Free Don't Turn Around by Michelle Gagnon Page A

transferred directly from her bank account, along with a security deposit.
    It would leave a paper trail, which was a risk. Noa sat back and debated. On-screen was a place that looked perfect: a studio apartment in Cambridge that was available for just five hundred dollars a week. Noa could hunker down there while she figured out who was after her, and why.
    But whether or not she’d really be safe depended on how much they knew about her. Had she just randomly been snatched off the street, or had they been tracking her for a while? They knew her name, but did they know about the fake family she’d set up, and where she lived? Could they get into her apartment? Did they know about the PO Box? They might just be hanging around there, knowing she’d have to get to it sooner or later.
    She really didn’t want to look at the file on herself again, but all the information they had on her was probably in there. Fighting past the fear of discovering something terrible, Noa gritted her teeth and dove in.
    Again, it proved nearly unintelligible, a mix of scientific and medical jargon. Noa wished she’d paid more attention during the three months she spent in biology class before dropping out. After sifting through more than twenty documents, she found one that contained personal information. Her heart sank at the sight of her address: not going home had been the right decision. Also listed were her height and weight, age, and other stats, the sort of thing they recorded at The Center when you had a physical.
    No sign of her bank account and PO Box, though. But those could always be on another page. There were more than three hundred documents in this file, and she’d only skimmed a fraction of them.
    While she weighed the pros and cons of renting a place short-term, Noa took a bite of sandwich. At the taste, her nose wrinkled and she nearly gagged. The sandwich wasn’t terrible—the turkey was a little dry and the lettuce was wilted, but that wasn’t it. She popped open the potato chips to clear the taste from her mouth and had the same reaction. It was like her body went into instant revolt. And these chips were salt-and-pepper flavored, pretty much her favorite thing in the world to eat.
    It was definitely weird.
    Noa tentatively sipped the coffee. No reaction there. She drank another big gulp and waited: nothing.
    Oh well, Noa thought. She’d been through a lot; maybe it was just some sort of delayed stress reaction.
    Back to finding a place to stay. Her gut was telling her to chance it. Even if they were monitoring her bank account, any transactions would take a day or so to process. She finally committed to one night in the Cambridge apartment, adding a special request for the keys to be left with the doorman.
    While Noa waited for confirmation, she checked her email. Another message from Vallas, who sounded increasingly annoyed. She responded with a single sentence: Working on it .
    No new missives from her mysterious pen pal, A6M0.
    She clicked on the email and went back to the link. It was for a shampoo—not one she used, but she recognized it. A teenage pop star who sang exactly the sort of crap Noa hated grinned out from the page, her hair long and black and glossy. Noa snorted and clicked through links. It appeared to be a standard promo site.
    She scanned through it looking for unusual source code; sometimes hackers sent one another messages hidden inside HTML formatting. But there was nothing. Why the hell had someone sent her this? If they’d seen her escaping from the warehouse complex, why hadn’t they tried to stop her? Was this from the same people who took her, or someone else?
    Noa sipped more coffee as she pondered, wrapping both hands around the cup to warm them. She still felt unusually cold, like with every exhale she should be seeing tiny puffs of air. Maybe she was in some sort of shock.
    She glanced through the picture window. There was a guy leaning against the building across the street. Around