Chapter 1

Chloe's POV

San Vespera doesn't get rain in June.

The dry heat rolled in off the Pacific, pushing a full day's worth of trapped warmth up off the asphalt, the streetlights dissolving into the blacktop like someone had poured oil across it. This stretch of Route 66 was nearly empty. Every now and then a semi would rumble through, its taillights shrinking to two red pinpoints in the dark before disappearing altogether, and then there was nothing.

Both sides of the highway were wasteland — dead grass, the occasional flash of an abandoned billboard, the lettering faded beyond reading. One sign was down to half its frame, the missing side eaten through with rust. The wind hit it and it let out a low, rattling groan, like something that had been holding on too long.

Linda was driving. I had the passenger seat. Neither of us had said a word since we got in the car.

Linda Marsh had been my mom's lab manager for nearly ten years. Forty-something, sharp-eyed, the kind of person who could run three simultaneous experiments, manage a grant deadline, and tell you exactly which cabinet the backup reagents were in without looking up from her clipboard.

She didn't panic. She didn't waste words. The only time I'd ever seen her rattled was the night a containment breach nearly took out the entire east wing of the lab, and even then she'd just pulled her hair back, snapped on a second pair of gloves, and started making calls.

If my mom trusted her enough to put her in this car tonight, that meant something. It also meant that whatever was happening was bad enough that my mom needed someone like Linda between me and it.

I kept my eyes on the dark outside the window, one hand resting on my leg, the fingers of my other hand tracing the pendant at my collarbone — a small black rose, the edges pressing into my fingertips.

My mom had clasped it around my neck two hours ago, her fingers resting at my nape for three full seconds, longer than she'd ever held on before. I didn't ask her why. Now, sitting in this car with nothing outside but dark and dead grass and the occasional stuttering glow of a streetlamp, my mind kept running that moment back on a loop.

I was at the monitor, scrolling through the last set of results, when the back door opened. No knock. My mom walked straight to the safe in the corner, the one she'd never opened in front of me, punched in the code, and pulled out a small box.

"Go with Linda. I'll head out first — you two wait five minutes, take the back door, switch to Linda's car, take the route I drew for you." Her voice was level, like she was walking me through something routine. "They're watching me. They won't notice you."

*I stared at her face. There was a stillness to her expression that only comes after every decision has already been made — so settled that there wasn't even room left for worry.

I'd seen her exhausted. I'd seen her frustrated. I'd seen her sit across from me at two in the morning with a cold cup of coffee and talk through a problem until it stopped being a problem. I had never seen her look like this.

I wanted to ask where she was going. I wanted to ask when we'd meet up. I wanted to ask who "they" were, how long she'd known they were watching, and why tonight was the night we were running. Every question sat jammed in my throat and not one of them came out.*

That was when Linda pushed open the lab door. She stood in the doorway, car keys clenched in her fist, lips pressed together, eyes fixed on the floor without a word. Linda had been with my mom for nearly ten years. She was the most unshakeable person I knew. But her knuckles had gone white around those keys, and she wouldn't look at either of us.

My mom looked at me one last time, picked up her keys from the bench, and walked out.

The centrifuge was still running, a low steady hum that slowly wound down and went quiet. What was left was a row of test tube racks, data on a monitor screen that nobody had saved, the smell of ethanol and reagents hanging in the air, and Linda standing in the doorway looking at me.

"Let's go," she said.

We went out the back. No running, no looking behind us — just two people walking at a normal pace on a normal night. Linda's car was parked three blocks away in a lot, an unremarkable dark gray Honda. She started the engine, switched off the navigation, and pulled out following the route my mom had mapped. Leaving the lot, she checked the rearview mirror once. Just the once. After that her eyes didn't leave the road. I opened my mouth.

"Don't," she said, still watching the road ahead. "You'll see when we get there."

I closed my mouth. I put my hand back on my leg and my fingers found the pendant again. The edges kept pressing in, one small point of pressure against my fingertip, pressing and pressing for the next forty minutes while the buildings on either side of the road thinned out and disappeared, giving way to open land, to dry grass, to this endless June highway.

My mom said they were watching her. Said they wouldn't notice us. Said go with Linda. Said take the route I drew for you —two cars appeared ahead.

Two cars appeared ahead. Black SUVs, both of them, parked sideways across the road with their headlights on full, flooding that stretch of highway bright as noon. No plates. Or maybe there were plates and I just couldn't see them from here — the light was coming straight at us, too bright to look at directly, the kind of light that doesn't leave you anywhere to look.

My fingers went slack against the pendant.

Linda hit the brakes. The car slid forward a few feet and stopped. We both looked in the rearview mirror at the same time. There was another car behind us, high beams just coming on, closing the distance at an unhurried pace, steady and deliberate.

We were boxed in on both ends.

Linda pulled the handbrake and cut the engine. Her hands didn't leave the wheel. She didn't look at me. She just stared at those two sets of headlights ahead of us, lighting up everything, leaving nowhere to be that wasn't already seen. She didn't move. She didn't say anything.

The car was very quiet. I could hear my own heartbeat, heavy and slow, dropping one beat at a time.

My mom said they wouldn't notice us.

She was wrong.