Jason's blood boiled. His arm—the one that wasn't intermittently screaming at him—stayed around Rachel's shoulder as they walked back toward the rail yard. He was half-convinced she'd shake him off, but she didn't, and concern fed his roiling anger. If he'd stayed in the parking lot where she'd told him to meet her, he never would have seen what was going on. He never would have even known anything wrong, not until the sun set and she still hadn't returned. Or until she did stumble back, clothes torn, eyes down, shoulders hunched to ward off his questions—

His fingers curled, and he turned them into his palm to keep from hurting her. "Come here," he said, steering her toward an old library with a wide flight of stairs leading down to the street. "Let's sit here a minute."

His arm was throbbing in time with his pounding head, but that wasn't why he stopped. After settling them onto the cold concrete, he rummaged in the new backpack to pull out the burner he'd bought. He punched in the number, and it rang.

"What are you doing?" Rachel muttered, and he put a finger to his lips.

"911," the operator answered. "What's your emergency?"

"I'd like to report an assault on an alley near West 18th and Canal street. The girl got away, but her attacker is lying in the alley. You need to find him before he runs off. Green jacket, white shirt, five ten, dark close-cropped hair."

"Sir—"

Click. Jason pocketed the phone.

Rachel shifted away from him. "That was freaking dumb."

"He shouldn't be on the street." He looked over the scrape on her face, still trailing blood. "We need to clean that up. There'll be bathrooms inside." He rose and offered her his hand.

She pushed up without it. "They won't arrest him just because you called."

"Unless they've already been looking for him." Jason mounted the steps slowly. "Today wasn't his first brush with crime."

"You know that, huh?"

Her voice begged for a fight, but he didn't want to argue with her. His steps carried him steadily up.

"And what about me?" Rachel padded after him, spinning him by his good shoulder as they reached the landing. He winced. "You gonna turn me in too? I do something you don't like? You gonna tattle on me?"

"You think that's what I'm doing?" His brow drew, hurt mingling with anger. "Tattling?"

"You don't have the first idea what our lives are like!"

Our lives, she said, as if she was more on the side of that animal of a man than she was on his. Disgust laced Jason's voice. "Right, I see, because he's simply forced to live that way. He doesn't have any other choice than to attack girls on the street."

"Like you would know, Suburbia!" She tried to shove him, and he caught her wrist gently.

"I know people," he insisted. "That was a predator." He cut off the flow of facts that would do nothing to calm her nerves: that most assaults happen between people who know each other; that if someone were to assault a stranger, it'd be much less risky to take place somewhere quiet and out of the way; that there was no reason to run across town in broad daylight—unless chasing was some sick part of the game.

She pulled, and he let go of her easily. But she didn't turn or walk away. She held her back straight, her chin up. Still, despite the angry lines of her face, her eyes shone.

Jason's voice softened. "You joke about me being psycho, Rachel. He was a psycho. That's not one of your friends back home. That's not me picking on you or your lifestyle. That is a rabid wolf."

She stood so taut the muscles in her neck quivered. "You think I don't know how to handle myself?"

Jason didn't mention the gun she'd shoved into his hands, or the fact that she'd gone who knows where only to come back with that creep on her heels, though they were both things she would have needled him for in a heartbeat. "You handle yourself better than I do, Rachel," he assured her. "I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't already know."

"Right." Her arms crossed, closing her off. "Then why don't you shut up?"

He bit his tongue. "Duly noted." His hand, near her back but not touching, gently suggested they continue into the library.

She turned, running up the stairs faster than his pulsing arm wanted him to keep up with. The doors closed behind her before he quite made it to the top. As he came inside, he glimpsed her slipping into a bathroom. He meandered in, staying close to the front door. A brochure wheel caught his eye. His eyes narrowed, and he spun through it: Best Chicago Eateries, Top 10 Things to Do, Chicago: City of Trains...

He slipped that one out and fingered through it quickly. His eyes flicked up for a price. Finding none, he raised it toward the librarian. "How much are these?"

"Oh, those are free, honey," she said. "Compliments of the city."

He thanked her with a wave and stuffed it into his back pocket. Rachel came back out, face washed, blood gone, the scrape a dotted red that swept from her temple to her cheek. Jason's jaw clenched, and he looked away, doubting she wanted him to linger on it anymore than she wanted to. "Ready?"

In response, she walked past him, strides stiff as she threw open the door. She pounded down the stairs. Jason adjusted the backpack on his good shoulder and slowly followed her. His arm sent hot bursts through the left side of his body in time with his steps. He didn't hurry to catch up.

Let her be alone, he thought. Not so long and she'll be stuck with me. A few streets passed in silence. Traffic wove by. The backpack bobbed against his back. Small enough to ride in his pocket, the gun hit against his leg too, but it felt awkward there, heavy. He'd handled guns before, but never one so casually, and never because someone thrust it at him like a dead rat. For the first time, he wondered which of the two of them might actually be the better shot. He'd spotted the shell casing in the alley where she recovered the gun, but she obviously hadn't hit her attacker with it.

Then again, he imagined it was much harder to shoot a human than a rabbit.

Rachel crossed her arms and fell back closer to him—still in front, still not looking at him, but closer. "How'd you find me anyway?"

He considered her, trying to figure out the best tone to respond in to set her at ease. And then he remembered the deal they'd made, the promise they'd shook on. No head games. A fair shake, she'd called it.

So he shrugged, winced, and answered straight. "The parking lot you picked out was a terrible place to watch from. I couldn't see anything with all the cars, and I didn't know what direction you'd come back from. There was a ladder around the back of the restaurant. I climbed up there with our stuff."

"One handed?" She glanced back at him, frowning.

His brows rose. "It was a ladder." Getting up had been easy; it'd been sliding down so fast his feet slammed against the ground and pumping his arms to catch up to her that had hurt.

She pulled her arms tighter against her but fell back a little more so that they were almost even. Her voice fell. "You shouldn't have kicked him so hard."

A barrage of words sprang to his tongue, and Jason barred them all behind the gates of his teeth. He wished he'd kicked that boy harder. He wished he'd broken something. He wished he could go back in time and break whoever it was that had made Rachel worry more about the person hurting her than herself. None of them deserved her sympathy. They certainly wouldn't get any from him.

He was glad when they made it back to the veiled shade of the trees by the rail yard, deeper now that the sun was starting to set. He sat in the damp moss and leaned his head back against a trunk. The pulse of his arm was a welcome distraction from thoughts about his parents or his sister or of what might have happened to Rachel if he'd been a couple minutes later. All of the mess curled in his gut. Arizona, he promised himself. Things will get easier when we get to Arizona.

But that was a lie, and he knew better than to swallow it. They'd be closer to saving Ana. But that didn't mean it'd be easier.

Rachel huddled near him, her back against the same tree, as they waited for darkness to fall. He wanted to ask how she was, but he didn't want her angry that he couldn't buy the brave face she wanted to sell herself. Her mask had fallen in that alley; she hadn't meant for him to see it, he knew. He felt like he'd read a page in a diary she'd rather burn. His shirt was still wet from where she'd clung to him. The more his arm throbbed and his thoughts rolled, the more he wanted to wrap his arm around her again. His jaw clenched against the traitorous thought. The last thing she needed was someone bothering her, and the last thing he needed was to let anything cloud his mind.

Her arms were still crossed, closed off against him. Anyone standing in that alley with her that didn't present a threat would have gotten the same reaction from her in that moment. She obviously wanted to forget it. And he should whether she wanted to or not.

The darkness thickened. Rachel rose from where she'd been huddled against a tree and crept toward the fence. Slowly, stiffly, Jason got to his feet to come after her. He hadn't even finished picking up the bag when she reappeared around a trunk and waved him toward her.

Snagging their things, he hurried that way. A wave of vertigo crashed over him, and he caught himself on a tree. Whoa. Blinking his vision clear, he placed his feet on the moss, one careful step after another. Using his hand to follow the tree around, he came over to her.

She was crouched down, pointing at the squat admin building she had hidden behind. "Look at that," she whispered.

Beneath a flood light, two suits were talking to a couple of muscular men in flannels and tees. One of the suits held up a photograph. The workers shook their heads. A train whistled and rattled as it slid into the rail yard, and one of the workers jerked their thumb toward it. They peeled off for their shift.

"Are those your spooks?" Rachel whispered. "Are they looking for us? How did they find us?"

Jason's fingers tapped against his leg. He drew a slow breath. "Maybe they didn't."

"They're here, aren't they?" she hissed. The suits went inside the admin building. "We need to get out of here."

"Think about it." Jason caught her wrist as she started to rise. Her eyes flicked to him. He let go, gesturing down, and she settled again. "The security cameras, if they even caught us on tape, aren't public information. They can't have hacked and combed the entire country's video feeds to find us here."

"How they found us doesn't exactly matter as much as that they're here."

"Yes it does!" he insisted in a low voice. "They don't know we're here. They—" His fingers drummed faster. There are spies in more places than there are not, his mother had said. "They must have people here. In Chicago. Just like they had people in New York, and in Hampton. These can't be individual people chasing us; we've been moving too fast, too unpredictably for them to constantly be right behind us." Realization crashed through him like one domino toppling another. "These men here are just scouts. Local scouts."

"Freaking lucky guess then." Rachel cursed.

"Not luck," Jason said. "Manpower. They lost us in New York—no stolen car to follow, no tickets under a name they recognize, no glimpse of us on the street—and they started thinking like you, Rachel. Where would we go? Where could we go? I bet they're still turning over rocks for us in New York. But look at this." Out of his pocket, he pulled a map he'd brought from the library. "Chicago is famous for its trains. You see all these rail lines that run into it? Any train we might've hopped in New York, there's a good chance it would have ended up here eventually. They're covering their tracks, Rachel. Looking anywhere we might have gone. They're hoping if they poke their head into enough holes, they'll find us in one."

The excitement of his realization buzzed in his hands. For the first time, he felt like maybe he had the upper hand. These people weren't all-seeing, all-knowing.

And with what they didn't know, he could beat them.

"You think it's dark enough to sneak onto one of those trains yet?" he asked.

The horizon slit the sun in half, slowly swallowing it.

"They're going to search the trains." She half-rose, starting to back up, and Jason caught her sleeve.

"They don't know we're here," he repeated. "But if they do check the security cameras right now, then they'll know we left through these woods earlier. And if you were them, and you were looking for us, wouldn't you start heading this way?"

Her head tipped back in understanding, eyes closing. "Because they won't know we doubled back."

Jason nodded, peering for the cameras in the gathering darkness. He hadn't even bothered looking for them before—hadn't even thought about them. Now, he saw them mounted high on the flood lights. They watched over the yard, most of which was bathed in a pale, faux-sunlight. It was almost as bright as it'd been in the day, and less busy. His lips turned down.

There was more cover here than at the last rail yard. Trucks and empty storage containers lay scattered over the expanse. Along the edge of the fence, the trees gave some shadow; they could maybe get from here to the admin building without being seen by anyone. Beyond that, though, the security cameras would pick up their shadows for sure.

"But maybe you were right." His head shook. "I don't see how—"

"Are you kidding me? The plan's brilliant. And I know how to get us in."

She rose to a crouch and tugged him after her, half-running along the inside of the treeline.

"What about the cam—" His arm jolted, and he cut off. "Cameras," he grunted.

"You talking about the bulky bricks on top of those light poles? That's CCTV. It's like a million years old, and grainy as all get out." They reached the edge of the trees, and she paused. The admin building, like the top of a triangle, was now between them and the hole in the fence. If the suits came back out, they'd have no reason to look this way and every reason to look the other.

In front of them was the fence and, close after, a discarded storage container. She pointed. "We'll slip it open and hide until we're ready to board later. Right?" He nodded, and she bit her lip. "You're gonna have to climb though."

"No I won't." He dug through the backpack and pulled out some bolt cutters he'd bought from the hardware section.

A wicked grin took her lips. "It's like you were planning to break in somewhere, Psycho Boy."

She stole the cutters from him and got to work on the fence. She was about to pull the opening away when Jason grabbed her arm. Finger to his lips, he pointed.

The suits were coming out of the admin building. One was on his phone. They walked at a quick, invigorated clip, straight toward the other hole in the fence.

As the pair passed into the darkness, Jason nodded at her. She clipped a nod back. She pulled the chain links open, and they hurried through.

The screech of the shipping container's door was covered by the wheels of another train rolling in. Rachel slid the doors behind them, leaving only a faint slice of light to peer out through. "Might as well get comfortable," she whispered. "I don't want to move until they're long gone."

Jason didn't point out they had no way of seeing the suits anymore. The darkness made the dizziness worse. His shoulder seemed to be trying to light a fire hot enough for him to see by. He laid the backpack on the ground as a pillow, and then lowered himself gently down. "Fine by me. Wake me when you're ready."

And he passed out.

🧬🧬🧬

He woke in complete darkness, ground tilting and leaning beneath him. For half a second, it was like being submerged in the ocean, the waves rolling over him, blocking out any light. Machinery screeched outside. The container yawed, sliding him until he bumped into a wall. In the darkness, he heard Rachel stumble and curse.

The box tilted the other direction, and he braced his foot to keep his place. With an echoing THUD, it slammed down against metal.

"What was that?" he hissed, scrambling into a crouch. Hot pain rolled over him, and his balance wavered. He caught himself on the backpack beside him and missed Rachel's first few words.

"...moved us onto a train." She snorted. "If I'd known they were going to offer a free taxi service, I would have bought the Trainhoppers United membership a long time ago."

"No," Jason muttered. "No, no, Rachel, where's the door?"

"Chill out," she said. "I listened when they shut it. They didn't padlock it. We're fi—"

Another THUD sounded across from them, rocking their box. For a second, they both sat in frozen silence. Then Rachel's feet tip-tapped across the metal. A quiet screech came—the door sliding open, but no light followed. Rachel cursed, and cursed again. Her voice echoed off the metal.

"Now we're trapped."