Free Rivals by David Wellington Page A

through
her, sweeping away everything that didn’t make sense.
    The car radio
was loud enough. The local college station played enough metal to keep her
sane. She drove through town, barely paying attention to the road, singing at
the top of her voice and pounding on the steering wheel to the beat.
    When she
arrived at her destination she stopped the car but she just sat there for a
long time, howling out her aggro, until another set of speed metal was done.
When the station broke for commercials she threw her head back against the
headrest and pushed her fingers through her hair.
    When she
reached for the ignition key she saw she’d battered the steering wheel all out
of shape. She was surprised she hadn’t accidentally released the airbag.
Whatever. She could just bend it back to normal again later. She grabbed the
keys and pushed herself out of the car, up the walk to Mandy’s door. She rang
the bell and stood there drumming one foot on the porch, craning her head
around to watch everything that moved on the street.
    Eventually,
finally, Mandy opened the door and looked out. Mandy Hunt was the closest
thing Maggie had to a BFF. Both of them would have gagged to hear that term
applied to them but they had a real connection. A bond. They’d been together
since way back, back when they still thought it was cute their names were so
similar.
    “You’d better
come in,” Mandy said, and pulled Maggie inside. The house was big and airy and
sterile, full of tasteful ornamentation and white paint and austere leather
furniture. The house was spotlessly clean and it looked like no one had ever
lived there. Mandy’s parents had some money, enough that even Jill Hennessey
treated Mandy with a certain level of respect.
    Without a word
Mandy lead her upstairs, into the bedroom Maggie had slept in many times back
when they were both young enough for sleepovers. The wallpaper still had a
pattern of Palominos galloping past desert mesas but in recent years Mandy and
her friends had taken turns cutting out pictures of celebrities from magazines
and pasting them on the horses as if they were riding them while showing off
their engagement rings, their trophy spouses, their fashion accessory babies.
    “Why are you
wearing that?” Mandy asked, after she’d closed and locked the door. “Did you
just come from practice?”
    Maggie looked
down at herself. She was still wearing her field hockey uniform. She’d been
so upset about being kicked off the team that she hadn’t thought to change.
“They won’t let me play,” she said. “God! What a stupid thing to get upset
about, right? But it just totally triggered me.”
    “You’re one of
their best players,” Mandy said. “How is that fair? Remember last year, you
were like, what, runner up for MVP? And the coach said—”
    “We were
supposed to have lunch,” Maggie said. “We made a plan .”
    “Yeah,” Mandy
said, reaching for the pearl necklace she wore. She held it out away from her
throat and twisted it nervously. “I guess we did. Well, there’s a funny story
about that—”
    “Tell me your
story later. After you have time to make one up,” Maggie said, diving onto
Mandy’s bed. “I didn’t come here to make you feel bad. I came here because
there’s nobody else in the world who can help me right now. I’m in trouble, M.
I’ve got the police after me. Maybe the FBI.”
    “I see,” Mandy
said.
    “I’m not
crazy. You know what’s been going on with me. What happened to me out in the
desert. You think the government doesn’t want to know more? You think they’re
not looking right now to find out how Brent and I survived when my dad died?
They would put me in a lab if they could. And I may just have given them the
excuse they needed. I can’t go home again. Do you—do you have a top I
could borrow, or something? I can’t even go back to get my clothes.”
    “Of course,”
Mandy said, because that was something she could handle. She went to