In Time (7 page)

I don’t see any kids, but maybe they have us bring them in through the back?

“How many times do we have to tell you to check your damn
applications
?” a man shouts from the far end of the hall. The man sitting next to him stands and slams his hands down on the desk, prompting the PSF next to him to stir. “We already searched the plate numbers in the system! He’s not registered—yet!”

The hall carries exactly two words from the man sitting next to him. “Stolen” and “score.” And even before they start to turn to go, I know I’m standing less than a hundred feet away from the beards.

Holy shit.

I back through the door, but I have no idea what excuses I’m mumbling to the soldier. I burst back out into the parking lot at a full run.

Because this isn’t suspicious at all! Good job, Gabe!

Shit, shit,
shitshitshit—
even if I were to wait for them to leave, the officers in this station will recognize the plate number when I give it to them on my application. Not to mention they probably have me on camera acting like a sketchball at the door.

Phoenix.
I can do Phoenix. I’ll change my clothes, wear a hat and sunglasses, swap out my license plate with one from one of the abandoned cars I find along the I-17. It’s less than a two-hour drive. If the gas situation starts to get touchy, well, I’ll figure it out.

I feel better now that I have a plan. It’s probably what I should have done in the first place, but it’s okay. Lesson learned.

The kid is still sitting on the floor when I jump back into the driver’s seat. There’s a rumpled piece of notebook paper smoothed out over her knees that she immediately tries to stuff back into her jean pocket. From my vantage point above her, though, I can read at least the first half of it:
We love you. If you need help, look for

Look for who?

“Well, Dorothy,” I say as I turn the key in the ignition. My mind scrambles to come up with some excuse that won’t make me look pathetic. “They’re not accepting freaks at this location. Looks like you’ve got two more hours of freedom.”

I swear, she can see right through the lie and she looks…unimpressed, to say the least. I put the car in reverse and she climbs up into the passenger seat, dropping the handcuffs into the drink holder between us.

Okay. Seriously. What the hell?

The girl sighs, but deigns to show me her trick. With the cuffs in one hand, she slides what looks like a warped bobby pin out of her pocket. I glance between her and the highway as she wiggles the bent end of the pin in a small hole on the handcuffs I’ve never noticed before. The metal arm springs open.

“Kid, you have the worst sense of self-preservation I’ve ever seen,” I tell her, because now I know not to use the handcuffs on her. I’ll stick to zip ties. She’s trying to teach me how to do my job, and while a tiny part of me is impressed she knows how to do this, a bigger part of me wants to stretch out across the highway and wait for someone to just run me over. All my anger from the morning has drained me to the point where I can only feel humiliated and tired about all this.

“I didn’t rescue you,” I remind her, but she reaches over—gloves and zip tie and all—and turns the radio on. I listen to hip-hop or I listen to silence, so naturally she finds the one station blasting out Fleetwood Mac and sits back.

“I don’t think so,” I said, switching it off.

She reaches over and turns it back on, this time cranking the volume up just as the song changes to something that sounds like it could be Led Zeppelin. And the look she gives me as I start to turn the dial again probably should have caused me to spontaneously combust.

“Okay, okay. Geez.” I’m going to think of it like her last meal before death row. She gets this. Only this.

Thirty miles later, the truck’s back right tire blows out just outside Black Canyon City. Who fixes it?

Guess.

Guess.

I’m not an idiot, I know I’m not. I’ve watched my dad change out his tire for a spare before, but I never had the experience of doing it myself. I barely get the car onto the shoulder of the highway without losing my shit. Meanwhile, Dorothy hops out of the car, her hands bound, and goes around to the back, looking for a spare I know old Hutch is too cheap to have supplied. The look I get when I meet her around back can be summed up in one word:
Seriously?

Traffic is light enough on the I-17 today that we can walk along the outer edge of the nearby string of abandoned cars without fear of being spotted.

Jesus
.
Is this what it feels like for these freaks—these kids? Constantly having to look over their shoulders, jumping whenever a car buzzes by, because in those two seconds, one wrong glance means the jig is up? I only have to be worried about another skip tracer spotting us and swiping my score; she has to be worried about everyone from skip tracers to grannies with access to phones.

We stop next to an SUV, and she crouches down, inspecting the tire. Her eyebrows draw together, and her forehead wrinkles, like she’s trying to mentally measure if this tire is the same dimensions as the others.

Dorothy holds her hands out to me, and I stare at them, confused. She nods toward them, giving them a small jerk, and I realize what she wants.

“You gonna run?”

She rolls her eyes.

“Nice. Real nice.”

I only cut the zip tie, expecting her to take the gloves off herself. Instead, she carefully adjusts them so they align with the right fingers. They’re laughably oversized on her, reaching up past her elbows—almost like the way a superhero would wear them.

I crouch down next to her as she uses the small tool kit and lift to remove the hubcap, then each nut holding the tire in place. She works quickly, methodically, but slow enough for me to keep track of what she’s doing.

“Who taught you how to do this?” I have no idea why the words escape. Maybe it’s because it’s such a nice day out; the sun is warm, not sweltering, and there’s a nice, cool breeze stroking down the sides of the nearby mountains and cutting across the valley. We ditched the evergreens a while back and have hit the full-fledged desert, but I swear the air still has that fresh flowery smell. This is the kind of landscape everyone sees when they think of Arizona. The part I grew up in might as well be Colorado in comparison.

“Your dad?” I ask. She shakes her head. “Brother? Yeah, your brother?”

Dorothy takes a break from what she’s doing and holds up two fingers. I’m surprised I know exactly what she’s trying to say. “Two brothers? Where the hell are they?”

Wrong thing to ask. A shadow passes over her face, and I get a stiff shoulder turned toward me in response.

“Was that other Asian chick your sister? The one who ran?” I ask, waiting for her answer. “No? Really? But you have one?”

Okay, two brothers and a sister. Interesting. If they aren’t with her, they must be too old to be affected by the Psi virus, in camps, or dead. Somehow, judging by the way her face lights up when she “talks” about them, I don’t think the latter is the case.

But where the hell are they? If I had a little sister, I’d be taking care of her. I would have clawed my nails down to broken stubs trying to keep her safe, not let her go running with a group of other kids. Where were they even going? Just bouncing around the country, from one place to another?

I think about the way she cried in the bathroom when she thought I couldn’t hear her, and I hate the way my heart seems to lurch down to the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t have asked her those questions, no matter how curious I was. Because you take these freaks and you stop thinking about what they can do and instead focus on the people in their lives, where they come from, what games they liked playing with their friends, and you find yourself on unsteady ground all of a sudden. You start to let all those things seep in, and suddenly they’re kids again with bony skinned knees, grass-stained clothes, and hands always in something they shouldn’t be. They’re just…little kids.

And they have even fewer choices than I do.

Dorothy shoos me away, motioning with her hands that I should take the SUV’s license plate and get on with switching it out with mine. I don’t know how she knows I’m supposed to do this, other than from experience. Maybe that’s how those kids went undetected: any time they thought they’d been spotted, they’d switch cars, and when they couldn’t, they’d switch plates.

Smart. How many other tricks does she know?

Not only does that tire fit, it inspires us to replace the other three. Might as well—they were looking worn and low on air. I doubt Hutch ever thought to get them rotated or had the funds to buy new tires every few years like I know you’re supposed to. Stuff like that becomes a luxury rather than a necessity when you get down to the bare bones of life.

It’s not until later, when we’re sitting a few blocks from the diner I’ve just bought us sandwiches from, with the windows rolled down and the Rolling Stones screaming out of the stereo, that I remember I never put a new zip tie around her wrists. I remember she took the gloves off to eat and never put them back on.

I remember, and I don’t really care.

“What’s your name, Dorothy?” I ask. “Your real one?”

She dips her finger into the ketchup that’s dripped onto the paper her sandwich was wrapped in and writes, in even, delicate strokes,
ZU
.

“Zu?” I say, testing it out. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

She reaches over and punches me in the arm—
hard
. I manage to wince only a little, but it’s an all-out inner war not to reach up and rub the throbbing muscle. Meanwhile, she’s looking at me, motioning like I need to exchange my name for hers.

But man, I don’t know. I don’t know what the point is, or what I’m even doing. It’s starting to feel hard again, all of it. It was nice to forget, for ten whole minutes, the reason we are sitting here together in the first place. The kinds of thoughts my brain starts turning over feel dangerous. Like: How can they be so bad? How can anyone not human like sandwiches and Mick Jagger and know how to change a tire? I start to wonder if maybe the things we’re so afraid they’ll do to us are the things they have to do to survive the tidal wave of hatred and fear we send coasting toward them.

“Sorry,” I say, just because I know it will annoy her, “you’re still Dorothy.”

I feel like I’ve been swept up and dropped on my head in a world that looks like mine but is slightly different. Brighter, more vibrant—or at least missing some of the dust and grime that’s collected over our lives after years of neglect. I can’t tell which direction is right or wrong anymore, but I know I want to stay.

FIVE

O
UR
next stop is a lonely little gas station in Deer Valley, just south of Anthem and Cave Creek. I doubt Zu is familiar enough with Arizona to know how close we are to Scottsdale, and that from there, it’s spitting distance to Phoenix. But with no warning other than a sharp intake of breath, she seizes the steering wheel and nearly gets us into an accident as she jerks it toward the exit.

“Jesus—! What the hell?”

One hand points to the gas light and the other points to the gas station next to the off-ramp.

“With what money, Dorothy?” I ask. “I barely have enough for a gallon, since I still haven’t been able to turn your ass in.”

Trust me.
I narrow my eyes, but she meets my gaze head-on.
Trust me.

Unsurprisingly, we’re the only ones here. I navigate the truck around, picking the pump farthest from the small convenience store and the worker peering out his window at us. The gas tank is on the driver’s side, which means that Zu, when she follows me out, jumping down from the door, is blocked by the body of the truck.

“Now what’s your plan?”

She mimes putting a credit card into the slot, but I could have told her before that the pumps don’t take card payments anymore. You have to pay up front in cash.

Zu doesn’t look fazed. Instead, she jerks a thumb back toward the store and the man still watching me and then does that jibber-jabber motion with her hands, pressing her four fingers against her thumb repeatedly.

Distract him!

I shake my head, stuffing my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, but I do like she asks. Because there’s no chance
that
could go horribly wrong.

It’s already about thirty degrees warmer than it was in northern Arizona. I come down here so rarely that the hundred-degree heat always feels like opening an oven door and leaning in. The station attendant at least has the fans cranked up behind him, even if the owner is too cheap to shell out for real AC.

The bells above the door jangle. I glance back over my shoulder, surprised to see the formerly blank-screened pump suddenly light up with numbers. I don’t know what the attendant can tell from watching his register’s screen, and I don’t know what the hell the girl is doing, but a quick plan comes together in my head. It’s as dumb as it is simple.

I feign a big trip, crashing headlong into the shelves of candy. I thrash my arms out, knocking most of it to the ground in mess of epic proportions. The attendant must think I’m having some kind of a seizure, because all of a sudden, he’s at my side where I’m sprawled out on the floor, checking my pulse, shoving a thick candy bar between my teeth, like he’s afraid I’m going to bite my tongue off.