Ana haunted Jason in his dreams. Her pitiful and accusatory gaze pleaded with him to come to her, demanded to know why he wasn't there already. She held her hands out to him, crying. When he reached out to touch her, though, she'd dissolve, appearing somewhere ahead.

He ran all night and never caught her.

Jason snapped awake, exhausted and ill-at-ease. His arm throbbed, a nasty taste lingered in his mouth, and hunger clawed at his stomach. He groaned as he pushed himself into a sitting position.

Rachel glanced over, shoulders hunched. "About time."

He scowled. "Were you planning on going somewhere soon? As far as I can tell, we're stuck on a train." The countryside flashed by through the slit of open door.

"Right now, sure. But it's gotta stop at some point. I was beginning to think you'd sleep through it." She crossed her arms and looked away.

"So what, I'm in trouble for..." His good hand rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to push back the headache forming there. "...not being conscious? Why not wake me up?"

"What am I?" she muttered. "Your babysitter?"

"You act enough like it," he scoffed. His arm throbbed harder and harder the longer he sat up, like all the blood was repositioning inside him. He leaned back against the wall, cradling it.

Rachel wouldn't look at him, crawling away to peek out the door. His jaw clenched. The longer he stayed around this girl, the less he knew what to think of her. She was about as constant as a light switch: nearly-sweet to caustic, deathly serious to flippant, safety-paranoid to daredevil. It was a roller-coaster he wasn't sure he could keep up with. Right now, he wasn't in the mood to even try.

One-handed, he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. "Did you check the gun?"

"No," she said, back to him. "And I'm not going to."

"You—" His hand pressed against the bridge of his nose, pressed so hard it hurt. She hadn't checked it. She didn't know. She poked her nose into literally everything else; why not the one thing he laid right in front of her? "Why are you so absolutely, ridiculously stubborn?"

"Because you're tricking me again," she said, still looking outside. "You feel bad for getting me involved, right? And you wanna get rid of me." She swung her legs over the edge of the crates, back to him. "Whatever's up with the gun is part of your trick. I ain't falling for it."

"You're hopeless," Jason said, anger rising in him. He knew he should box it up, shove it down, but for once, he let it boil out. "Absolutely, completely hopeless!"

"Oh yeah?" She turned back, jaw crooked.

"Yeah!" he shot off. "Who gave you that split lip? Some jealous boyfriend? Some heavy-fisted father figure?" She paled, but he didn't let up. "You like beating yourself up, Rachel. How long did you let them hit you for?"

Her eyes went cold; her posture stiffened to ice. "I don't let anybody hit me," she hissed.

"You'd let anybody that smiled at you twice hit you," he spat. "Just hoping they'd smile at you again."

"As if you would know!"

"You wanna talk about what I know? I know you have nowhere else to go, or you wouldn't be tailing me like a lost puppy," he said. "I know you suck on that split lip because you like the way the pain feels, just a little bit. I know you're too used to things being hard to take it easy, too used to being the one who will when everyone else won't. You think that it makes you strong, that it makes you special. What it makes you especially easy to manipulate. I know you think we're friends, and I know we're not."

She shoved into a half-crouch, as tall as the ceiling would allow. "You wake up looking for a fight, Psycho Boy?"

"I woke up looking for you to be gone." He was on his feet now too, head spinning as the train rattled beneath him.

"Train," she sneered, stepping so her face was right in his. "Remember?"

"Then we can part ways when it stops."

"Do you want to die?" Her breath plumed hot over his skin.

"Do you?"

The freckles dusting her skin danced as her muscles twitched. Her eyes—grey, with flecks of green—searched his face. The hard slant of her lips slowly loosened and, for some logic-forsaken reason, began to curl in sympathy.

No. No. Quick as light, his hand slipped around her waist. She barely had time to stiffen before he pulled the gun out of her waistband and stepped back. "Look," he said. After sliding the clip off, he held it out on his open palm. The morning sunlight washed over the bullets inside.

All ten bullets. Full from the top of the clip to the bottom. He waited for her to figure it out.

Her jaw slowly slacked. She took a half step back.

Then she surged forward, shoving him with both hands. "What kind of sick, twisted creep are you?" He stumbled into the front wall, arm hitting it full-on, and bit his tongue to keep from crying out. She balled her fist up in her sleeve and slapped the empty fabric down across his chest. "You told me I killed that guy."

He didn't say anything. There wasn't anything left to say. Maybe now she'd finally get it.

"You let me think—" She smacked him with the empty sleeve again. It barely stung, and he wondered why she wasn't using her fist. "Who does that?"

"I do." There was more gasp to the sentence than resolution, and he cursed his stupid arm for the hundredth time.

"Psycho!" she shouted, and he let her rail. Maybe he was.

She yanked the gun away from him. She'd opened her mouth to say something else, eyes ablaze, when the track twisted. It threw them together into the side wall, and she shoved him off her. A wave of dizziness and pain swept over him, and he moaned low in his throat. The train began to decelerate. She scooted quickly away from him.

A cold, sick pit grew in his stomach. Mission accomplished, he thought darkly. Soon, she'd be out of danger. And he'd be alone.

Carefully, he propped himself up on his good arm, blinked his vision clear, and took a deep, stilling breath. The train would be stopping soon. He needed to be ready.

"This is it." Rachel crept to the open slit and peered around it. "Don't get caught," she said sharply, as if insulted that he might put all her hard work so far to waste.

"I know how to handle myself." To prove it to her, he picked himself up and edged to her side. He set his face to stone. His arm wasn't that bad. He could block out the bursts of flame, wrap them up, hide them in the depths of himself. He'd get by fine.

She looked at him sideways. Her lip curled, and she shook her head. Good, he thought, even as his stomach sank. Write me off. Should have done it sooner.

The train slowed to a crawl. He wanted to thank her one final time, but that might change her mind. Besides, she was so quiet she was hardly breathing—not that anyone could have heard anything under the train's whistle and the clattering and conversation of work in the rail yard.

Rachel crouched for a moment, tense and bouncing on the balls of her feet. Judging the moment right by some standard Jason couldn't see, she stood and hopped lightly off the train, blending into the crowd before anyone looked her way. Jason followed only a moment later, head spinning as the ground jarred his arm.

When his teeth unclenched, he managed a glance around the work yard, but she was nowhere to be found. His stomach clenched, but he nodded in approval and flowed into step with the crowd. Good for her. Good for her.

The workers bustled around him, and the sun shot sparkling brights in his eyes. Disoriented, he followed the flow of traffic. Eventually, a small stream of people split off to a small admin building, ready to log their hours and get paid, he assumed. He broke off from them, curving around the back toward a fenced-in parking lot. The city—he had no idea which one—stretched out beyond that.

A few workers were getting into or out of their vehicles. One glanced his way, and Jason leaned against the brick, fingers to his lips like he'd come out for a vape. Never mind that he didn't have one in his hand; people saw what they wanted to see. He just needed a minute to figure out what to do next.

A dark wave crashed over him. Right now, he had absolutely no idea.

His stomach growled. Right. He needed food. He had a couple hundred dollars in his pocket and that fake ID. The rest had been lost to the ambush at the apartment, but it'd be enough. Enough for a bite to eat. Something to cut the pain. Then he could think straight.

He stood himself upright. Somehow, he didn't feel better than yesterday, even after a hard night of sleep. His head swam, but he put one foot in front of the other. The city proper wasn't that far. It wouldn't be that long before he got something in him. Not long at all.

As he stepped past a recess in the building, a hand reached out to grab him.

He dodged it and almost fell. The hand came at him again, steadying him, and a halo of red hair frizzed around a frowning face. "You suck at this," Rachel muttered.

"What are you still—"

"Would you just shut up? Just. Shut up."

His mouth opened in another argument and she glared him down with the weight of a million bullets. His mouth clamped shut.

"Come on." She turned on her heel, hair streaming behind her.

Wary relief flooded him. He cast a glance over his shoulder where she'd hidden and waited for him. He could wait there too, let her get ahead. But despite himself, his feet trailed after her. He didn't want her to leave. He didn't want to be alone, with his head light as a balloon and his arm roaring like a lion.

He just didn't want to be responsible when she got hurt.

He felt the weight of eyes on them, workers getting into their cars, heads tilted as they watched two strange teenagers on company property. He caught up to Rachel, twining his fingers through hers. At first, she jerked away, angry eyes raking him down. But he tightened his hand on hers meaningfully, gaze flicking to the curious eyes they were drawing.

Her whole body language shifted. She rolled her eyes and pushed him playfully, as if he'd scared her. Then she danced forward a few steps, stretching their linked arms between them. She towed him toward the shade of the trees at the edge of the parking lot, like they were looking for a good spot to make out instead of a way past the fence.

The eyes weighing on him slid off, the mystery in their brain more or less solved. Two teenagers getting cozy in the shadows? Not something they got paid to report, Jason thought. Engines started up, and tires crunched over gravel.

Rachel tugged him along the fence until they reached a break in it he hadn't spotted. His shoulders sagged with tension he hadn't realized he was carrying. He wasn't sure he could have made it over a second time. Gladly, he ducked through after her.

They wound through the sparse, thin trees. The shade covered them like a thin veil. Rachel jerked out of his hand, setting it on her hip instead. She regarded him with pursed, tight lips. "Let's get some things straight. First, you don't talk about me. You don't talk about my past. You don't talk about my family. I'm not a test subject for your crystal ball or tarot voodoo or whatever crap that was back there."

"And if I do?" He swallowed, gaze locked just as sharply on her as hers was on his.

"Then maybe I start talking about your messed up family too! How about that?"

His heart skipped, thoughts running to his parents' and their tight lips, their suspicious belongings, his mother's scream, his sister, scared and alone and more powerful than she had a right to be.

Point made. She must have seen some recognition of it on his face, because she nodded sharply. "Two, the people following you are now following me too. It was my name they flashed on the TV—not yours. So whatever hero delusion you have, put it out of your head."

Jason bit back a retort about her own hero delusion. Instead, he just watched her, the wind dappling leaf patterns over her skin.

"Three," she said, "I get to make my own decisions. Stop playing head games with me. I'm not some doll for you to jerk around."

"I jerked you around plenty before we got to New York."

Her eyes flashed flint. "And then I wised up."

He wasn't sure at all that she had. She was still here. She still felt bad for him, responsible for him, like a mother hen given an egg. That damage was done.

But maybe... maybe she had a point about the people looking for her. They'd found her name from that partial security picture awfully fast. And 'terrorism in New York', which the story could all too easily get spun into, wasn't going to die down easily. Especially if someone out there was fanning the flames.

His head spun, and he leaned against a trunk to steady himself. "Alright."

She eyed him warily. "Just like that? Alright?"

He offered her his hand. "Just like that."

"This better not be another trick." She reached out to take it, then pulled back like he had that first night. "And no changing the terms on me."

"What exactly are the terms?" He gave a dry half-laugh and immediately regretted it.

Rachel quickly smoothed out her face from the sympathetic wince, but not quickly enough. He frowned, and she straightened her shoulders and looked him dead in the eye. "We give each other a fair shake. And keep each other out of trouble."

His lips pressed together. His head still spun, but she was clear in his sight: tall, proud, chin up. Could he give her a fair shake? Could he treat her like an equal? He didn't know. He didn't think so; he didn't exactly have a lot of practice. His entire life, people had been his to twist and tug whichever way he needed. He had usually left town before they realized there was no substance to him.

But if he was going to save his sister, he needed a partner in crime. And partners meant equal. Or at least as equal as things could be when he had her emotions on a string. One I won't yank anymore, he thought, if I can avoid it.

He reached forward for the shake. "I think we're both more trouble to each other than we're worth."

She pumped his hand once, a wicked gleam in her eye. "Isn't that what makes it fun?"