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“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. No damage done.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I hate that I got you into this.”
“I chose to get into this,” I remind her. “Are you okay?”
“I think I should get some of those leather driving gloves,” she comments.
I smile, reaching over to touch her shoulder. “You’re a badass.”
“I never thought of myself as tough or resilient or even capable.”
“But now you know you are,” I nod.
"I suppose so," she replies, a small smile playing at the corner of her lips as she navigates the night-shrouded road. The glow of the dashboard casts her face in a soft, warm light, making her seem ethereal and distant.
I glance at her, my heart swelling with a strange sense of pride. Our car zooms past an empty field under a blanket of stars. The darkness is complete, save for the headlights cutting through it.
"How did they find us?" I ask. “We lost them at the bridge. There is no way they could have followed us.”
She shakes her head, her expression grim. "I don't know," she admits, her voice tinged with frustration. “We were careful. The car was paid for under another name. Not my fake name, but another identity I used.”
“Your phone?” I ask.
“No. I left it at the airport in LA.”
I thought about it, coming up blank. It was like they had GPS on us—but how.
"Your credit card," she says suddenly, her words coming out in a rush. "They must have figured out we're together. They knew you were the pilot, and it wouldn’t have been hard to find out who you were."
I curse under my breath, a sinking feeling settling in the pit of my stomach. She's right—we've been careless, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone who wants to find us. I pull my cellphone from my back pocket. It was in my pants when I dropped them a few short hours earlier.
"You need to ditch that," she says firmly, her gaze locked on mine. "They can track it."
I hesitate, my fingers hovering over the power button. But then, with a sense of resignation, I switch it off, knowing that she's right. We can't afford to leave any more traces behind us, not if we want to stay one step ahead of whoever's after us.
As the screen goes dark, I feel a pang of unease in the pit of my stomach. We're in deeper than I ever could have imagined, with no clear way out.
"So, now what?" I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. “Is this part of your plan?”
She doesn't answer right away, her jaw clenching as she focuses on the road. “I say we stick with my initial plan. We know what the problem was. We fixed it. You can’t use your credit cards.”
“Where do we go now?” I ask. “We can’t keep running forever.”
Paige takes a deep breath. “I have cash. A lot of cash. I can pay cash for gas and whatever.”
“I need to get cash,” I say.
“You can’t use your cards.”
“They already know where we are,” I shrug. “Stop at the next gas station. We need food and I need cash. They know we’re in this area. They aren’t following us.”
She hesitates but ultimately agrees. “Okay.”
It’s terrifying to think about losing my identity. It was my last connection to the world. If I would have known the change my life was going to take when I accepted this flight, I’m not sure I would have gotten on the plane.
But I was here now. “Up there,” I point at the sign for a gas station.
