed to be gone. If I jumped off the moped and ran, I would no doubt get lost in the wheat, and Nathaniel would just follow me and drag me back. Either way, I was totally out of luck. I’d been stupid to follow him out here.
I got off the moped. Nathaniel took my arm lightly, as if to tell me not to even think about running. My brain was spinning, trying to come up with a plan for escape. Maybe in the barn there would be old farm tools, like a scythe or something.
The only sound out here was the wind. I heard no birds, no insects, no rodents scurrying. Soon there would be no sound of Cassie. My throat was tight. One week ago my life was the new normal: no Ma or Pa, but me and Becca and regular everything else. So far today I had decked a teacher and was now with the Provost’s son, wondering if I would have to kill him to escape.
He kept hold of me as he pulled one of the big barn doors open. It ground on rusty hinges, revealing the dark inside an inch at a time.
When it was wide enough for us to slip through, Nathaniel pushed me gently forward. I blinked, unable to see anything after the bright afternoon. Behind me, Nathaniel pulled the door shut with a groaning crunch. I tried to swallow and couldn’t, blinking wildly in the faint light let in by cracks in the boards.
On the count of three, I was going to whirl, stomp on his instep, and then throw myself at the door, I decided. One, two—
“Hey, Cassie,” said a girl’s voice. “Long time no see.”
“Wh—who is that?” I said.
A shadow moved toward me, and then another. And another. The nearer they got, the clearer their features became, and my mouth opened in surprise as I saw Rachel Detweiler, Russ Mickelson, and Tony Hanson. Kids from school.
Nathaniel let go of me and went to stand next to them.
“What is this?” I demanded. “Why am I out here?” I backed up, heading for the door, and glanced around to see if anyone else was coming at me. My eyes fell on a couple of rifles sitting on an old bale of hay. I tensed, but then realized that they had green paint splattered around the ends of their barrels. They were paint guns. The paint guns used to shoot the Provost the other night.
Nathaniel held his arms open wide. “Welcome to the Outsiders,” he said.
34
“WHA—?” I MANAGED.
“We’re some of the Outsiders,” Rachel said.
“Some of the kids that disappeared were Outsiders,” Nathaniel said. “We didn’t take them—we don’t know who did. Maybe my father. Maybe the police. Believe me, we want to find out just as much as you do.”
“But… what do you do, as Outsiders?” I asked, sitting abruptly on a hay bale before my legs gave out.
“Mostly we try to learn what we’re not being taught.” That was a voice I didn’t recognize. A girl with straight black hair, shaved off on one side of her head, stepped out of the shadows.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Tara Nightwing,” she said. “And guess what—I’m not from your cell.”