Chapter 11

Irubbed my own chin stubble. "That isn"t how we get back to our lives. Right now, we"ve got nothing to negotiate with. They hold all the cards."

"Yeah." Noah lightly pinched my arm a little above the elbow. It was a sweet but possessive gesture, and he probably didn"t even know he was making it.

We couldn"t lose each other. Not again.

An idea kept tickling at the back of my brain. If I could talk it out to where I could actually see it...

"We don"t wait in the house, and we don"t go to them," I said slowly. "We force them to come to us."

"Make them chase, make them work for it." Noah"s smile was small and grim. "I"m tired of being jabbed with knock-out drugs. I"d love to see them on my end of the needle for a change."

"So it"s settled." I spoke with more assurance than I felt. "We lure where we want them. Somewhere they"ll be a little more off-balance. That gives us the best shot at turning the tide in our favor."

"Rah, rah, go team."

"You make a cute cheerleader. I"d love to see you with pom-poms."

He laughed.

My baby idea had plenty of holes. Easy to say we"d move them where we wanted them. But where did we want them? And how did we move them there?

Strategizing a football game was child"s play by comparison.

I gazed back into the trees. The forest looked darker than it had an hour before. There must be something we could do with that. The Vietnamese did all right against an enemy with superior firepower as long as they stuck to forests and tunnels.

"I got it," I said. "We dig a hole. Cover it up with leaves, lead them on a merry chase, and, um, there"s spikes at the bottom so when they crash through..."

Noah put up his hand in a stop sign. "You watch too many movies. We can"t spike people, Slate." His laugh was gentle. "Anyway, what spikes?"

"OK, so we just dig a really deep hole. So deep so they can"t just climb out." I was being ridiculous, but I still felt like I was on the verge of something, something...

"And how deep is that?"

"Depends on how high they can jump and lift. Twelve feet. Fourteen?"

"Sure, why not. It could work. If they break an ankle when they fall in."

If.

"We don"t have a shovel anyway." Head spinning, too restless to stay still, I waded a few steps into the water. Noah was happy to tag along.

A few more steps, and we were ankle-deep. Then the sea took in a breath, and the water ran out from under us. Noah wrapped an arm around my hips to pull me closer. We braced each other against each rise and fall. At times, the water roared back higher at mid-shin—and almost hard enough to knock an unprepared person to their hands and knees.

Together, though, we were never unprepared. Together, we stood tall and strong.

"I should be able to figure this out," I said. "I"m so close. I can feel it."

"We will figure it out," Noah said. "The first idea was never going to be the best idea. That isn"t how ideas work. Take it from me, I"m in computers."

"I"m not a desk guy. I"m supposed to be fast on my feet."

"How do you think I feel? A desk guy without a desk? Other guys who do what I do, they"re young billionaires, and me..." One arm kept hugging me tight to his hip. The other gestured widely at this crazy place. This crazy situation.

We were both blaming ourselves.

Not helpful.

As the sun set in glorious streaks of scarlet and tangerine, we returned to shore to rummage through the backpack. The last moments of fading light had cued us to pull out the stuff we"d have to either eat or dump.

Of course, a smart man would have done this before he hiked around the entire perimeter of an island with a full pack on his back.

Under pressure, it"s easy to overlook the little things. What else had I missed?

"Why couldn"t they include a few matches?" Noah was setting out an odd selection of foods for dinner. "This is a survival situation."

"They didn"t want us to survive outside of our golden cage."

Also they didn"t want to make it too easy for us to set fires and make Molotov cocktails.

A heavily padded pocket turned out to contain two six-packs of fresh eggs. I pulled them free with a frown.

Lucky thing they didn"t break during the hike.

"What do we do with these?" I asked. "I never eat raw eggs because, you know, maybe salmonella."

"Gulls must have a natural immunity against that," Noah said. "They eat raw eggs every day."

"Flying rats, or so I"ve heard."

"I think that"s pigeons."

"Whoever it is, I"d better set out the eggs farther down the beach so they don"t crap all over us in their enthusiasm." I started to get up, but then I got that ticklish sensation in the back of my brain again.

Noah lifted an eyebrow. "Sounds good to me, but..."

"Yeah. I think I just changed my mind. They"re packed pretty good. Nothing"s broken. I guess there isn"t much harm in holding onto them a while longer."

He shrugged but the light in his eyes had gone inward. Or did I only think so because it was getting dark so fast?

"The gulls won"t come at night anyway. And I might be getting an idea..."

"Oh, yeah?" Noah was looking far beyond me. "I hope it"s an idea of how to get your pilot"s license."

That"s when I heard it too.

The chop-chop-chop of helicopter blades.

So much for the cool plan of drawing in our enemy so we could steal their boat.