Текст книги "Never Fade "

Автор книги: Alexandra Bracken

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

I felt Jude grab the back of my jacket again and guide us forward, flowing with the crowd. The drums up ahead rattled to life with a frantic rhythm, and for the first time, I felt a twinge of panic. I thought I heard someone calling my name behind me, but even the chanting was drowned out by the fury gripping my mind.

The crowd around me was still growing, and the farther they moved down the street, the more they seemed to work themselves into a frenzy of excitement. The same chant was singing through their blood, More, more, more, more. That was the only thing they had in common. The only thing they all wanted—more food, more freedom, more money, more.

I realized where we were headed almost immediately: back into the heart of Boston. The Massachusetts Avenue bridge was up ahead—and so were the familiar blue and red flashing lights of the police cars that were blockading it.

The protesters didn’t stop.

There were dozens of policemen in riot gear, National Guardsmen taking aim, and not a single one of the protesters stopped marching forward. I felt my feet slow and was shoved forward by the momentum of the crushing wave behind me.

The policeman in the center of all this, a grizzly old man staring the rest of us down, held up a megaphone. “This is Sergeant Bowers of the Boston Police Department. You are trespassing in violation of Mass General law, chapter two sixty-six, section one twenty, and are subject to arrest. You are unlawfully assembled. I demand you immediately and peacefully disperse. If you do not immediately and peacefully disperse, you will be arrested. This is your only warning.”

I didn’t see the first stone that was thrown. I didn’t even see the second or the third. But I heard the clatter of their impact against the clear shields of the riot police.

“Fire, then!” someone was yelling. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

The girls around me picked up the word and began screaming it. “Shoot, shoot, shoot!” was the only rival to the chant.

I took a step back, elbowing my way through the crowd’s throbbing crush. They wanted the police to open fire on them? To make a point, or—

To capture it on video. I saw the handheld devices clutched in their stiff, frozen fingers. The snowflakes clung to the cameras’ glassy eyes, following the path of every rock, snowball, and brick that was launched toward the men and women in uniforms. I ducked, holding my arms over my head as I fought my way to the back of the herd. A stray elbow nailed the back of my head, and it was enough to knock me out of my haze.

I reached behind me, grabbing Jude’s arm as I turned—but the person holding my jacket was a short Asian girl with thick black glasses, who seemed just as startled to see me as I was to see her.

“Sorry!” she shouted. “I thought you were my friend—”

Dammit. I whirled around, scanning the nearby crowd. Where is he?

The gunshot was the only thing sharp enough to cut through the chanting, the only thing strong enough to silence them. The girl and I both jumped back but were roughly shoved aside by the people still marching forward behind us. Maybe the officer or soldier thought the threat of it would break up the crowd, but they had seriously misjudged the anger powering these people.

The protesters at the head of the pack were clearly used to this kind of bullying. I glanced back over my shoulder; they were struggling against the clear shields blocking their paths, clamoring over the hoods of the police cars. The unlucky ones were yanked back and beaten into the ground by batons.

“Jude!” I called, my guilt nearly cutting me down at the knees. “Jude!”

The first can of tear gas released with a sinister hiss, but it wasn’t enough to shift the crowd. They only launched themselves toward the officers at a run. I felt someone try to grab my arm and haul me back around to face it with him, but I yanked myself free.

Bad plan, I thought, choking on the poisoned air. Bad, bad, bad plan, Ruby.

It was dumb luck I even saw him then; I had started turning the other way, only to catch a glimpse of a curly head of hair out of the very corner of my eye.

The blue EMT jacket was flapping in the wind, one sleeve torn with a ragged edge. Jude was standing on his toes, one hand on the nearest streetlight to keep himself upright, the other curled around his mouth as he shouted, “Ruby! Roo!” over and over again.

I saw now the way that fear fed anxiety and turned it into chaos. Jude’s shape went out of sight, tucked into a cloud of tear gas, hidden behind the sudden stampede of bodies trying to get away from the guns, from the smoke, from the bridge. People were screaming and the gunfire hadn’t stopped. There were new noises, too—a helicopter hovering above us, casting a light down over us. The whirring of its blades drove some of the smoke away, clearing the way for the National Guardsmen to rush toward us. For the first time, I noticed more than one black uniform in the mix.

If it had been a clear night, if my eyes weren’t streaming with tears, if I could have heard anything other than the thrumming thunder of my own heart, I would have noticed it sooner. The air seemed to vibrate against my skin, and I caught the whiff of ozone a second too late to do something about it.

“Jude, don’t!”

The line of streetlights along the stretch of road began to buzz, their orange lights bleaching to a molten white a second before they blew out together, sending a shower of glass and sparks down on the already terrified protesters.

I’m not sure anyone recognized what Jude was, not until the lights from the nearby buildings switched on after months or years of darkness.

I reached him half a second before the National Guardsman and his gun did, throwing my shoulder into his chest and driving us both to the ground. The impact blew the air from my lungs, but I scrambled up, shielding him from the butt of the soldier’s rifle. With one blow, it cracked against my skull and sent me spinning into darkness.

SEVEN

THE GROUND GRUMBLED beneath my cheek, a low clattering that underscored the dull pain in my brain. Feeling was slow to come back to my limbs. I took a deep breath, trying to swallow the taste of iron and salt from my dry tongue. Matted hair stuck to my neck in clumps. I tried to reach up and brush it away only to realize that my hands were trapped behind me, something sharp digging into the skin there.

My shoulders ached as I twisted to readjust myself on the van’s grimy floor. It was dark in the back, but every now and then a flash of light would come through the metal grating separating the front seats from the rest of the vehicle. Just enough for me to see that the uniformed driver and the man sitting in the passenger seat were dressed in black.

Damn. My heartbeat was in my ears, but I didn’t feel afraid, not until I saw Jude sitting pin-straight on one of the benches, his hands bound and his mouth gagged.

While the PSFs had bound my hands, for whatever reason—probably because I was already unconscious—they hadn’t used a gag on me, and I was grateful. Bile rose, burning the back of my throat, and the only way to make the whole thing worse would have been to choke on my own vomit. I could feel the anxiety in me building to a slow and steady beat of Not again, not again, I can’t go back there, not again.

Calm down, I ordered myself. You’re no good like this. Get a grip.

I couldn’t get my jaw to move, to say something to get Jude’s attention. It took several precious moments for him to notice that I was even awake, and when he did, his body gave a huge jerk of surprise. He tried in vain to rub the cloth out of his mouth with his shoulder. I shook my head. If we were going to do something, it would have to be quietly.

Jude’s fear was an actual, living thing. It hovered over his shoulders, black, thunderous. He began to shake violently. He tossed his head, trying to draw desperate gulps of air into his lungs.

He’s having a panic attack. The thought was a quiet, sure one, and I was surprised by how much resolve it flooded into my veins.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, hoping the guys in front wouldn’t hear me over the chatter of their radios. “Jude, look at me. You have to calm down.”

He was shaking his head, and I could read his thoughts clear as if I had actually been inside it. I can’t, not here, not now, oh God, oh God.

“I’m here with you,” I said, bringing my knees up close to my chest. It was painful, but I managed to drag my arms up around my legs, so my bound hands were in front of me.

“Take a breath through your nose, a deep one,” I said. “Let it out. You’re all right. We’ll be fine. You just need to calm down.”

And he needed to do it sooner rather than later. My mind was going in circles trying to think of where the nearest camp was—upstate New York? Wasn’t there one in Delaware, out near a whole town of abandoned farmland? Where were we now?

I held Jude’s gaze with mine. “Calm down,” I said. “I need you to focus. You have to stop the car. Do you remember Saratoga?”

If there was only one good thing I could say about the League’s methods of training, it was that the instructors were creative. They tended to have a supernatural sense of what kinds of situations we would find ourselves in, including a practice run-through of almost this exact scenario. In that simulation, Vida, Jude, and I had been on a make-believe Op in Saratoga and had been taken hostage. Vida and I had fought our way out of the van and both ended up “dead,” shot in our escape. Instructor Fiore pointed out everything we should have done, which included Jude doing something other than cowering in the back of the car.

I saw him take a deep breath and nod.

When I had traveled with Zu, the biggest hurdle she had to overcome was controlling her Yellow abilities. She had worn rubber gloves for the better part of our time together to avoid zapping machinery or the car, but we’d seen her lose control twice without them to block her charged touch. Jude, though—he’d been trained. He’d had the benefit of being around other Yellows who were willing to help him learn. Although he ran at a speed that was ten times faster than everyone around him, he kept his abilities in check. The scene out by the protest had been the first time I’d ever seen him slip, and in such a huge, horrible way.

He closed his eyes, and I rolled over onto my knees, trying to brace myself.

I felt the huge swell of electricity, felt it ripple along the hairs of my arms. It crackled in my ears, heated the air until it burned white.

It was too much for the car’s battery to take. The car didn’t even shudder as it died; it was like it had slammed into an invisible wall. I went sliding toward the front grate with the force of it. The two PSFs cried out in confusion.

But I didn’t think it through. Cars on the East Coast were rare, with the sky-high prices of gas and the cost of upkeep. I had just assumed that there would be no one else out driving, that the van would stop, and I would find a way to take the PSFs out one at a time.

I saw the flood of white headlights at the same moment the PSFs did. The force of the impact as the semi truck clipped the front of our van sent us spinning fast and wild. The airbags exploded with a scent like burning. I slammed into the bench opposite of Jude, who went tumbling to the floor.

The van went onto its right tires, and for a split second I was sure we’d start rolling and that’d be the end of the story. Instead, the van slammed back down onto all fours. Over the hiss of the smoking engine and the cusses one of the PSFs was hollering, I heard the semi truck’s tires squeal as it slid to a stop.

“—Flowers, Flowers!”

I shook my head, trying to clear my double vision as my hands felt along the ground for Jude. They didn’t stop until they met with his boney, warm ankle and I felt him twitch in response. Alive. It was too dark to see if he was in one piece.

“Flowers! Goddammit!”

If it had been anyone else beside the PSFs, I might have felt sorry for the trouble we’d caused them. One of the men in uniform—Flowers, I guess—was slumped forward in his seat, his deflating airbag smeared with blood.

“Shit!” The driver was pounding on the steering wheel. He felt around the crumpled dashboard until his fingers latched onto the radio. Jude had done his job, though. Anything electronic within fifty feet had been fried. The man kept trying to click it on, kept saying, “This is Moreno; do you read?”

The PSF must have remembered protocol, because he reached over and forced the door open, jumping out into the snow. He’d have to secure us, make sure we were all right.

I was ready for him.

My legs were shaking like a foal’s as I dove over Jude’s prone form, beating the soldier to the door. He had his gun in one hand but needed the other one free to unlatch the back door. I had my handcuffs looped over his neck and his face between my hands before he could let out a gasp of surprise.

The soldier, Moreno, was rattled enough that his brain didn’t put up much of a fight. Taking control was smooth, easy, without the slightest whimper of pain in my mind.

“Take…our handcuffs off,” I ordered. I waited for him to reach up and do it before ripping the gun out of his hand. Jude let out a blissful moan as their metal grip released.

“Turn around and start walking back toward Boston. Don’t stop until you reach the Charles. Understand?” My finger curled around the trigger of the gun.

“Walk back toward Boston,” he repeated. “Don’t stop until you hit the Charles.”

I felt Jude at my back, swaying, but kept the black handgun trained on the PSF’s head as he walked away, disappearing into the swirling clouds of snow, deep into the night. My arms began to shake, both from the frigid cold and the stress of keeping myself upright.

The truck driver took his time, but he appeared at the driver’s side window, pounding against it. “Is everyone all right? I’ve called for help!”

I signaled for Jude to stay back. The PSF was still visible as he made his way down the highway despite his dark uniform and the pitch-black road. The truck driver spotted him immediately. I counted off his steps as he ran after him, calling, “Hey! Where you going? Hey!”

At the sight of him, Jude slipped the cuffs from his shaking hands, and they clattered as they hit the floor. When the truck driver spun on his heel, I was already waiting for him, gun up, hands steady.

The truck driver’s face went stark white under his beard. For a moment, we did nothing but stare at each other, the snow collecting in his wiry hairs. His jacket was a vivid red plaid and matched the knit cap he had pulled down low over his ears. Slowly, he raised his hands in the air.

“Kids,” he began, his voice shaking, “oh my God—are you guys—”

Jude’s hand tightened around my shoulder. “Roo…” he began uncertainly.

“Get lost,” I said, nodding toward the gun in my hands.

“But…the nearest town is miles away.” I saw the driver relax, his hands dropping back down to his sides now that the shock had worn off. Clearly he thought I wasn’t capable or willing to shoot him if it came down to it. I didn’t know whether to be furious or grateful about it. “Where are you going to go? Do you need a ride? I don’t have much food, but…but it’ll be warm, and—”

Maybe the driver thought he was being kind. Jude obviously thought so. I barely caught the back of his jacket to keep him from jumping out of the van and throwing his arms around the man in weepy gratitude.

Or maybe the driver just wanted the $10,000 per head he’d get for turning us over.

“I need you to get lost,” I said, switching off the gun’s safety. “Go.”

I could tell that he wanted to say something else, but the words caught and stuck in his throat. The driver shook his head once, twice, and gave me a weak nod. Jude let out a strangled protest, lifting a hand in his direction, like he could compel him to stop. The driver was slow to turn and slower to walk away.

“What did you do that for?” Jude cried. “He was just trying to help!”

The thin layer of ice on the road cracked as I jumped down, snapping me back to full alertness. I didn’t have time for explanations, not when the need to run was singing through my veins. The night was long and the piles of snow in the heavy woods around us unmarred. We would have to move fast and cover our tracks.

“We help ourselves,” I said, and led him into the dark.

The distant specks of headlights down the highway did nothing to ease up on the chill that had dug its fingers into my chest as we ran. I kept hoping to come across a car we could use, but every single one that had been abandoned on this stretch of road had a dead battery or no gas. Five minutes of charging through the knee-deep snow of the nearby woods, following the edge of what I assumed was the Massachusetts turnpike, finally turned up an exit sign for Newton, Massachusetts, and another one telling me it was forty-five miles to Providence, Rhode Island.

This was what I knew about the state of Rhode Island: it was south of Massachusetts. Therefore, we were going to Providence. And then I was going to look for a sign for Hartford, the only city I knew in Connecticut, and then one for New Jersey. And that was how my fourth grade education was going to get me down the eastern seaboard, at least until I found myself a goddamn map and a goddamn car.

“Wait…” Jude sputtered, gasping for breath. “Wait, wait, wait…”

“We need to move faster,” I warned. I’d been dragging him along behind me, but I’d carry him if I had to.

“Hey!” He let his body go limp, dropping to his knees. I jerked back with the suddenness of it, almost losing my balance.

“Come on!” I snapped. “Get up!”

“No!” he cried. “Not until you tell me where the heck we’re going! Barton’s probably been searching for us all night!”

The highway was lined on either side by hills and pockets of dense trees, but we were still far too exposed. Every time a passing freight truck bathed us in white headlights, I had to steel myself all over again.

I took a deep breath.

“Do you have your panic button?” I asked. “Jude—look at me. Do you still have it?”

“Why?” he asked, patting around his pants pockets. “I think so. But—”

“Toss it.”

His thick brows were drawn together, the tip of his long nose red and running with cold. He used his free arm to swipe it against his coat. “Ruby, what’s going on? Please, just talk to me!”

“Toss it,” I said. “We aren’t going back to LA. At least not yet.”

“What?” Jude sounded small, far away. “Are you serious? We’re…ditching?”

“We are going back—eventually,” I said, “but we have another, special Op first. We need to keep going before someone comes looking for us.”

“Who assigned it?” Jude demanded. “Cate?”

“Agent Stewart.”

Jude didn’t look convinced, but I had him on his feet now.

“I have to recover information from one of his sources,” I explained, trying to make it sound as mysterious and dangerous as I could. And it worked. The nervous look he’d been wearing changed to one of interest. And a small, fizzing excitement.

“It’s vital to the mission of the League, but I couldn’t let Barton know the real reason for leaving. I had to figure out a way to make sure that Rob was gone by the time we get back.”

“You should have told me!” Jude said. “From the beginning—I could have handled it.”

“It’s classified. A need-to-know Op,” I said, adding, “a dangerous one.”

“Then why the heck are you taking me?” he asked.

“Because if you go back now, they’ll kill you just like they killed Blake.”

I felt ashamed—the feeling snuck up on me, gripping me by the throat. I’d taken him without giving him any kind of choice, and then simplified the truth to make this reality go down that much easier. Hadn’t I hated Cate for doing the exact same things to me? Had she felt as desperate to get me to agree as I did with Jude now?

Jude slowed again, looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “I was right,” he whispered. “That is why he picked me. I was right.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “You were.”

Jude nodded, working his jaw back and forth, trying to get the words out. Finally, he reached into his EMT jacket and pulled out the familiar black button, tossing it aside.

“It was dead anyway,” he muttered, pulling back out of my grip. “I fried that car and everything in it, remember?”

Right. Of course. The trackers in his clothes would be dead, too.

“All right,” he said, his voice sounding stronger. This was the Jude I had been counting on—the one who thought all Ops would be as cool as the video games he played with Blake and Nico.

I reached over and brushed the snow powder from his hair and shoulders. “You have to follow what I say exactly, understand? We’re going completely off the grid, and no one can know where we are. Not Cate, not Vida, not even Nico. If they find us and bring us in, we ruin every shot we have at this Op—at making sure the League is a safe place.”

As quickly and simply as I could, I laid the Op out for him. Everything, from where we were headed first to what Rob and the others had been planning. I gave him a sliver of the truth: that I had been traveling with Liam for a while, but we’d split up before Cate brought me in and I’d lost track of him.

Would it really be so awful to just tell him the whole truth? I was surprised there was a part of me that was even tempted to talk about those last few precious moments in the safe house. It just…didn’t make sense to complicate everything by letting him into that moment of good-bye. I was the only one I wanted living in it, thinking about it, dreaming of it. And, to be honest, I needed him to trust me absolutely now, more than he ever had, if this was going to work. If I told him what I had done to Liam, every look Jude would give me from that moment on would be tainted by the fear I could do it to him, too. If he could even bring himself to look at me at all.

This was the kid who had sat with me for every meal, when half of the League was too afraid to look me in the eye. He didn’t flinch when I touched him; he waited for me to get back from Ops to make sure I was safe. As annoying as it had seemed to me then, I had never thought about what it would be like to lose it. Him.

Jude listened to it all, strangely calm for him. He didn’t react at all when I told him what was on the flash drive Liam was carrying. At first I thought he had stopped paying attention, but at the end of it all, he nodded and simply said, “Okay.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I was fully aware of how stupid that question was. What wasn’t wrong? “Are you feeling okay? Nothing bumped, bent, or broken, right?”

“Oh, uh, no, I’m fine, all in one piece, at least.” He knocked on the top of his head. “It’s just I was wondering…”

“About?” I prompted.

“About before. Before-before, I mean.” He turned to look at me. “Did you have to deal with the PSFs a lot at your camp? It’s just—you were so calm. Don’t get me wrong, when you were all, Get lost! it was pretty epic, but you didn’t seem, you know, scared.”

My brows rose. “You think I wasn’t scared?”

“I wasn’t scared, either!” Jude added quickly. “It just made me wonder about before you came to HQ.…”

“Are you trying to ask me what I was doing before Cate brought me in?”

“Well, yeah!” Jude said. “We all wondered—there were rumors, but they seemed really hard to believe.”

“Really.”

“Really.” Seeing that his line of questioning was a one-way road into Silenceville, USA, he changed the subject as awkwardly as he could manage.

“Do you really think the scientists discovered what caused it?” Jude asked. “Idiopathic Ado-blah-blah-blah?”

“Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration,” I supplied. Otherwise known as the reason most of us died and the rest of us turned into freaks. How could he ever forget what those letters stood for?

“Right, whatever,” Jude said. “Oh man, can you imagine what the League could do with that?”

I could hear the hope underlying his voice and felt my heart break, just that little bit. How could I tell him it would be a miracle if we actually found Liam, let alone found him still in possession of the flash drive?

“I think about it a lot,” he said, “don’t you? There’s a lot I don’t understand, and Cate and the others don’t really give me anything to work with, but it’s sort of cool to think our brains somehow mutated. I mean, it would be slightly cooler to know how and why that happened, but still cool.”

I used to think about it, when I was at Thurmond and there was very little else to focus on outside of my own misery. I spent countless days staring up at the bottom of Sam’s bunk, wondering how and why any of this had happened to us. Why some of us were Green and others Orange and others dead. But almost from the exact moment Cate got me out, I forced myself not to dwell on it. There were more important things to focus on—like surviving. Not being recaptured. Liam, and Chubs, and Zu.

“I know it’s dumb, but I’ve been trying to puzzle it all out. Sometimes I really do think it’s a virus, and then other times…I mean, how could it be a virus or disease if it barely spread outside of the US?” Jude was saying. “What was different about us from those other kids, the ones who died?”

All fair points. All distracting points. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We have to find Cole’s brother first.”

Jude nodded. “Man, that’s going to be so…weird. Meeting him, I mean. I remember when he ditched. No one even noticed he was gone until they did the headcount at the end of the simulation.”

I glanced over. “You knew Liam?”

Jude glanced up, his amber eyes widening slightly. “Oh, no, not, like, personally. Knew of him. He was training at Georgia HQ, and Vida and me have always been in LA. Liam’s the reason they moved all of the Psi training to California, though. Less chance for people to go missing when everyone is underground, I guess.”

Right. Of course. Liam wouldn’t have been in California. I was surprised at how much better the thought made me feel, knowing that he hadn’t been forced to live in that dank hole in the ground.

“Is Liam one of the people you search for on the PSF network every week?” Jude asked. “Nico mentioned it once. Are we going to look for them, too?”

I felt my patience snap like the icy layer over the snow we were crunching through. I don’t think it ever stood a chance against tonight.

“Because it’s none of your business!” I hissed. “You wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t waded into such deep shit!”

“I know, okay? I know!” Jude said, throwing his hands up. “You don’t like us, you don’t like the League, you don’t want to be Leader, you don’t want to talk about yourself or Cate or training or your favorite food or your family and friends. Fine. Fine! Wait—what are you doing?”

I thought I had imagined them as we were walking; they’d been little more than distant, unidentifiable shapes. But as I guided us down the crest of the next hill, the woods suddenly pulled back, revealing a small, cramped neighborhood street.

I heard Jude slide to a stop at the edge of the icy street when he saw that these houses had lights on. That there were cars in the driveways and people moving behind the window curtains, ready to mark another Wednesday as finished.

A man with a beat-up truck was trying to plow the street, struggling through the thick blanket of snow. I nudged Jude back behind me again, eyes on the house directly across the street, an idea worming its way up through my haze of exhaustion. There was a small silver sedan parked in the driveway, but, more importantly, I had seen a blurry shape through the little window of the house’s front door.

Sure enough, as soon as the plow passed, a woman stepped out and turned to lock the door behind her. Her hair was an ashy blond, shot through with strands of silver. It peeked out between the emerald knit cap and black coat she was wearing. I saw a flash of her dress as she buttoned her coat up over it. The cut and design made it look like something a waitress in a diner would wear.

She swung her keys around her fingers as she walked, glancing up at the night sky and the snow falling in soft breaths around her. I waited for the beep beep of the doors unlocking before I moved.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing Jude’s arm.

The woman heard us coming. Her back went rigid with panic when she saw my face reflected behind hers in the car’s dark window. I saw fear chase confusion in her eyes and took the opportunity to slip one of my cold hands up the sleeve of her coat to her warm, bare flesh. She smelled like pineapples and sunshine, and her mind was just as bright. It was a quick touch; it had to be—so fast I didn’t even experience the usual flood of memories. I wasn’t even sure I had her until she blinked slowly at me, her eyes going glassy.

“Get in the car,” I said to Jude, looking over my shoulder to where he stood, mouth agape. “We have a driver.”

The benefits of coercing someone to drive us were twofold: she couldn’t report the car stolen and phone in the plates, and, even better, she could pay tolls and get us waved through security stations set up at town borders by the National Guard or police. After taking two seconds to really think it through, I compelled her to take us to whatever was the nearest transportation hub. In a perfect world, Amtrak and all of its many lines would still have been around, but the economic crash did such a bang-up job exposing its many flaws, it lasted only a year before collapsing. Now the government ran two electric trains up and down to the major cities on the eastern seaboard each day, mostly to shuttle National Guardsmen, PSFs, and senators around. The Elite Express, they called it, and tickets were priced to match its name.

Train jumping would be a lot riskier than driving a car, but I couldn’t shake the nightmarish image of us having to stop and siphon gas every ten miles. It would eat away every valuable hour we needed. We could luck out and get a nearly empty train, at least for a few cities. If it looked too dangerous, or the train started to feel too crowded with unwanted eyes, we could always bail early. I had a way of making us disappear.