The Escape (15 page)

Spinning, I saw her, the disk from the safe in her hands, but she was unmoving, her face grimacing in pain.
The shield!
I’d dropped it with my concentration, and the sensing Unbounded was in her mind, holding her in place with an impressive show of mental force. Physically, he was several feet away, his chest bleeding from her knife. I saw Mari’s gun on the floor by the fireplace poker.

I thrust out my thoughts, crashing into the Unbounded in her mind. Shoving a pulse of light at him, I threw up a shield around Mari, mimicking the thick one I’d seen around his own mind. His fury lashed out as his thoughts careened backward, but slammed uselessly against the outside of the shield. Mari’s relief made me momentarily weak. She took a step.

Shift!
I told her.
Get out now.

Even as I thought the words, agony dug into my back. I sucked in a breath filled with pain—or tried to. My lungs no longer seemed to work. White hot agony filled my awareness.

Everything seemed to happen at once. Mari arching and falling toward the fireplace. Me sending a pulse of light to the combat Unbounded behind me. His wrenching pain. The sensing Unbounded running toward Mari, a recovered pistol in his hands. Mari tossing the disk into the fire. The Unbounded reaching for it. Burning his hand. Dropping the blackened, melted disk once more into the greedy flames. Keene appearing in the doorway and more silenced shots as the sensing man sprinted toward the window, dragging his companion with him. More pain filling my mind as Keene’s bullet found a target.

Blackness consumed my physical sight, but I was still mentally with Mari as she shifted next to me. “Are you okay?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer. Why wasn’t she bleeding? I’d seen her hit, hadn’t I?

“Erin,” Keene spoke close to my face, “you have to shift out of here with Mari. She can’t take you all that way on her own. Concentrate. Can you do it?”

I nodded. Mari and I were still so strongly linked, that I doubted I could separate myself from her if I tried. Something to do with my mega shield that still covered her mind. Almost, it seemed to be keeping me inside her.

“Shift to the car,” Keene said.

“What about you?” Mari’s breath came in gasps. “They’ll be back with reinforcements.”

“I’ll meet you out front, but if they’re in view, don’t stop for me.”

Mari gripped my hand. “Ready, Erin?”

Ready,
I told her.

The next minute I saw numbers. Lots of numbers. I felt Mari’s joy in how they fell perfectly into place. So easily. Here and there . . . and then we were gone from the bedroom and in the car, with perhaps half of a heartbeat of time in between.

“I hope you have the keys,” Mari said.

“My pocket.” The pain had miraculously eased during that half heartbeat when we were neither here nor there, and I could see clearly again, but moving would probably restart the agony.

“Where are the Emporium agents?” Mari asked, digging for the keys. “Are they outside the building?”

With effort, I pulled my mind from hers to check, the shifting seeming to have righted my sense of self. “Yeah. Still in the same place. No. Two are moving now. They’re crossing and going around the corner. They can’t be leaving.”

“Bet they’re going to help those other agents. That’s where the bedroom is located.”

I took her word for it. She could also add pages of numbers without a machine and she pretty much always knew the time from a running count in her head.

Mari started the engine with too much gas, the roar sounding like a beacon that shouted out our location. “Keene shot at least one of them,” she said, “and the one who had the disk is bleeding pretty badly. The jerk. He deserved it. Not sure how they got up to the second floor window.”

“The other two are still in their car out front. Let’s get going before their friends come back.”

Our car lurched forward. “I’m sorry about the disk,” she said, a catch in her voice.

“They didn’t get it. That’s the important thing.” I also felt sick about the disk, but it was only one of several copies, and if Mari hadn’t thrown it into the fire, it would be in Emporium hands now, which was far worse.

She picked up speed as she drove toward Emerson’s townhouse. Through my slowly returning vision, I could make out the car where the Emporium agents sat, not twenty feet from the stairway to the house. This was going to be close. The only thing on our side was surprise. Hopefully their companions who’d been inside had told them that both of us had been shot. It was possible they didn’t know I could piggyback on someone else’s ability, so even if Mari was sound enough to shift out, they would still expect me to be inside.

Not that I’d be much help to Mari in my condition. Every movement was torture, and I was having a problem breathing. Then again, maybe I could reach the Emporium agents’ minds, maybe stop them if they tried to get out of the car.

First I had to find the strength. I began to absorb as fast as possible.

“Hurry, Keene,” Mari muttered as she came to a stop.

I wondered if he was coming at all. Maybe he wanted us to get away and had told Mari to leave, knowing the Emporium agents would be in front waiting and hoping she would obey him and not stop. Yet neither of us were prepared to leave him behind. At the same time, I didn’t dare expend energy trying to find him mentally. I was already close to collapse.

The agents’ shields were nowhere near as strong as the sensing Unbounded’s—a good thing since shards of glass seemed to be nestled inside my back and chest, making it difficult to focus. I pushed hard but the shield of the first agent only bounced back. I had nowhere near the energy it’d take to break it down. If only I had something strong to hit it with. In frustration, I conjured up a mental image of my machete and hit the shield again. I was in!

“There he is.” Mari’s voice came from far away.

Not daring to move my head and lose my concentration, I saw Keene not with my eyes but as a life force moving down the stairs. Far too slowly. He wasn’t going to make it. The second agent reached for the door. I slammed my machete again and I was inside him, too. His foot stepped onto the pavement as he reached for his gun. Keene was at the bottom of the stairs.

I mentally grabbed at the agent’s arm, much as I had pushed at Oliver’s hand that morning. But I was too spent, and he hesitated only briefly before the gun started rising. The other agent stepped from the car.

No!
I swung the imaginary machete at them and light pulsed from the tip. I felt more than saw them grab at their heads.

The next second our car was in motion, tires squealing on the pavement. The last thing I heard before I lost consciousness was the door slamming.

T
HE SOFT SCRAPE OF A
sword leaving its scabbard woke me. I was lying on my stomach naked from the waist up. Grabbing at the sheet covering me, I sat up too quickly, trying to see in the dark. I felt Ritter before I recognized the infirmary, and I let out a sigh of relief. Mari had gotten us to the safe house.

“Did I wake you?” Ritter asked, his tone too casual. In the dim light coming from the open door, I could see the gleam of his sword as he rubbed it with a cloth.

“What happened?” There was no pain in my chest, but I felt a buzz that told me I’d been given curequick, and probably more than once if I was healed and the high remained.

His hand stilled on the sword. “What part? When you disobeyed Ava’s order and took Keene with you this morning? Or when you almost got yourself killed trying to get the Hunters’ records? What happened to shifting out at the first sign of danger?”

“I did what any of us would have done to preserve our cover and mitigate damages.” I swung my bare feet over the edge of the bed, adjusting my position. No pain meant someone had operated on me and taken out the bullet so I could heal faster. It sometimes took days to expel bullets on your own. With Dimitri away in Massachusetts, I was betting Ritter had done the operation. He seemed to excel at taking bullets from my body.

Ritter didn’t respond, so I continued, “Look, I made a decision I felt would give the fastest return. As for the records, at least we stopped the Emporium from getting them.”

“It might have been our last opportunity for months to grab those records.”

“Don’t you think I know that? But if I was able to get the combination from him so fast, don’t you think the Emporium would have as well once they made contact with his son?”

In two steps Ritter was next to me, moving so fast I didn’t see him put down the sword. He smelled of soap and clean clothes, so at some point he’d had a chance to wash up after his day of work and my operation. As usual, he was dressed in black and looked as dangerous as any weapon. He opened his mouth to speak but closed it again. Frustration leaked from him. What did he want?

“I used the ballistic knife,” I said. “You’ll be happy to know it works great. Shot out of the housing perfectly.”

He sank beside me, a reluctant smile curving one corner of his mouth. “So I heard. Good shot, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

A buzz in the sudden silence had him reaching for his cell phone. “It’s Ava texting from the garage, asking if you’re awake. They’re on their way up.” He handed me a shirt. “Guess you’ll be wanting this.”

“Man, and I really liked my blue one.” I seemed to have the worst luck with clothes. Maybe I’d start ordering them by the dozen. Mari had ruined my favorite pair of jeans in Mexico, and I still hadn’t found time to find a decent replacement.

Voices down the hall signaled Ava and Dimitri’s arrival. Quickly, I pulled the shirt over my head, threading my arms in the holes and letting it slide down before releasing the sheet. The older Renegades in our group didn’t worry much about nudity, but I wasn’t casual with my nakedness. Besides, with what hung unsettled between me and Ritter, the more clothes between us, the better.

Ritter hit the light switch on the wall by the bed and came to his feet. “I hope they have good news.”

I did, too. And I hoped someone had already explained to them what had happened at the Emersons’ townhouse so I wouldn’t have to. Glancing down, I saw the shirt was a dark gray with a V-neck I’d seen Ritter wear before, made of a thin, stretchy material that caressed my skin like a touch. All at once, accepting the shirt felt far more personal than if I’d kept wearing the sheet.

“Is she awa—” Dimitri broke off as he saw me. He crossed the space between us and leaned down to give me a hug. “Sorry I wasn’t around to take care of you.”

I laughed. “You mean put my pieces back together?”

“Something like that. I hope Ritter did a good job.”

Ritter paced to the other side of the room. “Wasn’t me. Keene took out the bullet.”

Oh, so not only had I disobeyed and gotten myself shot, but I’d had the gall to get better with Keene’s help. “Guess I’d better thank him,” I said lightly, turning to Ava. “Did you find anything?”

“Actually, no.” She frowned. “Everything, and I mean everything, was in place. We talked to dozens of people at the hospital, pursued leads all over Worcester and several other cities in Massachusetts, and interviewed more people over the phone. Stella hacked into computers, I spied on people’s minds, and Dimitri consulted on several cases—he even saved two trauma patients in the emergency room.”

“They were children,” Dimitri said somewhat apologetically. “All I did was give them enough strength so they would survive their surgeries.”

Ava met my gaze. “Try explaining to frantic parents why a strange man was touching their child in such an intimate manner.”

“Oh, I thought you filled in rather well with all that talk about pressure points and blood flow.” Dimitri smiled. “As always.”

Ritter and I exchanged a glance, and I was relieved to feel the tension between us dissipate. “There has to be something,” I said. “Patrick Mann got those genes somewhere. Isn’t there a chance he could be adopted like Brody Emerson?”

Ava shook her head. “The doctor who delivered him died a few years back, but we talked to two nurses who were there that day. For one woman, it was her first week on the job, and it was a big deal to her. They both verify that the Manns had a son that day. The only slightly interesting thing we found was that on the same day another woman had a baby boy and placed him for adoption, but that’s not unusual in a hospital of that size.”

“Did you talk to the birth mother?” I asked. “Is she Unbounded?”

“I wish. Then we might have some reason to think there was a switch.” Ava sat on the bed next to me, her expression grave. “After some digging around, Stella found her name, but there is no Emporium connection that we can see. Same with the listed father. We talked to the mother on the phone and she became quite upset. Said she saw her baby after he was born and that he had black hair, but he had problems breathing so they rushed him away. When she saw him again his hair was lighter and he looked different.”

“That seems promising,” I said. “Maybe there’s something to her claim.”

Dimitri pulled a chair from against the wall and straddled it, resting his arms on the back. “Babies are always wet when they’re born. That makes their hair darker. Depending how long they’ve been in the birth canal, their features are often squished and their color odd, and this mother had been in labor for over thirteen hours. It’s also likely she was trying to emotionally distance herself from the baby she wasn’t planning to raise.” He sighed. “At any rate, if she were Unbounded or had any connection to them, I’d be more suspicious, but unless she’s lying about who the father is, she can’t be Patrick Mann’s mother.”