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He lifts his head as I reach the desk, and for an instant, I could swear I’ve seen him before.
But I haven’t seen him before. I’ve only seen someone who looks like him, and it was Senator Chris Walsh.
The animal parts of my brain do not appreciate the resemblance. I can’t think about the photos in that envelope right now. I can’t think about what they mean, and who took them, and how Apollo must’ve felt when he saw them. Every instinct says that this man was involved in that somehow—that he orchestrated this—but I don’t have time for that now.
I’m not as tall as my dad. I’m about the same height as my mom. But I still know how to loom.
So I loom over the man at the desk. “Where is he?”
“Gone,” he answers, with a smile like the missing chunk of the building. He sounds far too American to be here. He sounds way too pleased for this to be a good thing. But if that means Apollo isn’t dying in a cell somewhere in here, then okay. I can deal with whatever is happening one step at a time.
“Gone where?” I match his genial tone. I was out front, so wherever he went was clearly not above board.
“Gone to make a deal.” I remember the voices earlier and curse myself for not checking it out. I’m getting pretty good at cursing myself, apparently.
“A deal with who?”
“It’s none of your concern, little lady.”
I turn on my heel and leave.
His confusion follows me. He probably expected me to beg. He probably expected me to cry.
I don’t care what he expected. This little lady has other things to do. None of it ladylike.
I circle the building. No sign of Apollo. But a short distance away, at the place where the fence bumps up against the forest, which crowds the skirt of the mountains, there is a gate in the fence, and two guards.
They’re young. One watches me make my way over. The other watches beyond the barbed wire, smoking a cigarette.
I go for the young, wary one.
The thing about private planes is that you can bring all your good knives with you. Never let it be said that I travel unprepared.
I push the point of my knife gently into the soft part of the first one’s chin. His fellow guard is too busy with his cigarette to notice.
“Where’s Apollo?”
He blinks. Swallows. Points at the forest. “They went into the mountains. They’re going to the border.”
“Thank you,” I say, with a big, earnest smile, then push the knife just a little farther in and draw a little blood as a warning. He squeaks, but stays still. “Now open the gate.”
His buddy has noticed by now, but the first guard hisses at him. He pulls the gate open just wide enough for me to slip through. I pause on the other side and look back through the wire at them.
“Say anything to anyone, and I’ll slit your throats.” I punctuate this with a wide, bright smile, like I’ll enjoy slitting their throats, and wait until they’ve both nodded.
Then I head off into the woods.
When I can’t see them or the fence anymore, I swing my case onto the ground and shrug off my coat. There’s a portable bow inside my case, originally designed to survive plane crashes and remain useful through covert military missions. It will stand up to just about anything. There’s also a collapsible quiver and a collection of the sharpest arrows I’ve ever owned.
Thusly prepared, I toss the coat and the case off the path and do a last check of my outfit.
It’s similar to the clothes Apollo and I wear when we play our games, except this one is the one I wear when the hunt is real.
The dawn comes on very, very slowly in the mountains, and the cloud cover isn’t helping. It’s giving all the evergreens a strange, surreal quality that isn’t my favorite.
I make two phone calls in that weird light.
The people I’m following don’t care about getting found out. They leave an obvious trail that I follow for at least fifteen minutes, and then they turn off into more densely wooded and mountain-ed terrain.
