Page 69 of Never Lost

Let’s not get cute. “What were you humming, ma’am?”

The jubilation melted off her face. “Nothing. A slave song.”

“Jenseits der Hügel, unter’m Sternenschein/Fliegt er durch die Nacht, so mutig und allein,”I forged ahead before I could stop myself. “That’s the only couplet I remember, ma’am.”

“Something about flying and the night. It’s all I?—”

“Beyond the hills, beneath the stars/He flies through the night, so brave and alone,” I translated. That was the gist of it, anyway.

Her chin flicked up to the limitless, diamond-studded, purple-black blanket above us. “Do you remember anything else?” Her voice and manner were growing younger and more vulnerable by the second.

Which was exactly what I wanted.

As long as I remembered we werebothacting.

“Only that my mother sang it, ma’am,” I rasped as another spasm of pain gripped me, one I couldn’t let on if I didn’t want another pill jammed down my throat. “And that it made the days feel shorter.”

“It made everything feel shorter,” she whispered darkly. “Which was the next best thing to not feeling it at all. But who cares?” She added, “I decided some time back that I’ll never again feel anything I don’t want to feel.”

She pressed her thumb into the center of my bottom lip so I could taste it and her cinnamon breath on my face. “And if you keep being so sweet, neither will you.”

Resi stepped closer, her presence an enveloping warmth in the chill of the desert night. She reached out, her fingers trailing through my hair.

“I taught myself the constellations, you know,” she said. “But nobody ever told me the stories.”

Her hand left my hair and dropped limply by her side, while the long fingernails of the other traced the sharp metal edge of my collar, over the lock.

“Would you like me to?” I asked gently, meeting her eyes once more, expecting to be scolded.

Instead, her fingers dug into my arm as she helped me up off the ground like a newborn foal, my broken knee crumbling almost immediately. And, yes. There went my chain, released from the post with a silky metallic sound, and I tried to desperately shove down my elation.

“Stay close, Starling,” she ordered.

Starling?

She was naming me, I realized. Just as she’d threatened.

After twenty years of resisting, I’d reached the one situation where I couldn’t.

So I nodded and limped on as Starling, Resi’s leashed pet, dragging one useless leg behind me.

The desert air hung heavy, a blanket of stillness only broken by our breaths. Every so often, a slight breeze tugged at Resi’s hair, carrying the raw scents of sand and sagebrush, wending between silvered rocks and the occasional patch of sparse mesquite.

My muscles ached with every labored non-step, but I masked the pain before it showed all over my face. There would be no escaping here. My mangled body had no strength, speed, endurance, or reflexes to speak of, and Noam was still lurking nearby, waiting to pound me into a smoking crater if I got out of line.

But I had to keep moving because the farther we went, the better sense I’d get for the lay of the land, and that could only help me. It would especially help if I could figure out where Noam was, and even better, where he had stashed that chip and the vial of sulfuric acid. Because whatever else I did, I had to destroythatfirst.

There was nothing scientific about what I was about to do. Besides, Resi knew as much as I did about science, so factswere useless here. To get her under my spell, I’d have to do the unthinkable.

I’d have to get them wrong.

19

HER

When it came to my top ten list of bizarro happenings, I might have included zooming south toward the border, lying crumpled beneath the contents of an entire box of instant ice packs in the back seat of a cramped, rusty Datsun redolent of fast-food hamburgers, with one of the West’s richest tech moguls riding shotgun and a gardener, who couldn’t actually drive, at the wheel with a pistol jammed between his ribs in a spot pretty far up the list. It moved even higher when we picked up a hitchhiker underneath the faded sign of a sleepy tire shop in a rapidly depopulating neighborhood south of town. The kind of neighborhood my father had grown up in, full of formerly working-class families whose jobs had been stolen by slave labor and were likely only a breath away from becoming slaves themselves, either by debt or conviction.

That hitchhiker turning out to be Erica Muller bumped it highest of all.