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“You mean”—I twisted in my seat—“they deliberately allowed you to escape the lab? Is that what you’re getting at?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“No way. Think about it. If that was the plan, Connor and Riley wouldn’t have been there to begin with. They wouldn’t have risked themselves.”
“Anna’s right,” Nick said, surprising me. He gave me a look. “Well, it makes sense. We were never supposed to escape, and now that we have, they know the information Sam stole is at risk of being found. This is them scrambling to prevent more damage.”
Trev set the radio on a classic-rock station. If Cas were there, he would have demanded a pop-hits channel. I felt the loss of him suddenly and acutely. He’d been so close to escaping. Maybe if I had helped him…
I put my face in my hands and tried to force the image of Cas lying on the floor, blood pouring from his wounds, out of my head.
Please don’t be dead, I thought. Please.
“Are we headed to Port Cadia then?” Trev asked.
“Yes,” Sam said, “as fast as we can. Before they catch up with us.”
28
“GET UP.” I OPENED MY EYES. SAM leaned in through the door of the SUV. His hand lay gently on my shoulder. Exhaustion still held me in its grip, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open as I righted myself on the bench seat, arching my back to stretch my sore muscles. I’d never before used my body in such a brutally real way, and it was starting to catch up to me. I felt like a pretzel, knots included.
I had no idea what time it was, but it was still dark, so I couldn’t have been out for too long. “Where are we?”
“Port Cadia. I got us a room.”
Behind us, an orange motel sign buzzed, but the street was dead and quiet. It was such an anticlimactic arrival. We’d been pushing to reach this place for what felt like forever, and now we were here, and there wasn’t anything to see. And Cas was gone. I closed my eyes again, thinking that if I hoped hard enough, maybe it wouldn’t be true.
“We’ll get him back.” Sam tried to sound positive, but his voice echoed my distress.
“They shot him.”
“Cas is strong.” He held the SUV door for me as I slipped out, shivering in the cold. He forced me to look at him with a nudge of his thumb. “We’ll get him back,” he said again. “I promise.”
All I could do was nod.
Trev, still in the driver’s seat, cleared his throat. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.” To me he said, “We’re going to the gas station to fill up. You need anything?”
“No, thanks.”
The boys pulled away and I followed Sam down the motel’s open breezeway, passing brown metal doors with the room numbers tacked above the peepholes. Sam stopped at room 214 and wiggled the key into the lock. The door opened with a pop. He flicked on the light and I squinted, still too tired to see clearly.
I dropped into the chair at the table, slouching, arms crossed over my chest. I missed my jacket. I missed Cas. I missed Dad and the farmhouse. I missed being normal.
Sam sat across from me and dug a few sheets of loose paper from his pocket—the clues he’d left himself. We still didn’t know the answers to those mysteries. We had no idea where we were going or what we were looking for.
I lay my head on the backs of my hands on the table, too exhausted to even think about it anymore.
“What did Sura say to you? On the stairs?”
I jolted upright and met Sam’s eyes. He regarded me with open sympathy. I swallowed. “Did you hear any of it?”
“Enough to be interested.”
So I told him everything. I wanted to get it out before Nick came back and formed his own opinion. I still didn’t know how I felt about it.
I vividly remembered a sketch I’d done not too long ago, of a girl in a snow-covered forest, pieces of her separating and dissipating. Was it my subconscious, trying to tell me something?
“What if I am a Branch tool?” I said once I’d finished. “What if you can’t trust me? What if…” There were too many what ifs to list them all.
I bowed my head. My hair swung forward in a curtain. “This doesn’t even feel real anymore.”
Sam ducked his head to better see my face. “I trust you. You got it?”
“Okay.” The pressure in my chest lessened. “Thank you. Really.”
“We need to figure out what I stole from the Branch. Maybe some of your answers will be in there.” He disappeared into the bathroom and came out a minute later, shirtless. My eyes went to the R scar on his chest, then down to the hard planes of his stomach.
“Can you look over the tattoo again?” he asked. I had to drag my eyes up to meet his. “If you see anything unusual, tell me.”
“Sure.” I climbed on the bed from the opposite side as he sat on the edge, waiting. I scooted up behind him. I started at the trees’ leaves, checking the veins, counting the clusters, looking for any sort of symbolism.
Finding nothing, I moved to the bark, examining the fine lines. On the third tree to the right, a line in the bark caught my eye. I stifled a yawn. I was exhausted and not seeing clearly, so whatever it was wasn’t immediately evident.
I got in closer. Something definitely seemed out of place. I ran a finger over Sam’s skin. He felt warm to the touch, warmer than he should have been in the cold room without a shirt.
“Did you find something?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
He got up from the bed and dug around inside the drawer of the bedside table. He found a pad of paper with the motel logo on it and a pencil and handed them to me. “Can you redraw it?”
I nodded and he settled back on the bed. My knees were sore from my sitting on them for so long, so I unfolded myself, keeping one leg up and putting the other alongside Sam’s. Being so close to him sent my heart skittering, and I wondered if he felt it, too.
My lips tingled as I remembered the feel of his mouth on mine. I worried my lower lip with my teeth, trying to squash all the emotions running through my head.
I re-created the peels and texture in the tree bark with my pencil, enlarging it so it was easier to see. As I worked, a pattern started to emerge. When it was finished, several striations in the bark came together to form what looked like numbers. Since the work had been done in a light gray color, from afar it looked like nothing more than expert shading.
Sam twisted around. “Let me see.”
I handed him the pad of paper.
“Numbers.” He squinted, took my abandoned pencil, and started to sketch lines around the bark. “Two-six-four-four.”
I nodded. That’s what I’d read, too.
He studied the drawing with a furrowed brow. “There wasn’t anything else?”
“No. I mean, I can look again, if you want.”
“Yes. Please.”
We resumed our positions, even though I knew I’d find nothing. And as I thought that, I couldn’t help wondering if he just wanted me near, if searching the tattoo was an excuse. Of course, that was a stupid idea. Sam wasn’t the type to waste time with excuses.
I eyed the tattoo again, running my finger down the bark, over the trees and the grass, as if using a part of myself to memorize the lines would somehow reveal a new clue I hadn’t seen before.
Sam shuddered beneath my touch. I was no longer looking for clues so much as I was pushing for a reaction. He hung his head for one quick second before twisting around to meet me face-to-face. We were inches apart. I slid closer.
“Anna,” he said.
The door burst open and I leapt away. Trev and Nick stared at us. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I had never wanted to disappear more than I did at that moment.
Nick tsked and shook his head as he came in. He set a paper bag on the table and unpacked what they’d bought.
“We got sandwiches and chips,” Trev said. “Two turkey, two roast beef. Iced tea for Anna. Sam, I got you a water.”
Sam ignored him, keeping his back to the rest of the room, his shoulders taut.
“Roast beef is mine,” Nick said. He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels with the remote. “You lost your shirt, Sam?”
“Anna was looking over the tattoo.”
“Yeah.” Nick grunted. “It looked like it.”
Sam took one quick step and snatched the remote out of Nick’s hands. He tossed it toward the bathroom, where it smashed against the wall, shattering into a dozen pieces.
Nick spread out his arms. “What the hell?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
Nick rose to his feet. “I never said you did, but in case you forgot, we’re in the middle of a clusterfuck, and we lost Cas. And instead of, I don’t know, focusing on figuring this shit out, you’re practically sticking your tongue down Anna’s throat—”
Sam’s fist cracked against Nick’s jaw. Nick flew back into the bedside table, causing it to judder against the wall. Sam was instantly on him, taking a fistful of Nick’s shirt and hauling him up.
“You think I don’t know what’s at stake?” Sam barked.
I glanced at Trev, hoping he’d step in, but he looked as shocked as I was.
Nick wiped the blood from his face and wrestled himself free. “You’re supposed to be the goddamn leader, so f**king lead!”
Sam let out a guttural growl as he swung again. Nick ducked at the last minute, and when he came back up, he landed a punch to Sam’s gut. Sam doubled over. Nick seized the opening, swinging his foot, almost catching Sam in the face before Sam crossed his arms in a shield.
Nick stepped back, picked up the glass bottle of iced tea, and started after Sam.
“Nick! Stop!” My voice bounced off the walls, cutting through the fight, and Nick went rigidly still. “Put the bottle down.”
Sam struggled to his feet, spat blood on the floor.
Eyes molten with annoyance, Nick set the tea down and started for the door. “I think I need some air.”
“No.” Sam eased into his T-shirt, then threw on his coat. “I’ll leave. I need to leave.”
Without saying another word, he walked out.
29
I SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE MOTEL room, should have quieted the rumbling in my stomach because I was starving. But I didn’t. I chased after Sam, dodging potholes in the parking lot. I met up with him as he crossed the street.
“What was that all about?” He didn’t answer me. I hurried ahead and cut him off. “Talk to me.”
He met my gaze with a disquieting look. A broken blood vessel had turned the white of his left eye dark red. “I didn’t mean to fight him.”
I paled. They’d fought because of me, and I hated it. Or at least the fight had started because of me. “I know. He probably knows that, too.”
“Nick and I have never seen eye to eye, and—” He disconnected again and focused on his hand, rubbing at the knuckles.
“And what?”
A clench of his jaw. A shake of his head. “Nothing.” He started forward.
“Sam. Don’t shut me out.”
He paused. His head sank back, and with a sigh, he said, “I can’t seem to concentrate anymore. I feel like shit all day long. I can’t tell what’s real, or what’s a flashback, or if it was something I heard on TV, read in a book, saw in a dream.”
“And it’s putting you on edge,” I concluded. He didn’t deny it. “Any more flashbacks about Dani?”
His guarded looked told me what they were about even as he said, “They aren’t specific.”
I couldn’t help wondering how far back the flashes went and how long he’d kept them from me to spare me the heartache. In the pantry, our first day at the cabin, he’d mentioned a memory brought on by that dent in the kitchen wall. When I’d questioned him, he’d dodged me, like he was doing now.
He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“No way. Think about it. If that was the plan, Connor and Riley wouldn’t have been there to begin with. They wouldn’t have risked themselves.”
“Anna’s right,” Nick said, surprising me. He gave me a look. “Well, it makes sense. We were never supposed to escape, and now that we have, they know the information Sam stole is at risk of being found. This is them scrambling to prevent more damage.”
Trev set the radio on a classic-rock station. If Cas were there, he would have demanded a pop-hits channel. I felt the loss of him suddenly and acutely. He’d been so close to escaping. Maybe if I had helped him…
I put my face in my hands and tried to force the image of Cas lying on the floor, blood pouring from his wounds, out of my head.
Please don’t be dead, I thought. Please.
“Are we headed to Port Cadia then?” Trev asked.
“Yes,” Sam said, “as fast as we can. Before they catch up with us.”
28
“GET UP.” I OPENED MY EYES. SAM leaned in through the door of the SUV. His hand lay gently on my shoulder. Exhaustion still held me in its grip, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open as I righted myself on the bench seat, arching my back to stretch my sore muscles. I’d never before used my body in such a brutally real way, and it was starting to catch up to me. I felt like a pretzel, knots included.
I had no idea what time it was, but it was still dark, so I couldn’t have been out for too long. “Where are we?”
“Port Cadia. I got us a room.”
Behind us, an orange motel sign buzzed, but the street was dead and quiet. It was such an anticlimactic arrival. We’d been pushing to reach this place for what felt like forever, and now we were here, and there wasn’t anything to see. And Cas was gone. I closed my eyes again, thinking that if I hoped hard enough, maybe it wouldn’t be true.
“We’ll get him back.” Sam tried to sound positive, but his voice echoed my distress.
“They shot him.”
“Cas is strong.” He held the SUV door for me as I slipped out, shivering in the cold. He forced me to look at him with a nudge of his thumb. “We’ll get him back,” he said again. “I promise.”
All I could do was nod.
Trev, still in the driver’s seat, cleared his throat. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.” To me he said, “We’re going to the gas station to fill up. You need anything?”
“No, thanks.”
The boys pulled away and I followed Sam down the motel’s open breezeway, passing brown metal doors with the room numbers tacked above the peepholes. Sam stopped at room 214 and wiggled the key into the lock. The door opened with a pop. He flicked on the light and I squinted, still too tired to see clearly.
I dropped into the chair at the table, slouching, arms crossed over my chest. I missed my jacket. I missed Cas. I missed Dad and the farmhouse. I missed being normal.
Sam sat across from me and dug a few sheets of loose paper from his pocket—the clues he’d left himself. We still didn’t know the answers to those mysteries. We had no idea where we were going or what we were looking for.
I lay my head on the backs of my hands on the table, too exhausted to even think about it anymore.
“What did Sura say to you? On the stairs?”
I jolted upright and met Sam’s eyes. He regarded me with open sympathy. I swallowed. “Did you hear any of it?”
“Enough to be interested.”
So I told him everything. I wanted to get it out before Nick came back and formed his own opinion. I still didn’t know how I felt about it.
I vividly remembered a sketch I’d done not too long ago, of a girl in a snow-covered forest, pieces of her separating and dissipating. Was it my subconscious, trying to tell me something?
“What if I am a Branch tool?” I said once I’d finished. “What if you can’t trust me? What if…” There were too many what ifs to list them all.
I bowed my head. My hair swung forward in a curtain. “This doesn’t even feel real anymore.”
Sam ducked his head to better see my face. “I trust you. You got it?”
“Okay.” The pressure in my chest lessened. “Thank you. Really.”
“We need to figure out what I stole from the Branch. Maybe some of your answers will be in there.” He disappeared into the bathroom and came out a minute later, shirtless. My eyes went to the R scar on his chest, then down to the hard planes of his stomach.
“Can you look over the tattoo again?” he asked. I had to drag my eyes up to meet his. “If you see anything unusual, tell me.”
“Sure.” I climbed on the bed from the opposite side as he sat on the edge, waiting. I scooted up behind him. I started at the trees’ leaves, checking the veins, counting the clusters, looking for any sort of symbolism.
Finding nothing, I moved to the bark, examining the fine lines. On the third tree to the right, a line in the bark caught my eye. I stifled a yawn. I was exhausted and not seeing clearly, so whatever it was wasn’t immediately evident.
I got in closer. Something definitely seemed out of place. I ran a finger over Sam’s skin. He felt warm to the touch, warmer than he should have been in the cold room without a shirt.
“Did you find something?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
He got up from the bed and dug around inside the drawer of the bedside table. He found a pad of paper with the motel logo on it and a pencil and handed them to me. “Can you redraw it?”
I nodded and he settled back on the bed. My knees were sore from my sitting on them for so long, so I unfolded myself, keeping one leg up and putting the other alongside Sam’s. Being so close to him sent my heart skittering, and I wondered if he felt it, too.
My lips tingled as I remembered the feel of his mouth on mine. I worried my lower lip with my teeth, trying to squash all the emotions running through my head.
I re-created the peels and texture in the tree bark with my pencil, enlarging it so it was easier to see. As I worked, a pattern started to emerge. When it was finished, several striations in the bark came together to form what looked like numbers. Since the work had been done in a light gray color, from afar it looked like nothing more than expert shading.
Sam twisted around. “Let me see.”
I handed him the pad of paper.
“Numbers.” He squinted, took my abandoned pencil, and started to sketch lines around the bark. “Two-six-four-four.”
I nodded. That’s what I’d read, too.
He studied the drawing with a furrowed brow. “There wasn’t anything else?”
“No. I mean, I can look again, if you want.”
“Yes. Please.”
We resumed our positions, even though I knew I’d find nothing. And as I thought that, I couldn’t help wondering if he just wanted me near, if searching the tattoo was an excuse. Of course, that was a stupid idea. Sam wasn’t the type to waste time with excuses.
I eyed the tattoo again, running my finger down the bark, over the trees and the grass, as if using a part of myself to memorize the lines would somehow reveal a new clue I hadn’t seen before.
Sam shuddered beneath my touch. I was no longer looking for clues so much as I was pushing for a reaction. He hung his head for one quick second before twisting around to meet me face-to-face. We were inches apart. I slid closer.
“Anna,” he said.
The door burst open and I leapt away. Trev and Nick stared at us. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I had never wanted to disappear more than I did at that moment.
Nick tsked and shook his head as he came in. He set a paper bag on the table and unpacked what they’d bought.
“We got sandwiches and chips,” Trev said. “Two turkey, two roast beef. Iced tea for Anna. Sam, I got you a water.”
Sam ignored him, keeping his back to the rest of the room, his shoulders taut.
“Roast beef is mine,” Nick said. He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels with the remote. “You lost your shirt, Sam?”
“Anna was looking over the tattoo.”
“Yeah.” Nick grunted. “It looked like it.”
Sam took one quick step and snatched the remote out of Nick’s hands. He tossed it toward the bathroom, where it smashed against the wall, shattering into a dozen pieces.
Nick spread out his arms. “What the hell?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
Nick rose to his feet. “I never said you did, but in case you forgot, we’re in the middle of a clusterfuck, and we lost Cas. And instead of, I don’t know, focusing on figuring this shit out, you’re practically sticking your tongue down Anna’s throat—”
Sam’s fist cracked against Nick’s jaw. Nick flew back into the bedside table, causing it to judder against the wall. Sam was instantly on him, taking a fistful of Nick’s shirt and hauling him up.
“You think I don’t know what’s at stake?” Sam barked.
I glanced at Trev, hoping he’d step in, but he looked as shocked as I was.
Nick wiped the blood from his face and wrestled himself free. “You’re supposed to be the goddamn leader, so f**king lead!”
Sam let out a guttural growl as he swung again. Nick ducked at the last minute, and when he came back up, he landed a punch to Sam’s gut. Sam doubled over. Nick seized the opening, swinging his foot, almost catching Sam in the face before Sam crossed his arms in a shield.
Nick stepped back, picked up the glass bottle of iced tea, and started after Sam.
“Nick! Stop!” My voice bounced off the walls, cutting through the fight, and Nick went rigidly still. “Put the bottle down.”
Sam struggled to his feet, spat blood on the floor.
Eyes molten with annoyance, Nick set the tea down and started for the door. “I think I need some air.”
“No.” Sam eased into his T-shirt, then threw on his coat. “I’ll leave. I need to leave.”
Without saying another word, he walked out.
29
I SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE MOTEL room, should have quieted the rumbling in my stomach because I was starving. But I didn’t. I chased after Sam, dodging potholes in the parking lot. I met up with him as he crossed the street.
“What was that all about?” He didn’t answer me. I hurried ahead and cut him off. “Talk to me.”
He met my gaze with a disquieting look. A broken blood vessel had turned the white of his left eye dark red. “I didn’t mean to fight him.”
I paled. They’d fought because of me, and I hated it. Or at least the fight had started because of me. “I know. He probably knows that, too.”
“Nick and I have never seen eye to eye, and—” He disconnected again and focused on his hand, rubbing at the knuckles.
“And what?”
A clench of his jaw. A shake of his head. “Nothing.” He started forward.
“Sam. Don’t shut me out.”
He paused. His head sank back, and with a sigh, he said, “I can’t seem to concentrate anymore. I feel like shit all day long. I can’t tell what’s real, or what’s a flashback, or if it was something I heard on TV, read in a book, saw in a dream.”
“And it’s putting you on edge,” I concluded. He didn’t deny it. “Any more flashbacks about Dani?”
His guarded looked told me what they were about even as he said, “They aren’t specific.”
I couldn’t help wondering how far back the flashes went and how long he’d kept them from me to spare me the heartache. In the pantry, our first day at the cabin, he’d mentioned a memory brought on by that dent in the kitchen wall. When I’d questioned him, he’d dodged me, like he was doing now.
