Page 76 of Never Lost

My gaze swept the patchy dunes and arroyos beyond. Were Noam and Obadiah out there, waiting to ambush us? I shuddered, imagining Noam’s cold black eyes set in his dome of a head, peering at us through a rifle scope. I shivered again, feeling impossibly vulnerable in the gloomy expanse of sand.

It took only minutes for the dusty air to start rasping against my skin, sticking to my clothes and clinging to my throat. It only took a few more for grains of sand to start swirling around my feet, scratching and burning my exposed skin, the rough terrain causing every muscle in my legs to ache and protest and my throat to feel raw and dry as if I was swallowing sand with each breath. Soon, I was uncapping our last water bottle, tipping it back for a small sip that barely moistened my parched lips. For lack of anything else to do, I crinkled the bottle, loud in the silence. This was it. Either we reached the mine soon, or we would die.

How long hadhebeen out here?

“Max,” I rasped. “Maybe we should turn?—”

“There it is.”

As we crested a particularly vicious dune, my heart skipped. The mine’s gaping maw seemed to swallow all light into its depths, sucking it into darkness sinister by moonlight, casting eerie shadows across the barbed wire barricades and the blood-red entrance sign.

Sure, it was basically the worst place on earth. But why did it have tolooklike it?

“Welcome to hell,” Max remarked. “Still available for lease at a low monthly rate. See my agent for details.”

I stood, alternately shivering and sweating in the desert night, the barbed wire casting twisted shadows on both ourfaces as Max’s fingers moved over the aged keypad, the beeps punctuating the stillness. A green light flickered, and with a groan of protest, the massive metal doors rumbled to life.

“How did you know the code?”

“Because I set it. It was just a guess that Resi didn’t change it. But it makes sense since she’s never had any reason to keepmeout before.”

Before we went any further, Max offered me a sheathed knife, then reached down and unstrapped the holster from his leg, complete with pistol—larger and thicker-barreled than the one he’d been using, probably a Colt .45—and handed it to me.

“Ever fired one of these?” he asked.

“Surprisingly, yes.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” he said, turning away in relief. “I was getting tired of being the only one with any tactical knowledge around here.”

“My grandfather thought I should learn. I hated it, of course. At first, I was crying so hard I couldn’t even see the target.”

“But you did learn.”

“I did learn.”

“Here. Have fun.”

I checked the safety and strapped it around my waist without another thought. It felt solid. Weird, but solid.

I shuddered as the gates slammed shut behind me, knowing that sound didn’t mean half as much to me as it did to Max, and it didn’t mean half as much to Max as it did tohim, trapped down below.

I’d been wondering this whole time why Resi would choose to bring him here, and now I knew. It was because she wanted to remind him that no matter what he did, he was still a slave.

Herslave now, even though he wasn’t. He was my father’s, I realized with the kind of surreal revelation I hadn’t had sincehigh school, smoking a bowl and looking at my own hands as if for the first time.

My father owned the boy who had just disrupted slavery in a way no one ever had before or since, and it was likely that neither of them knew it yet.

It seemed like the brighter he shone, the more darkness it took to extinguish him.

Was he hatching some new plan, even now? Trying to escape? To fight his way out? And why imagine what he was doing now, what he was thinking now, or what his face would look like when, and if, he finally saw me again? Did it matter? I couldn’t fathom it, anyway. I’d take him. In any way, in any shape, in any form he cared to take, I’d take him.

And to do that, I would do whatever it took. Just like he would do for me.

Whatever it took.

HIM

I kept tugging. Maybe I couldn’t feign the desire to do it, but I thought I was doing okay at feigning the desire to get it over with. Breathlessly, subtly, I guided her toward one of the metal cots nearest the chains, its stained mattress torn into by about a thousand generations of rats. For a moment, my heart hammered, a faint drumbeat urging me to resist, to turn back, to let her kill me, if that was what it took. I couldn’tactmy way out of this. I couldn’t play a role in my own mind.