There is no bag for the man to take. Evan follows him through the crowded terminal, doing his best not to limp.

  They find themselves alone in an elevator heading to Parking Level 3.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Bob says, dropping the pretense of formality the instant the doors slide shut. “Jack’s had a heart attack. He’s in the ICU. And it…”—a faint quaver of the voice and Evan wonders how this man knows Jack or if he knows him at all—“… it doesn’t look good.”

  A wave of heat washes through Evan, setting his nerves tingling. It cannot be true. It simply cannot be true.

  He mouths the words his training has placed at the ready: “Who’s Jack?”

  “Jack Johns,” the man says. “I know there are comms directives. I know you are likely feeling denial. But this is real, son. It is serious. And we need to discuss what comes next for you.”

  Evan’s vision grows glassy. But he will not cry. Not right now. Not in an elevator with Bob.

  He tries not to think about flannel shirts and the smell of single-barrel scotch. Or about Jack’s study with its mallard-green walls. Or about the way Jack smirks when he is amused, that square baseball-catcher head bobbing slightly.

  He tries not to think about what Jack means to him. And what it will mean to be in the world without him.

  Now the elevator doors part.

  Now he is following Bob on numb legs across the parking garage. A family passes them, kids quarreling, parents pack-mule burdened with bags, tugging rolling suitcases on either side of them.

  Once they’ve passed, Bob says quietly, “You will be assigned another handler. Your training will continue uninterrupted.”

  “Can…?” Evan’s throat closes off. He was going to say Can I see him? but he knows to never confirm anything about his relationship with Jack. He wonders when and how this next phase can be initiated if he cannot communicate about what is happening. He wonders how he will ever continue on his trajectory to become Orphan X without Jack at his back looking out for him.

  They cut between two SUVs, sliding alongside a white cleaning van.

  Bob stops, facing Evan, hands resting on his shoulders, turning him slightly. “What?” he says, his tone mercifully kind. “What would you like to ask?”

  Evan’s lower jaw is trembling ever so slightly. He clenches. He does not trust his throat or his voice.

  A faint purring sounds behind him.

  A spit hood slams over his head.

  He is ripped violently backward into the van.

  Slammed on his stomach. A hefty knee crushes into the space between his shoulder blades. Powerful hands zip-tie his wrists behind his back. A needle slips into his neck and he feels the press of warmth into his bloodstream, spreading through shoulder and pectoral and then drawing across the rest of his torso like a funeral shroud.

  Has he just been killed?

  Has he been captured by enemies of the Program?

  Or is this another more brutal phase of training?

  The First Commandment slips into his brain—Assume nothing—and then he wobbles out of consciousness into whatever comes next.

  * * *

  His eyes are crusted shut.

  He is next-level cold, the air a brisk fifty-something Fahrenheit.

  He lies in the dirt. A grave?

  Is he dead?

  He pries his eyes open. The sun feels blinding, though as his vision adjusts he sees it is 4:00 P.M. low in a dreary gray sky. He is in the middle of a forest. Yellow birch and pine thrust up like totem poles.

  He tries to sit up, realizes his wrists are still bound behind him. His shoulders are both asleep, as well as his left arm.

  He rolls onto his side. Squat-hunching, he tries to work his bound hands around to his front. He cannot get them over the thick tactical soles of his combat boots.

  The next fifteen minutes are spent working his laced-up boots off by shoving them against each other, bringing fresh agony to his injured toe. The left boot finally pries free. He uses his right big toe to tug at the paracord shoelace of the left boot until it, too, pops free.

  Now he can swing his hands beneath his feet to get them to his front side. He stands up, pine needles poking through his socks. The ground is so cold it feels wet. The flex-cuffs are standard, made of durable polymers. Using his teeth, he tightens them even more. Then he brings his fists up over his head and slams them down across his rising knee.

  A jolt of pain rocks through his forearms but nothing else happens.

  He braces himself, does it again. The flex-cuffs snap free.

  He has control of all four limbs now. Such as they are.

  His pockets have been emptied. No bundles of hundred-dollar bills, no Spanish passport, no credit card under a phony name.

  He has nothing aside from a thin layer of clothes. This is how survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training goes.

  SERE is hell.

  There is nothing Evan hates more.

  He collects himself.

  First things first.

  Boots back on, lace tightly.

  As he rises once more, his back aches.

  He is not dressed to weather a night in the forest. Not in February.

  He has no idea how long he has been unconscious or where he is.

  He has been left on the side of a mountain slope. Okay. Catch up to reality and embrace it. Reality, after all, is undefeated.

  He scrabbles along a rocky ridge until he comes to a break in the trees. A constricted view shows high elevation and familiar mountain peaks. It appears that he is looking down on the Piedmont foothills, which puts him somewhere in the Bull Run Mountains of Northern Virginia. He estimates he is seventy klicks from Jack’s farmhouse, the place he has called home since his thirteenth year. At nightfall, he’ll be able to orient better by the stars. If he hasn’t frozen to death by then.

  He has done much of his SERE training in these mountains.

  Though his firecracker toe will slow him down, if he takes the best route sticking to moderate terrain, he can average a bit over five kilometers an hour. That means fourteen hours of hard hiking to get home.

  He is depleted from travel and beach runs and underwater knot tying and O-training and the impromptu toe surgery and the cortisol and prolactin wash of thinking Jack was going to die on him. Calorie depletion, drug withdrawal, and the stress of being kidnapped don’t help.

  He is sitting down on a rocky outcropping.

  His groggy head tips into his hands.

  He is alive. Jack is not dead.

  He is overcome with emotion, everything rushing him all at once. He feels it pressing through the back of his face, constricting his throat, loosening his sinuses.

  He yells. A deep-chested bellow of grief and pain and fear that rolls out across the valley and comes back to him. The echo is the loneliest sound he’s ever heard.

  One primal scream is all he will allow himself.

  Energy is low and night is coming. He has to get to work.

  He is down to a long-sleeved T-shirt and cammy pants and nothing else. He stuffs his shirt with moss for warmth and then finds a stream in which to wash his toe. It looks angry but not yet infected. The chill stream shocks him alert. The freezing water is exceedingly painful but he holds the foot under until the toe goes numb. Always clean your gear even when the gear is just body parts. The thought of fourteen hours of hiking on a bum foot elicits in him utter dread, but he pushes the sentiment down.

  As he pulls his socks back on, he is struck by a lightning bolt of hope. The twenty-dollar bill. It takes a few tries to peel up the right boot’s insole, but there it is.

  Bob & Co. clearly missed it when they dumped him out here.

  He realizes he is laughing out loud like a crazy person.

  Twenty bucks is not much. But it’s not nothing. Twenty bucks opens up his options.

  Nightfall is coming on. To avoid freezing, he needs to get moving. The first stars are blinking into visibility, and his training tells him to orient himself and go. Hiking will work up body heat and that will keep him alive.

  And yet.

  With a twenty-dollar bill there might be another way. Does he risk waiting to find out?

  The path up the mountain is steep and rocky. It looks to be no more than a few kilometers, but already dusk is crowding in, messing with his depth perception. He doesn’t have a lot of energy to waste, let alone time spent shivering in the cold.

  But he takes the risk, scrambling upslope.

  He gets near the peak, a clear patch with a panoramic view.

  Then he waits.

  Darkness bleeds slowly into what’s left of dusk. He studies the horizon.

  The stars come clearer.

  There is still nothing in sight but endless trees and slopes and valleys.

  He is just beginning to think that he bet wrong when he sees it to the east—a distant glow of electricity at the edge of a valley. It is a mirage? He waits for the last glow to leach from the sky, turning up the volume on those man-made lights.

  A town.

  He gauges it at ten klicks.

  Ten klicks beats seventy every time.

  He starts off.

  The going is rough. Between hiking intervals, he starts fires to coax frostbite out of his fingers, but never pauses for long. The sky is pregnant and he has to beat the rain. Beneath a rotting log, he finds a stand of browning cattails to eat. He takes the last third of the distance in a single go, his feet rubbed raw in his boots.

  When he finally stumbles out of the woods, bedraggled like a mountain man, he can scarcely breathe because his teeth are chattering so badly. He is at the edge of a small town and there are lights and movement all around, so much sudden humanity that his head swims. He stares at what he is looking at, trying to make it make sense.

  A traveling fair.

  And not a small one.

  There is a massive Ferris wheel and spinny rides and trailers and hot-dog stalls and carnival games. There are families and couples holding hands and carnival workers of various ages. He drifts forward in stunned disbelief, passing a strongman game where guys are lined up to smash a lever with a rubber-headed mallet. A figure-eight coaster whooshes by, the car sending out a wash of air and screams. A colorful sign over a house of mirrors spells out a devil’s promise: WHY NOT NOW? FUNN FUNN FUNN!! An exhausted mom hip-carries a toddler inexplicably swathed in a ladybug costume. “No, Madison,” she intones. “The Dragon Wagon went ni-night.”

  Given Evan’s current state and lack of group social experiences, his brain hardly knows how to process what he is seeing.

  People pay money. To strap themselves into machines. Which throw them around in a completely safe manner. So they can experience—what? Fake risk? Zero-stakes fear? Ordinary life confounds him. How far this all seems from the concrete jungle he grew up in and the wild and dangerous life he navigates now. His are worlds that break people apart and—if they’re lucky—remake them stronger.

  He drifts past a shooting-gallery game that is clearly rigged, the misalignment of the sights on the barrels evident even at distance. He notes where an anchor bolt could be loosened on a Tilt-A-Whirl to make the track come apart and cause disaster. He thinks back to that three-mile night swim he’d undertaken through shark-infested waters with his feet, ripped-open big toe and all, rammed into Inquisition flippers and can scarcely believe it was less than twenty-four hours ago.

  People are staring at him and he realizes he has forgotten to pull the moss out from beneath his shirt. He finds a vacant porta-potty and tugs the natural insulation free. In the tiny clouded mirror he does his best to clean himself up, but the water leaks slowly from the plastic faucet and the sewage reek is revving his OCD; he can practically feel the stench taking up residence in his lungs.

  He comes back out.

  Light-headed from exertion and calorie depletion, he stumbles on the two plywood steps and bumps into a passerby.

  The guy wheels on him. Whorls of facial hair form a ragged almost-beard. Around Evan’s age, he looks ropy and wolfish, a too-big jean jacket hanging on his tall frame. His name tag, CLAY, sports the carnival logo.

  Evan says, “Sorry.”

  “You drunk, man? A meth-head?”

  Clay shoves him. Evan lets him.

  Evan says, “No.”

  “This is a family place, man.” There is booze on Clay’s breath, something cheap and syrupy like triple sec. “You look like a fuckin’ hobo.”

  Clay goes to shove him again but Evan swats his hand aside.

  “Don’t,” Evan says. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Not in the mood?” Clay snickers. “Or just scared?”

  On the main thoroughfare, people keep whisking by, the altercation by the row of porta-potties relatively unseen . Evan cannot kill anyone. Jack has recounted the cautionary tales—the SEAL who accidently snapped a guy’s neck in a bar fight in Virginia Beach, the Delta candidate who paralyzed a mouthy outlaw biker at a gas station when the guy fell back in a fight and hit his head on a curb. Evan stares at Clay’s throat. He can see the pulse beating faintly in the side of his neck. But it cannot happen.

  Never let an innocent die. The Tenth Commandment.

  And the Eighth: Never kill a kid.

  But oh how he wants to.

  Clay sucks his teeth at him. “Not tonight, dear, says the scared little faggot. I’m not in the mood.”

  Evan shows his palms, backpedaling. Clay holds his spot and eye contact, watching Evan go.

  Once Evan disappears into the crowd, he searches out food. Everything is junky—cotton candy, caramel popcorn, funnel cake. He cannot risk the crash after a sugar high. One stall has a bag of FunTime trail mix for $3.99.

  The family in line ahead of him debate what to do with a knocked-out three-year-old in a stroller. “We’d better play the keep-the-baby-awake game till we get him in the car,” the dad says. He starts to tickle the child, who stirs and grunts.

  The grandmother considers the sleeping boy, one angular arm flopped to her side, hand perched out from the wrist as if awaiting a cigarette holder. Her head is drawn back with Dorothy Parker wry cynicism. “Perhaps a shock collar,” she observes.

  Her daughter swats her: “Mother!”

  Evan buys his little bag of protein, breaking the precious and slightly moist twenty-dollar bill. The girl working the register is high-school cute, with baby-fat cheeks and braces.

  He asks, “Is there a bus stop nearby, ma’am?”

  “‘Ma’am’? Ain’t you cute?”

  A surge of self-consciousness rolls through him. He knows he looks a mess with his dirt-smeared cheeks and stretched-out lowest-bidder navy shirt. Part of him is still back at the Pride House Group Home in his worn-thin foster-kid jeans, hungry and filthy, the kind of boy that respectable folks crossed the street to avoid.

  The girl points southward. “’Bout a half mile that way. They’re running ’em late ’cuz the carnival.”

  Her skin is shiny and clean, her breath watermelon gum. She seems like something from a movie, something perfect and pure around which he deserves no place.

  Again he senses the dried dirt streaks on his arms, the side of his neck, and he lowers his eyes. “Thank you.”

  Sitting on a bale of hay, he picks out the almonds, peanuts, yogurt-covered raisins, and dark chocolate chips, eschewing the mini-marshmallows. On an adjacent bale, two scrawny middle-school kids wearing black concert T-shirts discuss a stuffed-animal prize they won, a salamander in pajamas and roller skates.

  “So lame,” one kids snickers. “Like, why would an axolotl wear PJs with axolotls on it? It’s not like humans go around wearing suits with pictures of little humans on them.”

  Through a break in the stream of carnivalgoers, Evan spots Clay across the way. Now he has two friends with him and he is leaning to talk to them out of the side of his mouth, his gaze locked on Evan.

  “Not as lame as the roller skates,” the nerdy friend says. “Real useful for all their extensive land travel. Like: ‘There goes that highly mobile axolotl!’”

  Clay and his buddies knife through the crowd, heading Evan’s way.

  Evan thinks, Here we go.

  He rises, moving quickly in the opposite direction, toward the scattering of trailers he noted on the east side of the carnival.

  The crowd thins out as he nears the park’s periphery. The area is unlit, though the glow of the rides follows him. He hears shuffling footsteps behind him, quickening.

  “Ole boy looks homeless,” one of the other guys says.

  “And scared,” Clay’s voice pipes in. “Go hand in hand, Franky.”

  Evan takes a hard right around a corner, heading up a dark alley hemmed in by trailers on either side. The last in line are parked tightly perpendicular against the side of a barn, forming a makeshift cul-de-sac.

  Precisely what he is seeking. There are three of them and one of him. He can guard his back here, the dead end horseshoeing him. And the position gives him three walls to shove off for leverage, shatter noses against, bounce heads off.

  These boys, they think they’ve cornered him alone.

  But that means they have to be alone with him.

  As he heads into the cul-de-sac, the light of the Ferris wheel spills across his shoulders, laying his shadow clear on the ground before him. He can see the three kids’ shadows as well, sweeping around the corner, stretching along the sides of the trailers. He gauges distance.

  “Ole boy took a wrong turn,” Franky’s voice says. “Whatja think, Dale? Think he needs a escort outta here?”

  Laughter.

  “You ran the wrong way, m’man,” Clay says. “’S what happens when you run scared.”

  Franky again: “You scared, ole boy? What you think we’re gonna do to you?”

  Dale now: “Definitely scared. Look at him. Gimp leg and everything.”

  Evan reaches the dead end and turns.

  The three young men spread out, blocking his egress, and sidle closer. Evan takes one step back out of the reach of the light, the shadow of the barn eclipsing him, turning him into a dark outline.

  “Scaredy-cat’s done run himself into a trap,” Clay says.

 

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