“More like a spy thriller.” I eye him sidelong, realizing after a moment that I’m chewing on my lip.
“What is it?” Jules asks, making me curse the fact that we’ve spent so much time together. I don’t like it when anyone can read me, and he doesn’t even make it look hard.
“Do you really think I give you orders all the time?” The words tumble out before I can stop them, my voice betraying me with its wistful lift at the end.
His eyebrows go up again, and then he smiles again, softer this time. “My word, yes. You don’t?” But before I can object, this time he does stretch his hand out, fingertips brushing mine before he gives them a tentative squeeze. “But I’d be dead if you hadn’t started ordering me around. I think you missed the more important part of what I said.”
Part of me wants to pull my hand away. He’s calling me bossy and overbearing—worse than that—and damned if I’ll let him hold my hand while he does. But my skin tingles where it touches his, and it turns out I’m not too tired for my heart to start racing. I stare hard at the gravel at my feet.
When I don’t respond, he tilts his head as if to try to catch my downward gaze. “The whole partner part?”
In spite of myself, I glance at him. His face looks like it always does, but for some reason looking at him while he’s holding my hand is ten times harder than looking at him while curled up together in an alien ship. There, it was life and death. No time for self-doubt or confusion, and certainly no time to examine our feelings. Here, with the crickets singing and the gentle breeze across the Catalonian countryside, it couldn’t be more different. My face heats, and my mind empties of any possible reply.
A distant laugh reminds me that we’re not alone, that even aside from Dex and Atlanta—holding their own intense, whispered conversation by the tree—there are other cars parked all around us.
I blink, staring again at the camper van laden with outdoorsy gear. I let go of Jules’s hand and straighten, all too glad—and maybe a little disappointed—to have a way out of the conversation. “I’ve got an idea.”
On our stolen bicycles, it doesn’t take long to get far enough from the border crossing station to cut across the grassy valley and into France.
I could’ve laughed—if I wasn’t so freaking terrified—watching Dex and Atlanta try to stay upright on the bicycles, following us in wobbly, faltering, winding zigzags. Of course, their clumsiness only lasted for maybe half an hour before they started to get the hang of riding, and now they’re every bit as confident on the bikes as Jules and I.
Damn alien reflexes. They look more at home on the bikes than we do.
Sometimes they look morehumanthan we do.
On the ship it was easy to notice the differences between us and the tall, blue-blooded Undying—the fact that we wereon their star-shipwas one major difference—but when it’s just two of them they don’t look nearly so alien.
Dex has slung over his shoulders the rope-like thing he retrieved from the shuttle before setting it to self-destruct. “Rope” isn’t really the right word—it has that strange, semi-metallic, semi-crystalline structure that the portal ship had. It’s some piece of Undying technology, that’s for sure. Just the sight of it makes me uneasy, but Dex looks sohumanpedaling in a zigzag that I don’t know what to think. And while I watch, Dex gives a little whistle and veers left, as if to hit Atlanta, who gives an amused yelp and squeezes the brakes so that he shoots off into the grass, laughing.
They tease each other like friends do.
A glint in the starlight catches my eye. It’s the grip of Dex’s gun peeking out of his waistband. My throat closes, and I concentrate on pedaling.
Jules was able to wheedle the use of a cell phone out of one of the other travelers stopped by the border, while I went and picked the lock chaining the bicycles to the camper. He didn’t get hold of his cousin—not surprising, given it was well past midnight in England and even later here—but he left a message. With nochoice but to keep moving, we’ve just got to hope that the cousin, Neal, checks his messages regularly.
The second call he made was to the club that holds Evie’s contract. His face, when he came back to me, was grim—and my heart sank. “They said she didn’t show up for work today,” he said softly, eyes shadowed. “And she’s not in her bunkhouse.”
Now, I can’t dismiss the idea of my sister in IA custody somewhere, scared and alone, with no idea why she’s being held. No idea that she’s been taken to use as leverage against her fugitive big sister.
I try to focus on the ground in front of me. The task in front of me.Save the world first, I tell myself.You’ll be saving Evie too.
Eventually we come across a dirt trail, and follow that to a one-lane road that passes a number of dark enclosures. Jules says they’re vineyards, but all I see are rows of gnarled wooden roots. It takes us a bit of backtracking to find our way to a larger road, but once we reach it it’s only a few minutes before we see lights in the distance. There’s a little motel, a few shops with dark windows, and a gas station. They’re all closed, even the gas station, but there’s a map pasted up on the inside of its doors and a sign that saysENTRER Ç’EST ACHETER.
“ ‘To enter is to buy,’ ” Jules translates, looking amused. “I guess they got sick of people coming in for directions.”
Since we’re not exactly sure where we are, it takes a while to locate the town we’re in on the map. I leave Jules to it, and with Atlanta’s sharp eyes monitoring my every movement, I wander over toward an ancient-looking pay phone. I’ve only ever seen them in movies, and I reach for the receiver with the oddest feeling—like I’ve gone back in time, somehow, or like all of this is some strange dream I might wake from at any moment. Though I know the phone’s a long shot, and I don’t even have any French coins to use, I want to call Evie, to try her cell phone—even though that’d be the first thing the IA would confiscate—and find out if she’s okay. Iwish I could make sure she’s not scared, wherever she is—I’ll lie if I have to, if it means she can rest easier for even a few days. Before her big sister gets arrested and thrown into IA detention for the rest of her life.
I can’t resist putting the phone to my ear, but there’s nothing to hear. Even when I jiggle the metal thing that it hangs on, there’s not so much as a click. Clearly, even in this tiny town, no one’s got any use for public phones anymore.
Except for a bunch of wanted criminals who don’t have cell phones.
Sighing, I hang up the phone and head back toward the others. Atlanta and Dex are still astride their bicycles, and Atlanta’s eyes follow me as I pass them.
“I think we’re here,” Jules murmurs, tapping the glass as I approach. “And we need to head up this road until we can go east, and eventually we’ll hit the coast. If we follow the coastline north, we’ll reach Montpellier sometime tomorrow morning. I said in my message to Neal that I’d try him again tomorrow, so hopefully he’ll have a plan by then.”
“You want to bike all night?” I don’t add the second half of that thought:My ass is already killing me.
“Do we have any choice?” Jules glances over his shoulder. “They don’t seem tired at all, and while I’m pretty sure Dex can keep Atlanta from murdering us, I don’t know that he can keep her from insisting we keep moving.”
