Chapter 32

Noah"s plan was simple. Follow the programmed destination as long as we dared. Get close. Get some clues.

Get out.

It sounded suspiciously easy. Too easy? I rubbed my forehead. My head was fuzzy from too little sleep.

Despite the noise-canceling headphones, the chopper was noisy. And it rattled. Were they supposed to rattle this much even with the storm clearing off?

As the thunderclouds rained out or rolled away, our visibility expanded from horizon to far horizon. All I saw was water. If the plan was to get an idea of where the baddies were and then flap off somewhere else, what happened if there wasn"t any somewhere else in sight?

There"ll be something. The volcanoes that create one island create others. That"s why islands come in strings.

Archipelagos.

If I could remember a word like that, I was thinking clearly. Wasn"t I? "Yeah," I said slowly. "It"ll work. We can do this."

"There"s at least two ways it gets us home." The headphones made Noah"s voice sound like he was whispering in my head. It was surprisingly intimate. "If your guys are tracking us, we"d have something they could move on. If they"ve lost us, we have something we can bring back for them to use without demanding anything else from us."

My blood chilled suddenly. Anything else like Noah"s arrest. Our side wanted him too. I shouldn"t let myself forget that.

My eyes closed. They were so heavy. I should keep talking. Noah was just as tired, Noah needed my help to stay awake.

The sun coming up had helped. But only a little. Noah had the controls to focus on, but I was just sitting here strapped in tight, and it was so easy to nod off...

My whole body jerked awake. "What if the bad guys are tracking this chopper?" I didn"t sound afraid but I also didn"t sound awake.

"There"s no if about it." Noah"s voice in my head was all very crisp and practical. "Of course, they can track their own chopper. As soon as we divert from the programmed path, they"ll know something"s wrong."

"Why wouldn"t they know that already?" I asked a little less sleepily.

"What they already know is we tried to take off and came back down That can be explained away by the intensity of the storm. It was too dangerous to keep going. But now that it"s clearing up, they"re probably watching pretty closely to see if we divert again."

"So you"re delaying the moment you have to divert. When were you going to mention that?"

"When you thought of it anyway."

I didn"t say anything.

"There was no point in worrying both of us."

I still didn"t say anything.

"I"m sorry, Slate. This is all my fault. If we never met, if we never got involved... I should have let them keep chasing you away from the park."

I could never stay chased away from you.

I didn"t say so. I didn"t want to forgive him too easily. I"m not a pushover for a pretty face.

Oh, who was I kidding? I wasn"t angry. There was nothing to forgive.

My hand crab-walked over to his leg. Squeezed gently.

We flew on.

The sky cleared as the sun rose higher. For all my good intentions, my eyes kept closing against sun and sea, and then I"d drop off into an uneasy sleep. Every time I woke, it was with a jerk.

Time was becoming a vague concept, and there seemed to be an awful lot of ocean out there. What was the range of these things? I"d half-expected somebody"s Air Traffic Control system to have challenged us by now. I"d fully expected land, if only in the distance.

The cool plan should have been working by now. Instead, there were no ships, no islands, no voices on the radio. Once or twice, we spotted another aircraft far in the distance, but they said nothing to us, and Noah wasn"t sure how to initiate anything with them.

It should have been so easy.

Unless Noah had a whole secret history he"d forgotten to mention, he"d be outed as an untrained pilot the minute we were asked to identify ourselves. The helicopter might or might not have a flight plan. We didn"t know the first thing about communicating properly with actual aviation professionals.

But there was no land down there. No airports. No challenges from ATC. Nobody around to get suspicious about how untrained we were.

Just a whole lot of nothing as far as the eye could see.

"If we didn"t steal this helicopter, we could have been lost for a very long time," I said.

"We didn"t steal it. We commandeered it because of an emergency." He was getting silly from lack of sleep too.

"I"m pretty sure that word doesn"t mean what you think it means. We don"t have the authority to commandeer anything."

"We had the moral authority. We were kidnap victims."

Did it work that way? It sounded good when Noah said it, but I still wasn"t sure.

A bell chimed.

"What"s that about?" I asked.

"Low on fuel."

I wish I hadn"t asked.

"We have to be getting close. They wouldn"t send a helicopter out just to drop us in an ocean." Noah didn"t sound sure. Shouldn"t we already be seeing something?

I squinted. Squeezed his leg for good luck. Sat up straight. "That"s gotta be it. On the horizon."

"Mmm, I guess."

"What?"

"It"s not land."

"What?" I blinked.

"It"s a ship of some kind."

Just what we needed. An aircraft carrier. Somebody"s nervous Navy ready to shoot us down.

No. Doesn"t make sense. We"re still flying the programmed track.

That ship is what we"re looking for. It"s gotta be theirs.

So much for the cool plan to check the place out, then land somewhere else. There wasn"t anywhere else.

The low fuel chime sounded again.