I was right. They did recognize us. They had us stay so they could contact the authorities, and now she’s driving us to the police. De Luca or Captain Abrantes is going to be waiting for us, and we’ll be shoved back into a cell, and we’ll never get to Jules’s dad, and the world will end. …
Luisa draws in a breath. Her hands are tight on the steering wheel, knuckles showing white. “We are now a half hour from the border with Tschechien—with the Czech Republic. You wish I would turn the car around?”
That stops us all short. I end up staring at Jules, who gazes back at me with equal confusion before looking over at Neal, who just shrugs, looking baffled and petrified all at once.
Not once did we ever mention we were trying to get to Prague. We’d planned on hitchhiking from Dresden if we couldn’t find bicycles, because it wasn’t that far to the border, and that way Luisa and Gisela would have nothing to tell the authorities about where we went evenifthe IA managed to connect us to them.
Abruptly, Neal rummages in his bag, and as he moves aside a hoodie, I hear the sound that made him start hunting—a faint chiming. Luisa glances across at him, but evidently dismisses the sound as a notification from his phone. I watch from my place in the backseat as he pulls out the electronic device Dex left on the pillow back in Montpellier, and checks the screen before wordlessly turning it so we can see. It’s faint, at the edge of the screen, and even as we watch, the little green blip flickers out and the chiming stops.
There are Undying in Dresden, too. Like there were in Lyon, when the flu broke out.
I look at Jules, whose hands curls tightly around mine. We can’t go there—we can’t warn them, because no one would believe us. We don’t know how the Undying are connected to the disease spreading across Europe, only that theyareconnected.
The only thing we can do is get to Dr. Addison and give him what he needs to shut down the portals and stop the Undying.
Luisa is still driving in tense silence. Jules squeezes my fingers,as much to comfort himself as to comfort me, and I try to calm the anxiety roiling around in my stomach. Instead I just feel like throwing up.
The border is crowded. I have no basis for comparison, but judging from the frazzled looks on the faces of travelers and officials alike, I’m guessing the heightened security across Europe is slowing everything down.
Luisa pulls the car into an empty space some distance from the crossing itself. She leaves the motor running, but puts it into park and then passes a hand over her face.
“I hope you have … gefälscht? Das Wort ist …fake? I hope you have fake papers. I do not know how you will cross, I do not want to know. But I know your face from the Zeitung. From the newspaper.” She looks up at the rearview mirror, watching Jules.
Jules’s hand tightens around mine. “Have you told anyone else about us?”
“My wife, even she does not know.” Luisa retrieves her handbag from under her seat and pulls out a thick envelope, which she then clutches in one hand as she turns in her seat to look at all of us. Her face is still troubled, still suspicious, still rather severe, as she regards us. “I do not know whether I should stop you, but I think you are good Kinder. These times, they are …” She stops to hunt for the word. “Frightening. You go to find your father, ja?”
I hold my breath, my eyes on Jules. He swallows, quiet for a long time. Then, he says simply, “Yes.”
Luisa hands the envelope to Neal, who opens it enough to show a stack of euro notes before he closes it and looks up, wide-eyed.
Suddenly, unable to hold it in anymore, I blurt: “Don’t go back to Dresden.” The innocent chime of the Undying locator is ringing in my ears. “Take Gisela and go somewhere safe—somewhere away from the city.”
Luisa’s looking at me now in the mirror, and though she hesitates, she nods after a long moment. “I will. Go, I do not want someone to see you in my Auto.”
Confused, torn between suspicion and gratitude, we all fumble with our seat belts and the door handles. My legs feel wobbly, and the heat of the sun reflecting off the pavement feels like an oven despite the cool morning air. We all stand there beside the car, unmoving, staring at each other—until Luisa rolls down the passenger’s side window.
“When you see your father,” she says, just before she shifts the car back into drive and pulls away, “tell him I believe in Addison.”
My heart’s still racing as we stand there, watching her car vanish back over the slight rise in the road. I find my gaze pulled toward Jules, whose face is nearly unreadable—but onlynearly. I can see his lips a fraction tighter than normal, the slight drawing in of his brows, the tiny flare of his nostrils as he struggles to breathe normally. It was one thing to see anonymous avatars online in support of his father—another to stumble upon one in real life.
Luisa’s suspicion toward us, at least in comparison with her wife, makes sense now. If she’d recognized Jules as Addison’s son, it would’ve made everything real for her too. Using a hashtag or posting a comment in a forum is easy. Breaking the rules and choosing a side and fighting for what you believe is far harder.
I reach for Jules’s hand, a tiny part of me worried that he won’t want that support just now, or that it’ll make him crack and cry, or—but his fingers curl around mine without hesitation.
Neal lets out his breath in an audible whoosh, and scrubs his hands over his close-cropped hair. “I guess we’d better try our luck at the border.”
The lines of cars at the gatehouses stretch far back beyond the border itself, but the booth for hikers and cyclists has far fewer people waiting. It’s not until we fall into step at the end of the line, though, that we see why there are lines at all.
A dozen uniformed IA security officers are conducting searches of travelers’ belongings, asking them questions, and conducting random inspections of documentation.
Neal shifts his weight from one foot to the other, trying notto look nervous. “Should we duck out of line, try to sneak across somewhere else like in France?”
“I don’t think we can,” I murmur, anxiety sharpening my voice a little. “If we go now, after seeing the security officers, it’ll be a dead giveaway that we’ve got something to hide.”
Jules’s eyes are scanning the people currently being questioned at the crossing. “They’re looking at everyone—I don’t think they’re looking for us specifically. We’ve still got our fake passports.”
“And they’re only doing close inspections at random.” My voice sounds far more confident than I feel. “Odds are they won’t look twice at our passports, and we’ve got nothing incriminating in our bags.”
