Don't Let Go (3 page)

“Well, yeah,” Peter said, trotting around to the back. “Don’t you remember? We parked here to make it look like it belonged to hikers.”

Noa didn’t reply. He examined her surreptitiously as he cracked the hatch. She appeared genuinely puzzled, which wasn’t a good sign. She’d never mentioned memory issues before; was this new? Peter bit his lip. Out here, they had no choice but to rely on one another. Yet while he and Daisy and Teo became increasingly tightly knit, Noa seemed to be drifting away from them.

“You want to check this time?” Teo asked as he threw his pack into the cargo compartment.

Peter sighed. “Why not? I’m already covered in mud.”

While the others waited, he crawled around the perimeter of the car, checking the tires and undercarriage for tracking devices. As usual, he didn’t find anything. They’d spent hours speculating on how Charles Pike’s minions seemed to find them no matter how far and fast they ran; a few states back, Peter had suggested that maybe they’d bugged the car. So they’d switched out vehicles. But two nights later, the mercenaries had shown up again.

There was another possible answer, but it was almost too awful to contemplate: that one of them was a mole.

As he got back to his feet and dusted himself off, Peter shoved the thought away. They’d been together 24-7 for over three months. Noa certainly wouldn’t sell herself out, and Teo and Daisy would never risk each other. He watched as they stole a kiss in the backseat. They were good kids; a little rough around the edges, but definitely trustworthy.

So how the hell does Pike keep finding us?
This last time had been too close—Teo was right, just a few more minutes and they wouldn’t have gotten away. Fortunately, the perimeter alarms that he’d set up had alerted them. But those had been left behind, and there wasn’t enough cash left to replace them. Which didn’t bode well for wherever they landed next.

Noa had settled into the front passenger seat. “Guess I’m driving,” Peter grumbled as he rounded the front of the car. His stomach growled—they’d nibbled on trail bars while waiting for the coast to clear, but he was still starving. What he’d do for a real lumberjack breakfast: pancakes, eggs, toast, bacon. Maybe once Little Rock was just a blip in the rearview mirror, they could stop at a roadside diner. He tugged the straps of his pack tighter and shifted the seat back to make room.

“Dude,” Teo grunted. “You’re killing me. Take off that damn pack so I can have a little leg room.”

“Sorry, man.” Peter knew it was ridiculous to wear the backpack while driving, but it had become a weird sort of safety net for him. He’d nearly died for these hard drives, after all. And if he ever found a way to access the data on them, he could save a lot of people—including Amanda. So he took it off as little as possible.

Teo muttered something unintelligible as he climbed over Daisy, switching seats with her. Peter waited until they were settled, then turned the ignition.

“Which way?” he asked.

Noa shrugged.

Peter hesitated, hands on the steering wheel. “South?”

“Too hot,” Daisy piped up. “I hate the heat.”

“North, then? Maybe Missouri, or Kansas again?”

“I hate Kansas,” Teo muttered. Noa didn’t answer; she was gazing blankly out the windshield, doing her hundred-yard-stare thing.

“All right, I vote west,” Peter sighed. “Nearest campus is Oklahoma State Institute of Technology.”

“It’s got
tech
in the title,” Teo said. “That’s probably a good sign.”

“Maybe.” They’d visited half a dozen “tech universities” across the country, and so far none had a computer lab as sophisticated as the one back at Peter’s high school. “Can’t be worse than the last place.”

“Oklahoma sounds nice,” Teo murmured, fatigue underpinning his voice. “Bet they have lots of cows.”

“Moo,” Daisy lowed. They both dissolved in giggles.

Peter pulled back onto the road, adhering strictly to the speed limit.

He flicked on the radio and started humming along. Noa had her eyes closed, but he could read her well enough by now to tell she wasn’t sleeping. A frown creased her features. He wondered if she was thinking about Zeke again.

Peter felt a twinge of jealousy. He’d sacrificed everything to join up with her: his family, friends, and quite possibly his entire future. He’d done it partly to save Amanda, sure. But he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that a small part of him thought the time they’d spent together last October meant something.

Apparently, not so much. Because now it felt like he was constantly being compared to a ghost, and coming up short.

The edges of the hard drives dug into his back, oddly reassuring. Peter was going to get the information off them if it killed him. And that data would save Amanda’s life, bring down Charles Pike, and maybe restore Noa’s health.

Then, she’d see who the real hero was.

CHAPTER TWO

“N
ow that’s what I’m talking about!” Peter exclaimed.

Noa had to agree—the computer lab at the Oklahoma State Institute of Technology was a lot more impressive than the other places they’d tried. Rows of humming terminals, all relatively new. They were so gorgeous it made her fingers feel twitchy.

“You kids need something?”

Noa jumped and spun around. A stocky older man holding a stack of manuals stood behind them. The waistband of his pants slung low under a considerable belly, and his button-down shirt strained at the seams. He had an enormous bushy mustache and small, pudgy hands.

“We’ve got some work to finish up,” Peter said, flashing a broad smile.

“Work?” The man’s brow furrowed. “School’s out, kids. Shouldn’t you be at graduation? The governor goes on soon, don’t want to miss that.”

Noa threw Peter a desperate look; the campus
had
seemed oddly empty as they made their way here, despite the fact that the parking lot was full.

“Unfortunately,” Peter explained in that overly cheery voice he always employed with adults, “I’ve gotta finish a term paper by the end of the day, otherwise they might not let me come back next year.”

“First I’ve heard of that.” The guy scrutinized them skeptically. “Got your student IDs?”

Noa fought to keep her face calm; all her instincts were screaming at her to bolt.

“Left them in the dorm,” Peter apologized. “Sorry.”

The man eyed them for a minute, then said, “Well, I gotta take these to the stockroom.” He hefted the stack in his arms an inch and continued, “Can I trust you alone in here?”

“You bet!” Peter chirped. As always, Noa marveled at how convincing he was. If she’d been on her own, the guy would probably have already called campus security.

“All right, then. Don’t break anything.”

The door closed behind him, and Noa’s shoulders slumped. “That was close.”

“Nah,” Peter said dismissively. “We’re just a couple of nice college kids with a bad habit of procrastinating.”

Noa raised an eyebrow. Their clothes were threadbare, and for the past few days they’d been washing up in gas station bathrooms. “Good thing he wasn’t close enough to smell us.”

Peter had already plunked down at the nearest terminal. He set his backpack on the ground, dug out a server drive, and carefully unwrapped it. “I smell like a daisy, thank you very much. Now.” He cracked the knuckles of both hands, then said, “Let’s hack these bad boys.”

Noa sighed. Following suit, she picked a terminal and unwrapped a drive. They’d created ad hoc Faraday cages for the server hard drives, just in case they were bugged; each one was wrapped in a layer of aluminum foil, then a layer of cardboard, then more aluminum foil. Basically, that metal shield should guarantee that any signal would be blocked.

When she plugged in the drive, a command prompt appeared on-screen. That, at least, was familiar enough. The problem came when she tried to open a file: No matter which one she tried—and there were thousands of them—the only thing that came up was an indecipherable mess.

The data was protected by 256-bit AES encryption, the same level of security utilized by the NSA. To crack it, they needed to figure out which file contained the decryption key. And even if they managed to accomplish that, the archive would be password protected, too.

It was kind of like the multiple layers of security around a castle. First they had to locate the castle itself: the file that contained the key. After that, cracking the password to access that key was roughly akin to overcoming moats and dragons and all sorts of other obstacles before finally getting inside the gates.

They were both skilled hackers, but this was a brute force operation. And despite the fancy computers here, Noa didn’t hold out much hope. It could take weeks just to find the key file; and they wouldn’t be able to fake their way into this lab for that long.

Still, Peter insisted on trying. He muttered to himself as he tapped away, maintaining a running play by play of everything he was doing. She found it simultaneously endearing and annoying; a few times in internet cafés, she’d had to shush him. They were alone in here, though, so it was harmless enough.

Noa stared at her screen. The fluorescent lights were already making her eyes throb, and she felt a headache coming on.

“All righty,” Peter murmured. “You don’t like that, you little bastard? Just wait and see what Daddy’s going to try now. . . .”

More annoying than endearing today
, she decided. If she was going to tolerate the patter without strangling him, she needed some caffeine. Noa pushed back her chair and said, “I’m going to grab a Red Bull. Want one?”

“But we’re just getting started,” Peter protested.

“I slept in a ditch last night,” she pointed out. “And you’re talking to yourself again.”

“Oh, sorry. Hey, get me one, too?”

Noa nodded and grabbed her backpack, slinging it over one shoulder. Peter had trained her well; she rarely let it out of her sight anymore, either.

In the hallway, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. What she would give for some real sleep. Her whole body ached, and she was covered in scrapes and bruises. For the first time in her life, she dreaded the thought of clocking hours in front of a computer.

They’d left Teo and Daisy on the grassy quad out front, ostensibly keeping watch. As Noa passed the enormous window that lined the front of the building, she spotted them lying beside each other. Daisy was tickling Teo’s nose with a blade of grass. He grabbed her hand, pulling her down for a kiss.

Watching them, Noa felt a pang. She’d almost had someone once, but she’d been too foolish to realize it. And now it was too late.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to blot out the image of Zeke bleeding to death in her lap. But the sound of his voice, and of that final gunshot ringing out across the water, replayed on an endless reel. She’d give anything to open her eyes and see him standing there, giving her that look that said,
I know you, better than you know yourself
.

Noa forced herself to set one foot in front of the other. She finally found a vending machine at the end of the next hallway; but of course they didn’t have Red Bull. She sighed and bought two Cokes, tucking one away for Peter. Popping the top on the other, she sucked down half the can, then let it dangle from her hand while she stared blankly at the floor.

Aside from when they were running for their lives, most of their days were consumed by monotonous, unbroken hours of driving. Which provided far too much time to dwell on the mistakes she’d made, all the things she couldn’t take back.

It wasn’t just losing Zeke that had disheartened her so completely, although she knew that’s what they all thought. It was worse than that. Right before he died, a biochemist had explained that her cells were deteriorating, overloaded by the extra thymus P&D had inserted into her chest. He’d predicted that her symptoms would worsen.

Noa didn’t understand the science behind it, but he’d definitely been right. She was constantly exhausted; some days, just sitting up took enormous effort. For the first few months after the operation, she would crash hard, then be awake for long stretches; now, all she ever wanted to do was sleep. And her eating habits had changed, too. Before, she’d gorge herself, then be unable to choke down food for days. Now, she could rarely bring herself to eat anything, and half of it came back up. It was like her body was engaged in an all-out revolt.

She polished off the soda and tossed the can in a recycling bin, then shuffled back down the hall. Noa glanced outside: no sign of Daisy and Teo. Maybe they’d headed off to find a quiet corner somewhere.
So much for keeping watch
, she thought with a sigh.

Turning the corner, Noa pulled up short. Two men were walking down the hall away from her. They wore jeans and cowboy shirts, the norm in this part of the country. But the way they were carrying themselves seemed off. . . .

She checked their shoes: combat boots. Noa quickly ducked out of sight, her heart racing. They’d been found again.

Peter hummed to himself as he tapped the keys. He still couldn’t understand why Noa wasn’t more into this project. For a hacker to be handed a challenge like this? The old Noa would’ve been racing him from the car.

Her indifference was just another sign of how much she’d changed.

Frowning, Peter shoved back the lock of hair that always drove him crazy. If he had to find the archive file on his own, so be it; Noa wasn’t the only hacker in town.

Maybe OSU Tech had some sort of summer school they could piggyback on, he mused. They could find a safe place to hole up; there had to be a ton of empty apartments during the summertime. Somewhere with a real kitchen, beds, and functioning showers. Catch up on their sleep. Have a shot at a few weeks of normalcy; hell, maybe even a few months.

He registered footsteps approaching; probably the older guy who ran the lab, returning to check on them. Peter hurriedly shut the open windows on-screen. Someone stepped into the room as he closed the final window.

He glanced up, then froze. Two huge men filled the doorway. Their eyes swept the lab, then came to rest on him. One of the guys broke into a broad smile. “Peter Gregory,” he said. “Looks like it’s our lucky day.”