Chapter 13

Nothing had changed. We were stuck thirty feet in the air. Naked in a stupid tree in a dark forest. And yet, with a simple smile, Noah made me feel like magic. He was better than any cheerleader.

Balling my right hand into a fist, I flexed hard to make the veins in my biceps pop. "You underestimate the muscle in this arm at your own risk."

Noah squeezed. "That"s rock hard."

"Later, we"ll celebrate with something even more rock hard."

Yeah, yeah. I know. Gonna need a little more than a good throwing arm.

The bookies would be drawing their lines in favor of the other team. I could create a little aggro, but the odds were high they"d bat us down in less time than it takes to play a fifteen-minute quarter.

They wouldn"t kill us, and they wouldn"t knock us around too much, but there was every chance they"d pump us full of those mindfuck drugs. We"d forget our escape attempt. Maybe forget we were ever on this island.

I hadn"t forgotten—not for one fucking minute—what Noah told me before about how they kept moving him around. Maybe they knocked him out as they thought of new questions to ask, but they also took the opportunity to keep changing the location.

It was an expensive but brilliant tactic. Keep the prisoner off-balance. Make him harder to trace.

Isolated as it was, this island might represent one of the few places where they felt safe giving us some access to the sun and the outdoors. Other places, presumably closer to civilization, would likely find us trapped in one of those nasty cells Noah described.

We had no reason to believe our next location would be any easier to escape. It would likely be harder, if not impossible.

We had to take our chance here or risk losing it forever.

They feel so fucking safe letting us wander free because we"re so far away from everything. How far you think you can fly a helicopter when you don"t even know how to take off? Or which direction you"re going?

I pushed the thought away. One problem at a time.

My glutes were getting numb. I shifted my weight around again. The branches we sat on felt knobbier than they had only a few minutes before.

Noah shifted too. Restlessness is contagious.

When we first picked up the sound of the helicopter beating through the air, we"d run around at manic speed to set up our trap before it was too late.

It had been silent for several minutes now. They"d landed on the beach.

They must know we were in the forest.

What were they waiting for?

"I can"t believe this shit." It wasn"t the first time I"d said it, but my nerves were getting to me. "Once it started getting late in the afternoon, I figured they weren"t going to come until tomorrow. Seems like it would be more of a hassle to chase us down in the dark."

"I thought so too, but now I see where we went wrong. The dark"s better for them."

"Yeah, yeah. It seems so obvious now. We"re the ones going in blind. They"ll have night-vision goggles. Infrared sensors. All the high-tech goodies."

If I tensed my butt muscles really hard and then relaxed them, I could stop that numb feeling from spreading out any more than it already had.

Noah shifted again in harmony. "Are you completely blind?"

Sort of, yeah. Not an answer he needed to hear.

A soft patter of rain on leaves silenced us both for a moment. The drizzle took its time filtering down through the broad leaves, but we were soon feeling it as a sort of clammy mist on our bare skin.

I shivered even though it wasn"t cold. You never forget you"re naked when you"re naked in a tree.

"Their flashlights will be visible a long way." I was talking to reassure myself. Noah was a smart guy. He didn"t need me to tell him.

"They"ll be switched off if they"re using the night-vision goggles..." He shivered too.

I scooted a little closer to him. Shared body heat felt like a reassurance we both needed.

"The rain is our friend there," I said. "As far as I know, night vision doesn"t work all that well in the rain. And if it picks up a little more, if it really starts coming down buckets of cats and dogs and frogs and..."

There was no "if" about it. The rain began pounding down harder and louder. More than a mere mist was getting through the foliage now. We were both getting drenched. Little waterfalls ran down my hunched spine.

Noah winged his elbow into my side.

A light was bobbing through the trees.

The rain didn"t deter the enemy.

It was showtime.