EVENT SUMMARY & YOUR CHOICE:
At the end of Chapter 8, a stranger in a black suit holding an eagle card locked the inner latch of the Purple Sprout classroom and demanded that Maya hand over Mark. The boy swore he had never seen the man before in his life.
You chose [BRANCH 2]: Overwhelmed by the pressure of murderous intent and the eagle card, believing she cannot resist the enemy, you decide to hand Mark over to the car.
The sound of the latch snapping shut was still ringing inside Maya's skull. Click. Like the lid of a coffin.
She stood in the middle of the dim classroom with both arms stretched wide, and for a few seconds her mind was an empty white page. Then, one by one, the man's words began to line up on it, and they sounded terribly reasonable.
He knows Mr. Travis's name. He knows Mark's name. He knows the exact minute the school empties out and the exact corner of the room where the boy waits.
And Mark was five years old. A child of five could not possibly remember every driver, every bodyguard, every nameless man in a dark coat who worked for a father who was never home. Mark had said the scar-necked uncle and the tattooed uncle were the only ones. But what if tonight there simply was no scar-necked uncle? What if the rain had delayed them, and this polite man had been sent in their place, and a frightened little boy was making a mistake?
And what if she was wrong?
Maya's eyes flicked to the black leather glove hovering in the air between them, then to the wooden door that was locked and bolted, then to the dead phone screen in her trembling hand. No guard within a hundred meters. No one to hear her. A tycoon's family, an eagle card, and a man who had just revealed what his smile looked like when it fell off.
If he is lying, screaming will only get us killed in this room. If he is telling the truth, then I am the one holding a child back from his own father.
"I want to see Mr. Travis," Maya heard herself say, in a voice that was thin but did not break. "With my own eyes. I will not hand a student to anyone, not even you, unless I put him in his father's hands myself."
The man tilted his head. For a long moment he studied her like a butcher studying a lamb, and the cold gleam in his snake-like eyes slowly softened into something that looked almost like approval.
"Reasonable, teacher," he said. His voice was polished again, as though the broken mask had never fallen. "The car is at the side gate. The chairman is waiting inside. Please."
He turned the latch. Click.
The door swung open on the empty hallway, and the whole hallway seemed to exhale a long, dark breath.
Maya bent down and took Mark's hand. His fingers were ice. The little boy's ash-grey eyes were swollen and red, and when he looked up at her, she felt something in her chest tear along a seam she had not known was there.
"Teacher..." Mark's whisper shook so badly the word came out in pieces. "I'm scared. I'm so scared. Please don't take me. He isn't Dad's man. He isn't."
"Shh. Shh, Mark." Maya crouched, pressing her forehead to his, and lied with the gentlest voice she owned. "We're only going to look. If your daddy is in that car, then everything is fine, and he will hug you and be so happy that I brought you. And if he isn't..." She lowered her voice until even the man behind her could not hear. "If he isn't, you hold my hand tight, and when I say run, you run. Okay?"
Mark stared at her for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he nodded, and his small hand squeezed hers so hard it hurt.
They walked.
Thud... thud... thud...
The man in the black suit walked half a pace behind them, so close that Maya could smell the sharp chemical sweetness on his clothes. The school's marble corridor stretched ahead like the throat of some giant sleeping animal. The lights were off. The rain beat against the Gothic windows, and every pane held a pale, distorted reflection of three figures: a woman, a child, and the shadow that followed them.
Too quiet. Maya's heart was pounding as though it wanted to climb out through her throat. Where is the night guard? Where are the drivers? The pickup lane is always crowded with cars, why is it empty?
Her eyes searched the shadows for the white-haired outline of Uncle Henry, for the glow of the security hut at the gate. There was nothing. Only the long, wet dark.
They stepped out through the side door.
The cold hit her first, a wall of rain and wind that soaked her blouse through in seconds. The side gate stood open. Just beyond it, in the pool of a flickering sallow streetlight, a long black sedan sat idling with its engine growling softly, its windows tinted as black as oil.
No eagle plates. No driver's cap. No bodyguards waiting at its flanks, the way there always were when Mr. Travis arrived.
Maya's steps faltered.
"Almost there, teacher," the man murmured at her ear. A gloved hand rested lightly, almost courteously, at the small of her back, and pushed.
The rear door of the sedan opened from inside.
Warm yellow light spilled onto the wet pavement, and the smell of expensive tobacco and leather drifted out. Maya's eyes lifted, desperate, hungry, searching for sandalwood and charcoal-grey wool and a pair of ash-grey eyes.
A heavyset stranger sat in the back seat.
He wore a camel-colored overcoat and four gold rings. His face was broad and pleasant and shaved smooth. He held a half-smoked cigar in one hand and a crumpled white handkerchief in the other, and when he saw her, he smiled the delighted smile of a man whose dinner had just arrived.
"Ah," he said. "There's the little teacher."
He is not Travis.
The thought did not even form as words. It went off inside her like a flashbulb.
"Mark!" Maya screamed. "RUN!"
She wrenched Mark's hand and spun on her heel, shoving her whole body backward into the gloved man. He grunted in surprise, a hand snatching at her hair, and then she was running, bare of every shred of courage she had ever pretended to have, dragging a five-year-old by one arm through the rain.
"Get them!" the heavyset man bellowed behind her. "Don't hurt the boy!"
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Heavy shoes slapped across the wet asphalt. Maya did not look back. She lifted Mark into her arms and ran with the kind of speed that only a body raised on fear could muster. Her canvas flats skidded on the wet stone and she nearly fell, but she caught herself on one hand, tore her palm open on the curb, and kept going.
"Teacher, he's coming, he's coming!" Mark sobbed into her neck.
"I've got you, I've got you, don't look!"
She plunged into the nearest side street without thinking, then into a narrower one, and then a lane barely wider than her outstretched arms, squeezed between the back walls of two old brick warehouses. Garbage cans crashed over behind her. A rat shrieked and scattered. The rain turned into a roar between the high walls, and the footsteps behind her echoed as though a dozen men were chasing her instead of one.
Her lungs burned. Her throat tasted of copper.
Ahead, the lane opened onto a patch of dim light, a gap, a way out.
Maya burst toward it.
And hit a wall.
Not a wall of brick. A wall of rust. A tall chain-link fence, topped with coils of razor wire, sealing the end of the lane like a lid on a jar. A dead end, long since walled up by whoever owned these abandoned yards. Beyond the wire there was a street, a yellow lamp, a car going by, free air, and a world that had no idea.
"No... no, no, no..."
Maya set Mark on his feet and threw herself at the fence, clawing at the links with raw fingers, trying to find a gap, a hole, anything. The wire cut into her palms. The fence only shuddered and sang.
Behind her, the footsteps slowed.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
She turned around.
At the mouth of the alley, framed against the rain-lit mist, stood the man in the black suit, panting lightly. He had lost one glove somewhere. His hair, once so carefully groomed, hung wet across his forehead. He was smiling again. The smile no longer had any politeness in it.
"I did say you were clever," he said softly, and began to walk forward. "Clever enough to run in the one direction that's a grave."
Maya stepped in front of Mark, spreading her arms, her torn hands trembling. Stay behind me. Stay behind me, stay behind me. She had no weapon. She had no plan. She had a five-year-old's wet fingers wound into the hem of her skirt, and a heart that was beating so hard she thought it might crack her ribs.
He was three paces away. Two.
She swung her fist.
It never landed. A hard hand caught her wrist and twisted it in the air as easily as snapping a twig, and a second hand, from behind, from somewhere she hadn't looked, seized the back of her collar.
There was another one.
Maya's feet left the ground.
"Teacher!" Mark shrieked. "TEACHER!"
"Don't worry, little master," said the heavyset man, who had somehow come around the other end of the alley, panting, wheezing, delighted. He scooped Mark's flailing body up with one meaty arm and held him against his camel coat like a prize. "No one's going to hurt you. Your grandfather has been waiting for you for such a long, long time."
Grandfather?
The word floated through Maya's mind, strange and meaningless, the way words do just before the world goes dark. She felt a cloth sack drop over her head, smelling of dust and old gasoline, and a rope bite into her wrists.
The last thing she heard, over the pounding rain, was Mark crying her name.
And then the engine started.
