Chapter 76
Sebastian’s safe house was dark blue.
It was on a narrow road with asphalt edges fading into grass yards, no sidewalks or curbs. Aluminum siding and garden ornaments. Basement windows set in concrete, like every house squatted on its own bunker. No streetlights, just a clear sky and a half-moon.
The key he’d given me was back at Helshire, so I had to ring the bell.
There was no answer at first, and I wondered if I’d gotten the address wrong—all those hours spent trying to forget it, in case the empathogens wore off and my old self came back.
I had no choice except to wait. I’d had my cab from the bus stop drop me a quarter mile away, and I was down to ten bucks.
Then the curtains rippled, and muffled footsteps approached. The door swung open, and he looked me up and down. I was dirty, exhausted, still wearing the clothes from my escape.
He stepped onto the porch and folded me in his arms. Warm, solid, real. “You made it.”
“Yes.” I reached up and touched his head, tracing the scar that Cyrus left. Sebastian’s sleek buzz cut was growing out, and he’d started a scraggly beard.
He pulled away to arm’s length. “How’d you get away?”
With a hug. A snap.
“I promised them we’d make Morton babies.”
His laugh spilled out across the silent neighborhood—huge, rampant, absurd as always. Dogs in backyards began to bark in answer, and someone yelled at him to shut it. No matter who I had become, he was still Sebastian.
Then he went silent, looking into the dark.
“The car’s already packed,” he said, pulling me inside.
He barely gave me time to shower and change.
“I bought some clothes for you,” he said. “You’ll hate them.”
I was still drying myself, my skin buzzing from the novelty of being warm and clean, from Sebastian being near. “We don’t have to leave right away. No one followed me.”
“Still.” He glanced at the front door again, and I imagined him here alone, all those days since we’d been parted, staring at that door. Waiting for me—or for the family, because I’d spilled his location.
My heart broke a little. “You can check my clothes for a tracker.”
“Already did.” He waved a hand at the kitchen window. Out in the backyard, a fire was going in a metal trash can. Not just my clothes—the white sparks of burning lithium batteries rose like fireflies against the dark.
We were starting over completely, somewhere far away.
All I wanted was to rest, here in this place he’d made for himself, even if it was only one night. I hadn’t slept in a bed for three days.
“Sebastian. They thought you were coming to Helshire to get me. They didn’t expect me to run. I made it out clean.”
“You can be sure of that?”
I stared back at him, trying to feel my old certainty. I was a prodigy, trained to evade, to outrun, to disappear.
But our family had always been a step ahead. They’d indoctrinated, manipulated, and programmed me, then fired me like a seeking missile into the heart of their enemies.
Sebastian’s only real reason for trusting me was that I hadn’t already cut his throat.
“They think I’m one of them now,” I tried again. “But I’m not.”
“How did you manage that?”
My mouth opened, but the answer was unspeakable. Her arms around me, welcoming. Blessica!
Suddenly, the dark outside was full of ghosts.
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We drove all night.
I couldn’t sleep—the car was old, the seats poorly sprung. When my eyes closed, I flashed back to waking up in the hospital, recovering from a forgotten crash. Every time a car passed us, I expected to see familiar faces inside.
We talked about my imprisonment. How I’d sacrificed Xavier Lindqvist, and how Kumar and Leopold had fled, leaving Helshire careless except for Regina.
“And Gertie,” Sebastian reminded me.
“Yes, but Tom’s further away than ever. Seeing me locked up didn’t change his mind. Turns out, he was the last vote on Peter.”
“Huh,” he said. “So the vote was rigged.”
Peter had never stood a chance.
“Are you in contact with…” I still couldn’t say the word.
“Yes,” he said. “But we’ll have to hide you from them.”
I looked across at him.
“They’ll never believe you were caught and got away again,” he said. “It’s not safe for them to trust you.”
I turned back to the road. It wasn’t safe for anyone to trust me.
Peter. Hiromi. Xavier. Bellamy.
Any double agent could become a triple agent. Except I knew whose side I was on: Sebastian’s. I had no one else.
“Do you trust me, cousin?”
He smiled. “I waited for you, didn’t I?”
“And now that I’m here?”
It took him a long time to answer. The horizon was growing lighter, a strip of red below the sea of blackness overhead.
“I could never tell when you were lying, Jess. I’ll just have to believe you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “For telling me you aren’t certain.”
“We promised each other the truth.”
“We did,” I said.
And then I told him about the pills.
We stopped driving just after dawn.
Not another safe house—a motel, exactly like the Motorway Inn back at Helshire. The woman at the desk took cash and didn’t ask for IDs.
There, I finally slept. Sebastian sat by the window all day, peering through a slit in the curtains.
We adopted this pattern for the next month, driving by night, resting in the day, one of us keeping watch at all times.
Sebastian had conned, pilfered, and pickpocketed a few thousand dollars while I’d been imprisoned, but a few times we slept in empty houses to save money.
They were decorated with Christmas trees, the rain gutters strung with lights on timers.
Like on that long-ago night in Connecticut, we stayed silent, changing nothing.
No place felt safe enough to stop.
I wasn’t sure that Sebastian would ever feel safe, now that he knew what had changed me—not grief for Peter, nor love for Hiromi. It hadn’t been a car wreck creating a new and better Jessica.
It had been the pills, and they had slipped away. Touching Sebastian, being touched by him, didn’t have the same intensity. But I woke up every morning and chose him, just as I chose not to kill the people who cut in front of me in line.
Like I chose not to tell him about Bellamy.