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They weren’t looking at me for answers. They were waiting for me to catch up.
I pulled in a breath, drawing all of my thoughts together. “I can’t go back to Arkendale, can I?”
Jesse stared at me silently, and Roark grabbed the glass of water from the nightstand and set it in my hands.
I sipped and handed it back as I said, “That’s not where we were headed anyway.”
Roark leaned forward, his knee bent against the mattress. “Hunter followed us this morning and returned to Arkendale after we settled.”
My drowsiness was fading by the second, my body alight with excited energy. “So Link would know how to find us.”
“He’ll send more men in a few days to help us track down the Drone.”
I wasn’t sure we’d need to do much tracking. “I saw the Drone in a dream.”
Was the Drone waiting for me in my motherfucking house? Desecrating my memories?
“What? How?” Jesse shot up, his eyes hard. “We didn’t leave you alone for one second. One of us was always touching you.”
Shea chose that moment to run into the room and launch herself at me in an emotional and fervent crush of toned limbs and black curls. Seemingly oblivious of the men in the bed, she wrapped her arms around my neck and peppered kisses across my face. “You scared the shit out of me.”
I returned her embrace, grinning. “I missed you, too.”
“Shea.” The air buzzed with the impatient tone of Jesse’s voice.
“Okay, okay. I’ll come back.” She slid off the bed, flashed me a huge smile, and darted out of the room.
When the door shut, Jesse and Roark turned their attentions to me. They were a stunning scenery of copper and jade eyes, each of them so uniquely different yet living in symbiosis, like now as they watched me with the mutual intensity, waiting for me to tell them about the Drone.
I put my hands on their thighs. “Maybe he didn’t find me in my dreams. But I found him. In my home in Missouri.”
Roark folded his hand around mine, his voice cautious. “And Michio?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. Maybe Michio hadn’t been able to track the Drone. Maybe he’d died trying.
My lungs hitched, stuttering my breath as I teased my eyes open. “We’ll find him.”
My belief in those words catapulted me through the next few days. I ate, slept, and regained my strength. Hiding out in an evacuated, high-end, gated neighborhood had its advantages. We acquired new clothing and shoes, found more generators secreted away in garages, and beneath the hum of a florescent light, mapped out our journey to Missouri.
Home. The house I’d shared with Joel and Annie and Aaron. A place of joyful memories and irreconcilable sadness. I never expected to return. Never wanted to.
Stay alive. Seek truth. And do not look back.
That was our agreement the day Joel and I fled our home. I’d held up my end, and would continue to do so with every ounce of fight left in me. My guardians were my future, and if the key to locating Michio waited in that house, I would find it, without looking back.
Four days after I’d woken in Charlottesville, Link arrived with three more men.
Roark met him at the door. “You’re coming with us?”
“Yup.” Link pushed his way inside, his frame thinner, and his bald head creased with more lines than the last time I saw him.
“This is Gary and Lee.” He gestured at the attractive white guys behind him. Evidently, muscles were a requirement to work for Link. “You already know Hunter.”
As Link and Roark spoke quietly, Hunter shuffled past, offering me a chin nod, his arms loaded with boxes. Wedged in the top of one was a bulky white laptop-like machine.
“Wait.” I grabbed his arm, stopping him. “Is that—?”
“You found one!” Shea ran in from the kitchen and snatched the machine from the box. “Does it work?”
Hunter shrugged. “I found a few of them between here and the peninsula. You know that nurse you cured in Arkendale? She checked them out. Said they would do.”
“An ultrasound machine,” I said with disbelief, but my thoughts were already skipping to the generator and the knowledge that we wouldn’t be leaving until the morning and…
I found Jesse’s eyes across the room, searing into mine. He sat on the floor against the far wall, knees bent, and his thumb sliding over the string of the bow between his legs. Anyone else might’ve thought he was disinterested in the conversations around him, too bored to interact with or pay attention to his current company. But I knew better. He was listening, always watching, and right now, he was thinking about all the possibilities that machine might give us.
Shea ran up the stairs with it, hell-bent on her mission, her finger crooking at me to follow.
