She puckers her lips. “It’s a sensitive area,” she says, “but I’ll live.”
Her eyes track me in the darkness.
“I heard you pass by me in the woods outside of camp,” she says. “How’d you get out?”
“I walked.”
“That’s impossible. You would have triggered an alarm.”
I shrug. “You got out without a problem, didn’t you?”
“I know how.”
“Then I guess I got lucky,”
“Twice in one night, huh?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“First you grab a gun, then you get through a laser perimeter. You must be the luckiest guy in the world.”
If she wanted to turn me in, she would have done it already. So I play it brazenly, showing her the arrogant side of Daniel Martin.
I say, “Actually, I got lucky three times in one night.”
“What’s the third?”
“I’m in the woods with a cute girl.”
That stops her short. But only for a second.
She says, “You didn’t come out here for the hot singles scene. So why are you here?”
Just then my iPhone chimes. She glances toward my pocket.
“You’re trying to make a call!” she says, thinking she’s figured something out.
Most operatives would be tempted to lie and cover their tracks in a situation like this, but I’ve learned that the truth is the most powerful tool I have.
I take out the phone and hold it up. “You got me,” I say.
I glance at the screen, hoping it’s a return text from Father, but it’s a simple reminder about a school assignment that’s due the next day. The iPhone has been preprogrammed with the data of the fictional student named Daniel Martin.
“You know there’s no reception in camp,” she says, “so you snuck up here hoping to find a signal.”
I see her putting it together. They’re used to playing strategy games in this camp, solving riddles. Maybe I can use that to my advantage.
“You’re right. That’s why I’m here,” I say. “But who am I calling?”
“Let’s see,” she says, intrigued by the question. “You’re trying to make a call in the middle of the night, which is stupid. You sneak out of the compound to do it, risking getting thrown out. Also stupid. And you get caught, which is—”
“Stupid,” I say.
“Right. So I have to ask myself: What makes a guy do stupid things?”
”What’s the answer?”
“A girl.”
I laugh.
“You have a girlfriend, don’t you?” she says.
My laugh stops.
A memory of my last mission pops into my head, Samara and I running through the rain in Central Park.
I push it back down, burying it deep in my unconscious, where I will not have to deal with it.
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I say.
The phone screen glows brightly in the dark of the forest.
“You want to call someone pretty badly,” she says.
There’s an edge to her voice now, anger creeping in where before there was only curiosity. I have to defuse it.
“It’s not my girlfriend,” I say. “It’s my mother.”
I see her body relax.
“You’re a momma’s boy!” she says, finding her answer at last.
Now I show the sensitive side of Daniel, allowing myself to be vulnerable in front of her.
“My parents don’t know where I am,” I say. “I mean, I sent my dad a text earlier, but he’s notoriously unreliable when it comes to passing on info to my mom. That’s if he’s talking to her at all right now.”
“But why call her in the middle of the night?”
“She’ll be up. She’s a worrier.”
“I wish my mom were a worrier,” she says.
It’s a curious response.
“She’s not?” I say.
He body posture deflates, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“No. She’s more like a traitor.”
“What do you mean?” I say, shocked at her use of the word.
“She left last year,” Miranda says.
“Your parents got divorced?”
She shakes her head.
“She just fucking left,” she says. “Him. Us. This place. Our way of life. All of it. She packed her bags in the middle of the night and left without telling anyone.”
I try to imagine a woman who would leave her husband and children without telling them. It could be a woman who is mentally unstable. It might be a woman who fell for another man and got lost in love and obsession. Or it could be something else, a woman so afraid for her life that she thought she had no choice but to run.
It would be helpful to know which it was.
“Why did she leave?” I say.
“I don’t really know. We haven’t spoken since that night.”
“Never?”
“A postcard. That’s what I got. One postcard, no return address.”
“That’s messed up.”
“Completely.”
“So you never found out why?”
She shakes her head. Perhaps she knows more, but she seems unwilling to go there.
Miranda is tough, a survivor. I appreciate that about her. And I sense that now is not the time to press her for more information.
The screen on my phone goes to sleep, casting us back into darkness.
“If you want to call your mom, you should,” Miranda says. “But don’t call from here.”
“Why not?”
“We’re too close to the encampment. They monitor everything and they can triangulate the signal.”
“Where should I call from?”
“Follow me,” she says, and she starts up the mountain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SHE WALKS AHEAD OF ME, HER MOVEMENTS NEARLY SILENT.
To walk through a forest quietly is extremely difficult. To move through a forest quietly while hiking up a mountain in the dark is nearly impossible. But she achieves it almost effortlessly, her body moving in patterns both trained and reflexive. It tells me worlds about who she is and the life she has led up until now.
It also tells me that she doesn’t know how to hide her skill set from me. This is the difference between a soldier and an operative. A soldier is a soldier all the time, but an operative is myriad things, each of them adjusted to time, place, and situation.
This girl is a natural, but naturals need to be developed to become operatives. This camp has taken her only so far. I wonder what she could become with the proper guidance.
A troubling memory comes to me. It’s a memory of Mike and me in gym class years ago. It was before he killed my parents, before I knew about The Program.
We were doing a basketball rotation, and the coach had us doing wind sprints on the court—free throw line and back, midcourt line and back, full court and back, each with a 180-degree turn to develop our flexibility and speed. Mike ran next to me, matching me move for move.
When we were walking back to the locker room after, he turned to me.
“I saw you out there,” he said. “You’ve got natural skills.”
“Nah, I’m too short for basketball,” I said. I was only twelve, and I hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet.
“Not just for basketball. In general,” Mike said.
The comment passed without my thinking much about it.
That was almost five years ago, but I think about it now as I walk behind Miranda.
I am assessing skills, just like Mike did. In his case, he was secretly recruiting a new operative.
But what am I doing?
I am keeping myself safe. No more than that.
I push the memory away.
As I move behind Miranda, I make sure I do not give away my own skills. I step on fallen branches from time to time, brush against dry leaves, take two steps when only one is needed. I may have made it out of the encampment and snared Miranda during a tracking maneuver, but I can muddy her impressions of me now, lead her to think that luck played a greater role in my success than it did.