Free Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) by Rachel Carter Page A

exposed, his fingers slightly curled. When the gunshots start again I reach out and clutch his hand to mine, assuring us both that the bullets have not found us yet, that we are still alive.
    We are getting farther from the city, and the new-growth forest emerges, lining the side of the road. This highway is emptier than the dense city streets were, but there are still cars dotted in our path. Twenty-two weaves us in and out, back and forth, making my body slide across the seat—first into Tim, then pressed against the window. I try to brace myself, though the turns are too quick, we are going too fast.
    But not fast enough, and the cars behind us are creeping closer. Up ahead a semitruck is lengthwise across the road, halfway through a turn when the grid shut down. Twenty-two cuts the wheel to the right and we skid along the asphalt, narrowly missing a minivan with two little kids inside, their pale faces pressed to the darkened windows. “Hold on,” I hear her say, and I know it is serious because her voice has finally changed, finally lost that detached, unshakable quality. Now she sounds shrill. Panicked.
    She jerks the wheel to the left and the car angles so quickly that it seems we will flip over. My stomach drops as if we are on a roller coaster, the very moment of descent. Tim grips my hand in his as I squeeze my other one into the battered leather seat, trying to hold on.
    “On the left!” I hear Wes shout, and then something slams into the side of the car in a blast of noise and sparks and screeching tires. I am thrown forward and feel Tim’s fingers slip away from mine. My body is in the air. My head collides with something hard. I fall back against the seat as the window explodes, as the metal erupts, and my body, just skin and blood and bones, is no match for the force of it.

Chapter 7
    “L ydia.” Someone is shaking me. “Open your eyes.”
    I feel pain, a fire burning up my leg. I blindly reach out with my hands. Something touches my fingers, forces them down.
    “Open your eyes,” the voice repeats, and it is so urgent, so desperate that I do. All I see is black.
    “You need to try and move. We only have a few minutes.” It is Wes, and I turn my head toward his voice. He looks fuzzy at first, but then his shape forms, standing in the doorway of the car—though there’s no door now, just a twisted clump of metal pushed to the side.
    “I’m pinned.” I choke out the words. “I can’t move.”
    “You’re not pinned.” He puts his hand on my forehead, slides it down the side of my cheek. He is so warm that I lean in to him, trying not to close my eyes again. “I pulled the metal away. You have a cut on your leg, but it’s not too deep. It already stopped bleeding.”
    I look down. He has ripped the hem off my dress and used it to bandage my lower thigh. The silk is sticky, but the blood doesn’t look like it’s spreading.
    I sit up, wincing when the movement reaches my left leg. Wes’s hand falls away from my face. I see Twenty-two standing near the headlights, her gown torn off at the knees, blood trickling from a cut under her eye. Tim is propped against the open driver’s-side door, one hand clutching the opposite elbow, his face chalky, his lips cracked. Only Wes is unscathed, though his dress shirt is ripped across the collar and I see a bruise forming on the sharp line of his chin.
    “Hurry up,” Twenty-two snaps. “They’re coming.”
    The crash. The Secret Service chasing us. We need to keep moving. I push up from the seat and take the hand that Wes offers me. Both of my shoes are on again; he must have slipped the other one back on my foot while I was unconscious. He pulls me out of the car. My leg is not as bad as I first thought; it only throbs a little when I put my weight on it.
    “The woods,” Wes says. “We can lose them there.”
    There’s a car flipped over across from us, dark and silent, and from somewhere behind the semitruck, orange flames throw black,