“They were holding her hostage too,” Griffin said.
“Were . . . ?” Willow stated as if this was news to her. “But not now?” Then her expression cleared and her face fell. “Aw, shit. Is she dead too?”
Griffin answered, “Not dead, but missing. We’re hoping to find her before it’s too late.”
“Then what are we still doing down here?” This was an accusation. The old Willow was ready for action.
TYLER
WE HAD IT—A LOCATION.
Jett refused to give us all the details—plausible deniability, he maintained. But if I had to guess he’d somehow hacked into NASA or some other space agency, and had used the reverse star chart to come up with the coordinates of a location here on Earth. Even better, it was in California.
The guy was a freaking miracle worker.
Now we just had to get there.
It was too far, and way too cramped, to make the 1,200-mile trip packed into two vehicles with eight people and a hyperactive dog. Or maybe it just felt that way.
Whatever the case, we stopped by Griffin’s temporary camp and dropped off Nancy and whoever else wanted to get out, which turned out to be Griffin’s two soldiers, who weren’t invested in finding Kyra the way the rest of us were. Ben made the poor guys promise to guard the dog with their lives and to feed her only the best rations. They agreed, but only after their eyes slid to Griffin for authorization.
Nancy howled and both men had to hold her back while our two vehicles rolled out of camp.
“She’s a dog,” Simon told me, the only thing he’d said to me in hours. “She licks her own butt. She’ll forget all about him in two seconds.”
Somehow, I doubted that. But I didn’t want to debate the Nancy-Ben relationship with Simon, either, so I dropped it.
Less than a day and we’d be there. And with any luck at all we’d find something—some shred of information that would lead us to Kyra. Because right now it was killing me not to know where she was. That I couldn’t pinpoint her location the way I had before—that beacon of light I’d sensed, leading me to her.
Simon didn’t seem to notice the part where we had no real plan. He just charged ahead like it would all work out, because Simon was like that—like a bull, never thinking, never planning, just bulldozing his way through life. Willow sat up front in the SUV, seeming no worse for the wear, even after being imprisoned down in that asylum, while Griffin sat in back with me.
I stared at the back of Willow’s head.
Everyone was so quick to accept her story, that of all the places in all the world, she just happened to cross paths with Natty in the middle of Wyoming. That Natty just happened to pull a fast one on her.
I wasn’t saying she was lying, I just wasn’t entirely convinced.
Still, it wasn’t like I had many options. Right now, finding out where this map led was our only hope. Which meant this had to work. That, or we might never see Kyra again.
It wasn’t easy though. I couldn’t wipe the images of the mess we’d left behind back there at the asylum—the bodies, the strange equipment. What had they done to Kyra?
I forced myself to focus on my primary objective—finding Kyra.
And the first thing I’d do was tell her I forgave her . . . for everything, because I did. How could I not? I’d had time to think about it, and if the roles had been reversed . . . if it had been Kyra dying and my only option had been to send her to them in hopes that they might save her . . . even if it meant she might come back changed . . .
Well, I’d have done it too.
Of course I would have.
Because I loved her.
I couldn’t remember everything about us, but I remembered that . . . deep in my bones . . . in every cell of my being, I loved Kyra Agnew.
And I’d be damned if anything was going to stop me from finding her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Days Remaining: Eleven
WITHOUT THE DRUGS IN MY SYSTEM TO SHIELD me from daybreak, those orange-tinged tips of the sun’s arrival felt like white-hot fire pokers gutting me.
Eleven, I heard inside my head as I bolted up from the seat with so much force that my forehead nearly rammed into the dash. But Chuck’s reflexes were lightning fast, and instead I crashed against an arm as solid as a tree trunk.
“Damn, girl. Nightmare?”
From behind, Thom’s fingers cupped my shoulder more gently. “You okay?”
Working to get my breathing under control while still being branded from the inside out, I clung to the lie Chuck had offered me. “Yep . . . nightmares.”
Chuck hadn’t noticed that for the last hour or so I’d been faking sleep just to avoid his endless barrage of conversation. He was seriously the nicest guy ever, but I couldn’t help myself. I was just so tired of dodging his questions—about where we were going, where we’d been, who we were, and what our plans were.
Thom was better than I was at being evasive. At giving nonanswers.