“What—” says Mia.
“Now,” says Dex, at the same moment.
And a bright orange ball of flame blossoms up from the facility behind us. An explosion, huge. The boom reaches us a moment later, a physical force.
“What the hell?” I shout.
“The shuttle,” Atlanta says calmly. “It’s not designed to be detonated near vehicles like that. Fuel.”
Of course. As the IA were taking us out of the shuttle, I watched Dex weigh up whether or not he could hit that ignition switch just outside the door. He must have run back to do it just now.
“There could have been people near that thing,” I hear myself say.
“Yeh.” Dex’s voice is calm. “I hope not.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Atlanta says, dismissive. “Keep them busy, they won’t have time to hassle us.”
“Not for long,” I point out.
“Slow them down,” Dex says.
“So now,” Mia says slowly, “we need to give them a reason to think they can stop chasing.”
Atlanta nods, finally looking like she approves of some aspect of Mia. “The vehicle,” she says. “Out, now.”
Mia and I exchange a glance. I don’t know what Atlanta’s planning now, but as one, we dive out of the vehicle. Atlanta’s hauling a rock toward the driver’s side, and Dex is fiddling with a small handheld device he must’ve retrieved from the shuttle. He’s also got something metallic slung over his shoulder, but just now, I’m too busy imagining how loud the gunshots will be as the IA forces catch up to us.
Atlanta shouts something I can’t make out, and then Dex is slapping the device onto the hood of the jeep and she’s dropping the rock onto the accelerator pedal. Mia and I scramble away asthe jeep peels off, tires spinning, toward the cliffs out there in the dark.
Together we all watch in silence as it speeds into the night, completely vanishing from view, though the sound of the engine travels back to us, still audible over the faint sirens coming from behind.
And then it strikes the base of the cliff with a massive gust of smoke and fire, the boom shattering the night. Mia gives an inarticulate cry, instinctively shrinking against me as I fling my arms around her, as much for my comfort as hers. I look at Dex, whose eyes are calm and cold, and suddenly I’m not so sure he’s an ally after all. That device he put on the car—he planned that explosion, I’m sure of it. He and Atlanta acted as one unit, so in sync they barely needed words.
“Thisways,” says Atlanta, pointing along the valley.
They’re just far enough away that if we ran for it now, we might be able to elude them in the dark. Even with their training and their strength—we’d stand a chance. I take a step backward, feeling Mia tense with understanding and readiness in my arms.
Then Dex reaches for something behind his back. At some point—when he went to destroy the shuttle, I’m guessing—he exchanged the rifle for a more manageable handgun. Now, he pulls it from his waistband and fixes its barrel on us. His hand doesn’t waver.
“Thisways,” Atlanta repeats, her voice expectant.
At my side, Mia gulps a shaky breath. I squeeze her shoulders before releasing her, and slowly—our movements careful, our hands raised—we do as our new captors command.
THEFRENCH BORDER CROSSING STATION IS LITTLE MORE THAN A PAIRof officials in a gatehouse with a few floodlights, but it’s as impassable as a prison gate. None of us have passports with us, and even if we did, it’s been hours since we busted out of IA custody. Our names—and probably our faces too—are bound to be on some kind of watch list.
Not to mention the fact that we’re driving a stolen car.
Technically it’s the second car we’ve stolen in a few hours, the first one now smoldering at the base of a cliff. This one we found at a gas station—gasolinera,apparently—after the first car we broke into turned out to be too modern to hotwire, with a fancy computer regulating its ignition. It took several tense moments of explanation, Dex’s stolen gun still trained on us, to convince our captors that we needed to find acrappiercar. Now we’re in an old, broken-down junker of a station wagon—which is fine by me, because we don’t want to attract attention anyway.
I’m hoping the IA is too busy sorting through the wreckage atthe bottom of that cliff to send someone after us, but it won’t take long for them to realize there aren’t any bodies there. And not long after that to think of looking for other recent car thefts. It was a risk, crashing our original transport, but it was worth it. Drive away at top speed in a car, someone’s going to chase you. Send that car up in a ball of flames, and you buy yourself some time to get away on foot, in the dark, before they realize you’re not smoldering somewhere in the wreckage.
Turns out driving isn’t all that complicated—but driving knowing that the guy sitting behind you has a gun pointed at the back of your seat?
Much harder.
A handful of other cars are stopped on this side of the border. A couple are outfitted with roof racks with kayaks, bicycles, and other unidentifiable outdoor gear, and I’d lay good odds that the drivers are sleeping inside until morning. The IA guys talked about a heightened state of security, so there might be people here who didn’t realize they’d need to have papers to get through a usually lax border crossing.
It’s not like there’s a fence along the whole border—we could make the crossing on foot by heading out into the farmland nearby, but that would mean leaving behind our only means of transport, and we’d be in the middle of nowhere without a ride.
