Page 92 of The Puppet Master
I’ve been going crazy in here, cooped up like an animal in a cage, but I don’t immediately jump at the chance to leave with Sawyer. In fact, I wish he’d leave me alone.
I turn to peer at him, at his kind face, his sparkly eyes. It pains me to be so attracted to him, and it kills me that my attraction only deepens every day.
I’m not like his victims.I’m not gullible.I couldn’t be tricked as easily as they were.
I think I’ve said that to myself a hundred times now. I’m terrified it isn’t true.
My head moves in a stiff nod before I stand. “Let me get my boots.”
CHAPTER 22
SAWYER
Luna doesn’t breathe heavily. Her strides don’t shorten. She never stumbles.
It’s impressive…Emasculating, but impressive.
Hiking is in my blood. It’s mything—the first thing that drew me to my island, all steep hills and sunset waterfalls. I’ve hiked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, trekked Chile’s Torre Del Paine, climbed Africa’s Kilimanjaro.
But I’ve never met anyone with Luna’s lung capacity.
“Are you a runner?” I ask when I can’t hold the question in any longer. I slow my gait when I spot the trip wire, the same one from my earlier scout while my solemn athlete was apparently starving. We’re only three thousand one hundred and forty nine steps away from where I turned around. Maybe four thousand from the mines.
After all this time, after countless hours spent in this forest, it took one flippant slip from Zephyr to find them.
She appeared like a ghost in the forest this morning—creepy as hell but not unlike her. On the walk to the compound, we caught a glimpse of a Keeper on the mysterious path Istillhad not been able to track.
“Where are they headed?” I’d asked, expecting nothing from the question. Light fishing, mindlessly almost, nothing but a reflex.
“The mines,” she’d answered promptly.
“Ah.”
“I feel bad for them,” she’d sighed. “It’s a three mile hike, a whole mile past the cave you had prepared for the prisoner. The poor Keepers used to get caught in the traps so often that we had to remove them from the area.”
All this time searching… only for it to be in theexactspot I hadn’t looked, that I neverwould’velooked.
I’d been following the minefield, convinced the traps were to keep people from the money.
But the traps aren’t for the money.
They’re for the babies.
The mines are protected solely by the Keepers, so many of them in the area, I turned around. It’d be a disaster to get caught by myself.
But with the girl… On an innocent hike through the forest…
“Yes,” Luna says.
I squint and turn my head toward her.
Right. I asked if she was a runner.
“For endurance. I’m not big into runner’s high, but I like to keep my body prepared for anything.”
Obviously.
She steps in front of me despite my instruction to stay behind, let me watch for traps. Her pace is faster, strides more even, graceful. The flashlight I brought is off and in my pocket, so only the last sliver of sun lights our way.
