Blood

16. Abandoned

"Uh, where are they all going?" Hedges asked me.

I frowned. "Guess they're afraid of me. Guess they should be. I'm an agent magnet. You should get away too, Hedges. You really should."

Hedges stood up. "Someone's overriding these controls," he said, frowning and looking around. "But who?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I'm locked out. The screen's frozen."

"No one else is down here," I said. "But there's a couple monitors and keyboards in the lounge. Could they—What was that?"

Something had clicked loudly. I hurried over to the stairs. The door at the top was closed. The very heavy steel door.

"They're leaving us behind," Hedges said. He frowned. "The human who knows too much, and..."

"And me, the bait that brought federal agents here and ruined their lives."
"Uh, yeah. Basically. You can see how taking us with them doesn't make sense.

Not if they want to be safe."

"What about our safety?" I asked.

"That's a problem." He said. "We'll have to work on that. But first we have to get out of here. Any ideas?"

I ran up the stairs and threw myself at the metal door. It wasn't going to open. Not unless you had that saw from Hedge's workshop. "Any tools down there that can cut steel?" I called.

"I don't think so," he said.

"Where do you think they'll go?" I asked.

"Canada, of course," he said. "U.S. agents probably won't follow them there, and why else have your Hide on this lake? I mean, the border's just a ten minute boat trip and it's all forest over there. No walls. No towns. Nobody to see you."

"Then what? Live in the woods?"

He shook his head. "No, they've prepared for this. I saw some of the protocols. They already have bank accounts and new IDs set up. They'll blend right in. And do you know what Cachette means?"

I shrugged. He was the brainiac, not me.

"French for hideaway. It's all over their computer records. They maintain another Hide in Canada," he said. "Guess your girlfriend didn't mention that."

"Who, Amira? She's not...wait, are you jealous because she was helping me?" He frowned. "I saw how you were looking at her."
"I saw how you were looking at her," I snapped.
"Doesn't matter now," he said. "She's abandoned us."