“Let go of me!” yelled the Alchemist. “I need to get through!”
“Sir, get down on the ground!”
I didn’t stick around to see what happened. I let them fight it out and finally slipped through the door. There, another well-meaning guard was trying to keep all the evacuees in an orderly group. I ignored him and immediately broke off from the others, trying to get my bearings. We’d actually come out near the front of the hotel, and across a busy boulevard, I could see the shopping center Adrian had been to last night. I began running toward it, wishing we were in a much busier city—like Las Vegas—where I’d have a crowd to lose myself in. As it was, I was pretty conspicuous, and I soon heard shouts. Glancing back, I saw two more people in sunglasses charging toward me. I was more exhausted from my earlier climb than I’d expected, and that type of physical exhaustion translated to difficulty with magic use.
I was nearing a crosswalk that would take me across to the shopping center, and I began to slow down. Frantically, I wondered what on earth they really expected to do. We were in public, in broad daylight. Did they think they could just grab me off the street? Yes, I realized, that’s exactly what they’d do, and they’d find a way to justify it later and write it off to any witnesses. They did it all the time with supernatural phenomena. How much harder could it be with a human abduction?
The light changed, and I sprinted across the street, moving as fast as my out-of-shape muscles would carry me. It wasn’t enough, though. The Alchemists were gaining. I reached the shopping complex’s parking lot and headed straight into the superstore my clothes had come from. Without looking back to see how close my pursuers were, I darted straight into an aisle of stationery and murmured the weak invisibility spell. I felt the magic settle around me, and then I hurried out into another aisle in case they’d seen my original destination. No one immediately came after me, and I took a roundabout way through some other aisles to finally circle back and get a vantage on the store’s entrance. One of the Alchemists was stationed at the door, and I had to assume the other was searching the store. With them actively looking and expecting to see me, the spell wouldn’t hold if we crossed paths. There was a much more powerful invisibility amulet in my bag, but I hated to waste it when I was so close to meeting up with Adrian. I either had to find another way out of here—without running into the roaming Alchemist—or distract the one by the door.
Continually ducking and looking all around me, I zigzagged toward a display of bathing suits that looked like they were made of pretty flammable material. Lighting a fire wasn’t a problem for me. I could do a fireball in my sleep. The problem was, I didn’t want to attract attention right away. As soon as my fire was noticed, all attention—including the Alchemists’—would head that way, which was what I wanted. But I needed to be well away from there when it happened.
I closed my eyes and summoned up the smallest of sparks in my hand. It was difficult keeping it from growing because my work with Ms. Terwilliger had focused on making the biggest, baddest fireballs imaginable. This one, though, needed to be just a kindling, like I’d made in re-education. Once I had it sustained, I set it on top of a khaki pair of swim trunks—out of principle—and then backed up as quickly as possible, crouching near some carts. Although I could see tendrils of smoke, the swimsuit didn’t actually ignite as quickly as I’d expected, and long, agonizing moments went by as I waited for people to notice it. The Alchemist at the door held his position, and then to my horror, I saw the second one approaching, obliviously unaware that he was headed straight toward me. I was trying to figure out how to get out of his line of sight when someone shouted by the display, and finally, true flames erupted from the cheap material.
The Alchemist headed toward me stopped and stared at the fire while the one at the door gaped as well. With their attention diverted, I was able to slip past them and run three stores down the strip mall to a drugstore. Outside it, an idling tour bus marked LAS VEGAS was loading up senior citizens, and in my haste, I ran into one of them. He blinked in surprise as we made eye contact. I must have appeared out of nowhere for him, but as so often happened when humans encountered the unexplained, he shook his head and turned back toward the bus.
I headed straight to the back of the store, toward the pharmacy, and found Adrian in the contraceptive aisle, as I’d known I would.
“Hope you picked out something good,” I said.
“Thank God,” he breathed, wrapping me in a huge embrace. “I hated leaving you but thought our odds were better if we split up first. I knew you were smart enough to get over here.”
“To the place you forgot to go last night?” I asked with a smile. “Yeah, I figured it out, but I had a couple of tagalongs. They’re down at the megastore . . . which is also about to be visited by a fire truck, I think. Wish I’d found something less conspicuous.”
“Can’t be worse than me,” he said. “When I heard the explosion in the casino, I used spirit to throw a whole bunch of Alchemists around in order to get out. I don’t think it was obvious that I was the one responsible, but those places are packed with cameras that are now probably going to have some very questionable footage.”
“Actually,” I said, “the Alchemists most likely disabled all the cameras or put them on a loop before infiltrating the place. They wouldn’t want their activities recorded any more than yours.”
Adrian looked relieved. “Well, that’s something. But now what’s the plan? Should we call Marcus for help?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want him coming back here and risking himself when this town is crawling with Alchemists.”
“How do you think they tracked us? The car?”
I sighed, feeling foolish over something that had occurred to me earlier. “Honestly, I’m guessing they had eyes and ears in all the nearest towns to the re-education center, in the very event of something like this happening. They probably put our descriptions out, and someone reported back. Maybe a hotel employee. I should’ve considered that and gone a lot farther before we stopped for the night. This is my fault.”
“The only ones at fault are those freaks who lock people up in dark cells in Death Valley,” said Adrian. “So stop beating yourself up, Sage, and use that beautiful brain I know and love.”
I swallowed and nodded, steeling myself. “Okay. We need to get out of this town fast, and I think I know how.”