After the End

54 JUNEAU

WHEN WE’RE FINALLY FORCED TO STOP BECAUSE of traffic, I try to slip up the door lock, but it’s frozen in place. “Child safety locks,” says the driver, who is bald and wearing sunglasses.

“Who are you?” I ask, knowing exactly who they are but wondering what else I can find out.

“We are your escorts to Blackwell Pharmaceutical. Mr. Blackwell has something he wants to chat with you about.”

“So you’re just going to kidnap me and drive me to L.A.?” I ask defiantly.

“No,” the man in the backseat says. I turn to look at my other captor. He’s got a brown crew cut and thick neck, and his clothes look too small. He sees me looking and puts two fingers inside his collar to loosen his tie. “We’re not driving you to L.A. You get the special princess treatment.” He glares at me as Baldy pulls into the Salt Lake City airport. “We’ve been looking for you for days,” he says, as if I have been hiding expressly to piss them off.

“That’s not my fault,” I say.

“Well, it doesn’t make me like you more,” he says.

We pull into an isolated section of the airport with signs for PRIVATE: CHARTER AIRCRAFT, and drive straight up to a tiny plane with BLACKWELL PHARMACEUTICAL painted on the side. My stomach drops, and I feel all the blood leave my face. I’m going up in the air. In an airplane. Oh gods.

Baldy clicks the unlock button, and we all get out of the car. “Don’t bother running,” he says, opening his jacket to show a gun holstered across his chest. They need me. They’re not going to shoot, I think, and take off running across the pavement. I am immediately tackled from behind.

Baldy slaps handcuffs on my wrists and pulls me writhing to my feet. The heels of my hands are scraped raw, and my elbows and knees sting from my collision with the concrete.

“Got a live one,” he chuckles to Necktie, but he’s red and panting with exertion.

I take a deep breath and try to look calm. “You guys are going to feel pretty stupid when you take me to Mr. Blackwell and I tell him I don’t know anything about a drug formula.”

“Not our problem,” says Baldy, and puts a hand on my back, steering me toward the plane. There’s nothing I can do but go with them. I consider metamorphosis, but that only lasts a few minutes, and there’s nowhere out here to hide once I’m visible again.

I grasp for straws… I could try to call any animals in the vicinity. I glance around at the barren landscape. Nothing to work with. I could try to Conjure a strong wind, I think, but before I can form a plan, I am walking up the stairs toward a man in a pilot uniform who steps aside to let us board.

“Didja get my message?” Baldy asks him.

“Yes. Ready to go,” the pilot confirms. I am trying to control my shaking, but my bowels are twisting and I feel like I’m going to be sick. And we haven’t even left the ground.

Planes were one of the evils of society that Dennis taught us about. They polluted the air and gobbled fossil fuels. In the Seattle newspapers, I saw the term “carbon footprint.” If Dennis had known that term, he would have used it.

I saw pictures of planes in the EB. I know that the pilot sits in the cockpit, in the front of the plane. That the passengers sit behind in rows. But this plane only has six seats, and they look more like overstuffed armchairs, all grouped around tables. I stand there, not knowing what to do, and Necktie points to one of the chairs. “You sit there,” he says, and pushes me down into a cream-colored seat that smells like new leather. As soon as the pilot closes and locks the door, Necktie produces the key to my cuffs. “You can’t go anywhere now, but you can be a pain in the ass. Tell me you won’t, and I’ll uncuff you.”

“I won’t,” I say, but only because I haven’t yet thought of a plan.

I’m not sure what to do once I’m uncuffed, but I watch Necktie pull seat belts up from the sides of his chair and click them together, and I begin to do the same. And then I remember something and unclick the belt. “I need to go to the bathroom,” I say.

“She needs to go to the bathroom,” he yells to Baldy, who has stuck his head through the cockpit door and is talking to the pilot. The sound of the plane’s roaring engine and spinning propellers is deafening.

“Well then, let her go to the bathroom,” Baldy shouts back, shooting him a what are you, stupid? look.

“It’s back here,” Necktie says, and standing again, leads me to a door in the back, stationing himself just beside it, thumbs through his belt loops as he waits.

“Are you going to wait here by the door while I pee?” I ask, raising my chin. Daring him.

He looks offended. “No!” And he sits back down in his seat.

I squeeze into the toilet, find the door lock and pull it over, and then fish in my pocket for the paper that Whit left for me. It’s a page torn from a map. Printed across the bottom is “…w Mexico.” About an inch above Roswell—in the middle of nowhere—is a circle drawn in blue ink. And at the bottom of the page, in handwriting that I know as well as my own, Whit has written, “Things aren’t as they seem.”