Run For Cover (3 page)

“They won’t know for sure it was us,” I say to Evelyn and Maddie. “They might think it was some of the boys on their survival mission.”

“Hey, that’s true,” Ryan says. “Since they’re not expecting me and Drew and Alonso back for a week, they won’t even start looking for us until we don’t show up.”

There’s an awkward pause. It takes Ryan a minute to figure out that’s because I still haven’t agreed to let them come with us, and he gives me an apologetic look.

“Listen, we can’t go back to CMS after what you guys told us,” he says. “We don’t want to be used as weapons against our parents any more than you do. If you won’t let us come with you, we’ll have to run away on our own.”

This sounds like a fine plan to me, but Louisa immediately jumps in. “Don’t be silly,” she says. “We want you with us. We’ll be safer if we stick together.”

That is blatantly false, but I’m guessing she doesn’t want to hear about how a large group will make more noise crashing through the woods, or how much easier it’ll be to spot all of us from their helicopters, or how much harder it’ll be to find somewhere for us all to sleep safely, never mind finding food for seven instead of four. Safer! We might as well turn ourselves in right now.

“Right, Rosie?” Louisa says. “I mean, look at these poor, helpless guys. They obviously need us.”

Ryan tries to make puppy-dog eyes. Alonso’s friendly, harmless expression is more successful. Drew, on the other hand, still has that I-know-things face, and he raises his eyebrows at me as if he’s curious to see what I’ll do, not that it actually matters to him one way or another.

It occurs to me that if he is working for the Alliance, maybe I
should
keep him with us, so I can keep an eye on him.

“Fine,” I say, pulling my hair back into a ponytail and wringing it out. “You’re right. If we didn’t let them come
with us, they’d probably end up wandering in circles around the school until they got caught.”

“We would,” Ryan agrees affably. “We’d be lost without you.”

“I’m not as bad as these two,” Drew offers. “I can actually start a fire, for instance.”

“So can I!” Alonso protests. He leans over to the stove and flicks one of the knobs. Blue light flares around one of the burners. “See? I rock at this.”

Louisa and Maddie both giggle. Oh, brother. I bet there’s going to be a lot of that — laughing at stupid boy jokes that aren’t even that funny. I reach over and turn the knob off. We have our own generator at home, too, but I still hate wasting energy.

“So, hot cocoa for everyone?” Louisa says hopefully.

I go back out into the vestibule while the others search the kitchen for mugs. There’s a small window by the front door that’s covered with a close-fitting dark shade, I guess so no one will see the cabin’s lights from the woods. I peek out just in time to see a
huge flash of lightning. This storm isn’t stopping anytime soon.

“We’ll have to sleep here tonight,” Drew says from right behind me, peering over my shoulder at the rain.

I whirl around and shove him back. “
Don’t
sneak up on me.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he says, raising his hands, palms out. “I came to get the sleeping bags, to see if they’d dry out if I unroll them.”

“Me, too,” I say. There’s only one thing I like about Drew so far, and it’s that he seems to have a sensible head on his shoulders. He keeps doing the same things I would do to survive. The problem is, I don’t trust his reasons. Maybe he was going to use the sleeping bag idea as an excuse to go through our packs. Or maybe he has a hidden Alliance communicator in his.

I watch him carefully as we both unpack the sleeping bags and shake them out, but I don’t catch him sneaking anything out of his pack, or any of the others. We spread the sleeping bags around the giant conference
table, head to toe, although there’s not quite enough room and one of them has to go under the table, between the chairs.

Despite the drenching downpour, the sleeping bags were pretty well protected in their waterproof bags, and are mostly dry. I wish I could say the same for the clothes in our packs, but they’re a little drier than the ones I’m wearing, so I slip into the bathroom and change into new jeans and a warm, long-sleeved black shirt.

When I come back out, Louisa has just emerged from the kitchen with two mugs of cocoa. She sets them down on the table with a flourish. “Maybe they’ll stain the wood,” she says. “It would serve them right.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Take that, Alliance! That’ll teach them for defeating Canada and kidnapping us!”

Louisa giggles again. To her disappointment, though, the mugs don’t leave any marks on the table. They’re a plain, institutional white porcelain with the NutriCorp logo emblazoned on the side. I have to look at it twice before I realize it’s not the Alliance seal, though. From a
distance, and when I’m this tired, the logo and the seal look eerily similar, except that the logo has a maple leaf where the Alliance seal has a giant star.

I barely have the energy to drink my cocoa, although it does warm me up and make me feel a bit better. I have no idea how far we’ve come from CMS, although I’m very sure it’s not far enough. But at least we’re safe from the storm, and we can get some sleep before moving on. Hopefully it’ll have stopped raining by morning. We’re getting out of here as soon as it’s light, storm or no storm.

I crawl into the sleeping bag under the table. Louisa, Ryan, Maddie, Alonso, and Evelyn stay up for a while longer, talking. I can hear them giggling as I drift off to sleep. It makes me feel a little left out and a lot grumpy, even though I don’t want to join them. Only Drew is sensible enough to also get the rest we all need.

But I’m not going to go out there and yell at them. The girls know perfectly well how I feel about getting
distracted by boys, I think. It won’t be my fault when they’re tired tomorrow.

Something is digging into my back, but I’m too tired to wriggle away from it. I close my eyes and dream, as I always do, of hurricanes and tidal waves, of Wren smiling up at Ivan, of swimming and running and hiding and helicopters, of the look on my mom’s face as a new ID bracelet is snapped around my wrist. Only this time, Ivan has Drew’s face, and when I look up from my ID bracelet, the person putting it on me, smiling evilly, is Mrs. Brewster.

I can even hear her loud, brassy voice. It’s so real… .

I jolt awake, all the hairs on my skin standing on end.

It
is
real.

Mrs. Brewster is
here.

R
unaways,” Mrs. Brewster snaps. I’m so befuddled and sleepy and out of it that it takes me another twenty seconds to realize her voice is coming from outside the cabin, not right above me like I first thought. I sit up fast and bang my shoulder on one of the rolling chairs, just barely missing the table with my skull.

“Louisa!” I hiss quietly. I duck my head to look under the chairs and I see Louisa’s wide, frightened blue eyes peeking out of her sleeping bag. She hears our headmistress, too.

“Four of them!” Mrs. Brewster goes on. The storm has passed, or else we wouldn’t be able to hear her so
clearly. If it had still been raining, she would have walked in and found us asleep. “Just when things were going so perfectly! Where could those idiot girls have gone?”

I wince. She’s talking about us! Of course, those “idiot girls” are nanoseconds away from being back in her clutches. There’s nowhere for us to hide, no way to run before she walks through the door. My heart is pounding and I can barely breathe. What will happen to my family now?

“What is taking so long?” Mrs. Brewster barks.

“I can’t find the key,” says Devi’s voice. “It’s like someone moved all the rocks around.”

“Connolly,” Mrs. Brewster snorts. “He has no discipline.”

I scramble out from under the table and nearly crash into Drew’s legs. He meets my eyes and holds up the cabin door key, but his face is pale, and for the first time he looks really worried. He never put it back last night, so we’re safe for another minute, but not much more.

“Is there another way out of here?” I whisper.

On the other side of the table, Louisa shakes Maddie awake and then Evelyn, covering Evelyn’s mouth as she opens her eyes to make sure Evelyn doesn’t start yakking and give us away. Alonso climbs blearily out of his sleeping bag and pokes Ryan with his toe.

“I don’t know,” Drew whispers back. “Not that I know of, but I’ve never, like, hung out here.”

“Get our stuff from the vestibule,” I say to Louisa and Evelyn. “All of it! Don’t leave anything behind. Put your shoes on and roll up the sleeping bags.” I don’t have time to act like we’re all a happy decision-making team right now. I can’t believe we’re such morons! Of course the teachers would show up here first thing in the morning, ready to discuss their new plans now that Canada has fallen. We could not have picked a worse place to hide.

This turns out to be truer than I first thought as I search for another exit. The bathroom window is way too small for any of us to fit through, except maybe Maddie.
Outside I can see the grayish-blue-pink light of early dawn; it’s maybe five in the morning or something horrible like that.

The kitchen doesn’t even have any windows, and neither does the conference room. There’s no back door. There’s only the front door, where Mrs. Brewster is standing, clearly getting more and more impatient. I tug on my socks and shoes as quietly as I can, listening through the wood.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. B.,” Devi says. “I found the rock, but the key isn’t in there. Someone must have taken it with them last time.”

“Idiots,” Mrs. Brewster growls. My hopes rise a tiny bit. Maybe they’ll have to go away and get a new one, and we can escape while they’re gone.

“Connolly and Grifone will be here soon,” Devi says. “One of them probably has it.”

“I’m not standing here waiting for them like an abandoned dog,” Mrs. Brewster says. “Run back to the truck and get our extra key.”

“Yes, boss,” says Devi.

I dash back into the main room. The others are huddled around the table, looking terrified. “We have maybe a minute,” I whisper. “Then it’s all over.” I press my hands to my forehead, trying to think. There must be something we can do. We can’t have failed so quickly, so spectacularly. This has to be the worst escape in the history of the world.

And it’s Drew’s fault,
I think, suspicion bubbling up inside me. But the truth is, if I had known about this place, I probably would have brought us here in the storm, too.

“There are seven of us,” Ryan points out. “I hate to say it, but I bet we could overpower her if we try to make a run for it right now.”

“Have you seen her?” Maddie asks with a shudder. “She could take all of us down easily.”

“Plus she probably has a weapon,” Evelyn whispers. “Most likely secret, advanced Alliance technology.”

This is such an Evelyn thing to say that Louisa can’t help rolling her eyes at me, despite how tense the situation is.

“And even if a few of us get away, she’s bound to catch someone,” says Alonso, keeping his voice low like the rest of us. “And she’ll know exactly how far the rest of us have gone, so we’ll all be in cells by the end of the day.”

I have no idea what to suggest. My sleeping bag is poking out from under the table, so I crouch down to drag it out while the others argue. I’m a little annoyed no one has packed it up for me while I was searching for an escape route.

The zipper catches on something, and I have to lean in to unhook it. When I see what it’s hooked on, I nearly yell with excitement, but I manage to keep my voice down.

“Guys!” I hiss, poking my head out. “There’s a trapdoor under the table!”

Drew and Louisa shove chairs aside and duck under with me. Together we turn the silver metal handle in the floor until there’s a click and we can heave the trapdoor up.

I shine my flashlight down the dark hole and we see a dirt floor about eight feet below us.

“This doesn’t seem like a good idea,” Maddie says.

“All we’ve got left are bad ideas,” I say. I scoot my feet over the edge, drop my backpack and sleeping bag down ahead of me, and jump after them. Quickly I spin with the flashlight, thinking it’s a cellar of some kind, and maybe we can hide in it until the Alliance meeting is over.

I catch my breath. Even better. “There’s a tunnel down here! We can get out this way!”

“But where does it go?” Maddie frets.

“Away from Mrs. Brewster,” Louisa says. “That’s all I need to know.” She drops her backpack down next to me and swings herself through the hole as well. “Come on, Maddie!”

“Hurry!” I add.

“Maybe Ryan, Alonso, and I should stay here,” Drew suggests, to my surprise, as Maddie reluctantly lowers herself through the hole. His face peers down at us, hidden by the shadow of the table above him. “That way if they figure out someone was here, we can pretend we just got lost during the storm. It’ll draw attention away from you girls.”

Louisa reaches out and catches Maddie as she stumbles away from the hole. Evelyn drops down right behind her. I see the expression on Louisa’s face: she knows Drew has made a good suggestion, but she’s still reluctant to leave the boys.

It’s the perfect chance for me to get rid of them … but I can’t. I know what’s likely to happen to them if they stay. Even if Mrs. Brewster believes their story — which she won’t — they’ll never have a chance to run away after this. And what if Alonso does have a secret like mine? Then he really can’t afford to get caught, either.

“That won’t work,” I call up to Drew. “There are seven used mugs of cocoa. They’ll know you were with us. Quick, rearrange the room like it was as much as you can, then get down here.”

Beside me in the dim light, Evelyn smacks her forehead. “I guess my mom was right about doing the dishes as soon as you’ve used them.”

“We’re so dumb,” Louisa mutters anxiously.

“We can still get out of this,” I say. “If they don’t figure out we’ve used the trapdoor, hopefully they’ll think we’re in the woods nearby and they’ll go out looking for us.”

There’s a thump as Ryan lands behind us, followed by Alonso. Drew jumps down last, and then Ryan lifts him on his shoulders so that Drew can reach the trapdoor and close it. Just as he turns the knob to lock it, we hear footsteps marching across the floor above us.

We all freeze, holding our breath.

“Of course Connolly is late, as always,” Mrs. Brewster grumbles over our heads. “Devi, did you bring the folders on those four girls?”

“Of course,” Devi answers. “And their ID bracelets. The data history might tell us something about where they’re going, if we can retrieve it.”

“I wonder if any of the boys are missing, too,” says the headmistress.

“I’m sure not. None of the hostages know about what’s happened in Canada,” Devi says reassuringly. “It’s bad timing — that’s all. The Ballinger girl was worried about her fake sister. That’s why they ran away, so they wouldn’t get in trouble. They don’t know about us.”

“I hope you’re right,” Mrs. Brewster muses. “But it’s a strange coincidence, on the very day we’re able to reveal our true purpose. And why would Posner and Chavez go with them? Blast it all. I knew those girls were trouble from the beginning. I should have locked all four of them up on day one.”

I wave my hand to get everyone’s attention. Fascinating as this is, it can’t be long before Mrs. Brewster notices something — the mud on the carpet, or the mugs in the sink, or the extra hand towels draped around the
bathroom. We’ve done a terrible job of covering our tracks. And we need to run. Now.

We don’t risk talking or even whispering. Ryan sets Drew down carefully and I head for the tunnel. My flashlight reveals nothing but packed dirt walls all around us. There’s no way to know what’s up ahead.

But whatever it is, it’s got to be better than being dragged back to CMS by Mrs. Brewster so our parents can spend all of their money trying to get us home.

I take a deep breath. And then I lead the way into the darkness.