She’s a threat to the life of every good and honest citizen, my own mom has determined. My dad spits every time he hears her name.
“Look, if you think you can’t let me go because I’ll run and tell the Guard where you are and what you’re doing, you’re wrong. I’m no squealer.”
I’m not on the government’s side or the Common’s side. I’m on my own side. I make my own decisions.
Big surprise, Rayla doesn’t answer.
“What are you going to do with me, then?” I ask, remembering to shout.
Rayla grimaces, and the car suddenly slows. With her right hand, she veers off the road and parks near a ditch. Without a backward glance, she opens her door, grabs her backpack, and vanishes into the dark.
Three possibilities: Rayla the Slayer is going to relieve herself; Rayla the Slayer has abandoned the car and me and is not coming back; Rayla the Slayer is off digging my grave with only her callused hands. My best guess is it’s probably the latter, so I better get moving.
I hoist up my left leg and use my heel to press the small button on the tongue of my right sneaker that loosens my shoelaces. I repeat the process with my other sneaker, then haul my legs up onto the lounge chair and crouch into a squat. In a pose normally reserved for gymnasts, I stretch my right leg up to my swollen hands, which are still cuffed to the door handle. Grabbing the end of the shoelace, I slide it through the tiny gap between my wrists and the plastic cuffs. I grip the shoelace with my teeth, pull, and, in the final touch of genius, tie the laces of both my sneakers together into a strong double knot.
I’d pat myself on the back if I could.
“Okay, last step,” I coach myself. “Don’t get cocky.”
Something moves outside the car, and I speed up my pace. I pump my legs up and down, up and down, working the cotton laces back and forth like a do-it-yourself friction saw, until bam, the plastic breaks, and I’m free. A little trick I picked up back in Georgia: always wear shoes with laces. You never know when you might find yourself in a bind.
Do I drive, or do I run? Rayla overrode the autonomous system and shut off the car before she disappeared. It would take too long to figure out how to manually override her hack so that I could reboot the software before she returns. Guess it’ll have to be run, then.
“Son of a Glut,” I curse out to the batty woman. She must have thought this was a summons, because the door opens, and there she is, back in the driver’s seat, sans coveralls. She doubtless buried it as evidence of her nighttime heist, right next to the empty pit waiting for me. A baggy combat jacket, way old-school and five sizes too big, swallows her tall frame. Who knows what she could have hidden in there. Get out of this car, you half-wit! I scream at myself.
Too late—I don’t know how to manually unlock the doors. I’m trapped. I dive-bomb for the wheel as a last-ditch option as soon as Rayla starts the motor with her device—but Rayla points the gun in my face, and there goes that.
Cowering back in my corner, I put up my hands. I present her with my most savage snarl, though, to let her understand I won’t go down without a fight.
“Looks like that wasn’t the first time you’ve been cuffed,” Rayla says, almost like she’s impressed. She grips the steering wheel tight, puts the pedal to the metal, and the car launches forward.
And we’re off, zipping down the back roads, and I’m still alive. I’m starting to think she likes me. Maybe even gets me.
“Put your hands on the dash,” Rayla orders. “And keep your mouth shut.” Okay, maybe not. But her voice has lost its bite; it’s now groggy and strained. Maybe she’s getting tired of me. Maybe she’s weakening. She might just let me go.
“My parents will be wondering where I am,” I lie. “And my friends. I have lots of friends who’ll be looking for me.”
Rayla laughs, or more like wheezes. “How old are you? Twelve, fourteen?”
I restrain myself because I’m not in any position to be snappy. “Nineteen,” I say very maturely.
She wheezes again.
“A year older than your granddaughters, right?” I venture, aiming to appeal to her matriarchal sensibilities. “For the record, I don’t agree with what happened to them tonight.”
“What?” Rayla shouts, caught off guard. She twists her head in my direction and tries to push the gun closer to my forehead, but she can’t seem to hold it up. Her arm is shaking. Her whole body is shaking actually.
Wrong topic. She’s going to shoot the messenger.
“It hasn’t hit mainstream media yet, but I thought you would’ve known already . . . being a rebellion leader and all,” I say placidly. The news broke just before my graveyard shift. “You can only get the real headlines browsing the illegal Dark Web, which, obviously, you can’t find without getting past the government’s firewall. And good luck doing that without a super illegal VPN—”
“The news!” Rayla interrupts my tangent. She sounds distraught.
“Right, the news is the Mounties took the twins. They’ve been detained by the Canadians.”
The car passes a series of streetlights. Under the harsh blue beams, I get an eyeful of Rayla’s deathlike complexion. Her head is bent at an awkward angle, and it looks like she’s fighting to keep her eyes open. And then I see the blood.
“Um . . . you’re bleeding,” I point out to her. “Like, a lot.” The sleeve of her upper left arm is soaked with red, confirming my earlier suspicions. One of Leeland’s bullets got her.
The gun drops from Rayla’s slack hand, and the car swerves. Her body goes limp and collapses onto the floor between us. With only a small yelp, I spring for the driver’s seat and slam the brakes, narrowly saving us from crashing into the pole of a solar streetlight.
Stabbing the button to make the car park, I sigh a long breath of relief. I’m fine. The car’s fine. I make myself peer down at the woman lying beside my sneaker. She’s not fine.
She’s breathing, but it’s slow. And fading.
Not good.
Dammit, now my hands are shaking. Her tentlike jacket slipped off her shoulders on her way down, showing me what she tried to hide and what I really didn’t need to see: an oozing bullet hole just north of her elbow. I spot a tourniquet on her upper arm. It’s made of the same ripped-off cloth from her coveralls and a stick she must have found when I thought she was out trying to dig my poor man’s grave. It untwists before my very eyes and even more blood gushes out, making me want to faint.
Double not good.
If I take the car and leave her here on the road, she’ll bleed to death. If I take off on foot and have the car drive her to a hospital, she’ll get arrested and then die. The Guard will kill her.
“Bullshit,” I curse at the night. “What am I supposed to do with an unconscious Common member?”
ZEE
Camp 22
3:29 a.m.
There are no clocks in the Sleeping Barracks. But I’m one hundred percent sure it’s 3:29 a.m.
No matter what Camp the Corrections Guard moves me to, my body always wakes me up one minute before Morning Call. I like to have time for myself. Even if it’s only sixty seconds.
All the other seconds of my waking hours belong to Texas.