Don't Turn Around (28 page)

Noa had stumbled across news of it on a forum. She researched /ALLIANCE/ further, and the work they were doing struck a chord with her. She liked the idea of helping people and animals that couldn’t protect themselves. The timing had been kind of perfect, too. It was about a month after she’d moved into her own place, after finally circumnavigating the system. What she hadn’t anticipated was that after years of being forced into tight living quarters with other people, being alone could get lonely. Plus she finally had her own computer, and twenty-four-hour access to the internet.

When she’d read about what /ALLIANCE/ had accomplished, it occurred to Noa that up until then, she’d always been struggling to keep her own head above water. And now that she was floating, she could use her newfound spare time to help others like her.

Which is kind of what she was doing now.

The silence in the car felt awkward. Peter was probably struggling to figure out the right thing to say. To change the subject, she said, “You know, I did steal a car once.”

“No way.” He mugged an overly shocked face.

“Yeah. I was fourteen.”

He flashed that grin. “So they do teach hot-wiring in foster care.”

“I boosted the keys from a foster mom,” Noa confessed. “Ended up crashing it, though. I didn’t really know how to drive.”

“They usually recommend learning before you get behind the wheel,” Peter noted wryly. “Why’d you take it?”

“I had somewhere to go.”

“Obviously,” Peter said. “So are you going to tell me where? Because trust me, you don’t want me to start guessing.”

She didn’t answer.

“All right, you asked for it,” he said. “Disney World. No, wait—you were fourteen. A concert? Was Miley Cyrus playing the Garden?”

“I wanted to visit my parents’ graves,” Noa said. “No one would take me, so I decided to try and go by myself.”

“Oh, man. Sorry.” He winced. “Now I feel like a jerk.”

“It’s okay,” Noa said, rubbing her wrist. “You didn’t know.” She’d barely gotten five miles before accidentally hitting the accelerator instead of the brakes. She’d badly dented the car’s front grill and taken out a mailbox. The end result was her longest stint in juvie, six months.

“Still. I’m really sorry.” Peter shifted his gaze from the road long enough to make eye contact. He had nice eyes, large and brown with long eyelashes for a boy. It was funny that she hadn’t noticed that before.

Traffic was easing as they approached the turnoff to 24 South. “Probably about another hour,” he said. “You want to try to sleep? You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” Noa said, but he was right; her eyes ached.

“We should call Cody,” he said. “Tell him we made a stop before going back to his place so he doesn’t worry.”

“I’ll do it,” Noa said. “I’ve got to send an email, anyway.”

“Yeah? To who?”

Noa wrestled with what to tell him. She felt obligated to let A6M0 know about what was going on, just in case something happened to them. But Peter still didn’t know he existed, and she wasn’t sure how he would handle that knowledge now. She finally said weakly, “It’s part of the plan.”

“Glad someone has a plan,” Peter said. “So what are you thinking? Go in guns blazing?”

“We don’t have guns.”

“Right, that’s a problem. We might not even be able to get in,” he said soberly.

“We’ll find a way in,” she said. “And after that, you’ll just have to trust me.”

“Hey! Get up!”

“What?” Amanda tried to focus. Her eyes felt glued shut.

“You can’t crash here. Gotta keep moving.”

Slowly, she managed to force her eyes open. A kid was facing her. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Safety pins ran in a jagged line down both ears and there was a stud stuck in his chin. He was dressed all in black and carried a skateboard. He looked filthy, but that might just be from the goth makeup.

He looked both ways, then tapped her foot again. “Seriously. That’s how they take you.”

“How who takes … what?” Her head felt funny, tongue thick. It was hard to speak. Amanda eased up to sitting. She was on a bench in the middle of a park. A dead leaf skittered past behind the kid, who was gazing down at her with something approaching concern.

“Shake it off,” he said. “You need to ride the high out, do it somewhere safer.”

He dropped the skateboard to the ground and kicked the back so the nose jabbed up, then hopped on and rolled away. She watched until he turned the corner where the path swooped around a bush.

Amanda pulled her jacket tightly around her. There were people walking through the park, but no one looked at her; in fact, everyone who passed was making an effort to avoid eye contact.

She rubbed her forehead with one hand. What the hell had happened? The last thing she remembered was being in the Campus Center with Drew. Walking home in the dark, the stars overhead …

But that didn’t make sense; there were still fading fingers of pink traced along the sky above the trees. Had she been here all day?

Her teeth started chattering. What the hell was going on?

Amanda tried to get to her feet, but was too wobbly. Which was completely bizarre. She didn’t drink or do drugs. Would never even consider it, after seeing what addiction had done to her brother. Had she been drugged by someone? Had Drew done this to her?

He couldn’t have,
Amanda thought. Yet no matter how hard she strained to remember, the last thing she could recall was walking across the quad toward her dorm.

Should she go to the cops? What would she tell them? Amanda didn’t even know if anything had happened to her. All her clothes were on. Her backpack was beside her on the bench. She unzipped it and checked: Her wallet was still inside, with the forty dollars she’d withdrawn from the campus ATM. Maybe she’d had some sort of weird seizure; she’d heard of that happening.

Amanda experienced a sudden and overpowering urge to start crying, but choked it back and stiffened her jaw. There had to be a good explanation. She’d get back to her dorm room, then figure it out.

She got up gingerly, testing her balance. Carefully lifted her backpack and slung it over one shoulder. Turned around to get her bearings.

As soon as she saw what was behind her, she froze. Amanda knew exactly where she was. Knew this park, this strip of sidewalk, this park bench.

It was the same one where her brother, Marcus, had been found dead five years ago.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“W
e’re almost there.” Peter glanced over. Despite her protests, Noa had nodded off soon after they crossed the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border. It was amazing how different she looked when she was asleep. He kept sneaking peeks at her: the sharp angles of her face, that choppy jet-black hair. She was unbelievably gorgeous when she wasn’t glowering.

Noa blinked and yawned, then stretched her arms up above her head. “I can’t believe I fell asleep,” she muttered.

She sounded a little worried about it. Peter couldn’t blame her; it was weird and unnerving how quickly she’d lost consciousness. Like driving with a corpse in the passenger seat. A few times, he’d been tempted to reach over and check for a pulse.

Meanwhile, every one of Peter’s nerve endings was tingling. Stealing the car, then driving south to confront God knew what … he was climbing out of his skin. His throat was dry, and he definitely needed to find a bathroom soon; his insides were churning uncomfortably.

Noa had a plan, he reminded himself. Peter hoped it was a good one, because the closer they got, the more he realized how completely nuts this all was. Three days ago, his biggest concern had been fighting boredom on a Saturday night. Now he was a car thief on the verge of breaking into a top-secret research facility that was probably filled with highly trained armed adversaries. He couldn’t go home, and he was partnered with a girl he barely knew. Could he really trust Noa to watch his back in there? He wasn’t even sure she liked him.

Noa rubbed her eyes blearily and yawned, then sat up in the seat. They were approaching a desolate peninsula at the tip of southeastern Rhode Island. According to what he’d seen on the internet, it was a naval base that had been abandoned during budget cuts in the midseventies. This part of the state was heavily forested. Towering trees draped over the road; their sagging branches blotted out the sky.

They hadn’t passed another car for miles. From the turnoff a mile back, it rapidly became apparent that there was one road in, one road out, which made him anxious.

“Pull in there,” Noa said, pointing.

Obediently, Peter turned left down a narrow lane. It had once been paved, but years of harsh winters had caused the concrete to buck and heave until it was more a collection of potholes than a road. The car kicked into all-wheel drive as it grated against the larger chunks jutting up from the soil.

A few hundred yards in, the road became impassable. He slowed, then drew to a stop and turned off the lights.

“This is good,” Noa said approvingly.

“Yeah?” Peter couldn’t hide the shakiness in his voice. Noa still seemed preternaturally calm, as if they were on their way to grab a burger. The farther they’d driven from Boston, the more the insanity of this had gripped him. More than once he’d been tempted to turn the car around.

But he’d kept right on driving. And now they were here.

“The cops might not come,” Noa said, apparently guessing his thoughts. “They’d need a warrant, anyway, and there’s not enough for them to get one. Even if they believe us, which is unlikely, by the time they show up, all the evidence might be gone.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “You’re probably right.” Still, he was harboring serious second thoughts. “So what’s this genius plan you’ve got?”

“You bricked their main server, right?” Noa asked.

Peter nodded.

“So I’m guessing they’re probably stalled out for a few days until everything is up and running again. They’ll have security here, but probably not on the same level as the place where I … well, you know.”

That seemed like wishful thinking to Peter. Uncertainly he said, “Okay …”

“We’ll scope out the security system and sneak in. Make sure that they’re doing experiments here. Then we get the cops to come before they can hide anything.”

“How are we going to get the cops here?” he asked, puzzled. “Like you said, they’d need a search warrant.”

“Not under certain special circumstances,” Noa said.

“Circumstances like what?” Peter said, brow furrowing. “I don’t get it.”

“Just trust me,” she said impatiently. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Amanda hung her head forward, letting scalding hot water course down her back. Usually she was strict about showers: five minutes in and out so as not to waste a drop of water. She found it appalling when people left the tap running while they brushed their teeth—didn’t anyone realize that sometime soon the potable water would run out?

Today, though, she allowed herself an extra five minutes. She needed it. Everything ached after spending the night on a park bench. At least Amanda assumed that was where she’d spent the night. She’d been experiencing odd flashbacks of bright lights, hands on her. She filed them away as bad dreams. She’d already booked an appointment at the campus medical clinic for tomorrow morning after class. If they suspected anything was seriously wrong, they’d send her to Boston Medical. And if that happened, she’d decided, then and only then would she tell her parents. After Marcus ran away, they’d become overprotective to the point of nearly smothering her. The last thing Amanda wanted was to give them something else to worry about.

Besides, she was hoping it would turn out to be nothing, a minor blip. After getting back to her dorm room, she’d done some research online. It turned out that seizures were actually startlingly common among teenagers. A doctor could test whether or not that was what had happened to her. And if so, it was treatable, which was a relief.

Plus, amnesia was almost always a factor. People lost track of the minutes and sometimes hours leading up to the seizure. So it was normal that she couldn’t recall anything after crossing the quad the night before.

How she’d ended up clear across town on a park bench—that park bench in particular—was another issue. But obviously it was buried in her psyche. And really, who else would have known about it? Somehow, in a confused state, she must have wandered there on her own.

Amanda turned off the shower and toweled dry. The more research she’d done, the calmer she’d become. Now she felt silly for even considering calling the cops. And she was really glad she hadn’t gone home, which had been her first instinct. She’d like to talk to Peter about it, actually—he’d always been good at cheering her up. He’d probably joke about how she’d lost her mind without him, or say something equally stupid that would make her laugh.

Oddly, it hadn’t occurred to her to call Drew. Amanda knew it wasn’t fair, but in her mind he was inextricably linked with what had happened to her, even though the two things were obviously completely unrelated. It was silly, she told herself. Anyway, tomorrow she’d know more. Until then she planned on laying low.

She leaned over the sink as she brushed her teeth, the towel wrapped around her.

Another girl from her hall padded in wearing fuzzy slippers and a pair of Victoria’s Secret flannel pajamas. She nodded to Amanda; they knew each other by sight, but weren’t really friendly. The girl was a future sorority sister, the type who’d spend half an hour blow-drying her hair before class. Amanda had no patience for that sort of thing.

The girl went into a bathroom stall. A flush, then she came over to wash her hands in the next sink.

“Who’s Peter?” she asked as Amanda bent over to rinse out her mouth.

“What?” Amanda was startled. Whenever Peter stayed over they hung out in her room, and he used the guys’ bathroom on the floor downstairs. He’d had very little contact with her hallmates.

There was a hint of mockery in the girl’s voice as she said, “Peter. Is he your boyfriend?”

“Why?” Amanda said sharply, not liking her tone.