Page 1 of V-Day
1.
HER CELLPHONE BATTERY WAS TOOclose to dead for Chloe to risk checking her location often. Without it, she felt as though she was going in circles in the night. She couldn’t be, because the slope of the mountain did not change. It felt like it, though.
Chloe looked up at the lowering moon. It was getting late. She should stop for the night and find a softer piece of dirt to sleep on, only she was too close to where X marked the spot. Her adrenaline had been spiking for an hour or more. No way would she sleep now.
Cristián was somewhere ahead. If she checked her phone, she would know how far. Google Maps could place her within two meters. Her own app was even more accurate. One of these days, she would have to come up with a cute name for the app. She had thrown the app together over the last few weeks at the big house, in between staring at satellite photos, to relieve the tedium.
It was coming in useful now.
A tree branch swiped at her unexpectedly as she clambered up the slope. She hadn’t noticed the low hanging fir branch. It brushed across her arm, startling her.
Chloe paused with one foot planted on the up-slope, catching her breath. She resettled her backpack and considered. She was missing things, like the branch. The adrenaline told her she was wide awake, yet failing to notice details meant she was too tired to push much farther.
She weighed the pros and cons.
It wasn’t guaranteed Cristián was still at his last location. She had taken coordinates from the satellite images of fires laid out to represent Morse code, forming the letters C.P.S. It had been a personal signal to her—he knew she was scanning satellite imagery of Vistaria. Cristián had been trying to tell her where he was.
If he pointed to his location, then leaving it made no sense. She must assume he was still there.
Unless he had been forced to abandon the location.
She still did not know why he and everyone in Pascuallita had deserted the town. The image of a dog trotting carelessly down the middle of the empty street reinserted itself into her mind. That was Pascuallita, now—a ghost town. Whatever had made Cristián leave the town so abruptly might also have forced him to move on from the place where he laid out the Morse code fires. She couldn’t guess how likely it might be because she didn’t know what he was running from.
So. He was either a few hundred yards away…or miles from here.
It was tantalizing to think he was just ahead, although her hope was probably a product of her tiredness, too.
Chloe looked around. The night wasn’t really dark. Out here with no city lights to compete against, the moon and the stars provided enough illumination for her to see her way through the trees and place her feet. The monochromatic landscape gave her no clues, except to tell her she was high enough in the mountains for there to be more pine trees than deciduous sycamores and whatever the trees were called with the multiple trunks and gnarly roots.
She should sleep, she decided. Only…
Make a decision!She railed at herself. Then, with a curse, she pulled out her phone and switched it on. The light would destroy her night vision, but she had to know where she was.
Her app loaded quickly. The compass swung around, coordinating with her geo-position. Then it turned green. Dots flowed from the point of the needle, giving her a direction and encouraging her to move forward.
The compass didn’t point north. Instead, it pointed to the target location she had set as Nick rowed the little dinghy into the beach, two days ago. At the top of the screen, white letters glowed.
0.32 kilometers.
She was almost on top of the place. There had to be a shelf or glen somewhere ahead. No way would Cristián have laid out fires on this forty-degree slope.
Chloe looked at the battery read-out. Thirteen percent. She shut the phone down, her heart beating hard, and waited for the complete dark to thin and for her vision to settle.
Absolutely, she should sleep, she decided.
Instead, she pushed the toe of her sneaker into the slope and hauled herself upward. Inwardly, she jeered at her lack of discipline.
Cristián was less than half a kilometer away. A quarter mile, maybe. No way could she lie down and sleep. Not now. She wanted to see him. For the first time, she wanted to stand in front of him and look at him with her own eyes, without a screen between them.
What would he say? Would he look different? Or would he feel as familiar to her in person as he felt when she looked at him on her laptop?
Would he like what he saw when he beheld her?
Her heart thudding way too hard even for this sharp slope, Chloe kept climbing. Her breath was fast and heavy. Vistaria’s mountains and forests tested anyone’s fitness.
When the darker shadows rose on either side of her, Chloe had no breath left to scream her shock. She gasped raggedly as a hand slapped over her mouth. An arm came around her middle and she was hauled backward, off her feet.
As her backpack was yanked from her shoulders, the second shadow stepped in front of her. The moon was behind him—definitely a him, she decided. She couldn’t see his face.
