“’Scuse me?”
Boreas’ll get rid of it, same way he brought it all down...
The crates I saw on Boreas’s dolly in the mess hall were huge. Big enough to stow a person inside. “That’s how we’ll get out of here. Boreas will do anything for a price. You said it yourself—no one will notice a few extra boxes coming or going.”
Chill stops crunching. His throat bobs as he swallows a mouthful ofdry chips. “This is not a crate of beef jerky or Pop Rocks we’re talking about smuggling, Jack.”
“We have money. Lots of it. We’ve been investing our allowances and skimming from our operating accounts for thirty years. You’ve seen Fleur’s and Amber’s financial records. You know they have, too. How much do you want to bet Julio’s been doing the same?”
He rolls up the bag of chips and drops it into his drawer. “Even if youcouldget everyone to agree, there’s no way we’d get out of here without Chronos finding out. So what’s your brilliant plan, assuming he doesn’t already know what you’re up to?”
“I don’t know.” I drag a hand through my hair, kicking at discarded plans and drawings. Chill’s right. Chronos knew I was going to do something stupid even before I did. He’ll see every possible move in his staff before I make it. I’ve got a dozen different plans taped to the wall, and every one of them is dangerous. They’re all flawed. I don’t know which one to choose. I rub my eyes, wishing the answer were obvious, remembering what Lyon said, about how the eye of the staff is only as clear as our own memories. Our own choices.
I lift my head to the maps. To all the schedules and routes and half-baked plans. And suddenly, the fact that there is no one right answer makes perfect sense. “I can’t be the one to plan the escape.”
Chill looks at me like I’ve completely lost my mind.
“If I come up with the plan, Chronos will know the whole thing before we get one foot out the door. So we break it up. Delegate responsibilities. Everyone has a job. You hack us off the Guard’s monitors. Julio and Marie get us out of the Observatory. Amber and Woody arrange to get us out of London. I get us someplace Chronos won’t find us, andwe keep moving.” I pace the room, talking faster as ideas shake loose and tumble from my mouth. “We’ll plant bread crumbs everywhere. Map out dozens of routes. Book multiple flights to different destinations. We’ll shift our plans as we go. Chronos will see too many possible outcomes. If my future isn’t clear, he won’t know where to look for us.”
Chill whistles, long and low. “You know this is crazy, right? Like, two-beers-on-a-double-black-diamond-level crazy?” In other words, he’s pretty sure we’re all going to die.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I know.”
13
The Path of Low Resistance
JACK
I’ve spent the last week preparing for this, and I feel a little sick. Sweat slicks my palms as Boreas unlocks the cold-storage room off the hallway to the main service elevators and ushers Chill, Poppy, and me inside. Chill and I consolidated all our mattress cash—money skimmed from our operating accounts and left over from our annual stipends. We paid Boreas half to get us all here. The other half paid for his silence.
Poppy hugs herself and shivers. She lingers by the door, casting distrustful glances at me and Chill. Chill glances back with equal amounts of uncertainty. Poppy refused to meet with us at first, only agreeing once we told her that we’d come up with a way to save Fleur from the Purge. But the longer the anxious silence drags out between the three of us, the more I worry she’s changed her mind.
We all jump when the door to the cold-storage room flies open. Amber stops dead, the heel of one boot still planted in the hall outside.Her eyes dart over each of us—me, then Chill, then Poppy. A Spring Handler poses no threat to her, but a Winter—even one just out of stasis—shouldn’t be underestimated in a tightly enclosed refrigerated space. My Handler’s presence only heightens the risk.
“What’s this about?” She waves the cryptic note I paid Boreas to deliver to her room, a single sheet of notebook paper folded around two hall passes, containing one hand-written word—ARIZONA.
Amber’s knife hand is twitchy at her side, level with her hip. Weapons are forbidden outside the sparring rooms, but Amber would be a fool to show up unarmed to a mystery meeting with me.
“Thanks for coming.” I keep my hands where she can see them. “This is Chill, and Poppy.”
“What are they doing here?” she asks, foot lingering strategically in the hall.
“Maybe you should’ve brought Woody along, if you were worried about being alone with me.”
“Real diplomatic, Jack,” Chill mutters.
Amber saunters into the room, watching me around an auburn curtain of hair. It falls over one shoulder, covering her ear. She’s wired. I expected no less. “Unlike you, I don’t need a team of babysitters,” she says irritably.
Chill grumbles to himself as he taps commands into his tablet, clearly stung by the babysitter comment. His glasses ride low on the bridge of his nose, and when he looks up, he glares at her over the empty frames. “Woody’s on his way. I put a block on your signal right after you got here. By now, I’m betting he’s freaking out because you’re not answering. By my calculations, given the shortest distance betweenyour room and the service hall, Woody ought to be joining us in...” He glances at his tablet. “Three... two... one.”
There’s a crash as the steel doors down the hall swing open into the walls, followed by the frenetic pounding of feet. Woody’s ratty Converses skid to a stop in front of the open storage room, his long hair clinging to the sweat on his narrow face. He bends over his knees, breathing too hard to speak.
Amber reaches over the threshold and drags him inside. She kicks the door shut. “Spill it, Jack. What’s this all about?”
Up until now, I’ve been intentionally vague about my reasons for wanting to bring the five of us together. And this—right here and now—is my moment of truth. If I’ve assessed them right, the dominoes I’ve lined up will fall in a perfect path out of here. But if I’m wrong, any one of them could bring the entire plan crashing down around me. I can’t afford to screw this up.
“I found a way out.”
