Breaking Point (Article 5 #2)(60)

We snuck out his back door, onto his patio. He locked the door while I bounced from heel to heel. He didn’t waste any time with good-byes. It was a house. Just a house, like he’d said.

We exited the side gate, sneaking as quietly as we could across the grass divide between our two houses, then edged along the building, careful to stay out of the moonlight, and to roll our feet from heel to toe to make as little noise as possible as we crossed into my small backyard and stood on the single step that led into the kitchen.

My home. We were home. Everything, everything was going to be okay. The tears were already filling my eyes. My whole body was trembling and ready to hold her and squeeze her until her ribs cracked. We would take her to the cruiser. She couldn’t stay here and do this. We’d take her to Chicago. And then, after we figured out how to free Rebecca, we’d all go to the safe house.

Chase jimmied the back lock using a knife from his belt, and after a few painfully slow moments, it clicked open. He raised his weapon. I wanted to tell him to put the gun down; he didn’t want to accidently shoot her after everything she’d been through.

He pushed inside.

Despite my bubbling excitement, the scurrying of feet across the carpet spiked my awareness, and my body, trained to react with caution these last weeks, braced.

“Soldiers!” I heard a male voice whisper fearfully.

A scuffle sounded across the carpet beyond the kitchen.

I ran toward them, petrified that they would try to escape out of the front and run right into a passing cruiser on curfew patrol. I jerked around where the kitchen table should have been and slid, rounding the corner too fast.

Chase was right on my heels. He grabbed my shoulder and shoved me bodily into the wall, pinning me against it. A moment later my heart rebounded, its cadence slamming through my eardrums.

“No soldiers here,” Chase called loudly enough for someone in the next room to hear. We waited behind the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room and the front of the house.

Hurried footsteps, and then silence.

“We won’t hurt you!” I said against Chase’s tightening grip. “Don’t go out the front! There was a patrol car passing through earlier.”

Silence.

“I’m not a soldier,” Chase said again. “It’s just a disguise.”

“Yeah, right!” returned a male’s voice. “How’m I s’pposed to believe you?”

“I’m putting down my gun,” said Chase. He cast me a warning look before releasing me, and then, to my shock, knelt and leaned the weapon against my foot. I scooped it up, but kept it lowered.

“I’m not putting down mine!” the man responded.

“We both know you don’t have one,” said Chase calmly.

“We’re looking for a woman—Lori Whittman,” I said. “That’s all. We don’t want any trouble, we just want to talk to her.”

“She’s here,” said a female voice. “I’m Lori Whittman.”

My stomach turned. No, no, no, no, no. That was not my mother’s voice.

“I’m coming out,” I said.

Chase blocked my path. He flipped on the flashlight and stepped out into the hall with me right behind him. I tucked the gun in the back of the skirt’s waistband and pushed, trying to get him out of my way, but he was as solid as a brick wall.

“Who gave you my name?” the girl inquired.

“A friend…” Chase trailed off. He stiffened before me.

“It’s … you,” she responded. “You!” she screeched. She knew him. And he knew her.

I finally succeeded in shoving Chase aside.

There before me, highlighted in the beam of the flashlight, was a girl with a wild thicket of red hair, pale cheeks, and dark freckles. Her thin mouth was pulled back into a sneer, and the green eyes I’d known since my childhood hardened with fury, and then blinked, confused.

“Beth?”

“Ember?”

My knees began to knock. This wasn’t right: Beth, here in this condemned house, using my mother’s name. She couldn’t be running a checkpoint, she was just … Beth. Just Beth, my best friend. She didn’t know this world. She knew high school and who was dating who and what assignment was coming up in English class. She knew what size pants I wore and that I hated tomatoes. This was all wrong.

But I didn’t think any more about it, because the next second her arms were around my neck and she was hugging me, and I was hugging her back, and she was blubbering and bawling like I’d only seen her do when we were thirteen and her cat Mars had died.

She smelled like Beth, and she felt like Beth, all hard joints and long skinny limbs. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and jeans and cute slip-on flats and all I could think was how impossible those would be to run in.

“Ohmygoodness I thought you were dead! What are you doing here? What are you wearing? Are you a Sister now? And your hair.… Are you going back to school? Wait, that’s silly, I don’t know what I’m talking about I’m just glad you’re alive!”

She said it all so quickly I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It was better that way. If I had opened my mouth, the disappointment would have come flooding out, and I couldn’t do that because this was Beth, my best friend, and I was supposed to be as overjoyed as she was.