Shine (13 page)

What?
The car fell into a stunned silence. Only the sleeping Dylan hadn’t reacted.

Connor gazed at Siobhan so serenely, I wondered if we’d heard wrong.

“You’re breaking up?” Mickey exclaimed. “As in, the two of you, not going out anymore?”

Connor nodded. “Yeah, but not until we start school next month.”

“This way we can enjoy the time we have,” Siobhan said, “without angsting over whether it’s going to end.”

“We’ll still be friends,” Connor added.

“Totally. The alternative was trying to do that whole long-distance thing two hundred miles apart.” She unwrapped the plastic from the
sandwich she’d packed. “We’ve seen too many friends go through that, and someone always ends up crushed.”

“Usually by the end of September,” Connor said. “It’s inevitable.”

Megan looked mortified. “It is?”

“Not for everyone,” Siobhan blurted. “I’m sure you and Mickey will be fine.”

Dylan gave a quiet snort, his eyes still closed. “Nice save, Siobhan.” Apparently he wasn’t asleep after all.

“You guys are equally cool with this?” I asked Connor and Siobhan.

“Uh-huh.” She studied her bread crust. “I hate flaxseeds. They look like deer ticks.”

Connor reached for her sandwich. “Let me exterminate them for you.”

“No, I’ll deal.” She went to bite the sandwich, then handed it to him. “On second thought, thanks.”

I watched their familiar, easy exchange. They were the best-matched couple I’d ever known, and now they were throwing it all away.

Meanwhile, up front, Mickey gripped the steering wheel, and Megan sat with her arms crossed over her chest, her face turned away from him. Siobhan and Connor’s discussion had thrown gasoline onto the flames of Mickey and Megan’s own long-distance-relationship tension.

Though my stomach was knotting up from nerves, the smell of Siobhan’s ham sandwich made me hungry. I opened a bag of cheese puffs, the crackle of plastic sounding as loud as a shotgun in the strained silence.

“We shouldn’t have said anything,” Connor murmured to Siobhan behind me. “It was stupid timing.”

“You’re saying I’m stupid?” Siobhan snapped.

“We both are. We should’ve thought how they’d react, is all. Now we’re stuck with them all weekend.”

Dylan and I exchanged a worried look. If this operation failed because of relationship drama, I was going to scream.

In the front seat Megan wheedled, “I just don’t see why I can’t come with you next weekend.”

“I don’t see why you’d
want
to.” Mickey dragged a tense, freckled hand through his wavy brown hair. “I’ll be sitting around waiting for furniture to be delivered. There won’t even be electricity yet.”

The heat of embarrassment crept over my cheeks. I hated when they fought in front of us.

“It’ll be romantic,” Megan said to Mickey.

“It’ll be hot as hell without air-conditioning. You’d complain the whole time.”

“No, I wouldn’t!” Her whine gained an edge of rage, then softened. “I swear I won’t.”

“See what I mean?” Connor said to Siobhan.

“Okay, fine. It was stupid to tell them at the beginning of the trip. Happy?”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Connor kiss the top ridge of Siobhan’s multi-pierced ear. “I got you to admit you were wrong. I rock.”

She laughed, leaning into him and wrapping her hand around his thigh. “Shut up.”

“It’s not worth you getting in trouble,” Mickey told Megan. “Your mom would kill us if she caught you going away overnight with me.”

“I’m going away with you now.”

“As part of a group. Your mom can tell herself you’ll be sleeping in Aura’s room.”

“Maybe I will.” Megan clicked her seat-belt latch and snapped the strap away from her shoulder.

“What are you doing? Watch it!” Mickey said as she clambered over the center console.

“I’m taking a break.” Megan plopped into the seat between me and Dylan. Her tone was angry, but there were tears behind it, and her ruddy skin was even more flushed than usual. She needed a distraction.

I took out the small green memo pad I’d started carrying since Simon told me to get information from Nicola. I wrote,
I want to try to change a shade to a ghost on the fall equinox.
I wiped off the cheese puffs’ orange powder and passed the pad and pen to Megan, pointing at Dylan so she’d show him, too.

Megan read the note, then shoved the pad into Dylan’s chest. “Are you crazy?” she whispered, though Mickey had cranked the music back up.

Dylan wrote on the paper.
You’ll be a total puke machine.

Me:
If I could do it for Logan, maybe I can do it for anyone. SHOULD do it for anyone.

“Why?” Megan asked out loud.

Dylan proceeded to scribble on the pad without taking it off her leg. She tensed at his almost-touch, but didn’t brush him off.

Dylan:
Because being a shade sucks. Logan said so.

Me:
Will you guys come with me in case I pass out?

They nodded without hesitation.

Megan:
How will you find a shade?

Me:
The DMP started a list on their website last week.
It was like the FBI’s Most Wanted list, except these poor souls usually hadn’t committed any crimes.
I’ll call their names and tell them to fly through me like Logan did. If it works, they’ll be ghosts again.

Megan flipped the page and wrote,
THIS IS CRAZY!

I gestured to the SUV around us, as if to say,
We’re heading into Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, to find the hidden laboratory of a government agency, so we can rescue my boyfriend and send him on the first plane back to Scotland.

She snatched the bag of cheese puffs from my lap. “Good point.”

Around two o’clock we reached the area in the mountain forest where the DMP had taken me and Zachary. Connor was driving now, since he was the least likely to be recognized if we were stopped.

“You’d think there’d be a sign.” I twisted the end of my ponytail around my fingertip as I scanned the endless, thick forest. “Even the National Security Agency has a sign at the start of the highway exit.”

“And armed guards at the end of it,” Mickey grumbled behind us.

“That’s the thing.” Dylan peered through the windshield between Connor and Siobhan. “No DMP sign, probably not much security. If we do find it, maybe it’ll be easy to get in.”

“Or out,” Megan added, now in a better mood. Mickey’s doubts aside, the atmosphere in the car buzzed with anticipation.

Little by little, that anticipation turned to frustration, as we proceeded to find, as Dylan put it, “precisely dick.” Siobhan marked off
each part as we explored it thoroughly, but three hours later, we’d covered only a small portion of the county’s pothole-punched roads.

“We’re destroying the shocks on this thing,” Mickey murmured to Megan. “And for what?”

“It’s an SUV. Yeah, a froufrou one, but it’s still built for this. And how can you ask, ‘for what?’ ”

“I don’t even know this Zachary guy. Logan hated him.”

“No, he didn’t.” Dylan glared at his brother. “Not at the end.”

Mickey gave a sullen sigh. My shoulders tingled with tension at his hostility. Also, I wondered what Dylan knew about Logan and Zachary that I didn’t.

I was about to ask when Siobhan shouted, “Is that it?”

Connor hit the brakes, jolting us against our seat belts. Behind us, someone honked.

Ahead on our right, a heavy-duty, pale-green steel box sat next to a narrow driveway. It showed no name or number.

“Let me get closer.” Connor steered the SUV toward the shoulder.

“Watch it!” Mickey said. “Don’t put us in the ditch.”

“Calm down.” Connor glanced in the side-view mirror. “I’m gonna let this jerkwad behind me pass. He’s been riding our bumper for miles.”

A big white box van zoomed by. The logo on the back tossed my heart into my throat.

SECURILAB
.

F
ollow him!” I pointed at the truck. “He’s going where we’re going.”

Connor jerked the steering wheel to the left to put the Escalade back on the road.

I explained. “SecuriLab is the company that makes BlackBox. They’re tied up tight with the DMP. If they’re out here in the middle of nowhere, they’re going to 3A.”

“Good eye, Aura!” Megan leaned forward for a high five.

We followed the SecuriLab van down ten miles of winding, nauseating highway, until it pulled onto a rough-paved, heavily wooded road to our left.

“Follow from farther back,” Dylan said, then noticed I’d twisted the seat belt strap around my wrist in my anxiety.

“Hey.” He unwrapped my hand. “We got it, okay?”

I stretched my fingers, which tingled with the return of blood. Our lucky streak would have to continue for me to share Dylan’s confidence.

We rounded a curve in time to see the SecuriLab van turn into a driveway, passing under an unmanned security gate.

“Now what?” Connor asked. “There’s no guard. Maybe we could lift the gate.”

“That guy used an ID card,” Mickey pointed out. “No way we can drive in.”

“Maybe we can walk in.” I tapped the back of the driver’s seat. “Let’s go back and see if there’s a fence.”

“Wait a few minutes,” Dylan warned. “There might be a camera at that security station. If they see us drive by again so soon, they’ll know we followed the van. They might run our license plate.”

I got the feeling Dylan was forming his plan of attack based on TV shows, movies, and video games. Still, what he said made sense.

Connor eventually turned the SUV around, and we proceeded back to the gate at 3A.

No fence. No armed guards. No plaque with the DMP insignia or even
PROPERTY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
. Just a dark road plunging into an even darker forest.

“Guys,” Siobhan said, “the GPS says we’re an hour away from our lake house. We could go there, change, maybe take a nap, then come back in the middle of the night.”

We all agreed—out loud at least. I longed to smash the SUV through the gate, drive up to Area 3A’s front door, and demand Zachary’s freedom.

But Siobhan was right. Stealth was our best bet. The moment I showed my cards to the DMP, the moment they knew I was doing something other than sitting around crying, or getting over Zachary by hanging out with Dylan, I’d lose the upper hand.

Assuming I had it in the first place.

“How do you spell SecuriLab?” Megan asked me, opening Mickey’s laptop.

I sat down next to her at the long dining table in the lake house’s rustic great room. “I’ve already done searches on them.” Using the library computers (I assumed the DMP was tracking my own laptop), I’d learned that SecuriLab was a multinational corporation charged with bribery in four different countries.

Megan ran a search, thumbing her sun-chapped bottom lip as she scrolled through the results.

“That’s interesting,” she said. “Their patent on BlackBox is running out in a few years.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means other companies can start making it. At the funeral home, there’s this new machine that takes the body’s—” She cut herself off. “Never mind.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t need an image of any machine doing stuff to Logan.

“Anyway, my dad always complains how expensive it is, because the company that invented it still has the patent. Their obnoxious salesmen are pushing it big-time right now. That way when other companies can start making it, all the funeral homes will have already
bought one from the inventor company. They’re greedy bastards, but smart greedy bastards.”

Because of her job, Megan was even more jaded than most post-Shifters. Death was big business.

“Let’s go lower in the search results,” she said. “The weird stuff is always on pages ten and up.”

We kept scanning, and finally on the twenty-sixth page of results, a rumor-mill website contained the heading: “BlackBox maker hiring private spies?”

“Uh-oh.” Megan clicked.

According to the article, SecuriLab was paying a group called Nighthawk to perform corporate espionage. Nighthawk employed ex-spooks from intelligence agencies all over the world—CIA, KGB, MI6, Israel’s Mossad—along with ex-special forces operatives.

Megan read a quote aloud. “ ‘Everyone does it,’ said an anonymous source. ‘Corporations have to get the edge on their competitors.’ ” She slanted a blue-eyed gaze at me. “By hiring ex-assassins? I’m definitely majoring in business now. It’s a lot more exciting than I thought.”

“And this is more dangerous than we thought.” Mickey read the screen over her shoulder. “What if Nighthawk is at Area 3A? We could be going up against professional badasses tonight.”

The rest of them were milling nervously around the table. Instinctively my eyes went to Dylan, Operation Scot Free’s co-mastermind. He turned away and stared out the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the sun-spattered lake. From here the boaters, Jet Skiers, and swimmers looked so carefree. Their biggest concern was avoiding sunburn, or where to find good, cheap barbecue.