Victor got behind the wheel. I got into the back seat with Gabriel.
Within minutes of Victor turning the engine, Kota appeared. He rushed out, bag in hand, phone to his ear. He jumped into the front passenger seat just as Victor started rolling the car backward.
We were escaping.
Since Kota was on the phone as Victor drove, I kept quiet. I stretched, yawned, trying to wake myself further. I leaned into Gabriel as part of my memory returned. “Did Luke make it out?”
“He waited inside. Too risky to leave. He’ll meet us in the music room. There was security all over that place last night, so he decided to camp out.”
Security all over for one smoke bomb near midnight?
I rubbed at my cheek and settled back into the seat. He’d need a day off after this, after being up all night.
Gabriel yawned, stretched and put an arm over my shoulder, tucking me into him. We leaned in together, getting comfortable, although it made it harder not to fall back asleep.
Kota eventually spoke into the phone. “Hi, I’m calling in for Marie Sorenson. I need her records...” He paused. “Yes. We need her changed to home school with protected status.” Another pause. “Right. Thank. Let me know.” He hung up. He put his head back against the seat.
“Why did we run out of the house?” I asked.
“My mom was in the shower,” Kota said. “I wanted to get out before she started asking questions.”
“Did she talk to you last night?”
“No.” He turned his head. His eyes were dark with heavy circles.
I raised an eyebrow. “Have you even been to sleep?”
“Nope,” he said, blinking very slowly then looking at me and smiling in such a way that he actually looked a little crazy. His lashes fluttered across his green eyes, a little spark in them from the morning light shining in his face. “Good morning, by the way.”
Victor pulled into the parking lot of the diner and parked close to the security trailer. Gabriel jumped out before I could. “I’ll get them,” he said, and he dashed over to the trailer. He returned with a gray bookbag with a little pink patch on the outside. He shoved it into the seat between us before climbing in.
Once we were on the road again, I laughed a little. The whole rush this morning brought some sharp realization to me. “We really do need a house,” I said. “All of our stuff is everywhere.”
“I was looking at a few,” Victor said. “The thing is, most of the best options are either downtown...”
“No,” Kota said. “Not downtown.”
Victor nodded shortly. “Then the other places are around Mt. Pleasant, maybe out further in John’s Island.”
“I don’t want to be too far from downtown, still,” Kota said. He laughed shortly and put a palm to his forehead. “I know that’s sounding indecisive, but it’s going to take a lot more time to find a big house for all of us.”
His comment and the pause in the conversation had me sitting upright. Kota hadn’t objected to the house before, but I’d thought out of all of them, Kota would be the hardest to convince.
Gabriel rolled his head on the headrest of the back seat. He hadn’t shaved. Coarse hair lined his chin and cheeks, a little dark. His hair was combed in odd directions. He tried to fiddle with it using his fingers as a comb. “Uh, shouldn’t we get the BMW out? Shouldn’t that be first thing?”
“A recovery team was sent out,” Kota said. “Nathan and I were there before dawn to identify where the car went down. They’ll find it.”
“Will it be bad?” I asked. “Can it be fixed?”
Victor spoke, “I may have to get creative with what happened to it. Or find another one and just change the plate somehow without my parents knowing.”
I felt bad for Victor. He’d have to figure out how to not let his parents know about what really happened to the car. “Maybe you can use Mr. Blackbourne’s for now? Maybe they won’t notice?”
“We could,” Victor said. “I might do that tonight. Not that they pay attention too much. I could switch plates for now. But I’ll have a problem later if anyone checks the VIN number.”
“At least until we see if we can get your car fixed,” Kota said. “And Mr. Blackbourne will need a replacement.”
“Another reason for a house,” Gabriel said. “We can switch cars whenever we want.”
“I don’t need any more reasons,” Victor said.
“Another reason,” Gabriel said. He held up a couple of fingers, like he was ready to count off these reasons. “No running out the door without breakfast just to avoid Erica.”
“I’m not avoiding her,” Kota said. “We just don’t have the time this morning.”
“That’s avoiding.”
“Where’s North car?” I asked.
“North reported it stolen,” Kota said. “We don’t know where it is.”
My heart sunk. “We never found it?” I’d left the necklace he’d given me behind the seat. Not to mention he loved his Jeep. I’d hoped Volto ditched it like he had with Mr. Blackbourne’s car.
Kota shook his head but looked back at me again. “Don’t worry. It’ll turn up.”
“Maybe,” Gabriel said, sitting back again and crossing his arms. “If Volto didn’t sink that one, too.”
“If we don’t find it, we’ll get another one,” Kota said. “At this point, we’ll probably need some extra cars.”
Internally, I was laughing at myself. It wasn’t a good laugh, more something odd and out of frustration. A few days ago, I was on bed rest. Today was day two of being allowed back, and it was already wild. And who knew what would happen today. Volto was back. We were down two vehicles. Our mission last night seemed to have failed completely.
Maybe they thought nothing of the cars they needed to replace, but we needed to be more careful. He was probably right about that. Cars we could get. We couldn’t get another Nathan. He could have been seriously hurt last night.
It was really one more reason to get everything settled. Mr. Hendricks. Volto, if we could. Although, I found it odd that Volto was more interested in our activities around the school.
For weeks, we’d been away, and he had stopped. Why did he seem to go inactive and then come back now?
The big question was left hanging open. “Did we find out what was in the boxes going out? And what they brought in?”
“Food,” Kota said. “Just food. It seemed like similar supplies as well.”
“What? Why?”
“We’re trying to figure out why they were swapped. North ended up in a warehouse on the other side of town. It’s hard to explain and I don’t know the full details. We need to get to Mr. Blackbourne and find out.”
Another group meeting. They had more of those than I realized but I knew why now. And I realized they’d probably had a lot before I’d been allowed to join them.
We were safe now, that was good. “Kota?”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t tell the people you were on the phone with just now about Danielle. Didn’t she want out of school, too?”
“I don’t know how to ask about that without her parents getting involved. Her situation is different. We may need to put her into testing. See if she can qualify for some sort of local private school. Marie’s free to leave the school on her own, but we don’t want to tell her. A home school arrangement will give her mainly what she wants.”