Chapter 35

I panned my head slowly in deliberate sections: a periscope slicing through the ghostly silence like a probe seeking the origin of the snapped twig. My hairs were set on end; the frigid and gloomy morning wore a poker-faced stillness, a velvet hush with a sharpened edge.

Like a spilled secret under a held breath, another series of cracks froze me in place. The dampened air coated my skin in a frost-sheened sweat. My ears rang, void of footsteps, void of clues. I strained to gauge how near.

The proximity was stifling.

Panic spiked through me.

I felt a corpse-like grip seal my scream. The clammy fingers over my mouth belonged to a face no more than a breath's breadth from my own.

Recognition hit like a hammer blow: It was Sam. I couldn't blink. Couldn't respond. I'd tracked nothing. She was as good as Rob. Maybe better: Rob was quiet.

Sam was silence.

Slowly she pressed a single finger against her lips, a gesture to remain mute. Her hand peeled away from my lower face as she pointed to the bag and signaled a retreat. I expended extra care to stand as slowly as humanly possible with careful maneuvers to avoid making our presence known.

We kept the blind between us and the embankment below as we slowly edged away.

Sam placed a hand on my shoulder, and, like an idiot, I jumped. She kept a still finger on her lips as her eyes rose upward. I followed her gaze to see into the canopy of a particularly large and notable tree, easily three or four times my width.

With a start, a strange sense of deja vu and realization came over me: It's the same damn tree...

Yep. Just like the other two times, we'd all been caught entirely unaware.

She wanted us to climb. 

Chapter 34

While I had so many more questions, I knew it wasn't the time to expect detailed answers. It'd been a shock, but for the umpteenth time the statement, "We can talk about it later," crept back up from within rather than without.

I went with the easiest question we had time for: "Why are you telling me all of this now?"

Sam retreated inward to reflect on her response. "You're exhausted, hungry, and confused," she said quietly. "I can't offer anything to solve most of that—I don't have anything to give you. But I can apologize for how I acted and at least explain what little I do know. When Rob told me who you really were, it hit hard. He used to use you and your mother as a lesson in how to understand bad things happen to good people. He and your mother were close when they were children—you know that, right? Whatever I said or did before, if I'm treating you differently now, it's because Rob made me understand you're more like us than I first realized."

It had been the most she'd shared vocally since I'd known her, which, amazingly enough, only amounted to a few short hours.

Crazy....

Aloud, I voiced another question: "Us?"

Chapter 33

Rob pulled some of the pilfered equipment from my bag to distribute it between us. The largest items were the rifles Paul and Ted had been armed with.

"We've got two of these. Each of you take one."

Rob handed me one of the dense rectangles. I'd never actually seen one up close like this before in person; while I'd had enough exposure to popular culture over the years to understand where to put my hands, I was by no means a subject matter expert. Like a lumpy bed, on those nights I couldn't fall asleep, I felt restless and uneasy just from the touch of it. The arm-length gun felt oddly alien to my chilled hands: it felt heavy and dangerous.

"SK-Thirteen-R, Schwertkaufe models," Rob said. He manipulated my hands around the grip, which had buttons, labels, and all sorts of nonsense I wasn't sure I was ready to mess with. He slapped the back of the gun lightly and paused to ensure he had my full attention. "Hold this part to your shoulder. Point that end where you want it to go 'bang.' Squeeze, don't jerk."

It was a lot for my muddled brain to take in all at once. Though I'm sure Rob's delivery was rather precise and smooth, it was all jibberish as far as I was concerned. I sputtered, too busy in my attempts to not set it off unintentionally to pay attention fully the first time.

"I—uh, wh—bang where?!"

Rob actually snorted before he caught himself.

"You remember those shooter games, right? Karl and Preston wouldn't stop talking about em. I thought you were in the same circles, weren't you?"

Chapter 32

I turned to look up.

The line of flares continued their lofty descent at a not-so-far-away distance from the one Rob had launched above us. Without another word, he walked toward the embankment. It felt like someone had flipped my stomach inside out and pinned it to the interior of my throat. Between the flares, a vague reference to my parents' past, and the somehow super-secret-but-not-secret organization, which Rob, Sam, and now I were a part of. It felt like a spark had caught on a proverbial fuse. Like the pressure fitting of a Pod Lock close to a breach, something was about to go bang in my brain, and I couldn't take it anymore.

I hustled after him.

“Rob! Hang on...what about my mother? What about everything we were just talking about?! You can’t just leave something like that unanswered.”

Rob didn't stop. Instead, he scaled up the side of the embankment as easily as if he were navigating a ladder. I goggled up at him in complete surprise as he directed his voice back down toward me. “If you want any answers, you won’t find any if we’re caught.”

I eyed the muddy slope warily as Sam approached me from behind.

My voice was far squeakier than I wanted it to sound. "Do you know what all of this is about?!” I asked, fully expecting a snarky response in return.

Except it didn't come.

She paused. Her eyes followed the mud that sluiced toward us as she genuinely mulled over my question.

“Nope,” she said, “and it's not my place to tell anyway. You're going to have to wait for Rob.”

"Move you two." Rob's voice said hidden above. "We've got little time and much to do."

With a sudden burst of movement, Sam leaned forward and loped easily up the side. While it might have lacked the flair of Rob’s rapid ascent, it was still far better than any attempt I'd be able to muster.

Glumly, I looked upward as she twirled on the spot to look down at me.