Free Safe (The Shielded Series Book 1) by Christine DePetrillo

were working on getting power back to the rest of the globe and
were close to figuring it out—Mikale and I in particular.” He looked at Darina
here. “I’m not bragging.”
    “I didn’t say you were.” She motioned for him to continue.
    “The meeting lasted hours, and by the time I got to my domicile, Mikale’s
was totally empty. I mean, cleaned out. No trace that he’d ever lived there.”
Foster felt as if he were reliving that terrible day all over again as he told
the story. Not his favorite day. “When I got to my domicile, a handwritten note
was stuck to the door.”
    “What did it say?” Darina leaned closer, either to hear him better or
because she was interested in the story. Her eyes were so focused on him he
felt a little like a specimen under a high-powered microscope.
    “It said, Find me .”
    “But you didn’t find him?” Her voice had a note of accusation in it. She
didn’t know. She wasn’t there.
    “No, I didn’t. I couldn’t.”
    “Why? Didn’t you know where to find him? If you guys were such buddies,
wouldn’t you know where to look for him on the outside?”
    “Am I on trial or something here, Officer Lazitter?” He folded his arms
across his chest.
    A slow grin curved her lips, and any hope he had of getting angry with
her sifted into the seat beneath him. How many men had she reduced to mere ash
with those lips?
    “Not on trial.” She shifted in her seat, threw a glance to Zeke in the
front, then focused back on him. “I’m just trying to understand what went
down.”
    “Trying to decide whether I’m worth protecting or not.”
    She gave a little shrug. “Maybe.”
    He supposed that was fair. “I did know where to look for him, but Emerge
Tech wouldn’t let me go. They gave me two choices. Look for Mikale and suffer
his same fate or don’t look for him and continue to work on solving the biggest
problem the globe had ever faced. Would you have chosen differently than I
did?”
    Darina shook her head. “The world needed you more than Warres did.”
    “That’s what I thought. Originally.” He rubbed his forehead. “But if I’d
gone looking for him, maybe he wouldn’t have unleashed his disease while the
globe was trying to get back on track from the Anarch assault. Maybe I could
have reasoned with him. Maybe I could have gotten him back into Emerge Tech to
work on getting everything back online again.”
    “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Darina said. “Can’t play the What If game, Doc. If
we do that, we’ll have to go all the way back to what if the cops had caught
the Anarch before they unplugged us all.” She blew out a breath and drummed her
fingers on her knee.
    “Wait a minute.” Foster leaned toward her now, the small space between
their seats growing smaller. “The cops knew about the Anarch?”
    “They had tried to shut the world down more than once, but they were a
tricky bunch to track down. Amazingly we were only able to find them after they
zapped all our tech.”
    “Old-fashioned methods sometimes work the best.”
    “Simplicity is often the most valuable tool.”
    “If you two are done trading philosophical quotes,” Ghared interrupted,
“I believe we’ve just crossed the Vermont border. Now what, Ashby?”
    Foster peered out his window at the treetops below. While Boston and most
cities had fried with the blackout, the fighting, and Mikale’s plague, the
woods of Vermont had remained miraculously immune. Most of the people who lived
in Vermont had moved to the woods to get away from the bustle of crowded city
life. They lived simply off the land and didn’t give a shit about the latest
technology. With acres and acres of land—mostly filled with trees—between
properties, the plague hadn’t spread as quickly either.
    Vermont was the perfect safe haven.
    And I’m bringing these three into it. Foster hoped he wasn’t
making a colossal mistake.
    ****
    Darina couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much green in one
place.