Ingenious

Chapter Nineteen

As we start driving, Kacey and Maia excitedly go through the clothing and stuff that Morgan gave me.

"I told her not to," I repeat for the 8th time. No one minds the extra stuff, but I'm not a big fan of taking charity. "So why are you all here anyways?" They all hesitantly look between each other. It doesn't take a genius to figure out something happened.

"Someone found us," Ryan says. We saw them last night coming back from dropping you off. They must have followed us from the campus. We got them in the wrong direction by me manipulating their emotions to make them go home. Yet they must've figured out our general location."

"So while we are figuring out specifications for plan B, it's better to be in the middle of nowhere," Kacey finishes. I'm sitting next to her in the second row while Ryan has shotgun.

"Where are we going then?" I ask them. They shrug and we continue driving. We shouldn't go too far from Washington, but we also can't be too close. So we drive and we drive. We eat breakfast that consists of mini cupcakes Morgan gave us and then I sleep for a bit. I think about an hour and a half later or so, Kacey shakes me awake.

"We are at Maia's old apartment or something," she tells me, "apparently she and her Mom would come out here when there was a lot of publicity on them because it's bought under another name."

"How are we going to get in it?" I ask her. We walk over (Kacey kind of hobbling since I wrapped her ankle in a way that she can't bend it) where Maia stands in front of the door. Turns out it isn't a key, but instead a passcode. "Maia this is so nice!" I exclaim as we walk into the completely marble entrance way. It's a small little shack looking thing on the side of the road, that somehow is this pretty on the inside.

"Yeah," she says happy being here. "Plus we have a lot of clothing here of both mine and my parents that we can take." We go further into the house that has a full fancy kitchen. The master bedroom with a huge king bed. The guest bedroom with a double, and Maia's bedroom with a bunk bed, the bottom one a Queen sized bed.

"Wow, that's a lot of room," I exclaim, "didn't you and your mom just live here?" Maia nods,

"Sometimes my Dad would come, and once or twice we brought kitchen staff." I attempt to ignore the completely different lifestyle this girl led, and I settle in on the bottom bunk with Kacey. Apparently Maia prefers the top even though I offered to take it.

A couple hours later, Everett makes grilled cheese that I have to admit is amazing. We all sit around the fancy marble table and eat almost 2 sandwiches each.

"So we need to formulate a fool proof plan," Kacey says as we lounge around afterwards, too full to move. "So much in this could go wrong and we need to make sure it doesn't." There is a murmur of yeses and stuff, but we have so much to discuss we know it's going to be a late night of working on it.

"I'll go get the charting paper," Maia says, disappearing to grab a bunch of equipment from the office space. She tosses a pen at each of us and we start by writing out a list of what could go wrong. I do the writing because I have nice writing and I can write fast. The list goes on and on for 43 items. It has everything from the car breaking down to one of us getting injured to them tracking our chips.

"Okay," Kacey states as we pin the list up on the wall, "now for how to deal with each of those to the best of our abilities." We each do the brainstorming on our own and then move onto talking aloud. This kind of problem solving is kind of how I always pictured pre-gov. Under different circumstances of course. We work from noon until 7 when I go to make dinner with Maia. We are going to just boil some water and throw pasta in. Nothing fancy.

"How about we train?" I ask everyone, "we don't want our skills getting rusty." Everyone agrees to this and I play with the lights and electricity around the house while we sit around waiting for the pasta to cook. I focus my energy on the security camera system that is videoing outside the house. I look for the sparks of electricity keeping such a system working and then I pull lightly on the strings to get it to temporarily stop. When I see the monitors turn off I smile happy with the success. I'm going to have to turn a lot of things off during our little (not really that little) mission, but we agreed we'll wait a couple days.