Traitor.
“What? Is that true?” Cipher turned to me, not exactly glaring, but his expression was deliberately blank and his mouth was pinched at the corners, holding back his temper. Faced with his intense scrutiny, I could only shrug in response. “Then what have you been sucking on this whole time?” he asked.
“I can still get a little bit out of it, if I hold it just right,” I told him, but he wasn’t buying it, not even a little bit. “I was going to tell you,” I insisted and then turned to Teresa, “You didn’t have to say anything.”
She responded by sticking her tongue out at me, the brat.
“Whenwere you going to tell me?” Cipher asked. “When we were being chased down by Rabids?”
I didn’t have an answer to that, so Teresa stepped in again. “He had an asthma attack the other day in the basement–”
“Teresa, it wasnothing,” I snapped. She was only making it worse.
“It wassomething,” she argued, her own temper flaring. “And it was really scary, Kitten. For me too.”
It was a little surprising. One minute I was leaning over, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath, and the next I was on the ground staring up at a tearful Teresa. I may have hit my head too.
“And no one felt the need to tell me about this?” Cipher asked in that low, dangerous tone that always gave me a little thrill. His elegant fingers were spread on the edge of the table like he was one wrong word away from flipping it over. He was definitely mad at me, but it was still kind of hot.
“I’m telling you now,” Teresa said, trying to get back on his good side.
Macon held up both hands. “I didn’t know.”
The rest of the Assholes looked to me, waiting for me to defend myself, but I didn’t have a good reason, so I slumped back in my chair and crossed my arms, trying not to pout while definitely pouting. I hated my asthma, hated that I couldn’t hear as well as the rest of them, and I hated being called out in front of everyone else.
“There’s nothing you could do about it anyway,” I said.
“I could have found you an inhaler,” Cipher said as he wrote in his notebook, INHALER in neat and precise capital letters. He underlined it twice, two dramatic slashes, nearly tearing the paper with the blunted edge of his pencil. Yeah, he was pissed.
“Where would we even get one?” I asked because it wasn’t as if we hadn’t tried.
“All the houses around here are bone dry. We’ve scavenged anything we could possibly use already,” Macon said.
“We’ll have to get creative then, scavenge new territory,” Cipher answered.
“Humvee’s nearly out of gas, but we do have some in reserve we’ve been using for the generator,” Wylie said.
“It’s too risky to take out the Humvee,” Cipher said. “We don’t want to attract unwanted attention from the military or raiders. They’d see it as a prize, and I don’t feel like killing anyone to keep it. We need something less showy with better mileage.”
There were a lot of abandoned cars and downed trees on the roads, not to mention the way nature had taken over every crack and pothole in the asphalt. It would be difficult to navigate all that with the Humvee and if we went off-road, it would leave a trail directly to our compound.
“How’s that dirt bike coming along?” Cipher asked Gizmo. Gizmo and Wylie had been working on a dirt bike with a battery-powered engine. We’d seen them testing it out the other day, doing donuts in the cul-de-sac and making adjustments.
“It’s ready, but there are limitations,” Gizmo said.
“Such as?”
“The battery will only get you about forty miles before it needs to be charged.”
“Forty miles is pretty far. How fast can it go?”
“Cruising speed is twenty miles per hour with a top speed of thirty but that’s pushing it.”
“I’ll take it out tomorrow morning and be back before sunset,” Cipher said.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
Cipher glanced at me briefly, giving nothing away, and asked Gizmo, “Is there room for two?”
