Page 75

The car is already there when I come out. Of course it is. I slide into the back seat. I sit very still, hold the knife Torin gave me in both hands, and watch the door.

One minute. Two.

Then the sirens.

They rise out of the distance like something I've already been expecting, and maybe I have. My stomach drops before my brain has processed the sound. I sit up straighter and look through the windshield at the front entrance, and then I see him.

Torin comes out the door at a dead run.

Police cars are behind him, two of them, doors already swinging open. They're coming for him. I understand this in the time it takes to breathe in. I understand what it means, what happens if they take him, and what happens to me if they take him. I stop thinking and leap clumsily into the driver's seat.

I don't know much about this man. But what little I do know is that he can't go back into custody. I know that with a certainty that has no business being as absolute as it is, and I'm not going to examine why it's so absolute. I’m acting on it.

I start the car.

One of the officers looks toward me, says something into his radio, and reaches for his holster. Torin is running. I drive straight toward him.

“Get in the car!”

Another car comes flying in from the left, and I yank the wheel to the right. Torin hits the door, wrenches it open, and throws himself in. Before his door is even fully shut, I've already accelerated away from the curb.

“My god,” he says, catching himself on the dash. “You drive like a bat out of hell.”

“I think we need that right now.”

“Drive to the airport, Valentina.”

I don't ask which one. Logan, obviously. I already know the tunnels.

“Pull over, and I'll take the wheel,” he says.

“We don't have time.”

“Have you ever been in a high-speed chase?”

“Yes.”

He looks at me.

“Yes,” I say again, but I don't elaborate immediately because I'm watching the mirrors—there are still two of them, and I need to think. I take the next left without signaling, cut through a gas station, and kill the headlights for thirty seconds. One of them misses it. The other doesn't, so I turn the engine back on and head out.

When I was seventeen, my friends and I had been drinking near the high school. My father found out. He would have beaten the shit out of me, and I wasn't going to let that happen, so I ran. I kept two car lengths between us through four miles of back roads, cut my lights on the straightaway, turned hard into a neighborhood, and parked in somebody's driveway like I belonged there. I waited, watching him drive past.

I found a way because necessity is the same teacher, whether you're seventeen or twenty-three. The techniques don't change.

I kind of like the adrenaline rush.

I take the tunnel entrance fast, merge hard, and watch the mirror, trying to lose the last car.

Then we're on the freeway, and finally, nobody's behind us.

I don't let myself breathe until I've confirmed it three times in the mirror—once for each car and once for the helicopter I was listening for but never heard.

Then I breathe.

“Who called them?”

“Somebody who wanted me picked up rather than shot.”