Jason let the hot water pulse over his back. It swept away the dirt, blood, and sweat before spiraling down the drain. He watched it go eagerly, wishing he could do away with the last several hours as easily. They were a jumbled mess in his brain, a jigsaw that didn't fit together no matter how hard he shoved at the pieces. Just when he would think he was getting somewhere, a stabbing sensation would shoot through his arm, destroying his concentration. He hissed, both in pain and frustration. The involuntary car sleep hadn't done anything to clear his head; the Motrin wasn't doing anything to cut the pain.

Thank goodness he'd run into Rachel. Her sew-up job had done more for his arm than the medicine had. He wasn't sure what he would have done without her.

Probably died.

He shook his head under the stream, trying to wash the worry out of his mind. He had more important things to think about than death, than his mother's scream, than how close he'd come to losing Ana.

Whoever was after them had his parents. Or maybe they'd gotten away. Either way, Mom had been clear about what she wanted him to do, and he wasn't about to go rogue with some half-cocked plan to save her and Dad instead. His parents might not be easy to reason with, but that was because they'd always reasoned and counter-reasoned among themselves by the time they announced their decision. Jason couldn't count how many times they'd asked him to do something arbitrary, only for it to turn out to be the linchpin in their whole plan. They knew what they were doing; they always did.

In fact, if he'd been home when he was supposed to have been, all four of them would have been out of Hampton long before those cops caught up. The thought hit him like a punch to the face, and he leaned against the shower stall.

Regret crashed over him in a drowning wave. He dragged in a steam-filled breath as the pressure of it locked up his chest. What was doesn't matter—only what we do next. He chanted the mantra in his head, a lie he'd told himself every time they'd had to move, every time he'd left something behind. It was the one lie he allowed himself, because it was the one that let him keep going. His lungs clenched and unclenched, and he forced himself to regulate his breathing. What was doesn't matter. He slammed the faucet off.

He would take care of Ana, they would get to New York, and he would figure out some way to fix all of this.

He stepped out of the shower, carefully drying off with the thin motel towel. It was awkward, working the towel with one hand, but it gave him something to concentrate on. Methodical, slow motions sopped up the water from most of his body; careful dabbing dried the area around the wound. In the mirror, Rachel's sew up job looked like an angry mouth: red flesh and rows of teeth. But her stitches were small and neat. He stared at it for several long moments, but no blood beaded its way to the surface.

Still, he bandaged it back up, hiding it from himself and other prying eyes. The smart thing would be to ask Rachel to do it, play deeper into her sympathies, but he just wanted to be done with it.

He was half-dressed, about to towel off his dripping hair, when panic sliced through him. He had wanted so badly to shut the world out and wash it away that he'd left Ana in the other room. Alone. With a complete stranger.

What kind of brother was he?

He threw on his shirt and bit back a cry as he tried to shove his bad arm through the sleeve. Teeth gritted, he grabbed the edge of the sink as he rode out the wave of pain. His fingers turned white. He hissed a breath in slowly through his teeth. People who panic make mistakes. His mom had said it to him so many times that he could hear the words as clearly as if she were right beside him. You always have time to use your brain. If he had, then his arm wouldn't be screaming in protest right now.

As the pain ebbed, his brain sifted a mess of details to reach a conclusion that should have been obvious to him: Rachel wouldn't hurt Ana.

It might not have been obvious to most people. After all, it had been too easy to convince her not to take him to the hospital, and she was far too comfortable with the idea that he'd been shot. To top it off, it looked like someone had slugged her recently; a split like that didn't come from dry lips.

Despite that, she had sewn him back together. If she wanted to take advantage of him, or Ana, all she would have had to do was let him die. It would have been easier to let him die. For some reason, she wasn't interested in that.

Still his mom's words echoed in his head, shooting invisible bullets through his confidence. Trust no one. Assume everyone is the enemy. As he gathered his clothes, he tried to shake off the doubt. He could trust his eyes, his observations. If he couldn't, he wasn't sure he would be able to function.

Head high, he pushed out of the bathroom to find Ana tucked into bed, right where he'd left her. Relief unwound the last of the tension from his muscles. He started across the room to stow his dirty clothes.

"So." The edge in Rachel's voice stopped Jason midstep. She sat iron straight in her bed. The table lamp threw half her face in shadow. She may have been tucked under her covers, but she stared him down like an alley cat ready to pounce.

The hairs on the back of his neck rose, and the tension crept back under his skin. Voice neutral, he asked, "What's up, Rachel?"

Her head tilted as she watched him. "Exactly what are you running from?"

"What's it matter?" He shrugged. "We made a deal. Once we hit New York, you'll get your money, we'll go our separate ways, and we'll both be better off." He offered her a small smile, then stepped forward to put both his clothes and this conversation away.

Rachel snapped a gun from under the bed's comforter, pointing it straight at him. "Try again."

Jason's mind spun. She'd stolen that gun from his bag; he should have locked it in the bathroom with him. But she'd had access to it earlier when she'd gotten the first-aid kit. Why pull it on him now?

He held his palms out. "What is this about, Rachel?"

She tossed a phone at him, which he caught. Confused, Jason glanced at the screen. He paled.

From the floor of their apartment, his parents' dead, empty eyes stared back at him. His mother's body lay torn and abandoned as if murdered by dogs. His father lay riddled in holes beside her. His hand shook. "Where did you find this?"

"Hampton-based newspaper. Why? Have you seen it before?" Her voice dripped with scorn.

"Rachel, listen." Jason both wanted to throw up and to hunt down whoever had done this. "This wasn't me. The last I saw my parents, we were dodging cops. There's no way—" His mind flashed to his mother dangling from that helicopter and her scream as she fell. Still he hadn't thought, couldn't have... His voice dropped. "I can't believe they're really dead."

"Touching," she deadpanned.

The fire of his glare melted some of the ice in her expression. She's not going to hurt us, he tried to remind himself despite the roiling in his stomach. He repeated it in his head, over and over, partially to block out the rising horror and partly because it was the truth—and he could good and well use some truth right now.

The people who'd left his parents like that, they were animals. This girl wasn't.

"Put the gun away, Rachel." He shook, sick, angry, and wanting nothing more than to curl up in a real bed, but he held her gaze evenly.

Her hand didn't waver any more than his eyes did. "Or what? You'll murder me?"

"I didn't kill my parents," he hissed. "Do I look like a psychopath to you?"

"They come in all types."

"Rachel." Jason threw every ounce of his fear and fury into the conviction of his voice. "I. Did. Not. Do. This."

He held her gaze, shaking. The rock-hard set of her face softened, revealing fear and indecision underneath. The barrel dipped.

He let her consider him for a moment. Then, gently, he said, "Put down the gun. We both know you're not going to use it." He stepped toward her, intending to pull it from her hands.

She cocked it, aim leveled at him again, and he froze. "You don't know a thing about me."

On the other bed, Ana started singing to herself, and Jason fought back fear at what would happen to her if Rachel pulled that trigger. He backpedaled mentally, recalculating. She really was afraid of him, afraid it was a monster she had been kind to, afraid that if she turned her back on him, it would be her in the photographs next. Even nice people killed monsters when they were scared enough.

He took a shaky, steadying breath. For two seconds, he listened to Ana's song and just thought. Jason had never seen himself as a particularly scary person; he wasn't the towering schoolyard bully, and he wasn't the brawny hero who knocked the bully on his back either. So how did he make himself seem less threatening than he already was?

His hands came up slowly, defensively, innocently. He ducked his head slightly at the same time, tucked in his shoulders. If she paid attention to his hands moving instead of his subtle shifting, the effect would make him look smaller. If she did notice, he guessed he'd look cowed—which wasn't what he wanted, but probably wouldn't get him shot either.

His fingers twitched toward his sister, whose wordless song was getting louder. "She's upset. Can I see to her?"

A faraway look came over Rachel's eyes. The gun barrel wavered, and Jason frowned. This wasn't a moment to be getting distracted, and she didn't seem like the type to daydream. In the tight atmosphere, Ana's sweet song filled the silence. It had a calming effect on Jason, reminding him of his favorite house they had ever rented: Santa Monica in the spring, just streets away from the beach, where they'd leave the curtains open to play in the breeze and Ana would sit on the sills and hum in time with the waves.

"She's fine." Rachel relaxed into the pillows and lowered the gun. She looked cozy enough, almost like she was at a sleepover for convicted criminals. Her hand loosened on the grip and rested the barrel against the mattress. Jason eyed her warily, not sure what invoked her sudden shift in demeanor. "Talk," she said. "How did you end up in that newspaper?"

The truth spun in his mind, a convoluted, sharp structure. It was hard to look at and even harder to swallow. He tried to imagine being her, what he would want to hear if he was scared, was running from someone who beat him, was comfortable leaving the authorities out of the picture and taking matters into his own hands. The truth in his mind tilted to a less ugly angle. He froze it there.

"I don't know." As he took a testing step forward, Rachel pinned him with a look. Its meaning was clear. Stay where you are, or the gun comes back up. Since he much preferred the gun in its current position, he stopped moving. "All I know is that the cops were after us."

"Why?"

Jason's hand ran through his hair. The frustration in his voice wasn't faked, but he let it bleed through more than he usually would. "Believe it or not, I don't know that either."

"Don't play games with me."

"I'm not." His lies fell like heavy blows, the cadence of each word reprimanding her for even thinking that. "Why would I play games when me and my sister's lives are on the line?"

"People play games with their lives all the time."

"I don't."

Ana's song petered out. His eyes flicked over to her, to make sure she was okay. She curled into a ball beneath the blankets, eyes going distant again. He swallowed hard, chasing away his guilt. She should be in her own bed, content, warm, safe. She shouldn't be out here, in a junky hotel, with girls waving guns around.

Tapping swiveled his eyes back toward Rachel: her finger, thoughtfully, against the metal barrel. Her body might be relaxed against the pillows, but her gaze was anything but soft. "I want to know what's going on," she said. "And I want the truth."

As if truth was a currency he could afford to barter in. She wouldn't buy it even if he offered it to her wholesale.

But he needed her. Considering this was the second time today he'd had a gun pointed at him, she was obviously much better at this than he was.

"All I can do is tell you what I know. And that's not much." Rachel eyed him as he spoke. "Can I sit down at least?" If he was careful to let her feel in control, she was more likely to give him what he asked for.

Then again, right now, control wasn't exactly something he had to give her; it was something he needed to claw back without her noticing.

She sucked on her lip as they considered each other. Finally, she jerked her chin toward the end of Ana's bed. He slowly took his seat before gesturing with his phone. "May I?"

"Keep it turned toward me."

He nodded and flipped the screen her way as he scrolled through his pictures. "This is where we lived in Florida, last year." A run-down swimming pool stretched in the courtyard of a cheery pink apartment complex. Dozens of pictures lived around that one: his school, the beach, Ana wearing a warm, content smile while leaning over a coloring book. They were all dated for different months in 2041, proving it wasn't just a vacation.

He scrolled up. "New Mexico, six months before that." Here the desert painted the land with peaks of never-ending red and orange and brown. Even though their house rose in the middle of nothing, Mom had tended a garden of succulents. Jason had loved how eternal the distant mountains had felt; he'd hated the garden, not understanding why she even bothered when they weren't going to stay.

"Colorado, three months before that." His favorite picture here was of Ana 'sunbathing' in the shade of a natural stone column. The sun sparkled on the white highlights of the stone, while the shadows deepened the peace of her leaned-back lawn chair. She'd simply laid there and let the heat of the rocky mesa soak into her.

"Arkansas for 8 months, but two different houses." The first four months showed the blazing fall colors of the deciduous trees as their leaves danced on the rolling mountains. The last four months showed the barren rice deltas, black birds roosting in the bony branches of late winter. "Kansas for a year." Its endless fields highlighted a lone hawk he'd caught circling in the sky.

He scrolled up and up through his lifetime of memories, the only record he had of places he'd never see again. A stone, dark and hard, settled behind his heart. He shut the screen off. "It goes on."

"So what?" Her words bit, but her eyes roamed over him, curious, defeating the unimpressed air she put on.

"So I think my parents were hiding from something." He paused, long enough to let that set with her but not so long she would interrupt. "Something that finally found them."

She frowned, eyes flicking to the bag of cash.

"I don't know if it's stolen," he said, answering her unasked question. "But they certainly never acted like we were made of money."

"You think it's dirty," she pieced together.

He thought it was more likely his parents had scrimped and saved for a moment just like this. But he nodded. "And somehow the cops got tipped off."

Sirens hours old rang in his ears. His mother's final words played and replayed, a memory so vividly etched, he could hear the catch in her voice. We love you. Now run. His fist clenched, nails digging into his palm.

Rachel eyed him with concern. Even though he'd wanted her sympathy, it rubbed him the wrong way. He dropped his gaze to his hands, both maintaining the act and avoiding her eyes.

A soft shff marked her nail tracing the barrel of the gun. It seemed more absent-minded now than anything. "So what's in New York?"

"A friend of my mother."

"Like long-lost uncle kind of friend or like criminal accomplice kind of friend?"

"Does it matter?"

She barked a sharp laugh. "One might house you. The other might bury you." Her lips pursed. "Then again, one might turn you into the police and the other might hide you. Hiding you or your body kind of depends on how good friends they were." A scowl suddenly took her face, but it was almost sisterly in its tenacity. "And on how well you keep that thing thing out of sight."

Her long, thin finger pointed at the bag full of money. Jason doubted it really had much to do with this mess, but he was more than happy to use it as an excuse. He ducked his head contritely. "Lesson learned."

She rolled her eyes at him like he was hopeless. Hopeless and helpless and much in need of the street smarts of a girl motherly enough to bandage him instead of abandon him. If he didn't screw this up, not only would she not shoot him or take the money and run—she'd look out after him, at least until they got to New York.

All the qualms he had about that, he would bury with the strange truth that his parents had dragged him into.