That didn’t mean I had to make things easy for him. I slipped farther back behind the wall of boxes, hooked my fingers onto the first available handhold, and started climbing.
Most humans think flatly. It’s not a criticism: humanity evolved when monkeys left the trees, and—as a whole—we haven’t been all that eager to go back. Most people rarely look much higher than their own line of sight. More importantly, most people stop climbing when they get out of elementary school. Robert might expect me to seek higher ground, but he wouldn’t expect me to do it silently—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of free running, it’s how to ascend without making any noise.
I stopped once I was ten feet off the ground, moving sideways until I found a cleft between two boxes that I could wedge myself into without making myself visible. And then I waited.
It wasn’t a long wait. “She’s gone!” shouted Margaret.
“I gathered as much,” said Robert. His voice was closer now. I didn’t move. “What happened?”
“I can’t be sure—Peter’s out cold—but it looks like she somehow convinced him to unchain her, and then walloped the holy hell out of him.”
“She improvises well. We’ll have to remember that.” Robert stepped suddenly around the edge of the wall of boxes, visible from my current position only as a flicker of motion in my peripheral vision. I froze in my hidey-hole, trying not to breathe. “Her robe’s here.”
“She left her robe?” Margaret sounded incredulous. “What good did she expect that to do her?”
“It’s white. White would stand out in here. It was the right choice, assuming she’s not worried about running around naked.” Robert raised his voice, calling, “You can come out. We understand why you ran away, and we’re not angry, but there’s no way you’re getting out of here. You may as well make things easy on yourself, and stop hiding before we come looking for you.”
Biting back the snarky replies took an almost physical effort. I succeeded. The pounding ache in my feet helped. If they’d done this to me when they weren’t angry, what would they do if they got me back?
Robert sighed audibly. “It’s going to be like that, is it?” He started walking away, presumably moving toward the boxes along the next wall. “You know, I’d really hoped that we were making progress, Verity. I know we’ll never be friends, but I wanted you to know that we respect your willpower.”
I held perfectly still as I began counting down silently from ten. Sure enough, I had just reached four when a flicker of motion betrayed Margaret creeping cat-silent into the narrow space between the boxes and the wall. She was looking for me, and so I did the one thing that I could do: I didn’t move. Without my bathrobe and in this degree of shadow, my hair and skin would look like they were all one color. I just hoped that it would be the color of the box that I was huddling against. I could climb—climbing was mostly a matter of digging in with my toes and forcing my way past the pain—but I wasn’t going to place bets on my being able to run any time soon.
“Where is she?!” Peter’s voice blasted into the warehouse, loud and sudden enough that I nearly flinched. I managed to restrain myself, the large muscles in my thighs jumping frantically as I struggled not to panic. “Where’s that little Healy bitch? I’ll strangle her with my bare hands!”
“Your interest in doing things with your bare hands is how we lost her in the first place,” snapped Robert. His voice was a whip crack in the quiet of the warehouse. Margaret was still creeping along, moving like she thought there was no chance I’d have seen her. I pressed myself deeper into the crevice, barely allowing myself to breathe as I watched Margaret inch her way along.
In the movies, this would be where I inevitably had to sneeze, triggering an exciting chase scene. In the movies, I wouldn’t be stark-ass naked, and I’d have a machine gun or something, not a single stolen knife. I didn’t sneeze, and below me, Margaret moved on by, still searching for my hiding space. When she looked up, the shadows—faithful to the last—made me look like just another part of the wall. God bless the limitations of the human eye.
She passed out of my sight, her footsteps moving to join the others.
“She must be in the upstairs,” said Robert.
That was news to me. I hadn’t realized there was an upstairs.
“Well, let’s go get her,” snapped Margaret. “We need to get her back into custody, now.”
“I’m going to kill her,” said Peter.
“No,” said Robert. “You’re not. We’re going to enlighten her. I think you’ll find that she enjoys that far less.”
The three of them moved off together. Their footsteps faded into silence, until I finally heard a door close in the distance. I still stayed where I was for another five minutes, measuring the time by counting off the steps of a proper Viennese waltz in my head. Finally, I was satisfied that I was alone, and I allowed myself to unlock my shoulders, sagging into a sitting position on the box where I’d been standing.
I was alone, naked, practically unarmed, and terrified. I might not have much time, but I had long enough. Bending forward to press my forehead against my knees, I closed my eyes, and cried silently until the tears ran out.
When I was sure that I was done leaking, I unfolded and stood, not bothering to wipe my cheeks. These assholes from the Covenant wanted to play? Oh, we’d play. And they’d lose.
Twenty-two
“Never forget that I loved you, and I did the best by you I could. You can forget everything else about me, but please. Don’t forget that.”
Hiding from the Covenant of St. George in a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan
THE FIRST THING I needed to do was find a way out that didn’t involve going past the Covenant. There’s nothing dignified about racing naked across the rooftops of Manhattan—for one thing, without a bra, I was going to wind up in a world of pain, and that didn’t even start to go into the situation with my feet—but that wasn’t going to stop me. If I had an exit, I was going to take it. The trick was going to be finding that exit without coming out into the open.
I carefully extracted myself from my position between the boxes and began climbing again. Higher ground helped my nerves. Margaret and the others wanted me alive, for the moment, and that meant they’d be reluctant to shoot me; it’s never a good idea to shoot someone you’re not intending to kill, no matter how good of a shot you think you are. That’s something I learned from my grandmother, and she’s the best shot I’ve ever known. “Even when you’re aiming for the hand, you’d best assume you’re shooting to kill,” was what she’d said, and she was right. Shooting to wound was only a few inches from missing your target entirely, and a different few inches from killing them. Assuming the Covenant had similar training (a big assumption, but I had to go with something), they’d try to use other means of getting me down.
Besides, once I was high enough, they’d be even less likely to see me without my wanting to be seen, and there was something to be said for that. I didn’t want them to take me alive. I didn’t want to die, either. That meant I needed to escape.
The boxes were piled high enough that I could see the rafters overhead, but not so high that I could reach them. I couldn’t even jump with any assurance that I’d hit my target—not with my feet in their current condition—and a misjudged landing could send the entire stack of boxes toppling. That wouldn’t be exactly what I’d call “subtle,” and it would bring the Covenant rushing back to find me, instead of wasting more time searching the upstairs.