“I'm fine.” I pull away, more sharply than I intended. If she thinks I’m failing, she’ll panic. And if she panics, she’ll make a mistake. I’ll make a fucking mistake.
I gotta hold us together. I gotta lead us all the way to…Somewhere.
She doesn’t argue. She just sits beside me, leaning against my shoulder.
I reach back, checking the straps on the duffel bag. I pull out the map and fold it to the place we are. And my heart dips.
We’re heading into a bottleneck.
I look at Rue. She’s staring off into the trees, her hand resting near the opening of the bag. “Noah…”
“Yeah?”
“If it comes down to it...” She swallows hard, her eyes never leaving the dark. “If they catch us… Don’t let them take me.”
“What do you mean?” My chest tightens.
“You know what I mean.” She turns to me, meeting my eyes with a wild, dark, and dangerous gleam in her eye. “I’m not going to prison. They willnottake me.”
I pull her closer, my good arm locking around her. “Nobody’s taking you anywhere. I promise.” I close my eyes, listening to the wind howl through the pines.
It sounds like a funeral dirge.
“I won’t let them take you either.” The confidence in her voice is terrifyingly eerie.
My eyes fall back to the map.
In the morning, the road narrows down to a single point at the Morenci mine. If law enforcement has any inkling of where we are…
I know how they’ll do it. They’ll wait for the geography to do the work for them. They’ll wait for the squeeze.
I just hope I have enough left in my tank to blast through it.
50
RUE
“Noah, it’s freezing.”I shiver next to him, the concrete cold against my body.
Noah’s head is resting in his hands, his broad shoulders tremoring every so often in a way that has nothing to do with the mountain wind, I don’t think. The temperature is plummeting, though, and neither one of us has the right gear for this weather.
“Noah,” I whisper again, my teeth chattering so hard my jaw aches. “Noah, we can’t stay out here. It’s fucking freezing.”
He lifts his head, his eyes glassy and unfocused in the pale moonlight. He looks around the desolate graveyard of Black Jack Campground. I follow his gaze as he stills, and through the skeletal silhouettes of the Ponderosa pines, a dull glint of white catches my eye, too.
It’s an old, sun-bleached hunting camper, parked off the gravel in a patch of overgrown weeds. It looks like it hasn’t been moved since the nineties.
Noah doesn’t say a word. He just stands up, swaying for a second, and then pulls me with him. This is probably a horrible idea, but we stumble through the brush until we reach the dooranyway. Noah pulls a knife from his boot, jamming the blade into the cheap aluminum lock.
My heart jumps. “There could be someone in there…”
Noah doesn’t answer me. He just twists the knife with a brutal, desperate grunt, and the metal snaps.
“Problem solved,” he mutters.
The door swings open, releasing a wave of stale, musty air smelling of old cedar and dust. But at least it’s out of the wind.
Noah steps up inside and then turns back to me. “It’s clear. Whoever normally stays here isn’t here tonight. Or at least for now.”
